Month: August 2003

does the current US economy have $13 billion to spare?

[IP] the Epidemic on the Internet (or better the wreak of it)

On Aug. 11, the Blaster virus and related bugs struck, hammering dozens of corporations, including Air Canada’s reservation and airport check-in systems. Ten days later, the SoBig virus took over, causing delays in freight traffic at rail giant CSX Corp. and shutting down more than 3,000 computers belonging to the city of Fort Worth. Worldwide, 15% of large companies and 30% of small companies were affected by SoBig, according to virus software tracker TruSecure Corp. Market researcher Computer Economics Inc. estimates damage will total $2 billion — one of the costliest viruses ever. All told, damage from viruses may amount to more than $13 billion this year.

$13 billion is a lot of money, even to MSFT. But their license agreements — or more precisely our willingness to agree to them — absolve them of any liability.

[ . . . . . ]

Ralph Szygenda, chief information officer at
General Motors Corp., got fed up when his computers were hit by the Nimda virus in late 2001. He called Microsoft executives. “I told them I’m going to move away from Windows,” Szygenda recalls. “They started talking about security all of a sudden.”

Last year, amid much fanfare, Microsoft launched its Trustworthy Computing initiative, a campaign it claimed would put security at the core of its software design. As part of the campaign, more than 8,500 Microsoft engineers stopped developing the upcoming Windows Server 2003 and conducted a security analysis of millions of lines of freshly written code. Microsoft ultimately spent $200 million on beefing up security in Windows Server 2003 alone. “It’s a fundamental change in the way we write software,” says Mike Nash, vice-president for security business. “If there was some way we could spend more money or throw more people on it, believe me, we’d do it.” Yet, embarrassingly, Windows Server 2003, released in April, was one of the operating systems exploited by Blaster.

Gah. What good does it do for them review their own code? I think we see the results . . . .

Why software is so bad

Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum

Societies have invested more than a trillion dollars in software and have grotesquely enriched minimally competent software producers whose marketing skills far exceed their programming skills. Despite this enormous long-run investment in software, economists were unable to detect overall gains in economic productivity from information technology until perhaps the mid-1990s or later; the economist Robert Solow once remarked that computers showed up everywhere except in productivity statistics.

Interesting thread, at least til you get to the bottom where I show up.

where you might be better off without a computer

Computer bugs annoying, but not a major economic threat – Aug. 22, 2003

To the extent that they force businesses and workers to waste time deleting tons of spam e-mail or loading anti-virus software, the bugs could shave about half a percentage point from productivity growth in the quarter, said Anthony Chan, chief economist at Banc One Investment Advisors.

“Anything that causes people to spend more time thinking about what they do will clearly have an impact on productivity,” Chan said. “The good news is this is not a permanent situation — these things have a way of clearing themselves up. But will it be completely inconsequential? I don’t think so.”

Productivity, a measure of worker output per hour, is a big deal for the economy, since it lowers the cost of doing business, boosting corporate profits and improving standards of living.

Fortunately, with recent advances in technology and the longest period of labor-market weakness since World War II, productivity growth has plenty of room to fall. It grew at a stunning 5.4 percent rate last year, the fastest pace since 1950.

What’s more, a lot of the money businesses are spending on anti-virus software or hiring consultants to safeguard systems goes right back into the economy — it might even create a job or two, Chan said — though it seems unlikely this would totally offset the negative effects.

“With the disruption of airlines, trains and such, it’s hard to make the case that increased business at anti-virus companies would be totally offsetting,” said James Glen, senior economist at Economy.com.

So for some companies, office automation might be a lose, rather than a win. Air Canada’s reservations system was “crippled” for part of a day due to the latest vorm attacks: how much lost revenue does that amount to and what would be the outcome if the EULA was enforceable as a warranty, rather than as a copyright protection tool?

Given that small business is the engine of the US economy and how few mom and pop businesses are likely to have an IT staff, what was the cost to them and to the economy?

unintended consequences

The Seattle Times: Local News: Freed mink attack Sultan farms

The [10,000] mink were released Monday morning from the Roesler Brothers Fur Farm when someone cut through a fence and opened numerous cages. The Animal Liberation Front (ALF), a group classified as a domestic terror organization by the FBI, has claimed responsibility in an e-mail to the media.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the fur trade and mink farming — by all accounts. mink are ill-tempered, nasty little bastards: their rescuers this week were advised to handle them with oven mitts to avoid being bitten — liberating 10,000 of them to prey on other livestock and housepets, to say nothing of introducing who knows what into the bloodlines of the wild mink doesn’t seem like a useful gesture.

In one move, a fringe group manages to alienate farmers and citizens who may have otherwise sympathized with their cause.

so much for innovation

The Seattle Times: Microsoft: Microsoft may alter browser

Microsoft, which this month was found to have infringed on a patented method for viewing Internet pages, is expected to make changes to its Web-browser software, according to the World Wide Web Consortium trade group.

Innovators don’t infringe patents, do they? Especially given the army of talent in both software and legal code they can bring to bear, this seems a little hard to take. On top of the “big ball of mud” design of Windows, we now learn that the lynchpin of their dominance wasn’t even invented at Microsoft.

Gah.
Continue reading “so much for innovation”

Shakespeare may have had the right idea

William Shakespeare: Henry VI, Part II.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Talking to (or being spoken at) by a law professor this morning, I was presented with the idea that lawyers regard themselves as self-sacrificing creatures who have to read all the things no one else wants, eating spinach, in other words.

Of course, it was presented in such a way as to imply that everyone who isn’t a lawyer is an idiot, and we should count ourselves lucky we have lawyers to do all that drudgery for us.

Evidently, this idea was common 400 years ago in Shakespeare’s time, so the rest of us haven’t gotten any more clueful nor have the learned brethren gotten any less arrogant.

(and who writes all the stuff none of us want to read? Lawyers, of course.)

knowing where to apply the monkey wrench

Whole Earth: Places to Intervene in a System

The higher the leverage point, the more the system resists changing it-that’s why societies rub out truly enlightened beings.

Perhaps the only provocative quote in a well-reasoned, mind-expanding article. I used to read WER but there was a time when it was on hiatus and when my subscription lapsed, I was sure if it my subscription or the magazine that expired.

Anyway, this is a good introduction to how systems or organizations — work places, political structures, even sports teams — can be made to steer a new course. The examples were clear and the prose vigorous, making it easy to understand and envision how to apply its meaning.

harvesting the wind

Wind Power’s New Current

This story reminded of an idea that keeps popping up in my head. I have often wondered if, here in Ecotopia, there would be support for windfarms like these. I know there are some planned along the Canada-US border as well as others in place in Oregon.

But my pipe dreamplan is more ambitious and it ties in with another technology we like here in the Puget Sound area. My idea would be to take the technology we use in our popular floating bridges and build a wind farm at sea, off the Pacific coast. The wind never seems to stop blowing, from what I recall on my visits, and it would be possible to build them far enough offshore to render them invisible to residents and tourists alike.

There are some issues, like the cost of building the floating infrastructure (essentially the same concrete pontoons we use in bridges) at such a distance from land. But I see advantages as well. No land need be purchased to make this work, and expanding capacity might be cheaper as costs come down, rather than higher as land appreciates. The sea-based platforms would be off the flyways, minimizing birdstrikes and other hazards.

A single windmill generating 3.6 megawatts of energy, day and night, seems pretty amazing to me. A hundred of them would be something to see. If they are as self-sufficient as the article suggests, this could be a very effective means of generating low-cost energy in a scalable way.

this just in: eating less can reduce weight

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Scientists discover secret that keeps French slim: eat less of everything

The lesson is that though the French diet was rich in fat, overall, the Americans consumed more calories. Over the years, this would lead to substantial differences in weight.

Add to this the amount of processed/fried foods we eat here in the US and the hidden sugars (corn syrups instead of sugar).

hiring like its 1999

Business 2.0 – Magazine Article – The Coming Job Boom

[warning: obnoxious subscription interstitial ]

No sentient adult could have made it through the past decade without developing a healthy distrust of forecasts like these. But the case for the worker gap differs from the usual economic entrail reading in one crucial regard: It’s based on demographics, a far more certain discipline. When Carnevale’s model, for instance, shows that within seven years 30 million people now in the workforce will be older than 55, that’s not a guess. It is virtually a certainty. “Any kind of demographic projection with respect to people who have already been born is notoriously accurate,” agrees former Treasury Secretary Summers.

Long (5 pages) article discussing the effects on the job market that will result from the baby boomers leaving the workforce: they claim there will not only be enough workers but they will not have the experience to step into those jobs. Not only will experience (or its lack) be an issue, but college enrollments in technology fields have been declining, giving hiring managers the vapors as they survey their aging cubicle dwellers.

The hiring managers interviewed have decided to take the counter-intuitive approach of investing in employees, making them happy, and helping them form some loyalty to the organization and their peers, in hopes of repelling the onslaught of HR poaching.

So on the one hand we have the commoditization of transient IT workers (who were car mechanics and handymen — tinkerers, in other words — a generation ago) and the prospect of a shortage of knowledge workers who understand an industry or organization.