keeping simple

Category: business

  • Software comes from the sky and labor is overpaid: NOT!

    John Dvorak concludes an otherwise sensible  article on the effect of Linux/Office-clone packages combined with netbooks with the following: If Intel can provide users with powerful little systems for $99 and has been pushing prices lower and lower over the years, why can’t Microsoft? Intel makes elaborate hardware in billion-dollar factories. Microsoft stamps out a…

  • AIG and me

    The New York Times has an article explaining the business model of the  failed insurer AIG that is giving me a new perspective on why I walked out of a bank in New Mexico wondering whether it was worth it to put my kids college funds at risk to get a loan.  As I understand…

  • Venture Capital falls off the cliff

    Through all the bumps and strains in the broader economy, venture outlays kept up an almost eerily steady pace over the previous 21 months, ranging between $7.3 billion and $8 billion each quarter, from the start of 2007 to the third quarter of last year, according to the MoneyTree survey, which tracks venture-capital investments. But…

  • fault tolerant patent

    So I don’t understand the novelty in the methods here over the Glazer patent. The replica supervisors provide interfaces to the replicas that are the same as the interface provided by the operating system. Thus, when one of the replicas makes a call to the operating system, the corresponding replica supervisor is invoked and the…

  • Great software patents: fault tolerance

    software patent

  • The coming bust in venture cap

    According to Forbes (thanks to Trevor Loy for the link) The venture capital industry is staring at the most vicious shakeout in its history. Returns are pathetic for most funds, the public offering pipeline on which venture depends for its exit strategy is clamped shut, and with the shares of many big publicly traded tech…

  • the male weirdness of computer science

    ELLEN SPERTUS, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “”Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different…

  • Avaya’s bizzare business model

    Years ago, we got some equipment from Avaya – not terrible, but not wonderful. A junior tech with no signature authority signed a contract with them that says in big letters on the top “until 2005”. In 2007 we got rid of the equipment and now have spent over a year attempting to cancel the…

  • Investors and software patents

    Talking to possible investors, smart people with a lot of business experience, is a reminder of how critical patents are to innovative small business. Every new idea attracts imitators and worse, and small companies, by definition, do not have the market inertia that allows giants to sell bottled tap water at premium prices.

  • SCADA system security in the internet era

    This Washinton Post article on a SCADA failure at a US nuclear power plant was noted in Slashdot, but not much elsewhere. Specifically, experts worry that vulnerabilities were introduced into the systems that regulate the electrical grid as power companies transferred control of generation and distribution equipment from internal networks to supervisory control and data…