IBM minimizing ROI - what it means to you

Grok Headline matches for IBM minimizing ROI - what it means to you

Minimizing the iPod mini

Minimizing the iPod mini 01/09/2004 09:57 PM
Sounds like we're not the only ones who were less than impressed with Apple's new iPod mini. Alex Salkever of BusinessWeek complains that the new...

Secure programmer: Minimizing privileges

Secure programmer: Minimizing privileges 05/26/2004 12:02 PM

Jorvig Consulting, Inc. Announces the
Release of 6 White Papers to Assist
Engineering Design Teams Improve their
Project Execution by Minimizing
Disconnects

Jorvig Consulting, Inc. Announces the
Release of 6 White Papers to Assist
Engineering Design Teams Improve their
Project Execution by Minimizing
Disconnects 02/05/2005 09:28 PM
Jorvig Consulting, Inc. has released 6 white papers that discuss methods for improvements to a design teams effectiveness by minimizing disconnects in the product development process. The key thread that runs through all of these white papers is the necessary ownership of the design process by the design team. The design team should not assume that the details of their design process can effectively be defined and/or tracked by overall formal program management techniques. [PRWEB Feb 4, 2005]

Wi-Fi Means: Never Having to Say "I'm
Not Working"

Wi-Fi Means: Never Having to Say "I'm
Not Working" 01/16/2004 11:01 AM
The New York Times offers this cheery piece that suggests you can still ignore your kids while in the same room [reg. required]: I'm sounding cynical, but this article does extol the virtues of being able to be connected all of the time and work all of the time, even when in physical proximity to your family. Seriously, however, the notion that you can get necessary work done and not have to hole yourself up in a basement or at a specific location is one of the great benefits of a home wireless network. Oddly, the piece opens looking at Oren Michels, identifying him as the president of a human resources benefits administration firm. I knew that name, so I perform a Google search, and find that he is also president and CEO of WiFinder, a Wi-Fi directory site. (Disclosure: I'm the senior editor at JiWire, an editorial and directory site focused on wireless that competes for ad/sponsor dollars with WiFinder.) I shot a note to Oren to confirm that he was still in that role at WiFinder, which he is. Like WiFinder's chairman and founder Scott Rafer, Oren wears a few hats. My point here is not that it's odd that Oren has multiple jobs, but rather it's an odd choice of the reporter to not mention that Oren Michels is the head of a company that's devoted to spreading information about Wi-Fi. It's not bias; it's just a strange omission, n'est c'est pas?...

It has by no means been proven

It has by no means been proven 09/20/2004 03:16 AM
What fucking morons .. Orcinus

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"It has by no means been proven"

"It has by no means been proven" 09/21/2004 02:33 AM

Politics by other means

Politics by other means 02/10/2004 06:47 AM
The Internet may have made Howard Dean, but Dean didn't make the Net -- and his campaign's woes don't faze digital democracy's true believers.

Means for ends

Means for ends 01/07/2004 06:04 PM

Dave Pollard calls World of Ends #1 among the Ten Most Important Ideas of 2003.

La La means I love you.............

La La means I love you............. 08/07/2004 01:53 AM
I love last minute plans because often times those are the best ones! I'm headed to LA tomorrow for a...

What It Really Means to Save

What It Really Means to Save 05/25/2004 02:43 PM
A simple story from the other side of the world shows how everyday dreams come true.

Living Below Your Means

Living Below Your Means 02/12/2004 03:39 PM
Money-saving tips from your friendly pharmacist.

"If _, that means the terrorists have
already won!"

"If _, that means the terrorists have
already won!" 07/01/2004 03:35 PM

Green Means Go

Green Means Go 11/07/2003 08:48 AM
Andrew Gumbel has an article at The Independent titled, "Infra-red device gives drivers the green light." Basically, he reports on the sale (still legal at the moment) of Mobile Infra-Red Transmitters, little boxes that plug into your car's cigarette lighter, giving you the power to change (certain) red lights to green. Washington Post reported on it last Friday. With more Googling, I found out MIRTs were reported on earlier than Halloween even.

"World War IV: How It Started, What It
Means, and Why We Have to Win"

"World War IV: How It Started, What It
Means, and Why We Have to Win" 08/17/2004 03:41 AM

This Means War... or at least a good
noogy-ing!

This Means War... or at least a good
noogy-ing! 01/18/2004 08:08 AM

emptybottle.org/glass/2004/01/this_means_war_or_at_least_a_good_noo gying.php
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Ma Bell Means Business?

Ma Bell Means Business? 07/22/2004 01:13 PM
The telephone provider focuses on declining business customers.

A consideration of what it means to be
secure

A consideration of what it means to be
secure 07/23/2004 09:43 AM

On e-mail as a means of exchange...

On e-mail as a means of exchange... 03/06/2004 01:55 AM

I've had lots of conversations over the last few years about ways in which rising marginal cost could deal with grotesque abuses of online services. There are probably a dozen posts in this blog about that subject alone. Now the obvious example of a place where this kind of thing has been proposed has been e-mail - people have been talking about ways to get people to pay for e-mail "stamps" for years as a possible means of avoiding spam. Bill Gates has proposed another version of this scheme recently. His idea - ten-second pieces of computing time on the machine that sends the mail being given to some worthy cause (or to just solve some abstract puzzle). This would - apparently - be a gesture of good faith on the part of the sender that a spammer couldn't possible match.

Now, my personal opinions about rising marginal costs have mainly been about how to deal with noise, distance and abuse in online communities. I once touched on the issue in connection with e-mail (only because e-mail was a suitable jumping off point) and ended up in an almighty fight with Cory Doctorow about it. Since that time, I'm still of the opinion that exponential graphs of effort or diminishing causality over space or increasing marginal costs (all features of the real-world) still have a role to play in how we solve gross abuses online. On the other hand I've seen no evidence that there's a model that works particularly well with regards to e-mail. Certainly my experience of sending the fifty or sixty e-mails I send from my personal account a day (and the other fifty or sixty that I send at work) wouldn't be radically improved by having my various computers churn through puzzles for twenty minutes a day.

With regards to the 1p-per-e-mail approach - I'm still of the opinion that a more successful version would be about the redistribution of money rather than the paying of it. What if the person you sent your e-mail to got the 1p you spent to send it to them and could then use that penny to send an e-mail in turn to whosoever they wanted. In those circumstances, most users (who get as much e-mail as they send) would be financially unaffected, the spammed would get a financial reward for all the rubbish they were forced to consume (there might even be a legitimate business model in collecting spam) and the spammers would end up paying much much more money than before.

This is not a new idea either, and nor do I think it's a particularly practical one, but it does present some interesting opportunities to think about e-mail in very different (ludicrous?) ways - perhaps eventually even as a unit of currency that you write upon and distribute. After all noted currency is only an abstraction of value written on a rectangular piece of paper - why shouldn't our future currency be based upon the transactions of plain text files...

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Peoplesoft: No means no (TheDeal.com)

Peoplesoft: No means no (TheDeal.com) 05/27/2004 04:48 AM
TheDeal.com - The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based business software developer rejects Oracle's fourth bid, this time $7.7 billion.

This 3G phone means business

This 3G phone means business 02/05/2005 09:51 PM
Electric New Paper Feb 4 2005 5:12PM GMT

What a Weak Dollar Means

What a Weak Dollar Means 04/28/2004 01:10 PM
A weak dollar can actually be good for many American companies.

What Google's Gmail Means for the Web

What Google's Gmail Means for the Web 05/03/2004 03:44 AM
Techfocus May 3 2004 7:41AM GMT

Dell Means Business

Dell Means Business 05/10/2004 05:51 AM
With the IT market on the rebound, Dell faces the challenge of keeping prices down while providing innovation with a research and development budget that is only 10 percent that of competitor IBM.

Dell means business with new PCs

Dell means business with new PCs 02/01/2005 09:06 PM
Line of six new office models, including five notebooks and a desktop, continues computing titan's Intel-only policy.

Shark Tank: So THAT'S what it means

Shark Tank: So THAT'S what it means 03/23/2005 05:33 PM
This IT shop has a chargeback system, billing other departments for the amount of disk space they use. But this user wants to know: What day is disk usage calculated?

No visible means of support

No visible means of support 12/31/2003 12:01 PM
“I just got carried away and stared making stuff,” said Byrne. “It communicates within certain limited parameters really well and very easily. The genius of it is that it was designed for any idiot to use. I learned it in a few hours, and that’s the idea. It’s not a serious statement about anything.”

What the Attack on Abu Ghraib Means

What the Attack on Abu Ghraib Means 04/04/2005 12:46 PM
As I mentioned earlier, the attack on Abu Ghraib is proof that al Qaeda is now officially in Iraq.  The execution followed a classic al Qaeda pattern.  Here are some things that the press missed in the little coverage they provided:

• The level of sophistication.  Swarming and feints.
• Large number of attackers (50).
• Low casualties for attackers killed (~1 maybe).
• No prior intelligence on a large, well planned attack of this size.
• Weapons mix:  RPGs, VBIEDs, and small arms.

This is problematic.  This attack demonstrates that Al Qaeda can now mount an attack of the size and sophistication necessary to over-run a large number of US troops.An over-run could produce significant US casualties and captives.

Unbreakable means Hackable

Unbreakable means Hackable 12/08/2003 03:29 PM
Apparently, Oracle isn't as "unbreakable" as we've been brainwashed led to believe. Oracle confirmed that a variety of its server products could be tampered with through vulnerabilities via the OpenSSL protocol. The flaws could potentially open the door for a remote hacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, execute arbitrary code, and gain access privileges. Read all about it in Oracle Issues High-Severity Vulnerability Warning. I always wonder if vendors will just give up someday, realizing that no product is...

Inflammable Means Flammable?

Inflammable Means Flammable? 01/07/2004 05:19 PM
Thanks to John C. Welch, everything you need to know about Mac OS X's recently-ballyhooed "DHCP Vulnerability".

Pricing software by means

Pricing software by means 01/09/2004 09:51 PM

Among the many responses to my post on piracy was one which suggested I price my software by country. The general idea is that it's unfair that someone in the United States is charged the same price as someone in, say, Russia, where economic conditions are much harsher.

I have to say that I agree with this sentiment. Russia isn't such a warez capital because it's a dishonest country - it's a country with many skilled people thrown into chaotic times. In order for some of them to maintain these skills, they may need to stay up-to-date with the latest software. But in order to be ethical, they need to shell out a week's pay to register one measly program.

I've actually talked with other shareware authors about this in the past, and a number of them shared my belief that charging a lower price in certain countries would be a better way to do business. Several of us discussed ways to handle this, but in the end it was decided that it would be so hard to manage that it wouldn't be feasible. Verifying the country of origin and weeding out fraud would simply require too much time. There are ways to automate this, of course, but most of us need to rely on third-party ordering services so we don't have much control over the purchasing process - so it would be up to us to handle the extra work.

Most shareware companies are one-person outfits such as my own, and we all find it difficult to balance the many demands of running our businesses. We tend to shy away from anything that's time-consuming simply because we often have no time left at the end of the day. In my case, I'm not going to implement something if it means I have less time to spend with my kids.

One possible solution is to skip charging by country and instead ask each customer to pay what s/he believes the software is worth. A minimum price would be required to make sure the order processing fees are covered, but the final price would be determined by the customer. This sidesteps the need for any verification, and could potentially even increase earnings since I'd get orders from those who previously couldn't afford our software.

On the surface I really like this idea, but the more you think about it the more it seems just as problematic. First there's the fear factor: I rely on software sales to feed my family, so I'm scared to try such a thing. But even if I ignore this (not to mention the issues involving third-party ordering services), there are still a boatload of issues involving corporate sales, etc., that would eat away at my time.

I'd like to hear other thoughts on this so I've enabled comments for this post. However, I'm going to disable them once the comment spammers hit, so if you have your own blog you'd be better off posting there and sending a trackback ping.

BTW, I should add that my posting about this does NOT mean that I'm about to implement such a system, since the ordering services for both TopStyle and FeedDemon are already in place. I'm simply thinking out loud about how such a system might work in case I want to try it with future software.

Brouhaha Over Kazaa Means Nada

Brouhaha Over Kazaa Means Nada 03/25/2005 06:35 AM
As the case against Sharman Networks, maker of the Kazaa peer-to-peer software, wraps up, P2P technology continues to flourish. What effect will the ruling in this case really have on the music industry? Commentary by Patrick Gray.

What The Google Patent Means For
Webmasters

What The Google Patent Means For
Webmasters 04/03/2005 05:45 AM
Addict3d.org Apr 3 2005 8:32AM GMT

With services, Dell means business

With services, Dell means business 11/18/2003 07:47 PM
ZDNet Nov 18 2003 6:48PM ET

Search: Bigger Means Smaller

Search: Bigger Means Smaller 08/13/2004 10:30 AM
Source: ClickZ - As search engine marketing grows, it's fragmenting into an increasingly complex palette of niche media opportunities....

CVS as a means of keeping track of your
life

CVS as a means of keeping track of your
life 11/12/2003 01:28 PM
This is a habit of the alpha-geeks if ever there was one: Joey Hess keeps all of his email, config files, and all of his work files in a CVS repository. CVS is a free software tool that programmers use to keep track of, and synchronize, changes to documents. It's optimized to keep groups of people spread out over time (multiple versions) and space (multiple contributors) in synch, but Joey's had the key realization that he, on his own, is separated from himself by time (the file he edited yesterday, last month, last year) and space (his laptop, his desktop, his work computer). Keeping everything in CVS means that he can keep all of his user-environments in synch, it means that he never loses data. This is the kind of thing that Passport is meant to solve, and the sort of thing that LifeLog was supposed to do, but Joey's solution has the signal advantage of using free software with a robust developer community that is completely, 100 percent under his control.

It only took a few more weeks before the advantage of having a history of everything I'd done began to show up. It wasn't a real surprise because having a history of past versions of a project is one of the reasons to use CVS in the first place, but it's very cool to have it suddenly apply to every file you own. When I broke my .zshrc or .procmailrc, I could roll back to the previous day's or look back and see when I made the change and why. It's very handy to be able to run cvs diff on your kernel config file and see how make xconfig changed it. It's great to be able to recover files you deleted or delete files because they're not relevant and still know you've not really lost them. For those amateur historians among us, it's very cool to be able to check out one's system as it looked one full year ago and poke around and discover how everything has evolved over time...

I'm told that the best backups are done without effort--so you actually do them--and are widely scattered among many machines and a lot of area so that a local disaster doesn't knock them out. They are tested on a regular basis to make sure the backup works. I was doing all of these things as a mere side effect of keeping it all in CVS. Then I sobered up and remembered that a dead CVS repository would be a really, really bad thing and kept those wimpy backups to CD going. But the automatic distributed backups are what keep me sleeping quietly at night. Later, when I left that job, the last thing I did on my work desktop machine was: cvs commit ; sudo rm -rf /. And I didn't worry a bit; my life was still there, secure in CVS.

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Understanding what Reciprocal Linking
means

Understanding what Reciprocal Linking
means 05/18/2004 05:58 PM
WebDevInfo May 18 2004 9:09PM GMT

New Fitness Technology Means Better
Results

New Fitness Technology Means Better
Results 08/13/2004 03:27 AM
Are you getting the most out of your workout? You might be surprised to find that with new fitness monitor technology, you can measure the effectiveness of your workout and get better results faster. [PRWEB Aug 13, 2004]

Porn is just a means of reaching our
goals.

Porn is just a means of reaching our
goals. 07/08/2004 10:09 PM
Envir opornoshockrockers!!! Ellingsen claims the couple performed the surprise sex stunt during a set by the controversial band The Cumshots "actually to draw attention to the rain forests, which are in the process of disappearing." (NSFW, maybe, and via The Spoonbender)

What 2007 means to your data center

What 2007 means to your data center 06/12/2004 03:38 PM
Part I: The SMP revival
Grok Description matches for IBM minimizing ROI - what it means to you
GrokA matches for IBM minimizing ROI - what it means to you

IBM minimizing ROI - what it means to you

The following phrases have been identified by the grok system as matching this entry: