This is beyond Oops.
$5,000,000 / 40 = $125,000 per minute.
Amazon
website goes down for 40 minutes, costing the company $5 million
… At 40 minutes,
the outage could have cost the company as much as $4.72 million in
lost sales, the Puget Sound Business Journal estimated, based on the
company’s average
sales of $117,882 per minute. Of course, that’s an average
rate, and sales at the online retailer might be expected to be much
brisker on a Monday afternoon in the summer, when people are shirking
work by ordering barbecue tools, Hawaiian shirts, boxes of cheap
outdoor drink tumblers, or trashy novels to read on their Kindles.
Well this is a damn
shame.
Surveillance
concerns bring an end to crusading site Groklaw
Citing concerns about
privacy and government surveillance, Pamela
Jones is shutting down her site Groklaw
that for years took on what she and vocal fans saw as wrongheaded
legal action in the tech domain.
"There is now no
shield from forced exposure," Jones said in final
blog post Tuesday. Groklaw depended on collaboration over
e-mail, "and there is now no private way, evidently, to
collaborate."
Jones, a paralegal,
started her site a decade ago taking on the SCO Group's legal attack
on IBM and others involving Linux and Unix intellectual property.
She rebutted the company's position, detailed the arcana of the
lawsuit proceedings, and shared legal filings on which the case
rested. Volunteers attended some hearings in person, and
collaborative efforts found just any hole that could be poked in the
SCO Group's case. The site archives show hundreds
of posts since its start in May 2003.
As the SCO Group's case
fizzled, Groklaw directed its righteous indignation toward other
legal cases, including the storm of patent infringement cases in the
tech world, digital rights management, open-source licensing, and
Psystar's Mac
clones.
Jones herself is
withdrawing from the electronic world, too.
"My
personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's
possible. I'm just an ordinary person. But I really
know, after all my research and some serious thinking things through,
that I can't stay online personally without losing my humanness, now
that I know that ensuring privacy online is impossible. I find
myself unable to write," she said. "Oddly, if everyone did
that, leap off the Internet, the world's economy would collapse, I
suppose. I can't really hope for that. But for me, the Internet is
over."
(Related) Should we
join Pam, even if we have nothing to hide? At minimum, the Privacy
Foundation should consider a “Hiding from the NSA”
seminar.
Are
the NSA Revelations Changing How We Use the Internet?
… A new report from
the analytics firm Annalect finds what it calls "substantial"
changes in Americans' behavior and attitudes since June. Its survey
of 2,100 adults, which was conducted from May to July, found that the
percent of people who described themselves as either "concerned"
or "very concerned" about online privacy jumped by 20
percent, from 48 percent to 57 percent.
Beyond that, the report
found that increasing numbers of Americans are changing their
behavior online. When compared with Annalect's earlier first-quarter
report, the firm found that the percent of people who manually
adjusted their browser's settings had almost doubled (from 22 percent
over the entire first quarter, compared with 38 percent in July); 19
percent, compared with 13 percent for the earlier period, had adjust
the "location-aware" settings on their phones or other
mobile devices; and 21 percent, up from 14 percent, had "deleted
and/or opted out of mobile tracking," presumably for individual
applications. It's clear that the general picture is one of people
being more deliberate, more circumspect, with regard to their
behavior online.
(Related) They even
provide a handout (if you trust the NSA that far).
Among
the NSA's Own Tips for Securing Computers: Remove the Webcam
Seems like everything
gets hacked these days. Baby
monitors. White
House employees' personal email. Toilets.
If it's connected to
the Internet, it seems at least a little vulnerable.
… Yesterday,
security researchers Steve
Glass and Christopher
Soghoian were passing around a National Security Administration
factsheet with a little bit of advice
for Mac users on how to "harden" their computers to
attacks.
Among the tips, we find
the following suggestion: "Disable Integrated iSight and Sound
Input."
"The best way to
disable an integrated iSight camera is to have an Apple-certified
technician remove it," the NSA writes (emphasis added)
… The built-in
microphone comes under scrutiny, too. The NSA suggests setting the
mic input level to zero and removing a file that cripples the sound
system.
The rest of the tips
are available in
this handy, seemingly laminateable PDF. They include
firewalling instructions, file deletion suggestions, and several
other procedures. In fact, the NSA maintains an archive of
factsheets
on protecting its employees, contractors, and associates, but
you can use it to protect yourself from hackers -- inside or outside
the government.
Something to dangle in
front of my students. (Isn't this obvious?)
The
Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent
The
Broad-Based Rise in the Return to Top Talent. Kaplan, Steven N.,
and Joshua Rauh. 2013. “It’s the Market: The Broad-Based Rise in
the Return to Top Talent.” Journal of Economic Perspectives,
27(3): 35-56. DOI: 10.1257/jep.27.3.35
“One explanation that
has been proposed for rising inequality is that technical change
allows highly talented individuals, or “superstars” to manage or
perform on a larger scale, applying their talent to greater pools
of resources and reaching larger numbers of people, thus becoming
more productive and higher paid. Others argue that managerial power
has increased in a way that allows those at the top to receive higher
pay, that social norms against higher pay levels have broken down, or
that tax policy affects the distribution of surpluses between
employers and employees. We offer evidence bearing on the different
theories explaining the rise in inequality in the United States over
recent decades. First we look the increase in pay at the highest
income levels across occupations. We consider the income share of
the top 1 percent over time. And we turn to evidence on inequality
of wealth at the top. In looking at the wealthiest Americans, we
find that those in the Forbes 400 are less likely to have inherited
their wealth or to have grown up wealthy. The Forbes
400 of today also are those who were able to access education
while young and apply their skills to the most scalable industries:
technology, finance, and mass retail. We believe that the
US evidence on income and wealth shares for the top 1 percent is most
consistent with a “superstar”-style explanation rooted in the
importance of scale and skill-biased technological change. It is
less consistent with an argument that the gains to the top 1 percent
are rooted in greater managerial power or changes in social norms
about what managers should earn.”
Perspective. On the
other hand...
Tools & Techniques:
Security. Check that link before you click.
– is a tool to find
out the real link hiding behind a short URL. It could lead to a
malware or trojan infected website which could cause damage to your
system or fetch important information without you knowing. It checks
and scans the website first and makes sure that the website is safe
to visit or not. The website has been tested with more than 100 top
URL shorteners and all of them work flawlessly.
For all my students.
Simplify your research.
FTP, short for File
Transfer Protocol, is one of the most common protocols for
transferring files. You’ll use HTTP while browsing the web, but
FTP while communicating with a file server. Normally, you’d use an
FTP client for this. Especially when you work over FTP a lot (e.g.
web developers), it pays off to use a specialised client that
supports favourites, synchronisation and improved batch transfers.
We’ve listed some of these at our top Mac
and Linux
software pages.
While there are a huge
number of good FTP clients out there, sometimes you can get by
without installing any third-party software at all. An FTP client
like those mentioned above makes sense if you’re an avid user, but
you can avoid cluttering your system with another piece of software
if you only need FTP access every now and then.
Specialised FTP clients
are stronger and more versatile, but the standard file browser on
each of the three main operating systems can connect to FTP servers
as well!
My students probably
don't have enough spare time for these, but their kids might.
Here are four online
courses that are giving traditional bricks and mortar institutions a
run for their money.
Harvard University is
an institution that oozes excellence.
Introduction to
Computer Science is a course that looks very familiar to most
Computer Science undergraduates. Besides teaching C and PHP
– two massively popular and useful programming languages – there
is also a massive emphasis on learning how to think algorithmically.
This course is
delivered by EdX and takes some serious time commitment. It consists
of eight programming assignments, each taking up to 20 hours to
complete.
Thankfully, London
based artist Rosa
Nussbaum took it upon herself to create a complete,
comprehensive guide to all things fine art. She aims to teach
students about the history and theory behind some of the greatest
pieces of artwork and in a manner which is accessible, captivating,
and lacks any pretense.
This course is free and
you can sign up on The
University Of Reddit. Lectures are delivered by video on Vokle,
with the slides available to download.
CodeSchool is a Florida
based startup which has the lofty goal of teaching people to code.
Touting lessons in Ruby, Objective C, and Javascript as well as some
lesser known languages such as CoffeeScript,
it aims to teach people how to code from the ground up.
… This doesn’t
come cheap, however. The free videos offered by CodeSchool are
limited. If you want to follow a course to completion, you’re going
to have to fork out around $25 per month. It’s not
all bad though. For each completed course, you get $5 off your next
month, and you can download all videos in DRM free, iPhone friendly
MOV format.
Philip John Curie
There’s no greater teacher when it comes to dinosaurs, and you can
learn from him on “Dino 101: Dinosaur Paleobiology” on Coursera.
Dino 101 is free and
upon completion you can earn credit at the University of Alberta.
I still want my
students to write their own textbooks. This might be a useful tool.
Active
Textbook - Turn PDFs Into Multimedia Documents
Active
Textbook is an interesting service that you can use to turn your
PDFs into multimedia documents. The basic idea behind the service is
that you can upload PDFs and add pictures, links, and videos that are
displayed when students read your PDF through the Active Textbook
viewer. While reading your PDF through Active Textbook students can
highlight, draw, and add comments to the document.
The downside to Active
Textbook is that you have to create your PDF outside of Active
Textbook. You have to have the layout of your PDF set before
uploading it because you can't actually change the content of the
PDF, you're simply adding links to it through the Active Textbook
service.
Applications for
Education
Active
Textbook could provide a good way to create your own short
multimedia texts for students. The most compelling feature is the
option for students to highlight and take notes on the document while
they're reading it through Active Textbook. Active Textbook also
adds a dictionary tool to your document which could be handy for some
students. Active Textbook is free to use for up to
500 pages of material.
I didn't know we were
doing this. Are we?
LinkedIn
recruiting students with career-minded University Pages
As high school and
college kids head back to school this fall, they'll have a new tool,
courtesy of LinkedIn, to help them get ahead. The professional site
aims to assist young adults with determining the best educational
path with "University Pages," a feature launching Monday as
LinkedIn simultaneously announces that it will welcome future
professionals into its fold.
With University Pages,
200 higher education facilities are setting up the equivalent of
all-in-one virtual recruiting kiosks, student centers, and alumni
hubs. The pages, operated by university staffers, are meant to serve
prospect, current, and past students, as well as parents, but come
with a wealth of data that could help point career or major-perplexed
kids in the right direction.
… Come September
12, the professional site will make its network of more than 238
million people accessible to high school-aged kids around the world
for the first time. In places like the U.S., Canada, and Germany,
youngsters 14 and up can will be able to sign up to participate and
get a leg up on the college selection process.
LinkedIn worked with
the 200 universities launching pages Monday. Allen said that
thousands of additional schools will get access to University Pages
in the weeks ahead.
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