Offshoring
The India Times, 4/18/04: What does it take to be a part of Infosys
It is a billion-dollar company, literally. And this year, Infosys got a million applications for 10,000 posts. What makes it the hot shot company it is? CEO Nandan Nilekani, who was in Delhi , talks to TOI about the people factor:
What characterises Infosys the brand ?
There are many aspects. One, it stands for integrity, honesty, a value system and ethics. Then, it’s an aspirational brand for millions of young employees and for aspiring entrepreneurs, it’s an example of how you can have a bunch of young people without family history or money going on to make millions of dollars through sheer commitment and hard work.
And it’s not a story in Silicon Valley. It can happen right here, in India . From a customer perspective, it stands for transparency, shared values.
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IT Management
Infoworld, 4/16/04: Innovate, or take a walk
If you’re not bringing new ideas to the table, you’re signing your own pink slip
By Tom Yager
The theme for Ahead of the Curve this year is individual innovation, and I didn’t choose that theme at random. The IT economy is marginalizing and will permanently shed those who don’t bring creativity, curiosity, and invention to their jobs.
Productivity and precision can be outsourced or extracted from the less experienced. Innovation, the ability to conjure genuinely new ideas without the constraints of convention or even practicality, is what will determine whether you climb along with the recovery or slide into the morass of the replaceable.
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Infoworld, 4/16/04: Can Email Be Saved
Battered by junk and reeling under makeshift fixes, e-mail is ripe for reinvention. Here's how six of the industry's most provocative thinkers envision a brighter day
By Paul Boutin
E-mail is the victim of its own backward economics. Anyone can send a message to anyone else postage due; the sender pays almost nothing, while the recipient pays in time and money to download and read the message. With that kind of incentive, it's surprising that only 60 to 80 percent of e-mail traffic is unsolicited ads.
Any doubts that spam is the biggest problem on the Net were erased in February, when Bill Gates turned it into a keynote topic at RSA Conference 2004. As usual, rather than propose a new idea, Microsoft's chief software architect gave legs to existing schemes. Gates' first proposal, caller ID for e-mail, would use DNS to filter messages from forged addresses. A more high-concept Microsoft research project called Penny Black would require e-mail users to attach e-stamps to messages before sending them to strangers -- the stamps would be cryptographic tokens bought not with cash, but with 10 seconds of CPU time. Clever, but hackers are already cooking up ways to cheat the system.
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The Register, 4/19/04: Most firms cannot count cost of IT downtime
By John Leyden
A majority of firms have little or no idea how much IT downtime could cost their business, according to a survey out today. Of those able to provide an estimate, almost half reckoned it to be $100,000 per hour - or more.
Two-thirds (67 per cent) of 400 enterprises quizzed by Forrester Research either did not know or could not provide an estimate of the financial cost to their business of such a scenario. Many organisations often monitored the effects of application performance from a technical or fault diagnostic perspective while failing to relate any problems to an organisation's bottom line.
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Security
ZDNet, 4/19/04: Cisco warns of VPN security issue
Marguerite Reardon
Certain VPN client settings leave passwords vulnerable, the networks firm has warned
In what seems to be an almost weekly occurrence, Cisco Systems has issued yet another security warning.
Cisco warned customers on Thursday of what security experts are calling a "minor security issue" in its IPSec-based VPN 3000 Concentrator. The problem, which is present in both Linux and Microsoft versions of the IPSec client, occurs when customers configure the VPN (virtual private network) concentrator to accept group passwords rather than digital certificates for authentication.
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Microsoft
Computerworld, 4/16/04: Latest Microsoft patches draw user ire
News Story by Jaikumar Vijayan
Microsoft Corp.'s release Tuesday of three critical patches to fix 20 flaws in various Windows products (see story) drew flak from users who expressed frustration at the company's continuing problems with security.
In one of its biggest monthly patch releases to date, Microsoft issued updates aimed at closing several major holes in products ranging from Windows NT 4.0 to the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2003. Also affected were several versions of its Outlook Express e-mail program.
One of the patches fixed 14 separate vulnerabilities; another fixed four.
"We are extremely concerned by the high amount of vulnerabilities and patches from Microsoft. This goes against the credibility of what they have been saying," said Michael Kamens, global security director at Thermo Electron Corp., a $2 billion manufacturer of scientific equipment in Waltham, Mass.
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