Inshoring
Harvard Business Review, 10/2004: America’s Looming Creativity Crisis
By Richard Floriday
The strength of the American economy does not rest on its manufacturing prowess, its natural resources, or the size of its market. It turns on one factor--the country's openness to new ideas, which has allowed it to attract the brightest minds from around the world and harness their creative energies. But the United States is on the verge of losing that competitive edge.
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What if, for example, Vinod Khosla, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems and venture capital luminary who has backed so many blockbuster companies had stayed in India? Or if an Wang, founder of Wang Laboratories had gone to university in Europe? These are people whose creative genius has affected the trajectory of entire industries; their breakthroughs and business acumen have helped set in motion what the economist Joseph Schumpeter liked to call the “gales of creative destruction” that create new companies and industries and completely remake existing ones.
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IT Management
Gartner, 10/6/04: Savings Show Success of IT Service Management Initiative
The combination of IT service management guidelines from the IT Infrastructure Library and Six Sigma processes helped this company identify process improvement areas. This led to $30 million in savings in two years.
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To respond to complaints about inadequate service, excessive response times and high costs, the business demanded a solution that would provide a guaranteed level of quality service. The goal was to evolve IT from component-centric (systems management) to IT service-centric management.
The primary driver for the ITSM implementation with the ITIL project was to align IT with the business needs and objectives. The secondary drivers were to:
• Demonstrate value for IT services
• Reduce the cost of IT services
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Security
Computerworld, 10/12/04: Microsoft releases fixes for seven 'critical' vulnerabilities
News Story by Jaikumar Vijayan
OCTOBER 12, 2004 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Microsoft Corp.'s monthly patch release cycle may be making it more predictable for users to deploy software updates, but there appears to be little letup in the number of holes being discovered in the company's software.
Microsoft's security updates for October, which were released today, detailed fixes for seven "critical" vulnerabilities and three "important" ones across a wide range of Windows software. In total, today’s patches address 20 different vulnerabilities.
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Geeks With Too Much Time on Their Hands
Engadget, 10/12/04: Mess with your friend using an AOL Instant Messenger "bot"
Here’s a fun one, not really a hack, well, we suppose it could be used for all sorts of things, like blackmailing your friends and family, or at least embarrassing them. If you and your friends use AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) or iChat you can send an AIM “bot” to go and chat with your pal(s) and then have the conversation emailed back to you. This can be a lot of fun since you can choose the name of the “bot” like Stacey, age, as in “17” and location— The classic “asl” (age, sex, location) you see in those chat rooms no one ever admits to visiting.
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