Do you like Yelp?

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Unvarnished-Job-Interview-Online-Profile-Facebook,news-6319.html

Hows this for a barrel of worms, a site like Yelp that rates... us
This is designed to allow your coworkers and colleagues to post reviews of you as a professional. There is no ability to remove negative reviews unless they are obviously erroneous as the site defines it.
Personally I think this is a really bad idea, but I have a feeling that will not stop HR managers from using it to evaluate you. It does make me feel a lot more sympathetic to claims that yelp is basically an exploitative business model based on blackmail. As a professional I think I'll be forced to buy my unvarnished profile even though I don't want to support this.
I don't like the inability to delete reviews, and I wonder how they will verify someone actually works with you? I do see this making things even more political in corporate america, which I don't think is a good thing.

A Different Attack

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174132/China_s_Great_Firewall_spreads_overseas?taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=1

In class we've discussed a few different security concerns to date, revolving around different things hackers or poor network design could do. This is an interesting case because even though it was centered on the ISP the result was an Attack that shut off potentiall millions of hits on sites like you tube. This has a value of several thousand dollars initially and even higher potential loss in the future if customers begin to expect such things are a possibility in estimating the advertising value of your service (versus offerings on TV, Radio etc.)
I'm not really sure what can be done to prepare for this type of event, or if the international community needs to intervene. I have folowed Google's pull out from China. Open questions, can enough business pull out to make a difference? would the Chinese care? Is this going to happen again? with what frequency?

Artificial Intelligence?

Note the chronology here, the comic predates the news article

http://xkcd.com/695/

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/JPL-NASA-Mars-Rover,news-6243.html#comments

I think it's interesting to think about how willing we are to treat ever advancing technology as disposable. on many levels the old cell phones and retired computers I've thrown away can do mental feats I'll never be able to. my trash could enable someone to rule the world a few hundred years ago. I'm not saying that we are facing a skynet type situation, but if such a thing was possible I don't think anything would stop us from blundering into it. Consider the crises mentality for most economic bubbles, we see them burst in the past but we never learn enough to stop doing it over, and over again.

Delays Delays

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-fermi,9904.html

This is a heavily IT launch of what is supposed to be the new miracle product, a super heavy parallel processor for research and business, the ultimate in gaming graphics, and th core for a new generation of professional design. Of course it hasn't been very focused and is now 6 months behind its gaming focused competitor in having a current generation part to market. How much revenue is lost to letting deadlines slip? Nvidia has survived disasters like this before but the majority of their revenues come from graphics. A variety of reasons have been given over time for the delay, but I don't know if nay are valid.

I think I see a future case study coming though.

Let's add more cores

http://whymba8125why.blogspot.com/

Intel has created another even bigger multi core desktop processor. The tests here are somewhat interesting because what you see happening is that a lot of the software hasn't even made the transition to taking advantage of having two cores available to it, let alone 4 or 6. As software design grows increasingly complex, adding layers upon layers of intelligent functionality, and ever more detailed paths and graphics, software design slows. The human element to create something novel doesn't increase exponentially the way hardware can. as a result we have many people still using a 32 bit OS that has hit constraints on its hardware 4 years ago, and software tests still relying on a single thread hitting the barrier in terms of gigahertz with 80% plus of the processor idle.

The need to continue selling new hardware will drive advances for a while, but I think it almost has to leave software further and further behind as time goes on.