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OK, this is conceptually brilliant. Black socks in a subscription model (a package of three every three months). They do underwear too. I wouldn’t pay $89 for a year’s subscription though, not when a $20 package from Costco of assorted black socks lasts more than a year.
Month: May 2009
Grab bag: Be for something, fail fast, look around
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Why hatred is a bad business driver — if all you know is you’re against Company X, it’s very hard to be for something. Plus, it leads to weaker understanding of what the customers really want.
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Strong checklist to evaluate products, business models, and startups.
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I’ll have to download this before we go to the reunion at UVA.
Grab bag: Apple secures, Verizon out of copper
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Frankly, at this point, any sign that Apple takes security seriously is welcome.
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I wonder how that works for FiOS customers in those states. I’m guessing “landline” here means traditional copper, though they don’t specify.
Grab bag: Information wants to be in a river
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Nice. A ton of books from the Cornell Library are now on the Internet Archive.
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The “river of news” (to cite Dave Winer’s long standing description) is a little too markup heavy to be the Times’s front page–and the picture wall to the right is distracting when you mouse over it. But it’s a big step up from the table-heavy, newspaper manque layout that it’s an alternative to, and it has one big benefit–fresh news is on the top. I’d like to see other news outlets play with this format.
Grab bag: Humility, utopia, and self control
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There’s nothing more humbling than watching actual end users struggle with your software.
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Making a stronger connection between Krazy Kat (“There is a heppy land fur, fur, awaaa”) and the history of African American freedom. I had no idea that the Happy Land was real.
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The connection between self-control and academic performance: “The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.”
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New Salman Rushdie short story.
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Incidentally, password protected ZIP and RAR archives aren’t secure.
The Forrester application survey: 62% hacked through apps
Last week I indulged in a little live tweeting of a webinar my firm, Veracode, did with Chanxi Wang of Forrester, following up on our recent announcement of an independent survey in which 62% of the respondents reported being breached through at least one application vulnerability in 2008.
I’ve reposted the substance of my tweets below, followed by my $0.02 on the survey:
- (1) #Veracode & Forrester app risk mgmt survey: in 2008 62% of respondents were breached thru app vulns but don’t know their app risk.
- (2) As Kaspersky breach shows, 3rd party code is a big blind spot for most orgs.
- (3) open source, outsourced and off the shelf code used frequently but 59% don’t do anything to secure OSS.
- (4) only 32% require security at all stages of sdlc.
- (5) top training method in 37% of respondents is to learn on the job from experienced devs… who can’t be hired.
- (6) False sense of security pervasive. 94% think they know security of app portfolio but 40% dont know COTS risk
- (7) ease of use plus secure plus time saving is driving factor for third party assessments.
- (8) if you outsource code, consider outsourcing security assessments too.
Bottom line: the survey results suggest that application vulnerabilities lead to real risk for a lot of companies, but most companies don’t have secure practices that cover their development or training adequately, to say nothing of the risk from third party code.
Grab bag: Exploring the mind
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“Blaming blogs for not being real newspapers is too silly. Newspapers in the main are no longer real newspapers either.”
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Rands continues to plumb the depths of organizational psychology. Good stuff.
Grab bag: Getting, and not getting, the Web
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It’s rare that NYT has a public web fail–generally they seem to understand how to work on the web. But nuking old URLs without implementing redirects is the worst kind of fail, because it kills conversation and reputation as well as content. I also wonder how many {{deadlink}}s there are on Wikipedia in references now because of this.
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I like the “marketing” (editorial) short URLs, but I like the amzn.com/ASIN (Amazon stock ID number) even better. Every product on Amazon has an ASIN, so it’s easy to go directly to the product you want to point to.
Grab bag: Blinking into the light of 2009
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Yet another reminder: applications are the perimeter.
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I know what I’m doing tonight…
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This is the iron trap that newspapers are in, and it reveals that they still don’t understand tech strategy after 20 years of trying to make it in a digital world.
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Explanation of the process of the stress tests.
You mean you didn’t want it either?
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Talk about a refreshing statement: “One thing you’ll find less of: celebrity news. Our research told us you didn’t want it, which is a relief since we were doing it only because we thought we had to.”
More intense inner torment, please
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There’s probably a version of these markings for Mahler’s #2, because many of them look appropriate, e.g. “Langsam – Slowly; Schleppend – Slowly; Dampfer auf – Slowly; Mit Dampfer – Slowly; Allmahlich in das Hauptzeitmass ubergehen – Do not look at the conductor; Im Anfang sehr gemaechlich – In intense inner torment; Alle Betonungen sehr zart – With more intense inner torment; Getheilt (geth.) – Out of tune.”
Grab bag: Charging the pirates edition
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Might have to check this out. I hate the feeling that I'm killing the planet every time I put a new AA in the Wiimote.
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Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha. This is the funniest thing I've seen in a good long time.
Uncle Joe makes it happen
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You know, my admiration for Uncle Joe continues to grow.
Season over
Tonight was the last concert of the regular Symphony Hall season for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, with our final production of Berlioz’s Te Deum. (For those keeping track at home, that’s two seasons in a row that we’ve closed out with Berlioz, though the Te Deum is a different order of magnitude–literally–from Les Troyens.)
It was a good concert. Before the performance, our Fearless Leader shared a few quick thoughts about our Friday afternoon show, saying, “And second tenors! Your entrance at the beginning had real beauty! For the very first time!” Aside from being a great example of John Oliver’s wit, the comment was also 100% correct. I am slowly realizing that with this chorus I can bring every ounce of my musicianship to every entrance, bring my voice to its limits every time, and it will almost be enough.
One thing I like about how things are going with the TFC is that I still have my voice intact after this concert run. In the past, I would have bellowed my way through a concert and blown out my pipes. There’s something nice about (a) knowing one’s limits and (b) recognizing when you are surrounded by 139 other highly gifted voices that can also help carry intensity and passion in the climactic moments.
The wonderful thing about a TFC season “ending,” of course, is that we never really are done. I’ll be at Tanglewood in July for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and a reprise of the Brahms Requiem, and we get to start all over again just a few months later. Right now that sounds pretty good. I’m looking forward to the next run already. I haven’t sung Wagner yet.
links for 2009-05-01
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Digging into the Cluetrain, ten years on.
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Aaargh. I really really really want to kick this browser to the curb. Far be it from me to incite a riot, but could someone please write a worm that goes through and upgrades people's IE6 machines to IE7 or IE8?