Last Sunday, I brought the kids to swim.

We had a great time.

But what is valuable is what i noticed.

I tried to swim slowly and consistently as I lapped.

My kids say I moved too slow, and consistently overtake me.

But they stopped earlier because they got tired. I continued swimming.

Which is probably how I see competition.

We have lots of competitors who try to outswim us.  but they did not opt to go for distance.

After a while, I am still there, and they already are not.

Business is a marathon, not a 100 meter dash.

what is important is whether you will still be there 15 or 20 years from now.  There is no value to outshine all others, and burn out early.

I just read a very scary advisory from a CNN report, and felt compelled to do some reports further.

As I said earlier, it has been sometime since viruses made the headlines.  People will remember the IloveYou virus or the Melissa viruses which tends to shut down the use of computers and entire offices for hours, and therefore create a lot of news, headlines, and pain.  But in recent years, there has not been that kind of virus although viruses keep increasing all the time.  Most hackers have concentrated on making viruses that does not destroy, but rather try to hide, and now inside the computer, now try to steal information or make the computer send spam email, which practically speaking enables the hacker to make money.

However, a new virus has started spreading since last November.  It is called the Conficker virus, and by various estimates, this virus has infected over 15 million computers.  This virus is normally hidden, and how do you know that you are hit?  Here are some symptoms:

“ You cannot update your Windows, or your domain controllers respond slowly.  Most important, you cannot run Windows Defender, and you cannot access anti-virus websites to get updates.”

What worries experts at the start when Conficker started to show was that it was a very sophisticated piece

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Not long ago, CEO compensation was in the tens of millions.

Now, anybody earning a few million is either an object of envy or an article of hate.

Yahoo! News - Intel CEO gets $12.4M in 2008 pay by AP: Yahoo! Tech

The value of Intel Corp. Chief Executive Paul Otellini’s compensation package rose slightly to $12.4 million in 2008, a year in which the chip maker’s profit was whacked by a global slowdown in personal computer sales.

This is food for thought.  As a computer reseller to both corporate and consumer, sometimes distinctions need to be made, but there has been instances when corporations choose consumer PCs and products for their company.

Acer’s Gateway Move Puzzles Analysts - BusinessWeek

85 percent of Gateway’s shipments worldwide in 2008 were categorized as consumer. For Acer, 63 percent of global shipments belonged to this category. In contrast, only 24 percent of Lenovo’s global shipments consisted of consumer PCs, while Hewlett-Packard had 44 percent.

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IF you have private photos, the best way to keep it private is not to upload it to any website.

Earlier this evening we came across a privacy flaw on Facebook that allowed users to gain access to portions of their friends’ profiles that they should not have been able to see. We contacted Facebook about the issue over an hour ago (it remains unresolved), and they have asked us to refrain from going into too much detail as to how to reproduce it until it is fixed.

Update: Facebook has fixed the issue as of Saturday morning. The procedure for exploiting the bug was quite straightforward. Users simply had to deactivate their accounts under their Facebook settings, then immediately reactivate their account by logging back into Facebook (a process that took maybe thirty seconds). This apparently broke some privacy settings, as these users would then be able to see some of their friends’ profile information that they should not have had access to.

Facebook has responded with the following comment:

“While the scenario for the bug to work was a rare use case in the account reactivation process, we’re always concerned with any potential breach of user privacy. We worked quickly to address the reported bug and it was resolved within a few hours late last night.”

Facebook is well known for its granular privacy settings, allowing users to selectively choose which of their friends have access to their photos, videos, and ‘Walls’. As the social network has grown beyond schools to include many users’ employers and family members, these privacy controls have become even more essential. Users often create “Friends Lists”, segregating friends who they don’t want seeing their most personal content into lists with limited viewing rights.

The new bug allowed users to temporarily bypass these Limited Friends Lists, instead displaying profiles in their entirety, including photos and wall posts. Given the personal and often unprofessional nature of some photos and messages shared on Facebook, this was a potentially damaging security lapse.

It’s unclear how long the bug lasts - I found that refreshing a friends’ profile once or twice seemed to correct the issue and display only the information I was supposed to be seeing. But even if the bug only works temporarily, it’s easy enough to perform repeatedly that users could potentially view multiple profiles without much effort.

This isn’t the first privacy bug to affect Facebook - users have previously been able to access private photos and view private profile information in search results.

The error also serves as yet another blemish on the privacy controls of web-based services. Only two weeks ago, Google Docs revealed that it had inadvertently shared thousands of documents with users who should not have had access to them.

Tand responded with the following statement:

Thanks to Anjool for the tip.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Maybe another case of underestimating the competition?

According to a recent survey, small business owners do not necessarily think the grass is greener on the other side.  When it comes to the impact of the recession, they think their competitors were harder hit.

The above chart is from a recent Network Solutions survey conducted in conjunction with the University of Maryland’s Business School, in December 2008 and January 2009. 

I thought it remarkable that nearly half thought their competitors had been significantly impacted by the downturn.  Yet, just a little over a third reported their own businesses being significantly impacted.  And 31% thought their own businesses had been relatively unscathed — nearly twice the number who thought the competition was left unscathed.  It almost seems as if business owners are counting their blessings.

Roy Dunbar, CEO of Network Solutions, says he was struck by how optimistic small businesses are, especially considering that the survey was taken deep in the midst of the economic downturn.  ”Frugality is a hallmark of how [small business owners] look at the world.  They’ve been through tough times before and know how to get through them now,” he said in an interview I conducted earlier this week.

Network Solutions plans to conduct regular surveys and has developed an index called the Small Business Success Index.  The SBSI Index is an ongoing measurement of the overall health of U.S. small businesses.  The company has set up a dedicated website for the initiative.

Dunbar said Network Solutions wanted to discover the characteristics of those small businesses that are successful.  That way they can help by giving prescriptive advice to small business owners about how to become more successful.  The company chose to publish the information on a separate research-oriented website where they are not selling anything, because they want it to be a source of helpful information above all.

You can take the survey yourself online. You will get an immediate score.  I took it and Small Business Trends LLC got a score of 81 (the average is 75). Take the survey yourself.

From Small Business Trends

Grass Not Always Greener in This Economy, Say Small Business Owners

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There has been a lot of hullaballo about bonuses. I’m sure there are many companies that are cash strapped, and the last thing is to increase your expenses by giving out bonuses at this time.

But rewarding and retaining good employees is still important - especially in times of crisis, and this is one part where it may be too short term thinking to totally eliminate.

Read full story for latest details.
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I’ve always been of the opinion that the way to keep people is not to penalize them for other people’s problems…

AIG may be in big trouble but it doesn’t mean nobody is deserving to get some bonus…

but if people leave after getting it, what’s the point?

Top Democratic lawmakers called today for high taxes on AIG bonuses, as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo confirmed in a letter to Congress that the company paid 73 employees bonuses of more than $1 million each. Cuomo also wrote that 11 of the employees no longer work for the company, which has been under fire for giving bonuses after getting a $170 billion government bailout.

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That can be risky….

Cafe owner Sam Lippert has come up with an innovative way to cope with the recession: He’s done away with pricing and simply asks customers to pay what they want.

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The Associated Press:

It seems as if the country that used to make everything is on the brink of making nothing.

In January, 207,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs vanished in the largest one-month drop since October 1982. U.S. factory activity is hovering at a 28-year low.

Even before the recession, plants were hemorrhaging work to foreign competitors with low-cost labor. And some companies were moving production overseas.

But manufacturing in the United States is not dead or even dying. It is moving upscale, following the biggest profits and becoming more efficient, just as Henry Ford did when he created the assembly line to make the Model T car.

So what is made in the U.S.A. these days?

The United States sold more than $200 billion worth of aircraft, missiles and space-related equipment in 2007, and $80 billion worth of autos and auto parts.

Deere, best known for its bright green and yellow tractors, sold $16.5 billion worth of farming equipment last year, much of it to the rest of the world.

Then there are energy products like gas turbines for power plants made by General Electric, computer chips from Intel and fighter jets from Lockheed Martin.

Household names like GE, General Motors, International Business Machines, Boeing and Hewlett-Packard are among the largest manufacturers by revenue.

Several trends have emerged over the decades:

The United States makes things that other countries cannot. Today, “Made in U.S.A.” is more likely to be stamped on heavy equipment or the circuits that go inside other products than the televisions, toys, clothes and other items found on store shelves.

U.S. companies have shifted toward high-end manufacturing as the production of low-value goods has moved overseas. This has resulted in lower prices for shoppers and higher profits for companies.

Photo by somarakis.com.

From Business Opportunities Weblog.

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