Friday, March 10, 2006
IBM Builds Super Fast File System
The file system was an astonishing 1.6 petabytes in size, the largest ever in the world, and performance was maintained even as 1,000 clients pushed workloads into the file. The project used 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes and 416 storage controllers, IBM said in a statement.
The development permits a whole new class of applications, says the company. "Computing capability has been growing very fast, but the file system capacity has not kept up," IBM distinguished engineer Dr. Rama Govindaraju told BetaNews in an interview earlier this week.
Called the General Parallel File System (GPFS), the technology allows for high-speed access to files across multiple nodes of a Linux or AIX cluster. The file system could be used in a variety of fields, including engineering design, digital media and entertainment, data mining, financial analysis, seismic data processing and scientific research.
Govindaraju says that the biggest bottleneck to prevent more feature-rich applications were the file system's capacity and size. "More and more, computers are transitioning from numbers and strings-based to media-based analytics," he added.
With the enhanced capacity of GPFS, entirely new applications have been made possible. For example, the system is already seeing use in medical imaging, and is allowing for doctors to search and compare through thousands of images sometimes hundreds of megabytes in size each.
Uses in the medical field could go beyond just imaging, to enable more intelligent medicine, better medicine design, and for use in educational purposes as well.
The system could also have use in homeland security applications. Govindaraju offered a hypothetical situation where cameras at an airport could be connected to a GPFS-enabled computer allowing for pictures to be taken of passengers at multiple angles and compared to databases of known terror suspects.
"These pictures would have scanned and analyzed before the passenger gets to the immigration officer," he said.
IBM will push GPFS on several fronts, including an effort to even promote its use on non-IBM hardware. The source code behind the file system will be released to eligible clients who can develop upon the technology and share their work with others.
However, the impetus behind the development of GPFS is the user's changing computer needs, says Govidaraju. "The kind of data people are operating on is completely different from even ten years back," he said.
source:http://www.betanews.com/article/IBM_Builds_Super_Fast_File_System/1141943597
World box office dipped 7.9 pct to 23 billion dollars last year : study
Movie ticket receipts in North America dipped by six percent in 2005 to nine billion dollars, according to a study by the ratings statistics firm Nielsen Entertainment/NRG that comes as movie-goers increasingly stay out of cinemas.
The study, released by the powerful lobby group of the major Hollywood studios, the Motion Picture Association of America, however gave the industry some reason for hope amid sliding ticket receipts, the MPAA maintained.
Most movie-goers were satisfied with their recent experiences at the movies and felt the movies were a "good investment of their time and money," the Nielsen study reported.
"Despite increasing competition for consumers' time and entertainment dollars, theater-going remains a satisfying constant in people's lives," said MPAA chief executive Dan Glickman.
"That said, we can't bury our heads in the sand. We have to do more to attract customers and keep regulars coming back. It is no secret that our industry faces new challenges but with every challenge, there is an exciting opportunity," Glickman added.
The MPAA noted that eight movies had raked in more than 200 million dollars at the box office last year, compared with just five in 2004.
The total number of films released in the United States increased by 5.6 percent from 2004, while new releases by the major motion picture studios grossed an average of 37 million dollars in 2005, an increase of seven percent over the past five years," the industry group said.
Most movie-goers in 2005 went out to catch family films, with movies rated PG-13, meaning that children under 13 must be accompanied by an adult, accounting for 85 percent of the most watched films in 2005.
The MPAA also reported that the average production cost of a movie in 2005 remained below 100 million dollars and dipped slightly to 96.2 million dollars.
Marketing costs however rose by 5.2 percent, while production costs went down four percent from 2004.
The big studios that make up the MPAA spent more on network television and Internet advertising and less on newspapers and local television, the group said.
"Technology has not only changed the way people are able to view movies, it has changed the way our industry produces and advertises movies," said Glickman.
"We are exploring new ways to reach more people using innovative methods of communication and distribution. This data reflects those changes and also demonstrates the strength of the movie industry." MPAA members include the top Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Warner Bros, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Universal Studios Inc, Walt Disney Co. and 20th Century Fox.
source:http://www.breitbart.com/news/2006/03/09/060309211938.c3imi3s8.html
Opinion: The Problem with Protection
Image Software piracy has become a huge problem for game publishers — one that, according to the SIIA (Software & Information Industry Association), costs the software industry somewhere between $11 and $12 billion in revenue each year. Game companies have grown understandably frustrated and are constantly on the lookout for better ways to protect themselves.
Despite years of combating piracy, by the late ’80s and early ’90s, the games industry could do little more than ask nicely that people not pirate their wares. These days, however, copy-protection software is ubiquitous, and any PC game bought at retail is going to have it embedded on the game disc(s) in one form or another.
I’m okay with that in theory, but some of these anti-piracy software programs are so potent that they cause issues for legitimate game buyers. One of the leading brands, StarForce, is notorious for not only making it difficult for a small percentage of legitimate users to load up StarForce-protected games, but also for leaving potentially problem-causing StarForce software behind on your PC, even after you’ve deleted the game it was protecting. And this isn’t just some story that I’ve read about online or in emails from readers. No, it happened to me.
Last year, my work PC suddenly began blue-screening (crashing) any time I popped an audio CD into either of my two optical drives. I went online and learned that other people were having this problem and that it appeared to be StarForce-related. Deleting my StarForce-protected games did nothing. I had to run a StarForce-removal utility before my system — filled only with legal, licensed software — could play audio CDs again.
Prove It
StarForce Technologies, the company that makes StarForce, seems to think that problems like mine aren’t real — or that, if they are, they’re happening only to pirates. Not too long ago, they even launched a contest on their website (www.star-force.com) called “Prove It!” If you could prove to them that StarForce had physically damaged your optical drive (a long-standing internet rumor), SFT would pay you $10,000. According to them, no one proved it.
The contest was a bit of a red herring, though, because I don’t think StarForce is physically damaging drives. My guess is that the rumor was started by people who were having problems similar to mine, but who were unable to resolve them because they didn’t know how to fully remove StarForce.
And why don’t people know how to do that? I have to lay the blame at the feet of certain game publishers. Companies that use potentially problem-causing anti-piracy software could do a much better job of getting out in front of these sorts of issues and helping customers resolve them. (Including a FAQ sheet in each game box would go a long way.) As it stands, gamers sometimes run into issues, have no idea why, they can’t return the game they just bought because their store doesn’t accept returns (because retailers are also concerned about losing money to piracy), and in the end a lot of people are needlessly left out in the cold.
This month's PC Gamer offers a story that puts the largest, most widely used anti-piracy software under the microscope (a brief version of it appears below). It explains how the software works and offers solutions on how to make it play nice with your PC if you encounter difficulties. Be sure to read it.
As for the larger issue of what happens when you’ve got an industry that is justifiably concerned about losing billions of dollars and consumers who are justifiably concerned about anti-piracy software making their lives difficult, well, you can bet that over the next several years, we’re going to see even more games going the secure online-distribution route. For now, that’s the only fool-proof piracy solution (that’s also relatively headache-free for consumers) that anyone has been able to come up with.
source:http://www.next-gen.biz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2445&Itemid=2
Cubicles: The great mistake
Propst is the father of the cubicle. More than 30 years after he unleashed it on the world, we are still trying to get out of the box. The cubicle has been called many things in its long and terrible reign. But what it has lacked in beauty and amenity, it has made up for in crabgrass-like persistence.
See a gallery of cubicles -- from futuristic workspace to box.
Reviled by workers, demonized by designers, disowned by its very creator, it still claims the largest share of office furniture sales--$3 billion or so a year--and has outlived every "office of the future" meant to replace it. It is the Fidel Castro of office furniture.
So will the cubicle always be with us? Probably yes, though in recent years individuals and organizations have finally started to chart productive and economical ways to escape its tyranny.
The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. The year was 1968. Nixon won the presidency. The Beatles released The White Album. And home-furnishings company Herman Miller (Research) in Zeeland, Mich., launched the Action Office. It was the brainchild of Bob Propst, a Coloradan who had joined the company as director of research.
After years of prototyping and studying how people work, and vowing to improve on the open-bullpen office that dominated much of the 20th century, Propst designed a system he thought would increase productivity (hence the name Action Office). The young designer, who also worked on projects as varied as heart pumps and tree harvesters, theorized that productivity would rise if people could see more of their work spread out in front of them, not just stacked in an in-box.
The new system included plenty of work surfaces and display shelves; partitions were a part of it, intended to provide privacy and places to pin up works in process. The Action Office even included varying desk levels to enable employees to work part of the time standing up, thereby encouraging blood flow and staving off exhaustion.
But inventions seldom obey the creator's intent. "The Action Office wasn't conceived to cram a lot of people into little space," says Joe Schwartz, Herman Miller's former marketing chief, who helped launch the system in 1968. "It was driven that way by economics."
Economics was the one thing Propst had failed to take into account. But it was also what triggered the cubicle's runaway success. Around the time the Action Office was born, a growing breed of white-collar workers, whose job titles fell between secretary and boss, was swelling the workforce. Also, real estate prices were rising, as was the cost of reconfiguring office buildings, making the physical office a drag on the corporate budget. Cubicles, or "systems furniture," as they are euphemistically called, offered a cheaper alternative for redoing the floorplan.
Another critical factor in the cubicle's rapid ascent was Uncle Sam. During the 1960s, to stimulate business spending, the Treasury created new rules for depreciating assets. The changes specified clearer ranges for depreciation and established a shorter life for furniture and equipment, vs. longer ranges assigned to buildings or leasehold improvements. (Today companies can depreciate office furniture in seven years, whereas permanent structures--that is, offices with walls--are assigned a 39.5-year rate.)
The upshot: A company could recover its costs quicker if it purchased cubes. When clients told Herman Miller of that unexpected benefit, it became a new selling point for the Action Office. After only two years on the market, sales soared. Competitors took notice.
That's when Propst's original vision began to fade. "They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle," says Schwartz, now 80. As Steelcase, Knoll, and Haworth brought their versions to market, they figured out that what businesses wanted wasn't to give employees a holistic experience. The customers wanted a cheap way to pack workers in.
Propst's workstations were designed to be flexible, but in practice they were seldom altered or moved at all. Lined up in identical rows, they became the dystopian world that three academics described as "bright satanic offices" in a 1998 book, Workplaces of the Future.
Designer Douglas Ball, for instance, remembers the first installation of cubicles he created for a Canadian company in 1972. "I thought I'd be excited, but I came out depressed," says Ball, now 70. "It was Dilbertville. I'd failed to visualize what it would look like when there were so many of them."
Having taken over the world, the cubicle defeated several attempts to dethrone it. One of the most ambitious assaults came in 1993, when Jay Chiat, chairman of ad agency Chiat/Day, declared a sort of Bolshevik revolution when he moved his employees into newly renovated space in Venice, Calif. The design "was loungy, like Starbucks," remembers Stevan Alburty, then head of technology. "It was 20 years ahead of its time."
But it had a fatal flaw: No one had a fixed place to work. Employees were expected to park their belongings in lockers and check out laptops every morning as if renting a movie at Blockbuster. It quickly sparked a counter-rebellion--many employees simply stopped coming to the office, preferring to work at home. After the firm was acquired by an advertising conglomerate, employees got workspaces again.
Designers since then have mostly limited themselves to trying to offset the cubicle's most glaring defects. A recent Steelcase offering, the Personal Harbor, can be fitted with its own lighting system, fan, door, and window. Knoll offers the A3 (or anticube), a colony of rounded, podlike structures with translucent mesh coverings for privacy.
Herman Miller, now a $1.5-billion-a-year company, will launch two concepts in June that are the work of designer Ball. He says the new designs are the culmination of more than 30 years of trying to undo his early mistakes. The company won't release many details, but the systems will emphasize color and privacy; Ball says the workstations will be "more capsule-like, or cockpit-like." In all, more than 100 cubicle-variant office systems have come to market over the past three decades.
When openly challenged, the cubicle still gets the last laugh. In California state-employed attorneys obtained relief from the cube through Title 13.3 of their union contract: "The State agrees to make a reasonable effort to provide private enclosed office space to each permanent full-time attorney who has confidentiality needs." Should an attorney be assigned to "other than enclosed private offices," the union must be notified. Rather than violate the rule, says union president Holly Wilkens, the state sticks some young attorneys in airless closets.
Is that really where we're headed? No, says Stewart Brand, co-founder of the Global Business Network, an Emeryville, Calif., consulting firm that helps companies make long-range plans. Back in the '60s, right around the time Propst unveiled the cubicle, Brand created The Whole Earth Catalog, which became the bible of environmentally aware living and arguably had a much more benevolent effect on American culture.
He says that the most productive people he knows have developed ways to work outside offices, not in them. Brand himself worked out of a converted shipping container in Sausalito for seven years and now commutes to a beached fishing boat a few yards from his house. He sees two workspaces rising up to compete with the modern office: homes and what might be called the third space--i.e., Starbucks.
A living example of work in the third space is Diego Guevara, a 23-year-old appraiser for a large mortgage and insurance company. He camped out on a recent winter afternoon in a Manhattan Starbucks; before him on the counter were his ruggedized computer, a calculator, a Wi-Fi card, a yellow pad, and a grande.
As he used a PDA-cellphone to check on a property, Guevara typed details of the morning's appraisals into the laptop, which would sync the records with a database back at the office in West Orange, N.J. He usually goes to the office only when he needs supplies. And the last time he saw his boss? "Before Christmas," said Guevara, adding that his boss mostly works at home.
If working at home is now part of the zeitgeist, one very large employer that seems increasingly tapped in is the U.S. government. Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican whose Virginia district is home to many federal worker bees, has made telecommuting his pet project. "There is nothing magic in strapping ourselves into a metal box every day only to drive to an office where we sit behind a desk working on a computer," he told a congressional committee.
Wolf sees telecommuting as a way to decrease traffic, reduce air pollution, increase productivity, and frustrate terrorists. In 2004 he launched a campaign to penalize government agencies by docking funds if they fail to support telecommuting. Now the SEC, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and four other big agencies are required to offer every eligible worker the opportunity to telecommute.
A 2005 survey by Milwaukee's Dieringer Research Group reported that 26 million Americans use broadband to do work from home. Sales reps and consultants have always worked remotely; now finance people, lawyers, administrators, researchers, and creative types can too. Just as infotech has enabled companies to offshore white-collar functions, it also untethers Stateside employees from their cubes.
Coming to the office for meetings and in-person collaboration is still important, of course, but as Brand points out, "People are realizing they don't need face-to-face time all the time."
Remember how economics helped turn the cube into a plague? Now giants like Cisco Systems see "workforce mobility" as a way to cut real estate costs. Thanks to heavy use of mobile technology by employees, says real estate VP Mark Golan, "we discovered that Cisco offices and cubicles went vacant 35% of the time."
By switching to what it calls the Connected Workspace--employees set up work areas wherever they are needed in the building--Cisco says it has raised satisfaction while boosting density. Now 140 employees are able to work comfortably where 88 would work in a traditional workspace.
Hewlett-Packard, which has introduced a similar scheme, expects to cut $230 million out of annual occupancy expenses by mid 2007. The new economics of the office won't actually kill the cube. In fact, U.S. sales of office systems rose 11% in 2005. But as the office occupies a smaller part of companies' budgets, cubes will claim a smaller share of employees' lives.
FEEDBACK: jschlosser@fortunemail.com
REPORTER ASSOCIATES Doris Burke and Abrahm Lustgarten contributed to this article.
source:http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/09/magazines/fortune/cubicle_howiwork_fortune/index.htm?cnn=yes
Porn Billing Leak Exposes Buyers
Seventeen million customers of the online payment service iBill have had their personal information released onto the internet, where it's been bought and sold in a black market made up of fraud artists and spammers, security experts say.
The stolen data, examined by Wired News, includes names, phone numbers, addresses, e-mail addresses and internet IP addresses. Other fields in the compromised databases appear to be logins and passwords, credit-card types and purchase amounts, but credit-card numbers are not included.
The breach has broad privacy implications for the victims. Until it was brought low by legal and financial difficulties, iBill was a top credit-card processor for adult entertainment websites -- providing billing services for such outlets as DominaBDSM and Top-Nude.com.
The transactions documented in the database are dated between 1998 and 2003, spanning a period at the height of iBill's success.
The company didn't respond to repeated e-mail and telephone inquires by Wired News.
Two caches of stolen iBill customer data were discovered separately by two security companies while conducting routine research into malicious software online.
Southern California-based Secure Science Corporation found the first data file containing records on 17 million individuals on a private website set up by scammers. The site was part of a so-called "phishing" scheme, in which a spamming fraudster poses as a bank or online retailer in an attempt to con consumers out of identification and financial information.
Secure Science found that data in February 2005, and reported it to the FBI's Miami field office, the company says. The FBI declined comment.
Last month, Sunbelt Software found an additional list of slightly over 1 million individual entries labeled Ibill_1m.txt on a spamming website. That list appeared to date from 2003.
IBill has a troubled history. Founded in 1997 by executives of a Florida-based BBS software developer, by 2002 iBill was a big player in internet billing, processing approximately $400 million in credit card transactions per year, according to SEC filings. The company took 15 percent off the top in fees. Todd Dugas, a former inside sales representative for iBill, estimates that pornography made up 85 percent of the business.
But when Atlanta-based InterCept acquired iBill for $120 million in 2002, it immediately encountered problems. New rules from Visa made it more complicated and costly to process adult website transactions, and "accounts dropped like flies," says Dugas. Meanwhile MasterCard levied $5.85 million in fines against iBill for an unusually high volume of "charge backs" -- consumer-disputed charges -- though InterCept managed to recoup most of the fine from iBill's previous owners.
In September 2004, iBill lost the contract with its upstream credit-card processor, First Data, which had grown wary of being associated with adult content. Website operators relying on iBill for payments had to wait months for their checks while First Data held the money in escrow. Roger Jacobs, who followed the story of iBill for adult industry publications AVN and XBiz, described low morale and a hemorrhaging of employees during this period.
Lance James of Secure Science and Adam Thomas of Sunbelt Software speculate that the company's troubles may have left them vulnerable to information embezzlement: The breach, they say, has all the markings of an inside job. The files appear to have been generated by exporting an SQL database into a CSV format -- a procedure that would be unusually extravagant for a quick, furtive hack attack. Moreover, at 4.5 gigabytes in size, the larger file would have been tough to download unnoticed over iBill's internet connection.
Thomas speculates that an employee or other insider may have simply walked out of iBill with the transaction records to sell on the data black market.
What happened with the records from there is anyone's guess. The 1 million addresses found by Sunbelt Software were being used for spamming. Sunbelt found the database by tracing malware-infected computers as they connected to the internet to refresh their list of spam targets. The target list turned out to be the iBill database, hosted on a rogue website.
Secure Science's James says the 17 million database entries he found is prime data for spamming, phishing attacks, pretext phone calls and even possible hacking of vulnerable computers at the IP addresses listed.
Independently, Wired News found that entries from the smaller cache are listed as mortgage leads on a spammer community site, specialham.com. (The website's homepage offered no contact information and Wired News was unable to reach the registered owner of the domain, one "Juice Wobble.") This suggests that the database was marketed as a lead list for outside businesses. "I can attest to the fact that this goes on with phishing groups," says James. "They break in and steal leads and then sell those leads to (black market) leads companies, who resell them to legitimate companies, and sometimes the same companies they stole them from."
"The fact that a total of 17,781,462 iBill records have been found in the hands of criminal hackers is quite disturbing, be it an inside job or the successful work of criminal hackers," says Thomas.
Contacted by Wired News, one of the victims of the breach expressed dismay that his information was in the hands of criminals. The 41-year-old San Diego man says he allowed a "business partner" to use his credit card on an adult website dedicated to finding resources in Tijuana's red light district, with discussion groups and locations of prostitutes.
"Life is difficult enough," says the victim. "It makes the net that much less secure in my eyes.... I plan to not use any credit card information on any site."
The man says that neither iBill nor the FBI notified him of the breach.
Because the information didn't include Social Security, credit-card or driver's-license numbers, no U.S. laws require iBill or the companies for which they provided billing to warn victims. A year after the FBI first learned of the larger leak, they have also failed to issue any public warnings.
In January of last year, iBill was purchased by Interactive Brand Development for $23.5 million. On Monday, IBD's stock closed at 8 cents a share in over-the-counter trading.
source:http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70356-0.html?tw=wn_index_2
Rising Frustration with Microsoft’s Compensation and Review System
But the star engineers who are jumping to younger technology companies, such as Google and Yahoo, aren’t the only employees who are disgruntled with day-to-day operations.
Internal Microsoft documents obtained by WashTech News show that Microsoft salaries have been stagnant or nudged only slightly higher over the past two years. Comments from current and former employees about the company’s compensation and performance review system suggest a growing level of frustration among rank-and-file workers.
Example:
The documents outline 20 salary grade levels with a low, medium and high range of pay for 2004 and 2006. A software design engineer in Test, for example, might start at level “58,” earning about $67,000. An employee at the Product Manager level could earn a $74,000 base at level “59;” and a Program Manager might start at level “62,” earning a mid-range annual salary of $99,000.
Some employees have access to pay levels, but others do not. And although most are aware of the different pay levels, some have only a vague understanding of how the system works as a whole. At Microsoft there is an unspoken code that co-workers not share compensation information with each other.
What is causing considerably more ire than pay levels, however, is a performance review ranking system that uses a bell-curve model to decide who gets high scores and who takes the low ones.
Microsoft Corp. has over 60,000 employees, and like almost all large corporations, it uses a performance review process to rate them. The idea behind any corporate performance review system is to provide an accurate and fair assessment of employee contributions, but some employees say Microsoft’s system promotes politics over fair reviews.
According to employees, who said they would be fired if they spoke on the record, the annual review amounts to little more than a closed-door popularity contest in which managers “fight” for higher scores for their team, or defer to higher-level decision makers who mandate how many workers drop to the bottom of the review scale.
One employee in the company’s Mobile and Embedded Devices group said when it comes to her review score, “my performance is about 10 percent of the whole equation.”
Another employee denounced a compensation system that is “capricious in its tolerance of managers who corrupt the system for their personal gain,” and blamed consecutive low-rankings on a “well-entrenched culture of favoritism.”
She said that even though she had received division awards for good work, two consecutive low review scores blocked her from moving to another, less-politically driven team, and the low reviews exclude her from getting any raises. Now her only option, she said, is to leave the company.
Microsoft spokesman Lou Gellos said the company conducts an annual poll of its employees, and that it was aware of the “different feelings” about the performance review system.
“The theme of this is something that is not new. We’re aware of what employees feel about this issue and others,” Gellos said in answer to a question about the level of frustration among employees.
Gellos said senior vice president Lisa Brummel, who was promoted to Human Resources Director in April last year, has been conducting an open door “listening tour” over the past month to solicit feedback from employees, and that compensation is high on her list. Gellos stressed that Brummel’s listening tour wasn’t an exercise, and that there would be action once sufficient information is collected.
Behind closed doors
In many groups, an employee’s review score may have less to do with their performance than their popularity, or their manager’s ability to negotiate to give out more high review scores. Another variable is when a marketing manager who does not have the technical background to fairly assess technical work is expected to review individual contributors in their team.
Review scores range from 2.5 to 5.0, but the process by which scores are arrived at occurs behind closed doors, employees said.
A writer who has worked at Microsoft for over six years, first as a contractor and now as a full-time employee, said her team numbers “have to be distributed in some way along a pseudo-bell curve: a certain percent get 4.5, a different percent get 4.0.” She said a 3.0 score officially meets expectations, but, “we all know that 3.0 is a red flag that you're on your way out the door - after all, Microsoft wants only people who exceed expectations.”
Unfair or not, she noted, “At least the company actually has enough money to give out raises, and bonuses, and stock.”
One former employee who worked at the company for over a decade said that if someone received a low review score and was overheard by a manager discussing it with a colleague, they risked a serious reprimand or being fired.
“No one would even talk about his level,” said the former employee, who said any open discussion about pay or review scores was taboo.
Microsoft’s bell-curve grading system has been in use, in one form or another, for years. A “stack ranking” system, which identified employees as “number one” and “dead last,” was changed in recent years to a “bucket system” in which employees are placed in a categories. The change occurred after lawsuits were brought against Microsoft alleging racial and gender bias in the closed-door meetings that determined the fate of an employee.
But the system hasn’t changed much, said the employee who worked at Microsoft over 10 years. “That’s why people are so irritated; there’s no way to predict your bonus, or ranking,” he said.
“Now the big problem is that those bucket meetings are behind closed doors. And where you get ranked depends almost entirely on who your lead is, how hard they fight, and what you’re working on,” he said. “Somehow that passes legal muster.”
Another employee who has been a test developer for several years said the reviews have always been a political process.
“The more peoples’ consciousness that you can get into, managers or peers, the better your rewards,” he said.
“In other words, your performance is meaningless unless everybody knows what you've been doing and see that it has a value or benefit to them or the team.”
A blog run by an anonymous Microsoft employee argues that the company is alienating employees with the review system and needs to overhaul it or risk further damaging morale. A post on the “Mini-Microsoft” blog sums up what appears to be a growing sentiment at the company once famously known for its overachieving workforce: “Microsofties have had enough.”
Comparing Microsoft’s review system with Boeing’s
If Microsoft is one side of the economic engine in the Northwest, Boeing is the other.
Each company employs highly educated, skilled workers. But Boeing’s engineers enjoy far more transparency about pay levels and their review system due to collective bargaining agreements between Boeing and the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace union (SPEEA). SPEEA represents about 22,000 engineers, the majority of whom work in the Northwest.
Software sales are more predictable compared to sales of 737 jets, so Microsoft employees don’t face cycles of layoffs like at Boeing, but there are similarities in the review systems. Boeing engineers are assigned "Retention" numbers, from “R1” to “R3.” The 20 percent of the group who are categorized R3 know they are the first to go in a layoff, and explanations for R designations are available to all workers.
SPEEA makes salary grade level information available to all members. Retention ratings, layoff information, and salary adjustments are also readily available. At Microsoft, annual bonuses and review scores are determined behind closed doors. The difference between the two groups is the collective bargaining power of the Boeing engineers.
According to the Mini-Microsoft blog, Microsoft employees “own their own career.” For employees who work hard and manage to land on the high side of the review scale, the statement rings true. But for others, the bureaucracy in Redmond is wearing thin:
“I love working at Microsoft but cannot stay in an environment where I am treated shabbily and afforded no opportunity to defend myself against such treatment.”
source:http://www.washtech.org/news/industry/display.php?ID_Content=5041
Google faces Wall Street revolt after blunders hit share price
An analyst for RBC Capital Markets yesterday was the first to call for Google to step into line with the majority of US listed companies and begin publishing earnings guidance. “We believe it is time for Google to issue guidance, which would reduce volatility in the shares,” Jordan Rohan wrote.
“Issuing guidance is not ‘evil’, we believe,” he added, referring to the company’s “Don’t be evil” motto.
Google decided before listing on Nasdaq that it would not provide earnings guidance to Wall Street, and that investors would simply have to trust the company’s strategy.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders and biggest shareholders, made plain in their listing prospectus that the company would reject many of the orthodox methods of doing business with Wall Street and instead adopt a mantra to encourage its employees to do good and not “evil”.
Other Wall Street analysts last night were also preparing reports that agreed with RBC, The Times has learnt. “The time has come for Google to step into line,” one analyst said. “It is in the interest of all shareholders, including the company’s employees and officers, that the share price achieves some stability.”
Confidence in Google’s once- unstoppable business model has slipped this year since the company missed the earnings target set by Wall Street for the fourth quarter. Doubt about Google’s future performance was compounded last week when George Reyes, chief financial officer, told investors at a conference that he expected revenue growth to slow markedly in future and that the company’s method of generating revenue by selling online advertising was running out of steam.
On both occasions, billions of dollars were wiped off the market value of Google, of which Eric Schmidt is chief executive. However, last night’s call for profit guidance comes after an admission by Google that its finance department mistakenly revealed secret internal revenue targets in a presentation for analysts — an event that cut hundreds of millions of dollars more from its value.
In a filing on Tuesday night with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Google said that the figures revealed in the report were about a year old and should be treated as unreliable. Nevertheless, the market seized on the gaffe as another excuse to sell Google shares, which last night closed down by 3 per cent at $353.88.
The mistakenly published report suggested that Google would have revenue of $9.5 billion (£5.5 billion) this year.
Since the report was written, Mr Rohan said, the company has increased revenue by about $450 million in a deal with AOL, meaning that revenue for this year should be about $10 billion.
source:http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8209-2076799,00.html
Cisco's New Opportunity With SyPixx
RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Sue maintained an "outperform" rating and $23 price target on Cisco Systems in light of the company's recent acquisition of video surveillance company SyPixx Networks.
"Cisco made the acquisition to capitalize on the trend that has been underway which is moving video surveillance from analog to IP," wrote the analyst in a research note Wednesday.
Under the terms of the agreement, Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO - news - people ) will pay $51 million in cash and options for SyPixx, which offers network-centric video surveillance software and hardware. The acquisition is expect to close by the end of Cisco's fiscal third-quarter 2006.
Currently, SyPixx's success has mostly been in the casino gaming segment, as well as retail, transportation and state and local governments. Cisco plans to expand this and focus on the large enterprise market segment including finance, transportation and school districts.
Cisco believes the overall market opportunity in 2007 is estimated at $2 billion and has been growing at a 40% year-over-year rate for the past several years.
"Shopping ensues when the environment is improving and we believe things seem to be on an upswing for Cisco," said Sue.
source:http://www.forbes.com/markets/economy/2006/03/08/cisco-systems-sypixx-0308markets12.html
