Bookmarks for December 19th through December 20th

These are my links for December 19th through December 20th:

Technology Review: A Chinese Challenge to Intel – Erik Metzger, a patent attorney at Intel, says that the chip will only perform at about 80 percent of the speed of an actual x86 chip. “That implies that [the Chinese government] is going after a low-end market,” he says. This is the same market that Intel is targeting with its classmate PC and low-power atom microprocessor. Metzger adds that the inner workings of the chip, known as its instruction set, have not yet been disclosed, making it difficult to know if or how any x86 patents may have been breeched.
Atom demand still stymied by testing bottleneck – Network World – This bottleneck, first highlighted in a July conference call by Intel CFO Stacy Smith, exists because Intel underestimated the level of end-user demand for the chips found in netbooks. The shortage of Atom chips is so severe that Asustek Computer decided to use a much older Intel chip, the 900Mhz Celeron M 353, in two models of its popular Eee PC.There’s no quick fix. Intel can’t easily take away capacity from other processors to handle the higher Atom demand. Atom processors are cheaper than other Intel chips and priority in the testing process goes to more expensive models that command higher average selling prices (ASPs).
InternetNews Realtime IT News – Atom Proves Too Hot for Intel to Handle – “Intel obviously has lots of manufacturing capability and test capability as well, but they were bumping up test limits and it was an issue of resource allocation. You can’t just pull Core 2 Duos out and put Atoms in their place for testing,” Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, told InternetNews.com. “You have to expand it to add capacity for the new products and it takes a while to expand that capacity.”To say the Atom is proving a hit would be an understatement. McCarron estimated 100,000 Atom processors would be sold in the fourth quarter of last year and it ended up selling 400,000. He now estimates the company will sell five million units this quarter and six million in Q4.
Intel’s Dominance Is Challenged by a Low-Power Upstart – NYTimes.com – Other chip makers have not ignored power consumption. Just this month at Computex, a huge computer and consumer electronics trade show held each year in Taiwan, the Silicon Valley graphics chip maker Nvidia demonstrated a small mobile computer that worked five times as long on a battery as a similar portable machine powered by Intel’s most recent low-power chip.Qualcomm and Nvidia share a chip design licensed from a relatively tiny British chip firm, ARM Holdings. ARM has had a big impact on the communications world. Its processors sell for substantially less than Intel’s more powerful X86 chips and are far more numerous: they are standard for the cellphone industry. Cellphones outsell PCs by about five to one.
How To Measure Your Company’s Risk in a Downturn – Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton – The crisis in financial institutions and the imminent failure of the US-based automobile producers have raised the issue about whether use of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) would have helped these companies avoid the disasters that occurred. Let us explore the possibilities.Many of the failed or failing organizations suffered from having a much too narrow focus on short-term financial performance. This is exactly the problem that the BSC was designed to mitigate. And the BSC’s financial perspective is the natural location for enterprise risk management (ERM) objectives and measures.
The high-level objective in BSC’s financial perspective is growing and sustaining shareholder value. Traditionally, we have advocated two methods to drive shareholder value: revenue growth and productivity improvements. The third method for sustaining shareholder value, missing in many companies’ strategies, should be risk management.
This Board of Directors Needed Ethics 101 – BV Krishnamurthy – A leading Indian IT company, hit the headlines two days back for all the wrong reasons. First, the company — Satyam Computer Services, Ltd. — announced it was acquiring two companies in an all-cash deal of $1.6 billion. The announcement was made in the morning (Indian time). When the US markets opened, the ADR of the company tanked over 50%. What was the problem?How could a well-respected company commit such a blunder? And what was the Board of Directors doing? It has been reported that 7 of the 9 directors were physically present when the acquisition decision was taken and the other two were on conference call. Didn’t any of them have the courage to advise the Chairman that it was palpably wrong to use the company’s cash reserves to make a dubious acquisition in which a clear conflict of interest also existed? It is worth noting that among the directors are some very distinguished academics.
The 7 dirtiest jobs in IT | InfoWorld | News | March 10, 2008 | By Dan Tynan, IDG News Service – Working in IT isn’t always pretty. After all, we can’t all work on the cutting-edge technologies all the time. Some of us have to get dirty — in some cases, literally.Unfortunately, dirty jobs — whether you’re being chained to a help desk, hacking 30-year-old code, finding yourself wedged between warring factions in the conference room, or mucking about in human effluvia — are necessary to make nearly every organization tick. (Well, maybe not the human effluvia part.)
The good news? Master at least one of them, and you’re pretty much guaranteed a job with somebody. We don’t guarantee you’ll like it, though.

Here are seven of the dirtiest jobs in IT, and why your organization needs them.
Schneier on Security: Bypassing Airport Checkpoints: Security Theater – No one bats an eye as to what might have transpired or how my stuff magically appeared on the “secure” side and is now leaving right in front of them
Windows Viewers & Information Extractors for Various File Types « SANS Computer Forensics, Investigation, and Response – I’d been doing a bit of work with EnCase to optimize my configuration and minimize the amount of work required to view various file types or extract specific data from them. The results from this are a list of applications and a few associated options for use in employing them as viewer plugins for your forensic tool of choice.
Windows Physical Memory: Finding the Right Tool for the Job « SANS Computer Forensics, Investigation, and Response – I’m a big proponent of live incident response and forensic analysis, and as such, I’ve been following the windows memory analysis field of research closely for the last 3 years. There have been leaps and bounds made over the last year with the release of many great acquisition and analysis tools; however, there are caveats that must be taken into consideration before simply inserting these tools into your investigations. You must know what you’re doing, how the tools you’re using will impact the system and be able to explain those things to others, whether they be peers or jurors.I also believe in having more than one “right” tool for the job as it gives me choices as I conduct an investigation and it provides validation that each tool is doing what it should. Below is a comprehensive list of available tools accompanied by screenshots screenshot (where available).
How to Rebuild your Computer and Reinstall Windows Without Headache – To deal with this problem, I did a clean installation of Windows last weekend and re-installed all the important software programs from scratch. As expected, the boot-up time has reduced and the computer’s performance has improved significantly. Luckily, this task is not as complex as it may sound but here are a few things you should remember before taking the plunge:
Economic Logic: What if one could buy votes? – Until secret votes were imposed throughout democracies, outright vote buying was not uncommon. Even today, there are suspicions that some elections or referendums are influenced by vote buying. In fact, delivering campaign promises to particular segments of the polity is a particular form of vote buying that is openly practiced today. So what if vote buying were generalized and accepted?