This is the place where we use to go some weekend.
Thursday, June 01, 2006
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Reservation Issue
On the burning issue of reservation someone came up with the following idea. I think we should have job reservations in all the fields. I completely support the PM and all the politicians for promoting this. Let's start the reservation with our cricket team. We should have 10 percent reservation for Muslims. 30 percent for OBC, SC/ST like that. Cricket rules should be modified accordingly. Also we should have reservation in Olympics. Let's be creative and think of ways and means to guide INDIA forward... Protest against the reservation should be continued. These bloody politicians are trying to break the unity of India as a nation. They are the persons who make people of India fight with each other and play their election game on top of this.
The boundary circle should be reduced for an SC/ST player.
The four hit by an OBC player should be considered as a six and a six hit by a OBC player should be counted as 8 runs.
An OBC player scoring 60 runs should be declared as a century.
We should influence ICC and make rules so that the pace bowlers like Shoaib Akhtar should not bowl fast balls to our OBC player.
Bowlers should bowl maximum speed of 80 kilometer per hour to an OBC player.
Any delivery above this speed should be made illegal.
In the 100 meters race, an OBC player should be given a gold medal if he runs 80 meters. There can be reservation in Government jobs also.
Let's recruit SC/ST and OBC pilots for aircrafts which are carrying the ministers and politicians (that can really help the country.. )
Ensure that only SC/ST and OBC doctors do the operations for the ministers and other politicians. (Another way of saving the country..)
Let's show the world that INDIA is a GREAT country.
Let's be proud of being an INDIAN.. May the good breed of politicians like ARJUN SINGH long live... So, what do you think, huh???
Friday, May 19, 2006
Evil vs. Good cont.
Something from the blog post of Brian Krebs from Washington Post In the following snippet from an online conversation Reshef had with a sponsor known as "ATM," the spam operator reluctantly acknowledges that scrubbing his lists of Blue Security users' addresses is the most expedient solution. ATM: We want to understand, who is attacking us? You? Competitors? Or both? What do you want, to stop your attack? My tech people till now was able to stop your attacks, but I and you want to solve this problem peacefully. Blue Security: We don't want to harm to your business, we only want you to stop sending spam to our users. ATM: Who are your users? List of emails, to pass to my affiliates to stop spamming? But first, answer my question - botnet of 15k IP addresses is it yours? BS: This is not botnet, this is 15,000 of our users from about 500,000. We have program (free/open source) which can automatically clean your email list. ATM agrees to use the e-mail list-scrubbing program, and asks Reshef for a copy of his customer list. Reshef requests ATM's e-mail address, but the spam sponsor suggests other means of communication, ending the conversation with this priceless quote: "I'm sick with the spam in my mail boxes, so I don't use email any more." But one pharmacy spam sponsor who calls himself "Pharma Master" didn't exactly appreciate Blue Security's tactics, and launched a volley of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against the company's Web site that eventually cascaded across the Web, knocking dozens of sites and thousands of blogs offline for hours. Pharma Master: i am discussing daily with 10,000 of people and the biggest companys in the world. i know one thing which i already told you, u started with my and my people and my staff, you shall get hurt first to feel who we are. and when i'll make sure you got the point of who we are then we can talk but i dont feel like you guys really in mood of something. Bleusecurity.con is down now that's not bad how bout to keep all your system down for few months? How bout each time you play games i'll hit your company? Here the spammer is saying he's willing to cover the costs of his sponsors being knocked offline after they send spam to Blue Security's members: "How bout each time you trying to screw someone i'll pay to sponosrs the money they loosing if they do? Reshef didn't have much more to say to Pharma Master, and later decided he had lost the fight against the spammers. As of today, Blue Security will no longer be offering its services. Reshef said the company made the decision not to continue with the service out of fear of even more crippling attacks against his company that could further affect other sites. He said the spammers threatened to increase the volume of their attacks, and to write computer viruses that seek to attack security weaknesses in his company's software, thereby targeting the company's individual users themselves. I can't say I'm surprised. It was only a matter of time before some spammer decided it was worth paying a few thousand dollars to rent out a botnet of 20,000 hacked home computers and take this company offline. The fact that a spammer can hold millions of Web sites hostage just because he is upset that someone is meddling in his business is disturbing. Still, this saga is yet another reminder that while the Internet is an incredibly versatile, resilient and adaptive network, the underlying framework that the commercial Web rests upon was never designed with mutual trust and security in mind. As such, it will take a lot more than clever gimmickry to give businesses and consumers the upper hand over Internet hucksters, spammers and criminals. Courtsey : http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2006/05/legal_antispam_vigilante_compa.html
Evil vs. Good : Evil won the war this time
A company that was protecting its customer from spammers by spamming them and making a denial of service attack has been thrown in the towel following a massive attack by a Russian spam organization. Here is the story from Washinton post . Eran Reshef had an idea in the battle against spam e-mail that seemed to be working: he fought spam with spam. Today, he'll give up the fight. Reshef's Silicon Valley company, Blue Security Inc., simply asked the spammers to stop sending junk e-mail to his clients. But because those sort of requests tend to be ignored, Blue Security took them to a new level: it bombarded the spammers with requests from all 522,000 of its customers at the same time. That led to a flood of Internet traffic so heavy that it disrupted the spammers' ability to send e-mails to other victims -- a crippling effect that caused a handful of known spammers to comply with the requests. Then, earlier this month, a Russia-based spammer counterattacked, Reshef said. Using tens of thousands of hijacked computers, the spammer flooded Blue Security with so much Internet traffic that it blocked legitimate visitors from going to Bluesecurity.com, as well as to other Web sites. The spammer also sent another message: Cease operations or Blue Security customers will soon find themselves targeted with virus-filled attacks. Today, Reshef will wave a virtual white flag and surrender. The company will shut down this morning and its Web site will display a message informing its customers about the closure. "It's clear to us that [quitting] would be the only thing to prevent a full-scale cyber-war that we just don't have the authority to start," Reshef said. "Our users never signed up for this kind of thing." Security experts say the move marks a disheartening development in the ongoing battle by computer users, online businesses and law enforcement against those who clutter e-mail inboxes with a continuous glut of ads for drugs, porn and get-rich-quick schemes. According to Symantec Corp., maker of the popular Norton antivirus software products, more than 50 percent of all e-mail sent in the latter half of 2005 was spam. Alan Paller, director of research for the Bethesda-based SANS Institute, a computer security training group, said extortion attacks have exploded in the past few years. With Blue Security, Paller said, the attackers' extortionist demands were that the company merely stop interfering in a multimillion-dollar spam operation. "We're hearing from federal law enforcement that they are getting more than one new case of online extortion each day," Paller said. The spammer's counterattack generated so much Internet traffic that it also affected other sites, including Six Apart Ltd., a San Francisco-based company that runs millions of Web sites through its TypePad and LiveJournal blogging services. The attack also shut down operations for roughly 12 hours at Tucows Inc., a Toronto-based Internet services company that helped manage Blue Security's site. Tucows chief executive Elliot Noss called the attack "by far the largest the company had ever seen," and said that only a handful of companies have the infrastructure in place to withstand such an assault, much less a more powerful one. "This attack really was like trying to take out a mosquito with an atomic bomb," Noss said. The FBI is investigating the attacks, according to Six Apart, but agency officials would not confirm a federal investigation yesterday. Todd Underwood, chief of operations and security for Renesys Corp., a company that monitors Internet connectivity, called the attack against Blue Security "unsurprising but sad." The innovative approach in the fight against spam caught the attention of investors in 2004, when Blue Security received more than $4 million in venture capital, but critics questioned whether the company could win such a massive battle. "When the company's founders first approached the broader anti-spam community and asked them what they thought of the idea, everyone said this was a terrible idea and that they would eventually cause a lot of collateral damage," Underwood said. "But it's also extremely unfortunate, because it shows how much the spammers are winning this battle." Courtsey : http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/16/AR2006051601873.html
Symantec sues Microsoft
Surfing round the net I found this information. SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Symantec Corp. sued software rival Microsoft Corp. on Thursday, accusing it of misappropriating trade secrets to develop its own competing features and products, including the next version of Windows. The lawsuit filed in federal court in Seattle charges the world's biggest software maker with misappropriating intellectual property and breach of contract related to a licensing deal with Veritas, which Symantec acquired last year. It also seeks an injunction that would block the further development, sale or distribution of Vista -- the already- delayed next version of Windows -- and other products until all Symantec intellectual property is removed. "Microsoft's pervasive and continuing disregard of Symantec's intellectual property and contract rights has irreparably harmed Symantec and constitutes trade secret misappropriation," the complaint said. Microsoft said in statement it worked hard to try to resolve the dispute and that it acted within its rights in the contract. "We are confident that our actions are wholly consistent with the legal agreements between Veritas and Microsoft and that these claims will be shown to be without merit," Microsoft said. The dispute pits two of the biggest consumer software makers against each other and centers on a Symantec product called Volume Manager, which allows operating systems to store and manipulate large amounts of data. The complaint accuses Microsoft of improperly incorporating the technology into its own operating system products and seeks compensation as well as the removal of the intellectual property from the company's offerings. Copyright 2006 Reuters Link : http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/provider/providerarticle.asp?feed=OBR&Date=20060518&ID=5733228
Friday, May 12, 2006
Word 2007 includes blogging support.
It’s a great feature that I’m trying to test from within Word 2007. Now I don’t need to go to the blogging portal or use some other blogging tool. I can just write/edit in the word and click publish. Wow Cool product. Kudos to Word team they have done a nice job. It has a cool look some big icons I’m not familiar with(but they looks good). If I could publish this post successfully I’m not gonna use any other tool for blogging and I’m sure you won’t either.
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
Rediff.com Still sending the clear text password to the server
I was just testing if rediff.com still sends the passwords in clear text. I found that out once in my college days while sniffing the college network. I thought that they might have patched it so today while playing around with gmail's I thought to give Rediff.com a try And see what I found. This is the code from the home page of http://www.rediff.com
Blogger sucks it didn't lemme format my data according to me. Anyway
It must be very clear if you ever read HTML. It just calls the login.cgi and provides the User name and Password in clear text (using POST method).
Look at the Request object your browser is sending
POST /cgi-bin/login.cgi HTTP/1.0
Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/msword, */*
Referer: http://ia.rediff.com/index.html
Accept-Language: en-us
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
UA-CPU: x86
Pragma: no-cache
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)
Host: mail.rediff.com
Content-Length: 60
Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
Cookie: Some Cookie string
FormName=existing&login=username&passwd=mypasswords&x=0&y=0
So now anyone who can read your data have your password. It's not that hard to sniff the data. If you are using LAN (using hubs) anyone can read your data. Beaware if you are in a cyber cafe, your neighbour might be reading your emails or may be sending emails to your GF/BF.
Thursday, May 04, 2006
Some Microsoft ADs
Hope you enjoy these Microsoft Advertisments
This is the banned ad of Microsoft Office
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
Google afraid of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 Beta (IE7B)
Google is afraid of Microsoft in the long run for search engine champion trophy. As published in a article in the NYTimes Google started lobbying in the Washitongton against MSFT for removing MSN as default search engine provider in the IE7.
I dont why they forgot to remove Google as default seach engine in Mozilla Firefox. So funny..........................
[SNIP URL=http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01google.html?_r=1]
With a $10 billion advertising market at stake, Google, the fast-rising Internet star, is raising objections to the way that it says Microsoft, the incumbent powerhouse of computing, is wielding control over Internet searching in its new Web browser.
Google, which only recently began beefing up its lobbying efforts in Washington, says it expressed concerns about competition in the Web search business in recent talks with the Justice Department and the European Commission, both of which have brought previous antitrust actions against Microsoft.
"The market favors open choice for search, and companies should compete for users based on the quality of their search services," said Marissa Mayer, the vice president for search products at Google. "We don't think it's right for Microsoft to just set the default to MSN. We believe users should choose."
Microsoft replies that Google is misreading its intentions and actions. It says the default settings in the browser, Internet Explorer 7, are easy to change. And it says the product was designed with consumers and many partners in mind — even though it might not be to the liking of Google, the leading search engine.
Companies often talk with antitrust officials, and the talks do not imply that an investigation is imminent. But they do indicate that Google is pursuing every option in its escalating rivalry with Microsoft, which has already led to some public battles.
Last December, Google outbid Microsoft to remain the primary search service on America Online, paying $1 billion and taking a 5 percent stake in AOL. Last year, Microsoft sued Google to stop a star computer scientist and manager at Microsoft, Kai-Fu Lee, from working on search technology at Google. The suit was settled, and Mr. Lee runs Google's operations in China.
Microsoft has lost some ground in the browser market in the last year, mainly to Firefox, which is a Google ally. But Microsoft still holds more than 80 percent of the market. And Internet Explorer 7 is expected to be extremely popular because it is an improvement over Microsoft's previous browser, and because Microsoft will promote downloads of it and include it in Windows Vista.
That gives Microsoft the potential to use the browser to steer substantial traffic, and business, to MSN and away from rivals. MSN handled 11 percent of searches in the United States in March, down slightly from a year earlier, according to Nielsen/Net Ratings, a market research firm. That put it well behind Google, which had a 49 percent share, and Yahoo, with 22 percent.
[/SNIP]
Read :http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/01/technology/01google.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
Amazon finds Live.com better than google.com search
Amazon.com choose Microsoft's Live.com search engine over Google.The Amazon division's chief, David Tennenhouse, said Google search was removed from the site at the weekend after the contract expired. But Microsoft still has a long way to go to challenge market leader Google and smaller rival Yahoo.
Read more at : http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/04/amazon-drops-google-from-a9-and-alexa.html
Google is more than afraid with Microsoft push on search business. It's apparent from their recent struggle over default search engine provider in IE7Beta. I'll blog it in the other post.
[SNIP URL=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/01/AR2006050101447.html]
Amazon.com Inc. said yesterday that it has dropped Google Inc. as the provider of search engine results on its Web site in favor of one powered by Microsoft, a move that signals a small rebellion against Google but a large gain for Microsoft.
Last week, Amazon quietly removed the "powered by Google" wording near its search box when the company's contract with the search giant ended, according to Amazon. On Sunday, Amazon visitors were directed to its own search site, called A9.com, to scour the Web.
Although they are not labeled as such, A9's search results are now provided by Windows Live Search, Microsoft's new search engine, which is still in its testing phase.
"Our engineers have done some testing and evaluation, and overall we concluded this was an interesting option to discover information," said David Tennenhouse, chief executive of A9, a subsidiary of Amazon.com that provides search and mapping results.
Asked whether Microsoft's search engine is better than Google's, Tennenhouse said, "It will be up to users to try that out."
Microsoft recently announced plans to spend more than $2.4 billion to invest in the company's online efforts, where it has been slow to recognize the fast-paced growth of consumer-driven Web sites.
Microsoft said the win is part of a larger effort for the software giant to become more aggressive in providing search results on other companies' Web sites. Many sites note that their search capabilities are powered by Google or Yahoo. Few give that credit to Microsoft.
"It's very important for us to reach out to different partners in the search space," said Justin Osmer, senior product manager of Windows Live Search, adding that Microsoft cannot just offer search results on its own Web sites.
"It's going to be an area where we're going to continue to focus and continue to expand," he said.
[/SNIP]
Google earning money from your typos
You never knew that just a typo can get some money to Google. Read the news at WashingtonPost.com
Link: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/29/AR2006042900279.html
[Snip]
Google Inc., which runs the largest ad network on the Internet, is making millions of dollars a year by filling otherwise unused Web sites with ads. In many instances, these ad-filled pages appear when users mistype an Internet address, such as "BistBuy.com."
This new form of advertising is turning into a booming business that some say is cluttering the Internet and could be violating trademark rules. It also has sparked a speculative frenzy of investment in domain names, pushing the value of some beyond the $1 million mark.
[/Snip]
Read at FuckedGoogle.com : Google's single largest Adsense revenue source is mistyped domain names.
You can watch the Adword abuse video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuXilEu2EfI
Reference:
HitFarm
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Google sketch up
I dont know where google is heading towards but one thing for sure they are soon gonna be the indutry leader in fastest software development at least smallest s/w development life cycle.
They are releasing product almost on a daily basis and nobody knows for sure (ofcourse except google themselves) who they are competing with. Yesterday they added a new 3D designing tool in the list of the s/w from their labs. Dont know if they bought it or developed it but it certainly is a PR+ tool.
[Update] Google bought it not developed it just as I thought it earlier after seeing the logo of the 3D warehouse.
Announcement From GOOGLE :
The new 3D Warehouse is an online location where you can find and share 3D models.
 | | From within SketchUp, you can search among thousands of models stored in the 3D Warehouse. |
| | You can download the 3D models you like best to use in SketchUp or view in Google Earth. |
| | You can also upload your favorite 3D models into the 3D Warehouse to share them with your fellow designers. |
| | The models in the 3D Warehouse include everything you need for your own 3D world, including buildings, houses, bridges, statues, sculptures, couches, cars, people, pets, and much more. |
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Kashmir fact
What is the authorities answer to this video. I dont want to ask the question about it.
This is you have to comment about.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Riya.Com is up for its beta customers
Riya.com is open for its beta customers. I was also the one lucky guy to get it for testing. Right now I'm trying it lets see how it performs. May be they guys did it better after getting rejected from Google.
This is not just another photo uploading service but an intelligent application that recognize your face. After uploading and with a little practise it recognize me in three pics and I think thats fairly good. keep up the good work guys.
Thursday, March 16, 2006
On10 More hype than Origami
Robert scoble talks about 10. A sister of Channel 9.
This is meant for geeks to show their videos. 10 is built from the ground up using ASP.NET 2.0, SQL Server 2005 with a simple, easy to use design. Jeff sandquist talks about it in his blog.
Discuss 10 at Channel 9
Saturday, March 11, 2006
Is this the Microsoft pay guidelines
I myself am not aware about the salary about my colleague or boss. But somebody outsider does. What do you think. Dont ask me if they are real.
Link to original image
Read the story at my previous post or
here(Seattle Intelligence)
Controversy over MS IDC and outsourcing
Now they are complaining against offshoring their job. Read the story from SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
A Seattle-based labor union is seeking to use newly obtained internal Microsoft Corp. documents to fuel the debate over outsourcing and draw attention to its assertion that the company is shifting fundamental work offshore.
Microsoft rejects the claim and says a certain amount of overseas contracting is natural given the company's worldwide presence.
The Washington Alliance of Technology Workers says it obtained the previously confidential Microsoft contracts, spreadsheets and phone lists this month from a source inside the firm. The documents describe a series of agreements between Microsoft and outsourcing firms in such countries as India.
One conclusion the union draws from the papers: More than 1,100 people work for Microsoft in India under contracts with outsourcing firms, in addition to the 970 direct employees the company acknowledges. That brings Microsoft's total presence in India to more than 2,000 people -- significantly larger than previously known.
"They clearly have not been forthcoming about the extent of their offshore outsourcing," said Marcus Courtney, president of the union known as WashTech.
Microsoft said it doesn't disclose the size of its contract work force in India or anywhere else, because the figures can fluctuate significantly. But the company disputed the union's broader assertions about the role of its overseas contracts.
"These accusations don't reflect an understanding of the global nature of our business," said Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake. "As a global company with operations in more than 80 countries, we absolutely work with partner companies around the world."
She noted that top Microsoft executives have said repeatedly that they plan to keep the majority of the company's core software development work in the United States.
During the fiscal year ended June 30, about 4 percent of Microsoft's research-and-development budget went to contract work by outside firms, Drake said. About 1 percent of the R&D budget went to work by contractors outside the United States.
Examples of work for which the company has recently contracted with Indian outsourcing firms include the development of a promotional computer program that advertises the company's software. In another case, Microsoft contracted with a company to replicate problems reported by customers and provide the information to Microsoft employees, who analyze and fix the problems.
Microsoft uses contract workers for "projects -- not products. There's a big difference there," said S. "Soma" Somasegar, the Microsoft corporate vice president who oversees the company's 6-year-old India Development Center in Hyderabad, India.
"Anything that is core to what we are doing, core to our mission, we are going to do it in Microsoft," Somasegar said in a recent interview.
WashTech's Courtney, however, pointed out that the documents leaked to the union include long lists of outsourcing contracts that refer in two instances to Longhorn, the code name for the next version of Windows. One contract with Infosys Technologies is described as "Longhorn Migration Guide," and one with Wipro Ltd. describes testing for Longhorn and other products.
Courtney called it "a red flag" suggesting that fundamental work on the next operating system is being outsourced overseas.
But one analyst said the descriptions don't seem to refer to fundamental development work. "Based on the names of these contracts, I don't see that you can reach that conclusion," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft, a Kirkland-based research firm.
Microsoft's Drake said the company uses employees, not contract workers, for "all intellectual property work," including the design and creation of Windows and other products that the company sells. "All development work on Longhorn is done by Microsoft employees, the vast majority in Redmond," she said.
It's the second time in recent months that WashTech has obtained documents outlining Microsoft's outsourcing practices. Last month, the union publicized two Microsoft outsourcing contracts, including job descriptions, seeking to show that high-end jobs are prone to outsourcing.
As part of its broader campaign against outsourcing, WashTech also is running an ad in The New York Times today urging Congress to protect technology jobs. The ad doesn't mention Microsoft.
The latest documents received by WashTech also include a recent agreement between Microsoft and a Russian outsourcing company, Luxoft. Courtney said the deal shows that Microsoft is developing "a global supply chain of labor." Drake described the company's relationship with Luxoft as new and said the firm isn't yet doing any work for Microsoft.
Courtney said the union received the latest documents in early July, from the same source as before, but waited to provide them to reporters until this week to coincide with the recent release of Microsoft's hiring projections and the company's annual meeting with financial analysts, to take place today on its Redmond campus.
Microsoft last week said it plans to hire 6,000 to 7,000 employees worldwide during the next year, including 3,000 in the Puget Sound region, but a significant number of those people will fill jobs vacated by others, rather than new positions, making the net gain in employment smaller. During the past year, for example, Microsoft hired about 3,000 people in the region, but less than half of those filled new positions, and the company's local employment expanded by about 1,400 people.
That is much smaller than the company's growth during the economic boom of the late 1990s.
"Microsoft has significantly reduced its hiring," Courtney said.
Rising Frustration with Microsoft’s Compensation and Review System
http://www.washtech.org/news/industry/display.php?ID_Content=5041
Wash Tech a seattle labor union got hold over some Microsoft confidential documents and now trying to unionizing microsoft. Read the story from Washtech
Defections by high-level engineers have stung Microsoft in recent months, prompting questions about a rush of creative minds for the door. One explanation is the Redmond software giant has grown too big and cumbersome to keep its top engineers happy and productive.
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.”
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Origami - what is the hype all about
Here is the Origami launched by Microsoft I talked about earlier in my posts.
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS4596527542.html
Microsoft launched a new category of mobile computers Thursday, following several weeks of teasers on its Origami Project website. "Ultra Mobile PC" (UMPC) mini-tablets feature 7-inch touch-screen displays, built-in hard drives, WiFi, and Bluetooth wireless, and run Microsoft's Windows XP Tablet Edition operating system.
The first generation UMPCs are expected to weigh around two pounds and offer two and a half hours of operation per battery charge, and will include 30-60 GB hard drives, according to Microsoft. They are expected to be based on Intel Pentium M, Intel Celeron M, and VIA C7-M processors.
Intel showcased several UMPC prototypes based on its chips earlier this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, and Via is showcasing a new high-integration chipset and several UMPC prototypes using its chips, at CeBIT starting today.
Bill Mitchell, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Windows Mobile Platforms Division, said he expects some UMPCs "to include additional built-in features such as GPS, a webcam, fingerprint reader, digital TV tuners, and CompactFlash and SD card readers." Additionally, "some UMPCs will be able to connect via wide-area networking."
Because they run a full Windows XP OS, UMPCs will be useful for a wide range of entertainment and computing applications. An on-screen QWERTY keyboard can be used for data entry and navigation, along with stylus-based handwriting input. The devices will also support external Bluetooth and USB keyboards as input devices.
Mitchell said he expects the devices to be popular for "mobile communications, entertainment, gaming, and new scenarios such as location-based services."
According to Mitchell, UMPCs will initially run Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005, along with a new software package called Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows XP. The Touch Pack "optimizes the touch screen user interface for UMPCs to simplify navigation and ease-of-use while on the go," Mitchell said.
The Touch Pack also includes a customizable Program Launcher that "organizes software programs into categories, and uses large buttons and icons to make it easy to find and open your favorite applications," according to Mitchell. Other Touch Pack features include a thumb-based on-screen keyboard, a "Brilliant Black" Windows Media Player skin, and Sudoku, a "highly entertaining touch and ink enabled game," Mitchell said.
Windows Vista will eventually replace Windows XP Tablet PC Edition as the UMPC operating system, Mitchell added.
"We anticipate pricing in the $599-999 price-range," Mitchell said. "Part of our objective in creating the original reference design for the UMPC category was to engineer a platform that's both very compact and, through careful component choice, possible to sell for $500 MSRP."
UMPCs are expected to begin shipping during 2006. Founder and Samsung plan to introduce Intel-based UMPCs in Q2, with Asus following shortly thereafter. PaceBlade and TabletKiosk also plan to introduce Via-based UMPCs in Q2, according to Mitchell.
Interestingly, several companies have already introduced or announced Windows XP-based handheld mini-tablet PCs over the past several years, including OQO and DualCor Technologies.
OQO, which has made "ultra personal computers" (UPCs) for several years, recently began shipping a UPC running Windows XP Tablet PC Edition that offers handwriting input. The 4.9 x 3.4 x 0.9-inch OQO model 01+ is based on a 1 GHz Transmeta x86 processor and is equipped with 512 MB of DRAM and a 30 GB built-in hard drive. The device boasts a 5-inch 800x480 pixel touchscreen LCD along with a slide-out QWERTY thumb keyboard, and it provides both 802.11b and Bluetooth wireless, as well as connections for USB 2.0, Firewire, and Ethernet (available via a docking cable).
For its part, start-up DualCor recently unveiled a 6.5 x 3.3 x 1.2-inch handheld that combines the functions of a Tablet PC with those of a Pocket PC Phone. Like OQO's devices, DualCor's cPC has a 5-inch 800x480 pixel touch-screen. Unlike the OQO handhelds, the unusual cPC runs two OSes -- on two processors, no less. Windows XP Tablet Edition runs on a 1.5GHz Via C7-M processor, equipped with 1GB of DDR 2 DRAM memory and a 40GB hard drive, while Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition runs on an unspecified XScale processor equipped with 128MB of DRAM and 1GB of Flash. The device also provides two USB 2.0 type A ports, one USB 2.0 type B port, and a CompactFlash Type II slot.
OQO's UPC currently goes for a whopping $2099, roughly double the expected pricing for the initial UMPCs. Additionally, both OQO's and DualCor's devices have smaller screens -- 5 inches, vs. 7 inches for the current generation UMPCs. DualCore, which offers the advantage of including Pocket PC Phone capabilities, has disclosed neither availability nor pricing of its device.
Nokia takes a lower-end tack with its 770 Internet Tablet, which runs a Linux-based software platform and sells for around $360. The device, which features a 4.3-inch 800 x 480 pixel touch-screen LCD, is substantially smaller than the current-generation UMPC prototypes. The 770 boasts built-in WiFi, Bluetooth, and an RS-MMC (reduced-size-MMC) memory card slot, and its bundled software suite is mostly oriented toward Web browsing and media playing. It includes a version of Opera's mobile browser, along with an email client, multimedia player, image viewer, sketching, note-taking, and games. VoIP capabilities will be added in an upcoming software update.
Compared to the first generation UMPC prototypes, the 770 offers smaller size, lighter weight, and, most likely, longer battery life. But these advantages come at a cost: constrained processor and memory resources -- a 200 MHz TI OMAP processor, 64 MB of SDRAM, and 128MB of flash (expandable via RS-MMC) -- and a limited set of available application software, in comparison with all that Windows XP Tablet Edition has to offer. On the other hand, by the time second generation UMPCs reach market sometime next year, the Nokia Internet Tablet can be expected to have evolved, both in terms of computing resources and available applications.
We reckon consumers, who already have desktop and laptop PCs running Windows XP or Vista, will be reticent to shell out $750 or more for a fairly large, rather heavy, high-powered device that requires handwriting or soft-keyboard taps as input -- and that might easily get dropped or lost.
Frankly, we think Nokia has the right idea but the wrong software. In our opinion, a Windows Mobile version of the 770 Internet Tablet -- but with more DRAM and flash, and an honest-to-goodness SDIO slot -- priced under $400, would be a real winner.
Not that we don't think the Windows XP-based UMPC concept has merit. It's just that from a Moore's Law perspective, the necessary economies of scale are probably several years off.
LinkBack :
http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS4596527542.html
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1935744,00.asp
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/24/1734257
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/02/23/what-is-the-origami-project/
http://www.origamiproject.com
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