NewsScan Daily, 29 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 29 January 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       Mydoom: Same Stupid Song, Second Stupid Verse
       Small and Midsize Businesses Wary of Microsoft
       EBay and Amazon: Different Models, Different Attitudes
       India: The New Face of the Silicon Age
       Smile, You're Being Googled

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Laura Ingalls Wilder

MYDOOM: SAME STUPID SONG, SECOND STUPID VERSE
     The e-mail worm Mydoom (also called Novarg or MiMail.r) is back now in
a new variant, Mydoom b -- which like its predecessor is spread through the
Kazaa file-sharing network and is disguised as an e-mail error message. The
message bears a variety of subject lines, text and attachment names.
Mydoom.b launches a denial-of-service attack in which networks are flooded
with junk traffic. The Mydoom code includes a message from its creepy
author: "I'm just doing my job, nothing personal, sorry." Warning: Don't
open an e-mail attachment that you haven't requested or that you have any
reason to be suspicious about. (San Jose Mercury News 29 Jan 2004)
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7825088.htm

SMALL AND MIDSIZE BUSINESSES WARY OF MICROSOFT
     A study by The Yankee Group says 43% of small and midsize businesses
(companies with fewer than 500 employees) are concerned about becoming
"overly reliant" on Microsoft's products and services. A Microsoft spokesman
has expressed surprise and puzzlement over the study results -- which also
indicated that three out of four such companies are actively exploring the
possibility of using vendors other than Microsoft. Yankee Group analyst
Michael Lauricella says: "It will be very important for Microsoft to be
smart about how it uses partners and channel companies, and in some ways, it
may be better for them to be more of a behind-the-scenes player, to reduce
this perception of dominance." (CNET/New York Times 29 Jan 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/cnet/CNET_2100-1012_3-5149066.html

EBAY AND AMAZON: DIFFERENT MODELS, DIFFERENT ATTITUDES
     Internet e-commerce sites eBay and Amazon have different models and
different approaches to growth -- with EBay raising its prices this month
for the fourth year in a row and Amazon retaining its strategy of
maintaining low prices even at the risk of lower profits. The strategies can
also be compared and contrasted as studies in corporate attitude, with eBay
chief executive Meg Whitman saying, "The eBay marketplace is a powerhouse.
We continue to enjoy ever-bigger, ever-faster cycles of success, fueled by
the unlimited opportunity of our huge addressable market," while Amazon
founder and chief executive Jeffrey Bezos promising: "We will, for years and
years and years, consistently give back the gains we get in lower operating
costs to our customers in the form of lower prices." Care to pick a winner?
(Washington Post 28 Jan 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A58253-2004Jan28.html

INDIA: THE NEW FACE OF THE SILICON AGE
     An interesting long article in the new Wired magazine gives a good
picture of India as it becomes the "new face of the Silicon Age." Journalist
Dan Fink writes of Indian engineers doing outsourced programming work: "What
begins to seep through their well-tiled arguments about quality, efficiency,
and optimization is a view that Americans, who have long celebrated the
sweetness of dynamic capitalism, must get used to the concept that it works
for non-Americans, too. Programming jobs have delivered a nice
upper-middle-class lifestyle to the people in this room. They own
apartments. They drive new cars. They surf the Internet and watch American
television and sip cappuccinos. Isn't the emergence of a vibrant middle
class in an otherwise poor country a spectacular achievement, the very
confirmation of the wonders of globalization -- not to mention a new market
for American goods and services? And if this transition pinches a little,
aren't Americans being a tad hypocritical by whining about it? After all,
where is it written that IT jobs somehow belong to Americans -- and that any
non-American who does such work is stealing the job from its rightful
owner?" (Wired Feb 2000)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.02/india.html

SMILE, YOU'RE BEING GOOGLED
     By making the mistake of dating a woman who knew how to use the
Internet, fugitive LaShawn Pettus-Brown found himself jailed soon after the
woman looked his name up in Google and found he was wanted by the FBI for
alleged wire fraud. Use of the Internet for background checks is gaining a
lot of popularity in the dating world, so stop doing whatever it is you're
doing wrong, or restrict yourself to dating Luddites. (USA Today 29 Jan
2004) http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-01-29-google-bust_x.htm

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Adults are obsolete children." (Dr. Seuss)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: LAURA INGALLS WILDER
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the author Laura Ingalls Wilder
(1867-1957), who wrote the classic Little House novels that inspired the
producers of Michael Landon's long-running TV series, Little House on the
Prairie. In writing her novels Wilder called on her own experiences growing
up as a member of a family that moved about in the frontier West, living for
periods of time in Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, Iowa, and the Dakota
Territory. 
     The father of the family loved to entertain his two daughters, Laura
and her blind sister Cary, with tales about prowling mountain lions,
skirmishes between Indians and white settlers, and other exciting tales of
the old West. Such lore and her own memories of frontier life provided
Wilder material for the Little House series of novels she began writing at
age 65 at the urging of her news reporter daughter Rose, who had been
regaled by her mother's stories from her earliest years.
     The Little House series (Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy,
Little House on the Prairie, and On the Banks of Plum Creek) describe not
only the dangers faced by frontier families, but the practical details of
day-to-day frontier life, such as churning butter, baking, cooking, and
personal hygiene. Five of her books won Newbery Medals, the Pulitzer Prize
of children's literature, and in 1954, the Children's Library Association
created the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for "substantial and lasting
contribution" to juvenile fiction.
     Wilder was born Laura Elizabeth Ingalls in the Big Woods of Wisconsin,
seven miles north of Pepin. Soon thereafter, her family moved to Charlton,
Missouri, where they lived until 1868 when attracted by the Homestead Act's
offer of free land to settlers, the family traveled west by covered wagon,
first to Indian Territory in Kansas, later to Grasshopper Country in
Minnesota, and then to the Dakota Territory. In the search for a better
life, the Ingalls family endured many hardships. In Minnesota their farm was
devastated by a plague of grasshoppers, and the family was saddened by the
loss of an infant boy. In the early 1880s they suffered through the hard
winter blizzards.
     At age 15 Wilder earned a teaching certificate and became a teacher.
After a three-year romance, she married Almanzo Wilder, a young farmer and
in 1886 their daughter Rose was born. In 1894 the Wilders settled in the
Missouri Ozarks town of Mansfield, where they built a small log cabin that
they subsequently added to over the years until it became a large rambling
farmhouse. Before writing her first Little House novel, Wilder wrote
articles for the Missouri Ruralist and other magazines. Then with the
success of the first of the Little House novels, she became a dedicated
writer for young readers. Much of what she wrote was autobiographical, but
she wrote it as historical fiction, in a style that appealed to children.
Both of the Wilders were long-lived, Almanzo dying in 1949 at age 92, and
Laura in 1957 at age 90.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0064400409/newsscancom/ref=nosim
for a set of the Little House books --.or look for them in your favorite
library. (We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult
literacy programs.)

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