Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Make Better Quality Decisions with the Help of This Spreadsheet


The best way to tackle a problem—whether it's something big like what car to buy or as small as where to eat out—is to evaluate the possible solutions. This Excel spreadsheet helps weigh all your options and find the best choice.
To use the decision making tool, enter up to five values or qualities you consider important about the decision in question and then rank them. In the example provided, when looking for a vacation spot, you might want to go somewhere warm, relaxing, inexpensive, and nearby. Then list the possible options (e.g., Florida, Bermuda) and score them against each quality. The spreadsheet will automatically calculate a final tally and show you the most desirable choice.
Whether or not you geek out like I do over charts and pros and cons lists, this tool from Idea Sandbox might help make tough decisions a little bit easier.
Idea Sandbox: Decision Making Tool | Idea Sandbox

How to Build a Hack-Proof Password System with LastPass

 It seems like every day there's news that a new site or service has been hacked. The intruders make off with usernames and passwords, and even if they're encrypted the service forces users to change them. This week it was DreamHost , and last week it was Zappos .
We're big fans of LastPass , a cross-platform password manager that helps you create and manage secure, unique passwords for every site, but the point of failure is obvious: What happens if someone gets your master password? Here's how you can beef up LastPass by turning a USB flash drive into a key you have to plug in to your computer before you can access your passwords. This way, the next time a service you use has been hacked—even if it's LastPass—you won't worry.
If you're not already using LastPass to generate, maintain, and manage different and unique strong passwords for every site and service you use on the web, it's time to get started . The beauty of LastPass is that it's available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and even mobile devices, and you can choose and remember one strong password and then use that password to manage and access all of your other logins and services on the web. Still, LastPass keeps all of your passwords in the cloud, and while they're as secure as they possibly could be, if someone gets a hold of your LastPass password, you're pretty much screwed, right? Not if you have a spare USB drive with Sesame, a utility that turns your USB key into an actual key needed to unlock your LastPass vault. Once installed and set up, you'll need both your LastPass master password and your key plugged into your Mac, Windows, or Linux PC in order to unlock your vault and access your saved passwords.

Step One: Get LastPass and Set It Up

The first thing you'll need is LastPass, and a Premium Account . It's $12/year, but that's a small price to pay for password security. LastPass is our favorite any-browser, any-OS password solution , and if you haven't tried it yet, The How-To Geek has a great guide to getting started with it , and we have a more advanced guide to mastering your passwords and increasing your personal security with it.

Step Two: Grab a USB Flash Drive and Install Sesame

The next thing you'll need is a USB flash drive. Building on the principle that most secure password is the one you can't remember , your second authentication factor will be a device, not a passkey or code. LastPass offers a tool called Sesame that can turn any USB drive into a second authentication method to use when you need access to your LastPass vault. This way, even if someone obtains your LastPass password, it's useless without the USB drive, and vice versa.
You already know how to secure your personal belongings, like your wallet or keys, so a USB flash drive like the LaCie key-shaped USB drives that fit right on your keychain shouldn't be a problem to keep safe and secure.
Once you have Sesame downloaded and extracted to your USB drive, here's how to set it up:
  1. Run the Sesame utility on your USB drive, and log in with your LastPass credentials.
  2. Sesame will email you an activation code, required to enable two-factor authentication on your account.
  3. Click the link in your activation email to activate Sesame. (Note: The activation code is only good for 10 minutes.)
  4. After you've activated Sesame, you'll have to log in with both a Sesame passkey and your LastPass credentials whenever you want to access your password vault (more on this in the next section.)

Step Three: Use Your Key to Access Your Password Vault

Going forward, you'll need your USB drive any time you want to access your Lastpass vault, like when a service or site you have an account with gets hacked and you need to change the password, or you reset a password for one of those services.
To access your LastPass vault once you have Sesame enabled, you have two options.
  • Option One :
    1. Visit LastPass in your browser, and log in with your LastPass credentials.
    2. When you're prompted for a Sesame one-time token, pop in your USB key and run Sesame to generate your token and copy it to the clipboard.
    3. Paste the token into the authentication screen, and click OK to access your password vault.
  • Option Two :
    1. Insert your USB key and run Sesame.
    2. Check the box for "Launch Browser," and click the "Generate One Time Password" button.
    3. Sesame will generate your token, open your browser and go to LastPass, and pass the token for you. Type in your master password, and click OK to access your vault.
Don't worry, if you lose your Sesame USB key, the key is useless without your LastPass email address and master password. You can always visit your LastPass vault, click the link in the authentication screen to tell LastPass that you no longer have your Sesame device, and confirm via email that you want to deactivate Sesame. Then, you can grab another USB key, reinstall Sesame, re-activate it, and be on your way.

Step Four: Audit Your Passwords and Strengthen Security

Now that your LastPass vault is well protected with two-factor authentication, it's time to tune up the passwords that LastPass is protecting. After all, LastPass won't do you much good if your Amazon password is "password" or if your Google account password is "123456." We've discussed how you can use LastPass to audit and update your passwords , and even how you can make those passwords more secure and easy to use . If you're taking steps to make your LastPass account as hack-proof as possible, you may as well go the extra mile and make your individual passwords as strong as possible as well.
As we mentioned, Sesame is a great tool to make sure that even if LastPass gets hacked, or someone gets a hold of your LastPass master password, they don't have carte-blanche to log in to your LastPass account and grab your credentials to everything else on the web. It doesn't, however, automatically add a second authentication method for all of those services you use, so it's important to make sure those passwords are strong.
Photo by Juan J. Martinez .

Step Five: Consider Secondary Authentication for Other Web Services

In addition to beefing up your LastPass account, you might want to consider activating two-factor authentication for any other web services where it's available. For example, we've discussed how you can—and should—set up two-factor authentication for your Google account , and how you can do the same for your Facebook account as well. Many banks and financial institutions are coming around to offering two-factor authentication before you can get at your financial statements or move your money around, so contact your bank or investment firm to see if that added security is available to you.

Step Six: Stay Vigilent

If you've been following along, you should now have LastPass set up with two-factor authentication for your vault, you've audited your passwords and made them stronger and more difficult to crack, and you've activated multi-factor authentication on the services where it's available to you. That all doesn't mean that you can relax and forget about security—you'll still need to quickly change your passwords for any sites or services you use that get hacked, and you'll still need to use different strong passwords for each site or service you use. No password mechanism, web service, or authentication scheme is completely hack-proof. That said, this should help you breathe a little easier.

Alternatives to Your Thumb Drive Key

LastPass provides more than one way to set up two-factor authentication, so if you don't like this specific method, you have other options. For starters, you can purchasea Yubikey from Yubico for about $25, and set up Yubikey authentication on your LastPass account for the same effect. You can also use LastPass with Google Authenticator and turn your smartphone into the "key" that—along with your master password—unlocks your LastPass vault. If you're not interested in paying for a LastPass premium account, consider grid multifactor authentication for your LastPass account, a technique we've shown you that you can apply to other services

What Your Favorite Blog Says About You


Gawker :  You tell your friends jokes about their ethnicities and sexual orientations. They grin and say "Bitch!" and pretend to smack you.
Huffington Post :  Most of your pleasures are guilty pleasures.
Daily Kos :  You own a "Disappearing Civil Liberties" mug.
Laughing Squid :  You own an unconventional bicycle.
BuzzFeed :  Your giggle is too high-pitched.
Gizmodo :  You correct people in conversations that you overhear in public.
Lifehacker : You know where your pens are.
Kotaku :  Your girlfriend says, "At least when you read a book, you come away having learned something."
Mashable :  Your Facebook feed is all "likes" of news articles you've read.
TechCrunch :  You "network".
Jezebel :  You convinced your mom to leave your dad, and she's never been happier.
The Awl :  You aren't snotty about keeping books in good condition, you acknowledge that dogears and scribbled notes are healthy, but you have a few special editions you'd only lend out to a very close friend.
Deadspin :  You're going to kickpunch the next asshole who says "I only watch it for the commercials" as if this is some mark of intelligence.
Boing Boing :  You've voted for a satirical political candidate.
[EXPANDED version since Boing Boing linked to us : Boing Boing: You are someone's favorite uncle who taught them how to build their own toys. You are someone's "cool" aunt who sends the amazing Birthday gifts from far-off lands. You know swear words in fifteen languages. You have built seven completely different and contest-winning party costumes around a single vintage fez.]
Kottke.org :  You read all the liner notes, even if you bought the album as mp3s.
Daring Fireball :  You know three ways to tell Helvetica from Arial.
The Hairpin :  You got Maira Kalman to draw a cartoon in your book at a reading.
[EXPANSION cause The Hairpin linked us ! The Hairpin:  You get the importance of hand towels. A lot of other shit in your life is out of control, but you are not gonna make anyone visit your home and dry their hands on your bath towel, like a peasant. You have an uncanny ability to guess the correct time of day within a five-minute range. It's a shame "spunky" is such a gross little word because it used to be a good one and it would be helpful right now.]
Think Progress :  You can communicate multiple levels of disgust with your snorts.
Perez Hilton :  You were bullied in high school.
The Gloss : You have a purse dog.
PopSugar : You feel comforted by laughtracks.
Neatorama : You've bought food from ThinkGeek.
Serious Eats :  You've debated about Five Guys vs. In 'n' Out.
TreeHugger :  You feel bad about how long you take in the shower.
Roger Ebert :  You like discovering cheese-and-fruit pairings.
Geekosystem :  You used to steal Reddit jokes for your Facebook feed, but your friends caught you.
Autoblog :  You use pomade.
Vulture :  You have theater tickets.
Stereogum :  You have a working definition of "authentic".
Brooklyn Vegan :  You have a working definition of "facon".
Videogum : You've openly scoffed at a celebrity in person.
Hipster Runoff :  Your friends squint at you a lot after you say things.
Consumerist :  You have some sort of fact sheet, like the Bill of Rights or some measurement conversions, in your wallet.
Cinematical :  You refuse to acknowledge that AOL shut this blog down. Jesus, live in the present.
TubeFilter :  You're surprised how much you say "content".
ReadWriteWeb :  You are the only person who actually called your representative about SOPA.
Art Fag City : You've fantasized about throwing poop onto something expensive that you actually like, just for the filthy thrill and the knowledge that this will make it worth more to someone foolish.
PostSecret :  You try so hard to act mysterious that everyone knows this about you.
I'm Remembering :  You own a stuffed animal.
The Frogman :  You can't listen to a Muppets song without singing along.
The Daily What : You like to borrow your friends' pets.
Slacktory :  You keep tripping over your own feet.

Apple's Growth Rate Is Simply Incredible... And It's Accelerating





There are plenty of impressive stats in Apple's December quarter earnings report , such as 37 million iPhones shipped, $46 billion of overall sales, and $13 billion of profit.
But Apple's most impressive stat continues to be its growth rate: Apple is not only huge, but it is growing at a rate far greater than its peers. And, even more incredible, its growth rate is accelerating .
As a company gets bigger, or as a market matures, its growth rate typically falls. It's only natural: The numbers get bigger, so the percentage of change eventually shrinks. But for Apple, during the Christmas quarter — its busiest time of the year — that hasn't happened yet.
Specifically, last quarter, Apple's overall sales totaled $46.3 billion, an increase of 73% over the previous December quarter. That's an acceleration over Apple's growth rate from the December 2010 quarter, when it posted 71% growth. And that was better than the year before, when it grew 32%. That, too, was faster than the year before, when Apple posted a 6% growth rate in the bowels of the recession. So for the third year in a row, Apple has accelerated its Christmas quarter sales growth.
Why is this so impressive? Because maintaining your growth rate when you're Apple's size — never mind increasing it — takes a lot of work!
This past Christmas, Apple needed to add an extra $20 billion in new sales to grow by 73%. The year before, it "only" needed to generate an additional $11 billion in new business to grow by 71%. It's pretty astounding, especially considering that Apple's product lineup didn't even change that much last year.
The reason it happened, of course, was the iPhone 4S "perfect storm." Not only was it a new iPhone, but it launched during what is already Apple's busiest time of the year, the holiday quarter. And it expanded Apple's footprint to new carriers, such as Sprint. Add pent-up demand to the mix, and Apple was easily able to shatter its iPhone sales record. Then consider that the iPhone is Apple's biggest business by revenue and profits, and the big numbers fall into place.
Can it happen again? It's only going to get harder. To match this year's growth — 73% — Apple's December 2012 quarter would have to beat $80 billion in sales. That's a lot of iPhones. The way the smartphone market is growing, and the way the iPad looks like it's going to do, anything's possible. But it's not going to be easy.




Apple December 2011 Earnings Chart

Colorado Judge Mandates Defendant Decrypts Laptop Hard Drive

In the order issued yesterday, the court dodged the question of whether requiring Fricosu to type a passphrase into the laptop would violate the Fifth Amendment. Instead, it ordered Fricosu to turn over a decrypted version of the information on the computer. While the court didn't hold that Fricosu has a valid Fifth Amendment privilege not to reveal that data, it seemed to implicitly recognize that possibiity. The court both points out that the government offered Fricosu immunity for the act of production and forbids the government from using the act of production against her. We think Fricosu not only has a valid privilege against self-incrimination, but that the immunity offered by the government isn't broad enough to invalidate it. Under Supreme Court precedent, the government can't use the act of production or any evidence it learns as a result of that act against Fricosu.
The court then found that the Fifth Amendment "is not implicated" by requiring Fricosu to turn over the decrypted contents of the laptop, since the government independently learned facts suggesting that Fricosu had possession and control over the computer. Furthermore, according to the court, "there is little question here but that the government knows of the existence and location of the computer's files. The fact that it does not know the specific content of any specific documents is not a barrier to production." We disagree with this conclusion, too. Neither the government nor the court can say what files the government expects to find on the laptop, so there is testimonial value in revealing the existence, authenticity and control over that specific data. If Fricosu decrypts the data, the government could learn a great deal it didn't know before.


In sum, we think the court got it wrong.


Could Jailbreaking Your iPhone Become a Crime Soon?



Whether or not jailbreaking or rooting one's smartphone is a legal act isn't something most of us in the U.S. have had to think about for some time. That's because, in 2010, the U.S. Copyright Office declared that jailbreaking devices is not a violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Fine, said Apple, but it will still void your warranty and we bet it will screw up your phone.
Despite the company's official disapproval, jailbreaking iOS is still big among a certain subset of users, as evidenced by the popularity of the A5 Absinthe tool that wasreleased last Friday . But should people in the jailbreak community continue to rest easy, assured that freeing their devices will forever remain legal? Probably not.
That's because the notion that jailbreaking is legally acceptable wasn't established by, say, a Supreme Court ruling and all of the weight of legal authority that that would entail. Instead, it was a directive from the U.S. Copyright Office. So the thing can expire. That could happen soon, warns the Electronic Frontier Foundation .
The only way to ensure that this doesn't happen, says the EFF, is for everyone to let the Copyright Office know that they would prefer to see jailbreaking remain legal, and why. There's a comment form that lets them do that.
In addition to smartphones, the EFF wants the Copyright Office to add exemptions for tablets and video game consoles as well. Two years ago, the tablet market simply wasn't what it is today, let alone the jailbreak community around it.
Video game consoles have been hacked and modded for years, but more recent tinkering with Microsoft's Kinect in particular has brought the true potential of the technology to the forefront. Even though Microsoft itself has embraced Kinect-hacking, the EFF doesn't want to let this kind of user-modification of game consoles slip through the legal cracks.

New VMware VCenter Ops Suite Geared More Toward Managers



On the surface, it would seem to make sense that management is a task best performed in an organization by managers. When you apply that ethic to the emerging structure of data centers, which now use virtualization and private cloud foundations, you realize there are changes that can be made. Casting business resources as cloud services moves the budgeting process from capital expenditures to operating expenditures. And for more organizations, it means relocating management responsibilities from IT administration to a newly combined resource administration.
For these managers newly tasked with administering clouds along with people, admin tools don't make much sense. In a sweeping restructuring of its key virtualization management tools suite this morning, VMware is introducing a completely renovated dashboard for monitoring virtual data center operations, with graphs and 100-point-scale ratings designed to make better sense to people who might not, at first glance - or even second - know what any of this means.

Retooling VM administration as analytics

"This transition from an architecture standpoint requires a new approach to IT management," states Martin Klaus, VMware's director of product marketing for vCenter Operations Management Suite, in an interview with RWW. With managers having a more marketing-centered view of the world, the new vCenter Ops will take more cues from the marketing mindset, beginning with using analytics more prominently in boiling down streams of data into need-to-know bullet points.
"As there are more moving parts that come and go more quickly, especially when you think about self-service portals," Klaus continues, "where the demand for more resources cannot be predicted up front, you need something that allows you to use analytics that give the IT administrator much more predictive controls over what's happening in environments, to intervene and intercept issues that are building before those issues impact the end users."
The revised dashboard is designed to communicate more ideas in shorter spaces. Perhaps you've noticed dashboards these days taking their cues from mobile apps, which have learned (out of necessity) to communicate greater information in shorter spaces. VMware group product manager Jai Malkani says the inspiration for nugget-izing vCenter's information into nuggets came from a recent reassessment of how its customers divide responsibilities among themselves.
"The customer teams working today in a cloud environment, what are they really focused on, and what's the top thing on their minds?" remarks Malkani. "As I worked with some 140-odd customers in the beta program over the last year, [I found] the main two areas that an ops team focuses on are: insuring and restoring service levels, making sure the problems are resolved and the environment is up and running at all times; and being pro-active toward optimizing the environment for efficiency and costs."

Administration is a two-cycle engine

Some of VMware's competitors perceive such tasks as workflows that can be diagrammed using flowchart tools. VMware is gambling that these two task areas that Malkani has identified are instead perpetual and ongoing cycles, where problems are identified, mitigated, and resolved; and ideas are generated, perfected, and implemented on a continual basis.
With respect to the cycle on the left, Malkani explains, the cloud administrator is focused on three areas: 1) The applications profile of the VM that appears to be the source of the problem. In other words, an app on that VM may be the actual source of the problem, but any remedial measure involving that VM will affect the entire profile of the apps or services in its purview; 2) Determining whether the problem is on account of how a problem app may be behaving in its environment, or instead the characteristics of the VM which presents that environment to the app - such as available capacity, or the current state of security monitoring; 3) Whether a corrective action is available in an immediately accessible manner - preferably, something which the admin can simply do and be done with it. A manager acting as an admin here would like to be given a multiple choice question, and choose the answer that appears to best resolve the problem - or to use Malkani's phrase for it, "closes the loop."
The "ideas" part of VMware's cycle are what Malkani calls optimizations - little improvements that come incrementally, instead of in great batches or overhauls. We see this concept emerging in so-called "resilience architectures," which replace typical crisis remediation methods with regular workflows that mitigate problems by their very nature, so that the responses to problems are essentially the same as everyday maintenance. "Do this [on the right-hand side] so that the left-hand side doesn't happen in the first place," he illustrates.

Fewer silos sounds like a good idea

The drive toward easier-to-understand metrics, and reducing and compartmentalizing dashboards with graphs and icons, is not a trend that was started by VMware . It's an increasingly competitive field, with an emerging ecosystem around management tools that fill in the gaps that management suites have left open.
Speaking with RWW, VMware's Martin Klaus admitted that one of his company's explicit goals for vCenter Ops was the reduction of the need for certain third-party tools, or for anyone else to come in thinking they need to patch the holes in vCenter. Its strategy here takes a cue from its competition, even borrowing some of its language: The new suite will incorporate tools that were offered for VMware's previous vCenter Operations tools as add-ons, including the Chargeback Manager tool that produces forecasts of future expenditures when current conditions are left as they are, compared to the savings recouped from making adjustments.
"Before, there were too many element levels, management tools in place that made for overlaps in some of the data," says Klaus. "But there's only one person sitting in front of these tools. And it was not possible for him to correlate the data that each of these tools were collecting. So with vCenter Operations, you can now see the data from third-party monitoring tools - from the storage layer, the networking layer, the database layer, the Web server layer - coming together. And now you can take a step back: What is really needed in terms of net-new data points? In this case, you can reduce the overall number of monitoring tools that are needed in the environment."
General availability of vCenter Operations Management Suite begins now, with various licensing rates beginning at $50 per VM.

Results of Thailand floods still affecting tech industry



Last year, Thailand was rocked by floods that devastated the country. It destroyed cities and towns and put a severe dent in Taiwan's manufacturing industry. Hard drive manufacturing was hit the hardest and shortages in the supply of drives started to surface last year. This deficit is impacting tech companies from Western Digital to Intel and AMD.
According to Macworld, Western Digital recorded US$199 million in charges and expenses from the floods and its hard drive manufacturing plants are still trying to recover. As a result, hard drive shipments fell from 57.8 million drives in Q3 2011 to 28.5 million drives in Q4. Intel's business slowed as computer makers like HP lowered their microprocessor orders. Even AMD's GPU business, which uses components made in Thailand, fell 10 percent in the last quarter because of this manufacturing slowdown.
Unlike other tech companies, this shortage will have little impact on Apple's computer business. CEO Tim Cook confirmed in yesterday's earnings conference call that Apple will see little financial impact from this disaster. The company will pay more for its supply of hard drives, but it can secure the drives that it needs for its computers. It helps that Apple has moved several of its computer models to SSD, which is not affected by the floods. It also doesn't hurt that the company has a $97 billion cash reserve to absorb this extra manufacturing cost. For the financially-minded, this extra cost is already calculated in Apple's Q2 2012 guidance.

How Google Wants to Make TCP Faster



Google has some ideas how to make the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) a little bit faster. Earlier this week, Google’s Yuchung Cheng wrote about some of Google’s research and ways that the “make the web faster” team suggests improving TCP. This includes things like increasing the initial congestion window, reducing the initial timeout for TCP, and using a new algorithm for loss recovery. According to Gooogle, this would decrease network congestion and boost page load speed significantly.
  • Increasing TCP’s initial congestion window would reduce network latency by about 10%, according to Google research. Currently the window is four segments, which is good for transmitting about 4KB of data. Google wants to increase this to 10 segments, or about 15KB.
  • Google says that using TCP Fast Open would decrease HTTP transaction network latency by 15% and whole-page load time by 10% (on average) and up to 40% in some cases. This is because fast open would enable data exchange during the TCP initial handshake, which would decrease latency by a full round-trip.
  • Google also wants to shorten the initial timeout by two seconds. This would give connections one second to time out, which Google argues is plenty on modern networks.
  • The Proportional Rate Reduction for TCP that Google developed is already implemented in Linux, and is proposed by Google as a standard.


Cheng says the company is also working on better recovery on noisy mobile networks and more. The work being done by Google is all open source, says Cheng, and submitted as standards proposals to the IETF.

Shrooms may open the doors of perception

January 25, 2012 10:28:32 PM

Shrooms may open the doors of perception, seriously

boingboing.net

New research suggests that taking psilocybin, the hallucinogen in magic mushrooms, may actually decrease the amount of blood flow in certain parts of your brain. Scientists at Imperial College London injected subjects with psilocybin and scanned their brains. Turns out, they observed a reduction of blood flow in core regions of the brain like the thalamus and cingulate cortex. From Science News:

"Decreasing the activity in certain hubs in the network may allow for a more unconstrained conscious experience," says Matthew Johnson, an experimental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore who studies psilocybin and other hallucinogens. "These drugs may lift the filters that are at play in terms of limiting our perception of reality."

Further work by (Imperial College London) neuropsychopharmacologist David) Nutt's team showed that the brain hubs responded together, linked by a neural circuit called the default mode network. Some scientists believe this highly interconnected brain superhighway is essential for maintaining a person's sense of self.

Putting the brakes on this network could help to treat certain psychological conditions by opening the brain to new ways of thinking, researchers hope. Several studies have shown that psilocybin can change people's attitudes for the better and may be useful for treating depression, a condition linked to too much activity in the default mode network.

"Chemically switching off might have very profound beneficial effects," says Nutt, who suspects that psilocybin could also be useful for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. "It may help people completely locked into a mindset that drives their lives."

"Turn off, tune in, drop out" (Science News)

"Neural correlates of the psychedelic state as determined by fMRI studies with psilocybin" (PNAS)

The Web's Worst Privacy Policy



"With much of the web upset over about Google's latest privacy policy changes , it's helpful to remember it could be much worse: A search engine called Skipity offers the world's worst privacy policy , (undoubtedly tongue-in-cheek) filled with lines like this: 
'You may think of using any of our programs or services as the privacy equivalent of living in a webcam fitted glass house under the unblinking eye of Big Brother: you have no privacy with us. If we can use any of your details to legally make a profit, we probably will.' The policy gives the company the right to sell any of your data that it wants to any and all corporate customers, send you limitless spam, track your movements via GPS if possible, watch you through your webcam, and implant a chip in your body that is subject to reinstallation whenever the company chooses."

Netflix Streaming Margins Are 11 Percent, DVD Margins Are 52 Percent



If you look closely at Netflix's fourth quarter earnings , it will become clear why the company wanted to split its DVD and streaming businesses. This is the first quarter that the company is splitting out each business and reporting revenues, profits, and margins separately.
While the streaming business is growing (adding 220 subscribers domestically in the quarter), and the DVD business sis shrinking (it lost 2.76 million subscribers domestically), it's margins are much worse than the legacy DVD business. The streaming business has an 11 percent profit margin, compared to a very healthy 52 percent margin for the DVD business.
Out of Netflix's total $847 million in revenues last quarter, $476 million came from streaming and $370 million came from DVD rentals (the remainder came from international). The streaming business also twice as many subscribers: 21.7 million versus 11.2 million. But the DVD business contributed the vast majority of Netflix's profit: $194 million versus $52 million.
If you break that down, each streaming subscriber is worth only $2.40 in profit each quarter to Netflix, compared to $17.32 for each DVD subscriber. The old business was very lucrative. The new business kind of sucks. The economics are very different. The DVD business had fixed costs, while Netflix is forced to negotiate streaming licenses on a case by case basis with each media company.
Investors are going to have to figure out how long the old DVD business can keep generating cash until the new streaming business takes off, but the stock will be valued based on those future cash flows from streaming. And those future cash flows are worth a lot less than the cash flows from the DVD business. At least that is what it looks like right now.

Mac OS X Leopard and Lion Help: Resetting PRAM




A small amount of your computer's memory, called "parameter random-access memory" or PRAM, stores certain settings in a location that Mac OS X can access quickly. The particular settings that are stored depend on your type of Mac and the types of devices connected to it. The settings include your designated startup disk, display resolution, speaker volume, and other information.

To reset your computer's PRAM:

  1. Shut down the computer.
  2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
  3. Turn on the computer.
  4. Immediately press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
    Continue holding the keys down until the computer restarts, and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
  5. Release the keys.
Resetting PRAM may change some system settings and preferences. Use System Preferences to restore your settings.