Gates Espouses Creative Capitalism
- By Peter Varhol
- 01/29/2008
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland last week, Microsoft founder
and chairman Bill Gates received the unusual honor of being the sole non-government
speaker to have an entire session to himself, and in the largest hall available.
Gates took that opportunity to speak of what he termed "
creative
capitalism," which might be better defined as business with corporate
and social responsibility.
Does anyone else find his position highly ironic? While no one can doubt his
generosity and good works at this point in his life, Gates appears to be renouncing
the hardnosed approach to capitalism and competition that fed billions into
his own coffers over the last three decades.
Alternatively, he has set a double standard, in effect arguing that he can
choose whatever form of capitalism suits him at a particular time, and use the
world stage to convince others of his correctness. Taken that way, he's becoming
a shining example of the alternative form of the Golden Rule: He who has the
gold makes the rules.
What's your read? Tell me at [email protected].
Demo 08 Brings Out the Best
This week, DEMO
08 brings together the hottest startup companies with the venture capital
money in Palm Desert, Calif. Many new technologies and trends have been "discovered"
and well-funded as a result of this conference.
Are you on the lookout for The Next Big Thing? Tell me what your IT department
really needs at [email protected].
LANDesk Announces New Management
and Security Suites
Systems management vendor LANDesk
today announced and shipped LANDesk
Management Suite 8.8, adding new real-time software distribution, licensing
monitoring, alerting, provisioning and reporting tools to the product.
The company also announced and shipped LANDesk Security Suite 8.8, with the
goal of increasing enterprise systems security by introducing new data leakage
protection, wireless access point discovery, enhancements to patch management,
host intrusion prevention and other enterprise-level security provisions.
Do you have issues in managing the security of your wireless networks and wireless
access points? Tell me your challenges at [email protected].
Mailbag: Mac Security
Yesterday, Doug reported on the findings
of a Sophos study -- namely, that Macs are increasingly being targeted by
hackers. But Pete thinks Macs still have a leg up on Windows when it comes to
keeping out attacks:
On Unix, if you need to perform privileged operations, you take explicit
actions to run as root. System files are protected against change by normal
users, and different users are -- within the limits of the default or modified
file permissions -- more or less protected against each other. I understand
that the underpinnings of Mac OS X are a Unix. Linux is a Unix.
However, on Windows, either your account has Administrator privileges,
or it does not. It's a big nuisance to have to log out, log in as Administrator,
install some software or whatever, log out, log in again as yourself -- if
you even have the Administrator password. So many user accounts have Administrator
privileges. Even if not, it used to be that you still would have write access
to system files or files of other users. (I'm somewhat detail-challenged here
by being a Linux guy and XP user with no OS X or Vista experience.)
Every OS has bugs, and exploits are surely possible. However, Windows
appears be a much better target for attack than Linux or Mac OS X. The likelihood
of being able to take over the whole system is much higher, never mind the
sheer number of targets.
-Pete
Tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or send an e-mail to [email protected].
About the Author
Peter Varhol is the executive editor,
reviews of Redmond magazine and has more than 20 years of experience as a software
developer, software product manager and technology writer. He has graduate degrees
in computer science and mathematics, and has taught both subjects at the university
level.