If you read eWeek or listen to some other people enough you are bound to start believing that the world is on the verge of some major computer security meltdown. But when a former UBS network administrator damaged computer systems in a plan to affect the company’s stock price, the expected financial gain didn’t happen. Are the computer security systems that vendors would sell us to prevent this type of thing not responding to the right threat? In a world where we have more information and copies of that information than we can handle, does losing some of it really matter if you can recover the important parts?

Are companies rejecting open-source software because it’s free? I don’t think so.

Companies (and non-profits) like to cut costs. They do not pass over free (as in dollars) anything if it will meet their needs. Getting companies—particularly small companies—to pay for support on something that’s not broken is a hard sell.

I just read in the Register about SpikeSource, whose business is to charge a subscription for “certified” versions of software you can download for free. The article says this will be valuable to “SME end users,” but I wouldn’t bet on it. Small businesses will find more valuable uses for their cash.

There’s a myth that companies don’t use open source software because it’s free. In my experience, the commercial competitor actually needs to offer some additional feature or service. If there’s a company that will pay for something they can get for free, I’d like to know about it.

We finally stopped into New England Mobile Book fair this past weekend. (Perhaps motivated by a comment I made about independent bookstores recently on another blog). I can’t believe I’ve never been in there before! (Admittedly, we just moved to the neighborhood.) It’s a typical old Boston sort of place: one part erudite, one part improvised, making you feel like you’re in college regardless of your age. Just stacks and stacks of unfinished wood shelves in which some sense of order had evolved, but not from any sort of master plan-o-gram.

I bought Jeff Nathan’s Family Suppers cookbook. I’m especially excited to try his recipe for cooking kielbasa and sauerkraut; hopefully it will be a good kosher way to keep alive the Polish-Catholic part of my heritage. I was also looking for Beyond Fear by Bruce Schneier, but couldn’t find it—they have a lot of books but not necessarily easy to find just one.

(You know what? I’m not going to link the above titles to Amazon.com pages or anywhere else. I gave you the author and title. That used to be enough—you can look it up yourself! Maybe even at the library.)

Anyways I wonder if these independent bookstores are doing themselves in. Most books here are 20% off. How do they handle that? By scanning the books and having the discount price display automatically? By have a “20% off” button on the register? No…the cashier has to look up the price for each book on a tiny little card that translates list prices to discount prices.

I still wonder if the store has anything to do with those mobile book fairs that would come to the school cafeteria a couple times a year when I was a kid.

This was interesting: a report from the Olin business school at Washington University (where I took some classes in college) says that complex strategies work best but aren’t valued by the market. So you mean that a simple twist like sell groceries–but online! will get you investments, but won’t neccessarily be a sucessful company? Well I guess we all know the answer to that one but it’s good to see serious research confirm it. The idea that the public-held “conglomerates” I remember from youth (does anyone else remember the “we’re Beatrice” advertising?) have been replaced by private equity firms is an interesting idea.