24 minutes with Bill Gates on career choices

In April last year Bill Gates addressed a collection of students at Harvard for 24 minutes on the topic of where to devote your talents. It is well-known that Gates dropped out of Harvard in the mid 70’s to develop his fledgling software company. He was returning as a philanthropist on this occasion, armed with the following question “Are the brightest minds working on the most important problems?”. And clearly he does not think so, as it appears many of top minds in the US are going into sports, entertainment or finance. In fact, “The allocation of IQ to Wall Street is higher than it should be.” You can find the video of the talk here.

10 Reasons Why Microsoft's Internet Explorer Dominance is Ending

It has been widely reported recently that Microsoft’s share of the global browser market has fallen below 60% for the first time. If this trends continues then Firefox is forecasted to overtake IE by Christmas 2012. Don Resinger at eWeek has given his reasons why IE is losing market share (and also mind share) as follows

1. The European Union
2. Microsoft's complacency
3. Internet Explorer's security
4. Rebounding from IE 6
5. The features aren't there
6. The Google conundrum
7. The united fight against Microsoft
8. The educated user
9. No-names are actually doing well
10. Microsoft is still lost on the Web

Projection: Firefox overtakes IE by Christmas 2012

It has been widely reported that the global market share for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has fallen below 60%. While pundits, commentators and technologists discuss the future of IE, Zack Whittaker at ZDNet has done “a bit of maths” and produced the following extrapolation, showing FireFox passing IE market share around December 2012.

Assuming Zack has done his Excel sums correctly, the prediction is still pure data extrapolation. The last year has been extremely unfavourable for IE with its security flaws and the playing out of the European anti-trust case against Microsoft. Redmond may still be able to turn the prediction around.

More Microsoft SDL Giveaways

Recently Microsoft published a simplified version of their SDL methodology, reducing the detail in the hope of making implementations a bit easier. Microsoft has also made available its four core SDL Training classes (introductions to SDL & Threat Modeling, Basics of Secure Design, and Privacy for SDL) as well as the supporting tools. Finally, Adam Shostack has also made available Elevation of Privilege, the Threat Modeling Game, which he thinks is the easiest way to get started threat modeling – just try it!

Simplified implementation of the Microsoft SDL

Microsoft has announced a new 17-page whitepaper that presents a simplified version of their Security Development Lifecycle (SDL). From the announcement

One of the common misconceptions about the Microsoft SDL is that you have to be an organization the size of Microsoft in order to be able to implement it. Another misconception is that the SDL is only appropriate for Microsoft languages and Microsoft platforms, and that you need to use some other methodology if you’re writing code with Ruby for OS X. The Simplified SDL white paper helps address these misconceptions by explaining how the SDL can be implemented with limited resources and applied to any platform.