It's been quite some time since I blogged. But I'm back :)
Yesterday, a typical Sunday night, I had trouble to sleep. So I opened Feb's issue of MIT Technology Review.
There was a good article on how Lucent lost its empire. There were four reasons attributed to their downfall:
1) Lucent ignored the long standing telecom customers and went for the startups, a large number of them had cropped up due to deregulation in the US telecom sector. These new guys had no initial capital to purchase telecom switches and Lucent lent its products to them.
2) Though these smaller customers were yet to prove viable, they were very demanding. These smaller guys wanted to build the data telecoms of tomorrow. Lucent, having the ancestry of AT&T was not playing in the data domain. So it frenzied to acquire startups in large numbers...many of them had not even proven their might.
3) Lucent ignored the cry of its insiders for developing its Optical switching business. Soon Nortel captured 90% of this market segment.
4) And lastly, Carly Fiorina's 20% year to year sales increase pitch made the accounts bloat with fudged data. The company even allocated 8 billion for lending products to its customers. At one point of time, Lucent was literally giving away its products to meet the inflated sales goals.
Zeno's paradoxes are a set of paradoxes devised by Zeno of Elea to support Parmenides' doctrine that 'all is one' and that contrary to the evidence of our senses, the belief in plurality and change is mistaken, and in particular that motion is nothing but an illusion.
Several of Zeno's eight surviving paradoxes (preserved in Aristotle's Physics and Simplicius's commentary thereon) are essentially equivalent to one another; and most of them were regarded, even in ancient times, as very easy to refute. Three of the strongest and most famous -that of Achilles and the tortoise, the Dichotomy argument, and that of an arrow in flight - are given here."
F-Secure : News from the Lab: "
So how come anybody ever gets infected by it if you have to click 'Yes' so many times?
Well, we've spoken to many people who've actually been infected, and they typically explain it like this: They got this weird message on the phone, requesting a 'Yes' or 'No' answer. So they clicked 'No'. But the message popped up immediatly again. And they clicked 'No' - only to see the message pop up again. And since 'No' didn't seem to be working, they clicked 'Yes'...
The message would have disappeared if they would have walked away from the area where they were (to get out of the range of the infected phone), but there's no way for an end user to know that. "
