That was Then... This is Now

Haven't seen one of these in quite a while. Normally I wouldn't pay any attention to it but I just bought a new car and financed it through Wachovia. Of course I was suspicious of this email and know better than to fall for something like this but you can never be too careful. I thought it might be interesting to point out some things that tipped me off. Here is the original email: Of course it sounds very "official" and even cites "Federal Law." Although it is better written than many phishing emails that I've seen, the link itself (obviously "fake") as well as a typo "you account profile" make this email very suspicious. Notice that they ask for your PIN as well as one or more card numbers! To my knowledge, no bank or business will ever ask for this information . When in doubt, you can always contact your bank directly. Just for fun, I decided to click on the link anyway to see where it went... Of course! To a page where y...

CES 2010 runs through this weekend in Las Vegas. If you couldn't go, the next best thing to being there is Cnet's " Live @ CES " web site! Also visit the official " CESWeb " site for more information on vendors, products, events, celebrities, and awards.

January 5, 2010 (Baseline) - 10 business and technology trends that will help define the IT landscape in 2010. No surprise that "Green Technology," "Cloud Computing," and major investments in infrastructure lead the list.

December 11, 2009 - If you have ever wanted to ditch your cable company, you might find this article from the New York Times interesting. For about a year now, I have been doing something similar although not to the extent that this guy has. My own results have been mixed (watching sports is still a problem) but it is possible to live without cable!

November 18, 2009 (eWeek)- Microsoft Office has an unenviable task: getting organizations and individuals excited about undertaking a major upgrade of a platform whose previous versions have been handling users' productivity chores just fine for going on 10 years now. The beta of Office 2010 shows extended Web and mobile reach, as well as a number of useful enhancements across the suite's apps. Read about it here .

November 2, 2009 (CNN) - What's the first thing that goes through your mind when someone says the word "data"? For many of us, the first image is line graphs, pie charts and spreadsheets with columns and rows full of numbers that leave you bleary-eyed and a bit dazed. But what if someone were to say data can also mean what you post on Facebook and Twitter, the ratings you gave a restaurant, the photos you uploaded to Flickr or even, perhaps, what you feel. A bit of a reach? Not anymore. An emerging set of tools is making it easier than ever to track and compile all sorts of "data" and display it in a way that's relatively easy to understand. You can now point your mobile phone at a street and instantly get ratings for restaurants. Or type in your address and find reports of crimes that may have occurred in your neighborhood. It's even possible to track emotions on a national and global scale. "Specialists from scientists to accountants have been dea...

In Operations Management today we used Excel to calculate product reliability. Reliability is defined as "the ability of a product, service, part, or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of circumstances" (Stevenson, 2009). In order to calulate reliability over a given length of time we need to use the following formula: P(no failure) = e -t/MTBF where: e = 2.7183 t = Length of service before failure MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures One of the cases we did in class involved an auto detailing company that wanted to calculate the reliability of its vacuum cleaners. Excel provides an "EXP" funtion that we can easily apply here. After entering all data for the problem as shown on the spreadsheet below, we type the formula =EXP(-A5/$B$2) in cell B5 and copy down. Next we plot the distribution for t=0 to the maximum life expectancy of 20 years using a line graph. What we end up with looks like a classic case of "ex...