Microsoft's Pay-As-You-Go PC?

I know it sounds as if Steve Ballmer and co. have been spending too much time with the big cell phone guys, but it appears that they've applied for a patent with allows for a pay-as-you go PC.

Click for the full story via Fast Company

This has some interesting permutations as it has the potential drastically reduce the cost of computers by bundling services. If you coupled this with their cloud computing strategy, it would seem that they're serious about changing their business model from shrink-wrapped packages to a services-oriented offering. Given the changing landscape in IT towards more open systems and service oriented architectures, perhaps MS is actually getting ahead of the curve on this one and taking things to the next level.

Now if they bundled 3G networking, let me upgrade every two years, and allow me to "roll over" my unused computing cycles...

TouchGraph Facebook Browser

This is a cool new app that visualizes your contacts and interconnections in Facebook.

TouchGraph | Products: Facebook Browser

BookNotes on MineZone wiki

A little something I recently ran across. A great site that has some concise "Cliff Notes" on a number of business books.

BookNotes - MineZone Wiki

IE bug being exploited by Word Documents

IE bug being exploited by Word Documents, (Fri, Dec 19th): "We've published several articles over the past few days detailing the latest IE flaw. However, now one of our readers (thanks roseman) writes in with an article posted over on ComputerWorld.

Turns out that this bug is now being exploited through Word documents. While this is basically a simple evolution of the exploit method, I imagine that this is only the first or second evolution. There are more to come I am sure. We don't have any samples of this malware yet, so if you have any, we'd like a few examples.

-- Joel Esler http://www.joelesler.net

(Via SANS Internet Storm Center, InfoCON: green.)

MS08-078 - Critical: Security Update for Internet Explorer (960714)

Okay folks, this one's gotta be important. Microsoft rarely releases an out of band patch so they're obviously worried about this one and there are also reports of exploits on the prowl so be sure to install this one.

MS08-078 - Critical: Security Update for Internet Explorer (960714)
Bulletin Severity Rating:Critical - This security update resolves a publicly disclosed vulnerability. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

(Via Microsoft Security Bulletins)