If you work as a bank teller, I'm pretty sure you can't take your cash drawer home to count out your currency. Likewise, I don't think jewelers allow their employees to take precious metals or stones home and pharmacists probably don't have the option of taking drugs home to fill prescriptions.

Most companies whose employees handle valuable commodities have strict security protocols intended to prevent losses due to carelessness as well as outright theft.

Except the IT industry, apparently.

It seems to be perfectly OK for employees--and contractors, consultants and various other third-party non-employees--to walk out the door with corporate databases loaded onto laptops or portable hard drives, with predictable results when those laptops or hard drives are lost/stolen.

When laptops with sensitive data get lost and/or stolen, it doesn't matter how conscientiously you've protected your personal information from identity thieves. You are at risk because someone who should have known better acted irresponsibly. Maybe it was a human resource clerk at your current employer--or maybe at a company you haven't worked for since the Reagn administration.

Maybe it was someone at a hospital where you received emergency medical treatment, or the insurance company that paid your claim, or your university. Or someone who works for a government agency.

Whoever did it may never be held accountable. And you may not even hear about it until you get a letter informing you that your data may have been compromised and you can sign up for a free credit monitoring service, sponsored by the company or organization that lost your data in the first place.

To get an idea of the scope of the problem, check out numbrX Security Beat, "an online record of reported personal, private and confidential data breaches which can lead to identity theft and credit fraud."

And remember, the breaches you read about on numbrX are probably only the tip of the iceberg: these are only the breaches that have been reported publicly.

I saw a link to something called "MoSQL", and could tell it had something to do with MySQL. I had to check it out.

The linked page is in Japanese--which I don't speak. But Google does, sort of. The translate function returned some amusing translation text, which I think says that MoSQL is a version of MySQL that runs with the character code defaulting to UTF-8 for high-speed full-text retrievals on Japanese text. And MoSQL error messages are mostly in Japanese.

Reading between the lines and tilting my head a bit, I interpret the Google translation to tell me that MySQL doesn't do as good a job as might be preferred at handling Japanese text. For example, the implication is that some data can be lost when using plain MySQL, and Japanese text retrieval may be slower than it should be.

Which shows that open source is a force for good in a lot of ways: it provides a way for IT people around the world who don't speak English to get their jobs done without having to learn English, for one thing. And it shows that if a software provider doesn't respond to user needs, someone else can take up the challenge.

It wouldn't surprise me if the MoSQL news (whatever it actually is) prompted MySQL AB to make some moves to provide better support for its international customers.

IT industry research giant IDC released a new report last month. The press release, Worldwide Revenue from Standalone Open Source Software Will Grow 26% to Reach $5.8 Billion by 2011, IDC Research Indicates.

The actual report will set you back $1,500, but the press release is free, and two of the key points people are taking away from the release are that, first, "[w]orldwide revenue from standalone open source software reached $1.8 billion in 2006." In other words, companies are currently selling open source software for real money. And second, "[t]his revenue will reach $5.8 billion in 2011...." In other words, not only are they generating real cash flows, but those revenues can be expected to continue growing at an annual rate of 26% for at least the next few years.

This report is getting a lot of attention, though most outlets are covering it as they would almost any other press release about a research report. Harper Mann, "IT Troubleshooter" at InfoWorld, did some real reporting by talking to a dozen CEOs at open source friendly companies, CEOs Weigh in on Latest IDC Open Source Research. It's worth a look if only to see the list of companies that rely on open source software.

My biggest question: what exactly is "standalone open source software"? I assume that the answer is in the body of the $1,500 report; some of the online commentary tells me that "standalone OSS" refers to software that isn't bundled with anything else--which I find unsatisfactory, since most of the volume of software included with any Linux distribution is bundled from an assortment of sources.

A slightly more satisfactory definition comes from Allen Bernard at CIO Update, in his story, Open Source Adoption Continues Unabated, where it's defined as "OSS that has a revenue model associated with it like SUSE Linux or RedHat".

A couple of billion in revenue with double-digit growth for the next few years is very noteworthy, but to put it in perspective consider this: Oracle's revenues (per Yahoo! Finance) were $17 billion for the last year; Microsoft's were almost $50 billion.

The thing about IT industry research is that you've got to take it with several grains of salt. The research firms don't get paid to produce unspectactular results: most research is funded by companies that expect to benefit in some way by the results (and the suspicion that some research results may be skewed as a result can never be escaped). At the same time, the research firms often err on the conservative side simply because most of their customers have big investments in the status quo.

Bottom line: I'm quite sure that the OSS business will produce results that are at least as good as IDC's numbers--and I would be very surprised if their results over the next five years are very much better.

Do you remember when Windows first came out? I mean Windows 1.0 (a.k.a., "Windows Alpha" as in "pre-beta"). I do, sort of. But even if you weren't even born yet, everyone can enjoy this awesome collections of screenshots of Windows through the ages: Windows Evolution. From 1.0 to Vista.

It's pretty amazing, and the comments are pretty amusing.

It's fun to keep track of how much Windows costs these days when Microsoft must compete both with pirates, who sell Windows cheap and send nothing to Redmond, as well as with non-Windows open source software who likewise pay nothing to Redmond.

What does Vista cost? List price on Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate is $399.95; Amazon.com has it for $339.99.

But it's cheaper if you buy a system with Windows pre-installed. While Dell doesn't make it easy to compare on their website, according to this report on Ars Technica, the "Microsoft tax" for Dell systems--how much more you pay for the same hardware with Vista pre-installed--is about $50. Of course, that's for Home Premium or Business version of Vista, both of which list for about $200 or so if you buy a shrinkwrapped box at retail.

Then, there's Microsoft's own effort to get something from developing nations: Microsoft offers $3 Windows package for poor nations. Three bucks for a stripped-down version of Windows and Office, if you're in the right (or wrong) part of the world.

That's a deal, but it's also the going rate for pirated versions of Windows and Office in places like Lagos, Nigeria. According to this (which you probably can't reach, since a flood of hits shut it down) the Google-cached version is here, Nobody Knows Linux.

What it says, basically, is that OS prices in Lagos depend on how many discs the OS fits on. Since Vista fits on one disc and Linux takes up four discs, Linux costs more than Vista.

So, Microsoft retains its monopoly through the efforts of the pirates: if consumers can't afford to pay the full freight for Windows, Microsoft may not like it that people are buying pirated versions, but they'll take it over the alternative of having people buy open source software instead.

Go read this article by Matthew Haughey: How Ads Really Work: Superfans and Noobs, and then think about how you can turn data into knowledge.

If that doesn't convince you to drop everything and go read the article, here's my quick summary:

In one sentence, what Matt (re-)discovered is the old 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, or power law (this one's an article about power laws and blogs.

Matt was using Google Analytics and found that most of his ad revenue came from "noobs" (one-time visitors who are on the search for something), with most of his loyal visitors ("superfans") generating a disproportionately low volume of ad revenue.

So, what can you do with this data? Matt decided it made sense to give his loyal fans an ad-free experience because they didn't click on ads anyway. Win-win: he got a higher click-through rate because all the pages served to his superfans didn't actually have any ads AND he was able to give potential superfans an incentive to opt for premium membership.

Not really a big deal, just an example of using common sense when you're crunching numbers.