Most of us are moving to our own individual blogs.
Jason Brooks's Free Enterprise can be found at :
http://blogs.eweek.com/brooks
Cameron Sturdevant's Permit/Deny can be found at:
http://blogs.eweek.com/permit_deny/ Andrew Garcia's Signaling IT is here:
http://blogs.eweek.com/signaling_it/
The Demo conference folks have posted videos of each company's presentation. Here are some that stood out:
D'Fusion's cool 3-D demo featuring
Total Immersion.
Inkless printing from
ZINK Imaging.
Seagate's portable wireless storage device called DAVE.
An online and mobile media creation service from
Vuvox Network.
Software from
Serendipity Technologies that delivers data from of enterprises applications using RSS
.
Boston-Power's notebook battery, which delivers 30 percent more battery life and solves the battery fade issue.
An online notebook akin to OneNote from
Zoho.
At the Demo conference in Palm Desert, the most interesting (and probably the only new technology) debut we saw was from Zink (Zero Ink). Essentially, dye crystals are embedded on paper and run through a pocket-sized printer to produce 2-inch by 3-inch photographs from your digital pics. Each 300-dot-per-inch print costs about 25 cents, and looks pretty good.
The printer receives the prints from your camera or camera phone via Bluetooth and will cost about $100. Eventually Zink will add Wi-Fi as well. Zink is also partnering to release a 7-megapixel camera/printer that executives say will be priced in the $300 range and charged via USB.
While this technology will obviously appeal to kids, we can see this technology taking off with users such as professional photographers who need to get a quick contact sheet.
To get a better sense of how all this works, check out
this video from Gizmodo Editor Brian Lam.
One of the big announcements out of this week's Lotusphere show was about how IBM's Lotus division is now adding social networking capabilities.
Wow, this is big news! So now Lotus is joining the Web 2.0, or more
specifically, Enterprise 2.0, wave and adding the most hyped
capabilities of the day, which on top of social networking will include
blogs, personal and project dashboards, and interactive community
capabilities. All right! It's about time.
Finally Lotus products will let businesses offer users personal and
team site pages that can be edited interactively. It will now be easy
to scan through employees in a company and know who is working on what,
who is linked to whom and who is the biggest expert on key topics.
Isn't this great!
Mmmm. Now that I think about it, haven't I always been able to do
these things with Lotus products? Outside of real specific Web 2.0
functionality like RSS feeds, most of these highly touted new
technologies are basically just updated Web 2.0-ified versions of the
collaboration features that Lotus has always offered.
So like most other "Enterprise 2.0" announcements (and if you want
to know what I really think about Enterprise 2.0, look for my column
next week), this Lotusphere social networking announcement is mainly
about trying to change the perception of Lotus from a company that is
all about aging legacy systems to a company that is hip to all the cool
new technologies that the kids are using today.
That's OK from a marketing perspective. But I think it must burn
some of the longtime Lotus engineers to see all of these Web 2.0
technologies getting the fanfare for basically adapting technologies
and capabilities that Lotus pioneered many years ago.
This morning, Intel
announced that its 802.11n plans are ahead of schedule, and specifically that it will be shipping a product within the next couple of weeks. Initially, Intel's draft-802.11n implementation was
supposed to be a part of its Santa Rosa platform, but now some laptop vendors will be shipping the new wireless adapter with its first-generation Core 2-based systems.
According to Dave Hofer, Intel's Director of Wireless Marketing for the Mobile Platform Group, laptop makers Acer, Asus, Gateway and Toshiba will be shipping the new wireless chips shortly. HP, Dell and Lenovo were not mentioned as part of this group.
Given
last week's events in London, it is not surprising that Intel has pushed up the time schedule. With all the comments on the first draft specification resolved, the TGN Task Group will be looking to approve the latest revision (1.10) as the next full draft (2.0) in the next few weeks. Hofer indicated that Intel's product is compliant with the 1.10 draft. Feeling that the
initial concerns about draft 1.0-based 802.11n products' shortcomings in performance, range, interoperability and interference have been largely resolved since products first appeared last April, Intel feels the time is right, he said.
The new Centrino chips will support both 2.4- and 5GHz bands, although, to my knowledge, no access point manufacturer is actually shipping draft-11n products with 5GHz radios (although the underlying wireless chips should support it).
Hofer also outlined the "Connect with Centrino" compatibility program. Intel has been working with D-Link, Belkin, Asus, Buffalo and Netgear to prove interoperability between the Intel clients and the other manufacturers' routers and access points. With interoperability proven in Intel's labs, these vendors will start displaying a Connect with Centrino logo on their product packaging to help customers identify compatible products.
Running through the list of vendors working with the Connect with Centrino program, we can deduce that all three of the other draft-11n chip-set vendors are represented in this interoperability testing, as Belkin uses Atheros, Buffalo uses Broadcom, and Netgear concurrently
announced that both its Marvell (WNR854T) and Broadcom (WNR854B) routers have been certified in the program.
Noticeably missing is Linksys, but Hofer indicated that Linksys is considering the program and that we can expect to hear announcements in the near future.
The bulk of the discussion focused on 802.11n usage in the home, as Intel's marketing and development efforts are aimed squarely at the consumer market for the time being. Hofer indicated that Intel expects business adoption of 802.11n to commence around the time the specification is ratified. While no enterprise access point/WLAN manufacturers were identified as members of the Connect with Centrino program, again Hofer indicated Intel is working closely with several major (but unnamed) enterprise-grade wireless companies.
Over the weekend, I noticed that
Nero posted an update to the Nero 7 Ultra Edition (version 7.7.5.1). As I use the software to do a lot of video encoding and viewing (but, surprisingly, not that much disc burning), Nero is one of the few software applications where I stay on the bleeding edge, so I immediately downloaded it and tried to install.
The installation failed, however, when my
Bit Defender anti-virus software announced that the installer had a virus. Specifically, the NeVideo.ax file was detected as infected with the IM-Worm.Win32.Licat.f worm.
A quick Web search indicated that a few other people had experienced the same problem, including one
forum where someone scanned the software with many different anti-virus engines -- finding only a few that reported a problem. Since there was no definitive answer whether the virus was a false positive or not, I decided to contact Nero's PR representatives in the matter.
In short, Nero says it is a false positive.
Here's the Nero response:
After various statements in forums regarding a virus/worm in the current WebRelease, we have checked the installer package thoroughly and scanned them with the popular antivirus scanners.
Here are the results of the analysis:
-- the file NeVideo.ax which is mentioned in the forums does not contain any viruses. It has an extended protection mechanism, which is misinterpreted by some virus scanners. The antivirus software companies already reacted and adapted their signature-files and provided updates.
-- the virus checks which were done during the build process/QA were negative and the logfile also show no positive entries
-- some virus scanners classify the Ask Toolbar as malware or adware. So in that case this is not a virus- or worm-warning.
We will be making a posting on our Web site and in the blogs.
It looks like all of the remaining comments on the 1.0 revision of the 802.11n draft standard were resolved at this month's Task Group (TGn) meeting and the group unanimously approved Version 1.10 based on this result. There will be some more letter ballots to see if Version 1.10 will become the new Version 2.0 within the next few weeks, which will likely bring about a new round of comments - although likely many less than the initial draft received (over 3,000).
The resolution of all the comments at this point was anticipated, since significant work was accomplished in the prior TGn meetings. Nonetheless, it is great news to hear that the specification is on the cusp of a new revision before the Wi-Fi Alliance starts announcing the results of certification testing in March, because their results should hew that much closer to the eventual final standard in that case.
According to prepared statement from Atheros' CTO, Bill McFarland, the bulk of the changes between draft 1.0 and draft 1.10 "are limited to protection mechanisms for legacy devices during the operation of 40 MHz in the 2.4 band."
McFarland also pointed out that Atheros will be able to bring its stable of draft 1.0-based XSPAN chip sets into compliance with the latest draft through a software update instead of a hardware upgrade.
When it comes to the quasi-religious subject
of development methods, I try to avoid sectarian violence. I like to think of
programming languages, for example, in the same way that I think of
wrenches: the all-purpose variety tend to do a wide range of jobs with
only mediocre success.
When languages evolve under different pressures, they develop complementary
strengths that we all later profit from recombining
into more advanced hybrid tools.
At least as contentious is the topic of development method families,
which I try to avoid calling "methodologies"--because "methodology" is,
of course, the study of methods. "Paradigm" had potential as a better term, but
it's long since been wordjacked
and left as a vandalized wreck
by the side of the road. I favor environments and repositories that
serve as method-neutral settings for capturing and representing
developers' goals and products, with Telelogic's
System Architect being a long-standing favorite.
It's hard to find any good reason, though, to maintain my neutrality
on the subject of agile development, as I've made clear during the past
year both
in print and in
person.
With this coming Monday marking the end of my time at eWEEK--more than
18 years after my first eWEEK byline--I therefore feel real
disappointment that I never managed to find the bandwidth for a full
review of the agile-oriented management tools from Rally
Software Development.
I
always had an excuse for putting something else ahead of Rally in my
queue: As Robert Townsend said when he was running Avis, never do
something in public that you can't do consistently well. Reviewing a
product that can't be benchmarked, that pretty much by definition can't
be evaluated objectively--but can only be judged by the response that
it produces from a development team, is a task that doesn't lend itself
to labs-based testing ... unless you have a few dozen slave-labor
graduate students that you can use as test subjects, and that's not a
resource that I keep on hand.
As I said, though, it's a particular disappointment to me that I
never found the time or the circumstances in which to give this product
a full review in eWEEK--because the basic idea is right, the execution
is polished, and the
on-demand model
makes good sense for this kind of thing. Developers have enough pain on
their hands with configuring databases and setting up all manner of
infrastructure as part of the task of actually delivering the
applications that they're paid to develop: I can't imagine anything
more perverse than to ask them to take time away from those somewhat
productive tasks to set up a complex infrastructure for measuring and
supporting their efforts. In practice, I find that such diversion of
scarce resources just does not happen.
Rally's product editions satisfy two key agile
principles.
- Give motivated individuals the environment and the support they
need
- The art of maximizing the amount of work not done is essential
Given the try-before-buy option
that the company provides, the reasons for not trying it seem few and
the potential benefits many. I wish I had time to say more, but this is
clearly a case where your mileage is the only mileage that matters.
Tell me what your mileage is, whether with Rally or with the tools or methods you've tried in general, at my Convergence Points blog.
Boy, you really have to hand it to Digital Rights Management. Has
any security measure ever been this effective? No wonder the pirates
are all running away with their tails between their legs.
Oh wait, that's not what's happening at all. It actually seems as if
each new DRM and anti-piracy measure gets cracked by real pirates in
practically no time. From the original "protection" for DVDs to Vista's
authentication server features, real pirates find DRM about as hard to
get around as a one-foot high garden fence.
The latest high-level protection to fall is the so called unbeatable
DRM features in the HD-DVD format. Pirates recently posted a version of
the HD-DVD movie Serenity, with all DRM protections removed, onto
Bittorrent. So now the pirates will have no problem distributing the
latest high-quality format.
This is just further proof to what I've always said. Anti-piracy
protections such as DRM or software activations really have nothing
whatsoever to do with piracy. The companies that use these things know
that real pirates will break it easily.
DRM and its nasty cousins are all about one thing: controlling the
ability of consumers like you to use content that you think you own in
whatever fair use way that you might want to.
Sixteen years ago technology luminaries Mitch Kapor, John Gilmore and John Perry Barlow met on the Well and decided to form a new group dedicated to protecting technology freedoms against misguided federal laws and massive corporations determined to protect their aging business models against the incursions of progress.
The group that they founded was the Electronic Freedom Foundation and on January 11 that group will celebrate it's sixteenth birthday.
I hate to think where we would be without the EFF. They've fought against bad censorship laws that would shut down education sites. They've been the first line of defense against seriously dangerous proposed laws that would make all fair use rights illegal. And they've fought to stem the tide against the worst of the over-reaching and broad software patents.
So Happy Birthday EFF, may you always be there to protect the rights of the many against those of the few.
And as someone who has helped support the
EFF, if you're someone who thinks that technology freedoms are worth fighting for, don't forget to support them.
When I was at Macworld yesterday, I spent the requisite amount of time peering intently at the
iPhone demo
on glass and then sitting through the presentation. Of course, I was duly impressed, but I was also overcome with logistical questions about iPhone in the enterprise.
At the weighty starting price of $499, no administrator with a brain will be standardizing a cell phone fleet on the iPhone. But there is no way to ensure that a CXO or VP is not going to knock on the IT manager's door, to hand over an iPhone while saying "Make this work here."
So, likely, some of these are going to pop up on the network.
My first thought was that the iPhone's dock connector is going to be pretty lousy for people traveling a lot. I've never been confident that I wouldn't bend and wreck the delicate 30-pin connector as the cable traveled around in my bag. Indeed, I've had to replace the cable a few times over the years, as the pins get crushed under a laptop or book or whatever.
Jobs' keynote also pointed out that the iPhone uses iTunes to sync data, contacts and e-mail between a Mac or PC and the iPhone. Ugh. Over the years, iTunes has introduced a number of handy features that have been a major headache for desktop administrators. Particularly, the music-sharing capabilities of iTunes have led to a lot of unexpected Bonjour traffic on the LAN, as users share their music collections between their PCs.
Of course, this feature can be disabled, but can it be done remotely on a bunch of machines? Where is the enterprise iTunes control panel? How about a set of administrative templates to set policy via Active Directory Group Policy Objects? Even
Skype is planning the latter to ease the admin's job...
And if administrators are going to be forced to support iTunes in some corners of their networks, admins will need to start worrying about application security. Will existing patching software support iTunes and QuickTime now? Will Apple move to a patching paradigm for iTunes, rather than requiring a full download and installation? How about an MSI file to work with an existing software deployment solution?
Given Apple's previous lack of interest in enterprise-class support, I'm going to say no. None of this is going to happen any time soon.
So come next June, congratulations on your new iPhone. You've just made your IT staff's job that much harder.
Lastly, I was quite intrigued by the voice mail features on the iPhone. Apple is touting the iPhone's ability to make voice mail a random-access experience, rather than a serial process: Press a button and get a message rather than wading through the whole chain of messages to get to the one you want. But there was little detail about how that works in the presentations.
Did Cingular change its centralized voice mail capabilities to make this work? If so, will other devices be able to take advantage? Or, on the other hand, are the voice mails downloaded to the iPhone, where they are organized to allow this feature? If so, is this part of the voice service or will it require the EDGE data service as well?
If the latter, how much is the iPhone's service going to cost per month to get the full functionality? Pricing things out on the Web site, the minimum phone plan is $40 per month for 450 minutes, data connect ranges from $20 to $45 per month (or will Cingular offer an iPhone-only tier of service like it does for the BlackBerry?) Or will the iPhone be locked to Cingular's Wi-Fi network (oh, how I pray that won't happen)? Because that adds another $70 to $100 per month.
Yowza...
When I saw a Reuters article about David Platt's new book, Why Software Sucks,
I thought it sounded familiar. Then I realized that I'd gotten a
reviewer copy of that book a few weeks ago, but had put it aside
because it didn't have an animal on the cover.
That article brought me up short when it cited Platt's apparently
anecdotal assertion that "computer programmers tend to prefer manual
transmissions." That sounded like the kind of thing that might have
casually morphed from a metaphor into an unsupported factoid, so I dug
my courtesy copy of the book out of a stack of as-yet-unread volumes to
see what Platt actually claimed. I found reasonable support for the
claim, based on what Platt described as show-of-hands responses in
classes taught at companies over some period of time. And the Reuters
writer only needed to get as far as page 13 to find it.
The question is, why would this be the case?
- Do programmers feel a well-founded discomfort with unnecessary complexity?
- Do programmers sneer at the notion of relying on someone else's code?
- Do programmers incline toward, as Platt asserts, any choice that gives more control even at the expense of less convenience?
- Are programmers merely more thrifty, as a group, than the population at large?
Absent additional research, any of these explanations is as
plausible as any other, but #1 would say hopeful things about the
future of software reliability; #2 and #3 would be harbingers of
continued failure to exploit software reuse or to pay attention to
usability issues.
Platt is not the only one to generalize about programmers,
and I wonder how well such generalizations hold up at all any more. The
population of "programmers" is becoming ever more diverse, it seems to
me. I also wonder whether something like a preference for stick shifts
is really quite ambiguous in what it says about the challenges of
identifying talent, attracting and retaining it, and motivating it to do good work.
Tell me what works for you at my Convergence Points blog.
So far as I can tell, just about nobody recognized the joker in the deck when I put dBase Mac on my list of 25 killer applications of all time -- even though I took pains to say, "in the homicidal sense."
Many Web sites merely posted the list of products' names
without my explanations of their significance, burying the joke still
more deeply -- and leaving many people confused about the distinction
between a platform-driving killer app and a generally excellent app.
There's some overlap between those definitions, to be sure, but often
not much.
At this point, though, it's clear that the slot jestingly held by
dBase Mac deserves to be given to WordPerfect, for the ironic reason
that it was a killer app for DOS -- after the debut of Windows and even of several graphical word processing products for Macintosh, Windows and OS/2.
In a six-way "Shoot-Out" competition among word processors of that
period, which I designed and directed at what was then PC Week Labs,
DOS WordPerfect excelled in tasks such as massive mail-merge
operations. Its left-brain/right-brain presentation of explicit
formatting codes was at least as seminal a contribution as the
idiosyncratic WordStar user interface. And people have assured me that
yes, machines were bought for the specific task of running WordPerfect
-- the core of the definition of a killer application.
So, here's to the real 25th killer. Thank me for addressing my oversight, or beat me up for taking so long, on my Convergence Points blog.
My engineering education was significantly shaped by my MIT faculty
advisor, John Biggs, who thought it would be a good use of my time to
take core courses in other departments whenever my degree program left
some room for "free electives."
Instead of taking a class in Cinema of Classical Science Fiction,
hypothetically, he thought I'd do better to take -- say --
Thermodynamics over in the Mechanical Engineering Department, or do two
semesters of micro and macro in the Economics department instead of one
semester of engineering economics within our own Civil Engineering
department. These memories of the late Professor Biggs (I didn't know
his first name was "John" until I read his obituary,
years later) arise this morning because he had a habit that I'd like to
think remains with me to this day: before I try to figure out an exact
answer to anything, I try to have a rough idea of what the answer is
likely to be so that I know an idiotic mistake when I see one.
When Prof. Biggs started to solve a truss on the blackboard, for
example, he'd run across it -- thinking out loud, for the benefit of
the class -- and quickly show the range within which he'd expect to
find key results.
That habit came to mind when I saw two recent stories about the
totally ridiculous mistakes that systems can make, and when I thought
about the potential consequences of building end-to-end chains of Web
services -- or other literally-minded protocols -- that could do really
dumb things if allowed to take unbounded actions.
- The tourist who misspells the name of a city, and winds up on the wrong continent,
has probably failed to do a reality check on how long a trip should
take before assuming that his journey will end in the right place.
- The hypothetical fuel-oil inventory management system that looks at
outdoor temperature, makes an updated estimate of "degree days" for the
remainder of the season, and places orders accordingly could wind up
ordering the entire annual output of all U.S. refineries if it doesn't
have logic to detect unreasonable excursions from past ranges and request operator verification.
I know that it takes more work to put in guard logic, or to use
languages like Eiffel that make explicit assertions as part of normal "design by contract"
practice. I also know that the costs of not doing these things can be
enormous -- and that incidents of such expense will become more
frequent as we do more things with programmable devices and platforms
instead of having people in the loop. Feel free not to be part of that
problem, and feel free to share your own examples and recommendations on my Convergence Points blog.
Our Killer Apps list continues to inspire conversation, much of it missing the point that I'm not saying a Killer App is necessarily a good app: only that it appeared at the right time, with the right functionality or appearance thereof, to drive users' platform choices. No more, no less.
But killer apps are nothing compared to killer toys. Personally, I think that concern about toy safety can easily be overdone. Have you tried to buy a real chemistry set lately? But some of these blasts from the past are beyond even my high threshold of healthy fun.
Have a safe and happy holiday; if you're on the late-night geek shift and want to talk, join the conversation on my Convergence Points blog.
