Friday, January 26, 2007
Nortel CTO started with the ‘Atom chart’
John Roese’s Blog
In his first posting, the network equipment maker’s technology chief discusses how he identifies with his customers. “As a former CIO, I know that I never had just one project or challenge. In fact, I usually had so many that my teams could at best triage them to make sure the business operated and we achieved the best results with limited time and resources,” he writes. “To address this changing reality, one of the first things I did at Nortel was create what is affectionately known as the ‘Atom Chart.’ This chart says that in the present and future reality, the telecom industry must focus on the intersection and interplay of domains. The six domains of interest are wireless, wireline, carrier, enterprise, applications, and infrastructure.”
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Web 2.0 can take us that much closer
Ideant
Ulises Ali Mejias explores the idea of “network proximity,” or how we experience “nearness” in social networking technologies. “Technologies acquire their agency by becoming part of networks in which humans delegate certain social functions to them. A traffic light, for instance, performs a social function in lieu of a person standing there directing traffic,” he writes. “Of the technologies we delegate agency to, software code is one of the most sophisticated ones, since it has the power to coordinate complex forms of sociality based on the laws or instructions programmed into it. What we call Social Media (a.k.a. Social Software, Web 2.0, and a variety of other terms), is a set of networked ICT’s that have reached a critical mass in terms of users, and that engender complex forms of networked sociality that transcend traditional location-bound forms.”
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Governance is the key component of an SOA
Technometria
In a preview of an upcoming article, Phil Windley explains his outlook on the management of service-oriented architectures. “This view that governance is more important to successfully employing SOA than the technology factors is the basis for viewing SOA as a way of formalizing collaboration in the application development process,” he writes. “Governance prescribes and proscribes patterns of interaction, acceptable standards, and creates communication channels. Done right, governance also aligns the incentives in the organization with the goals of SOA and sets up support structures inside the organization.”
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Thursday, January 25, 2007
HP accused of paying for scoop on Dell’s printer plans
Trade Secrets Blog
A lawyer from the firm of Womble Carlyle reports on “a strange story concerning accusations in a case between Hewlett-Packard and a former executive (himself accused by HP of stealing its trade secrets) that HP paid for information concerning Dell’s secret plans to enter the printing business. According to the story, the former HP employee, Karl Kamb, contends in a counterclaim that in 2002 senior HP executives signed off on payments to a Dell Japan employee who then turned over Dell’s product specifications, launch dates and financial information. Kamb says he was working in Japan as an HP vice president at the time,” the blog says. “Interestingly, Kamb named in his suit some of the same former employees and investigators that allegedly conducted the illegal spying operation on journalists.”
BrainTilt: Who would even want Dell’s trade secrets?
Channel Register: Dear Lord, what has happened to HP?
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TechCrunch targeted amid Microsoft-Wikipedia spat
CrunchNotes
After weighing in on a story about Microsoft’s alleged attempts to pay someone to edit some Wikipedia entries about the ODF standard, Michael Arrington finds himself in the crosshairs of a Redmond employee. “Apparently (he) didn’t like my post about Microsoft’s attempt to pay a blogger to make Wikipedia changes on their behalf, so he vandalizes the Wikipedia entry on TechCrunch to…prove a point? What point? That he’s a jerk?” he writes. “My respect for Microsoft just took a very, very deep hit. I’m not sure if/how we’ll respond. This action would not be acceptable under any circumstances, but I also wonder if (he) even fully read my post – I defended Microsoft.”
Earlier: This Wikipedia entry brought to you by . . .
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Cisco routers could fall prey to ‘ping of death’
Security Fix
The network gear maker informs customers of three major vulnerabilities on its routers, writes Brian Krebs. “Most Internet service providers will stagger the installation of these patches so as not to disrupt customers’ online connectivity, but one of these flaws appears to be so easy to exploit that if the bad guys figure out how before ISP get around to patching then we could very likely see portions of the Internet go dark soon,” he writes. “Indeed, one of the flaws that Cisco highlighted today appears to suggest that most of Cisco’s routers are susceptible to what can aptly be described as a “ping of death,” that is — send a single, specially crafted data packet down the wire to the control interface for an unpatched Cisco router, and you could make the device either crash or you can install software of your choosing on top of it.”
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Wednesday, January 24, 2007
If you’re sensemaking, get ready to rumble
Creating Passionate Users
Dan Russell offers five points to do a better job of research, which he says happens much differently than others imagine. “The common conception of research is that a scientist first thinks up a hypothesis, then collects data to test it, then writes up a neat analysis confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis. That’s beautiful, but it’s also almost completely wrong,” he writes. “When I’m making sense of some complicated area, it’s more of a full-contact, sweaty, wrestling-around-with-data kind of thing. Trust me: it’s not nearly as antiseptic and passionless as the common conception would have it. This is red-blooded science as played on the field. It’s more of a rugby scrum than a still-life chess game.”
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AJAX doesn’t have to be such an eyesore
AppDev
After much searching, David Lambert says he has found an interesting tool called WebGui. “The only bad news about AJAX was that it was ugly. No, the apps were beautiful — it was the code that was ugly. So AJAX went on my personal radar screen of things that were going to change the way I do development… as soon as the kinks got worked out a bit,” he writes. “Is (WebGui) ready for prime time? Not quite, if you want my honest opinion. In playing with this toolset for a couple days, I ran into a few too many cases where I had to blow a form away and start over because I got myself into an unrecoverable error state. This sort of problem isn’t a deal breaker if it happens every once in a while, but at the frequency I saw problems, it would be a problem. I can assure you, though, I’m keeping my eye on this project.”
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Adobe should have gone the IM route years ago
/Message
After hearing news of the company’s forthcoming peer-to-peer ambitions, Stowe Boyd lets loose. “Considering that Flash is installed on 99 per cent of the Internet-connected PCs in the world, I am baffled as to why they never rolled out a instant messaging network. I raised the question in many meetings with vairous product teams at Adobe, and generally got the answer ‘We don’t want to make that sort of money,'” he writes. “Incredibly dumb. Meanwhile, AOL, MSN and Yahoo, and now Google, have been growing their networks.”
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Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Sun-Intel deal better deliver on choice
The Trouble With Tribbles
Recalling a recent anti-Itanium ad on its Web site, Peter Tribble looks back at how the two firms worked together in the past. “I remember Sun recently selling a number of Intel powered systems. The LX50 was a nice box – even if it was pushed with SunLinux. The V60x was OK, but I quite liked the V65x, and that sort of system (6 internal drives) is something that would be quite valuable. And the B200x blade was quite a marvel – twin hyperthreaded Xeons and a decent memory configuration in a tiny package,” he writes. “I expect closer collaboration will improve driver support for Solaris, but I’m also hoping for a wider range of systems designed for Solaris to give us a breadth and variety of system configurations that Sun themselves seem disinclined to supply.”
Pakora Korner: Where does this leave the Sparc?
IT@Intel: This is socially positive
Jonathan Schwartz: Just so nice to be on the same side of the market as Intel
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Poor Lotus can’t keep up with Web 2.0
Squash
IBM launched a slew of social networking features on Monday, but Phil Sim wasn’t imporessed. “Let’s face it, most intranets and indeed most Web sites are simply a collection of documents. That’s what made Lotus so perfect, being a document-based database. To hack up an app you simply built a wysiwyg form, modified a view and you were away,” he writes. “Wikis are even more simple. You just type. However, I’d always considered wikis to lack power until I lifted the covers of Jotspot. I’ve also been checking out competing wikis like the offering from Australian company Atlassian, and I’ve finally found the direction that has enabled me to put to bed Lotus.”
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If you’re going to measure something, measure something worthwhile
Seth Godin
“There are literally millions of bloggers that have become so focused on measurable traffic that they end up posting nonsense designed to do nothing but attract a Digg. Look back at a blog like that a month later and it appears to be a series of gimmicks, all designed to maximize a metric that’s almost totally irrelevant to what the blogger set out to do in the first place,” Godin writes, while offering a series of more worthwhile metrics. “Sometimes the unmeasurable is a shield, a way to insulate ourselves from the fear of measurement. But to embrace a number just because it appears to be accurate (though not relevant) is just as bad.”
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Monday, January 22, 2007
The new economy is for rule breakers, not rule-followers
Rohan Jayasekera’s Very Own Web 2.0 Blog
In a look at James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg’s Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad, Jayasekera sees some insights into the present day. “In 1987 they predicted the end of Communism, in 1991 they predicted that ‘Muhammad replaces Marx,’ and in 1997 (following the emergence of the public Internet) they argued that skilled individuals would be able to operate largely independently of governments, undermining the tax base of welfare states,” he writes. “The theory of megapolitics suggests that it is no accident that those at the forefront of the Web 2.0 revolution are anti-authoritarian, because a consequence of the revolution is that, unlike in the past, an authoritarian approach simply will not work effectively in the future.”
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How come no one expects Vista to work right the first time?
Meandering Passage
As Microsoft gets set to release the consumer version of its latest OS, Earl Moore notices that the tips and tweaks are already being offered by experts. “Does it seem strange to anyone that with the new and greatly improved Windows OS, Vista, which hasn’t even officially launched yet, people are already writing tips on how you can tweak it to ‘whip it into shape.’ Shouldn’t that have been Microsoft’s job prior to launch?” he asks. “Are users expectations of Windows so low that it seems perfectly normal with a brand new and ‘greatly improved’ version you’d need a vast number of tips to make it work effectively? Just what the hell did Microsoft spend the last five years doing?”
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Apple has no choice but to embrace BootCamp
East Coast Blogging
Now that the company is charging for a product that allows a dual Windows/Mac OS enviornment, it can no longer be considered a novelty, Jimmy points out. “According to Apple, it was a non supported product. Meaning that if a user had issues with Windows, they could not call Apple to help them out. If the product was official, the Apple would have been on the hook for Windows, as well as OSX support, on their Apple hardware,” he writes. “How could Apple now officially support a product that allows another OS to run on their systems and not support that product as well ? They can’t. Not only is BootCamp official now, so may an iMac running Vista at an Apple store near you very soon.”
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