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Loading ...YouTube Fridays: Neil Young’s JavaOne jam session
I was originally scheduled to attend JavaOne this year, but had to back out due to a family emergency (which will also keep me on light blogging over the next while). Instead, we sent the talented Kathleen Lau, who covered the update on Open Solaris, a development platform called Project Hydrazine and more. There was one other particularly Canadian angle, however: a special guest appearance by Neil Young, who discussed the impact of IT on music. Talk about a case study for the ages.
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...Barack Obama is the iPhone of politicians
I don’t know why it took me so long to make the connection. Even for a political figure, Barack Obama generates an extraordinary level of attention, and probably hundreds of news articles a day. He represents (for many people, at least), hope for an enormous change, almost a transformative revolution. And, like Apple’s most famous product, you won’t find him in Canada.
Pundits and everyday voters in the United States are doing the same thing the IT industry was doing when the iPhone was first launched more than a year ago: trying to anticipate what everyday life will be like with Senator Obama, and how they should prepare themselves for that change. In a journey that almost matches research firm Gartner Inc.’s famous “hype cycle,” Obama and the iPhone have rejuvenated interest in areas once thought stagnant (politics and mobile communications, respectively), and seem to followed a similar trajectory of crazed anticipation and premature backlash.
Obama’s attempt to win the Democratic nomination was presaged by the publication of his second book, The Audacity of Hope, which almost sounds like an Apple marketing slogan, just as “Think Different,” could be easily associated with his brand of political discourse. The iPhone=sleek, stylish and sophisticated, appealing to an upper-class elite. Obama=sleek, stylish and sophisticated, appealing to an upper-class elite. Has Steve Jobs sent him a free handset yet or what?
Even the criticisms Obama receives – that he’s all surface, no substance, that he lacks a track record, that he won’t mesh well with the established groups and processes that keep America running – sound a lot like the worries around the iPhone in the enterprise. Obama’s success has been attributed, in part, to his strategy of approaching the Democratic nomination as an outsider who can bring fresh improvements. Apple’s entrance to cellular telephony was similarly brazen, risky and somehow terribly compelling. As I write these words, Obama has been working the House floor, described by some reporters as doing a victory lap. Didn’t Apple’s launch – despite the lack of details around pricing plans, software compatibility and security – seem a little self-assured too?
Of course, no one had to hold a vote (apart from Apple’s board of directors, perhaps) to get the iPhone to the market, and even if Obama wins the nomination he’ll still have John McCain and the Republican Party to fight in a federal election later this Fall. The iPhone is probably here to stay, although consumers will constantly voting with their wallets. That’s the difference between a politician and a product. What really matters is whether the great speaker and the tool for speaking can create a real dialogue – whether, after the mania has died down, we can use them to our best advantage.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: IT managers star in summer blockbuster!
Okay, maybe blockbuster is stretching it a little. This is an animated trailer for a live-action short film that’s probably coming to a YouTube channel near you. It’s hard to glean a lot of plot details here, but the Dawn of the Dead-meets-Revenge of the Nerds premise looks promising (It certainly can’t be worse than War, Inc., which I saw last night. ). The help desk hasn’t seen this kind of big action since the Y2K crisis.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...A simple way to improve IT usability: the flanker test
Every time I get my eyes checked I’m just waiting for bad news. It doesn’t help that every time I visit the optometrist, they seem to have installed a new piece of equipment to test another aspect of my visual abilities. Some of them are really hard to cheat.
The most recent one (which added an extra $10 to my visit), involved sitting with my head pressed against a pair of goggle-frames which looked into an apparently blank white screen. I had a small button in front of me, and any time I saw some activity I was supposed to press it. What I ended up seeing was like a faint fluttering – almost like a large cursor blinking on and off – that would appear in various spaces around the screen, presumably to measure the effectiveness of my eyesight in each quadrant. At first it seems straightforward, but the fluttering would get fainter in some regions and more pronounced in others. The point was to track user error, and what I was doing isn’t far removed from the flanker test.
An article in the Economist last week discussed some recent research that has been conducted into the links between human error and brain activity. We still don’t understand a lot about the loss of concentration that tends to happen when we do routine tasks, even though we know it causes major problems. “In a factory it might mean that a component has to be thrown into the scrap bin. But in some occupations, like operating a giant crane or piloting an aircraft, the consequences can be devastating,” the Economist said. In IT it’s more about information being entered (or not entered, or entered incorrectly) into a database or other system, but it still leads to duplication of effort, botched processes or (in health care) lives put in jeopardy.
The researchers use the flanker test, which is available via a Java applet online, to gauge how distracted we really get. Here’s how it works: you see arrows and boxes flanked by other arrows and boxes. You have to choose (with your keyboard’s arrow keys) which direction you think they’re moving. There tends to be a 10 per cent error rate. According to the Economist article, tracking brain activity suggests there might a way to predict those errors about six seconds in advance, which would obviously be huge.
While the cognitive scientists pursue this area of study, it might be worthwhile to use the flanker test as in the early stages of application development. Look at how well users perform and examine the workflow which constitutes the technology-driven process. If the application requires even more response time, or throws something more distracting at them than the flanker test’s arrows, prepare for a higher level of failures once the system is up and running.
We tend to think of software projects as a way of ridding repetitive, mundane tasks but the inputting and retrieval processes alone leave a lot of room for missed steps. The successful use of technology demands, at a minimum, lightly focused attention. Human error may simply be explained by what we unconsciously, occasionally, ignore.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Fifteen years of the Web, and Facebook 15 years from now
Without Tim Berners-Lee, we might all be slaves to Gopher by now.
You could probably celebrate an online anniversary of some kind every day, but April 30 marks the moment, 15 years ago, when Berners-Lee and CERN renounced all claims of intellectual property around the protocols that allow users to access information over the Internet. Until then, the best we had was Gopher, a spin-off from the University of Minnesota which gave away browsers for free but charged for its servers. The World Wide Web knocked Gopher aside like a troublesome rodent.
In a thoughtful, easy-to-read overview published on the BBC Web site, CERN director of communications James Gillies points out that CERN’s altruistic approach meant we had a uniform way of navigating the Internet, “instead of a Microsoft Web, a Macintosh Web and who knows, perhaps even an Amstrad Web.” We still, however, might end up with a Facebook Web.
Although I set up a Facebook profile in order to administrate our publication’s group, I had put off filling out the details because it’s not a way I tend to communicate. A friend of mine – who has recently surpassed the 1,000 friend mark – changed my mind, when he pointed out that there are many people he knows he can contact through Facebook, but who tend to be unavailable any other way. Although I’m more of LinkedIn guy, that got me thinking, so I have added more information to my profile.
The World Wide Web was set up to read things in cyberspace, but a lot has changed in 15 years. After years of discussing its promise, social networking is putting the emphasis on relationships rather than information. Even as some organizations ban Facebook and similar sites, there is a growing recognition that a shift is talking place in online communication. Just as there was a time when we realized that some people were more likely to respond by e-mail than return a phone call, some people are using social networking services to avoid interaction by more traditional means.
The difference is that we tend to congregate as users not in open, public services but in those owned by a single company, like Facebook. If CERN had invented Facebook, its focus would probably not have been on the advertising opportunities but the chance to enlarge the online conversation.
In a recent interview with Esquire, Vint Cerf admitted there was no great “ah-ha!” moment when he and others set the Internet in motion. “They see the Internet now and think, Well, thirty-six years ago someone imagined what it would look like in 2008, and that is what drove the process. It wasn’t like that at all.” The same holds true for the Web. Although we tend to think those that forget their history are doomed to repeat it, we have to make sure as we wax nostalgic about the early days of the online revolution that we don’t lose sight of the principles which guided it.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...AMD offers breathing room with Business Class PC
AMD’s decision to move into the business PC market this week reminds me of the first line of Shopgirl, a novella by Steve Martin, which points out that working in the glove department at a large retail store means “you are selling things that nobody buys anymore.”
Of course, someone has to be buying new PCs somewhere, but with more people concerned about software licence terms and the ability to save the Windows XP operating system, updated hardware seems kind of beside the point. It’s intriguing, then, that AMD would not only move into such a saturated segment but that it would offer absolutely no innovation. The company’s Business Class line includes its Phenom quad-core X4 9600B for US$230, the Phenom triple-core X3 8600B for US$175, and the Athlon dual-core X2 5400B and 5200B for US$120 and US$110, respectively. There is also the Athlon X2 5000B and 4450B for US$95 and US$80 and the single-core Athlon 1640B for US$50.
In place of enhanced features AMD is pitching stability. The company is and guaranteeing that processors will remain available for two years and is extending warranties from one to three years. Forge about good enough computing. This is peace of mind computing, and, much like Oracle’s pledge for lifetime support in the software space, it’s not a bad strategy.
I’m not sure how well this competes with Intel’s processor lifecycle, but given that its product roadmaps often seem to stretch from Toronto to Vancouver, something tells me it’s more focused on moving customers to the next generation of technology than preserving their investment in the previous one. AMD admitted its Business Class line will probably resonate with small businesses first. That’s because corporations, if they’re big enough, are probably able to wrangle the lifecycle they need with Intel’s product line.
Although all the major business PC makers leapt on the announcement, the big beneficiary might be Dell, which is trying to regain its No. 1 position and could nicely piggyback its traditional reputation for quality service onto the longevity of AMD’s platform. Remember that three years ago, former Dell chief exec Kevin Rollins caused major upheaval in the market by considering AMD-based Dell servers. It’s a sign of AMD’s progress that an OptiPlex 740 with AMD inside is almost a foregone conclusion.
Intel’s own business processors and chip sets, Vpro, is not that old, and AMD hopes to win with features like out-of-band management, which allows IT staff to access machines even if the OS doesn’t boot. Although Vpro’s Active Management Technology allows this, AMD is touting an open standards approach. That may not make much of a difference, though, when the proprietary option, Intel, owns more than 80 per cent of the market.
Perhaps the biggest issue of AMD will be its own financial performance, which has been dismal lately. Although Intel has had its own operational screwups, missing product deadlines has been an ongoing problem since AMD’s early days. It may be difficult for IT managers to think of AMD as a business-class PC provider if it can’t keep its own business running smoothly.
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...YouTube Fridays: A seranade for beta testers everywhere
So all I know is that a German company called Popula is planning to launch an online event calendar, or something like that. Until it arrives, you can enjoy these extremely weird, oddly melodic tributes to those who decide to work with technology before the rest of the world does. This is actually part thee of “The Early Adopter Song,” which appears to be a cross between the Backstreet Boys and . . . . Sprockets?
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(No Ratings Yet) Loading ...Yahoo! A social networking strategy that makes sense
There’s a reason you don’t often see someone compile a top-10 list of the coolest Yahoo applications. Yahoo isn’t cool enough to attract cool applications, and until this week it wasn’t that easy to build on top of them. Now that it is promising to remove the first barrier, it might be possible for Yahoo to overcome user inertia, too.
At the Web 2.0 Expo this week in San Francisco the portal player’s CTO, Ari Balogh, announced a plan by which Yahoo will build on its existing open API strategy and streamline the process by which developers create tools on its various platforms. It will also bring all its user profiles – a Yahoo visitor’s e-mail account, instant messaging, Flickr albums and so on – under one virtual roof.
Though it is being touted as a radical depature, Balogh’s strategy is very much in keeping with Yahoo’s traditional modus operendi. While Google pushes visitors out to other sites through its search engine, Yahoo was more concerned with keeping visitors within its borders, whether it was to read news or look at photos. It took a wrong turn with Yahoo 360, which would have been a great social networking service if it hadn’t lagged so far behind MySpace and Facebook.
Like a lot of other startups that flame out (but which receive far less attention), Yahoo was forcing asking users to create yet another profile, when few of them have time to do any of that. Instead, the company has realized it can mine its installed base and the information they have already entered into its database. This is, effectively, a master data management project, one that recognizes how much easier it is to get more business out of an existing customer than it is to find new ones.
What a difference a couple of years make. Not long ago Yahoo was behaving like enterprises in the early days of the Internet, who would announce a Web site redesign as though they had created a new model of automobile. Now the company has realized it can get a lot more mileage out of simply following the lead of the social networking services which have sped by it. If Yahoo doesn’t get swallowed up by Microsoft – which may have its own API strategy for a combined entity – it might become a much more interesting player. That’s not to say Yahoo entirely gets this market.
“We don’t think of social as a destination. We think of social as a dimension. It infuses every element of the consumer’s experience on the Web,” Balogh told IDG News Service. Wrong. Social is not just a destination but a series of destinations, which is why more developers are thinking about Facebook than MySpace, and why they’re probably thinking more about both MySpace and Facebook than they are Yahoo. There’s no point in creating, say, the next Scrabulous if you put it on a platform where no one’s going to play it. Social networking is about real estate. Yahoo’s three biggest priorities right now are to prove it is an choice location, location, location.
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(1 votes, average: 6 out of 10) Loading ...Microsoft’s Live Mesh: The IT department implications
Even though it seems to signal a shift from its PC-centric corporate philosophy, I wouldn’t call Microsoft’s Live Mesh offering a disruptive technology. If anything, it’s an accommodating technology.
Released this week at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Live Mesh allows users to share data folders across different PCs and devices, storing information both on the hardware and on the Web. It’s not pure cloud computing. It’s kinda-cloud computing. Which may give cloud holdouts the peace of mind they need.
Much like Adobe’s Apollo project (which morphed into AIR last year), Live Mesh is about moving data between the online and offline worlds, which is the real “last mile” of mobile computing. As much as vendor promised anytime/anywhere/any device access, Internet connectivity is not ubiquitous and probably never will be. Nor would all users necessarily want everything stored in a single place. Live Mesh would avoid that problem by synchronizing changes made to information in folders and updating them every time the user downloads them to a client device or links back to a portal. Good for customers, good for developers. Not necessarily good for businesses.
So far Live Mesh has been restricted to a private group of beta testers, and in the earliest iterations Microsoft seems to be targeting consumers. There have been vague mentions of security features to be offered to corporate users, but nothing of any substance. And that kind of thing was fine in a world where businesses took their sweet time migrating to new platforms and environments, but not in a world where consumers buy their own devices. Microsoft suggests this doesn’t matter.
The issue is not the technology – sharing folders between devices and the Internet is undoubtedly useful. The issue is the data, or more precisely, the information that might make its way through Live Mesh. If we’re talking about sharing and synchronizing your recipes, no problem. It gets trickier when we’re talking about sales data, expense reports, marketing materials or other content that may be more vulnerable when it’s moving back and forth from a Web site to a cell phone.
Microsoft is also, oddly enough, behaving with Live Mesh as though it were a dot-com startup in the late 1990s, in that it has not revealed any ideas around the business model it will use to support the service. We can assume that users will be stuck looking at ads in their folders and businesses will be charged subscriptions, but the details are as important as the technology itself in determining how well Live Mesh will be accepted.
Online file storage, file sharing and remote desktop technologies are not new, but a combination of them in a package from the world’s largest software firm make for an important launch. I don’t think it’s a question anymore of whether Redmond “gets” the Internet. The task now is to prove it gets how customer adoption patterns and the subsequent IT management headaches are changing, too.
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(1 votes, average: 7 out of 10) Loading ...Five ways of defining cloud computing
As with nearly every IT trend, including service-oriented architectures and Web services, just because we’re all talking about cloud computing doesn’t mean we’re talking about the same thing.
I recently joined a LinkedIn/Google group on cloud computing, a member of which posted what should have been an innocent question: Is there a difference between cloud computing and what we know as grid computing? I was ready with my own answer, but overnight about a dozen responses had already flooded in, creating an e-mail chain that offered some interesting nuances on the terminology.
I hope this doesn’t get me kicked out of this group, but I thought it might be interesting to reproduce some of these as food for thought. In the interests of privacy I’m not publishing anyone’s names, and I’ve edited some of the definitions for the sake of clarity and length. Here are the top five:
1. “Vendors, as always, blur the real definitions of new terms. In my opinion (and the opinion of others, cloud computing isn’t the same as utility computing, which isn’t the same as grid computing:
“Grid computing generally refers to resource pooled environments for running compute jobs (like image processing) rather than long running processes (such as a Web site or email server).
“Utility computing generally refers to resource-pooled environments for hosting long running processes, and tends to be focused on meeting service levels with the optimal amount of resources necessary to do so.
“Cloud computing refers (for many) to a variety of services available over the Internet that deliver compute functionality on the service provider’s infrastructure (e.g. Google Apps or Amazon EC2 or Salesforce.com). A cloud computing environment may actually be hosted on either a grid or utility computing environment, but that doesn’t matter to a service user.”
2. “Cloud computing = Grid computing. The workload is sent to the IT infrastructure that consists of dispatching masters and working slave nodes. The masters control resou