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| Volume 6, Issue 1 |
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In This Issue:
 U.S. Supreme Court rejects RIM’s appeal
Ten thoughts on the new Intel iMac
What the heck is Yahoo thinking?
Google co-founders cash in
Geek designer wears tech well
 Terrorist support or mere fraud?
LANDesk rules the roost in desktop management
 How to survive a bad boss
When data goes missing: Will you even know?
Surfing the mobile wave
Developing mobile communications for the enterprise
Bold predictions for 2006
 When code changes lead to unemployment
Stratus doubles up on the ftServer 4300
Microsoft tries to slip Windows XP SP3 delay under our noses
 Disney to acquire Pixar for 7.4B
Coming to your PCs back door: Trojan’s
 What to do in the first 100 days
 Training - a company or a workers responsibility?
 6 more reasons to exercise in 2006
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U.S. Supreme Court rejects RIM's appeal
"Anything that increases the risk of a shutdown increases the chance of a settlement."
--Richard Williams, senior analyst, ICAP
The prospect of a wide-scale shutdown of the BlackBerry mobile e-mail service
is closer to becoming reality, as the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned down a
request to review a major patent infringement ruling against BlackBerry-maker
Research In Motion.
The court rejected a petition by Research In Motion to review a federal appeals
court ruling that could lead to a shutdown of most U.S. BlackBerry sales and service...
Read the article. Back to top
Ten thoughts on the new Intel iMac
Somehow I ended up in an Apple store asking about the availability of the
new Intel-based iMac. Yes, they had a few in stock, despite the lack of signage
in the very crowded store (the employees manning the Genius Bar deserve a raise).
Long story short, I lugged home a 20-inch model with the Intel Core Duo, and I have
some thoughts for anyone considering whether to pick one up. This is not a
review, replete with benchmarks and Photoshop filter times (shorter bars are better)
and musings on Rosetta emulation software. Rather, it's a list of some
initial impressions on the newest iMac. ...
Read the article. Back to top
What the heck is Yahoo thinking?
In this era of nasty malware and Internet scams you'd think one of the Internet icons would know better.
You'd be wrong. With that in mind, I nominate Yahoo for the "cobbler's children
have no shoes" award. To renew a subscription to Yahoo Mail Plus (which went up
$10 this year for some reason, a 100 percent increase), Yahoo sends its subscribers
a billing e-mail from...
Read the article. Back to top
Google co-founders cash in
Google execs keep $1 salaries
Top executives at search giant counting instead on stock
options and grants of the company's volatile stock for
their pay.
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Last month, the 32-year-old celebrity co-founders of Google each sold more
than $160 million worth of their company's stock.
That may sound like the ultimate jackpot to most people, but to Sergey Brin and
Larry Page it was just another month in their billionaire-in-a-year lives.
Since the search giant went public in August 2004, Brin has sold about...
Read the article. Back to top
Geek designer wears tech well
Although we saw her struggle periodically, she projected a seriousness of purpose
that was unfaltering. Diana captured the attention of the fashion industry and
viewers fell in love with her.
--Tim Gunn, chairman, Department of Fashion Design, Parsons The New School for Design
If you one day find yourself strutting down the street in an inflatable
dress or peeking out from beneath a hood embedded with a digital camera, you
may have Diana Eng to thank.
The 22-year-old designer, recently featured on the popular Bravo reality
television show "Project Runway," favors fashion that's influenced by math,
science and technology. A geek's geek who discovered the joys of math by second
grade, she wants to make the fashion-minded more interested in technology
and the fractal-minded more interested in fashion...
Read the article. Back to top
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Terrorist support or mere fraud?
How phone records are stolen
How do companies like LocateCell get these phone records?
Paul McNamara investigates - and asks what can be done
to stop them.
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One of the last vestiges of critical infrastructure protection is apparently
being scaled and destroyed. Companies are violating every common-sense security
premise I have ever known, cracking (illegally or not) the people component of
security, in ways that heretofore have only been in the hands of law enforcement
and judicial overview. Today, for a few dollars to LocateCell.com, an online data broker,
I can identify every person you have spoken to on your cell phone. All of the
private names and numbers you have acquired during your career, building your
business or protecting the country. Then I map when you spoke to your contacts,
for how long and what they did in response to your communications with them.
Then I find their addresses, Social Security numbers, friends, relatives . . . you
get the idea. Paris Hilton Hell at your front door...
Read the article. Back to top
LANDesk rules the roost in desktop management
In this round of testing desktop-management software, we decided to analyze how
well the tools performed from the perspective of five different roles, or sets of users.
For example, looking at these products from the perspective of the help desk,
we evaluated how well the products help diagnose and fix problems on remote
desktops, and we looked at the deployment of software, imaging, personality
transfer and upgrades. ...
Read the article. Back to top
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How to Survive a Bad Boss
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Coping with the monster manager.
William McQuiston retires this month as CIO at Truman Medical Centers Inc.
in Kansas City, Mo., after 41 years in IT. But he still vividly recalls the
boss who made his life miserable in the mid-1980s. That difficult period followed
his acceptance of a position at a county medical center. McQuiston was hired to
work on a four-person team that was moving one hospital's registration, billing
and accounts-receivable system in-house. The team was led by a former PC
technician who'd moved quickly up the ranks based on his technology prowess.
McQuiston was eager to please his new boss. "I'd been out of work six months,
so I was totally elated to have a job and would have done anything for that guy
for the simple fact that he hired me," he recalls. But that was easier said than
done. It quickly became apparent that McQuiston's manager was distrustful of
the hospital's intentions and paranoid that his newfound power wouldn't last...
Read the article. Back to top
When Data Goes Missing: Will You Even Know?
Where Did the Data Go?
Companies need to be aware of the regulations that various
states are imposing that require them to notify consumers
when their personal information has been compromised.
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Recent reports of company-compiled personal data gone missing (such as
Marriott losing many thousands of vacation club records), while clearly important,
is really just the tip of the iceberg. What customers really need to ask of
companies is, What other data has been lost?
And in all likelihood, there is absolutely no way for the companies to know.
The truth of the matter is, reported cases of massive data loss are just the
ones they know about. And this problem will only grow with the proliferation
of tiny personal mass-storage devices of dramatically increasing capacity. How
many people currently own flash memory drives? Tens of millions. And how many
companies control the use of flash drives? You can count them on one hand. I
travel a lot, and on a recent trek through airport security, I found a flash drive
that had fallen under the security table...
Read the article. Back to top
Surfing the Mobile Wave
| COMPANIES ARE ADOPTING MOBILITY FASTER THAN PLANNED |
| TECHNOLOGIES |
2004
PLANS* |
2005
DEPLOYED** |
| Wireless e-mail or BlackBerry |
39% |
51% |
| Personalized contacts and calendar |
30% |
56% |
| Content/information for employees |
23% |
44% |
| Sales force applications
| 20% |
30% |
| Field service applications |
20% |
26% |
| Customer-facing applications |
18% |
28% |
BASE: *875 decision-makers at North American companies
**292 telecom decision-makers at North American companies
Source: Forrester Research Inc., April 2004 and May 2005
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The surge in mobile devices swept ahead of many companies' projections. Here's
how some CIOs are managing to get on top of it.
At many companies, internal customers have gotten ahead of themselves—and IT—in
the rush for the latest mobile devices, unaware of the challenges they pose.
"They don't realize it takes infrastructure, a wireless signal and a whole bunch
of things before you can use a handheld," says Hap M. Cluff, director of IT for
the city of Norfolk, Va. For IT, trying to guide the flood of mobile adoption is
like trying to channel a tidal wave through a funnel. But CIOs are attempting to
quickly identify the best values, limit support and security headaches, and make
sure everyone knows the rules....
Read the article. Back to top
Developing Mobile Communications for the Enterprise
Many organizations are looking to their IT departments to deliver services to their mobile workforce.
So IT managers have been reading a lot about wireless technologies and what s
ervices can be offered. They've seen many different acronyms relating to wireless
and mobile services and have many options on hand. Now those IT managers have been
given a mandate from corporate executives to deploy mobile applications,
but are not sure where to start. If this sounds familiar ... this article is for you...
Read the article. Back to top
Bold Predictions for 2006
We asked some industry leaders for their most provocative predictions
about the future of IT, no holds barred.
Here's our collection of their most interesting thoughts....
Read the article. Back to top
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When code changes lead to unemployment
With a high-priced project manager to keep application design on course, what could go wrong?
I was working for a small software company when we got the assignment to build an
online customer system for an international shipping corporation. It was a major
sale for us. I had done a fair amount of the initial coding, and naturally I
was excited. There were all kinds financial incentives riding on it -- including a
trip to Hawaii for yours truly. A good scope of work had been drafted before we
began design and coding, and both the customer and our upper management approved
it. Nonetheless, maybe because so much money was riding on the project, my
company brought in an expensive project manager to make sure the project was
completed successfully and on time. As the project moved into high gear, two
interesting things happened...
Read the article. Back to top
Stratus doubles up on the ftServer 4300
Two-in-one server's promise of high availability proves unbreakable.
It's true: Two is definitely better than one, at least when you're talking about
high availability. For most server manufacturers, that means two or more
identical servers in some form of cluster. Outside the clustering code, these
servers are singular entities without a direct relationship with one another.
Stratus takes a different approach with its ftServer W Series 4300: It combines
two discrete servers within a common backplane, operating as complete mirrors
of each other. Using custom drivers, all tasks handled by the ftServer 4300 are
executed in parallel. Each instruction is simultaneously computed on processors
across both units. Each I/O call is handled in parallel, simultaneously. The
Stratus code is essentially a traffic cop of sorts, making sure that traffic is
flowing, even if there's an accident. Should a CPU or DIMM fail, the OS never
sees the event and continues as normal. Thus, the ftServer 4300 isn't really a
cluster but a wholly redundant single server. In essence, Stratus has crafted a
shim, abstracting the hardware layer from the OS, presenting the OS with only
what it needs to see, regardless of the physical hardware in use. Suffice it to
say, the ftServer 4300 is like no other server you've seen...
Read the article. Back to top
Microsoft tries to slip Windows XP SP3 delay under our noses
Forget the so-called wireless flaw in Windows; waiting until 2007 for XP SP3 is the real headache.
It’s been a bang-up year already for Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles).
Hot on the heels of its WMF disaster, Redmond announced that other
vulnerabilities existed in Outlook and Exchange. (The company is working on those.)
Then another spat erupted about a supposed wireless flaw in Microsoft’s Windows
2000 and Windows XP OSes. This one’s been going on for a week now, and I’m a
mite ticked, not only because it’s not actually a flaw, but also because the
flap about it seems to be masking a real flaw: the one in Microsoft’s software
release schedule. The company just announced its delay of the Service Pack 3
release until 2007, as much as a year later than expected. Backing up for a
moment: The wireless "flaw" was discovered by...
Read the article. Back to top
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Disney to acquire Pixar for $7.4 billion
The Walt Disney Co. said Tuesday it is buying longtime partner Pixar
Animation Studios Inc. for $7.4 billion in a deal that could restore Disney's
clout in animation while vaulting Pixar CEO Steve Jobs into a powerful role
at the media conglomerate...
Read the article. Back to top
Coming to Your PC's Back Door: Trojans
These slick cyberattacks take aim at specific recipients to get past
firewalls and gather sensitive data. And they're on the increase.
It was a stealth cyberattack. Last Nov. 18, an e-mail with a nefarious
purpose was dispatched from an Internet address in the Tianjin province of China.
The targets: individual employees of the U.S. and European military and
pharmaceutical, petrochemical, and legal companies, according to e-mail
security firm MessageLabs. Attached was an apparently innocuous Microsoft
Word document with a news story from CNN. And it was designed to look like
it came from a trustworthy source. The sender was listed
as copyrightagent@turner.com, suggesting that the host was Turner Broadcasting
System, CNN's parent company and a unit of entertainment conglomerate Time
Warner (TWX)...
Read the article. Back to top
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What to Do in the First 100 Days
You’re starting a new job. You have to make a great impression, but exactly
what do you need to do and how?
So, you’re starting a new job, maybe after sitting on the bench for too long.
You have to make a great impression, but exactly what do you need to do and how
do you need to do it? All you know is that you need to do it soon. The position
you now occupy may have been open for a while since your new boss was methodical
in filling the role. Finding just the right person takes time. But, now you’re it.
There are three ways to start: You can spend time figuring out what you just
got yourself into, or go right in and “fix” everything or continue “business
as usual.” The right answer is a combination of all three, naturally; it all
depends on what you just inherited...
Read the article. Back to top
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Training - A Company or a Worker's Responsibility?
r0wan asks: "I'm currently working as a Microsoft Systems Administrator.
Through a series of bungled management decisions, have found myself responsible
for a Windows Server 2003 Active Directory network, that I know nothing about
(the person who was sent for training was: not the Microsoft point person, as I was;
and left the company, soon after the domain upgrade).
It doesn't look as though training will be forthcoming, and I've just been moved
from the lab, where I was training myself while simultaneously handling the domain.
I've got the MCSA/MCSE Training Kit, but recently I've found numerous errors,
so many that I was sent a free Press Kit book, for submitting all of the errors
I had found. Between management's reluctance to shell out for training, and being
moved from the lab, I'm getting the distinct sense that training is something
I'm expected to take care of, on my own time. Is this the de-facto standard within
IT, and for all jobs within IT? If so, how do you Slashdot readers keep up with
your continuing education, while still maintaining a personal life? Is it naive
to try to leave my work at work?"...
Read the article. Back to top
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6 more reasons to exercise in 2006
It's not just about weight loss, as a look back at the year's headlines shows.
Once again it's that time when many Americans will resolve to lose weight. Health
clubs will run membership specials, hoping to draw in legions of people
freshly committed to making 2006 the year they finally shape up and slim down.
But if history repeats itself, most people will have fallen off the weight-loss
wagon before spring — some even before the Super Bowl. More than half of people
who begin exercising drop their program within three to six months, according
to the American College of Sports Medicine. We know why...
Read the article. Back to top
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