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| Volume 7, Issue 3 |
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In This Issue:
 Bereft of Blackberrys – the untethered make do
FAQ: Detangling Virtualization
Tool mines personal data from across Net
Chinese political prisoner sues Yahoo
Land Warrior System: Inside the Pentagon’s new high-tech gear
 The kid who turned down $1 billion
Flight plan
 12 Ways to be a security idiot
 The fine art of data destruction
CEO compensation: How much do network security chiefs make?
Ballmer: Citigroup to upgrade 500,000 PCs to Vista
Popular web-sites highly vulnerable to attack
 Top 10 Vista hacks
Five more ways to screw up Virtualization
Seven Steps to a green data center
IT Mangers fear growing technical gender gap
Data breach? Here’s what to do, when and how
 The hiring manager interview: A look inside the hiring process
Young CIOs: They’re smart, ambitious, and they’re going to take your job!
Leadership and Generation X
How to master professional speaking
 DOJ: Kickbacks on government contracts widespread
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Bereft of BlackBerrys, the untethered make do
Where were you when the BlackBerrys went out?
On Tuesday night at 8 p.m. Eastern time, technical problems cut off more than 5 million BlackBerry users in the United States from their cherished wireless e-mail.
Service was restored 10 long, data-starved hours later.
The BlackBerry blackout was grueling to many--and revealed just how professionally and emotionally dependent so many people had become on their pocket-size
electronic lifelines. Stuart Gold was in Phoenix on a business trip when the service went down. Gold, the marketing director for Omniture, a software firm, noticed
ominous red X's next to his outgoing e-mails. He is not proud of what happened next...
Read the article. Back to top
FAQ: Detangling virtualization
For anyone buying servers or server software, and even many buying PCs, virtualization is getting hard to avoid.
The term typically refers to running multiple operating systems simultaneously on the same computer. It's long been around on high-end servers, but new software and
hardware options mean mainstream users are starting to have to worry about virtualization. For example, both major commercial versions of Linux now have virtualization built in, and the next version of Windows for servers will,
too. Virtualization is complicated. But there are reasons you might want to take it seriously...
Read the article. Back to top
Tool mines personal data from across Net
VANCOUVER, B.C.--Who needs to dive through dumpsters or steal snail mail when so many details on people are available simply by searching the Web?
South African security researcher Roelof Temmingh, known for his work on security tools such
as Wikto,
is taking the search for personal information a step farther.
Temmingh--who spoke at
the CanSecWest
security conference here Wednesday--has crafted a tool
dubbed "Evolution" that
associates data found in multiple search engines and
social-networking Web sites such as MySpace.com and LinkedIn. It also uses other sites' tools to find information behind Internet Protocol addresses, Domain Name System entries, domain registration and more...
Read the article. Back to top
Chinese political prisoner sues Yahoo
A Chinese political prisoner and his wife sued Yahoo in federal court Wednesday, accusing the company of abetting the commission of torture by helping
Chinese authorities identify political dissidents who were later beaten and imprisoned.
The suit, filed under the Alien Tort Claims Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act, is believed to be the first of its kind against an Internet company for its
activities in China. Wang Xiaoning, who according to the suit is serving a 10-year prison sentence in China; his wife, Yu Ling; and other unnamed defendants seek
damages and an injunction barring Yahoo from identifying dissidents to Chinese authorities. [Several American Internet companies, including Cisco Systems, Google and Microsoft, have come under fire, with some politicians and human rights groups
accusing them of helping the government monitor and censor the Internet in China.]...
Read the article. Back to top
Land Warrior System: Inside the Pentagon's new high-tech gear
A Stryker brigade from Fort Lewis, Wash., will wear Land Warrior equipment when it deploys to Iraq as part of a troop surge.
The 16-pound system has a dozen pieces of new gear and plugs infantrymen into the global battlefield network--but not all the soldiers like the hardware....
Read the article. Back to top
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The Kid Who Turned Down $1 Billion
When Mark Zuckerberg showed up in Palo Alto three years ago, he had no car, no house, and no job. Today, he's at the helm of a smokin'-hot social-networking site.
Here's why this 22-year-old CEO spurned Yahoo and Viacom to go it alone...
Read the article. Back to top
Flight Plan
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| Solving for X: Once the FAA clears the way for the Eclipse 500, Iacobucci will get to see how good his models really are. |
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“Iacobucci says 80% of his revenues will come from travelers who would otherwise drive. DayJet, in other words, is creating a market where none existed, an astonishing mathematical feat.”
"We'll see more companies integrate modeling," says former Microsoft CFO Mike Brown. "This is just like the Internet: One day no one had heard of it, the next day we were all using it." |
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The math wizards at Dayjet are building a smarter air taxi--and it could change the way you do business.
It's only fitting that a service pitched to traveling salesmen should find itself confronting an especially nasty version of what's known as the
"traveling-salesman problem." Stated simply: Given a salesman and a certain number of cities, what's the shortest possible path he should take before returning home?
It's a classic conundrum of resource allocation that rears its ugly head in industries ranging from logistics (especially trucking) to circuit design to, yes,
flesh-and-blood traveling salesmen: How do you minimize the cost and maximize your efficiency of movement? Back in 2002, that was the question facing DayJet, a
new air-taxi service hoping to take off this spring. Based in Delray Beach, Florida, DayJet will fly planes, but its business model isn't built around its growing
fleet of spanking-new Eclipse 500 light jets. It's built on math and silicon, and the near-prophetic powers that have in turn emerged from them. "We're a software
and logistics company that only happens to make money flying planes," insists Ed Iacobucci, an IBM (NYSE:IBM) veteran and cofounder of Citrix Systems (NASDAQ:CTXS),
who started DayJet as his third act.The advent of affordable air taxis has been heralded by a steady drumbeat of press over the past few years, with an understandable
fixation on the sexy new technology that's generally credited with making the market possible: the planes. The Eclipse 500 is a clean-sheet design for a tiny jet that
seats up to six and costs about $1.5 million (the Federal Aviation Administration may clear it for mass production as early as next month). It is also the most
fuel-efficient certified jet in the sky...
Read the article. Back to top
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The fine art of data destruction
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Peggy Jones, a business manager for the information-management team at the College of Southern Maryland, was asked recently to help dispose of what she now estimates
were about 1,200 old backup tapes and cassettes her IT organization had been storing in a relatively well-fortified walk-in vault.
The issue of what to do with the old tapes came to a head when renovation was scheduled for the building where the vault resided. "We had already moved to another
backup system. So, these old tapes didn't work in our current system anyway. Now it was just old data we needed to figure out how to dispose of properly," Jones says.
Her research led her to Data Killers, a media-destruction and computer-recycling firm in Maryland that could shred tapes and hard
drives securely, and provide a
certificate affirming their destruction. It would even let you stay and watch the shredding process, if you wanted. Then the media's "remains" would be delivered
to a smelter for melting and recycling its various metals. With its 6,600-pound shredder, Data Killers is able to take just about
any storage medium,
such as
the college's tapes, and turn it into particles the size of a thumbnail, owner Elizabeth Wilmot says...
Read the article. Back to top
CEO compensation: How much do network chiefs make?
Network industry CEOs made some big coin last year, and new SEC reporting rules require public companies to spell out just how much.
New rules make it tougher for public companies to be evasive about executive compensation. Check out what some key technology chiefs cost their companies
in the last fiscal year -- once their salaries, bonuses, stock awards, corporate expenses and more are tallied together. We’ll keep adding to the collection as tech leaders file proxy statements in accordance with the latest compensation reporting
rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission...
Read the article. Back to top
Ballmer: Citigroup to upgrade 500,000 PCs to Vista
Citigroup may be in the midst of massive IT restructuring, including layoffs, but it is planning to upgrade as many as 500,000 of its PCs to Windows Vista in the next 13 to 14 months, according to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer...
Read the article. Back to top
Popular Web sites highly vulnerable to attack
Eight out of ten Web sites contain common flaws that can allow attackers to steal customer data, create phishing exploits, or craft a variety of other attacks, a security company reported today.
WhiteHat Security
regularly scans hundreds of "very popular, very high-traffic sites" for its online business customers, says Jeremiah Grossman,
the company's founder. "More than likely, you have shopped there, or bank there," he says. Thirty percent of scanned sites contain an urgent vulnerability, such as one
that allows direct access to a company database with customer information, he says. Two out of three scanned sites have one or more cross-site...
Read the article. Back to top
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Top 10 Vista Hacks
Itching to make Windows Vista behave the way you want it to, not the way Microsoft does?
Take these fun and useful hacks for a whirl....
Read the article. Back to top
Five more ways to screw up virtualization
The last "gotchas" installment talked about correctly configuring virtual machines and having the right supporting cast of hardware resources associated with them. But other problems can crop up, too, especially as virtual server adoption builds.
Too much, too quickly:
Once virtualization takes hold, it can grow rapidly in many directions and become difficult to manage -- a phenomenon that Matt Dattilo, vice president and CIO at PerkinElmer Inc. in Waltham, Mass., calls "VM creep." "You have servers here, servers there, but there's no overall management or function in place. No one is keeping track of what is going on," says Bruno Janssens, senior architect of infrastructure architectural services at The Hartford in Hartford, Conn...
Read the article. Back to top
Seven steps to a green data center
How green is your data center? If you don't care now, you will soon.
Most data center managers haven't noticed the steady rise in electricity costs, since they don't usually see those bills. But they do see the symptoms of surging
power demands. High-density servers are creating hot spots in data centers that have surpassed 30 kilowatts per rack for some high-end systems. As a result, some data center managers are finding that they can't get enough power distributed out to those racks
on the floor. Still others are finding that they can't get more power to the building: they've maxed out the power utility's ability to deliver additional capacity to
that location. The problem already has Mallory Forbes' attention. "Every year, as we revise our standards, the power requirements seem to go up," says Forbes, senior
vice president and manager of mainframe technology at Regions Financial Corp. in Birmingham, Ala. "It creates a big challenge in managing the data center because
you continually have to add power." Energy efficiency savings can add up. ...
Read the article. Back to top
IT managers fear growing technical gender gap
Inflexible hours, growing demands prompting departures from key jobs.
Weary of answering late-night alerts and troubleshooting calls, Bethany King finally had enough. Six months ago, she closed the book on a 12-year stretch as an IT
storage administration professional to become an IT auditor. “I had a 14-year-old daughter that I didn’t want to leave alone at 3 a.m.,” said King, who was
allowed to shift to the more flexible IT job at The Empire District Electric Co., a Joplin, Mo.-based electricity supplier. “That really was one of the reasons I
got out. I could’ve made it work, but it’s just a choice that I made not to,” she added, noting that her husband is a firefighter who works various shifts. King, who
attended this week's Storage Networking World (SNW) conference, co-sponsored by Computerworld and the Storage Networking Industry Association, is one example
of what some attendees said could become a major problem for organizations...
Read the article. Back to top
Data breach? Here's what to do, when and how
The key is to prepare ahead of time with a contingency plan that details roles, actions and timelines.
There's been a data breach. It happened 268 times during 2006 (according to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse). Now, it's happened to your organization. What do you do?
Well, you might want to obey the 33 or so state laws that govern when and how you should notify the people named in those exposed files, gently breaking it to them that
because of you, they're now naked to identity theft. The laws are hardly copies of each other, but the standard bearer is California SB 1386. The California Office of
Privacy Protection has 30 pages of recommendations on how to comply with it. If you're with a financial institution, specific federal laws apply, and the Federal
Trade Commission has its own list of recommendations, including a model notification letter. Obviously, the situation is complex and fraught with legal hazards -- and
the experts agree that your only hope of navigating them successfully is to have a contingency plan written in advance...
Read the article. Back to top
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The Hiring Manager Interview: A Look Inside the Hiring Process
Conversations with IT managers on how they hire the best.
Stephanie Cline, former CIO of Jack in the Box, spoke with Executive Recruiter Jane Howze in January 2007. Cline retired from Jack in the Box in February 2007 after a 28-year career with the San Diego, Calif.-based fast-food chain.
Jane Howze: Who was the first person you ever hired? What company were you working for and in what capacity?
Stephanie Cline: The first person I hired was here at Jack in the Box 25 years ago. I remember at the time that I was not nervous—just thrilled to be able to make my
first hire. I managed a small group, and I hired a young fellow by the name of Tom Sawyer who had about two years of experience working as a programmer analyst.
During that first interview, he came across as a genuine, quality person with a "solid citizen" demeanor. He appeared to be the type of person who would be sincere,
honest, hard-working and a really good employee. Of course, he also had the exact technical experience I was seeking. Tom is still with the company today as director
of our distribution and restaurant development systems group.
Did you receive training about how to hire?...
Read the article. Back to top
Young CIOs: They're Smart, Ambitious and They're Going to Take Your Job!
CEOs are hungry for talent they can nurture. Learn how this new generation of CIOs—aged 25, 33 and 36—climbed the corporate ladder so quickly.
A new generation of IT professionals is coming of age in corporate America. They're young—in their late 20s and early- to mid-30s. They're astute.
They're moving into executive management positions faster than did their hoary predecessors. Unlike many of their elders, this new generation is not content to make the CIO role the capstone of their careers. And CEOs are very interested in—and
willing to take a chance on—this new generation of IT execs...
Read the article. Back to top
Leadership and Generation X
How understanding the relevance of generational dynamics can invigorate your leadership potential.
received so much feedback from CIO.com readers on my last column,
"Generation X:
Stepping Up to the Leadership Plate," that I decided to delve back into
the controversial topic of leadership and Generation X. As a reminder, and for those of you who haven't read that column, I maintain that X-ers as a generation have not
been equipped with key leadership skills and knowledge needed to assume vital leadership responsibilities being passed on to them by retiring Baby Boomers.
Due to generational differences, Baby Boomers have not been good about sharing their knowledge, experience and networks, and Generation X has not been good about
tapping into them...
Read the article. Back to top
How to Master Professional Speaking
Vary your style so people listen.
"Letting people see how I think" is how Senator Barack Obama describes his speaking style on the stump. As he travels the country seeking to introduce himself to voters
as well as build support for his presidential campaign, Obama is taking a rhetorical approach that differs from candidates in both parties. Most presidential candidates
use their stump speeches to state their views and exhort the faithful. If they are good, they use their speeches as points of inspiration...
Read the article. Back to top
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DOJ: Kickbacks on gov't contracts widespread
Whistle-blower cases could involve dozens of high-profile tech companies.
An alleged multi-million-dollar kickback scheme involving work on numerous U.S. government contracts touches dozens of IT vendors and systems integrators, according to court documents unsealed Thursday. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)
announced Thursday it
had joined three whistle-blower lawsuits
against Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Accenture. The DOJ's complaints allege that the three
companies, through "alliance partnerships" with dozens of other vendors, exchanged millions of dollars in illegal rebates and other payments since the late 1990s.
The DOJ complaints accuse Accenture and other systems integrators of collecting money from IT vendors in exchange for...
Read the article. Back to top
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