Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/02/2009 - 16:29
IBM has announced a new online service based on the popular Lotus Notes. The new service is called LotusLive iNotes, and the new service is aimed squarely at both Microsoft Exchange and Google's Apps Premier Edition. Regular readers know that I don't have much tolerance for the whole cloud computing buzz--it's a glorified mainframe, with less fault tolerance and much less data security. If I had to bet IBM's offering against Google, I'd go with IBM every time. Nobody knows how to do big, distributed computing better than IBM. Google is starting to get squeezed a bit, which is a good thing. I've been using Microsoft's Bing search engine for several weeks, and really like it--better results all around with far less dreck. And now IBM enters battle with Google. Good. Competition is great for everyone, especially buyers of services.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 09/06/2009 - 10:47
Diebold has thrown in the towel on its troubled voting machines business. It has sold the whole division to its competitor, ES&S. Diebold electronic voting machines have been plagued with problems, and the company says it is writing off tens of millions in losses, due primarily to lawsuits from disgruntled local governments who bought the machines only to find out they are a security nightmare.
Those of us that warned for years that electronic voting machines were a recipe for disaster can take little comfort in being right. Unfortunately, taxpayers are the big losers, as local governments spent hundreds of millions of dollars on untested equipment, much of which has had to be replaced already. It is not that the technology is inherently flawed--indeed, there are a few simple ways to make electronic voting machines reliable and auditable, like producing a paper record of votes entered. Buying technology and relying entirely on vendor promises can lead to unpleasant surprises.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 08:21
This story says that software for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch has grown to $2.5 billion. This is a market that did not exist just two years ago. What the article does not mention is that most of the programmers writing and selling software for the iPhone are working from home, and many of those businesses are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
This is where broadband becomes important. These home-based software businesses have to have reliable, high performance broadband connections--to coordinate activities with other programmers and co-workers also working with home, to upload and download software, and to access online business services (e.g. accounting, printing, etc.) that enables these work from businesses.
Economic developers: What is your strategy for attracting these new home-based businesses? Are you working with local builders and developers to ensure that "Internet ready" homes are available? Are you supporting a regional effort to improve access and affordability of broadband? Do you have a virtual business incubator that is designed to help home-based entrepreneurs grow successfully?
Communities that market their quality of life, their recreational resources, and that have open access broadband have a recipe for growth.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 08:36
The intertubes are abuzz with news about Google's announcement of its Chrome browser-based operating system. Folks that think it will be a Microsoft killer will be disappointed. The new entry to the OS marketplace will erode Microsoft market share at about the same rate competing software like Apple's OS X and the Unix-based Ubuntu. It's bad news for Microsoft, but the new software will barely put a dent in the Redmond company in the short term.
The good news is that more options are a good thing. Not everyone has the same needs, and having a variety of operating system choices, each with a different set of price points, applications, and features creates more competition, more pressure to continuously improve each OS, and more pressure to deliver more at reasonable prices.
Part of the reason Microsoft has been losing market share is because for a long time, there was a lack of competition. The company had little pressure to innovate, reduce prices, or add real value. With Google bringing yet another OS to market, Microsoft has to work harder to keep existing customers and to attract new customers. That is good for everyone.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/31/2009 - 09:02
Skype is now available for the iPhone. Sound quality for iPhone to iPhone connections on WiFi networks is excellent, and if you leave the Skype app running (in the foreground) you can turn the phone off and still get calls. However, if Skype is not the main app, you cannot receive calls, so there are still some limitations on the usefulness of it on the iPhone. But all that is set to change in June or July, when Apple releases the next major software upgrade for the iPhone, which is supposed to include "presence," or the ability of applications like Skype to sit in the background and still run--in the case of Skype, you could be browsing the Web or sending email and still receive incoming Skype calls.
Skype support for the iPhone is a big deal. There have been some helper apps that allowed Skype calls or used another third party VoIP service, but having your Skype phone book and preferences on the iPhone is very convenient, and at least gives you the ability to make phone calls via the Internet even when not in range of an AT&T cell tower.
When the software upgrade is released this summer and presence is fully supported, it will help sell more iPhones without a cell provider service contract. For some people, just having VoIP on the iPhone will be enough.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/24/2009 - 18:48
A new study of smartphone Web browsing shows the iPhone positively crushing the competition. The Apple iPhone accounts for 33% of all the Web browsing being done by smartphones. The nearest competitor is a Nokia phone, the N70, with a measly 7.1%. After that, it goes downhill even more rapidly, with most of the other phones in the top ten barely breaking 3%. The iPhone has a good, fast Web browser, a large readable screen, and a touch interface; the combination is unbeatable at this time.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 10:16
Verizon gets a pat on the back for cracking down on spam. The company has announced that it will finally close Port 25 on its mail servers. Port 25 allows email be sent without any authentication, making it easy for spammers to use "zombie" PCs infected with spambot software to send spam email. The change will make it more difficult to send spam from infected PCs and will also make it easier to identify infected machines, since the infected machines will have to now provide authentication before sending the spam. Judging from the comments in the this article, anyone who provides PC support for a fee will see a surge in business helping some home users make the change. A single setting buried in each user's email client on their PC has to be changed; it only takes a minute if you know where it is, but if you don't, it can be frustrating (you won't be able to send mail until it is changed). Verizon will likely provide detailed instructions for a variety of email software.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 02/18/2009 - 10:09
A Vietnamese researcher has cracked face recognition technology that has been built into some laptops. Built in or add-on cameras are designed to do facial recognition with the aim of making the laptop more secure. But the researcher found the software could be easily duped by displaying a picture of the owner, and a brute force attack (by showing the software many face images in succession) also worked.
Submitted by acohill on Sat, 01/31/2009 - 10:22
If you are in the mood for a chuckle, take a look at the screen shot here, where someone discovered that Googling Google gives you a search results page warning you that every single Google service may damage your computer. Note: By the time I wrote this, Google had apparently fixed the problem.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 01/02/2009 - 09:37
TGDaily reports that Microsoft's share of the Web browser market has fallen below 70% for the first time. The open source Firefox browser from the Mozilla organization now has over 20%, with other browsers like Safari and the iPhone Web browser picking up the rest. In a testament to the popularity of the iPhone, it's share of the Web browser market has tripled (but it is still very small).
In another TGDaily story, Google has begun to flex its muscles and has tossed both Internet Explorer and Firefox over the the side of the boat and told users of its free online applications and services to start using Chrome. This push by Google forebodes a replay of the Internet Explorer problems of the last ten years, where Microsoft made tweaks to their services to favor their own browser. If Google does this with Chrome, users will lose again, as Google could make it difficult to use their "free" apps unless you also use the Chrome browser.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 12/03/2008 - 10:10
ComputerWorld reports that Microsoft's share of the operating system marketplace continues to shrink, and has now fallen below 90% for the first time in more than a decade. The recent 2% drop in marketshare was made up primarily by Apple, and a much smaller gain in Linux-based computers. Microsoft's share of Web browsers has also been shrinking steadily, with FireFox, the free open source browser, taking most of the users away from Internet Explorer. Safari, the Mac Web browser, has also made smaller gains.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/01/2008 - 09:59
This note from ComputerWorldUK suggests that the problems for Vista run deep. With so many applications having compatability problems with Vista, companies are sticking with older machines, buying used machines that will run XP, and are evaluating alternatives like Linux and OpenOffice. There are some really good Linux variants available; one I've played with is Ubuntu, which is impressive. The interface has borrowed the best of Windows and Macintosh features, and is easy to use and very fast--even on older computers. And OpenOffice is a respectable replacement for Office. If your word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation needs don't use a lot of special features, you may not need Microsoft Office at all.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 10/03/2008 - 09:13
In the continuing saga of voting machines that simply don't work, here is perhaps the most alarming story to date. In a Washington, D.C. voting precinct during the primaries, a "static discharge" magically created an extra 1,500 votes on the memory cartridge that stores the vote tally. The only slightly good news is that someone did notice that the manual tally of voters at the precinct was only 326, but what if it had not been caught?
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 09/22/2008 - 08:13
New research suggests that email, to hardly anyone's surprise, is a huge time waster. A UK scientist studying how we use email found that stopping to check your email imposes a big time loss on us as we switch back and forth mentally between tasks. For those who have their email set to check automatically on frequent intervals, the overhead of task switching can eat up an entire workday out of a five day work week.
The solution is pretty simple. Turn off automatic checking and check your email only a few times a day. Fewer interruptions means more time spent on work.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/12/2008 - 08:08
"Cloud computing" has replaced "Web 2.0" and "social networking" as the latest buzz phrase. IT folks love buzz phrases, and the IT landscape is littered with them. Whatever happened to "client-server," "relational databases," "artificial intelligence," and "fifth generation?" All of those buzz phrases were based on solid and useful technical advances that were grossly oversold as the answer to everyone's problems.
Cloud computing is just the latest, and beware of vendors and IT staff claiming a modest 15% increase in the IT budget to develop a "cloud computing platform" will fix all current and future woes. Or beware of "free" online services that tout cloud computing. Over the past five or six years, as more and more people and businesses have acquired broadband connections to the Internet, it has become more practical to store data of all kinds (documents, email, etc.) remotely and use a desktop application or Web app to access that data. Google Apps is a perfect example, as well as more common services like Gmail and Hotmail.
In many cases, storing data in a "cloud" somewhere on the network improves accessibility, reduces costs, or both. But there are two problems. If you are relying solely on a third party to store your data, you may lose it, as did customers of The Linkup, who just discovered that the company lost large portions of paid customer data. Some customers apparently did not have backups.
Social networking sites also store data in a cloud, and a recent lawsuit over data stored by LinkedIn, a popular business networking service, illustrates similar difficulties. The legal problem arose when an employee left a company in the UK and started a rival firm, using contacts built up during his previous employment and stored online at the LinkedIn service. The employee was sued and the courts forced him to turn over the information; the courts agreed that the contacts represented confidential company data. But it was stored online by a third party and the account was in the name of the employee. And apparently the firm encouraged employees to use LinkedIn to manage contacts.
So beware of cloud computing; technically, it can be used to solve all sorts of datasharing problems, but like any new technology, it can introduce new policy and management issues.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 07:21
Cloud computing has replaced Web 2.0 as a popular IT buzzphrase. Nobody ever really knew what Web 2.0 was, but it sounded important, and a lot of small companies got lots of cash to "really important" Web 2.0 applications and services that were going to change the world, make a lot of money, and cure cancer. None of them made much money, and most of them made no money.
Despite the hype, Web 2.0 signaled a shift to much more sophisticated use of the Web, with much better Web-enabled interfaces. The secret sauce for Web 2.0 services and applications was broadband. Cloud computing takes these sophisticated Web apps and high speed data connections to the next level, where both desktop computers and portable devices like the iPhone are connected continuously to data and services hosted somewhere on the 'net (the "cloud").
Apple probably has the clearest vision for this; the company has provided nearly seamless integration of desktop computers and portable devices like laptops and iPhones/iPods with its MobileMe service. For $99 a year, you get "cloud computing," which means your various devices (e.g. desktop, laptop, phone) all stay synchronized more or less automagically--as long as you have some kind of high speed data connection attached to each device.
Cloud computing, despite the hype, is here, and will quickly become a business necessity, meaning communities that cannot provide their own businesses with the right levels of connectivity will suffer economically. And cloud computing, to work properly, has to work from home as well as from business locations, so residential broadband is business broadband. Finally, communities have to have broadband hotspots for business travelers, because those business visitors have the most urgent need for access to the "cloud" of data they use to manage their work.
Submitted by admin on Thu, 07/17/2008 - 16:33
Fuel prices may be a proximate cause of airline financial problems, but insanely inefficient reservation systems and insulting fee structures are structural problems that less expensive fuel won't fix. I just spent over an hour and a half trying to make a simple change to an existing flight reservation. A full hour was spent on hold, with periodic updates from the reservation agent, who said the change was being "processed." The call was finally disconnected by a recorded message telling me to hang up and try again. Huh? An hour and a half just change a few bits in a computer, and it could not be done!
The cost of the flight doubled, and there was no change in the locations, just a change in the time. So the airline strategy is to treat customers with contempt and bad service--at the same time. It's baffling, and one can only conclude that airline executives never have to deal with their own reservation systems.
Submitted by admin on Mon, 08/13/2007 - 08:49
iPhone users are starting to get bills from AT&T (which is really SBC), and the bills are apparently stupefyingly detailed. This article describes 52 page, double-sided bills that include detail on billing items that cost $0.00. Apparently one of the problems is that even if you have an "unlimited" data plan (for using the Web and email features of the iPhone, AT&T provides billing line items for every time you access the 'net, even if there is no charge for such access.
This is yet another example of IT departments run amok, along with accountants and bookkeepers who apparently lack common sense. Margins on cellphone accounts are already slim; it makes you wonder who is responsible at AT&T for looking at the cost of postage. How can the company afford to mail out a 52 page bill?
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 06/07/2007 - 08:18
At least part of the reason that health care costs so much is due to arcane software and poor information systems design. I had to have a routine blood test this morning, and went to the hospital to do it so I could take care of it early in the day.
The whole process kicked off at a desk in the lobby where I had to fill out a slip of paper that was carried by hand to the patient registration folks. After a twenty-five minute wait, I finally got to talk to a registration person. This is where everything went seriously off the rails. I've been to the hospital before for this sort of thing, and they had a record of me in the computer. But the poor woman registering me clicked away with her mouse and typed for six full minutes. I thought I was on line at at airline registration desk--the only other place where I see long periods of typing going on for simple tasks.
The registration process generated at least 18 sheets of paper that I could see, and I suspect several more were generated at printers whirring in the background. Part of the time was spent checking data like date of birth, addresss, and phone number, which they already had but had to ask again, in a tedious process repeated daily in tens of thousands of doctor's office and medical facilities around the country. And of course, there was the requisite photocopying of my insurance card. I suspect that every day, we probably use a forest's worth of trees making copies of insurance cards.
The actual process of taking a blood sample, including being greeted by the nurse, rolling up the sleeve, printing labels for the samples, and putting on a band-aid, was under three minutes.
Total elapsed time: 40 minutes.
What should and could happen? This business of photocopying the insurance card is insane. The hospital has computers. The insurance company has computers. We have this thing called the Internet. Insurance companies and health care providers could establish an open standard to verify insurance coverage electronically, with much higher reliablity than a worn piece of pasteboard carried around in a wallet.
Today, you can buy a thumb drive with 2 gig of memory on it for under fifty bucks. This would hold my entire medical history, from birth, including a good sample of important X-rays. It could also hold some personal information like address, phone number, and next of kin. Instead of endlessly and repeatedly manually filling out forms and entering data, we could carry one of these, with something like thumbprint biometric secure access. Instead of many minutes of typing, I would plug it into a little keypad at the registration desk, enter a PIN number and a thumbprint, and everything needed to would transferred (and only what was needed, under the patient's control). Quick, easy, and more accurate than hand data entry.
This is not a difficult technical problem. I suspect it has more to do with the health care establishment's fear of giving more control to patients. But ultimately, we pay, one way or another. We should be in control, not underpaid and overworked clerks (who are really controlled by IT staff who have failed miserably to be of any real service to their clients and customers).
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 03/05/2007 - 13:51
If the airlines are losing money, they have no one to blame but themselves. The systems they use to process their customers are so arcane and inefficient it is a wonder that they work at all. On Friday, I was in New England, which was having a typical bad weather day. I had a noon flight out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and discovered via email at 9 AM that Delta had rebooked me on a flight out of Boston instead, also leaving at noon.
There were so many problems that it is hard to list them all. The email looked suspiciously like a phishing email gimmick--please logon to the Delta site to check your flight status. I tried to call Delta but after a half hour on hold, gave up. I logged into Delta (I am a Delta frequent flier), but could not print a boarding pass--no explanation. At nine-thirty, I decided that I better head to Boston, even though I had not been able to verify the change.
When I got to Boston, I could not print out a boarding pass from the Delta kiosks, because the system "could not find my ticket." Oh joy. I had to get at the back of a very long line to go wait for a ticket agent, and realized I would miss my flight--it was going to take an hour or more to go through the line. I was finally able to flag down a passing Delta agent who let me jump the line and get help. After the agent "found" my ticket, she spent a full minute punching away at her terminal just to print a boarding pass. Huh?
Repeat the problems I had by thousands or tens of thousands of passengers every single day, adding in all the extra Delta staff time needed to work around bad systems, and you have passengers fleeing to other airlines and greatly increased staff costs. My ticket was obviously in the system, since it was able to send me an email, but how can one terminal or access point not be able to "find" it? This is a catastrophic failure by the Delta IT department, and the whole group should be sacked for nearly bankrupting the company with garbage software.
Too many IT departments love expensive, hard to use and hard to maintain systems because it justifies their existence, justifies larger staffs, and justifies bigger budgets. Don't let IT staff hijack your school system, business, or organization. Demand excellence, simple systems, and low costs.
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