Articles in “September 2005” from Datamation Blog

Our friends over at Developer.com published a Q&A with Pat Gibney, IBM Director, Software Group Componentization, which discusses IBM's Community Source development strategy. Taking a page from the open source community, where developers collaborate to create components of software, IBM's program helps the company develop components in-house that can be used in any number of software applications. Gibney says the program saves valuable time.

Called Community Source, this development model mimics the collaborative style found in the open source model, with one result being that IBM is now able to bring its commercial software to market about 30% faster. With 100 Community Source projects underway, this internal open source model has never been attempted on this scale in a commercial enterprise, for as broad a product portfolio as IBM's.

WebSphere Studio, WebSphere Integrated Runtime, WebSphere Application Servers, Lotus Workplace, Rational Application Developer, and WebSphere Portals have all used or utilize Community Source as part of their development cycles, according to the interview. There are 266 active projects.

Because Community Source leads to increased awareness of reusable assets, we maximize the probability that similar capabilities needed across different product lines will be satisfied by the same shareable component. This improves horizontal integration which then improves overall consumability. It also increases speed of delivery. For any development effort, having access to the right reusable component allows for faster delivery, even if changes need to be made.

If your development team isn't trying something like this, maybe it should.

It seems anything is possible. A new musical comedy about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs is taking the Off-Broadway scene by storm. No, I'm not making this up. Seriously. Nerds:// A Musical Software Satire is a limited run production, showing through Oct. 2. Hurry. Buy your tickets now! This has got to be funny. The show follows the story of Gates and Jobs as ''they blaze a path from 'garage inventors' to warring titans of the computer revolution.' According to the Web site, songs in the show include I am Just a Nerd and Windows Rap. My toes are already tappin'! Of course, I'm trying awfully hard to picture the two 'titans' arm and arm, belting out a tune while doing high kicks. You're smirking now, aren't you? But come on... if they could make a successful musical about a bunch of cats, couldn't they do the same about a bunch of geeks? The show is playing in the Beckett Theater as part of the NY Musical Theatre Festival.

BusinessWeek's look at Dell this week raises a number of questions about a company that was once a darling of consumers looking for inexpensive PCs backed up with customer suport. The story focuses on the launch of Dell's XPS line of computers for tech-savvy types like gamers, or people who have money to burn and want a new PC. XPS computers, you see, start at over $1,000. As a backdrop to all of this, however, are some numbers that Dell is not too proud of: complaints to the Better Business Bureau about Dell were up 23 percent from 2003 to 2004, and BusinessWeek says they're up another 5 percent this year. Dell's customer satisfaction rating fell 6.3 percent to 74 in a University of Michigan survey. While those numbers aren't good, what's scarier for Dell customers who won't be buying an XPS model is that paying more will get you better service, creating a have and have-not atmosphere among Dell's customers.

In an added appeal to the high-end market, Dell is offering a buffed-up service package for the XPS machines. Their standard warranty is one year, compared with just 90 days for Dell's other PCs. Plus, Dell gives XPS customers a special phone number to call for service and support, which is supposed to put them in short phone queues and help them avoid the long hold times that irk many existing Dell customers.

In his blog, BusinessWeek's Rob Hoff questions the wisdom of cutting corners with support

Whether it's providing adequate support or building better products that just work, technology providers need to step up to the plate. Sell stuff that people are delighted with, instead of stuff that they merely endure, and maybe they might be willing to pay a few bucks more.

Those with Dell horror stories certainly found a forum to vent in the comments attached to the BusinessWeek story. I guess this weekend I'll have to hug my Dell.

Sure, their salaries are paltry relative to other tech titans, but don't expect to see Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer serving up fries at the local McDonald's any time soon. Documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission show that Microsoft co-founder Gates and CEO Ballmer each drew salaries of $600,000 in the fiscal year ended June 30. Not too shabby, but you don't get to be the richest and 11th-richest Americans simply by squirreling away those paychecks. For that you need serious equity, and between them Gates and Ballmer own 14 percent of Microsoft shares. A guy who keeps track of how large corporations compensate top executives is mightily impressed, according to this story.

"There (are) so many other founders  the main one being down the coast, with [Oracle founder] Larry Ellison  who have a great deal of money as well, but still pay themselves massive amounts by options every year," said Patrick McGurn, special counsel at Institutional Shareholder Services. "These guys have been on the side of angels with this particular issue."

McGurn might be going a little overboard with the angel stuff, but let's give props where they are due.

Brian Jones, the program manager for Microsoft Office, blogs about XML and what Microsoft calls its Office Open XML file formats on a regular basis. Today, Brian has a very lengthy explanation for why XML is the default format for the upcoming Office 12. Brian says he wrote the explanation because there is a lack of trust in Microsoft's motivations (you don't say?).

That really concerns me so I wanted to get back to a discussion around our motivations. I think that after you see clearly why we are doing this work, you'll probably have a better time understanding where it's going and you'll see why we aren't going to "pull the rug out from under anyone."

To be honest, far more interesting to me than the argument over how open Microsoft's XML formats are, is the history Brian includes in his post. In the early 90s, the Office developers were developing for people who mostly printed their documents instead of sharing them.

For Office 2000, the internet wave had hit strong. We all thought that web pages were the documents of the future and we wanted Office applications to have the ability to save and edit those documents. So, we spent a ton of time (almost 25% of the overall dev budget) making it possible to save any Office document in HTML.

But the use of the Web as a document format didn't happen to the extent they predicted, and Brian says that's when the conspiracy theories about why Microsoft was so invested in HTML within Office got started. Now they've moved to XML (both Microsoft and the conspiracy theorists). I'm sure Brian knows he can't explain Microsoft's motivations to the biggest conspiracy theorists. But if you have the time, I found the read very interesting in its discussion of trying to predict trends in how people use their documents and trying to develop software accordingly.

It's ours, so keep your grubby international hands off it. That's the basic response of the United States to a European Union proposal to create an intergovernmental forum, possibly under the United Nations, that would control the main servers that rout Internet traffic and also would determine who gets specific Internet addresses. Right now that considerable authority rests with the U.S.-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) and the U.S. Commerce Department. Many countries, especially developing nations, contend the U.S. has too much (read: total) control over the Internet, which is emerging as a key component of the global economy. The EU proposal, made in Geneva at a meeting prior to November's U.N. World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia, was roundly rejected by the U.S. official in attendance.

"We've been very, very clear throughout the process that there are certain things we can agree to and certain things we can't agree to," Gross told reporters at U.N. offices in Geneva. "It's not a negotiating issue. This is a matter of national policy."

I too would be leery of having the dysfunctional U.N. run the Internet -- oil for 'Net access, anyone? -- but take the U.N. out of the equation, and the "national policy" cited by Gross won't change. You can take that to the World Bank. What if the impasse continues? It could affect international cooperation regarding spam, cybercrime and identity theft, for starters. Or, as this story mentions, the outcome could be more dramatic:

Without consensus, some experts say countries may move ahead with setting up their own domain name system, or DNS, as a way of bypassing Icann.

In other words, goodbye World Wide Web.

Ask your local pharmaceutical executive how much money there is to be made off the aging U.S. baby boomer population. It seems IBM already has. Or maybe the company just realized it offered its employees the opportunity to leave the company to become teachers and will need software to process all those who do it. IBM announced yesterday a new practice to help organizations prepare for the upcoming retirement boom.

The firm will supply software programs, consulting services and technological fixes intended to help businesses understand how vulnerable they are to boomer exodus and how to manage it.

Boomer exodus is a real problem. IBM says it has software that can analyze personnel records to help predict how many retirements are coming up; software that can identify where an organization risks losing important knowledge; and software that can help companies track the subtle nuances of business relationships that can be lost when someone retires — like what type of wine a client likes to drink. But since the mere act of paying for gas to drive to work these days can delay retirement, you can expect an aging workforce in the future. IBM is prepared for that too. The company says it's ready with what it calls "workplace modifications" for older workers who can't hear or see like they used to, including a mouse that compensates for motor tremors.

It's not about being able to tear apart a balance sheet, or being the smartest person in the room, or even good ol' nepotism. No, to make the successful transition to CEO or COO, an ambitious chief information officer must act the part, according to a new white paper by executive search firm Korn/Ferry International. The eight-page paper, Aspiring CIOs Should Focus on Critical Behavior Skills, suggests that behavior styles thwart many CIOs' chances to become CEOs or COOs. Korn/Ferry concluded that to be promoted, CIOs need to be, well, less geeky. They must be more action-oriented than analytical. In other words, more Kirk, less Spock. The good news, according to Korn/Ferry, is that action-oriented behaviors can be learned, including how to make quick decisions under pressure and how to effectively communicate these decisions to their staff. And if your new acting skills fail to pay off in the workplace, there's always dinner theater.

Larger software development teams aren't as efficient as smaller ones. You may have been able to guess that, since as teams and organizations grow they tend to become less efficient. But now research proves this to be the case. The study was done by QSM, software development consultants.

For a typical project of 40,000 source lines of code, QSM found that a 29-person team on average would take 191 staff months of effort and cost $2.3 million (at $12,000 per person month); for a project of the same nature, the 2.5-person team would have used 40 staff months, and cost $480,000.

Obviously the smaller teams takes longer to get the job done, but even then the difference is only 12 calendar days. And why is that?

Large teams created significantly more defects, more than six times as many, in fact. The increased volume of defects creates more rework cycles, more than giving back the schedule benefits of the additional people.

Thanks to Michael Sampson of Shared Spaces for the link.

There are a number of Web sites I visit every day whose design I find confusing, bland or just plain ugly. One example is Slate, which to me looks unfinished, as if they ran out of money to pay a Web designer and just went with what they had. Ironically, it was on Slate where I found a good article about software that allows users to personalize any Web page to suit their own needs. The software is a Firefox plug-in called Greasemonkey, which enables you to deploy Javascript code that can modify Web pages after your computer has loaded them (and, I should point out, only on your own machine). In other words:

Greasemonkey resurrects the Web's original spec: Page layouts are just suggestions, people. Everything is remixable.

You don't have to be a geek to use Greasemonkey, either:

Gung-ho Greasemonkey acolytes have already written a few thousand mini-applications that, for example, add competitors' prices to Amazon's book pages, install extra buttons on Google, and increase the security of Yahoo!

You can find hundreds of these Greasemonkey scripts here. Just type in Greasemonkey in the Search Scripts box on the right. Now go play God.

Back in October of 1871, a massive fire destroyed most of the city of Chicago. That's why October is recognized as Fire Prevention Month around the United States. October is also National Cyber Security Awareness Month. I'm not sure what the backstory is on that one. With October just days away, a couple of announcements along the computer security lines from the Department of Homeland Security caught my eye this week. First, US-CERT will begin issuing uniform names for computer viruses, worms, and other online bad things next month. The program is called the Common Malware Enumeration initiative. You can read all about it at eWeek. The program is voluntary, and most of the great minds in security say this is a good idea, but they don't really say why. A Bank of America VP says in the article it will help them coordinate their response to attacks because they use security products from multiple vendors. I guess I buy that. But, and I'm trying not to be jaded here, it sounds like the adding of bureaucracy from a bunch that just sent ice for hurricane victims to Maine. I feel much better about the second announcement. Microsoft, eBay and some non-profits and federal agencies are launching an Internet security awareness campaign across print, television, and online media. I've often wondered why we don't see more of this. The campaign centers around a Web site at OnGuardOnline.gov with plenty of resources and information, as well as a Stop, Think, Click catchphrase that sounds a lot like its October cousin Stop, Drop & Roll. It might be wise to point the site out to end users in your organization and your family and friends at home. You can read more about it from the Washington Post's Security Fix blog. Thanks to Bruce Schneier and Brian Krebs for the links.

The tech world loves real conflict and drama, whether it's Linux vs. Windows, Microsoft vs. Google or hackers vs. the civilized Internet. Those battles, however, pale in comparison to the epochal struggle that has landed in a Pennsylvania courtroom. I know it's OT for a blog about the Internet and enterprises, but it's hard to ignore the challenge to evolution mounted by advocates of a theory called "intelligent design." The court case involves some parents suing a school board in Pennsylvania for voting last fall to force students to be taught intelligent design, which basically is creationism with a new user interface. There's an excellent Knight-Ridder article that lays out the arguments on both sides. This is a serious topic, and how the courts treat it will determine how (or perhaps whether) science will be taught in our public schools. Still, there was one thing in the article that struck me funny:

To buttress its case, the Discovery Institute (which is spearheading the intelligent design campaign) has collected about 400 signatures on a statement labeled "Scientific Dissent from Darwinism." About 80 of the signers are biologists; the rest are mostly philosophers, mathematicians, chemists, computer scientists, historians and lawyers.

Lawyers? Maybe they plan to depose God.

More than once since Windows Vista was given its name have I brought up the issue of hardware requirements. Some have suggested that the hardware requirements to run Vista will give a viable Linux desktop one last shot a gaining a foothold. I disagree. A 32-bit starter version is going to be available for emerging markets with hardware concerns (much as it was for Windows XP). Writing over at CIO Update, Steven Warren says he has the lowdown on what exactly you're going to need in the hardware department to get the most out of Vistsa, as well as to get enough out of Vista. How does this sound? At least a 128 megabyte display card for the full graphical user experience; 256 megabyte for ideal performance. It's also recommended that you run a serial advanced technology attachment (SATA) drive with a 8 MB cache and native command queuing (NCQ). The bottom line:

It is like building a house. You can have the bones of the house for a certain price but if you add crown molding, natural stone, etc. the price goes up. Of course all of these things are pleasing to eye but if you just want the newer construction with better efficiency it provides, the extras do not matter. Will the house work for you without the bells and whistles? Yes, just as Vista will work for you without all of the major upgrades to hardware. Certainly, you will benefit from more memory and bigger and faster hard drives, but it really isn't necessary unless you decide it is.

Most important, Warren says, is that you get the security and performance enhancements Vista will provide.

The newspaper industry appears to be in big trouble. And the kryptonite doesn't appear to be online content, but specifically free content — especially free online content. Some headlines to consider:

• Bye, Bye, Broadsheet (Vanity Fair)
• The End of an Era: Good Night, News (Richard Reeves via Yahoo! News)
• Newspapers in Turmoil! (Rake Magazine)
• Paper Loss (National Journal)

That last article, written by William Powers, includes this observation:

Watch the behavior of the newspaper industry, and you have to conclude it has some kind of sick death wish. How else to explain its unflagging determination to do whatever it takes to bore and alienate readers?

Powers goes on to call the debut of the Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition "one of the more spectacular bellyflops of modern media history." I haven't seen anyone truly excited about the New York Times' new paid content offerings, but I admit it's rare that people get excited about having to pay for something that was free 10 days ago. My executive editor here is boycotting the paper (so he claims); David Card over at JupiterResearch expects the Times to give up at some point; and our CEO, Alan Meckler, calls the Times move "a big mistake." Three more headlines to mull over:

• Yahoo Enlists Finance Writers for Native Content (Wall Street Journal)
• Print Media's Hot New Star: Celebrity Mags (Washington Post)
• From the Times, oddly enough: Why Time Warner Has Fallen in Love With AOL, Again (Hint: because the content is now free)

There's a million conclusions you can draw from this. People want their content online. People want their content free. People want their content stupid. Or some combination thereof.

As you probably know by now, China has toughened restrictions on the kind of information it will allow on the Internet. Basically, pro-government news and soccer scores are OK; anything else is not. But thinking about what the average Chinese citizen can view on the Internet made me wonder what I could see if I  from my computer in America -- visited Chinas official mouthpiece, Xinhua News Agency. In its story announcing the new government rules, Xinhua said Web sites must be directed toward serving the people and socialism and insist on correct guidance of public opinion for maintaining national and public interests." (Which I figured ruled out any Paris Hilton coverage.) So what does Xinhua let outsiders see? Well, the front page is filled with the kinds of headlines youd see anywhere: Egypts Mubarek Sworn in for Fifth Term, Al-Qaeda Leader Sentenced to 27 Years in Jail, etc. There also was blatant propaganda, such as the package of stories on Tibet. Smiling faces were everywhere as people celebrated the 40th birthday of the Tibet Autonomous Region, we are told. Admittedly, Ive never been to Tibet, but I hear that nation's subjugation to China offers scant pleasure to its long-suffering people. The features sections were surprising, and made me reconsider my Paris Hilton theory. The top story in Entertainment was about the Playboy fashion show in Taipei. Another prominent piece was Stars Pose Naked for Breast Cancer. And in the Life/Health section, there was a handy guide to recognizing phony beggars in Shanghai. These are articles I can read online in America. Can the average Net user in China also read about the naked stars, or are they force-fed only news about the countrys 15-year road construction plan? If someone could reveal this information without being imprisoned for divulging a state secret, please fill me in.

The Joker sat glumly, watching the fawning television coverage of his arch-nemesis and primary threat. "I have given a name to my pain, and it is Batman," The Joker says. Then he shoots the TV. In the 1989 movie, The Joker was played by Jack Nicholson. In today's real-life technology industry, that role belongs to Microsoft. And the name Redmond has given its pain is Google. That's the basic thrust of this excellent article about the realization of Microsoft's decade-old fear that the World Wide Web somehow would jeopardize its powerful, Windows-based business model. Here's one excerpt:

More than a few analysts believe that Google, with its massive array of networked computers and Web-based software, is rapidly expanding beyond its traditional search business and is about to collide with Gates & Co.

And here's a quote in the article from an internal Microsoft memo (first reported in the Wall Street Journal):

"Google threatens Microsoft's position on the Internet, and could potentially lock Microsoft out of its existing distribution channels and reduce the value of Windows."

The stakes are high, citizens of Gotham City.

Computer People, an aptly named British IT recruitment firm, did a survey that found that techno-speak confuses office workers.

Over half (56%) of those surveyed said that IT professionals "speak another language" with two fifths (40%) saying that they feel IT staff are unaware of the confusion that tech jargon causes.

The survey found that the terms bandwidth, HTML, hostname, alias, and IP address are the most commonly used bits of jargon. How to bridge this communications gap? Almost 70 percent want their computer-related issues compared to more easily understood problems, like those in a car. Computer People suggests using analogies. ("Do you know how your catalytic converter uses platinum and rhodium as catalysts? Microsoft Excel tables are just like that.") Another 20 percent, ever considerate of the value of the IT department's time, would like visual aids like flow charts to aid in their understanding of IT problems. Ten percent think IT staff should provide jargon-free literature. Meanwhile, back in the cubicles, 85 percent of the office workers in the survey said they use their own jargon in their roles at work. The IT staff wants them to develop a first-person shooter console game to help them learn it. Thanks to ChiefTech for the link.

Whenever I come across a column that lists the problems with IT management, I can probably guess at least three of them off the top of my head. Martin Brown's Computerworld blog pointed out one such list that puts an open source spin on things. The list comes from Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier, who wrote the "Five common mistakes that Linux IT managers make" over at IT Manager's Journal. But Brockmeier's approach isn't just "All Linux all the time." In fact, he encourages patience and thorough research before moving to open source applications. Brockmeier also harps on the lack of communication that seems rampant in IT management.

In my experience, most IT departments have very poor practices for disseminating information between members of the IT department and the users who depend on them. Vital information, like passwords and setup information for home-grown applications, often lives with the systems administrators rather than being stored in a central and permanent location.

Last month I mentioned the same issues as a problem for organizations with IT staff nearing retirement.

While most coverage of Forbes magazine's annual list of richest Americans has focused on the rapid ascension of Google's co-founders, I think this headline from the U.K.'s Inquirer offers the best perspective:

Four out of five top billionaires are IT bosses You must ask yourself why

I'll ponder that rather droll question another day, For now, here's who tops the Forbes list of the fantastically wealthy:

1. Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman ($51 billion)
2. Warren Buffett, CEO, Berkshire Hathaway ($41 billion)
3. Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder ($22.5 billion)
4. Michael Dell, CEO, Dell Computer ($18 billion)
5. Larry Ellison, Oracle CEO, philanthropist, ($17 billion)

With the exception of Buffett (and quite honestly, I've never cared for all that Parrothead silliness), the top five is comprised of technology entrepreneurs. And there are more in the top 20. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is No. 11 (with $14 billion), Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are tied at No. 16 ($11 billion each) -- up from No. 43 last year -- and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar checks in at No. 18 ($10.2 billion). The Forbes list includes a few other techies, but once you get below, say, $5 billion, can you really take them seriously?

While blogging generally is a safe endeavor, there are hazards. Criticize Apple or open source, for example, and you will be tarred, feathered and dragged through the blogosphere by a mob of incensed and indignant geeks brandishing iPods in lieu of pitchforks, your techno-ignorance sadistically exposed for the cyberworld to see. (Fortunately, I've only heard of this happening because I stand behind no blogger in my rapt awe of all Apple and open source products.) Sometimes, however, one's online musings court a different kind of danger, especially in countries such as China, Iran and others where the Internet is heavily monitored and controlled. Reporters Without Borders (RWB), a Paris-based organization that advocates free-speech, on Thursday released The Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents to help people avoid government censorship and worse. The 87-page pub is free and available online. It includes tips on blogging anonymously and techniques for dodging censors. The handbook also contains personal stories to underscore the real-world consequences of angering a repressive government. One of the handbook's contributors, Arash Sigarchi, was sentenced in Iran to 14 years in prison for posting messages online criticizing his government. Sigarchi is free pending appeal. RWB says at least 70 people have been jailed worldwide for violating censorship laws, with most (62) occurring in China. In the most recent case, RWB accused Yahoo! of collaborating with the Chinese government by providing electronic information to identify a journalist subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets to outside media.

This is funny in a sad sort of way. It seems that ardent fans of the Manchester United Football Club in England -- that's a soccer team to you Yanks -- took umbrage earlier this year at American millionaire Malcolm Glazer's attempt to take over their beloved Red Devils. Finding Mr. Glazer unavailable for a personal meeting and thumping, our loyal lager louts decided to wreak vengeance the new-fashioned way: Launching a DoS attack on Allen & Overy, the London-based law firm representing the American tycoon. According to the linked story:

Infuriated fans of the club attempted to overload the firm's servers "by sending a large quantity of large emails" over the months that Allen & Overy were representing Glazer, according to Mark Andrews, infrastructure developer with the firm.

So did the sassy soccer sods succeed? Here's how Andrews characterized their attempts:

..."a fairly crude attack" "It was an annoyance"... ..."so unsophisticated"

Not only was the DoS bombing easily thwarted, Glazer won control of the Manchester club in May, no doubt leaving many longtime fans gobsmacked. And as for our hooligan-cum-hackers, it's off to a pub near Old Trafford for you, lads. Thanks to TechDirt for the tipoff.

If the recent Forbes and BusinessWeek articles about Microsoft had you feeling down pre-Professional Developers Conference (PDC), then maybe some post-PDC reports will make you feel better. No, not Gartner's warning to approach Office 12 like a downed wire after a blizzard, but the blog of venture capitalist Rick Segal, who ended up with an employee badge at the L.A. gathering for everything Microsoft. The badge got Rick into some rooms he probably shouldn't have been.

They say Dude a lot. I think that's some new code word. On a more serious note, they get it. You could wander all over and pulse check the place. Having done these events before and lived to tell the tale, it is a different place and, well, the line folks get it. Lots of biz cards were handed out and lots of MS people said, check out my blog for this or that to the customers.

Rick also has an anecdote about how one Microsoft employee fixed a minor problem because he knew if he didn't, the customer who called it to his attention would blog about it. Once fixed, the customer could write a favorable blog. Customer service from the rank and file...

We've published a few articles about using wikis as a collaboration platform in Intranet Journal over the last few months, covering SocialText, Central Desktop, and JotSpot. As we've seen from the traffic to those articles, there is a lot of interest in using wikis to exchange ideas on projects. Wikis are much easier and less expensive to implement for a small project than most types of workgroup software. Rob Hoff over at BusinessWeek used a wiki so the writers and editors involved in BusinessWeek's Best of the Web feature could collaborate without the mess of e-mail. Rob blogged about the experience this week, pointing out what worked well and what didn't. To his credit, he points out where human decisions may have impacted the software's effectiveness.

Although wiki software lets you revert to previous versions easily, I still felt that too many cooks might overflow the broth, so we limited the number of people who could edit the list. That was probably my main mistake. I think it ended up limiting the effectiveness of the wiki, since we didn't get a lot of participation. To be most effective, you really need all the people, from writers to production folks, to be able to work inside the wiki.

Overall, Rob thought the wiki worked great (they used SocialText, by the way). But as with all collaboration technology, the hard part was getting people to adjust their habits. They haven't made software for that yet.

High-speed Internet access providers are having a harder time luring dial-up users to the fast track. A new study by The Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals that the adoption rate for high-speed 'Net access is slowing. The organization's survey shows that 53 percent of Internet users had broadband hook-ups at home in May, compared to 50 percent last December. That's a much slower adoption rate from the comparable year-ago period, when the percentage of high-speed users increased to 42 percent in May 2004 from 35 percent in November 2003. Not only that, the survey shows nearly one in three American adults (32 percent) do not use the Internet at all, a number that has held steady through the first half of the year. Oddly enough, 61 percent of these people rate spam as "very annoying" and a paltry 23 percent believe blogs should be eligible for the EPA Superfund. OK, I made up those last two data points. See what fun they're missing?

Overall, technology really has done some great things for everyone. Its benefits far outweigh its evils by a long, long shot. But, in reading about Google's plan to put a bunch of books online, it seems to me that information and ideas  the cornerstones of our economy  are being commoditized in a way that eventually may lead to a complete devaluation. Look at the music industry and its fight with P2P networks. I'm no prude and I like getting free stuff just like everybody else, but when you download an artist's material from you "friend's" computer and don't compensate the artist, it's stealing plain and simple. Pretty soon those artists who have worked like dogs (most of them anyway  I used to be in that business) will find another way to make a buck and we will all lose out. The same goes for information. Just because you can't carry it away in your car, that doesn't mean taking the thoughts and inspirations of others without due compensation isn't stealing. It is. That's why we have copy write laws and patent laws. Information, in all its forms, is valuable; perhaps the most valuable commodity of all. Without it, we might as well be finding some flint pretty fast to make some tools because we're all going to have to head for the forest for dinner.

Jack Vinson has an interesting post on sharing ideas and how knowledge travels in organizations. Knowledge management and knowledge sharing are important foundations for intranets, and as the managing editor of our Intranet Journal site, I'm always interested in how people communicate and disseminate information within an organization.

I've been reading Christensen's The Innovator's Solution, and he talks about the struggles that people have for sharing good ideas (innovations) within organizations. His argument goes that "middle managers" are set up to be the gatekeepers and that they have conflicting needs for passing along ideas for the good of the corporation but also managing their own careers. The career-minded manager, who tends to change positions frequently, tends to promote ideas that will show results within their tenure. Similarly, on the bad news side of things, people don't want to be the ones passing along bad news, either upwards or downwards.

The list of 16 reasons why we don't share information is interesting. Jack got it from Dave Pollards' blog. I think anyone who looks at the list can find an example of each one within their organization or at a previous job. You don't have to have a corporate intranet or be responsible for an intranet to understand the problem. There are good ideas in your organization just dying to get out.

I wrote a column last week about how Wall Street appears primed for another technology investment bubble. Of course, to have a bubble, you need a lot of companies on which to place bets. Well, here they come. An article in the New York Times (yes, it's true I'm boycotting the Times, but only on a personal basis, and excluding their pro football coverage):

After several years of caution and hesitation, if not outright fear, the venture capitalists are again opening their wallets to the start-ups. Technology companies are primarily the benefactors of the current venture boom...

Here, though, is the really important part:

Most will fizzle, ...

Let's roll back the tape and play that one more time:

Most will fizzle, ...

Still, that reality isn't a deterrent to everyone because another crucial element for any investing bubble is fear, as in:

...fear of missing out on the next Google or Skype, the two-year-old Internet phone company that eBay plans to buy for as much as $4.1 billion, is causing something rarely seen since 2000: fighting among venture capitalists to own a piece of the hottest properties.

Remember, just because the VCs are getting all in a lather doesn't mean we have to. After all, VCs get in on the ground floor, plus they investing in potential. But by the time a company goes public, it's not about how cool an idea is, it's about a viable business plan and market strategy, demonstrable revenue streams and earnings. Don't let them tell you otherwise.

I made some changes this morning that will make it easier to leave comments on this blog, if you're so inclined. Our goal was to allow readers to comment with a low barrier to entry, and also protect them (and ourselves) from spam. Your e-mail address will no longer appear with your name when you comment. The Moveable Type software we use to power this blog has a feature called Spam Protect that allowed us to publish your e-mail address with your comment and still protect it from spam harvesting. But this wasn't readily apparent to visitors. So instead, we won't display your e-mail. Your e-mail is still required, but will not be sold or published. I added a note to the comment page that tells you we will not publish or sell your e-mail address. If you use a URL, it will link your name and the URL. This way, if you want people to see who you are, they can click on your name to see your site. Comments must be approved by the author or an editor. So we can prevent spam in the comments. You do not have to register to post a comment. You do have to give us a name and e-mail address, but we chose to pass on the full-featured registration process we could have enabled. You can also set a cookie when you comment by choosing "Remember Me" to make the process even faster in the future. Thank you for reading. And if you like what you're reading, be sure to tell a friend.

Just kidding with the headline. Really. But a study by the Stanford University Graduate School of Business suggests that "CEOs receive more compensation when the board (of directors) has more females." This fascinating nugget was buried about halfway down a 56-page academic paper (see what I go through for you people?) titled, "Setting the CEO's Pay: Economic and Psychological Perspectives." The bottom-line conclusion of the research is that CEO pay is determined by many things other than how well the corporation performs, such as size of firm, reciprocity (trading favors) and social influence. Who would have known? As to why CEOs fare better financially with a board that includes more women, the researchers offer three possible theories:

"Women directors are simply more generous." "Female directors are less expert such that CEOs are able to convince them to award more compensation" (which the researchers think unlikely). "Boards of highly paid CEOs appoint more women" to appear more progressive (thus negating any suggested cause-effect).

I think this is pretty interesting stuff and hope to see more studies in the area. But a tip to all you researchers: Don't bury the lead!

Gartner is advising clients to approach Microsoft's Office 12 with caution, according to an article in Information Week and a post in Ed Brill's blog. Ed is an IBM guy, so he was happy to see that Gartner recommends IT managers take a look at Office alternatives like IBM Workplace.

Despite many potentially powerful enhancements, most enterprises will find it hard to justify upgrading during 2007 and 2008. Pay close attention to Microsoft's Office 12 plans, test and pilot technology as it becomes available and take a look at the broad range of options including: using alternatives to Windows and Office. IBM Workplace is far more "real" today than Office 12, as IBM is shipping Workplace Services Express and other Workplace products.

Among Gartner's other concerns:

The new user interface might make it more difficult to have multiple versions of Office running in an enterprise, like during a rolling upgrade.

There are a number of other upgrades from Microsoft alone, specifically Vista and SQL Server, due out in the same timeframe. So the budget might be tight and time even tighter

Above all, Gartner wants clients to think of their businesses first. If business will suffer waiting for an Office upgrade, then consider an alternative. If business won't suffer, then why upgrade at all? You wouldn't be the first to continue running a Microsoft product long after Redmond has moved on. Both Gartner and Ed want to know whatever happened to Groove, the collaboration tool that Microsoft invested in and then purchased, presumably to integrate its features into Office. So do I, for that matter.

 

If you're as ruthlessly pursued by paparazzi as I am, here's some good news, courtesy of computer science graduate students at the Georgia Institute of Technology. According to GIT student Shwetak Patel, he and a team of fellow researchers have invented a device capable of detecting nearby digital cameras and camcorders and blurring any unwanted images by shooting a beam of light directly at the offending lens. The device itself is a modified digital video camera hotwired to a computer. Unfortunately, it has limitations. The device can detect digital imaging devices only within 33 feet, so the secret shooters with zoom lenses can still stalk you from afar. It also has a 45 degree range of detection and only works indoors. Still, it should only be a matter of time before they or some other clever grad students work out these bugs.

That expert analysis comes after about an hour of reading what I could find on Google's Secure Access wireless software, which mysteriously appeared online and was noticed by... everyone who notices such things. Last month, I noted the Business 2.0 column that suggested Google was building a WiFi network. This morning, Danny Sullivan over at SearchEngineWatch had plenty to say on what Google is doing.

Google wants everyone online. Get everyone online, and you can more easily ensure you're routing them to Google information for searching the web, searching video, whatever. And along the way, you'll show them ads -- targeted to what they're viewing, to where they are actually located...

Google says the Secure Access software was developed by an engineer using his 20 percent personal time. The company, as you may know, requires its engineers to spend 20 percent of their time working on personal technology projects unrelated to their primary Google projects. Regardless of what the people at Google are up to with WiFi, this 20 percent rule is what should get the attention of IT managers. It pays to foster innovation in the workplace.

Not to be outdone by Apple and Motorola, Sprint and RealNetworks are debuting a wireless service that streams radio broadcasts to cell phones. The new streaming service for Sprint Nextel wireless customers is based on RealNetworks' Rhapsody subscription radio and costs $6.95 a month. Users will be able to listen to several stations as well as podcasts. And if you're into creating your own raps -- and who isn't? -- the service also includes something called "Beats N Breaks," instrumental hip hop beats over which users can rap. Not all Sprint phones will be able to access the service, which comes shortly after Apple and Motorola's unveiling of a cell phone that downloads songs via iTunes. No word yet on celebrity endorsements, but we can only wait with bated breath.

Trains can go faster on straight tracks. This explains (in part) why countries like Japan, Germany, and France have such nifty high-speed railroads while Amtrak's Acela service in the Northeast U.S. continues to struggle. Much of the rail infrastructure in the Northeast Corridor was put down early in the 19th century and had to make its way around existing communities and geography. Japan, Germany, and France were largely rebuilt in the late 1940s after World War II. Because Americans have been fortunate with regards to invasion and aerial bombardment, the chance to rebuild something after utter devastation hasn't really presented itself — until now. A story in the Washington Post (free registration may be required) last week talked about the possibility of rebuilding the telecommunications infrastructure of New Orleans to make it the envy of 21st century America.

With many poles and wires reduced to sticks and spaghetti, cell towers down, miles of streets still flooded, and parts of the region uninhabitable for the near future, these experts see the perfect opportunity to deploy new systems that otherwise might be too expensive or disruptive to build.

Not only would New Orleans get a new telecom infrastructure, but the city could be wired in a way that the poor could be given a ramp to the Information Superhighway. New businesses can also help bring back and diversify the economy by taking advantage of the improvements. EarthLink founder Sky Dayton says in the article to forget about the downed lines and instead rely on cellular, WiFi, and WiMax networks. Jeffrey Citron of Vonage says he'd come up with a trenching plan for the major streets in New Orleans while there is no traffic (I don't know how this works in a city that buries people above ground). A satellite executive says he'd go (surprise!) with satellite, adding it would work much better in a disaster. Good ideas all; though certainly self-serving and hardly perfect. But the plan that really matters is that of BellSouth, the primary phone carrier in the region. When put on the spot, BellSouth's CTO had very little to add to the story, other than the company hopes to let people set their home video recorders from their cell phones one of these days.

So says a report by European IT consultancy Butler Group. In many organizations, just 8 percent of the IT budget is actually spent on initiatives that bring value to the enterprise, their research found.

"An inordinate amount of IT executive time seems to be expended on measuring and controlling costs rather than focusing resources on initiatives that will add value to the organisation," says Mark Blowers, Butler Group Senior Research Analyst and co-author of the study. "Those IT departments capable of measuring performance are in the minority. Small wonder then that IT remains isolated, misunderstood, and treated simply as a cost centre by senior management. This absence of measurement means that most organisations have no idea whether investments in IT are providing increased efficiency, added value, or competitive advantage."

The study found that IT management is not focused on understanding the main value drivers of their organization and coming up with ways IT can help. Butler Group recommends devices like balanced scorecards and business cases to help communicate what is working and what isn't.

Count me among those online New York Times readers who are shocked, disappointed and dumbfounded about the paper's absurd decision to charge readers for the privilege of reading most of its op-ed content. Starting today, readers must fork over $49.95 per year to read the excellent, insightful commentary of Paul Krugman and Frank Rich. They even have to pay for David Brooks; that's like making the WB a premium cable channel. All this new policy will do is turn off loyal readers of the Times' op-ed page. This strategy will backfire. For starters, if the Times thinks this content won't make its way beyond the firewall to blogs, discussion groups and emails, it's dreaming. How is the paper going to police that, and what will it cost? Further, many readers not willing to go underground to read this content will simply forego their regular fixes of NYT op-eds. They'll go cold turkey. Some will pay, but they'll do so grudgingly. I will not be surprised if the Times eventually reverses course and tears down that subscription firewall.

About two minutes after the Internet was invented, a Republican Arizona senator began his relentless campaign to ban online gambling. Alright, maybe it wasn't that soon, but Sen. Jon Kyl has been at it for a decade, having first introduced legislation to prohibit other adults from having fun -- I mean, to prohibit morally degenerate wagering -- back in 1995. Here's how a Whittier College law professor describes Kyl's initial vision:

In its early years, the Internet Gambling Prohibition Act proposed placing far more restrictions on gambling than the infamous 18th Amendment's Prohibition on intoxicating liquors. It would have outlawed virtually everything, from actual betting online to merely putting information in online gambling magazines. The proposed restrictions against putting gaming information online were so broad, that it would have been dangerous for a licensed casino to advertise its legal activities on the World Wide Web.

Kyl's latest efforts aren't quite that, um, vigorous, but fortunately they are just as unsuccessful. On Thursday the Senate rebuffed Kyl's bid (is it OK to say "bid," senator?) to attach Internet gambling restrictions to an annual spending bill. The proposed law would force banks and credit-card companies to block money transfers to online gambling sites. Federal law prohibiting interstate gambling also applies to online gaming, the U.S. Justice Department has said. Kyl is trying to shut down Americans access to offshore gambling sites, which have evolved into a multibillion-dollar business. After this latest legislative defeat, Kyl vowed that he won't give up. You can bet he won't -- at least while it's legal.

IBM is going to try to help the shortfall in the American teaching ranks, especially with regards to math and science, by encouraging employees to become teachers.

If selected, the employees would be allowed to take a leave of absence from the company, which includes full benefits and up to half their salary, depending on length of service. In addition, the employees could get up to $15,000 in tuition reimbursements and stipends while they seek teaching credentials and begin student-teaching.

Workers have to get approval from their managers to participate, and once they finish their education and student-teaching requirements, they leave IBM to become school employees. The trial program will involve 100 employees. IBM expects older workers nearing retirement to be the most likely to jump at the opportunity because they would be able to afford the pay cut. For as long as I can remember, going back to when I was in school, there was much made of the gap in science and math between the U.S. and other countries. Back then, we always heard about Japan; now it's India and Vietnam. Kudos to IBM. Off the top of my head, Intel's Science Talent Search is the one program I could think of that's trying to do something about the problem.

This will be my last mention of chairs being thrown on this blog. Going Ballmy: the Game. Hint: the trick is to get it out the window.

"Desktop Linux is never going to have a better chance than it will in the next eighteen months," says Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols over at Linux-Watch.com. The issue, he says, isn't the cost of the Windows Vista operating system, it's the cost of the hardware you're going to need to run it (something I touched on briefly earlier in the week).

Practically speaking, I think you're going to need at least a 3GHz processor and a gigabyte of RAM. I can say that with some confidence, because that's what it's taking me to run the latest beta...

Vaughan-Nichols' thinking is that only the diehards are going to be excited to move on to Vista, which means there is a chance a "power, take-no-prisoners Linux desktop" can gain some ground. I know some of the Linux desktops can do a pretty good job of mocking a Windows-type environment. And I know OpenOffice can be every bit the productivity software that Office is. But I think he's coming at it from a tech industry perspective and not an office worker perspective. I maintain something that I've believed for years: if you take Windows off a PC, at least 70 percent of the users have no idea how to use it. It's more than the programs; it's the look, the user experience, and the odd things people do to customize their Windows and their desktop. Vista may end up being costly, but as Vaughan-Nichols himself points out, most businesses haven't gotten around to XP yet; they still use the unsupported Windows 2000. And doesn't that just prove the lengths people will go to have Windows when alternatives exist?

A new survey shows that 79 percent of IT professionals say employees put the network and corporate data at risk by engaging in risky online behavior. My response was, 'Just 79 percent?' Really, I'm shocked it wasn't 100 percent. Maybe 21 percent of those surveyed misread the question. It seems users are neck-and-neck with hackers when it comes to who is putting the network at the most risk. According to the survey, which was conducted by Sophos, an anti-virus and anti-spam company, ''Despite instructions from IT departments, many employees continue to use their computers irresponsibly.'' Sophos even came up with the Sinful Seven -- a listing of the top unsafe online activities. Here they are: 1. Downloading music and movies; 2. Opening email attachments or clicking on links in unsolicited emails; 3. Surfing pornographic or other dubious Websites; 4. Running ''joke'' programs sent by friends and colleagues; 5. Installing unauthorized software and Web browser plug-ins; 6. Giving information to unknown parties via phone or email, and 7. Using the same password on different Websites and password sharing. And, not surprisingly, IT workers are getting pretty mad about the whole thing. Another Sophos poll shows that 63 percent of IT professionals say workers who do not follow safe computing guidelines, despite being made aware of the risks, should receive official warnings, followed by dismissal. Ten percent say offending employees should be instantly dismissed. Well, I'm going to go mass email my friends and family this new joke I got this morning, and after that I'm going to download a movie or two. It's not such a big deal, right?

Now that images of the user interface for Office 12 are all over the Internet, I read the thoughts of Jensen Harris, one of the people who designed the UI, in his MSDN blog. Microsoft has replaced the toolbar that sits atop the older versions of Office applications with something they call the Ribbon. It looks like this: You can see more screenshots in the article we published at Intranet Journal this week, in addition to Harris' blog.

One of the concepts behind the Ribbon is that it's the one and only place to look for functionality in the product. If you want to look through Word 2003 to find an unfamiliar command, you need to look through 3 levels of hierarchical menus, open up 31 toolbars and peruse about 20 Task Panes. It's hard to formulate a "hunting" strategy to find the thing you're looking for because there's no logical path through all of the UI.

The Ribbon gave the designers of the UI much more flexibility. One of the things it does is allow them to label everything, because apparently users had trouble with the icons in the old Office UI that didn't have a label.

Something we've known from usability tests for several years now is that most people don't click on an unlabeled 16x16 icon. Sure, Bold and Italic and Center and a few others get a lot of clicks, but the curve falls off after the first 8 or so.

When Office 12 debuts there will be an interesting test. We've all heard for years various versions of the old "people only use 10 percent of Office functionality..." line. If the UI in Office 12 is as good as Microsoft thinks it is, we may finally learn if users were limited to 10 percent because they couldn't find more functionality or because they didn't need it.

Whether you're an IT manager, a small business owner, or even a tech writer, natural disasters aren't far from your mind these days. In addition to the staggering loss of life, the property and business losses can ruin lives and businesses. Just as we saw after Sept. 11, the tech press is renewing its focus on disaster recovery and back-up options in the wake of Katrina. Given all the havoc a natural disaster can cause in all aspects of our lives, the good people at Slate, aided by a map from FEMA that shows where disaster areas have been declared over the last 40 years, tried to find out where the best place to live to avoid a natural disaster is. And at the same time, it should be added, not be in the middle of absolutely nowhere. And we won. We as in Connecticut. Yes, that's where I live, and from where I write this missive (the 100th entry in this blog, by the way). Not only did Connecticut win, but Slate points out the town of Storrs, Conn., as the best place to be to avoid a natural disaster and have some semblance of a life. They say Storrs, home of the University of Connecticut (where yours truly earned his degree), is close to Hartford, far from major rivers, and has a good hospital. This tells us two things: The people at Slate haven't realized the aforementioned UConn Health Center is actually in Farmington, some 37 miles away as the MapQuest flies; and they have never been to the annual Spring Weekend at UConn. Connecticut, as you may know, is already the home of United Technologies, General Electric, and will soon be home to the Royal Bank of Scotland. And we're high and dry. Unless it's pouring rain and the local streets are flooded. Like it is right now.

Google wasn't about to sit back and let Microsoft make all the news during PDC. As I'm sure you know by now, Google introduced its blog search to the world today, and not a moment too soon. The available options for searching blogs were, um, lacking. Now that everyone has given it a try, I took the time to read what people are saying about it. Naturally, the folks at Search Engine Watch deserved a read, and SEW blogger Gary Price has several insightful comments. Also full of interesting points, comments, and links was this Threadwatch post, titled "Google's Blog Search is NOT Blog Search." It's a feed search, for the sake of accuracy. There is an interesting comment in Phil Ringnalda's blog:

When I search on Missouri, I want to find out things about the state -- the government sites, the maps, the tourist info, and so on. I don't want to hear about a person who drove through the state on his way somewhere else.

Sooner or later, between Google's Web search, News search, and Blog search, people are going to get confused about which search best suits their needs. I personally think a better blog search was needed, if you're the type that tracks blogs. And I think Google is taking steps to provide it, as I'm sure this product will improve. But at what point does the number of search options fracture both the searchers and the content to the point where just "Googling", as we all call it now, isn't what it used to be?

There's an article over at PC World that "reveals" to readers 20 things technology companies "don't want you to know." The piece contains some pretty good info. But the list probably could have been cut in half because many of the "insider tips" hardly strike me as revelations. Three examples: "You Never Have to Pay Full Price" (unless you're the government), "Extended Warranties Aren't Worth It" (tell that to Best Buy) and "You Too Can Exploit Windows' Bad Security" (can't everybody?). In fact, if your response to all 20 of these is "I didn't know that," you should be banished from this industry. Some of the better tips are "Your CPU May Be Much Faster Than You Think," "That Dead Pixel on Your LCD May Not Be Recovered" and "You Can Get a Human on the Phone." A note of caution: If you get impatient clicking "Next" at the bottom of text, run away now -- the article is broken into 11 pages. Anyway, the excessive link-hopping aside, it's worth a look.

The same Forbes article Chris just mentioned caught my eye too. Having been at the big 3-0 not too long ago myself, I'm glad I'm not a software company. According to Forbes, which published the article to coincide with the start of PDC in Los Angeles, the company is in "advanced middle age." I'll consider myself lucky that I feel great (and I still have several years to become fluent in Snoop Dog-ese).

The company relies on Windows and a suite of desktop applications -- products released a decade ago -- for 80% of sales and 140% of profits. Newer products -- the Xbox videogame machine, the MSN online service, the wireless and small-business software -- collectively have racked up $7 billion in losses in four years.

To read the article, you'd think we were talking about Delta or Northwest here. But alas, there is an interview with Bill Gates himself in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer today, in which he seems more than aware that Microsoft has its work cut out for it in several areas.

At any point in our history, we've had competitors who were better at doing something. Novell was the best at file servers. Lotus was the best at spreadsheets. WordPerfect was the best at word processing. Right now, because of the breadth of what we do, we have that in many areas. Nokia is way ahead of us in phones; we're closing the gap. Sony is ahead of us in video games. We're just on the verge of something (the Xbox 360) that will help us close the gap there. In Web search, Google is the far-away leader. Big honeymoon for them. Even if they do "me, too" type stuff, people think, "wow." And Apple in music has done a fantastic job.

But fear not for Microsoft. The Forbes article echoes something we heard from Michael Robertson last week, albeit in a more politically correct or journalistically objective way: "Microsoft is at its best when a new threat looms -- as Netscape did a decade ago -- and now it has the next one."

The signs are unmistakeable: A snazzy convertible, a sudden obsession with six-pack abs, the relentless use of the word "minizzle"... Oh, sorry, those are signs of my midlife crisis. If you want to read all about Microsoft's midlife crisis, check out this Forbes article. Here are a couple of excerpts:

Microsoft is slowing down. It is bigger, more lumbering and less profitable than it was five years ago. ...In the fiscal year just ended, sales rose only 8%, the first time the company has ever reported less than double-digit growth.

And...

"Microsoft has become what it used to mock," says Gabe Newell, a developer on the first three versions of Windows. At late-night rounds of poker with "Bill (Gates) and Steve (Ballmer)" in the mid-1980s, he says, "we laughed at IBM. They had all this process for monitoring productivity, and yet we knew they had spectacularly bad productivity. That's Microsoft now."

Of course, Google has become what Microsoft was then -- the cool kid tweaking the stodgy older guy who's falling behind the times. I could go on, but it's time to rip off a set of 100 crunches. Back in a minizzle...

Unbelievable! A study came out this week showing that a majority of corporate users still are unaware of IM threats, such as malware and scams. Here are a few of the findings from from IMlogic Inc., an instant messaging security and management company: 1. 78 percent of the 1,100 IM users surveyed say IM is not subject to security threats or potential vulnerabilities; 2. 63 percent would click on an unknown link because it came from someone on their buddy list -- someone they normally trust; 3. 45 percent use IM at work because they believe their communication is unmonitored, and 4. 35 percent believe they have received a message containing a malicious link. Even though users still slip up and open an email attachment or get duped by an email scam, they're getting smarter about email security. The IT folks have been talking to them (hopefully) about it for years. Don't open attachments. Beware of any email from someone you don't know. Don't believe it when someone offers you free books about the pope or pictures from the devastated Gulf Coast. So you think we would have taken some of that knowledge with us and transferred it to Instant Messaging. However, that just doesn't seem to be the case, does it? We simply have a long learning curve on this one. Of course, it's a party for hackers and virus writers. But it just means more work for IT -- more work cleaning out viruses and more work educating users. So it's back to the IT classroom for these folks. You better sign up your users for IM Security 101 as soon as possible.

All good things must come to an end, including ugly legal battles over high-priced technology talent. A former Microsoft executive can begin working immediately for online search giant Google, a judge in Washington state ruled today. The decision was a defeat for Microsoft, which filed a lawsuit after Dr. Kai-Fu Lee resigned in July to take a job running Google's research office in China. Microsoft argued that Lee would be violating a one-year non-compete contract by taking the Google gig, and in July won a temporary order preventing Lee from starting his new job. Google's victory, however, came with some serious caveats. First, the judge ruled that Lee cannot recruit from Microsoft. Second, he is prohibited from working on speech, natural language and search technologies, the areas most in contention by Redmond. Third, Lee cannot determine budgets or salaries or set Google's research agenda in China. Fourth, and I think this is way over the line, when conducting online searches at work, Lee can only use MSN or Froogle. OK, I made that last one up, but I bet it really would have stuck in his craw.

So said Austin Powers while collecting some embarrassing personal items after being unfrozen to do battle with Dr. Evil. Workers using recycled PCs may want to try that same defense in light of research by a U.K. data recovery firm which shows that seven in 10 re-sold hard drives and memory cards come with an extra bonus -- porn. According to this story in The Register, Disklabs discovered pornographic images on 70 percent of the 1,000 or so used hard drives it has inspected over the past year. The company also found plenty of financial documents and personal information on a bunch of hard drives and memory cards it purchased through eBay. As more organizations feel pressure to either recycle PCs or purchase used computers, proper "data wiping" is emerging as an important security issue. A number of vendors offer products or services that they promise will give your discarded hard drives and memory cards a clean slate, but I couldn't tell you which ones work best. If any readers (readers, not vendors) could recommend some good ones, drop us a line. In the meantime, check the bottom of this story for some advice and links. And practice saying this.

The Gap took a lot of heat in August when it shut down the Web sites of its most popular retail brands in order to give them a makeover. Web teams launch new sites and new features everyday without taking a site completely offline, people said. Have you ever heard of a staging server? It cost, as a story in today's New York Times points out, millions of dollars when The Gap turned away thousands of customers from its Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic sites during the overhaul. So what do they have to show for it?

"Gap's new sites leapfrog every other retail site out there today," said Carrie Johnson, a retail analyst with Forrester Research, an online consulting firm. "They're providing a customer experience that other retailers will quickly try to figure out how to copy."

The goal was to cut down on the number of clicks, and the new sites do that using a variety of mouseover and pop-up features that are supposed to allow users to shop online in a way that more closely mimics how they shop in the real store. The Gap says it had to do a shutdown of the sites because what they did was much more than a re-design, it was overhauling all the back-office systems used to track inventory and manage promotions. One more interesting tidbit: Gap wrote its own software for all the major behind-the-scenes systems and all features the consumer sees on its sites. There's 101 shopping days 'til Christmas...

If you're one of those people who cringes when you hear the word "Microsoft," you may want to look into a vacation this week. It's PDC time in Los Angeles, so the Microsoft news will be coming fast and furious. Taking a look at the early blog postings, most PDCers have noted that two years ago PDC in L.A. was impacted by the wildfires that ravaged the region. This time, they note, much of the city had a blackout yesterday. Adjust your tin foil hat accordingly. As far as real news coming out of PDC, Paul Thurrott claims to have the lowdown on the seven (7) versions of Windows Vista that will hit the stores later this year.

Vista will feature two categories: Home and Business. In the Home category, Microsoft will create four product editions: Vista Starter Edition, Vista Home Basic Edition, Vista Home Premium Edition, and Vista Ultimate Edition (previously known as the "Uber" Edition). The Business category will feature three editions: Vista Small Business Edition, Vista Professional Edition, and Vista Enterprise Edition.

There are six editions of Windows XP, for those keeping score. Vista Starter seems like a good idea because Vista is going to start pushing the limits of hardware, which isn't a big deal for those who upgrade every few years, but it's a very big deal in emerging markets (the only place Vista Starter, a 32-bit version, will be available). Thurrott has a very long list of features for Vista Home Premium; too long to enumerate here. No analogous XP version exists for Vista Enterprise, which will include Virtual PC, the Multilanguage User Interface (MUI), and the Secure Startup-Full Volume Encryption security technologies (the products code-named Cornerstone). The InternetNews gang has a couple of stories published in advance of PDC, one on the WinFS file system and one on whether Microsoft can deliver on the promise of Longhorn.

RFID brings with it the promise of greater supply chain efficiencies. As I'm sure you know by now, the plan (roughly) is to put these small radio frequency tags on, well, everything, and hook the tag readers up to software that tracks inventory and accounting, and all the things that make business go. Perhaps the biggest push the RFID movement ever got was from Wal-Mart. When the largest retailer in the United States says it wants to work RFID into its supply chain, people take notice. And since Wal-Mart started its push, Target and Home Depot, among others, have made strides as well. So imagine you're Wal-Mart. Yes, you're huge and rich, and you have millions of loyal shoppers. When the ISO didn't move fast enough to develop RFID standards, you got together with manufacturers and retailers in Europe and the U.S. and started EPCGlobal to get the standards moving. But there is one catch. It lies about 7,500 miles to your west. If Wal-Mart were a country it would be the sixth largest exporter of goods from China. Of the non-edible products in Wal-Mart stores, 65 percent are manufactured in China. China hasn't adopted RFID standards and seems likely to blaze its own trail, according to this story in BusinessWeek.

To China, developing RFID standards doesn't mean embracing those already created by the West. Recent statements and actions by Chinese officials indicate that China intends to chart its own course, not necessarily in line with the recently developed "international" standards. Given China's growing economic clout and cohesion with other East Asian countries, nonconformity may lead to a proliferation of regional standards that limit the use of RFID or force the creation of a complicated set of translating interfaces between different "standards."

Yesterday afternoon, as I was trying to track up to eight NFL scores simultaneously during Week 1 of pro football, I remember thinking to myself, "It's really hard to keep all these numbers in your head." Then I found a pen. That must be how Larry Ellison feels today -- his head filled with numbers. He also should find a pen. Or better yet, a pen attached to a vast army of accountants. For starters, there's the $5.85 billion acquisition of CRM software maker Seibel Systems. (The sale price is $3.61 billion if you factor in Seibel's $2.24 billion in cash on hand. See, already he needs that pen!) Then there's Ellison's tentative agreement to donate $100 million to charity to resolve an insider-trading lawsuit, a deal that still must be approved by Oracle's board of directors. As reported in today's New York Times, the shareholder litigation stems from Ellison dumping $900 million in Oracle shares in January 2001 -- at an average price of $30.76 -- soon before news that the software company wouldn't meet Q3 earnings estimates. After the disappointing earnings were released on March 1 of that year, shares plunged to $16.88 from $21.38. A lawyer for the plaintiffs in the case, which was brought in California, told the Times, "The plaintiffs believe this is a very innovative settlement providing a positive benefit to Oracle." Not to mention a positive benefit to the attorneys who represented the shareholders! They would get a separate $22.5 million as part of the settlement. The lawyers, that is, not the shareholders. The charities also would be winners here. Over the next five years, they would receive $100 million in Oracle's name. Let's hope some of it will find its way to the Gulf Coast hurricane victims. When you think about it, the only potential loser here Ellison, who may have to pay $100 million for selling $900 million shares of a stock that weeks later were worth about half as much... Hey, wait a minute. I gotta get a pen.

I've been trying to enjoy the waning days of summer on my weekends and after work, and I actually went almost two weeks without going online from home until one day last week. But once I did go online, I had quite a few virus definitions to download for my antivirus software (which also needs a subscription renewal later in the month). I shouldn't have been surprised how many virus definitions were developed in a span of two weeks, but the download took some time. So on Friday when I was reading Bruce Schneier's security blog and saw a link to Marcus Ranum's "The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security" I took note of one in particular: Dumb Idea No. 2, according to Ranum, is "Enumerating Badness."

It's a dumb idea because sometime around 1992 the amount of Badness in the Internet began to vastly outweigh the amount of Goodness. For every harmless, legitimate, application, there are dozens or hundreds of pieces of malware, worm tests, exploits, or viral code. Examine a typical antivirus package and you'll see it knows about 75,000+ viruses that might infect your machine. Compare that to the legitimate 30 or so apps that I've installed on my machine, and you can see it's rather dumb to try to track 75,000 pieces of Badness when even a simpleton could track 30 pieces of Goodness.

Ranum goes onto point out that if you developed a security model that focused on using the good instead of tracking the bad, you solve the problems of spyware, viruses, trojans, and exploits involving executing pre-installed code that you don't use regularly. Is anyone out there in security listening?

So much for easing into the work week! The tech world woke up to a pair of major acquisitions this morning as eBay confirmed rumors it was buying VoIP fave Skype, while Oracle announced it was snatching up troubled CRM vendor Siebel Systems for $3.61 billion. When stories began circulating last week about eBay's interest in Skype, the purchase price was being pegged between $2 billion and $3 billion. The actual amount, comprised of cash and eBay stock (what, no free listings for the Luxembourg lads?), came in at $2.6 billion. Nice pegging, rumor-mongers! The Oracle-Siebel deal works out to about $10.66 per share, which is 17 percent above Siebel's Friday closing price of $9.13. Counting Siebel's $2.24 billion in cash on hand, the total value of the transaction is $5.85 billion. Siebel was up more than 13 percent in early trading (Quote), while Oracle rose (Quote) slightly. eBay, meanwhile, had gained less than 1 percent (Quote). There's supposed to be a press conference later today to provide more details of the Siebel buyout and to enable the media to witness the tearful reunion of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and former protege Tom Siebel, who left the database software maker 16 years ago to form his own company. In the meantime, if you're looking for insightful background on both companies' recent strategies (Oracle) and woes (Siebel), Datamation's Enterprise Advisor columnist Josh Greenbaum has written plenty, here, here, here and here.

I've seen a number of surveys in recent months showing low morale among IT workers. This one by staffing firm Hudson is fairly typical. Respondents cited fear of losing their jobs, concerns about personal finances and weaker job satisfaction as major reasons for a marked drop in confidence. But here's something I haven't seen until now: A new study on IT ethics shows that tech workers "feel less able to refuse work they don't agree with and more resigned to cutting software testing in the face of ever-shortening deadlines," according to an article in The Register. This is a much more specific problem than "lower job satisfaction," and -- to my mind, anyway -- much more significant. I'm no developer, but one thing I do know about developers and other technology professionals -- the good ones, anyway -- is that they take fierce pride in their work. And that pride is the glue that holds together the best development teams. It keeps them focused, motivated and, yes, competitive. (Can I get some inspirational music in the background here?) It makes them believe in the organization's goals and builds a strong bond. Stock options don't hurt, either. However, once you take away that pride by turning your workplace into a schlock factory, your best employees will leave and the rest will produce, well, schlock. You will rob them of their pride, if not their stock options. Your workers don't deserve this, and neither do your customers. But your company probably will get what it deserves. Don't say you weren't warned.

Stephen O'Grady over at RedMonk points to four barriers to entry that keep software vendors from making new customers. O'Grady lists poor documentation, closed documentation, availability of code, and poorly implemented APIs. When it comes to documentation, some vendors and many open source groups have been aided by knowledgeable and active user groups that take advantage of blogs, wikis and other collaborative platforms.

For example, IBM/Lenovo provide little in the way of documentation for the installation of Linux on Thinkpads, but a community has arisen to meet that challenge in the ThinkWiki. Not only is it produced at no cost to IBM, it allows individual users such as myself to make corrections or add helpful tips to future readers. This real-time collaborative documentation process is a stark contrast with the traditional, high latency official documentation workflow.

What O'Grady doesn't mention is that getting a community like that to appear and be useful can sometimes be like capturing lightning in a bottle -- especially if you don't have a name like IBM. But it does happen, and it saves vendors themselves quite a bit of time and money. The bottom line is if your software works and you have happy customers, they'll be more than happy to help you get the ball rolling.

Spurred on, it would seem, by reports of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's Google-related tantrum, Michael Robertson used his Web site to publish his take on what he sees as a three-way battle for Net supremacy involving Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!. Robertson, who founded MP3.com among other tech businesses, was involved in his own legal tangle with what the technology press far too often calls "the Redmond-based software behemoth" when the name of his Lindows operating system was deemed a little too cute by Microsoft.

The only way Microsoft knows how to operate is with an enemy in their crosshairs. A few years back, Linspire (then Lindows) was the recipient of Ballmer's profanity-laden tirades. But Microsoft's attention has since been somewhat diverted from the ambiguous threat of Linux -- which doesn't present a singular target -- to Google, whose O's make convenient bull's eyes.

Since no one seems to be throwing chairs at the mere mention of Yahoo!, they get to be the Oakland A's of this trio -- you don't pay much attention to them, and the next thing you know, they're in the playoffs. Robertson had some interesting insight into how Yahoo works to stay competitive and below the chair-throwing at the same time.

Yahoo! has taken a unique strategy to track movements of competitors. Employees are asked to submit tidbits of information they hear to management, and the company coalesces these nuggets of knowledge into a more comprehensive documents, which are then circulated more widely to help employees understand possible moves Microsoft and Google might make. Because they are often competing for the same talent, working with same suppliers, and receiving visits from the same companies, this "due diligence" is remarkably accurate. Yahoo! often takes meetings with companies they have no interest in doing business with just to scrape them for data about the industry and what Google or Microsoft might be up to.

I also like the meter at the bottom of Robertson's site that polls readers on whether they agree with him. He's even got a scorecard going.

Well, they got me. I opened a news brief about Katrina the other day and dutifully clicked on the supplied link and, what do you know, it didn't send me to a news story like I expected but started downloading a Trojan onto my machine. I couldn't believe what dope I was. I mean, after all, I read, write and publish articles on this stuff all the time yet they still got me. (Thanks to my Symantec software for catching it and automatically removing it from my machine.) This got me thinking about just how potent this social engineering stuff really is. I've been sitting here thinking for years that if you just educate you staff about this phishing, pharming, worms, et. al. it will go away. Well, obviously, that isn't, nor hasn't been, the case. I guess it just goes to show you that even experienced users can get tagged from time to time. So, next time I do a story about phishing I think I'm going to be a little less flabbergasted at the inability for rank and file staffers to 'get it' when it comes to being duped by social engineering.

Already embroiled in a legal battle with Microsoft over a recent hire, Internet search giant Google has just snagged a man many call the "father of the Internet" (more on that later). Vinton G. Cerf is leaving his job as senior VP of technology strategy at telecommunications company MCI to become the "chief Internet evangelist" in Google CEO Eric Schmidt's growing royal court of advisors. (Now, I'm not saying anyone else we know did this, but I bet MCI president Michael Capellas didn't throw a chair upon learning that one of his execs was defecting to Google.) Back when I was demonstrating my programming incompetence as a college freshman trying to learn BASIC, Dr. Cerf was developing TCP/IP, the protocol that allowed disparate networks to communicate and which eventually led to creation of the Internet. Not to be immodest, but if you had spotted me another 30 years, I could have done the same thing. Getting back to the "Father of the Internet" title, Cerf has never been comfortable with it. In an interview with me a few years back, he said he felt the epithet slighted the contributions of his research partner Robert Kahn, as well as other network pioneers. Which raises a question: Who else, rightly or not, has been called the "Father of the Internet"? I Googled it (appropriately) and came up with these names: Jon Postel The supercomputer Al Gore Philip Emeagwali Nicholas Negroponte Tim Berners-Lee (who really is the Father of the World Wide Web) Chris Nerney (oops -- that was a Google Desktop search)

Do Skype and Reuters become second cousins? Word has been coming from across the pond that Google is interested in buying Reuters, now that the search company has decided it doesn't want Skype. The first published account seems to come from The Guardian. I saw it on Good Morning Silicon Valley. Gary Stein over at Jupiter Research (speaking of second cousins) thinks it's unlikely, as does The Guardian's article once you get past the headline.

But, even if this isn't true, it brings up an interesting question that seems to be floating around the whole search business: do the engines need to diversify their services, specifically away from the content-capture/indexing business? There are discussions in the hallways of SES and other conferences that the search engine business may, in fact, be a house of cards. Not because Ballmer thinks so, but rather because they make money by grabbing other people's content.

It's an interesting read on where search companies are going.

I have to admit: I have seen some pretty impressive demonstrations of enterprise search technology. I specifically remember the people at Convera showing me search technology that combed faux homeland security files not long after Sept. 11. The problem with enterprise search is that every enterprise is unique. And even worse: every department or organization within an enterprise is unique. When you're trying to uncover knowledge in an enterprise, the fact that every worker is unique also comes into play. As I type this, the editors on either side of me are using different programs to create their Web content than I do; different file types, different places to store the files, etc. Given that our work habits vary from person to person, it's no shock that enterprises have a hard time meeting their search needs. TechNewsWorld is the latest to survey the enterprise search landscape and see that satisfaction has yet to be found. Also interesting in this story is that Google takes some heat for its search appliance products not being up to snuff with its Web searching. It's another example of Google going from everyone's favorite underdog to global corporate bad guy.

Some of the complaints center on the product's Internet-centric design. Google's PageRank search technology, which determines which items are displayed to users, does not categorize company data as well as it does Web information. The product does not offer corporations robust filters so they can fine tune searches. An aerospace company may want to break a term like satellite into four or five subcategories but the search engine may only support the two or three categories.

The article also accuses Google of providing paper-thin support and not building up a system of partners and re-sellers. There is a huge opportunity for someone to step up and nail enterprise search, and the article seems disappointed Google hasn't done it (yet). But how any vendor can do it at a reasonable price point in a way that can even come close to being duplicated out of the box for multiple customers is beyond me.

The latest buyout rumor swirling around Skype has online auction giant eBay buying the Internet telephone company for anywhere between $2 billion and $3 billion. That's a lot of "between," which might in part account for eBay's stock dropping as much as 4 percent today as hesitant investors try to get a firm handle on the potential deal. The real question is: How do you sufficiently monetize a service that currently is free to the vast majority of users in order to justify a possible $3 billion price tag? That's what Wall Street (and, I'm sure, eBay) is trying to figure out. The negotiations could well come to nothing, and it wouldn't be the first time. Skype, based in Luxembourg, previously has been in talks with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and (shudder) Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Those are some high-powered suitors. It's also possible that Skype will go the IPO route. Whatever happens, the founders of Skype are poised to collect an unbelievable payoff for a company started only two years ago. The Internet boom may be over elsewhere, but it lives on in the world's only Grand Duchy.

Given the latest evidence that driving while using a cell phone is dangerous, I'm really not looking forward to this. How long before "Googling in a school zone" earns you a trip to traffic court?

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is, first and foremost, about human suffering. But as FEMA and other government agencies continue their unforgiveably belated rescue and aid efforts, we're now getting the first estimates of the economic impact of the storm. It isn't pretty. For IT professionals responsible for keeping their enterprises running 24/7, the hurricane provides a stark reminder of the absolute necessity of having a disaster plan in place. Here's a good, new article about the lessons IT can draw from Katrina. Not surprisingly, the piece's bottom-line conclusion is this:

The ability of companies to salvage their IT operations and their data in the wake of Katrina depended on corporate resources, the quality of IT disaster recovery plans and the ability to move data and employees quickly.

Of course, many articles had been written well before the hurricane about IT disaster planning. I've listed some below: Business Continuity Planning in 4 Easy Steps, Datamation U.S. Firms Unprepared for Disasters, eSecurity Planet Before Trouble Strikes, CIO Update The New Logistics of Disaster Recovery, CIO Update There are plenty more out there. The important thing is that IT managers must make effective disaster planning part of their jobs before it's too late.

So says an article in the latest McKinsey Quarterly (free registration required). McKinsey surveyed 9,300 business and technology leaders from around the world to get a handle on the important trends affecting the global economy during the next five years, with particular interest on factors that could promote or constrain growth. The business managers and the tech executives did agree on certain things, such as the importance of the growing affluence of emerging economies (duh), but they didn't agree on the role of technological innovation as a profit driver.

Eighty-one percent of the executives surveyed see technological innovation as a critical global trend. Not everyone sees it as a profit driver, however: 79 percent of CIOs and CTOs, but only 71 percent of their business counterparts, believe that innovation makes their companies more profitable.

And when it comes to improving operating efficiencies, the IT execs want to automate business processes. But the business execs want to improve economies of scale. Advice from McKinsey:

Since business executives tend not to see the overall results and impact of IT spending, CIOs must make information technology's business value more visible -- and the costs much more controllable -- so that IT isn't seen as a black box.

Another interesting article (free registration again) in the latest issue deals with using your organization's brand in your recruiting efforts. Check it out. P.S. Just as I wrote this I see that Datamation columnist George Spafford discusses the IT and business disconnect today on the site. George uses an A.T. Kearney study on the subject.

It's hard to watch the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina without getting frustrated with the response. In due time, fingers will be pointed, jobs will be lost, and we'll be told that such a tragedy will never happen again. One of the things that stands out in the flawed response appears to be a lack of good ideas, though I suppose it's possible (even likely, unfortunately) that good ideas were stymied by bureaucracy. There are always people who pride themselves on thinking outside the box. But as a manager, sometimes you have to unlock the ideas that your employees have without re-inventing the wheel. Sometimes the best idea is common sense, you just have to shine a flashlight on it. (Example: those paratroopers that rolled into New Orleans in convoys days after the storm. Perhaps they could have been dropped from the sky soon after the storm passed.) Martin Leath has a Web site that lists every idea generation method he's come across -- everything from storyboarding to backwards mapping. Among the dozens listed is one called Block and Barriers, which enforces the idea that you don't have to be the most creative person to generate an idea and solve a problem.

Research by social scientists such as Kurt Lewin has shown that the most effective way to solve a problem or create a desired outcome is to remove blocks and barriers, rather than engaging in creative problem solving.

Thanks to James Robertson for the link.

Things are getting downright nasty in the Microsoft-Google dogfight over the professional services of Kai-Fu Lee, who abandoned his Redmond employers in July to join the online search company, thus drawing a lawsuit alleging violation of his employment contract. As part of the legal battle, another former Microsoft engineer has submitted a sworn statement to a court in Washington state recounting the reaction of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer late last year upon being told that he (the engineer) was departing to Google. There's a good story about it here. If Mark Lucovsky's recollection is accurate, it could be said that Ballmer -- and I'm using the clinical term here -- "threw a nutty." From the linked story:

"At some point in the conversation, Mr. Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,'" Lucovsky said in his statement. Lucovsky replied that he was joining Google. "At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office," Lucovsky recounted, adding that Ballmer then launched into a tirade about Google CEO Eric Schmidt. "I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google." Schmidt previously worked for Sun Microsystems and was the CEO of Novell.

Ballmer issued a statement last Friday denying this version of events:

"Mark Lucovsky's account of our conversation last November is a gross exaggeration of what actually took place. Mark's decision to leave was disappointing, and I urged him strongly to change his mind. But his characterization of that meeting is not accurate."

Am I the only one who noticed that Ballmer didn't really deny throwing a chair? Perhaps that was the "I urged him strongly to change his mind" part. I guess it's all semantics.

I am of the opinion that sometimes the tech industry gets wrapped up in itself when it comes to products and services and it forgets about what the rest of the world wants or needs. When I was the editor of the CyberAtlas site, which later became ClickZ Stats, my job was to read and digest market research on Internet use and all subjects tech-related. Many of the forecasts I examined seemed overly enthusiastic (it was the late 90s after all), and I often had a sense that many of the technologies and gadgets were great toys for the people selling them and their friends in the tech industry. Without a clear case for saving money or time, however, most of these products would never reach mass appeal. Now, on the eve of the Apple-Cingular-Motorola iTunes cell phone doohickey, USA Today tells us most people don't want fancy mobile phones. They want to (gasp) talk.

A recent In-Stat survey showed relatively little interest in new phone add-ons, such as video. Since most people upgrade their phone about every two years, they're looking for an easy-to-use device -- not a pricey all-in-one...

But there's always Wi-Fi Internet access, right? Everyone has a laptop and goes online in their favorite coffee stop or library, or is just waiting to use that new downtown hotspot, right? Actually, there is evidence that may be overblown as well.

A survey of 2,000 business travellers in the U.S. and the U.K. by analyst Gartner showed that take-up was low, despite the rapidly increasing number of hotspots in places like hotels, airports and coffee bars.

Makes you wonder how or if ideas like using mobile phones for contactless payments will ever find mass appeal. Or if anyone ever asked someone outside the tech industry if they even care.

It may have been a national holiday in the U.S., but on Monday in Australia a federal court was busy at work ruling for the recording industry in its legal battle with file-sharing network Kazaa. Basically the Aussie court concluded that Kazaa had violated Australian music copyrights because the company knowingly allowed its file-sharing network to be used to download copyrighted songs for free. Kazaa, which is based in Australia and plans to appeal the decision, was ordered to modify its software to thwart illegal downloads. It appears the music industry is slowly winning the legal battle against P2P downloads. Earlier this summer the U.S. Supreme Court decided against two other file-sharing software vendors, Grokster and Streamcast Networks (which developed Morpheus). Here's a detailed analysis of that ruling by Bill Rosenblatt, editor of DRM Watch and somebody who knows a lot more about this stuff than I do. I asked Bill about the significance of these rulings. Here's what he said:

Neither this nor the Grokster decision are likely to have much impact in the short-term. Lawsuits against individuals for infringement and the addition of more user-friendly features to copyright-respecting services are having more of a short-term impact on P2P usage.

Bill doesn't need me to tell him he's right, but he is. Over the long-term -- and this is my opinion -- the continued expansion by the music industry of legal, per-song downloading services increasingly will render illegal file-sharing an unattractive and potentially costly activity.

I hate going into a long weekend on a down note, but this is too relevant to ignore... As the tragedy in New Orleans continues to unfold, American workers will be hard-pressed to enjoy their Labor Day weekend as much as in years past. Especially IT workers, whose morale and optimism appear to have reached new depths, according to two recent surveys. The monthly employment index compiled by the staffing firm Hudson, shows a drop in U.S. worker confidence to 98.2, the lowest level on record. A Hudson official said the sharpest plunge in worker confidence came in the IT sector. And this survey by the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers indicates "increasing worker pessimism about the future of the technology work force and technology economy" in the U.S. Among the reasons cited for IT worker gloom are downsizing, deteriorating health care coverage, offshoring, visa importing, concerns about personal finances and lower job satisfaction. There are a lot more details in the links, but as I said, it's all pretty depressing. See you next week, and let's hope the victims of Hurricane Katrina finally start getting the help they so desperately need. They deserve better.

In case anyone missed this, I wanted readers to know that a number of technology companies are rushing to assist in Hurricane Katrina rescue efforts in New Orleans and other devastated areas along the Gulf of Mexico coast. Their efforts stand in stark contrast to the corporate equivalent of looting that clearly has begun. Thanks to Sprint Nextel, Tugboat Enterprises and other heroes of the tech community.

About a month ago, I wrote about the phishing filter in Microsoft's Internet Explorer 7.0. Rob Franco today has further details on how the filter is going to work. The filter is going to use real-time look ups against the anti-phishing server, instead of an intermittent download list of sites like most anti-spyware software. Rob says this is because phishing sites come and go so quickly. In addition to checking suspicious Web sites, Microsoft is also building in a system for Web site owners to get their legitimate sites off the list of phishing sites (a problem that is bound to happen).

To be sure it's fair, the process will allow sites to ask for a reevaluation if the site owner does not agree with the Phishing filter rating. You won't have to find a support number to call, instead the link to report an incorrect evaluation is built into the UI of IE7. If you dispute an evaluation by the phishing filter, the situation will be addressed as quickly as possible. If the review process determines that there was a mistake on part of the phishing filter, your site will instantly be restored to good standing once it's been reevaluated as not-phishing.

There are more details available in a white paper, including tips on how to make sure your legitimate site doesn't get listed.

What Apple's double-secret "special event" next week to unveil an iTunes-enabled cell phone may lack in suspense, the pending advertising campaign more than compensates for in star power. According to the Web site (I kid you not) madonnalicious, filming has just wrapped for a television ad introducing the new Motorola Moto Rokr mobile phone, which is expected to be available late this month. The ad apparently features Madonna, who is recovering from several broken bones after being tossed from a horse in mid-August on the grounds of her English country estate. (Note to self: We really could use more celebrity coverage in this blog.) Other stars in the ad, according to madonnalicious, are Little Richard, Bootsy Collins, Lil' John, The White Stripes, Sleater-Kinney, Sum 41, Mya, Pussycat Dolls and Billie Joe Armstrong (from Green Day). The ad also features look-alikes of the late Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix and Biggie Smalls, who together once formed a potent power trio. Still no word on pricing, but our friends over at Forbes-licious report some troubling rumors about stingy song capacity.