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November 1, 2004
Computerworld: Data Centers Get a Makeover.
But this familiar scene masks some big changes in the way that data centers are built, as well as changes in computer technology and an evolution in what data centers are expected to accomplish. Ultradense server racks, the move to distributed and virtual processing, a requirement for instant fail-over, and new requirements for IP telephony and voice over IP are all driving changes above and below the raised floor.
November 2, 2004
IBM developerWorks: Hardware and usability, Part 1.
The next couple of installments of The cranky user look at the negative effects of lousy hardware choices on usability. I'll start this one with a look at how poorly designed hardware impacts one of the most important features of your computer system: reliability.
CIO: How Verizon Flies by Wire.
Every 15 seconds, a new set of charts telling the story of Verizon Communications' performance flash onto a giant LCD screen in CIO Shaygan Kheradpir's office—everything from the percentage of customer calls resolved by voice systems and how many repair trucks are in the field to the resolution of IT systems problems.
November 3, 2004
PC World: Qualcomm to Build National Wireless Media Network.
The network will use the 700-MHz radio spectrum for which Qualcomm already owns licenses, the company said in a statement Tuesday. Cellular operators expect mobile multimedia to be a key driver of 3G use. Qualcomm aims to save them the trouble and expense of building their own infrastructure for delivering multimedia services.
News.Com: Cisco, MIT look from lab to market.
Cisco is sponsoring the MIT Media Lab's Digital Life Consortium, which will give the networking giant the ability to view the lab's projects and influence the direction of the work, Charles Giancarlo, chief technology officer at Cisco, said Wednesday. The company has been working with MIT on other projects since 2000.
November 4, 2004
Schneier on Security: Computer Security and Liability.
And that's the problem. We're not paying to improve the security of the underlying software. We're paying to deal with the problem rather than to fix it. The only way to fix this problem is for vendors to fix their software, and they won't do it until it's in their financial best interests to do so.
Wired News: Movie Lawsuits on the Way.
As expected, the movie industry said Thursday that it will begin suing film fans who share copyright movies online, following the get-tough strategy of the music labels. Dan Glickman, president and CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, said that its member studios will file lawsuits beginning Nov. 16...
November 5, 2004
Clay Shirky: Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software.
We have grown quite adept at designing interfaces and interactions between computers and machines, but our social tools -- the software the users actually use most often -- remain badly misfit to their task. Social interactions are far more complex and unpredictable than human/computer interaction, and that unpredictability defeats classic user-centric design.
Computerworld: Convicted spammer gets nine years in slammer.
The indictment also alleged that the sender falsified transmission or routing information to prevent recipients from knowing who had sent the messages and how to contact the sender. This falsified information is what makes such spam a crime in Virginia...
November 6, 2004
InfoWorld: The state of rich Web apps.
Unlike a Web application that manages state information almost entirely on the server, an rich Internet application achieves a more balanced distribution of that information between server and client. The benefits that flow from this arrangement can include responsiveness, context preservation, and offline capability.
November 7, 2004
Useit.Com: Acting on User Research.
It tells you what really happens when people use computers. You can speculate on what customers want, or you can find out. The latter is the more fruitful approach. Research offers an understanding of how users behave online, and is a solid foundation on which to build a design.
November 8, 2004
NY Times: One Internet, Many Copyright Laws.
The case is one more example of the Internet's inherent lack of respect for national borders or, from another view, the world's lack of reckoning for the international nature of the Internet, and it is also an example of the already complicated range of copyright laws.
November 9, 2004
EE Times: FCC commissioners agree on inter-state nature of VoIP.
However, Commissioners Jonathan Adelstein and Michael Copps cautioned not to read too much into this finding, as fundamental issues of universal service under a VoIP environment have yet to be addressed. Nevertheless, FCC Chairman Michael Powell made clear that the ability to personalize service and get far cheaper voice service in a VoIP environment will be a revolutionary advance in voice telephony.
PC World: Google gives Gmail POP3 support, plans antivirus features.
Google Inc. will roll out POP3 support gradually in the next few weeks to Gmail users, who will be able to use the feature to download e-mail messages from Gmail servers to e-mail applications on devices such as PCs and wireless devices.
November 11, 2004
NY Times: Wanted by the Police: A Good Interface.
Since June, the police department has been using a new mobile dispatch system that includes a Windows-based touch-screen computer in every patrol car. But officers have said the system is so complex and difficult to use that it is jeopardizing their ability to do their jobs.
NY Times: Microsoft Unveils Its Internet Search Engine, Quietly.
But while dismissing talk of an Internet search war, Mr. Sohn acknowledged that Microsoft hoped its new search abilities might entice Web surfers who do not have what he termed a "religious" commitment to Google.
PC World: Skype Calls on Siemens Phones.
Skype's partnership with Siemens pushes it into a new direction, off of the desktop and into more traditional telecom areas. The Siemens adaptor was developed using Skype's recently released API, and is expected to be the beginning of a wave of applications built to integrate Skype.
November 12, 2004
PC World: SBC Tunes Into IP-Based TV.
The fiber network will reach 18 million potential customers by the end of 2007 and will be able to deliver to a household four simultaneous streams of TV, including high-definition TV, in addition to IP-based data and voice services, the company says.
NY Times: Even Digital Memories Can Fade.
Yet no one has figured out how to preserve these electronic materials for the next decade, much less for the ages. Like junk e-mail, the problem of digital archiving, which seems straightforward, confounds even the experts.
November 13, 2004
InfoWorld: Dictate and 'see' the master’s voice.
Jon Udell. In the past, despite chronic trouble with RSI, I could never convince myself to make dictation part of my routine working life. But with each generation of hardware and with each version of the program, the gap between desire and reality has narrowed. Now dictation technology may finally have crossed the threshold of practicality for me.
November 14, 2004
NY Times: Gates vs. Jobs: The Rematch.
What happens next Christmas and beyond, however, is a matter of considerable debate. Microsoft fans say that other music players will begin to match Apple's features and styling, and with lower prices. They suggest that consumers, meanwhile, will want to buy music from stores other than iTunes.
SJ Mercury: Once again, Microsoft buys its way out of trouble.
Dan Gillmor. Promises to the contrary, there's precious little evidence that Microsoft has made truly meaningful changes in its business practices -- or that its leaders see their legal battles as anything but the frustrations of competitors defeated in a tough marketplace.
November 15, 2004
Schneier on Security: The Problem with Electronic Voting Machines.
But in the rush to improve speed and scalability, accuracy has been sacrificed. And to reiterate: accuracy is not how well the ballots are counted by, for example, a punch-card reader. It’s not how the tabulating machine deals with hanging chads, pregnant chads, or anything like that.
eWEEK: The Beginning of the Crypto Era.
The collapse of MARID brought forth a call for experimentation with the various proposals in the hope that the experience would inform the standards process and help to produce a consensus. We're lucky. The experimentation so far has formed along the lines one would expect, meaning the proposals backed by the major players.
PC World: Pioneer Eyes 510GB Optical Discs.
While Pioneer has no immediate plans to commercialize the technology, it believes it could be used to make both recordable and read-only discs with more than 100 times the capacity of today's 4.7-inch DVDs. "We successfully recorded 348GB, 424GB, and 510GB on [4.7-inch] discs," Kadoi says.
November 16, 2004
Donald Norman: Design as Communication.
DeSousa makes a major advance in our understanding of the communication model. If the designer explains the reasoning behind the model, the user will find the task of uncovering the conceptual model much easier. In other words, what we need to provide to people is reasons, not just methods.
Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill.
Several lobbying camps from different industries and ideologies are joining forces to fight an overhaul of copyright law, which they say would radically shift in favor of Hollywood and the record companies and which Congress might try to push through during a lame-duck session that begins this week.
November 17, 2004
Tim Bray: The DRM Debacle.
I spent a couple of days this week in Brussels talking with European Commission people and other vendors about a bunch of things, but DRM kept coming into the conversation. Herewith some doomsaying and paranoia; the whole idea is broken and going to cause severe damage and pain for content vendors, technology vendors, and ordinary folks who just want to go on with life.
Technology Review: The Real Problem with Voting.
I have enjoyed the opportunity to carefully watch elections at hundreds of polling places nationwide for the past three-and-a-half years. What I have observed is that grave errors of judgment and protocol are apparent almost everywhere, regardless of the voting method used.
News.Com: Poland withdraws support for EU patent plan.
Without the backing of the Polish government, it is likely that the directive no longer has enough support to be sent back from the Council to the EU Parliament. Crucially, the EU has just revised the number of votes that each member state can wield, and this move has given Poland enough influence to tip the balance.
November 18, 2004
LA Times: TiVo Will No Longer Skip Past Advertisers.
By March, TiVo viewers will see "billboards," or small logos, popping up over TV commercials as they fast-forward through them, offering contest entries, giveaways or links to other ads. If a viewer "opts in" to the ad, their contact information will be downloaded to that advertiser...
WIRED: How I Learned to Love Larry.
Hilary Rosen. If the essence of copyright law is to allow creators to have control, he argued, then there are ways to maintain ownership of copyrighted works and still make it possible for the average person to license the use of those works. After all, what's wrong with a licensing system that makes music more accessible to more people?
NY Times: Google Plans New Service for Scientists and Scholars.
Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature...
November 19, 2004
Adaptive Path: Making A Better CMS.
Jeffrey Veen. The experience cemented a theory of mine: Most open source content management software is useless. The only thing worse is every commercial CMS I’ve used. But it doesn’t have to be that way. This whole category of software desperately needs to be redesigned with writers, editors, designers, and site owners in mind.
November 20, 2004
InfoWorld: Whatever happened to SVG?
Jon Udell. It’s tempting to conclude that SVG just plain failed. Yet it keeps popping up on my radar screen lately. Case in point: Lighthammer Software’s innovative use of SVG. The company’s toolkit creates applications for the manufacturing sector, where dashboard-style visualization of meters and gauges is a key requirement.
November 21, 2004
Popular Science: When Car Design Goes Bad.
The business of automobile design may seem to be the uncontested territory of traditional car companies, but a closer look reveals a wide range of characters: sportswear manufacturers, electronics behemoths and architects are all venturing into the world of automobile design.
November 22, 2004
Useit.Com: Undoing the Industrial Revolution.
We typically overestimate what can be done in the short term. Improvements seem so close we can smell them, but human behavior and social institutions are slow to change. At the same time, we underestimate what will happen in the long term, because changes accumulate and accelerate.
Technology Review: To Fight, Verizon Switches.
With such an infrastructure in place, the theory holds, the longtime supplier of plain old telephone service can change into a new kind of company, one that can compete in a world where media giants like Comcast are blending services such as television, telephone, and Internet access.
November 23, 2004
Wired News: A Kinder, Gentler Copyright Bill?
The Senate passed a scaled-back version of a controversial copyright bill Saturday, keeping a provision that imposes severe penalties on people caught with camcorders in movie theaters but scrapping other provisions that copyright-reform activists had criticized.
InfoWorld: Law may snag Philadelphia Wi-Fi rollout.
The city could provide the service for free, but it is unlikely to find a funding source for that, she said. Alternatively, it could offer the service through a consortium of private companies that would sell it to the public -- probably at a higher price, Neff believes.
November 24, 2004
WIRED: Technology Over Ideology.
Lawrence Lessig. Powell knew this was heresy. But without denouncing the party line, he nonetheless set up its demise. Auctions were slowed; spectrum commons were encouraged. The free space in which your Wi-Fi network runs would coexist with chunks of spectrum sold like so much beachfront property.
News.Com: P2P start-up gets record label deals.
For now, Peer Impact's partners include Universal Music, Sony BMG, and the Warner Music Group. The company remains in negotiations with EMI Music and plans to launch the file-swapping service in early 2005. Songs will cost 99 cents, as they do at Apple Computer's iTunes and other download stores, and they'll be wrapped in copy protection technology.
November 25, 2004
BusinessWeek: Q&A With Samsung Design Boss Chung Kook Hyun.
A key player in that drive is Chung Kook Hyun, a senior vice-president who heads the company's design center. Chung recently sat down with BusinessWeek's Asia Editor David Rocks and Seoul Bureau Chief Moon Ihlwan to discuss Samsung's design operation.
November 26, 2004
Fast Company: She Reads Customers' Minds.
That's Alissa Kozuh's job at Nordstrom.com. Kozuh, 28, who formerly worked on search-related projects for Microsoft, is now the editor of Nordstrom.com, where her most important role is to analyze the words that people put into the site's search engine every month. All 45,000 of them.
November 27, 2004
Wired News: TiVo Their Way: Ads, Copy Brakes.
Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester Research, said, "Any product that's part of a cable and satellite world has to obey some of the restrictions that go with it." The restrictions are tightening.
November 28, 2004
NY Times: Electronic Voting 1.0, and No Time to Upgrade.
The phenomenal reliability of the systems we trust for banking, communication, and everything else rests on two bedrock principles. One is the universal understanding in the technology world that nothing works right the first time, and maybe not the first 50 times.
November 29, 2004
Technology Review: Portable Projectors.
Raskar, a research scientist at Cambridge, MA’s Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, sees tiny projectors as the solution to one of the fundamental problems with our ever shrinking cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras, and other portable devices.
eWEEK: Desktop Google Finds Holes.
Bruce Schneier. GDS is very good at searching. It's so good that it exposes vulnerabilities on your computer that you didn't know about. And now that you know about them, pressure your software vendors to fix them. Don't shoot the messenger.
November 30, 2004
Wired News: Battling the Copyright Big Boys.
IPac pledges to support candidates and elected officials who fight for a balance in copyright law: The group will support those who advocate for laws that will pay creators without limiting political expression, innovation or research and education, and back laws that foster new creativity.
News.Com: Fighting for file-swapping on Capitol Hill.
Q&A with Philip Corwin. I think the best way to reduce piracy on peer-to-peer networks is for the content owners to license their content in a way that's attractive. There's always going to be some unauthorized distribution going on. (There has been discussion) of having some kind of compulsory license that would compensate copyright holders.
eWEEK: Lycos Offers Customers Program to Attack Spam Servers.
At the risk of breaching Internet civility, Lycos Europe is offering computer-users a weapon against spam-spewing servers: a screen-saver program that automatically hits the offenders with data to slow them down.
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