Network World Article Source

I saw this article today and said to myself “well ain’t that just a
kick in the pants.” This has to be the coolest idea I’ve seen in a very
long time. I mean, take your basic 3 components needed for fire, and
change which of the 3 components you remove. How long have we been
damaging our computer systems with either toxic Halon systems, or
simply destroying them with water based solutions? This is one of those
technologies that, in hindsight, begs the question of why didn’t
somebody think of this sooner.

I have to say to the makers, well thought and thank you for your simple
brilliance. Now, let’s just hope that they can get it to be affordable I’m sure it will play a part in the next generation of high caliber
data centers. Of course, now we might have to deal with altitude
sickness even though we’re still setting at or near sea-level.

Slife – an awareness browser from Slife Labs

These guys have a very interesting concept in mind here. I can see this
being a very powerful tool if used in the proper ways. However, like
all powerful tools, if it is misused, I would be quite afraid of the
consequences. There are major privacy concerns here, at least in my
mind.

One example of a very good use is that I tend to work in a very
multi-threaded fashion in my web-browser. It can be very hard,
sometimes, to keep up with the 40 to 50 tabs I get opened in my Firefox
sessions at times. Most of the time, however, I am really only actively
using about 5 to 8 of those windows and the rest are kept open for
referential purposes because I don’t want to go back and look for them
later. (As a side note, if any of you have any suggestions on how to
save a group of pages as semi-temporary bookmark groups, let me know…
I would love to come back to a group of 5 or 6 tabbed web pages at a
later date and continue on from that point, but I wouldn’t necessarily
need to hold those references past that later date.)

I could also see this being used in a group collaboration activity (see my other post on collaboration here)
where research regarding a given subject is followed and tagged so that
others can see the trail of information that led to certain decisions.
This could be an immensely useful tool for training and/or educational
purposes. Something very similar to a shared bread-crumb trail that
tracked web pages all over the world wide web.

Of course, most of you privacy guys know that this is exactly the kind
of thing that could get out of hand fairly easily if implemented by the
wrong people and for the wrong reasons. It could also be misused if it
was just implemented in the wrong fashion, but technology is usually
easier to fix than people’s bad intentions…

I have only one request for these guys… Please make it available for
Windows… Maybe Linux would be easier since you’re starting on OS X,
but most of my semi-untracked time goes into stuff I do on my Windows
machine anyway.

Second Life

My father had a saying when I was growing up in front of my computer…
Something to the effect of “Life is not completely digital, get out and
enjoy the analog world too.”

So tell, me, why would I want to waste MORE of my time in a virtual
world that, by definition, doesn’t even exist when I don’t have enough
time to do the things I enjoy in the REAL world?

I will concede that there are some very compelling reason for virtual
reality technology, such as remote medicine, real estate preview, or
even virtual meeting places. However, the entertainment industry as a
whole is so adept at helping people escape from the reality of their
lives that people can easily forget that normal reality can be a very
interesting and exciting thing.

I guess the part of me that needs balance just screams to stay away
from this kind of thing except in those rare circumstances in which it
is truly the most productive way to accomplish a task. Of course, that
same drive for productivity is also what drives my family crazy at
times because I just won’t sit down and relax in front of the
television like so many people are accustomed to doing.

The technical offerings of pretty much everybody out there doing
“Collaboration” has been pretty weak for a very long time, in my
opinion. Today tipped off my thought process and helped me to
understand exactly what I have been having a problem with for so long.
So, here it is:

Collaboration is not best accomplished by merely bridging the virtual
divide with voice, video and instant messaging. Companies like WebEx and Citrix’s Goto… suite
provide a good start by doing virtual meeting-places with web
demonstration capabilities, but that isn’t all that the “Collaboration”
sector should be.

No, what it should be was something I saw in a preview video a few
years back. There was a preview video that showed two people getting
together and working on the same report over the web. They both saw the
changes to the document in real time and they could add whatever sort
of data that saw fit. This is something that Google (and possibly Zoho,
but I haven’t previewed their application suite nearly as deeply as
Google’s) is starting to hint at with their ajax’d up Google Apps in
collaboration mode. That’s getting much closer to what I’m thinking.
People I know are getting really excited about that kind of technology,
even though they’re not techies by trade.

However, I would say that collaboration needs to go a full step forward
and integrate all of these wonderful technologies together in a truly
unified communications suite. E-mail, voice, video, IM, screen-sharing,
white-boarding, collaborative document editing, etc. All of these need
to work seamlessly together, which they now just don’t. Bits and pieces
are working together, such as Unified Messaging with e-mail, fax and
voicemail. Google adds to that with unifying their Google Talk chat
sessions, but I don’t believe that that archives voice in the same form
(that’s a small hint for you if you’re listening, Google).

The technologies are getting there, but very slowly. The sector
definitely needs a vision, and not just focus on the islands of partial
collaboration that exist today. It needs fully collaboration
applications that fully interact with each other using open, standard
protocols.

I don’t usually go to Microsoft to get security advice, but an article written back in May of 2004 (linked here) is a very convincing example of why IT professionals need to take security seriously.

Now, this is not to say that external monitoring systems do not exist
to mitigate these problems, because they do exist. However, they are
generally outside the realm of most businesses’ interest and usability.
Personally, I find this rather alarming. Companies like Tripwire
have been doing critical file system fingerprinting for a very long
time now. But that is the only company I can think of that even does
this kind of thing. Sure, there are probably one or two others, but my
point is that that market hasn’t picked up on the type of technology.
That means either that the technology is not sound, or that nobody is
really interested in it enough to create a large market out of it.
Unfortunately, I believe it is the latter.

So, my point is that as IT professionals, we need to be pushing our
vendors for higher security measures. Less critical security bugs. Less
patching required. Etc. Etc. Being in the world of EDI these past few
years, I have grown accustomed to the concept of “charge-backs.” Maybe
it’s time we start pushing the issues back to our vendors. At very
least, we need to make sure each of us are taking a serious look at
every piece of our infrastructure to analyze the security risks
involved in them.