So as we Discuss web 2.0

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Facebook-Social-Networking-MySpace-Twitter-Privacy,news-6687.html

We really need to bear in mind other topics like security and our personal life on the web. This is a great article since I caught myself making one of these mistakes before fixing it. How often do we hear all the great advice from our classmates and online and not even act on it? will this be one more time?

I'd actually really like to see any data anyone has on how many times you have to tell someone a specific action to secure themselves online before they listen. I have a sneaking suspicion it's increased dramatically as we get bombarded with more security advice daily. Some things may almost be counter productive. for example, after being on my fourth password for GA State in 2 year, I make my passwords as weak as possible so I can remember the ever changing passwords amongst the myriad of other passwords I use. I have a few stronger passwords for things without enforced changes, Of course. I wish they didn't have to keep mentioning the whole thing about not listing when No one is home, but this happens almost as much as people download viruses from emails about Britney spears.

I hope everyone reading this takes a minute to fix their facebook and other social networking applications as needed, now I need to make a minor adjustment.

Pirated Software

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2363043,00.asp

I was reading this and have to admit I was as impressed as Microsoft was to discover the Pirate manufacturing operation they shut down in 2007 was larger than the legal operations Microsoft had in the territory at the same time.
The ever increasing level of sophistication is a potential problem for any business, but Microsoft's efforts should make it easier. The technology they discover and the rings they shut down should be observed closely by smaller companies for potential tips. Second mover advantage is low cost and fewer bugs. Microsoft is a great opportunity to observe the first mover.
The other big thing is the addition effort to work with customers. 80,000 of 280,000 historical leads were last year. This is a strategic shift that we may want to consider in our companies, as the addition of true independent intelligences is harder to counterfeit then a data security technique.
The losses from piracy are in the billions and more and more of us ar einvolved one way or another in IT related businesses. it pays to watch these events unfold.

Following Needs

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=18237

After our presentation on LBS that I hope everyone enjoyed, I noticed as a follow up the FCC is in the process of reallocation spectrum from the television market to the smart phone market. I think it's a good move and one that the market requires of them to move the spectrum. I think it also tells us something about the changes in our society. We are all relying more on our smartphones every day. Meanwhile fewer and fewer people are watching what was once an american miracle, broadcast television. My parents have seen immense changes
In the meantime this is one more reason for anyone that still thinks of their phone as just a phone to get on board with all the changes in technology over the past few years. More then texting and phone calls, Email, Mobile tv, Location Based Services like GPS, and others rule the future

Improved Security

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/BitDefender-Trojan-Google-Chrome-Extension,news-6571.html

I thought this was a great example of social engineering to create security holes. Google Chrome has had excellent growth in the browser market, and there are numerous positive associations with the Google name. This seems targeted explicitly at business users since it claims to improve accessing documents from emails. This is an interesting move and one that directly pits corporate IT against user flexibility. Is the only right path for corporate IT to forbid any user use of .exe packages? What about legitimate updates?
While corporate IT can do all legitimate updates themselves, this type of forced control creates a lot more work for IT in dealing with every time there is a basic upgrade to a browser, graphics driver etc. Th other option would be to deal with cleaning up issues form less sophisticated users falling prey to tactics like this. I assume each company has to do its own cost benefit trade off, and may set policy by department. Where I work all IT employees are assumed to be sophisticated enough users to slef manage most updates etc. but Sales and otehr departments are not.
I also hope if anyone is reading my blog and using Chrome that they are careful of this issue at home and at work.

What is our core product?

As everyone knows I've been asked to come up with an example of what a quiz could be to be appropriately focused on the subject matter. (which as my previous post suggests i often feel the course fails at). I have been considering this while working on the IT doesn't matte paper, and I think both events come down to a very MBA concept, core competencies. in IT doesn't matter the Author has no intention of saying it doesn't matter, rather he is saying that strategically it has be treated as something that matters very much in terms of a basic ground level, but its to be used efficiently, at a minimum of expense. I want to make sure I can ask a quiz question or two, which I'm sorry to say will almost have to be short answer format, that focus on the "core competency" of the chapter. Not the sidebar about email, but the one main concept that we hopefully all retain after we leave this class and move on through our degree. The reality of the situation is that many of us are years away from graduation and have to put together all this information into a usable form. Obviously I feel this class has failed miserably at this, almost nothing I could put in my blog would really be constructive at this point as far as helping me master the material, or conveying a deeper understanding of it. Now I'm trying to find a way, I will probably email my quiz in tonight, I hope I do a better job recognizing the core product of the chapter and asking about that, and nothing else, than what we've seen so far.

Effeciency

I thought it was really interesting listening to my classmates and I talk both after and during class. I think this bears further discussion. In truth, I doubt I will have any class contribute less to my education than this class, a constant barrage of writing briefly about what's going on with a few principles from each chapter in a half dozen different case studies and a go narrow go deep focus seems like an ERP implementation where the goal is simply to do everything all at once. Personally I tend to learn best from what I read, writing papers on a case study becomes an exercise in the details, I got the general case on the first read through, but not the previous job of the new CIO (which has no impact on the principles we should learn as potential management staff), as I result I spend most of my time on the least useful details of a case, because they have to be memorized, no understanding is possible. Hopefully I understood how the textbook would apply to my job, but I may not have remembered which things go to which list after doing thousands of lists through my education. Most other classes I know where to go, but here I reread lists and gain almost nothing from the major focus of a chapter.
Back to the ERP analogy. Looking at our cases, are we focused on the information most relevant to management in a case? often as students this would be a short discussion of a specific principle, but in writing it out and quizzes, trivia and minutiae are the order of the day. Rather than the highest order of needs first, we are assuming that memorizing the lowest details implies learning the highest. None of my peers reflect this back to me, they talk of picking what not to read or do to get done other pieces. Blogs, often only vaguely relevant and case study papers, drawing into marathon session of research and rewrite information that could be legitimately discussed and covered in half an hour are the most visible and guaranteed points. How would we handle a good ERP implementation? Allow groups to focus on the most visible work? Are we assessing the impact on actually teaching students of any of these assignments? Is there a well thought out lesson I should learn from my blog that can't be taught in a tenth the time? Would anyone recommend their jobs build a system around all the separate parts prioritizing work based on visibility without measuring contribution to the company?

Do you like Yelp?

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Unvarnished-Job-Interview-Online-Profile-Facebook,news-6319.html

Hows this for a barrel of worms, a site like Yelp that rates... us
This is designed to allow your coworkers and colleagues to post reviews of you as a professional. There is no ability to remove negative reviews unless they are obviously erroneous as the site defines it.
Personally I think this is a really bad idea, but I have a feeling that will not stop HR managers from using it to evaluate you. It does make me feel a lot more sympathetic to claims that yelp is basically an exploitative business model based on blackmail. As a professional I think I'll be forced to buy my unvarnished profile even though I don't want to support this.
I don't like the inability to delete reviews, and I wonder how they will verify someone actually works with you? I do see this making things even more political in corporate america, which I don't think is a good thing.

A Different Attack

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9174132/China_s_Great_Firewall_spreads_overseas?taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=1

In class we've discussed a few different security concerns to date, revolving around different things hackers or poor network design could do. This is an interesting case because even though it was centered on the ISP the result was an Attack that shut off potentiall millions of hits on sites like you tube. This has a value of several thousand dollars initially and even higher potential loss in the future if customers begin to expect such things are a possibility in estimating the advertising value of your service (versus offerings on TV, Radio etc.)
I'm not really sure what can be done to prepare for this type of event, or if the international community needs to intervene. I have folowed Google's pull out from China. Open questions, can enough business pull out to make a difference? would the Chinese care? Is this going to happen again? with what frequency?

Artificial Intelligence?

Note the chronology here, the comic predates the news article

http://xkcd.com/695/

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/JPL-NASA-Mars-Rover,news-6243.html#comments

I think it's interesting to think about how willing we are to treat ever advancing technology as disposable. on many levels the old cell phones and retired computers I've thrown away can do mental feats I'll never be able to. my trash could enable someone to rule the world a few hundred years ago. I'm not saying that we are facing a skynet type situation, but if such a thing was possible I don't think anything would stop us from blundering into it. Consider the crises mentality for most economic bubbles, we see them burst in the past but we never learn enough to stop doing it over, and over again.

Delays Delays

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-geforce-gtx-fermi,9904.html

This is a heavily IT launch of what is supposed to be the new miracle product, a super heavy parallel processor for research and business, the ultimate in gaming graphics, and th core for a new generation of professional design. Of course it hasn't been very focused and is now 6 months behind its gaming focused competitor in having a current generation part to market. How much revenue is lost to letting deadlines slip? Nvidia has survived disasters like this before but the majority of their revenues come from graphics. A variety of reasons have been given over time for the delay, but I don't know if nay are valid.

I think I see a future case study coming though.

Let's add more cores

http://whymba8125why.blogspot.com/

Intel has created another even bigger multi core desktop processor. The tests here are somewhat interesting because what you see happening is that a lot of the software hasn't even made the transition to taking advantage of having two cores available to it, let alone 4 or 6. As software design grows increasingly complex, adding layers upon layers of intelligent functionality, and ever more detailed paths and graphics, software design slows. The human element to create something novel doesn't increase exponentially the way hardware can. as a result we have many people still using a 32 bit OS that has hit constraints on its hardware 4 years ago, and software tests still relying on a single thread hitting the barrier in terms of gigahertz with 80% plus of the processor idle.

The need to continue selling new hardware will drive advances for a while, but I think it almost has to leave software further and further behind as time goes on.

Fitness through IT?

http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Philips-DirectLife-Activity-Monitor,review-1509.html

This is an interesting little device that attempts to monitor your calorie expenditure through the day and communicate it with an available personal trainer at phillips HQ. Although there are limits for highly specific motions like an exercise bike, there is a huge potential advantage (as the writer notes) in simply providing a highly visible reminder of daily activity for each of us.
I'm not personally convinced I'd buy one yet since I spend so much time rock climbing and weight training that don't show up well but I think this is a technology I'm certainly going to be watching develop in the future.

Gold Plated IT

http://whymba8125why.blogspot.com/
This is outside the realm of traditional business function, but I found it interesting that we seem to have an increasing number of luxury gadgets, from multiple companies. I personally can't imagine a gold plated video game system ever not looking tacky. I find it especially interesting that they mention another company competing over gold and diamond covered iphones. How many businesses can tacky luxury electronics support?

Business Power Up?

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-itanium-tukwila-xeon-nehalem,9634.html

This is another new tech development, a highly stable processor with huge increases in bandwidth running over 30 simultaneous threads. I am suggesting for your analysis that as we see ever increasing single processor threads, which in turn greatly increases the total threads on the server, the possibility of an interaction with desktop multithreading (for example excel 2007, unlike its predecessors can expand across multiple threads or processing cores) that this can affect virtualization development. I was looking online but didn't see many recent articles on how a client sending an expanding number of threads would be handled. I'm wondering if there would have to be an artificial constraint on the number of separate threads submitted to a series of servers. Do you think any companies would miss this and potentially allow one power user to use a program like PC SAS on a virtual machine that could create a huge number of separate threads to affect server performance?

Mobile Technology

I thought I would share a review of the new Nexus one for any Android Fans. I'm still hoping for a future merging of the Net book and Smart phone forms in the future (I at least would be willing to exchange carrying something with say a 6.5 inch diagonal and a bit more weight in my pockets for more PC like web browsing and entertainment experience)
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/Google-Nexus-One-Review,review-1497.html
I think that's my ultimate hope as I see more things like the Windows XP phone made available. Anyway Google being a highly innovative company. I expect their open source software to move the software portion of the industry into being more open to such developments. I know everyone has heard of the Apple ipad, Imigine a form factor mor splitting the differenc eiwth the iphone, sort of at the limit of what can be kept in a man's pockets, and another around the (width and length but not depth) of a small womans purse, kept razor thin so it was almost all screen