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?