Tag: microsoft

The Rack

Cloud Expo: It’s about IT Jobs

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I was at Cloud Expo yesterday in New York City.

I heard the keynote address entitled “Parting of the Clouds” from Dell’s Steve Shuckenbrock.

I sat through half of “Patterns of Cloud Computing” delivered by Microsoft’s Bill Zack.

And finally reached saturation 10 minutes into a breakout session led by Mark Wilkinson from HP.

My synapses were put into a deep freeze by the marketing blather (“flexibility”, “continuum”, “engaged in outcomes”, “end-user benefits” ) and mashed up metaphors (“an exclamation point on our journey”).

And the Javits Center’s generous WiFi terms ($4.95 for one hour) only validated my sense that delighting (to use a marketing-ism) attendees was not a concern of the Cloud Expo conference folks.Continue reading

The Rack

PC Quarantines May Be a Good Idea But…

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Bruce Schneier points out—you know he would!—some of his issues with Microsoft’s proposal to quarantine infected computers.  He’s not against the idea in principle. For it to work, though, it has to have a good chance of success.

Schneier’s main concern is that hackers will be motivated to get around the software, initiating another security arms race. Bruce does note that Internet access restrictions would work better if ISPs are the central authorities in deciding who can leave their digital houses.

Of course, as he rightly notes, there would be all kinds of forces, not necessarily benign, who would want their say in this matter.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Microsoft’s Solution to Cyber Attacks: PC Health Certificates

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Quarantine officers on our flight

If you haven’t already, please read Seymour Hersh’s insightful and non-alarmist New Yorker article on cyber security in the context of the recent Stuxnet virus and China’s growing hack capabilities.

The Hersh piece contains a very simple solution to safeguard our nation’s IT against government or mere freelance hackers: mandatory encryption of all commercial and civil Internet communications.

While this broad approach is attractive in principle, cost and inconvenience make this less than desirable. And there’s also opposition from the same government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting us against cyber attacks in the first place: they wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop as easily.

Though perhaps not the most credible candidate, Microsoft has offered its own proposal, an idea that has proved useful in managing infectious diseases: PC health certificates.Continue reading

@NYC

NYTM 8/3/10: Shirky Rebutted, Social Shopping, and Semantic Web

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My ears are still ringing from a rant by Sam Lessin, Drop.io founder, as he went about trying to disprove intrinsic altruism and trust, and reclaim the commanding heights with neo-classical economics. More on this later, but it is a curious position for a tech entrepreneur whose site is based on people uploading and sharing content for a cost of bupkis.

A few of the high points for me at last night’s New York Tech Meetup: TurnTo, which lets online shoppers find out what friends have purchased; Twilio (which I’ve written about before) had a nice telephony demo for this data-centric audience, and Indaba is a great site for helping musicians monetize their craft.

Oh, and there was a startup, I think called Microsoft, showing off their Bink, or maybe it’s Bing(?) search engine. And Willow Garage, a robotics startup, gave us a glimpse into a future where we stay at home and let our mechanical avatars roam the corridors and aisles of faraway office suites.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Meanwhile Back at the Enterprise

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I’ve been so focused on apps and trends outside of the office space that I thought I’d have a difficult time grokking the keynote speeches at  Voicecon 2010.   VoiceCon (now renamed to Enterprise Connect) is the place where business communication vendors announce their visions and initiatives for the coming year.

I’m happy to be misinformed in this case. Consumer-grade social media, open software,  and smartphone-like apps—areas I’ve been immersed in the last few weeks—are pretty much pre-requisites to enterprise communications coursework.  To varying degrees, Siemens, Avaya, Cisco, and Microsoft acknowledge, promote, and  support  micro-blogging, location information, transcription services, SIP, cloud-based software, and slicker interaces in their wares.

I took a quick tour through the recorded videos of the presentations given by Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, and Microsoft. A few impressions after the jump.Continue reading