My 2008 mrontemp rant about those who ignore the enterprise

One of my pet peeves about Silicon Valley is that the residents often assume that everyone in the world is just like them. Everyone in the world agonizes over Android vs. iOS wars. Everyone in the world works for really cool startups with great stock options and an on-premises chef. Everyone in the world obsesses over Michael Arrington's sex life. And, everyone in the world always uses cool and shiny things, and never does anything that the Valley considers uncool. And if you do something that they Valley considers uncool...well, you obviously have a serious mental problem.

By the summer of 2008, Internet Explorer 6 was definitely in the Valley's "uncool" category. And yes, the concerns about Internet Explorer 6 were legitimate. However, the hipsters forgot that there were millions of people who had legitimate reasons for continuing to use Internet Explorer 6.

To the Valley, such a stance was unforgivable - so they took online action.

Now I could have responded in the Ontario Empoblog, but I had quit writing in that blog by 2008. My then-current blog was called mrontemp. So my response appeared there. (In-line links can be found at the original post; not sure how many of them still work.)

Rant of the day - why YOU are to blame for the continuing use of Internet Explorer 6.0

(Rant on.)

When I am at work, many of you take the time to tell me, and others like me, how much of an idiot I am.

Perhaps I'll visit Cristian Neagu's site. Or Mark Theunissen's site. And I'll get THE MESSAGE.

Or I'll go to TechCrunch, and I won't get THE MESSAGE, but I'll read about THE MESSAGE.

Or I'll hear what 37signals did.

Or I'll try to visit www.me.com - and be unsuccessful in doing so.

Or I'll ask a question in FriendFeed - and get a response similar to THE MESSAGE.

Now, some of you may be wondering what THE MESSAGE is, because you don't receive it. Well, I do receive it.

And what, pray tell, is the solution to all of these issues? If I don't want to get THE MESSAGE, what should I do?

Hey, it's easy.

If all those folks using a version of any browser older than IE7 could just upgrade, get with the program and do their bit (it’s only a few moments to download and install and it doesn’t even insist on a legal copy of Windows these days!) then developers could concentrate on making great web applications using all the cool Ajax, Silverlight and Javascript features without having to worry about testing a load of different quirky behaviors.

Gosh, that's so easy, I'll go ahead and do it right now.

Um...there's one condition.

Are you willing to pay my salary?

Because, you see, the computer that I'm using now isn't mine. My computer at home is not using IE6, but that's a computer that I control. When I'm at lunch, however, I'm using a computer that I don't own - and if I insist on updating this computer, I might have a little minor problem with my future employment.

So after I pack up my things and am escorted off the premises, I can go home and play with a non-IE6 web browser all I want - well, that is, until I have to cancel the Internet access, sell the computer, and move my family to Tent City.

Or perhaps you're a businessman like RJ Owen, and 37signals is telling you to tell your customers to upgrade so that they can continue to use 37signals products. Owen points out how well THAT will work out:

[T]here's no assistance I can provide that will get these khakis-and-polo-shirts companies to upgrade any more than I can get them to quit thinking buying cake for their employees once a month will keep they happy....[W]hile they're only a few blips on your radar, they're the type of client most small to mid-sized software companies can't afford to lose. We can't stop supporting them, and we can't make them upgrade either.

37signals decision to quit supporting IE 6 forces us to choose between using Basecamp and supporting our customers, so the answer is pretty clear: goodbye, Basecamp. You're losing 100% of our business by refusing to support only 14% of our users - how's that for a bad customer experience?

OK, so Owen isn't an employee of a company using IE6, but I am. "Surely, O," you say, "you can just tell your employer to get with the program."

Let me clue you in on a little secret. If I march into the boardroom of my Fortune 500 employer, with my "save the developers" banner and my "IE6 sUxX, d00d!" t-shirt...um, I don't think that will be cause enough for my employer to see the error of its ways.

Because, you see, publicly traded Fortune 500 companies do not listen to employees. They listen to investors and the market.

If investors quit investing in a company because of a company's business practices, you can believe that the company will change its ways.

Which brings me to you.

Do you have some stock investments? Mutual funds? An IRA or 401k? If so, in which companies have you chosen to invest? What web browsers are these companies using? If you don't know this, then you're part of the problem.

OK, maybe you don't have any investments because you're a student or investments are fascist or something like that. Where do you shop? Which web browsers are used at your store's corporate headquarters? Are your purchases funding the abuse of Web developers? If you don't know this, then you're part of the problem.

So unless you want to pay my salary, get off my back - and onto your own.

P.S. Because everyone agrees that newer Microsoft applications are better than the old ones, I assume that I will soon be slammed for using Microsoft Windows XP and not upgrading to Vista. I will, right?

(Rant off.)

(Maybe.)

My 2005 "Rita Moreno of Arte" parody that regretfully never took off

I tried.

I really tried.

If there's any one thing that I wanted millions of people to see, it was an article that I wrote in the Ontario Empoblog back on January 4, 2005.

One of my pet peeves is when something is named after a famous city, even though it's not located in that city. One example of this is in my own backyard - the "LA/Ontario International Airport." The airport received this hybrid name because, although it is located in the city of Ontario, the airport is actually owned by the city of Los Angeles.

As it turns out, there are a lot of people who are irritated about Los Angeles' control of the airport, but not because of the name. However, that's a story for another time.

The chief offender in this regard, however, is not airports, but sports teams. Many suburbs go out of their way to host a sports team, granting tax incentives and who knows what else. But at the end of the day, the suburb itself is virtually ignored as everyone talks about the so-called "Washington" Redskins or the so-called "Dallas" Cowboys or the so-called "New York" Giants.

Anaheim, California thought that they had guarded against this. Anaheim had already lost the so-called "Los Angeles" Rams, and when they made improvements to the local stadium for the local baseball team, the city required that the team include "Anaheim" in its designation. Frankly, it makes sense - Anaheim wanted to be known worldwide as a tourist destination, so the city wanted to get its name out there.

But Angels owner Arte Moreno was rubbed the wrong way by all of this. How can he sell Angels gear in China if it has to be tagged with the word "Anaheim"? People have heard of Los Angeles, but have never heard of Anaheim. (An empty argument, by the way - the Green Bay Packers do just fine with their merchandising.)

So Arte Moreno hit upon a solution that would supposedly please both sides - the new team name "the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim," as trumpeted in a press release.

I was irked by this, because of my whole thing about naming. And who was Arte Moreno to pull a stunt like this? For that matter, who was Arte Moreno? Who has even heard of Arte Moreno? And thus an idea was germinated.

Here's the original 2005 post - again, a parody of the Angels' initial press release.

Angels Owner Announces Official Name Change

Angels Owner Announces Official Name Change

01/03/2005 11:07 AM ET

ANAHEIM -- Angels Baseball Monday announced the team owner has changed his official name to Rita Moreno of Arte. This change is effective January 3, 2005.

The inclusion of Rita reflects the original celebrity name recognized by the Hollywood elite in December 1960 and again returns Moreno as Hollywood's representative in the Greater Los Angeles territory that Major League Baseball expects the team to serve.

The Los Angeles region, which is comprised of Orange, Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, and Riverside Counties, is the second largest media market in the country. This name change will strengthen Mr. Moreno's long-term economic health by enhancing the marketability through this metropolitan area and beyond.

To emphasize the name change, Rita Moreno of Arte will appear on Broadway as the female lead in a stage production of "The King and I," produced by former Angels owner Disney.

A 2004 Annie Jacobsen parody from the Ontario Empoblog

My ten-year blogging career has been interspersed with a number of parodies. One of my favorites is one that I wrote in July 2004, right when the "Terror in the Skies" brouhaha was at its peak. If you're not familiar with the whole "Terror in the Skies" incident, just search for "Annie Jacobsen" to catch up. snopes.com has a good account of the whole thing. (Women's Wall Street, by the way, is defunct; as a British philosopher once said, all things must pass.)

The following is a parody of her original article - I didn't bother to parody the numerous articles that followed.

They Weren't Terrorists...They Weren't Desert Casino-Bound Musicians...They Were Girlie Men!

Note from the E-ditors: You are about to read an account of what DIDN'T happen during a NON-EXISTENT restaurant visit by one of our writers, Ontario Emperor. The Empoblog Editorial Team debated long and hard about how to handle this information and ultimately we decided it was something that should be shared. What does it have to do with synthetica or NTN trivia? Nothing, and everything. Here is Ontario's story. (P.S. Who is Annie Jacobsen?)

On July 21, 2004, at 7:37 p.m., I ate at the Denny's Restaurant in Guasti, California with my wife and our young daughter. Also in our restaurant were 14 Scandinavian men between the ages of approximately 20 and 50 years old. What I experienced during that meal has caused me to question whether the United States of America can realistically uphold the civil liberties of every individual, even non-citizens, and protect its citizens from moral threats.

On that Wednesday, our dinner began uneventfully. Starting out that evening in Ontario, California, we drove to the Denny's in Guasti. Guasti is a small enclave in Ontario, less than one-half mile from a major international airport. With no security check required at the door we waited for our table. Standing near us, also waiting to eat, was a group of six Finnish men. They were carrying passports with a lot of i's and u's. Two men wore tracksuits with the word "SUOMI" across the back. Two carried musical instrument cases - thin, flat, 18" long. One wore a yellow T-shirt and held a McDonald's bag. And the sixth man had a bad leg -- he wore an orthopedic shoe and limped.

My thirteen-year-old daughter was determined to get an adult menu, so I turned to the men behind me and said, "You go ahead, this could be awhile." "No, you go ahead," one of the men replied. He smiled pleasantly and extended his arm for me to pass. He was young, maybe late 20's and had a goatee. I thanked him and we went to our table.

Once in the restaurant, we took our seats at table 6. The man with the yellow shirt and the McDonald's bag sat across the aisle from us (at table 7). The pleasant man with the goatee sat a few tables back (in table 11). The rest of the men were seated throughout the restaurant.

As we sat waiting for the waitress to take our drink order, we noticed another large group of Finnish men entering. The first man wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He sat at table 1. The other seven men were seated at other tables. As "aware" Americans, my wife and I exchanged glances, and then continued to get comfortable. I noticed some of the other diners paying attention to the situation as well. As seating continued, we watched as, one by one, most of the Finnish men made eye contact with each other. They continued to look at each other and nod, as if they were all in agreement about something. I could tell that my wife was beginning to feel "anxious."

Once we ordered our iced teas and club sodas, the unusual activity began. I overheard someone asking for a tuna fish pizza. Meanwhile, the man in the yellow T-shirt got out of his seat and went to the lavatory -- taking his full McDonald's bag with him. When he came out of the lavatory he still had the McDonald's bag, but it was now almost empty. He walked to the back of the restaurant, still holding the bag. When he passed two of the men, he gave a thumbs-up sign. When he returned to his seat, he no longer had the McDonald's bag.

Then another man from the group stood up and took something from his duffel bag. It was about a foot long and was rolled in cloth. He headed toward the back of the restaurant with the object. Five minutes later, several more of the Finnish men began using the lavatory consecutively.

Watching all of this, my wife was now beyond "anxious." I decided to try to reassure my wife (and maybe myself) by walking to the back bathroom. I knew the goateed-man I had exchanged friendly words with as we entered the restaurant was seated nearby, so I thought I would say hello to the man to get some reassurance that everything was fine. As I stood up and turned around, I glanced in his direction and we made eye contact. I threw out my friendliest "remember-me-we-had-a-nice-exchange-just-a-short-time-ago" smile. The man did not smile back. His face did not move. In fact, the cold, defiant look he gave me sent shivers down my spine.

When I returned to my seat I was unable to assure my wife that all was well. My wife immediately walked to the front of the restaurant to talk with the hostess. "I might be overreacting, but I've been watching some really suspicious things..." Before she could complete her statement, the flight attendant pulled her outside into the parking lot. In a quiet voice she explained that they were all concerned about what was going on. The manager was aware. The waitresses were passing notes to each other. She said that there were people in the restaurant "higher up than you and me watching the men." My wife returned to her seat and relayed this information to me. He was feeling slightly better. I was feeling much worse.

Then, when the waitress was showing us the dessert menu, it hit me. In a quiet voice, I whispered to the waitress, "Please have the manager meet me in the parking lot." I then quietly got up from my seat, walked outside, and waited.

Two minutes later, the manager came out, accompanied by a second man with a military haircut, a neatly ironed dress shirt, military boots, and cut-off jeans shorts. I suspected that this person was an undercover Federal agent. As they approached me, I quietly stated what I had observed.

"They're a bunch of girlie men."

The second man looked at me quizically.

"They're girlie men! Isn't it obvious? Would any real men go to the lavatory in a group? Only women and girlie men do that!"

The manager looked at me in disgust. "I am nonplused by your comment," he said. "I don't know what the definition of 'girlie man' is. As opposed to their being he-men? I've undergone 80 hours of Denny's sensitivity training over the last two years, and quite frankly your statement offends me."

The second man walked a short distance away from us and started whispering into a cellular phone. When I saw that the man was using a Nokia phone, I knew that I was in trouble....

Through a series of events, The Los Angeles Times heard about my story. I talked briefly about my experience with a representative from the newspaper. Within a few hours I received a call from Dave Adams, the public spokesperson for San Bernardino County's restaurant inspection team. Adams told me what he knew:

There were 14 Finns in the Guasti Denny's. They were questioned at length by Ontario police, San Bernardino Sheriff's deputies, and a salesman from Mark Christopher Chevrolet upon leaving the restaurant. The 14 Finns had been hired as musicians to play at a casino in the desert. Adams said they were "scrubbed." None had arrest records (in America, I presume), none showed up on the FBI's "no eat" list or the FBI's Most Wanted Terrorists List. The men checked out and they were let go.

As for me, I'm brown-bagging...but I'm a little suspicious of that checker at Stater Brothers...

Ten-year anniversary of my first blog post

Yes, I know that I already acknowledged this in tymshft, but today is the actual anniversary so I'll do it again.

On Tuesday, October 14, 2003 at 9:46 pm, the online world was greeted by the first post of the Ontario Empoblog.

Why did synthetica start with fake bluegrass sounds? Why not? This is the Ontario Empoblog, or the blog for Ontario Emperor, which has nothing and everything to do with Canada, New Mexico, and Texas, but also California, which is a location in California. It exists in cyberspace, which is also synthetic.

The Ontario Empoblog may or may not touch on a variety of subjects, including music, poetry, poker, the supposed familial relationship between Brian Eno and Slim Whitman, the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop (1,121 - I checked), various comments about frogs, and the nature of nature.

Not an auspicious start.

I wasn't supposed to read about inContact...but I did anyway

I recently received a brochure, which I initially assumed was an invitation to some training seminar. I began reading it..and then saw that the brochure was "Exclusively for Contact Center Managers."

I continued reading anyway, even though I don't manage a contact center. But it's good to see what is happening in other industries.

I soon discovered that this was not a seminar advertisement, but an advertisement to use the customer contact services of the company inContact. And despite the unique nature of the customer contact industry, the story is one that we've seen elsewhere - companies with silos of different information that don't work toegher, resulting in poor deliveries to potential customers.

From my years attending Oracle OpenWorld, I knew Oracle's solution to this - get all or part of THE STACK. Oracle's standard-compliant software all works together, and if you insist on keeping your own software, Oracle pieces can work with your pieces also.

It turns out the pitch to call centers is similar, although inContact adds another wrinkle by using a word even more potent than STACK - inContact uses the word CLOUD.

Now you know and I know that the cloud, in and of itself, cannot cure cancer, feed hungry children, or improve your call center performance. In fact, while perusing through the brochure, the only feature that was specific to the cloud was scalability to meet peak demand.

The brochure was meant to pique the interest of your average call center manager, but since I'm not a call center manager, I couldn't really complete the offered assessment. Instead, I went to inContact's web site and looked at the company's list of solutions that it offers. And inContact has a host (heh) of solutions:

Blended Predictive Dialer
Use the best calling method to reach out to your customers.

Contact Center Infrastructure
Reduce costs and improve customer interactions.

CRM Integrated Contact Center Solutions
Personalize customer interactions with CRM data.

Disaster Recovery
Get 99.99% guaranteed availability and disaster protection.

ECHO Customer Satisfaction Feedback Survey
Drive loyalty and insight via the voice of your customer.

Interactive Voice Response Solutions
Give callers a flexible customized self-service experience.

Multi-Channel ACD
Quickly match customers to agents who can best help them.

Network Connectivity
Contact center software and telecom from one provider.

Personal Connection™ Outbound Solution
With Personal Connection, your customers will never hear a delay again

Quality Monitoring
Gain insight into your processes and customer interactions.

Reporting & Analytics
Get critical information for making business decisions.

Supervisor On-The-Go™ Mobile Application
Supervisor On-The-Go™ is a mobile application that untethers managers

Workforce Management
Align staffing with the work needs of your contact center.

Workforce Optimization Software
Improve everything that impacts the customer experience.

What does this mean? I tried to find a review of inContact software, but all of the "reviews" that I found seemed to list all of the good things about inContact, but none of the bad things. (In inContact's defense, it's quite possible that no one is performing independent reviews of ANY customer contact solutions.)

Oh well. On average, people seem to enjoy working there...

Well, I tried to find more oven temperature probe information

Some of you may not realize this, but the Empoprise-BI business blog is famous in some circles for its discussions about malfunctioning oven temperature probes. Since the American Thanksgiving holiday is coming up, I thought I'd seek out some new information on this topic.

Unfortunately, this site did not provide any...um, illumination.

Oven temperature probe.
■measures oven temperature.

Glad that this was cleared up. But what else does the site say?

■ideal for use in in ovens

I hope my readers find this to be helpful. It make my eyes moist just realizing how much I've given to the online community.

#occupy .@oscommerce (or, .@ucdavis pokes the world again)

Back in 2011, students at the University of California Davis caused trouble by blocking the path of some pepper spray. (Why didn't protests emerge with "Save the pepper spray!" slogans?)

Now, people from UC Davis are finding some issues with a particular commerce application, osCommerce.

Frankly, I had never heard of osCommerce, even though it's been around for a while and is reportedly used by over 14,000 online retailers. But osCommerce has a mission:

We're geeks. And we love what we do.

We provide you the tools to create your very own online store to start selling products and services to customers worldwide.

We want to make our products available to everyone worldwide and to make that possible we release all of our products for free with Open Source licenses.

We also manage a thriving community of store owners, developers, and service providers who help each other during the many stages of an online business.

Sounds like a good idea, and this provides a way for a number of small businesses to set up secure online websites.

Well, almost secure.

Now I'd be the first to admit that no piece of software is 100% secure. But UC Davis researchers have uncovered some issues with osCommerce:

"The majority of the payment modules in osCommerce are vulnerable to logic attacks that allow you to pay less or even pay nothing at all," said Fangqi Sun, a graduate student working with Professor Zhendong Su in the UC Davis Department of Computer Science.

The researchers have been attempting to notify osCommerce of the discovered vulnerabilities and to help the developers patch the software. They have also refunded the vendors for items they purchased at below cost during their research.

And how did the researchers purchase items below cost?

Sun found for example, that with a few simple changes to HTTP requests she could pay for an item in U.S. dollars instead of the same amount of British pounds, a marked discount depending on the exchange rate. It was also possible to trick a merchant into believing that an item had been paid when in fact it had not.

No idea whether they tried to use this with osCommerce-powered pepper spray vendors. And yes, there are some out there.

(H/T Homeland Security News Wire.)

It's appropriate to be reminded that the may be similar vulnerabilities in competing programs, including non-open source programs. The important thing is to see how osCommerce responds to this report.

The Retail Equation, revisited

I noticed an uptick in interest in my April 2012 post about The Retail Equation, a company that is hired by other companies to track returns and report on serial returners. No such system is 100% accurate, and you will encounter a number of false positives (i.e. people who are trying to legitimately return items but who have been flagged by the system as abusers). In my earlier post, I suggested the following:

The next time that fast-talking salesperson tries to sell you that electronic device or that lingerie or whatever, simply reply:

It's too risky. I can't commit to a purchase until I receive confirmation from an independent authority that the product has low defect rates and high customer satisfaction. I can't risk losing my money if the product is defective.

I tried to see if The Retail Equation has been in the news lately, but all that I could find was a brief mention in a BusinessWeek article about "wardrobing" (buying a piece of clothing for an event, and then returning it for a refund after the event if over):

About 70 percent of retailers now require an ID for a return without a receipt, Hayes says, and an increasing number won’t accept a return without a receipt. Stores operated by L Brands’ (LTD) Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works chains, are using return databases such as the one offered by consultant the Retail Equation to track patterns to identify customers whose continual returns are suspicious; they’ll then be refused future return privileges. Hayes says others are exploring such loss-prevention technologies as those developed by SmartWater CSI, which rely on applying code-laced liquids to valuable products; a merchant can then use ultraviolet light to view the code and verify the authenticity of a purchase.

It doesn't matter - Loren Feldman and some Catholic priests walk into a government shutdown/slimdown

When someone performs a particular action, the ripple effects of that action can extend way, way out.

Loren Feldman produces a weekly video called "Monday Matters," in which he comments on various tech and non-tech stories, and then follows it up by proclaiming, "It doesn't matter!"

Sometimes Feldman may do Monday Matters, but not release it on a Monday.

It doesn't matter!

Last week, there was no Monday Matters. I figured that Feldman was doing something more important.

It doesn't matter!

Well, there was no Monday Matters today either, and Feldman took the time to explain why. It turns out that the current showings of Monday Matters are funded by a government agency; Feldman has chosen not to disclose which agency is funding the show, but he does provide some detail about the conversations between himself and the agency on reviving Monday Matters.

Feldman then states:

Anyhoo, this agency has been impacted by the shutdown and they asked that the show be put on hold until they are fully funded again.

The Republicans and Democrats inside the Beltway who have been fighting over government funding were probably able to predict some of the results of a failure to pass a budget or a continuing resolution. Perhaps they predicted that people would be upset when the NASA social media websites stopped sharing goodies. Perhaps they predicted that it would become more difficult to track flu outbreaks or unemployment. But I seriously doub that any of the politicians predicted that the shutdown would bring a temporary close to a Loren Feldman video series.



Oh well, it doesn't matter. As long as they don't try to pry the puppets from Feldman's hands.

Now I know that some of you are saying that Feldman should just go ahead and produce the videos anyway. Unfortunately, there may be a law against that. Just ask Catholic priests who contract with the U.S. military:

The U.S. government shutdown is affecting religious services in the U.S. military, as the military has furloughed as many as fifty Catholic chaplains because of the partial government shutdown.

The furloughed chaplains were not allowed to celebrate weekend Mass, and Todd Starnes reports for Fox News that at least one chaplain was told that he would be subjected to disciplinary action if he engaged in ministry activity.

While some claim that this is part of Obama's continuing war on religious people, Homeland Security News Wire does not agree.

The decision to ban contract priest from offering their services, even voluntarily, may be the result of more prosaic consideration having to do with the Anti-Deficiency Act (ADA), though. The ADA codifies the Constitutional requirement that “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by Law.” Federal officials are prohibited from entering into contracts, incurring obligations, or performing activities without having a current appropriation. ADA specifically restricts acceptance of voluntary services or personal services beyond authorized levels “except for emergencies involving the safety of human life or the protection of property.”

From a legal standpoint, the service of Catholic priests does not impact emergencies involving the safety of human life (oddly enough, Catholic priests are usually pro-life, so this claim could be disputed). And apparently Loren Feldman's video services aren't needed in emergency situations either.

LinkedIn is weird, the October 3rd edition

Last night I spent a little bit of time on my LinkedIn profile. While on LinkedIn, I saw the box at the top of the screen that allowed me to endorse people for various suggested skills. I would be presented with a name, and a suggested endorsement. These endorsement suggestions fall into three categories.

The first category is "Yes, the person has this skill." There were a few of those obvious ones.

The second category is "LinkedIn, you're #durnk." In these cases, I knew for a fact that the person did not have this skill.

The third category is "I don't know." I'll give you an illustration. At my company I work with a number of engineers. I worked more closely with some of them during my product management days, but do so less now that I'm in proposals. Even when I was in product management, I wouldn't necessarily know the tools that every one of the engineers was using - and these days, I have even less exposure to this part of their work. So when I'm asked whether engineer X should be endorsed for Agile methodologies, I pause. "Well," I say to myself, "person X presumably keeps up with the industry, and probably has had some exposure to Agile, but I don't really know."

In my case, I end up NOT endorsing people in the third category. But because endorsements only require a single click, I'm sure that some LinkedIn users have no hesitation endorsing people in the third category - and even in the second category ("I know that person Y doesn't know this, but LinkedIn suggested it and it looks good").

So if you're a LinkedIn user and wonder why you're getting bizarre endorsements, now you know why.

But endorsement snafus were nothing compared to the results from the change made to my job history. No, I haven't left MorphoTrak, but I figured that since I've been doing this blogging thing for nearly ten years now, I might as well list it on my LinkedIn profile. It's obviously a marketable skill, complementary to the writing that I do for my day job, so I might as well get credit for it. So I added this:

LinkedIn requires you to list an employer name, so I wrote "self-employed." Technically I DO receive compensation for my blogging, but let's just say that it's not enough to pay the mortgage.

I then took care to list the blogging position BELOW my current position, so that there would be no confusion.

LinkedIn, however, blasted a message to my contacts, telling them to congratulate me on my new job.

When I next checked LinkedIn, I had received two messages from former co-workers, one congratulating me on my freelancing career, and the other wondering how MorphoTrak let me get away. I had to explain to both of them that I was still with MorphoTrak.

Oh well. At least LinkedIn doesn't send me bizarre job suggestions like Monster has been doing. (I'm not updating my Monster resume with this information; who knows how many odd blogging job suggestions I would get?)

The Department of State isn't COMPLETELY shut down - exchange student local coordinator training is still functional

As you may have heard, people within the Beltway are going through a bit of unpleasantness right now. It's referred to as a Federal government shutdown, unless you work for Fox News, which refers to this as a "slimdown" rather than a shutdown. And frankly, Fox News is right. I have a relative who is deployed in a war zone right now; he wasn't told to come home. Even the famous incident a few days ago in which veterans toured the closed World War II memorial showed that at least the (National) Park Police are still on the job.

And automated websites are on the job also. I think.

As I have previously mentioned, I serve as a volunteer with Youth for Understanding USA, one of many organizations that manage exchange student programs. In these programs, students from foreign countries spend a semester or year in the United States, or students from the United States spend time in a foreign country. All of these exchange programs are monitored by the U.S. Department of State, and the State Department requires that volunteers (or, in State Department terms, "local coordinators"), complete annual training once a year. The training consists of a review of the relevant State Department regulations, followed by a 30 question multiple choice test that has to be completed by the local coordinator. You need to get 27 correct answers (out of 30) to pass the test and be certified for another year.

Luckily for me, all of this is automated, requiring no manual intervention by State Department personnel. (Unless the computer goes down.) Therefore, I was able to complete the training and the test. (I scored 30 out of 30, not that I'm bragging or anything.)

However, there's one thing that I don't know - is the Department of State's notification to the exchange organization (in my case YFU USA) also automated? I didn't take any chances; I sent an e-mail to YFU staff letting them know that I completed the requirement.

In praise of travel agents

Author Elizabeth Becker was interviewed by Sales and Marketing Management, and at one point priased travel agents:

I gained a renewed respect for travel agents after traveling around the world for this book.

Sales and Marketing Management asked a follow-up question:

You mentioned in an interview on your website that you learned that lesson the hard way. Can we get more details?

Becker replied:

I conducted an experiment on my own to see how well I could navigate and act as my own travel agent through Brazil. Even though I had the map out and I went through all of these different websites, I had the craziest itinerary and I eventually had to drop one leg of it because I was crisscrossing the entire country. It was like a spaghetti noodle. It was horrible.

Becker's book is entitled Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism. A review of the book, which explores some of Becker's criticism of what is happening to travel, can be found here.

My PC (private cloud) conversation with .@mitchwagner

Mitch Wagner has held a number of tech journalism jobs, and is currently the editor-in-chief of Internet Evolution. He also maintains an active Google+ presence, and threw this into his stream yesterday (on the first day of the Obamacard insurance exchanges).

Problems on the launch day of a big system like this are predictable. But if the technical glitches don't get resolved fast, they'll badly hurt Obamacare politically.

The comments that Wagner received were generally from a technical perspective, noting that this was a technical problem that could easily be solved. For example, Chris Lau asked, "How hard is it to forecast the volume?" My reply touched upon the business issues that go beyond the technical issues.

Forecasting the volume is the easy part. The hard part is getting corporate approval to build a system to support peak loads rather than average loads - CFOs balk at those kind of so-called "unnecessary" expenses, especially when they are orders of magnitude above a non-peak load system.

Think about it. Go to your Chief Financial Officer and say that for most of the six month period, and thereafter, the requirements can be handled by a $10 million system, but because of peak load at the beginning of the six months and at the end of the six months, you need a $100 million system. The chances of your CFO saying, "Wow, let's spend all of that money and handle the peak loads properly!" is nil. (Which is why many technologists make lousy CFOs, and vice versa.)

Anticipating the possible next question - why not use cloud technology to scale to meet the peak load? - I continued my comment on Wagner's feed:

And before you reply "cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud," remember that the sites are dealing with medical data, and therefore the site managers will want ironclad assurances from the cloud provider that they are completely compliant with every sub-paragraph of HIPAA. They'd rather risk a site shutdown than a lawsuit.

In my day job I mostly deal with law enforcement customers, and many of those customers in my home country have to deal with something known as the CJIS Security Policy. It's not HIPAA, but it has its own set of regulations. Can a cloud provider be expected to effectively handle HIPAA AND the CJIS Security Policy AND the hundreds of other government regulations?

That's where Mitch Wagner entered the conversation. He began:

Private cloud private cloud private cloud private cloud private cloud private cloud private cloud.

Then Wagner continued:

We're talking about the US government here-- hardly a startup. It would make sense to build elasticity to handle extraordinary loads that would be available to any federal agency that needs it. One day it's used for a rush in demand at healthcare.gov. On April 15 it would be used for last-minute tax filers. And so forth.

Wagner has a point. And IBM's Sujatha Perepa recently talked about government cloud use:

While cloud deployments are mainly considered to contain costs by sharing services and infrastructures, government agencies have also devised innovative means of ensuring compliance across the enterprise (FedRAMP, for example). They’ve also been able to lower barriers to new business creation. Additionally, cloud adoption is helping governments to improve business flexibility despite their back-end silo systems. The U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, DOJ, USDA, Department of Education and more have been early cloud adopters, setting the trend and direction for others to follow.

The federal government isn’t solely relying on the same cloud computing model that hosts some of your favorite consumer applications delivered via the cloud like Netflix or Instagram. The private cloud environments they operate in definitely leverage some of the characteristics of elasticity in those public clouds but they need to be more reliable to handle mission critical workloads. That’s why IDC says that by FY 2014 U.S. Federal government spending on private cloud will be $1.7 billion vs. just $118.3 million on public cloud.

Now I'll certainly admit that there are challenges in allowing the IRS to use cloud services one day, and allowing Health & Human Services to allow it the next - you may know how I feel about the chances of bureaucracies working together - but there's admittedly a better chance of having U.S. government agencies share a private cloud than to share services on, say, Amazon.

And I may even be wrong about that:

AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS GovCloud (US) framework adheres to U.S. International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) regulations as well as the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMPSM) requirements. FedRAMP is a U.S. government-wide program that provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. AWS GovCloud (US) has received an Agency Authorization to Operate (ATO) from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) utilizing a FedRAMP accredited Third Party Assessment Organization (3PAO).

Leveraging the HHS authorization, U.S. government agencies can evaluate AWS GovCloud (US) for their applications and workloads, complete their own authorizations to use AWS, and deploy systems into the AWS environment.

Hmm...wonder if they support the CJIS security requirements?

Ignoring gender differences in B2B marketing is not an option - or it's a bunch of options

From the executive summary to How Women Decide by Cathy Benko and Bill Pelster:

Interviews with experienced buyers of professional services in 18 large organizations—and observations of meetings with hundreds of prospective and existing clients—revealed significant differences between men and women as B2B buyers. For example, women see a meeting with a candidate service provider as a chance to explore options in collaboration with an expert resource, while men see that event as a near-final step in the process, when they are narrowing down and choosing among options.

Susan Rosengarten concludes:

A good understanding of these differences has obvious advantages. If a company greets a female client with the same mindset and meeting schedule they would present to a male client, time is wasted. As a result client and contractor alike may lose out on advantageous opportunities.

So John Beale appeared before a Congressional committee this morning - uh, wait a minute...

Famous political commentator Robert Plant once observed that "sometimes words have two meanings." This used to make me wonder, but now I pretty much take it for granted.

For the past decade, we have been engaged in something that is called a "war" on terror. However, no one has been drafted to serve in this war, there has been no rationing, and most importantly, Congress has not actually declared any such war. (Of course, Congress has not declared war since 1941, despite a number of post-World War II incidents in which the American military has shot at people.)

Another instance of these multi-meaning words was revealed in passing in this item from Fox News:

A high-ranking federal Environmental Protection Agency official who admitted to cheating the government out of nearly $1 million by pretending to be a secret agent, smugly refused to answer questions from lawmakers Tuesday, invoking the

Uh, wait a minute. This Congressional committee hearing occurred this morning. As in the morning of Tuesday, October 1.

In other words, the hearing itself was taking place despite the fact that we were under a government "shutdown." As I've noted previously, the government does not shut down, even when it says it has shut down. Fox News itself refers to the current government status as a "slimdown," because so much of the Federal government is still operating. Many parts of the Federal government - including, ironically, the health care exchanges - are unaffected by the current budget squabbling.

Now perhaps a case can be made that we should continue to pay our military who are in war zones. And perhaps a case can be made that we need to pay for law enforcement at National Park sites.

But do we need to pay to hold a Congressional hearing for some loser who claimed to be a CIA agent for years - and for all of the people who believed him?

Heaven help us if some crisis occurs in one of the sports leagues, and Congress sees fit to hold hearings on it during this so-called "shutdown."

Standards! (Lenovo, PayPal, Apple, and you - or why people are barking at the new iPhone)

I've talked about standards before, and how standards are developed. It's kind of like the way sausages are made, or (as we currently deal with a partial government shutdown) how legislation is passed.

Apple's recent phone and its inclusion of biometric capability have merited comment from one Michael Barrett of the FIDO Alliance. Barrett's day job is with PayPal, as its Chief Information Security Officer. PayPal would obviously be concerned about the security of mobile phones, and has therefore been one of the active members in the FIDO Alliance, which includes other members such as Blackberry, Google, Lenovo, and LG Electronics.

Apple is not a member of the FIDO Alliance - something that USA Today has noted, and Barrett has acknowledged.

Touch ID, for the moment, is not FIDO-compliant. Apple spokeswoman Natalie Kerris declined comment.

However, Barrett says Touch ID could easily be adapted to FIDO. "Our view is that it's possible Apple might choose to start using FIDO, but that's probably a couple of years out."

I didn't see Samsung on the list either, by the way, nor did I see Nokia. Google's membership in the FIDO Alliance presumably includes Motorola Mobility.

Why should Apple, Nokia, or Samsung care about the FIDO Alliance? Here's what the Alliance says:

The Alliance plans to change the nature of authentication by developing specifications that define an open, scalable, interoperable set of mechanisms that supplant reliance on passwords to securely authenticate users of online services.

We'll see what happens.

By the way, I originally heard about this via findBIOMETRICS - another FIDO Alliance member. And - no surprise - findBIOMETRICS is in favor of this:

The industry is moving ahead full steam, with fingerprint sensors no longer a question to ask but a reality to deal with. A common set of standards like the FIDO protocol is a clear necessary step in making this coming generation of everyday logical access a positive, potentially historical shift in the way humans interact with the virtual world.

However, Apple has a history of going its own way, and positioning this as a competitive advantage. I don't really see any incentive for Apple to associate itself with (ugh!) mere ANDROID folks. They're bozos, you know.

Science! (Pauling, Streight, Feldman, and you)

Many businesses - heck, all businesses - must deal with the impact of Science. Science (and I capitalize the word intentionally) is an Absolute Certainty which all businesses must acknowledge.

Well, it's an Absolute Certainty - except when it isn't.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote the story of Nobel Prize winner Dan Shechtman, and how his quasicrystal advances in science were greeted by the scientific community. OK, they weren't greeted so well. In fact, one person commented, "There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists." And no, that person was not from Bob Jones University. The person who made that statement was Linus Pauling.

Initially, I made no connection between the Shechtman story and the recent story involving Popular Science's discontinuation of comments - although some of Popular Science's statements struck me as somewhat odd.

Comments can be bad for science. That's why, here at PopularScience.com, we're shutting them off.

Re-read that first sentence again.

Comments can be bad for science.

Popular Science got into specifics a little bit later.

As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter....

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television.

So, as they put it, Popular Science is defending itself against the Neanderthal yahoos (not that they'd appreciate being called that) who do not accept the "scientific certainty" espoused by the scientific community. (Although frankly, I'm not aware of a time when such a "popular consensus" universally existed.)

But Steven Streight wonders if something else is going on.

Science can't hold its own against pseudo-science trolls?

Science must run and hide from the mean old unorthodox thinkers?

Wait a minute. What is Popular Science shutting down?

Debate. Discussion. Conversation. Argument. Clarification. Confirmation. Dissent. Criticism. Questioning.

In other words, the interaction and testing of other minds and ideas, which is the very foundation of scientific progress.

Now Loren Feldman has noted that most comments are truly inane, and that if someone had something worthwhile to say, that person could use his or her own platform, rather than piggybacking on Popular Science's platform. And he's probably right, and I bet that even Steven Streight would agree that Feldman has a point here.

Of course, the ramification of this is that the debate on popular science will not take place at Popular Science.

To make ads not feel like ads...don't show bad ads

In the ideal world (or, to some, the ideal nightmare), advertisements will be perfectly attuned to your needs.

For example, let's say that it's 5:30 pm and you're working late. You want to grab a quick bite to eat, but you're not sure where to go. In the ideal world, an advertisement would appear for a quick service restaurant within a short driving distance of your workplace, for a type of food that you enjoy.

We're not in that ideal world yet. Just recently, I noticed that Facebook presented a day trading ad to me. Note to Facebook: when I buy stocks, I don't plan to unload them within minutes or hours.

Apparently Facebook is listening:

"When deciding which ad to show to which groups of people, we are placing more emphasis on feedback we receive from people about ads, including how often people report or hide an ad," Facebook said.

"If someone always hides ads for electronics, we will reduce the number of those types of ads that we show to them," the company said.

To which the proper response is...duh!

Now I will grant that it may be appropriate at times to show advertisements that people aren't seeking. People may not know that a particular service is available, so they wouldn't think of seeking information about it. In this case, the ad is informative and could potentially lead to a purchase.

But when people express displeasure toward a particular ad, you don't gain anything by showing the ad to them anyway. Showing me a day trading ad isn't going to make me into a daytrader, no matter how hard you try.

Now the only thing that needs to happen is for advertisers to make ads that are so compelling that people will want to see them, rather than reading the TV show or web page that is displaying the ad.

And considering the quality of TV shows and web pages today, that shouldn't be too hard to do.

Does Ellison's #oow13 no-show matter?

I waited about blogging about this for a few days because of work commitments. But my wait gives me the opportunity to look at the topic from a broader perspective.

The topic, you ask? While I didn't blog about it, I did write about it on Google+ - and even then, my opinions were divided.

The topic, you ask? Well, doesn't everybody know about it? Isn't everyone talking about it? I mean, back on September 24, everyone was talking about it. OK, well, a few people were talking about it, but you can bet that if you were in a specific corner of San Francisco, tens of thousands of people were talking about it.

The topic, you ask? OK, I'll get to it.

Traditionally at the annual Oracle OpenWorld conference, Larry Ellison gives two keynote speeches - one on Sunday night, and the other later in the week. He gave the Sunday night keynote, but when Tuesday rolled around, he wasn't there.

Oracle Corp CEO Larry Ellison skipped a keynote address at his software company's massive annual customer conference on Tuesday to be on San Francisco Bay as his Oracle Team USA made a comeback in the America's Cup.

Hundreds of Oracle OpenWorld attendees streamed out of San Francisco's Moscone conference center after an Oracle executive announced that Ellison was still on a boat and would not attend the keynote presentation, a focal point of the annual event.

The event reminded me of something that happened back at Oracle OpenWorld 2007. When Ellison gives his keynotes, many people try to get into the room to see them. Even though I was at Oracle OpenWorld 2007, I didn't bother to try to get into the room; I was in another room in the Moscone Center, watching the keynote via television. Therefore, I didn't realize that when Ellison left the stage during a demo, a number of people streamed out of the hall where Ellison had been speaking.

Those people weren't at Oracle OpenWorld to learn about Oracle.

Those people were at Oracle OpenWorld to see Larry Ellison. And when Ellison left the stage, there was no reason for those people to stay. (In the end, the last laugh was on those people, because after the demo ended, Ellison returned to the stage for Q&A, and the people who walked out weren't there.)

Fast forward to 2013, when Ellison didn't even show for his own keynote. As one can expect, reaction at the time was immediately negative. Barb Darrow at GigaOM:

Frankly, in the past Ellison’s second keynotes at Oracle OpenWorld were proof positive that less can be more. Still, if the CEO of a company under threat can’t be bothered to show up at his own massive customer event (Oracle claims 60,000 attendees this year), shareholders might wonder what’s up.

Chris Kanaracus at PC World:

Boris Aguirre, a systems integrator and Oracle professional from Ecuador, had stood in line for 30 to 40 minutes. “I felt like the America’s Cup thing was more important [to Ellison] than the event,” he said. “From the perspective of my clients, I feel it was not good.”

Aguirre thought that Thomas Kurian, Ellison's replacement, was "boring." But the more damning assessment came from an analyst:

Ellison’s move did little for Oracle’s customer relations, said analyst Michael Krigsman of consulting firm Asuret.

“While Oracle asks customers to prioritize its products over competitors, Ellison made the decision that racing, his passion and hobby, is more important than customers,” Krigsman said via email.

Certainly, in the heat of the moment on September 24, people were angry. But after the entire week was over and people started filing their recaps, the perception was a little different. In Silicon Angle, Maria Deutscher started her recap by speaking about the announcements in Ellison's first keynote. The second non-keynote wasn't even mentioned. Larry Dignan at ZDNet did the same.

The truth is, there is so much going on at Oracle OpenWorld that the lack of one of the two Ellison keynotes didn't really matter, in terms of information shared. There are all sorts of sessions at Oracle OpenWorld that provide all sorts of information. Although I didn't check, I'd be willing to bet that Oracle added extra technical sessions to discuss the in-memory stuff, for example.

And if you're being honest, you'll admit that Ellison's no-show did NOT send a signal to the entire company. I don't think there's an Oracle sales rep who is now saying, "You know, I think I'll skip that meeting with the customer and go play golf instead."

And even in terms of corporate governance, Oracle wasn't impacted by Larry's "I'm on a boat" routine. I mean, the company has TWO presidents. Talk about built-in redundancy.

So while the no-show looked really bad on Tuesday, it's probably all but forgotten a week later, unless you have an ax to grind with Ellison anyway.

But perhaps the Larry groupies will think twice before waiting in long lines to get into Moscone North for a 2014 keynote. You can just watch it on TV, after all.

Blackberry - victim of disruption, or victim of lack of innovation? Or lack of marketing?

First, the news:

Well, that didn't take long. BlackBerry plans to become a private company in a deal that is worth just $4.7 billion.

BlackBerry's largest shareholder, Canadian insurance company Fairfax Financial, hopes to buy the smartphone maker for $9 per share.

Others have a few weeks to issue competing offers, but regardless of what happens, the value of Blackberry is clearly lower than it was just a few years ago.

Tad Donaghe had the following reaction:

BuhBye BlackBerry

Another victim of Disruption!

But is Blackberry truly a victim of disruption? Certainly the case can be made, based upon this statement in the CNN article:

In the corporate world, BlackBerry once held a lofty position as the king of the enterprise world. But companies have been increasingly willing to let employees work on phones they choose -- a phenomenon known as Bring Your Own Device. Those employees are overwhelmingly selecting iPhones and Android smartphones.

OK, so Blackberry thrived in a period in which enterprises chose the phones for their employees, and after that business model was disrupted, Blackberry's fortunes fell.

But there's more to it than that.

Blackberry's earlier success was not solely due to business lock-up. It was also due to the features that the Blackberry phones offered; features that, for a time, met the needs of business users.

The ability for corporate workers to buy iPhones and Android phones should not, in and of itself, have sounded the death knell for Blackberry. As a phone provider with an emphasis on the enterprise market, Blackberry should have leveraged its enterprise advantage to encourage developers to provide enterprise-level applications. I'll grant that it's a hard sell to get people to develop apps for a platform, as Microsoft is discovering, but if Blackberry had done this, then it wouldn't matter whether corporate users could buy iPhones or Galaxies or Droids or whatever.

Unfortunately, that isn't what happened, and it got to the point that a single company's announcement of Blackberry platform support was deemed newsworthy.

But there are others who say that Blackberry's woes have nothing to do with market disruption, or lack of apps, or bad software. To Lucas Atkins, Blackberry 10 is a technically superior product suffering from a single failure - marketing.

BlackBerry has yet again failed to successfully market the new products…properly.

Sure, we have the whole “Keep Moving” thing and that odd deal with Alicia Keys, but aside from carrier-own advertising that’s it. The SuperBowl commercial looked as though BlackBerry would take the bulls by the horn. Instead, it just seems like wasted money. Did anyone really get intrigued to learn more about BlackBerry 10 when they’re not told anything at all?

Even if you're not in an industry that demands innovation, and even if you're not in an industry with disruptive factors, poor marketing will kill you every time.

If you are REALLY worried that the National Security Agency will hack into your iPhone and grab your fingerprint features...

(CAVEAT: This is my personal opinion only, and does not necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer or any association with which I am...um...associated.)

The announcement of the fingerprint recognition technology in the forthcoming iPhone 5s, coupled with the revelation that the National Security Agency has cracked just about every secure encryption method known to humankind, has resulted in a panic among some people.

These people are now convinced that the NSA will hack the iPhone 5s, grab your fingerprint, and do Bad Things.

So let's construct the use case.

Assume for the moment that I have an iPhone 5s (doubtful assumption, but humor me for now).

Furthermore, assume that the NSA wants to specifically target me to get the goods on me. (This is different from the other NSA use case, in which the NSA would conceivably grab information from every single iPhone. That's a more complex use case that I'll ignore at the moment.)

Furthermore, assume that the NSA knows that my fingerprints are NOT already on file with the FBI, the DHS, or any state and local agency. (In other words, I haven't already committed a crime, I don't have a concealed carry permit like [REDACTED] does, etc.)

So now the NSA wants to grab my fingerprints. While Apple itself doesn't have my prints, it does have information on the phone that is registered to me, and presumably the NSA can exert its muscle to grab that information. The NSA then targets my phone, eavesdrops on it, and breaks into the super-duper chip that includes the information on my finger. I would assume, incidentally, that my finger image is not stored there, but just a subset of fingerprint features.

So the NSA now has my fingerprint features, but without the image. At this point, some modifications may be required to make the fingerprint features compatible with the FBI's fingerprint system, or with the fingerprint system used by the DHS. This would be mere guesstimates, or perhaps the features are close enough to search as is.

At this point the NSA approaches the FBI and DHS and says that these fingerprint features need to be searched against their systems. Because all bureaucrats always cooperate with each other (and you know how I feel about that assumption), the FBI and DHS drop whatever they're doing and search my features against their databases.

Now what? Well, not much. Despite what the TV shows say, these systems aren't 100% reliable, and don't claim to be. Some person is going to have to review a list of possible candidates that match the fingerprint features that were captured - and that's going to be awful hard to do when you don't have the original fingerprint image.

But let's say that they do this, determine that the print matches the prints of someone who is on the FBI's Most Wanted List. Now let's make the leap to assume that this means that I myself am therefore that person on the Most Wanted List.

Unfortunately, this search result isn't going to stand up in a court of law, so the NSA will have to get the super-secret court to authorize my execution under the super-secret "Let's Execute Possible Terrorists" Act, passed in the wee hours of September 12, 2001 when Congress was drunk.

So, the NSA has gone through all of this trouble - a lot of trouble - to break into my iPhone 5s and do something with the stuff that they extracted from it.

And there are people out there who actually believe that the NSA would do all of this.

If you are one of those people, then I ask you this - when you go out in public, do you wear a veil?

"Of course not!" you respond. "I ain't one of them danged Muslim terrorists!"

So, if you don't go around wearing a veil, then your face is exposed in public for everyone to see. The NSA wouldn't have to hack into your iPhone; an agency could simply take your picture while you're coming out of the Walmart or Whole Foods or whatever.

And you don't need a fancy-dancy biometric system to perform a facial match. People have been doing that for thousands of years by using their eyeballs.

Why are you so concerned about your finger, but not your face?

But when will we get the Red Stripe operating system?

Continuing in my "I am not trendy" ways, I must confess that I did not hear about the Red Flag operating system until 14 years after its release.

But I have an excuse.

Back in the early 2000s, I was managing a product that was (and is) export controlled. Under those circumstances, the last thing that we'd want to do would be to include a Chinese operating system as part of the product bill of materials.

So I was blissfully ignorant of the Red Flag operating system, but Doc Searls was not:

Red Flag Linux first appeared in August 1999, when it was created by the Institute of Software at the Chinese Academy of Sciences....[T]he purpose of Red Flag was to reduce domination of the Chinese computer market by Microsoft's Windows operating systems....

The Chinese government doesn't just bristle at Microsoft's near-absolute market share of PC operating systems sold in China. It's as uncomfortable with operating systems that are opaque to the core. As a matter of routine, it is the custom of Customs to ask "what's in there?" And the routine answer from Microsoft is "none of your business." To a government concerned with security, that isn't always an acceptable answer.

It's always good to look at the perspectives of others. From my "Commies are evil" frame of mind, I'd be wondering what the Chinese would be putting in their operating system. It shouldn't be surprising to realize that the Chinese were equally concerned about what the Americans were putting in "their" operating system, even though the U.S. government can't control what private software companies do...uh, scratch that.

A few years later, Chinese efforts to promote Red Flag Linux met some success.

Currently [in 2007], the government is responsible for purchasing accounts for more than one quarter of China's Linux desktop software market, and the homegrown Red Flag Linux leads the government market.

Unfortunately, there were also some challenges.

Despite its rapid growth, China's Linux desktop software industry faces some problems. Piracy is still an issue. Using pirated Windows can be easier and cheaper than using a Linux desktop OS. Zhen Zhongyuan, vice president of Red Flag, says that China's Linux desktop market would increase as a "geometric series" every time piracy decreases 1%.

So in this case, piracy was not only hurting the foreign (American) operating system provider, but was also hurting the domestic Chinese providers who couldn't compete with the free operating systems.

To me, the whole idea of a national operating system is fascinating. It's entirely possible that the United States itself could come up with its own national operating system...oh wait, we have:

Outside of the U.S., there are several "national" Linux distributions. These include China's Red Flag Linux; Turkey's Pardus, and the Philippines' Bayahnian....But, there hasn't been a national American Linux desktop distribution... until now [2011].

The Software Protection Initiative (SPI) under the direction of the Air Force Research Laboratory and the US Department Of Defense recently created Lightweight Portable Security (LPS). Like the name indicates, this is a small Linux desktop distribution that's designed for secure use.

So now we just have to wait for the Jamaican technology community to launch a Red Stripe distribution to compete with Red Hat and Red Flag.

Maybe they can play Poppyfarmville - Blueline meets a vertical social networking need

Another police related story, this one from Fox News:

The final stages are near completion for the launch of a law enforcement social media network designed exclusively for the men and women in blue.

Created by former high-profile New York City police commissioner and Los Angeles Police Chief Bill Bratton, BlueLine is being touted as a site where officers can share their expertise, insight and information securely through video, instant messaging, videoconferencing and screen share capabilities.

Why not use Facebook, Google+, or LinkedIn for such networking? Because in this particular profession, there are people who kinda sorta want to kill you:

"Our focus is to have a walled community where you're verified and authenticated, so you have a safe form of communication with law enforcement, analysts and administrators," said David Riker, Bratton Technologies' president.

That wall of security is extremely important, said longtime Los Angeles Police Capt. Sean Malinowski, who has a group of officers testing BlueLine....

Malinowski said most officers have some safety and privacy concerns using social media sites due to the dangers associated with their jobs.

"They try not to be as traceable because there are threats made against officers all of the time," said Malinowski, who is also married to a police officer. "You try not to be paranoid about it, but it does cross your mind."

BlueLine will require multiple verifications for members of law enforcement to join and enter the network, said Jack Weiss, Bratton Technologies' chief strategy officer. He added that the platform will be housed in a secure data center that is compliant by the U.S. Department of Defense and the FBI's Criminal Justice Information Services.

And yes, in this case "FBI" does mean the Federal Bureau of Investigation, not Frontier Bookings International.

Oh, and incidentally, there probably won't be a "Poppyfarmville" game on the service. The creators say that the service is more akin to LinkedIn rather than Facebook, although it will have video capabilities.

Too many acronyms - EBTS

Acronyms are a shorthand that people in a particular profession can use to refer to something quickly. But confusion reigns when an acronym is used outside of that profession. Here's the latest example.

As part of my job, I spend a considerable amount of time dealing with the Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification, a standard used by U.S. state agencies to send biometric data to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, "Electronic Biometric Transmission Specification" is a mouthful, so we bio-folks just call it the "EBTS."

However, you'd figure that four-letter acronym was pretty common, and that someone else would use it for an entirely different purpose. When I was reading this ebts.info page, my theory was put to the test.

At EBTS, we don't book everything. We book only quality.

This makes sense to me. While the FBI would ideally like to receive all biometric data for serious crimes, sometimes the data just can't be used. In that case, the FBI sends the data back to the submitting agency with a rejection notice.

But I continued to read ebts.info, and things got a little strange.

Our staff personally visits many hotels and properties every year, to compile recommendations that meet our rigorous standards.

Now with all of the debate about supposedly expensive conventions attended by government bureaucrats, is that something that you really want to advertise? Frankly, I've been impressed by the professionalism of the FBI people that I've encountered at the International Association for Identification conference and other conferences, but I'm sure there's some rowdy FBI person who goes to a convention and whoops it up. Under those circumstances, you may not want to advertise all of these hotel visits.

Unless...

We stand behind what we sell 100%, a guarantee you'll never get from an online travel site.

With over thirty years of combined experience in the travel industry, we've cultivated a portfolio of contacts that we'll use to help you create an unforgettable vacation. The relationships we've developed, permit us to offer our clientele room upgrades, access to special amenities, and rare opportunities—the touches that turn ordinary vacations into cherished memories.

Elena Borrero Travel Services, LLC offers exceptional travel experiences designed to help you explore the adventures of travel.

Yes, this EBTS is a travel agency, named after Elena Borrero. As far as I know, Borrero does not spend her days staring at fingerprint ridges.

And neither do the people from Frontier Booking International, a talent agency founded by the late Ian Copeland. Ian's brother Stewart was a member of the Police - the band, not a law enforcement agency. Another brother started IRS, the record company. And Ian and Stewart's father worked for the CIA - in this case, the real Central Intelligence Agency.

The first play in the OFL - taking (American) football to its illogical conclusion

Hello, this is Marv Albert, and I'd like to welcome you to the inaugural OFL Football game.

Everyone has heard about OFL Football ever since it was first discussed in October 2013. Now here it is, September 2014, and everyone is waiting to see how OFL Football actually plays out. But before the first snap, let's look at how we got here.

Everyone agrees that the OFL movement began with a telephone call from well-known sports radio caller Chris in Syracuse. He suggested that the NFL needed to change its rules to emphasize what people really want to see, and if the NFL didn't do it, then someone else would.

The comments from Chris in Syracuse happened to be picked up by a Huffington Post blogger, and within the space of one weekend, everyone within the Silicon Valley tech community was talking about it. One week later, normal people were talking about it also, but Silicon Valley remained the leader in the new movement. Silicon Valley heavyweights championed a crowdsourcing platform to come up with the new set of rules, and then the funding for the league itself was crowdsourced. Since the traditional television networks didn't want to touch the league - they didn't want to endanger their revenue stream from the existing NFL - the rights to the league ended up becoming a bidding war between some of the newer Internet platforms. Amazon won the bidding battle, which is why you're watching us via Amazon's website tonight. Feel free to click on the ads on the right of the screen; your coverage of the game will not be interrupted.

OK, now both teams are coming on to the field. Head coach Dan Fouts is leading the San Jose Enlightened onto the field, and we're waiting for the San Francisco Resistance to take the field also. Naming rights to the two teams in the league were purchased by Google, ensuring that the league would be profitable from day one, even if no one tuned in to the broadcast. However, according to the latest statistics that are available, an estimated 11 billion people have tuned in to watch this event.

Now Coach Fouts is giving final instructions to his quarterback. The teams, of course, were also crowdsourced, and the overwhelming favorite player of everyone became the starting quarterback for the San Jose Enlightened. Tim Tebow has finished his warmups, and is now leading his team onto the field.

Now for those of you who haven't paid attention to all of the OFL talk, you'll immediately notice a couple of major differences between the OFL and the NFL. The first is that the Enlightened is not lining up to receive a kickoff from the Resistance. That's because in OFL football, there IS no kickoff. The offense simply lines up at their own 20 yard line.

Now you've also noticed that San Francisco has not yet taken the field. Again, this is because of an OFL rules change. In the OFL, there is no defense. Other than that, it's the same as the NFL. The offense gets four downs to advance ten yards. If they are unable to do so, the opposing team takes the ball at its own 20. This resulted from the wisdom of the crowds, who wanted to see more offense. In that case, why bother with a defense? And the team owners like the arrangement also, since their personnel costs were cut in half. Actually, more than half, since there are no punters and no kickers. Extra points after touchdowns were eliminated because two point conversions bring more -

And Tebow is ready to begin the first play ever in the OFL, the Offensive Football League. Thousands of cell phones are taking pictures of this historic event. Tebow takes the snap, and he hands off - no, he doesn't hand off! Tebow is back to pass. With no defensive people rushing him, Tebow has time to throw his pass, unobstructed - and it's incomplete!

Anecdotal comments about Hightail (formerly YouSendIt) customer service - are they representative?

I have a free YouSendIt account that I occasionally use to distribute large business files, but I haven't had occasion to use it recently. I had heard that the company was now called Hightail, but hadn't investigated much...until Hightail e-mailed me a survey.

I completed the survey, then re-entered my e-mail address (Hightail has an iPad drawing). Hightail made a point of noting that the iPad winner would be announced on Facebook's page, and by the way, why don't you like our Facebook page to receive updates?

Incidentally, as far as I'm concerned this does not violate Facebook's rules prohibiting forced likes. I didn't have to like the page to participate in the contest. However, I figured I'd like the page and see what types of announcements Hightail has.

But when I got to the page, the interesting part wasn't the stuff from Hightail (when I viewed the page, Hightail hadn't posted any new content in several days). The interesting part was the stuff TO Hightail - namely, comments from customers on Hightail posts. And it appears that things aren't going well in Hightail-land.

Diane McHenry Poormon
Maybe the team should work a little harder on getting your product to work since buying you send it.

Bill Match Frame
You have the nerve to send me an email titled "Last chance to get four months free"? You have one week to fix your well documented file transfer problems or I am an Ex Customer! And don't bother posting any more of those "this is our top priority" notes. You have been saying this since you made the jump from Yousendit to Hightail. ONE WEEK!

Annie Owens-Seifert
Yeah, what's the deal? Since yousendit became hightail we don't get our files on time or at all and have to turn to other sources. Your support responses are placating followed by asking me to 'further describe my problems if they persist'. They persist. We used to run our business using yousendit.

Brandon Hadley
Absolutely NO help through customer service yet daily Facebook posts. Super frustrating. I'm not sure if you could possibly try harder to lose my business.

Now these statements themselves may not be indicative of anything - anecdotal evidence is not statistical. And for what it's worth, the Better Business Bureau list of complaints (all resolved) predate the company name change from YouSendIt to Hightail.

So how will Hightail compete against Dropbox? After a search, I found a page at the Hightail website - http://learn.hightail.com/t5/Products-and-Features/Hightail-vs-Dropbox/td-p/53290 - that compared the two services.

I just completed a race between the two apps to sync 3gb worth of data. Dropbox was able to complete the sync three times over before Hightail was even finished (Hightail never finished - I gave up)

Now, I really love the idea having my express account and cloud storage combined, but I just dont understand why Hightail desktop is so inferior....

Can you please explain? When can we expect improvements?

As you can see, this is a forum comment. To Hightail's credit, they don't delete negative comments. Unfortunately, no one from Hightail Customer Support tried to explain the difference (if you view the thread, you'll see that Hightail did answer a subsequent person's question about customer support hours).

The interesting part is the perception. According to the views of several of the people above, the problems began when YouSendIt became Hightail. I doubt that Hightail made any technical changes when they made the name change (but I could be wrong), but people perceive it that way. And they're taking out their frustrations on Facebook.

Perhaps Hightail will respond in some way. And even if they don't, these glitches - provided that they're temporary - may not be fatal. I don't know if anyone even remembers how many "fail whales" Twitter had in its early years.

I'll monitor this to see if I learn anything more.

And this Xiaomi executive used to work for one of Xiaomi's foreign suppliers

More confirmation of a trend that I've discussed previously.

Hugo Barra is a new executive at Xiaomi:

It's unclear what Barra's next role will be at Xiaomi, but it's likely he'll have a major hand in product development. Xiaomi produces high-end Android phones for the Chinese market.

As I've previously noted, the Chinese smartphone market is the largest smartphone market in the world.

So how did Barra get to Xiaomi? Presumably his accent didn't do him in. It turns out that Barra's former employer is a supplier to the Chinese smartphone market. Barra used to be on the Android team at Google.

(empo-tuulwey) Technology is NOT the "Superman" that the education sector has been waiting for

Ken Yeung has written a piece entitled Is technology the ‘Superman’ that the education sector has been waiting for? The answer is a qualified "no," but I'm even uncomfortable with Yeung's qualification, found at the end of the post.

Now, some of you might be reading this thinking that I’m claiming that technology is the end all be all cure for all that ails the education world. This is not what I’m saying — it is part of the solution.

I'm fine with that, but I'm not fine with Yeung's final sentence:

So while the physical classroom may be going through some seemingly never-ending turmoil, perhaps technology can offer a helping hand and be that one party that actually thinks about the children.

Why am I not fine with Yeung's concluding statement? I left a comment on Larry Rosenthal's share of the original post. Here's what I wrote in that comment (with the Google+ link to the Reed College page converted to a hyperlink).






A tool is not a way of life.

The failure of all of these endeavors is that they conceive of technology as the solution. Even with the author's caveats, the author still looks at technology as "that one party that actually thinks about the children."

Technology does not think.

One of the biggest lessons that I derived from my undergraduate education at +Reed College was a devotion to original sources. In its introductory Humanities courses, the college makes a point of having students read the original works of Greek and medieval authors. (I'll grant the point that we read them in translation, not in the original languages.)

Something like that - an approach to educating oneself - is much more important in the long run than figuring out an education delivery mechanism, or a testing mechanism, or proclaiming that learning is student-directed. It's one thing to have a high-resolution tablet that lets you read the latest tech publication - it's another thing entirely to know what to do when the latest tech publication appears on your screen.

(One example: when "Monday Matters" mentioned the Paul Graham accent issue, it was something that I hadn't heard of before. Now I could have just ended my inquiry by seeing what "Monday Matters" said about it, or I could have used wonderful search tools to see what CNET and Mashable and the Huffington Post said about it. However, I figured that the best thing to do would be to see what Paul Graham himself said about it. That took a bit more effort, since "technology" is designed to provide the source with the highest SEO, rather than the original source.)






And that ends the original comment.

Incidentally, if you haven't seen my comments on Paul Graham, they can be found here.

For Paul Graham, the world revolves around Silicon Valley. For you, it may not.

I was listening to Loren Feldman's Monday Matters and heard about a recent tempest in a teapot that I had missed. It seems that Paul Graham of Y Combinator said something about accents in a recent Inc. interview.

One quality that's a really bad indication is a CEO with a strong foreign accent. I'm not sure why. It could be that there are a bunch of subtle things entrepreneurs have to communicate and can't if you have a strong accent. Or, it could be that anyone with half a brain would realize you're going to be more successful if you speak idiomatic English, so they must just be clueless if they haven't gotten rid of their strong accent. I just know it's a strong pattern we've seen.

Apparently this caused a tempest, and Graham offered additional comments. Excerpt:

We have a lot of empirical evidence that there's a threshold beyond which the difficulty of understanding the CEO harms a company's prospects. And while we don't know exactly how, I'm pretty sure the problem is not merely that investors have trouble understanding the company's Demo Day presentation.

But for me, the interesting part of the explanation had nothing to do with accents.

Even talking on the phone rather than in person introduces a significant degradation. That's why we insist the groups we fund move to Silicon Valley for the duration of YC.

And therein lies a clue to what Graham is saying. Graham is right - to a point.

If you have a thick accent, the people IN SILICON VALLEY can't understand you. Not only does Paul Graham have a problem understanding you, but other people in Silicon Valley have a problem understanding you.

And that apparently is important, because everyone agrees that nothing happens outside of Silicon Valley. MySpace was doomed because of its Los Angeles location. TechCrunch was doomed because it replaced Michael Arrington with a New Yorker. The French are doomed because they take two hours to eat lunch. Silicon Valley itself is doomed because it has tract houses like the ones the unwashed have.

Psst...things happen outside of Silicon Valley. And if you're in Hyderabad and approach Indian Angel Network, India Angel Investment Network, or Venture Giant India for funding, they may also be concerned about accents - but in an entirely different way. Or take Robin Chan, who is based in several cities - San Francisco is only third on his list, behind New York and Beijing.

But who cares about India and China, anyway? The Indians and the Chinese do. And if you want to go after the largest smartphone market in the world, you're not going to talk to Paul Graham.

He has a funny accent.