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Be on the wave or under it™
The News – 07/30/02
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In this Issue:
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Recommended Reading
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I realize this is the only
newsletter you’ll ever need, but if you want more in-depth
detail, check out:
Stan Hustad’s
The Coaching Connection
Management Signature's
The Express Read
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Gathering Cruft
The second part of the Why
You Need to Get Hip to HIPAA series will appear in a future
SNS
Dr. Dobb’s Journal recently ran a hilarious
column on the phenomenon of cruft, the various eccentricities
and mal operations that accumulate the longer you have your computer.
Actually, here’s the full definition of cruft so that you can
add it to your daily vocabulary:
cruft /kruhft/ [back-formation
from {crufty}]
1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust
that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary [the
Tech Model Railroad Club, an ancient jargon dictionary started
at MIT] correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces
more. 2. n. The results of shoddy construction. 3. vt. [from `hand
cruft', pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something
normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}).
4. n. Excess; superfluous junk; used esp. of redundant or superseded
code. 5. [University of Wisconsin] n. Cruft is to hackers as gaggle
is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of
hackers".
This term is one of the oldest in the
jargon and no one is sure of its etymology, but it is suggestive
that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University which is part
of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics
department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the
windows appear to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln
Labs people may well have coined the term as a knock on the competition.
Dr. Dobb’s Journal columnist Verity Stob,
asserting that to control a problem your must first measure it,
has established 11 cruft levels for Windows PCs. Here are some
excerpts:
Cruft Force
0. Virgin.
Description: The "Connect to the Internet"
shortcut is still on the desktop, and the "How to use Windows"
dialog appears at logon. Menu animations and the various event-based
sound effects — even the dreaded Microsoft Sound — seem cheerful
and amusing.
Cruft Force
1. New.
Description: User has taken time to rename cutesy desktop
icons incorporating the first person singular possessive pronoun
[Ed. Note: for example, My Computer, My Documents, My Network
Places].
Cruft Force
2. Comfortable.
Description: User has now got around to resetting Explorer
so that "web content in folders" is suppressed. Something
has made a C:\TEMP directory in the proper place unasked, for
which mercy the user guiltily feels grateful.
Cruft Force
3. Lived-in.
Description: One time in seven when the user starts
Word or other Office 2000 app, instead of running, it pretends
it is installing itself for the first time and starts a setup
program.
Cruft Force
4. Middle-aged.
Description: Amount of time from screen showing "real"
Windows background to the logon box appearing is >30 seconds.
Sometimes cannot "browse" other machines on LAN. Get
first real BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death]. An extra disk of huge
capacity has been installed. CD-ROM moves from drive F: to drive
[:
Cruft Force
5. Worn out.
Description: Some time after bootup, always get a dialog
"A service has failed to start - BLT300." What is BLT300?
Nobody knows. Although one can manually remove/disable this service,
it always reappears two or three reboots later. If one double-clicks
a document icon, Word takes 4 minutes 30 seconds to start up.
But it still works fine if started as a program.
Cruft Force
6. Limping.
Description: "Web content in folders" Explorer
setting switches itself back on unbidden. "Setup" programs
start crashing while unpacking their own decompression DLLs.
Cruft Force
7. Wounded.
Description: No longer able to logon using original
account as the system freezes, so must logon as "Verity2"
or similar.
Cruft Force
8. Decrepit.
Description: A virus checker is installed at the insistence
of IT. This actually improves performance, apparently violating
Newton's laws. Blue Screens Of Death are served daily. The SETI
screen saver, like ET himself, encounters difficulty calling home
and despairing during an overnight run creates 312 copies of its
icon in an (impressively expanded) system tray that fills half
the screen. Successful connections to the LAN are very rare.
Cruft Force
9. Putrefaction.
Description: Can only see the 32-GB D:\ partition —
the one which has all the source code on it — at every third boot.
Starting Control Panel shows rolling torch animation. The applet
icons never appear.
Cruft Force
10. Expiry.
Description: Machine only runs in Safe mode at 16-color
800×600, and even then for about a minute and a half before BSODing.
Attempts to start an app are rewarded with a dialog "No font
list found." Ordinary dodges, such as reformatting the hard
disk(s) and starting again, are ineffective. Cruft has soaked
into the very fabric of the machine, and it should be disposed
of safely at a government-approved facility. There it will be
encased in cruft-resistant glass and buried in a residential district.
Stob plans on providing Cruft levels for
computers with other operating systems in the future, but I think
we can all relate to the idea that the longer you use your Windows
computer, the more annoying little eccentricities show up.
I’m fighting cruft now in our home computer,
which, although it is an HP 700MHz, insists on running like an
old 486 most of the time. Even using the HP rescue disk to return
it to its pristine state has been no help. Office still wants
to run setup, Zone Alarm can’t save your decisions regarding whether
a program can access the Internet, and McAfee antivirus takes
forever to decompress and install new updates. I fear we’re at
Cruft Force 9 and rapidly heading for 10.
Dr. Dobb's Journal
Briefly
Noted
- Shameless Self-Promotion Dept.: I’ve
put up the Nanotechnology
Resources directory I promised last November.
Also, check out the article I wrote for the Taylor Harkins newsletter entitled,
Do you hate your customers?
It continues the theme from my earlier article, analyzing
the media industry’s response to file sharing.
Finally, and at long last, the CTOMentor wireless white paper,
You Can Take It with You: Business Applications of Personal
Wireless Devices, is available at ITPapers.
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Gartner On Wireless
Readiness (Update): The recent Webinar
sponsored by Astea International and Intermec Technologies
mentioned in the previous
SNS is now available online. Gartner Group analyst Ken Dulaney
gave a really insightful presentation and I recommend it to
all who are interested in wireless.
Astea
- Funniest User Support Stories:
UK site Silicon.com is sponsoring a contest to find the funniest,
or dumbest, IT gaffes. Here’s the story I submitted:
Back
in 1995, when modems where somewhat new for many business
users, I got a support call escalated to me from a very angry
user. Two other people were unable to help this lady, who
couldn’t get connected to the Internet to use our software.
I ran through all the obvious questions: Is your browser installed?
Is the TCP/IP dialer installed? Did you try rebooting? During
the course of these questions, I routinely asked her, “Is
the phone line plugged in?” She replied yes, but I asked her
to check the back of her computer to be sure. “Yes, I told
you it was plugged in!” she snapped, indignant that I doubted
her. Finally, after many other questions, I asked her if the
phone line was plugged into the wall. After a short silence,
she asked, “What do you mean?” It seems she thought that the
phone line was acting as some sort of antenna, magically connecting
her to the Internet. She plugged it in, and everything began
to work. But she still somehow thought this was our fault,
and was still mad as she hung up.
Silicon.com
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JPEG Patented:
First it was CompuServe’s graphics format known as GIF
(which, by the way, is pronounced jif, like the peanut butter;
all of you who pronounce it with a hard ‘g’ please stop; see
this
or this
for more info from the guys who designed it). Following claims
by Unisys, which held the patent
for the LZW compression algorithm used in GIF, in 1995 CompuServe
had to inform anyone using the file format that a royalty was due to Unisys.
Naturally, this announcement
was met with outrage
by Internet users, since GIF was the dominant image format
used on Web pages (and still probably is). At the time many
users converted over to the JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts
Group) format, which, although it is a more efficient method
of compression, it is “lossy,” meaning some data is discarded
during compression.
Well, the free JPEG ride is over. Forgent (stupid name alert)
recently announced that the patent
of their subsidiary Compression Labs covered the JPEG image
compression method, and they would be asserting their rights.
It seems that soon we’ll all have to convert over to PNG
(standing for, depending on your degree of geekiness either
Portable Network Graphics or “PNG’s Not GIF”), a format started
by a lot of very mad people after the GIF fiasco.
Forgent
- Update on the InternetHoroscopes.com
Update: In the Wayback Machine last SNS, I wrote about
EasyScopes.com’s 1 million Euro suit against InternetHoroscopes.com.
EasyScopes claimed damages from InternetHoroscopes’ practice
of copying Web site text and reproducing it, white-on-white,
on InternetHoroscopes’ Web pages.
I received a response to my query to EasyScopes’ Belgian parent
company, Euregio.net, from Hubert Savelberg: “The case was not
settled: Euregio.net claims compensation for the damage caused
by the copyright infringement, while Women.com contests that
any damages are due. Both parties have filed their written submissions
with the court and are now awaiting the decision of the court
to schedule the case for oral arguments. It may take six months
or more before the court will hear the oral arguments.”
The
Wayback Machine – A Year Ago in SNS
The
lead article in the July 30, 2001 SNS
was B2B Pace Car, about Covisint, the B2B exchange
sponsored by several large automakers. At the time Covisint
was on track to do $36 billion in transactions via auctions
but was having troubles signing up European suppliers. Well,
the company ended up booking $51 billion in auctions for its
first full year of service, and auctions represented 85 percent
of its revenue. In May, Covisint opened an office in Germany
a “major new initiative” to better pursue European suppliers.
Covisint Europe accounted for 25 percent of Covisint's global
revenue in 2001, and is expected to contribute approximately
30 percent of Covisint's increased 2002 revenue.
In
the article, Doug VanDagens, Covisint’s senior vice president
of strategy and business development, said “At the end of
the day, private and public exchanges want the same thing:
they all want to be profitable and save money for their customers
at the same time. Ownership is the only real difference.”
I took exception to this, and still do. Ownership affects
the mission of the exchange, and that affects the value proposition
for exchange members. COBAMs (Collaborative Online Bricks
And Mortar exchanges) exist mainly to get a better deal for
their owners, and that means more price pressure on suppliers.
The
article Do Online Ads Work? considered the famous saying,
“I know that half the money I spend on advertising is wasted.
I just don’t know which half.” It quoted a DoubleClick study
that found larger banner ads work better. Also more effective
were those incredibly annoying “interstitial” or “pop under”
ads. Those are the irritating windows that pop up when you
enter or leave a site. A year later, the pop under and pop
over ads have become an epidemic. Do they work? Well, between
January and May, the famous X10
pop under ads reached 32.8 percent of all Web surfers. But
according to Jupiter Media Metrix, 73 percent of the visitors
who arrived via pop-unders left X10.com after just 20 seconds.
There
are even newer ad techniques, like adPointer, developed by
AdReady. When you
pause while browsing the Web, a matchbox-size window appears
onscreen near your pointer. The ad disappears if you ignore
it but if you click it, the ad stays with you. You can move
it aside for later viewing or expand the window.
The
larger online ad formats are regaining lost ground, according
to the now-renamed Comscore Media Metrix: “The large ad formats
– consisting of skyscrapers, squares and rectangles – have
slowly but steadily carved out a niche for themselves, growing
from four percent share of all online ad impressions in April
2001 to nine percent in January 2002. The number of large-
format ad impressions grew 185 percent over that same period,
from 2.0 billion to 5.7 billion. The actual number of banner
ad impressions grew 39 percent, from 23.6 billion impressions
in April 2001 to 32.9 billion in January 2002.”
European
Online Grocers took a look at the success overseas retailers
have had with the online grocery phenomenon. It reported the
purchase of Peapod by retailing giant Ahold. In a recent financial
statement, Ahold said Peapod increased sales by 25 percent,
but still had an operating loss of $11.6 million, compared
with a loss of $14.4 million last year. GroceryWorks, which
had a busy year in 2001 – suing its parent, Safeway and having
35 percent of its equity sold to UK retailer Tesco – named
a new president. Tesco, meanwhile, withstood a challenge from
Safeway about truth in advertising. Unfortunately, Tesco was
unable to prove that it was more committed to cutting prices
than any other chain.
In
Demise of a Newsletter I bemoaned the ending of one
of my favorite online newsletters, the Rapidly Changing Face
of Computing, published by Compaq. Things turned out all right,
though, as RCFOC writer Jeffrey Harrow, now an independent
consultant, started the Harrow
Report. I also groused about a Web site outage on the
StratVantage site. I’m happy to report there have been only
a few outages over the last year, although a client of mine,
whom I had recommended my hosting company to, had his whole
site wiped out by a water main breakage in the server room.
Now why was there a water main anywhere near the server room,
I wonder?
Content-Free
Websites concerned Web site tag lines that say very little.
It quoted what is still very good advice by usability expert
Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen noted that the taglines for Angara,
Calico, CSG Systems, and E.piphany were, respectively:
- Creating customers online
- eBusiness for leaders: Enabling corporations to control the key
elements of eBusiness selling
- Harness the power of convergence with (company's name)
- Software for the customer economy: next-generation CRM software
Angara
now appears to be out of business. PeopleSoft acquired Calico
and has no tagline on its site. CSG Systems’ tagline is now,
“We know more than billing. We understand business.” And E.piphany’s
tagline is now “Software for the customer economy,” which
you have to agree is at least a little shorter.
In
Gimme a Cold (Bud) Light, I pondered the awesome achievement
of scientists who were able to stop light. Not stop at a stop
light, but actually slow the speed of light to zero. In January,
the principal investigator, Lene Hau, received a $500,000
MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (“genius grant”). I found
a better explanation
of the stopped light phenomenon: “Hau's apparatus does
something quite different: when the coupling laser is turned
off, the energy and quantum state of the signal photons are
stored as a ‘spin’ in the gaseous sodium atoms. Later, when
the coupling laser is turned back on, the reconstructed signal
beam emerges from the cloud, unchanged from its previous state.
This isn't a trick or gimmick; the light actually slows down,
and actually stops. The implications for optical computing
are huge.” Not to mention the implications for information
storage.
And finally, Wireless
LANs Unsafe took an early look at what has now become
a pretty commonplace observation: Wireless LANs can be cracked,
even when Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is enabled, which
it is not on most. Little has changed in a year, other than
the impending release of a new standard, 802.11i, that promises
to solve the problem. Wavelink
recently announced a new security solution for existing WLANs
(Wireless LANs) that involves automatically rotating the WEP
encryption key and tattling on rogue WLANs a client finds.
The good news is these solutions don't require a complete
infrastructure change to implement.
Just the Right Stuff™
If you subscribed to CTOMentor’s Just the Right Stuff™
newsletter, over the past few months, you’d have received news
nuggets like the following, along with expanded analysis. Your
personalized Information Needs Profile would determine which
of these items you’d receive. For more information, check out
CTOMentor.
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Vodafone U.K. to Distribute
BlackBerrys
Canada's Research In Motion added Vodafone U.K. to its growing
list of European distributors for its BlackBerry e-mail device.
Vodafone U.K., with 13.1 million customers, was to start selling
the device, which operates on its GPRS (General Packet Radio
Service) network, to its corporate customers in June. MMO2,
a former unit of British Telecommunications is also a distributor
in Britain and certain European markets.
ZDNet
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AT&T Wireless Launches
i-mode Service
In April, AT&T Wireless rolled out a suite of wireless
consumer services based on i-mode technology developed by
Japan's NTT DoCoMo, which owns a significant portion of the
US company. The service, called mMode, was initially available
in 12 markets.
InternetNews.com
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Send Handwritten Messages
via Mobile Phone
Vodafone, Sony Ericsson, 3M and Esselte rolled out the
new Anoto technology that makes it possible to digitally
transmit handwritten notes via e-mail, SMS (Short Messaging
System), or fax. Users write on paper with a special Bluetooth-enabled
digital pen such as the Sony Ericsson Chatpen,
which combines a camera and an image processor.
AllNetDevices
Still news to you? Get this Stuff as it happens, not
months later. Subscribe to CTOMentor
today. Charter subscription discounts still available.
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