poem Usword

USWORD

Know me by my most
mnemonic non-mnemonic
name--OK?

My most tangled chain
of digit-twisting and one-
off emoticons.

Whatever suggests
me to you and us to no
one overlooking.

poem End of March

END OF MARCH

In luxurious gloom.
In carbonated rain.
The lamb stands shivering.
Shakes the
remains of
her late last
wintering.

poem Aquifer

AQUIFER

Set. More massively
installed than the stone
beneath the weight of
the world's monuments.

As thoroughly stained
in sediment as
earth's running rivers
and God's ancient veins.

Streaked with the runoff
of daily rains and
fresh capillaries
of rust and red salt.

fyi Could Ajax Wash Away 'Smart Clients'?

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,1777009,00.asp

Kobielus kommentary:
Much as I hate to see an unnecessary new acronym enter our lingo, I think “AJAX” (asynchronous JavaScript and XHTML) is preferable to “RIA” (rich Internet applications). They both refer to the same phenomenon—the enriched browser-oriented presentation tier--but AJAX references open industry standards, whereas RIA (the older of the two acronyms) carries the unpleasant connotation of partially proprietary approaches from vendors such as Macromedia, Nexaweb, and Microsoft.

Of course, AJAX and RIA aren’t the first terms to be applied to this phenomenon (the enriched Web presentation tier). Back in the day (just a few years ago), a lot of attention was paid to “Dynamic HTML.” Now the new twist is that more and more of the content being interchanged within the presentation tier (between clients and servers) is XML, not HTML. And it’s in the XML vocabulary—XHTML—that has superseded HTML 4.0 as the evolution path for Web presentation markup standards. As the article points out, AJAX is a recently coined acronym that loosely refers to any and all of the following:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS);
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• JavaScript binding everything together.

Of course, AJAX can’t scrub the grubby pipes of the Web presentation tier overnight and get it all spotless and pristine. As an approach, it will need to coexist with partially proprietary approaches such as Microsoft’s XAML-based “Avalon” and Macromedia’s MXML-based Flex. I’m publishing an article next month in Business Communications Review that discusses the various Web presentation tier approaches—including RIA, thin client, Windows terminal emulation, and so forth—and am quite aware of the glut of presentation approaches that are crowding this space.

It’s not an issue of AJAX vs. smart client in the Web presentation tier. Every client these days is smart to varying degrees. It’s more an issue of having client-, approach-, and protocol-agile presentation middleware tiers that can support thick client, thin client (Windows terminal emulation, of which there are several approaches), basic browser, and enriched browser (RIA, of which there are several approaches, plus AJAX/DHTML). Oh…I didn’t mention the need for presentation tiers that can do equal justice to PC, laptop, and mobile/handheld browser/clients.

Yeesh…what a mess.

Jim

fyi “Tensions on the Web”—and the attention paid to Collaboration

All:

Pointer to blogpost:
http://www.adambosworth.net/archives/000041.html

Kobielus kommentary:
A very thoughtful post by Adam Bosworth of Google (formerly BEA), all around search, taxonomy/ontologies, web services, privacy, security, managed environments, and collaboration.

But the larger framing topic is blogs—in particular, the tensions that one of his recent blog postings created, inadvertently, for him at Google—and his need to continually stress that his blog doesn’t necessarily reflect the official positions of his employer. That’s a tough balance to hit, and any of us who work for other people are always at pains to do so. I’ve been writing Network World columns for 17+ years, and always with my byline ending with “The opinions expressed are his own.” Which has usually been understood without much confusion, since I’ve rarely had any significant clout or say in the operation of the businesses that have chosen to pay me a salary. Being powerless has always motivated me to make my thoughts and expressions all the more forceful. Since this blog got started during a period of unemployment, I haven’t had much to lose (except my good name, people’s respect, and any possibility of future employment—trifling matters, really) by posting anything that entered my cranium. The alternatives are not to blog, or to blog without expressing anything even remotely interesting, daring, or controversial. I don’t care for either of those alternatives.

In this post, Bosworth was discussing the exciting developments with “folksonomies,” which are essentially semantic web environments within which anybody can post whatever tag-sets they like, in a bottom-up fashion, without draconian taxonomy/ontology-nazis telling them what tags are legal or illegal in a particular domain (analogous to how wikis operate in terms of free-for-all post/overpost concurrent authoring/editing). Bosworth acknowledges the inherent sloppiness of this sort of distributed collaboration, but places his faith in the power of team dynamics to quickly converge on a consensus, good-enough tag-set taxonomy/ontology for whatever domain they’re defining. And to evolve, police, defend, regulate, and restore whatever (presumably worthy/benign) collective artifact gets assembled through these dynamics.

All of which got me to thinking about how increasingly we’re all placing our faith in this new sort of “invisible hand”—the collaboration environment—to design online phenomena through emergent interactions, rather than trust/empower any one real-person uber-author. And it is a faith—not a science or art. Here’s how Bosworth articulates his personal faith: “I've always believed in the twin values of rationalism and humanism, but humanism has often felt as though it got short shrift in our community. In this world, it's all about people and belonging and working with others.”

Nothing wrong with those ideals. But Bosworth and others who tout the grand promise of Collaboration (I’ll capitalize this word for the rest of this post, just to zoom it for your consideration) usually treat it as something that magically emerges from some constellation of tools/services: blogs, wikis, IM/presence, P2P, e-mail, message boards, discussion groups, RSS feeds, knowledge management, shared spaces, portals, search, VoIP, etc.

And nothing wrong with those tools, in the abstract. I use most of those tools/services fairly regularly. But it’s always felt to me that IT professionals have always been looking for some Collaboration killer-app, or priestly class of killer-apps, as if therein lies nirvana, if only we can initiate and educate the benighted masses to the wonder of it all.

Excuse my cynicism on this matter. But I’ve been in the IT industry for 20 years, and most of that time, I’ve been treated to one new Collaboration killer-app after another. Cluttering up my virtual desktop/workspace with all of these Collaboration killer-apps, I’m now convinced that all these killer-apps are someday going to kill me from the sheer weight of their o’erweening ambition.

A few posts ago, I (Kobielus) expressed exasperation with the sheer complexity of Microsoft’s Collaboration killer-apps: “I think Microsoft should take the good stuff from Groove—the P2P-based distributed file sharing/caching/synchronization features—and junk everything else. Microsoft should embed this core Groove technology into Office, Outlook, Windows Explorer, MSN Messenger, Live Communication Server, Internet Explorer, SharePoint Team Services, and the WiFi-based workgroup peer-LAN functionality within “Longhorn.” But present a rich-browser interface to it all (via XAML/”Avalon”) and radically simplify and converge the UI, integration, and management of all these scattered client and server components.”

I’ve felt that way for so long. Simplify and unclutter my Collaboration world, and I’ll be a happier camper. Which reminds me of a book I checked out of my local library a few months ago. It was called “Feng Shui Your Workspace for Dummies.” With a title like that, how could I not check it out?

It was interesting and useful, up to a point. Of course, it primarily addressed how to “feng shui” your physical workspace—your office. And, of course, it primarily addressed that topic within the context of 3000 years of Chinese astrology, numerology, metaphysics, superstition, and so forth.

But, when you cut through all the distracting nonsense (personal note: my wife is Chinese, and I very much love Chinese art and culture), you come to the essential deep structure of “feng shui.” It’s simply the art of harmonious arrangement. As a set of principles and practices, it describes how to arrange your physical space so as to maximize harmony, comfort, and productivity between you, your artifacts, your colleagues, your surroundings, and the universe at large. As you might expect, “feng shui”ing your workspace involves a lot of de-cluttering, balancing, and arranging all the objects, textures, lighting, and so forth to make you feel happy, calm, composed, etc. A lot of common sense ideas, but expressed within a set of practical/philosophical guidelines. A key take-away: Evaluate your physical space according to how the eyes, attentions, and bodies of people (including yourself) naturally move throughout that space, and endeavor to make those movements more free and flowing without becoming robotic and repetitive.

I was sort of hoping that the book would have explained how to “feng shui” my virtual workspace as well. From personal experience, that’s something I’ve rarely been able to do for very long: maximizing the harmony, comfort, and productivity of myself and everybody else I work/deal with regularly. Usually, given the hectic/ever-changing nature of my jobs and the industry and the world, disharmony and disequilibrium are more often the norm. How can I “feng shui” a world that’s splaying awkwardly in all directions? I can barely “feng shui” my head and heart in harmony with each other when the world does a number on me.

I don’t have any great hope for an ideal Collaboration environment. And I don’t place inordinate hopes in Collaboration killer-apps like Groove, blogs, wikis, etc. And I don’t expect that people, work, or the world will get any simpler or easier to Collaborate with. Sloppiness is the way of the world, when the world’s evolving out of control.

But I’ve found a way to “feng shui” the ever-messier Collaboration ecosystem, at least in my head. Ever since I covered the young Lotus Notes for Network World, in an article in 1990, I’ve been elaborating my own personal interpretive framework for all this. It found first expression in that Network World article, then in an article I did for Rapport Messaging Review in 1996, then in my “Workflow Strategies” book in 1997, and then in my Burton Group reports in 1998-2004. (Actually, now that I recall, I started developing my framework in 1987, when I was a research associate at the International Center for Information Technologies, and was exposed to Action Technologies' Fernando Flores, their Communicator structured e-mail program, and their new-agey Collaboration philosophy. But I digress).

Here now is my Collaboration conceptual framework:

• Collaboration involves sustaining a protocol for effective interaction among people and organizations: a framework for interaction between networked individuals to exchange information and manage work successfully.
• Collaboration in the business world often depends on well-defined but adaptable protocols expressed as recurring processes or workflows.
• In a dynamic world, the accent is on process adaptability, with fast-changing conditions requiring that people reorganize and improvise on the fly, using whatever resources are at their disposal to meet whatever new challenges emerge.
• The ideal enterprise collaborative environment must serve both the present (any existing process/protocol) and the foreseeable future (any process/protocol that is likely to emerge), with a clear emphasis on flexibility and adaptability to support new business goals, policies, and activities. This focus places the emphasis squarely on collaborative environments that support multifunctional, integrated, application suites and integrate with services supported on legacy network platforms (NOSs), but increasingly emphasize integration with services and standards running over the new world platform (the Internet and World Wide Web). The collaborative environment should also support access to all information and functionality from an integrated, universal client environment (browser-based applications).
• We define collaborative processes as taking place within a three-dimensional collaborative “space,” consisting of the dimensions of platform, structure, and media. The collaborative space supports the context and substance of interaction between users scattered across the map, time zones, projects, and organizations.
• Collaborative platform refers to the geographic, physical, and technological environment in which work is performed--in other words, the means of production and distribution. The dimensions of the collaborative platform include user terminals and application software, operating environments, networks, geographic range, and mobility. The collaborative platform incorporates the “network services model” of core enterprise services (file, print, directory, security, messaging, web, management), as well as the physical infrastructure supporting these services.
• Collaborative structure consists of the organizational apparatus and controls used to define, coordinate, and track business processes. In a company’s information technology environment, the collaborative structure resides in the sum total of automated information systems that implement and enforce organizational controls. The collaborative structure in any organization is constrained by the presence or lack of appropriate directory, security, and management functionality in the underlying network/systems platform. Structure-oriented collaborative applications fall into three main categories: time management, workflow management, and project management. We characterize these applications as “high structure” in emphasis. High-structure applications are designed to directly support threads or protocols for interpersonal coordination within the management “superstructure” within which most coordination takes place: work schedules, operating procedures, and organizational charts, as well as the associated task breakdowns and assignments.
• Collaborative media consist of the work products and all raw and semi-finished materials--including information and communications inputs--used to give the product shape, substance, and coherence. Media are the things that flow in a business process, within the context of a technological platform and organizational structure. Media fall into three general categories: stores, threads, and meetings. Media-oriented collaborative applications fall into three categories: information-base sharing, messaging, and conferencing. We characterize these applications as “high media” in emphasis. The best way to characterize high-media collaboration environments is by the range of information stores that they incorporate, integrate, and access. Indeed, one can regard Internet-based high-media collaboration environments as consisting of three layers of overlapping information stores, corresponding to the three principal application tiers in an enterprise network: collaboration, intranet, and NOS. A truly comprehensive Internet/intranet collaboration environment would include the following information stores: file, document, data, directory, message, newsgroup, image, webpage, and object.
• Traditional database-oriented corporate applications are “low-structure” in emphasis, since they usually do not directly support interpersonal coordination but nonetheless embody or enforce impersonal corporate policies and procedures. Examples of low-structure applications, according to this definition, include mission-critical applications in support of payroll, order processing, and customer service. Indeed, most enterprise applications fall into the “low-structure” category, imposing pervasive controls on operations by defining or embedding these controls within the underlying information stores.
• Many of the underlying authentication, access, and confidentiality controls used by both high- and low-structure applications are defined within the enterprise NOS, directory, security, and management services. Consequently, the enterprise directory service represents the pivotal piece of infrastructure for enabling both high- and low-structure applications
• A well-rounded collaboration (or “groupware”) environment is one that provides a broad range and smooth blend of high-media and high-structure functionality. Groupware point products, by contrast, are those that emphasize one or the other type of functionality, and often a subset within one of these categories (e.g., any of myriad specialized messaging, conferencing, calendaring, or workflow products).

Yeah, yeah, I know, that's messy as hell. Not much harmony for the uninitiated. But such are most Collaboration paradigms. If they get too simple, they get too simplistic. Or too fascistic.

So here's any even simpler version of all that: Any collaboration space can be characterized as meetings, messages, materials, teams, times, tasks, and flows.

Or, even simpler: A collaboration space is stuff that needs doing, and the stuff it gets done with.

Oh well, it's "feng shui" harmonious for me, at the very least. It keeps coming to mind. It helps me clear up my personal confusion. And classify every new Collaboration tool.

And get through my Collaboration-crazy days.

Jim

fyi France Plans Net 'Counter-Offensive'

All:

Pointer to article:

http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=31513

Kobielus kommentary:
I love the new word mentioned in this article: “omnigooglization.” And I’m happy for the French that they’re committed to putting the core of their literary legacy online for posterity, and to be swept up into the omnigooglizing cyberverse.

I seriously doubt that the French language is endangered, either as a written or spoken tongue. Since it’s written in a Latin character set that’s pretty close to English, more people will have online exposure to French-language texts and will roughly familiarize themselves with the tongue (for rudimentary reading, if not speaking or writing). In fact, the same phenomenon will buoy any tongue written in a phonetic alphabet derived from Latin, as long as there’s a significant amount of online literature for that language. We have to face the fact that most people can vocalize the basic Latin alphabet, and, hence, will be able to hack a rudimentary understanding of any tongue based on it. That includes not just the western European languages, but also such non-European tongues as Vietnamese and Indonesian.

However, any literature that isn’t written in a Latin-derived alphabet (e.g., Greek, Russian, Hindi, Arabic, Mandarin, Japanese) will tend to be shunned or ignored by non-speakers who find it much too difficult to hack their basic character sets. That’s not to say that native speakers of these languages won’t continue to teach them to their children, use them in daily life, and produce wonderful literary works in them. It’s just that English has burned a Latinate character set into most people’s brains.

And that character set is the true world “lingua franca” (a term, and a phenomenon, that should warm of cockles of Jacques Chirac’s heart). My hunch is that, in 500 years’ time, the world lingua franca will be a creolized mixture of English, Spanish, French, and Malayo-Indonesian. I’ve selected those four languages based on the fact that they, in that descending order, have the most native speakers in 2005 for their tongues (all of which use the Latin character sets). If the speakers of some other major world language, such as Mandarin or Arabic, adopt a Latin-derived character set, they may also get swept into this creolizing world tongue. Otherwise, their literature will be purely opaque to most non-speakers, regardless of how much of it is posted to the cyberverse.

Jim

fyi Microsoft considering WinFS support in Windows XP

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/windows/story/0,10801,100387,00.html?source=NLT_WK&nid=100387

Kobielus kommentary:
It’s very likely that Microsoft eventually support all principal “Longhorn” technologies--“Avalon,” WinFS, “Indigo,” and WinFX APIs--on its most recent “legacy” OSs: WinXP and WinSvr2003. If and when that comes to pass, Microsoft will have taken the next big step in the direction of pure OS virtualization. When you abstract the external interface from the internal implementation of any functionality, you’ve virtualized that functionality. If all “Longhorn” external interfaces have been abstracted from the underlying kernel implementations on which they run (WinXP kernel, Win2003 kernel, “Longhorn” kernel etc.), then “Longhorn” is not a traditional OS anymore. It becomes a set of virtualization technologies that bridge the legacy Windows to the future Windows. And which, conceivably, through open source implementations such as Mono, can bridge the Windows and Linux worlds.

At that point, Microsoft will have a harder time convincing users to upgrade to the “Longhorn” kernel, if they can get the same functionality by simply retrofitting their existing OS. Virtualization breaks the upgrade cycle upon which platform and application software vendors’ licensing revenues greatly depend.

Jim

fyi The Rise of Smart Buildings

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/networkingtopics/networking/story/0,10801,100318,00.html?source=NLT_WK&nid=100318

Kobielus kommentary:
Building automation control (BAC) systems are an obvious application of the “identity of things,” right there alongside RFID and identity dataweb in potential ubiquity. It’s good to see that OASIS’ Open Building Information Exchange (OBIX) TC is composing their specs with WSRF, WSDM, and other critical WS-* standards.

As regards BAC and the identity of things, the following article excerpt should raise alarm bells:

• “Security is a problem at multiple levels, says Toby Considine, chairman of the OASIS OBIX committee. Control system manufacturers have rudimentary password security mechanisms, but most have ‘no concept of directory-enabled security,’ he says.”

Hmmm…does that mean there’s no directory-centric device authentication, or multifactor facility administrator authentication on many BAC systems? If that’s so, then we’re opening our buildings to all manner of imposters masquerading as facility administrators, custodians, etc. And, lacking directory-centric device authentication, wouldn’t it be possible to plug in rogue automated doorlocks, security cameras, and so forth in many BAC systems and have them go unauthenticated and undetected? And we’re worrying about people bringing cellular cameraphones into offices! Imagine the even greater damage that can be done by having rogue fixed cameras and microphones in your offices 7x24, aimed at computer screens, eavesdropping on conversations, etc.

Actually, I’d prefer that my BAC systems continue to function as separate technology silos until these authentication/directory issues are addressed by BAC and IT vendors. As we’ve learned from the Internet, spyware, spam, viruses, etc, exposure is the flipside of interoperability. I’m not all that concerned with whether we can control HVAC systems room by room. Businesspeople don’t lie awake at night worrying about the office thermostat.

Jim

fyi IT's Role In The Technology-Based Economy

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.systemsmanagementpipeline.com/shared/article/printablePipelineArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=GY55IDOXY2MTUQSNDBGCKH0CJUMEKJVN?articleId=60404700

Kobielus kommentary:
By way of preface to this commentary, I should note that one of my first jobs was as an economic analyst. My undergraduate degree was in economics, from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor, where I was an honors student and wrote an award-winning thesis on competition in the television industry. Anybody who’s ever really known me knows that once I start covering a topic, I never stop. Which partly explains why I’m usually out of breath. I continue to try to pull my older thoughts forward into my next personal career stage. Per a recent “self” posting, I’ve long regarded my core career as a student of the economic development of mass media—such as, especially, the Internet/Web, which is the first wholly new mass medium since the advent of television 60 years ago.

Anyway, my fundamental feeling is that world economic development is driven primarily by the emergence of new networks, though sometimes at a considerable lag from when the network was first introduced. Go back historically and look at the power of irrigation networks (basis for civilization); maritime, riparian, railroad, automotive, and aviation networks (basis for international trade, exploration, conquest, and industry); and electrical, telegraph, telephone, television, radio, and computer networks (basis for information society). Each of these networks can be associated with one or more “long waves,” per Schumpeter, Kondratieff, and other economists.

Networks drive development. They provide new ways of connecting people to each other and to the resources of the earth and sky. As transaction costs drop, economic development soars. An article I read a few years ago put the right perspective on this all. It provided a broader strategic framework for understanding the transaction-cost impacts of Moore's Law ("Every 18 months, processing power doubles while cost holds constant."), Metcalfe's Law ("The usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users."), and Coase's Law ("Firms are created because the additional cost of organizing them is cheaper than the transaction costs involved when individuals conduct business with each other using the market.").

The bottom line on all this is that:

• Declining transaction costs spur economic activity (per Coase)
• Transaction costs in today's economy keep declining due to declining costs for fundamental resources (processing power, per Moore; network connectivity, per Metcalfe)
• Transactional cost reductions throughout the economy lower the barriers to new competitors, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, alliances, process reengineering, disintermediation, and other structural innovations
• Transactional cost differentiation (per Michael Porter's competitive/strategic framework) is the most powerful strategic differentiating weapon of all, making and breaking whole companies, industries, sectors, and economies

The fundamental value of networks (and all connected resources) as a resource to the economy/society may not be entirely quantifiable. The best we can say is that networks reduce transaction costs and make new types of transactions possible. And that all of this drives such economic indicators as innovation, investment, employment, and productivity, which can be quantified and satisfy some basic human needs and wants on which we can all agree.

Actually, these "laws" are just rules of thumb for understanding some important phenomena and trends. None of them has any scientific weight as a theoretical assertion confirmed through controlled observation and peer review. It's hard to see what the economic basis for Moore's Law might be, or what the psychological basis is for Metcalfe's Law's equation of squared-humans with some metric of collectivity happiness (after all, squares aren't much fun to party with), or what the sociological basis is for Coase's Law's implicit notion that a firm requires at least two individuals operating as an economic unit (what about us freelance writers? aren't we firms unto ourselves?).

I get the sense that the late 90s dot-com run-up in the market was no fluke, and it wasn't irrational. Collectively, society had begun to appreciate the discounted present value of future economic growth to be stimulated by the new, ubiquitous network (Internet) and transaction model (e-commerce). People bid equities up commensurate with that value. What society didn't figure, though, is that the future value will be driven/realized largely by the successors (or the successors to the successors) to the e-commerce companies who emerged in the late 90s. General rule: In a fast growing but new and volatile industry landscape, success will primarily accrue to the successors.

Microsoft has proved itself the ultimate successor time and again in so many markets. In this context, we can phrase “Gates' Law” as follows: As technology improves, new types of transactions with Microsoft will become more cost-effective, feasible, and, in fact, inevitable (and its corollary: the share of world income flowing to Redmond will increase).

All of which points up the fact that we've never had a "new economy," to use a term favored by many in the media these past ten years. The economy still runs on transaction costs, which juice liquidity. So much of this liquidity now rides the wire, but it still represents the time-old bottom line of balance sheets, financial exposure, and business and personal risk. In another article, Michael Porter and others debate whether there ever was a "new economy" immune to the historical cycles of capitalism. I like Porter's reductive comparison of the Internet to supermarket scanners (though others felt that was a ridiculous comparison): both innovations have contributed to a reduction in transaction costs, by supporting greater speed, flexibility, and automation in mundane buy-sell interactions. Later on in the article, the author notes that banks' cost of processing transactions on the Internet is much lower than through ATMs or human tellers. He also notes that economic development has historically followed the development of new types of networks, including roads, highways, canals, electrification systems, telephone systems, radio, television, airplane flight paths, etc., all of which enabled a reduction in transaction costs across the whole economy as well as greater flexibility in putting together, executing, and reconfiguring transactions and relationships.

The Internet is just the latest networking environment having an impact on economic transactions across the world economy. In that sense, it never created a new economy so much as juiced the one, only, and ongoing economy. And that's a good thing.

Jim

fyi Microsoft to buy Groove Networks

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0310microtobu.html

Kobielus kommentary:
Yeesh--I find myself habitually commenting on Microsoft announcements, as if they're where all the action is. I have to get out of the habit. But they certainly are a perennial action figure.

Anyway, as regards the Groove acquisition, this is one of those acquisitions that’s been expected for several years, and when it comes, it feels slightly disappointing. Though it’s definitely good for Microsoft and Groove (and their customers).

I’m actually happy that Microsoft waited till after the bloom was well off the “peer-to-peer” hype of a few years ago. Microsoft waited to see whether and how Groove and its approach would float in the post-bubble high-tech economy. Now Microsoft is buying Groove for all the right reasons: solid product, company, approach.

I’ve used Groove’s P2P collaboration tools and am not a fan. I consider Groove one of the clunkiest, overstuffed UIs in the collaboration space. Yeah, it’s sorta nice that I can cache all manner of external documents and other junk for offline perusal and don’t need to dial into some central server and so forth. But I found Groove’s stovepipe lack of integration with the rest of my collaboration clients—browser, e-mail, IM, etc.—to be frustrating and counterproductive. And I found Groove’s navigation paradigm to be maddeningly labyrinthine. I had been using it for months, and still was puzzled about where things were, or should be. And I got tired of being yoked to a “shared space” that I didn’t control—rather, others were dictating to me the organization of our shared environment—an organization that was optimal to them and bewildering to me.

I think Microsoft should take the good stuff from Groove—the P2P-based distributed file sharing/caching/synchronization features—and junk everything else. Microsoft should embed this core Groove technology into Office, Outlook, Windows Explorer, MSN Messenger, Live Communication Server, Internet Explorer, SharePoint Team Services, and the WiFi-based workgroup peer-LAN functionality within “Longhorn.” But present a rich-browser interface to it all (via XAML/”Avalon”) and radically simplify and converge the UI, integration, and management of all these scattered client and server components.

Because Microsoft’s collaboration environment is far too complex. They have no clear unification story on all this. If Ray Ozzie does anything as Microsoft’s collaboration CTO, it should be to bring some vision and discipline to reining in this growing mess. Ironically, if he does his job well, he’ll effectively have killed both of his babies: Groove technology as a stand-alone P2P environment, and Lotus Domino/Notes (or IBM Workplace, or whatever they’re calling it now) as a competitive force in the collaboration market.

Jim

poem Able

ABLE

Mighty mighty meathooks,
oh how I love to grapple.

Immerse myself,
bloody beaut of a world,
I will.

Xactly where I want to be,
poised to fail.

You see me,
I'll be,
rising,
reaching,
able.

fyi Netgear Aims To Surmount Wireless 'Dead Zones'

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.crn.com/sections/breakingnews/dailyarchives.jhtml?articleId=60406990

Kobielus kommentary:
One of WiFi’s drawbacks—indeed, any RF technology’s limitation—is signal fading, which causes dead zones. In order to optimize your WiFi cell to your office space, you would typically need to do rough-and-ready “coverage surveys”: in other words, move the access points around to see what positioning minimizes dead zones and maximizes signal coverage where it’s needed.

Ideally, your WiFi RF coverage plan should be self-configuring and self-optimizing: just install one or more access points at regularly spaced intervals throughout your space—as a first rough approximation--and rely on the access points themselves to auto-configure their power output, beam directions and widths, and so forth. Or, as a second best, rely on them to display to you—the human being who installed them—which way you should move them, and how far, to optimize signal coverage.

Adaptive antenna arrays are an important enabler for self-optimizing WiFi. We’re going to see adaptive arrays become standard in all WiFi access points before long. With adaptive arrays, each antenna housing has multiple internal antennas that are auto-configured dynamically to ensure optimal signal coverage, interference, and other parameters. Back in the day (1995-1998), when I was a product manager making RF test/measurement equipment for the cellular industry, I attended a conference at Virginia Tech on new frontiers in wireless tech. The most memorable session was a presentation on “Feasibility of Adaptive Arrays,” and I’ve been a firm believer in that technology ever since, not just for cellular systems (which have the benefit of teams of professional RF engineers) but especially for premises-based systems such as WiFi (which are often installed and optimized by non-RF professionals, who can benefit from the auto-optimization features).

Needless to say, I’m enthused about Netgear’s new RangeMax products that incorporate adaptive array technology. Per their press release:

“RangeMax is an advanced Smart MIMO (Multi-In, Multi-Out) technology that uses seven internal antennas. RangeMax constantly surveys your home environment for physical barriers and interference and adjusts the wireless signal to compensate for these performance blockers. For example, if you carry your laptop from the family room to the bedroom, RangeMax automatically senses the change and selects from over 100 possible antenna configurations to deliver you the fastest, clearest connection! Everyone will enjoy consistently high-speed connections, everywhere in your house - no drop-outs, and no dead spots.”

Way cool. And essential for the continued deployment of WiFi into every available indoor space across the whole wide world.

Jim

P.S. Here’s the poem I wrote in 1996 that leveraged this totally geeky concept into a mystical/spiritual riff (see if you can spot the acrostic):

*******************************

FEASIBILITY OF ADAPTIVE ARRAYS

Trained to receive, every fiber of me, every facet of you.
Unimpeded, one path, one singular path, through crowded sensations.
Recognizing our kind.
Now turning away.

Trying to receive, every moment of time, every flicker of thought and soft emanation.
Unobstructed, then blocked, then scattered through layers, accidental relations.
Recollecting our mind.
Now turning away.

True to my thoughts, we're moving in tandem.
Unawares, we're speaking the language of light.
Reconstructing our world through massive obstruction.
Now moving closer, now turning away.

*******************************

Read the story. Now read the poem. Go back to the story. Then the poem. It’ll sink in. Most people wouldn’t have a clue what I’m talking about. But you, my blogreaders, are techies too. Nature abhors a dead zone.

self Careers

All:
I have a philosophy of careers, just as I have a philosophy of almost everything. I get my jollies.

On the one hand, careers are often just one damn job after another. A chain of steppingstone opportunities starting from the day you first filled out an application to the day you hang it all up and go to that lounge chair in the sky, or under Florida skies.

On the other, careers are all that-—plus the story you tell, to yourself and others, that connects all those seemingly accidental steps into something resembling a life plan-—what it all amounts to, and what you yourself are amounting to. The meaning or purpose or end result of it all. How your presence here made something resembling an enduring contribution. Or simply something transient and meaningful to you alone as some sort of private joke or quixotic quest. How you rolled with the flow and were ultimately floated to some new plateau—hopefully high enough to see over the next incoming wave.

That story you tell about what it all means—it’s written up in your resume (the dots) and recited in your interview with the next potential employer (the connections among the dots, aligning your career trajectory with that employer’s trajectory, as best you can). Sometimes—often—we surprise ourselves by the connections we draw, when asked to explain “what do you want to do with your career.” Sometimes—often—we don’t truly know exactly where we’re going until we see a shiny new vehicle and ask to be taken aboard.

I’m no mystic, and I don’t pretend to understand if God has a plan for me, or if anything I’ve done will amount to much in the final analysis. The “what it’s amounting to” can be answered on several levels. One metric is your bank account. Another is the length and depth of your resume (and, in my case, considering how much I’ve published these past 20 years, my bibliography). Yet another is your Rolodex, or your e-mail address book, or simply the list of professional friends (or, hopefully, friend-friends) you’ve accumulated over the years.

But, fundamentally, it comes down to that story. Is my next step advancing me along that path toward whatever it is I see my life amounting to? How can I know till I’ve taken that step whether it was truly the best step?

As people say, God has plans for all of us. But I think God delegates a lot of the planning to each of us individually. He just rolls it all up at the end of eternity into some master plan that gets stuffed into a drawer somewhere. And stays there.

Jim

fyi Microsoft Outlines Two-Phase Business Application Plan

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60406981
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-07Convergence05UmbrellaPR.asp

Kobielus kommentary:
Now this is a roadmap that makes sense, on a couple of levels.

Support-wise, there’s no way that Microsoft’s ERP/CRM/etc app customers would tolerate anything less than an eight-year mainstream support lifecycle. That’s what SAP offers its customers, and it sets the high bar that Microsoft is attempting to polevault. Extending mainstream support on Great Plains etc to 2013 was a critical component of securing existing customers’ ongoing loyalty. Packaged business apps have very long lifecycles in customer deployments. Microsoft can’t attempt to substantially migrate older customers overnight to the “Project Green” codebase, or even over the next 5 years. Customers will migrate only if and when it makes sense. They’ve built their internal business processes on existing ERP/CRM/etc apps, and those legacy codebases are part of customers’ business-process DNA.

Rollout-wise, Microsoft did the right thing by spreading out “Project Green” enhancements over two separate releases. The first and most critical step toward the “Project Green” architecture was to integrate the presentation tiers of all existing Microsoft ERP apps, providing a shared presentation tier that knits all legacy apps into a common collaboration environment. They’re relying on their SharePoint Portal Server in the same way that SAP has built its NetWeaver architecture around the SAP Enterprise Server, as a unified presentation tier front-ending both the new generation of apps (mySAP) and the legacy generation (R/3). In both cases, Microsoft and SAP, the portal is more than a presentation tier: it’s also the platform for a wide range of collaborative functionality. I also think Microsoft is doing the right thing by providing a core group of common user roles that will be common to all new and legacy ERP/etc apps. Collaborative commerce demands an identity management infrastructure that supports what you might call “federated role management” among diverse business domains.

I’d like to see Microsoft go a little further in “Project Green” phase two. It’s not enough to simply declare they’ll provide a common VS.NET model-driven development environment that spans all ERP/etc. apps. Microsoft should be exposing all fine-grained ERP/etc app functionality--“Project Green” and legacy--as Web services, include the WSDL definitions of all that functionality in its UDDI registry, and provide a visual VS.NET/Visio/UML/WS-BPEL orchestration tool that makes “connecting the dots” among all those features as easy as possible.

Microsoft should be providing much more detail on its “Project Green” roadmap soon if it hopes to get a jump on SAP and Oracle for the high-end of the ERP/etc market. Those other vendors have a more aggressive, farsighted SOA-based approach to their business app product families.

Jim

lol The Eggcorn Database

All:

Pointer to site:
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

Kobielus kommentary:
Brilliant! I’m so glad somebody’s keeping track of these written malapropisms, which they refer to as “eggcorns.” Here’s their definition of an “eggcorn”:

o “This site collects unusual spellings of a particular kind, which have come to be called eggcorns. Typical examples include free reign (instead of free rein) or hone in on (instead of home in on), and many more or less common reshapings of words and expressions: a word or part of a word is semantically reanalyzed, and the spelling reflects the new interpretation. The About page offers more information on the history of the term and of this collection.”

And they doubly impressed me by having “baited breath” (which is a very common misspelling of “bated breath”). My mnemonic for this particular item is that “bated” is a shortening of “abated,” which means to “reduce the force or intensity of.” Hence, someone may wait with “bated breath”—in other words, self-consciously reduced, quieted, calmed breathing—for some anticipated event. But no one waits with “baited breath,” unless they’ve swallowed a bucket of minnows. Hey, a new stunt for “Fear Factor”! Here’s an ersatz Confucian proverb I made up in 1987, when this “eggcorn” jumped out at me:

o “He who waits with baited breath catches trout with forked tongue.”

Before I close this post, I'd like to note that these "eggcorns" are beautiful examples of "language as an object worthy of contemplation," per a previous "imho" post. Language's ambiguity (deliberate or accidental) is part of what can make poetical or rhetorical expression so powerful. The best poetry/rhetoric carries inside itself the penumbra of all the unspoken, invisible, and latent words, feelings, and concepts that the written words suggest or imply. Let me close this post with an example, a poem that I wrote a while ago. In reading this little capsule, ask yourself which implicit words/thoughts scream from the sidelines, and how they shade/inform the written words/thoughts. Half the time, I'm not entirely conscious of the penumbra poem until I've laid down all the visible words. OK, here's the example poem:

*********************

COMMENT

Deaden the anger with air
and a prayer for forgiveness.

Live it through. A sore outlasts
its irritant: a pain, the

point. A rash word holds the hurt
in the firmament of the

world’s regard. Curse: a comet
impressed into flesh’s fate,

a stone with a name, a mark
and a flame returning. Leave

these currents burn. Let the night
reset what day has torn. Pray

it take this weary frame. Void
me now in the calm to come.

*********************

Jim

lol Microsoft Patches "Blue Screen Of Death" In Windows XP SP2

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.techweb.com/wire/60402941

Kobielus kommentary:
What the…? Even the blue screen of death is buggy? Can’t Microsoft even engineer a graceful death sequence? They ought to consult with Dr. Jack Kevorkian.

Jim

fyi GSM at sea

All:

Pointer to article:
www.cellular-news.com/story/12153.shtml

Kobielus kommentary:
Isn’t this the core market that Iridium and all those other defunct global mobile satellite carriers intended to address? So pathetically puny. Even in the early 90s, when all of these ventures were in the insane-hype stage, you wonder what all the VCs were smoking when they greenlighted these pipedreams. Even then, the terrestrial cellular carriers had a lockhold on the bulk of the mobility market. Now that GSM base stations are being deployed on cruise ships, it feels like the final coup de grace. I’m curious (the article doesn’t say) what satellite service is providing the link between the shipside GSM network and the “adjacent” shoreside terrestrial GSM network(s). I’m also curious if the shipside GSM operators have shipside WiFi-to-GPRS roaming (and if they have WiFi service to begin with). I don’t know about you, but if I were cooped up on a vomitrocious vessel for days or weeks, I’d at least want a broadband porthole to stare out of.

Can you tell that I didn’t enjoy my one and only experience with cruise ships? The worst thing about them is being inside the vessel, feeling the rocking, but not being able to see the horizon. That’s when seasickness really takes hold. If I could have slept up on deck, in full view of the ocean, I would have quickly gained my sea legs. Or if I could have had a full view of the ocean of media from the shoreside world, it would have been less disorienting. As it was, I had to make do with junky lounge acts, second-rate Hollywood movies, and semi-edible continuous buffets.

Gag me with a spoon.

Jim

fyi Michigan City Provides Free WiFi to Residents

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117324,0...

Kobielus kommentary:
Imagine the horror that Philadelphia booksellers felt when Benjamin Franklin organized the USA’s first municipal library more than 200 years ago. People can borrow books at no charge from a big public library? Why would anybody ever buy a book ever again?

As we know, municipal libraries didn’t put much of a crimp in the publishing industry here or anywhere. Likewise, free access to the Web from library-situated computers hasn’t stopped people from subscribing to ISP services and installing Web-connected computers all over their homes.

I applaud what Grand Haven, Michigan is doing. I think most municipalities should provide their citizens with free WiFi-based Internet access. This should be part of the basic infrastructure that our taxes support, alongside roads, sidewalks, and sewers. It would be a critical component of the total package of civic amenities that spell the difference between a livable, economically vital community and a backwater.

I don’t think municipalities should worry about whether they’re putting a crimp in WiFi hotspot operators’ business models. My sense is that the hotspot industry is converging with the public cellular industry, which is converging with the landline telecom industry. Ultimately, there’ll just be a few nationally marketed telecom service brands, and they’ll offer the full range of voice, data, and multimedia services, including seamless broadband roaming from public to private wireless cells (and between wireless and landline networks).

As the broadband wireless industry evolves, municipal hotspots will provide the lowest-common-denominator free service option. But they’ll probably not support roaming to and from carriers’ public wireless networks (and only occasionally to other municipalities’ wireless networks). Instead, the municipal hotspots will be positioned as “fixed” wireless access islands with coverage primarily in business districts, libraries, municipal buildings, and other civic centers. Does anybody seriously think that, for example, Fairfax County, Virginia (the huge sprawling municipality to which I pay property tax) is going to install WiFi access points on every street corner? Even with WiMax, I doubt that citizens here or elsewhere will want their tax dollars spent on duplicating a “goldplated” wireless infrastructure best left to the private sector.

So Cingular, Verizon, Sprint et al. needn’t worry about being pre-empted by the municipal WiFi hotspots. Users will tune into those networks only when their primary wireless provider’s network is down or out of range.

And I would advise the wireless carriers to call off their lawyers, who are attempting to get state PUCs and legislators to nip the municipal hotspots in the bud. Actually, these hotspots are the best thing yet to happen to the broadband wireless market. They’ll enfranchise the masses on WiFi, and make them eager for value-added, higher-bandwidth metropolitan, regional, and national wireless services. In other words, for value-added services that only the huge national brands can build and sustain.

Jim

poem Fit

FIT

These my shoes
have soles grown
holey from
overuse.

The laces
are too long
from tugging
and I trip.

But we fit

I avoid
puddles and
tripleknot.

fyi Spam Controls Imperil E-Mail Reliability

All:

Pointer to article:
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050225/e_mail_reliability_2.html

Kobielus kommentary:
Think of how many business and personal relationships are getting hung up with undelivered (or quarantined—same thing) e-mail. Think of how many people are too lazy or too shy to escalate the matter through a simple human touch: a phone call to see if a message went through (assuming that the sender has the intended recipient’s phone number).

E-mail has always been, essentially, best-effort delivery. Unfortunately, best effort isn’t good enough in a world that hinges on e-mail, and isn’t enough to surmount the mail-filtering barricades we’re constructing everywhere. Blame spam, viruses, Trojans, and so forth with closing the e-mail frontier and initiating a cold war of contending forces (allied e-mail users vs. the evil axis of confederated malware perpetrators).

How do you detect the e-mail messages you’re not receiving (without checking your quarantine folders)? If you expect a particular e-mail from a particular sender on a periodic schedule (such as daily and weekly), and you’re not getting it, then you’re likely to check quarantine. But if it’s the normal crush of any-old-time e-mails from any-old-sender (or new sender), you’ll probably never know it arrived and was shunted to quarantine. Or, more to the point, you’ll never know unless the sender has access to a secondary channel for notifying you. Such as IM. Or SMS. Or the phone. Or walking down the hall and telling you.

All of which raises the issue of spam jumping the synapse gap from one electronic medium (e-mail) to others. As you raise filtering barriers in these other media, how will necessary/desired escalations (i.e., from senders you OK) get through to you?

One approach is to build a whitelist-driven notification mechanism into e-mail. When you pull down your inbox, you should only see messages from pre-approved senders (such as those in your address book or corporate directory). All other messages should have been shunted to quarantine. However, your inbox should have a separate frame that simply shows the identities of senders in quarantine (but doesn’t show the message subject lines or text), and ranks those senders by likelihood of their being spammers.

With a mouse click, you could simply select authorized senders from that list, and have their messages thereby moved to your inbox. Alternately, those senders might have their e-mail addresses linked with their IM screen names; if they’re in your IM buddy list, they might be able to send you an IM to display within the e-mail “quarantine escalation” frame, requesting movement to your inbox. Or you might have provided your IM buddies with the ability to automatically get their e-mails delivered to your inbox. If they’re in your VOIP or SMS directory, you might set them up with similar privileges: send an e—mail delivery escalation message or automatic delivery to your e-mail inbox.

Whitelisting is so critical in the new order of filtered messaging infrastructure. Whitelisting, if it’s going to work in a multi-messaging/multi-service communications environment, has to be able to link addresses and identities across diverse domains. And to give you, the message recipient, the ability to define the policies that give all your trusted identities priority delivery to your world. Or the ability to holler at you through a special transom that you and they have pre-arranged.

Jim

rip Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

All:

I saw a post in Bruce Schneier's blog about Thompson. And that, somehow, made me want to pitch in a thought or two.

First off, I've only read "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," plus his many articles for Rolling Stone magazine, plus the occasional article in other pubs, plus the occasional chapter or two of his other books while loitering in bookstores, plus the zillion excerpts of his books that have appeared in reviews of them. So I'm not the deepest person on Thompson's oeuvre.

But I've enjoyed every single word the man ever wrote (of those that I've read, that is). He wrote with such singular zeal and style that you couldn't not notice. But I wouldn't call him a journalist--most of his stuff was pure rant and invention that stirred the emotions but didn't attempt to present an objective portrait of anything outside of his own obsessions. And this notion that he founded a so-called "gonzo" style of journalism is even more ridiculous--he coined this silly word to refer to precisely one practitioner of whatever it was that he wrote: himself. And, consequently, he's the only referent of this meaningless self-assertive adjective. (Note to self: invent nonsense adjective to refer to own unique blogging style, and convince others to think I'm the vanguard of that new school of blogging--yeah, that's the ticket).

Fundamentally, Thompson was a comedy writer, and quite a funny one, as anybody with even a passing familiarity with his work will attest. Admit it: when you think of Thompson, you think of Duke from Doonesbury, or some other cartoonish stick figure guzzling booze, doing dope, shooting guns, speeding recklessly across America's highways, running away from creditors, and generally shirking responsibilities. He created a purely cartoonish persona--from everything I've read, the actual man was a lot like this. So he was a performance comedian who brilliantly committed his performances to writing.

So Thompson cut quite a distinctive figure in the landscape of American literary culture. Don't buy into all that "gonzo journalism" crap. He was just a clown--not a merry prankster--but an agent provocateur with no agenda other than just being a cussed fool.

It's sad that he took his own life. Clearly, he was possessed by demons (as was the brilliant monologist Spalding Gray, who took his own life last year). I don't know what moral to draw from the Hunter S. Thompson story. He abused his body and brain for 67 years, till, apparently, his spirit just wore out. All the fear and loathing became too much for him.

You can't truly celebrate a life like that. Just observe, numbly. And wish him well on his next madcap adventure.

Jim

lol Hilton Cell Phone Numbers Posted on Net

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.technewsworld.com/story/40769.html?u=jkobielus2&p=ENNSS_669c3848b38a83722f797d45e212845c

Kobielus kommentary:
I almost didn't want to blog on this one--low hanging fruit. This story adds a whole new dimension to the term “identity honeypot.” Somehow, this woman mixes and mingles all too well, ingratiating herself far too wide, grabbing too many connections, acquaintances, and phone numbers. I actually feel sorry for the celebrities in Paris Hilton’s address book. They already have to deal with the privacy-invading consequences of their fame. Little did they expect that one of their peers would, inadvertently, be the weak link in the mutual-identity-protection circle that they, as a loose-knit community, maintain around themselves. And I feel (gasp!) sorry for Paris Hilton. She networks far too well for her own good. So does her cellphone address book. Available for the hacking. Just as Paris herself is always quite available for the …

Jim

fyi Relics of computer history in New York auction

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/hardwaretopics/hardware/story/0,10801,99946,00.html?source=NLT_PM&nid=99946

Kobielus kommentary:
I’m originally from Michigan, whose state motto is (smartypants that I am, I recall the Latin without having to look it up): “Si Quaeris Peninsulam Amoenam, Circumspice.” Translated to the vernacular, that’s “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.”

What does this have to do with “relics of computer history”? My feeling is that we don’t need to be reminded of computer history—it’s all around us, all the time, in all the legacy hardware we have cluttering up our homes and workplaces. I have old home computers, of the desktop and laptop variety, plus old printers, monitors, mice, keyboards, cables, software CDs, data diskettes, etc. Yeesh—enough history. Legacy just won’t go away. Our computing present is cluttered with too much computing past.

Of course, we need computing museums to hold onto the most significant relics of our computing past. We also need archival institutions to hold onto as many old hardware and OS platforms as possible, so that we can recover, use, and migrate as much of the significant old data as possible. The physical instantiations of old computing environments shouldn’t be allowed to disappear completely if they have a) archival/recovery/migration uses or b) historical significance.

One thing I’d like to see is more discussion of significant conceptual breakthroughs that lead—directly or indirectly—to modern distributed computing as we know it. One of the things I like most about this article is that it highlights the following conceptual breakthroughs, as expressed in physical artifacts being auctioned in NYC:

• “a 1946 business plan for a company to design and build a ‘multipurpose rapid computing machine of moderate cost’…drawn up by pioneers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, whose list of possible users of their machine is remarkably prescient, if limited. It includes banks, insurance companies and government census offices.”
• “books documenting the history of mathematical calculation from the 17th century to the present day”

Many of the most fundamental breakthroughs in computing have been conceptual, in the realms of mathematics, symbolic logic, and software design and engineering. These are developments that don’t produce “relics”—rather, they produce enduring additions to the “prior art” upon which all future hardware, software, and networking inventions rely. Those inventions eventually become outmoded, hence “relics,” but the conceptual substrate continues to build.

Increasingly, the innovations in the conceptual DNA of the cyberworld don’t even produce physical journal articles or other tangible tokens of their provenance. And they don’t clutter up our physical environments. But they inform it all.

Jim

imho The difference between prose and poetry

All:
Indulge me for a moment. I just need to persist this thought to my blog. I wrote this on May 15, 2001 and e-mailed it to a bunch of people who never responded. I hate it when good thoughts go unrecognized. So I’ll take it from the top once again:

Most people couldn’t give a crap about the difference between prose and poetry. But since this is a perennial topic of discussion in literary circles, I thought I’d take a crack at it.

On one level, I agree that in practice there is often little difference between prose and poetry as distinct literary genres. In practice, modern poetry is often simply prose chopped up and defaced with arbitrary carriage returns, tabs, punctuation, misspellings, and obscurities. Poetry often suffers from highfalutin abstractions, precious diction, adjectival overload, lack of point or narrative, and whining, self-pitying attitudes. And poets wonder why very few people buy or care about their work.

On another level, though, we can distinguish between prosaic and poetic
expression, which, taken together and interwoven well, can enliven even the most mundane writing. Prosaic expression points to objects in the world (even if that world exists only in the writer's head, as many scientific hypotheses, for example, do). Poetic expression points back at itself, focusing on language as an object worthy of contemplation in its own right (write!).

Language as an object worthy of contemplation--what do I mean by that? I mean the features of language that make it noteworthy, catchy, and memorable: meter, cadence, rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, tintinnabulation, imagery, word choice, etc. Language as a symbol system or an equation that we continually manipulate: grammar, syntax, etc. Language as a human artifact that is capable of conveying beauty and meaning through its very structure and sound.

The very best writing is both prose and poetry--you want to read, then
re-read it, focusing on the objects that the writer is trying to depict, but also the object through which the writer depicts them. Through brevity, the best poetry encourages us to re-read. The best e-mails do too.

It's all art and artifice. I've spent my career trying to breathe life into technical topics of thudding complexity. Committing this crap to someone's memory requires stealth poetry.

Jim

fyi RSA looks ahead on RFID security

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.it-analysis.com/frame.php?name=The+Register&url=http://go.theregister.com/feed/2005/02/18/rsa_rfid/

Kobielus kommentary:
This raises a nightmare scenario in the “identity of things”: a scenario in which every personal “thing” we own or hold becomes a tattletale: a silent RFID beacon of who we are, who they are, and where we/they are.

How to keep this scenario from becoming a reality? Most important, it will have to involve the relying party presenting credentials before the RFID of a personal “thing” can be released. One approach is to require readers to transmit their identity, permissions, and other credentials to the holder of the RFID-tagged thing. The RFID thingholder—a human being or intelligent software agent—will then have the option of granting or not granting the request for RFID, once it has validated the credentials. The thing itself might display the results of that credentials check, or the results might be transmitted via an SMS to the thingholder’s cellphone display. Authorizing release of RFID might then involve pressing some key on the thing, or responding to the SMS, or some other dynamic handshake interaction.

Obviously, such a scenario demands several critical chunks of infrastructure. First of all, it would require that RFID “personal things” (we’re talking your personal possessions, not the RFID-bearing things in a manufacturing supply chain) come equipped with receivers as well as transmitters. Second, it would require a federated IdM infrastructure for registering, issuing, managing, and validating credentials for RFID readers—one that has the capacity to handle the huge and ever-growing transaction volumes. Third, it would require that all RFID-bearing things be engineered to participate in this federated RFIDm environment. Fourth, it would require serious rethinking of user interfaces associated with RFID-bearing things, so as to make it as easy as possible for ordinary people to set up the appropriate rules governing controlled, secure release of their personal, privacy-sensitive RFIDs.

If this sounds like a big kettle of public policy, technical, and usability issues, you’re quite right. We’ve barely begun to think through the many issues that will surface as RFIDs—and RFIDm as a discipline—begin to pervade our lives.

Jim

fyi 145,000 Americans' identity data stolen

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10921081.htm

Kobielus kommentary:
This just underlines how easy it is to fraudulently represent yourself as some “trusted” agency and use money to penetrate identity honeypot-for-profit sites.

One issue is when, whether, and how we’re going to mandate credentials and background checks on honeypot hounds who claim to work for legitimate debt-collection agencies, insurance agencies and other firms. Legislation and regulation seems to be called for here.

Another issue is providing prompt notification to people whose identity information is stolen or compromised. The notifications must be through all channels possible.

Yet another issue has to do with public education, and instilling in the culture habits of personal identity protection. We’ve all heard the guidelines about not disclosing more identity information than is absolutely necessary in various transactions. And in being careful who you’re giving it out to. And reporting/canceling lost/stolen credit cards and other credentials as soon as you’re sure they’re truly gone. And so forth.

But personal preventive habits don’t protect anybody against the incompetence of legitimate identity honeypots whose systems are breached, or who don’t do due diligence when selling our identities to the highest bidder.

I think personal identity surveillance is the most fundamental new habit we must all learn. A lot of it has to do with something quite simple we all should do like clockwork: check our statements. Know what statements (bank, broker, credit card, etc.) are due to you on what times of the month, quarter, or year. Check your statements item by item as soon as they arrive. Match up every single item against receipts and other records you’ve kept (you have kept them, haven’t you?) on every single transaction in which you’ve engaged over the preceding statement cycle. Question every anomalous item, and call the statement-issuing institution to discuss it with them. Flag possible identity theft right away so that the statement-issuing institution can implement appropriate damage/liability-control measures. And so forth.

These all seem like common sense habits, but it’s surprising how many people don’t pay close attention to what’s happening with their personal assets and liabilities. The point I’m getting to is that your identity isn’t valuable in and of itself. It’s only valuable as an instrument for unlocking and absconding with your assets.

Which brings me, and I’ll explain the relevance in just a moment, back to the subject of the “identity of things,” which I discussed in a recent blog posting. When I was thinking through that topic, my mind kept gravitating back to the time-honored characterization of nouns as referring to “people, places, and things.” Then I noticed a parallel with our concepts of identity. Most IdM systems focus on identities of people, and also on the identity of “places” (a term that I’m construing broadly as referring to any logical or physical grouping of people, and of “things”).

Then I rolled my mind over how we’re going to define the difference between “people” and “things,” from an IdM standpoint. And it hit me. The practical difference between these entities is simple:

• People have asses and assets that can be impounded.
• Things are just assets, associated with, owned by, and used by people.

Yeah, I know, that’s a crude cartoonish way to put it. But it occurred to me that all the risk of identity theft has to do with the fact that it’s your ass and your assets that are on the line. Your ass can be thrown into the slammer if somebody impersonates you doing something nasty. Your assets can all be taken away by the thief, or tied up in the most horrendous legal labyrinth.

Which is why you need to read your statements. Only you are keeping track of your assets. And should. They’re the real reason people want your identity. They covet your assets (hmmm...sounds quasi-biblical, doesn't it). Unless they somehow like your name more than their own, and enjoy introducing themselves with your euphonious moniker.

I suppose there are name fetishists out there, but that’s the least of it.

Jim

poem Sum Things

SUM THINGS

My coffee
today was

tea. My songs
silence. My

income the
absence of

debt. My friend
solitude.

fyi Prepaid Phones Get a Bad Rap From Crime Use

All:

Pointer to article:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/0,,SB110858146259256702-IFjeoNnlaZ4n5yoa4KHbayCm4,00.html

Kobielus kommentary:
It all comes down to identity. With prepaid cellular plans, people can buy the phones and airtime refill cards from pretty much anywhere. They can use cash. They don’t need to present identification to the carrier to activate the service. So, yes, they provide anonymity. And anonymity is an important weapon in the arsenal of criminals. So I’m not surprised that people are taking advantage of this feature of prepaid plans in order to commit what one might call “drive-by calling” (dump the phone after the deed’s been done).

Of course, Japan (the US and Sweden as well) is one of the few countries in the world where prepaid hasn’t succeeded in dominating the consumer cellular market. But I doubt that prepaid phones/plans are involved in criminal activity any more than postpaid phones/plans. The problem with prepaid, as implemented generally, is that these plans frustrate criminal investigations after the nasty cellphone-facilitated deed has been committed.

Prepaid is an offering of growing importance for most cellular carriers, and for customers who like the “built-in call budgeting” that comes from having to explicitly purchase airtime minutes in advance. For their part, cellular carriers make too much money off the hefty airtime charges from prepaid (higher than postpaid plans) to turn their backs on this approach. So you best believe the carriers aren’t eager to monkey with a good thing, though they would prefer that customers lock into long-term postpaid contracts, thereby reducing churn, but customers generally feel otherwise.

Nevertheless, it is possible to introduce customer identification into the prepaid mass-market equation. If customers are given incentives to use their credit cards when buying phones and airtime, then it would be easier to identify those who use their prepaid plans for bad purposes. Many cellular carriers provide bonus airtime to customers that have signed up to auto-refill their airtime balances from their credit cards (or debit cards or bank accounts).

As the article states, some countries are legislating on the issue, requiring prepaid customers to provide ID upon purchase. That’s a good approach, and it should be adopted by countries the world over. In the US, you have to show ID to purchase handguns, so why not for cellular phones as well? However, nobody in their right mind would require background checks on cellphone purchases (gasp--I'm sorry I even put the idea in people's minds).

The Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association (CTIA) needs to take a strong public position on prepaid plans and the need for customer identification. Otherwise, this issue will fester and put an important service category on the defensive in the PR and regulatory arenas.

Jim

fyi "Far Out"... of Compliance (school district RFID kid-tracking)

All:

Pointer to blogpost:
http://www.identityblog.com/2005/02/13.html#a137

Kobielus kommentary:
This is in regards to the SFGate.com story on a small school district in California, which in January began requiring all students to wear RFID-enabled badges that monitor their whereabouts on campus. The district’s stated reason was to “ease attendance taking and increase campus security."

According to Jamie Lewis, “The school district did this without involving the parents, many of whom are now raising a ruckus. How many ways does this system violate Kim's laws of identity?”

The fundamental issue here is that two types of domains claim control over children’s identities: school districts (during schooldays) and parents (each parent/couple its own household domain, claiming legitimacy in tracking their kids’ whereabouts/doings all the time, including when the kids are in school). And each of them has quite legitimate reasons for wanting to control those identities—or at least track various attributes associated with those identities (such as real-time locations).

Generally, the identity domain of the school administration and the identity domain of the kids’ parents/household are federated to each other, and have the same interests at heart. We have a trust relationship, and a division of responsibilities that consistent with that relationship. As the parent of two highschoolers, I’d like to know that my offspring are in their school during normal school hours (and normal afterschool hours). As regards their precise locations in their school at any point in time, that’s a secondary concern that I’ll let the school administrators worry about. For me it’s not a privacy-of-my-kids issue. In school, students have no expectation of privacy, except for their lockers, and even there, issues of discipline and public safety make that a meager expectation at best.

As a parent, I wouldn’t choose to de-federate from the public school system (i.e., go the home-schooling route) over an issue such as RFID tracking of students’ whereabouts in school. That’s an administrator’s prerogative. In this case, the law of identity federation applies: domains must be able to establish trust relationships under which they can choose to accept each other’s identity assertions and honor each other’s identity decisions--or reject them--subject to local policies.

In the case of this school district, I would choose to honor the administration’s identity decisions—track kids via RFID--and accept their assertions—kid is here, in the place where he or she is supposed to be. Yeah, the school district should have honored parents by notifying them and consulting with them before they did it.

But, if my kid were in that school district, I wouldn’t raise a bogus privacy concern. And I wouldn't stop them from doing it.

I'm constantly worrying about my kids. In other words, I'm a normal parent.

Jim

fyi Cisco To Target XML Messaging Market

All:

Pointer to article:
www.internetnews.com/infra/article.php/3482416

Kobielus kommentary:
This is one of the biggest, longest, most open secrets in the Web services management (WSM) arena. All the serious action in the WSM space is at the intermediary nodes, which are increasingly becoming full-fledged application layer routers, competing with the likes of Cisco (which traditionally has operated at the network layer).

No one has doubted for the past several years that Cisco would eventually muscle its way in the application-layer router market—most likely through strategic acquisitions. Cisco has yet to fully show its hand in that regard, but it undoubtedly will come out with scalable, clusterable, hardware-optimized layer-seven router appliances that play nicely alongside its core layer-three routers and traffic management products. I’d be very surprised to see layer-seven router-appliance WSM vendors DataPower Technology and Sarvega stay independent for much longer. They’re achieved enough of a headstart in that niche to make them quite valuable—or quite threatening--to the Ciscos of the world.

Increasingly, the enterprise service bus (ESB) will be an internetwork of layer-seven intermediary nodes. These intermediaries will facilitate transmission, routing and/or transformation of messages between ESB endpoints. Intermediary nodes in an ESB environment will perform any or all of the various message-oriented middleware (MOM)-oriented services, including queue management, brokering, routing, bridging, leveraging, wrapping, passthrough, bridging, and abstraction. An ESB intermediary will also function as an integration broker, orchestration engine, adapter engine, SOAP router, protocol gateway, and/or WSM agent. These intermediaries will increasingly be large, fast, powerful blade/grid servers executing a wide range of functions on a heavy traffic load.

Cisco will just be another purveyor of these intermediary appliances, and not necessarily the principal vendor. Middleware vendors such as IBM, Tibco, Sonic, and others will remain significant forces in the ESB market, as will dominant platform vendors such as Microsoft and Oracle. But Cisco will effectively leverage their layer-three dominance into a respectable share of the layer-seven market. When they actually make the leap into that niche. Which should be soon.

Jim

fyi IBM Sees Hackers Going Mobile, Targeting Phones, Handhelds And Cars

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60400349

Kobielus kommentary:
Another twist on the “identity of things.” The countless computing/communicating things embedded in other things. Those things will need to issue continual “halt, who goes there?” challenges to other things pinging them from all sides, continually running authentication and authorization checks on all these things. Are IdM systems ready for that? Think about automobiles. Things in motion, passing other things in motion all the time. Occupied and surrounded by people (and animals) carrying and wearing things. Bathed in wireless frequencies transporting signals from remote things and people and what have you, all the time. Considering the troubles we’re having with malware things invading every last personal computing/communication device we have, I’d be happy if my principal things—house, car, appliances—remain deaf, dumb, and mute to the new world of communicating things. All the better for the physical protection of me and my loved ones. And for safeguarding my most expensive personal physical properties.

When technology is embedded, we're literally in bed with technology. Are we sure we want to be that intimate with another species?

Jim

poem Sheer Enthusiasm

SHEER ENTHUSIASM

God's bottled. His fizz
sets the spirit sparkling and
the world on alert.

fyi Spyware vs. anti-spyware: get it together please!

All:

Pointers to articles:

Coast antispyware consortium falls apart
http://www.infoworld.com/article/05/02/08/HNcoastfallsapart_1.html

Anti-Spyware Site Knocked Out By DoS
http://www.internetweek.com/allStories/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=60300274

New Program Attacks Microsoft's AntiSpyware
http://www.computerworld.com/newsletter/0,4902,99666,00.html?nlid=AM_B

Nearly 30 Symantec Titles Open To Attack
http://newsletter.crn.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/emBJ0FaFLw0ElN0DCVb0EQ

Kobielus kommentary:
All of these headlines plopped into my inbox in a single day—this morning. It’s enough to make me swear off caffeine. I’ve got bad enough jitters from the morning news—why feed the fire? I’ve recently been plagued by spyware, and a persistent Trojan that keeps the barn door open to more. I have to run four (count ‘em—four!) anti-spyware programs daily to deal with the situation. But that’s like shoveling the snow while the blizzard’s still in progress. What I gather from this news is that the situation will get much worse before it gets better, because:

• The budding young anti-spyware tool industry can’t organize a coordinated collective response to this common threat.
• The anti-spyware tools that are out there are being attacked and neutralized effectively by the spyware community (or by their own inadequate engineering—viz. the beta Microsoft tool that consistently gives me the Blue Screen of Death)
• The big anti-malware vendors don’t necessarily offer rock-solid defenses against spyware and other threats.
• The biggest OS/application platform vendor is still scrambling to put together a coherent roadmap (and is hurriedly acquiring established vendors to cobble together a strategy).

All the more reason why each of us needs to keep virtual baseball bats by our virtual beds. We can’t trust the locks and guards and surveillance systems that we thought were keeping our perimeters safe. Perpetual vigilance, suspicion, and cynicism are the price we pay for Internet-centric computing. Intruders abound. Sometimes, they trigger no alarm. Sometimes, they snip the wires on their way in.

Jim

lol Why Wilco is The Future of Music (According to Larry Lessig)

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/view.html?pg=5

Kobielus kommentary:
I have and love Wilco’s latest two albums, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and “A Ghost is Born”—actually went to Border’s and bought the CDs. I also have a purely-downloadable-for-free-thanks-to-our-fans-for-buying-“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” EP that they released online between the two albums. I also love (but still haven’t gone out and bought, for some reason) their late-90s “Mermaid Avenue” recordings with Billy Bragg, wherein the Yanks and bloke set great new music to great old unsung lyrics from the incredibly great Woody Guthrie.

The quality of Wilco’s music isn’t my beef. I just worry that this band is setting itself up for the inevitable “they suck” backlash that comes from being embraced too tightly by the “cool” digerati and music aficionados. Wilco’s had this “cool” indie prestige for years, far outstripping their actual sales and popularity. They’ve become more a symbol than a band. Though they’re very much a band, and an excellent quirky one. If you actually listen to Wilco’s music, you can’t help wondering how they continue to pull it off: Jeff Tweedy’s voice is feeble at best, their song structures shamble all over the place, their lyrics are occasionally lame and pretentious, and they can’t seem to nail the pop-music hooks that they’re sorta trying to hit.

But I love popping their CDs into the player. And playing them over and over. They’ve got that same goofy shaggy-dog folk/rock-street cred that, say, Neil Young pioneered. And, like Neil Young, they somehow rock memorably against all odds.

No, I don’t manage the band. But I sorta wish all of their “Wilco-as-symbol” devotees would cool it. So the band—actually, let’s cut through the fiction here—Tweedy himself is Wilco—can just make that fun-to-listen-to music.

Why did I label this post “lol”? I think it was because I laughed a sardonic laugh when I saw that “Wilco is the future of music” headline. Heaven help us. God, no more strangling embraces.

Lessig: Just let this band be.

Jim

fyi Databases Can't Handle RFID

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/databasetopics/data/story/0,10801,99589,00.html?source=NLT_MW&nid=99589

Kobielus kommentary:
Good ol’ John Fontana of Network World called me the other day for analyst insight on this big bucket of abstraction called the “identity of things.” John’s one of the best tech trade press reporters. You can tell he’s good. He knows the right analysts to call. ;-)

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to opine blog-wise on the “identity of things” for some time. I just didn’t have a good enough fyi handle to hang my thoughts on till I ran across this story this morning.

First off, what the heck does the “identity of things” refer to? On one level, it sounds like some metaphysical plane of existence, some mythical spirit world, some platonic ideal, like the “secret life of plants” or the “lifestyles of the rich and famous.” Like animism: the identities/souls of the inanimate starstuff from which we’re all, magically, composed.

But I digress.

John called for assistance in helping him narrow down the scope of his contemplated article on the “identity of things.” He already had a good understanding of the broad scope of the term, in terms of concrete, real-world, commercial technical approaches, such as IP addressing, RFID, and ID dataweb. He had already ruled out discussion of IP addressing (nothing terribly new there—who’s up on IPv6?) and RFID (far too much into the supply chain management angle than John cared to delve in that particular article).

If I had read this article before John called, I would have suggested he explore RFID’s demands on the data storage, transmission, and processing infrastructure. Yeesh—listen to what one British RFID consultancy is finding in the manufacturing industry:

“[The consultants] contend that the [parts-tracking data management burden] will only get worse with RFID, which will balloon the amount of data that's generated and make indexing the information in a relational database prohibitively expensive and all but impossible. [One of them] estimates that if Wal-Mart Stores Inc. logged all of its inventory via RFID tags for a single day, it would reach 7 million terabytes of data. Gulp! Can your database swallow that? Didn't think so.”

That’s one of the big problems with the “identity of things.” There are just too many “things” in the universe. Try giving every star in the sky its own unique name, including the billions upon billions embedded in galaxies, and don’t forget to give each of the countless galaxies their own unique names. After identifying every discrete point of light uniquely, now try storing and managing all those names (plus the associated descriptive attributes of each star) in some master directory database in the sky. Clearly, the directory itself would have sufficiently massive gravitation to form its own black hole, sucking all of the named “objects” in the universe down into some freaky meta-universe, never to be heard from again.

But I’m rat-holing on a metaphor. Also, I’ve overlooked all the planets, asteroids, comets, and empire deathstars orbiting all those celestial bodies. We would need a universal Unicode that supports Klingon character sets, at the very least, to do justice to all that heterogeneity.

Actually, John was primarily interested in ID dataweb—aka federated resource sharing environments built on emerging Web services standards, especially Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI) and XRI Data Interchange (XDI). That’s a hot and interesting topic. John just wanted to know—as do we all—when it will actually become a substantial market. The standards have been laid down, and there are various companies implementing them. Epok in Bethesda MD is among the most advanced in this regard. It has commercial product. And customers.

ID dataweb (actually, there are many synonyms for this emerging space—I’m partial to “federated resource sharing”) is an approach under which every data element in every database can conceivably be given a unique, fine-grained identifier—thanks to XRI, which is backward-compatible with the URI/URN naming scheme that has achieved ubiquity on the Web. Hmmm…I hadn’t thought of that…the World Wide Web was built on the “identity of things” (aka pages, scripts, etc.), leveraging URI, DNS, and IP.

Well, anyway, ID dataweb is an environment within which autonomous data domains can choose to selectively grant fine-grained data-access rights to external parties—and unilaterally rescind those rights. It leverages the identity federation and trust infrastructure being implemented everywhere through open standards such as WS-Security, SAML, Liberty Alliance, and others. It’s a standards-based flexible way of securely setting up and managing as-needed data-integration connections between autonomous organizations. Such as manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and other participants in a supply chain. Or financial services firms engaging in dynamic partnering on equities underwritings. And so forth. Data integration/exchange/transfer is one of the principal tasks in any B2B collaborative-commerce partnering.

Stevie Wonder once sang “Don’t you worry ‘bout a thing, pretty momma, cuz I’ll be standing in the wings when you check it out.” Well, you gotta worry about “things.” People are going to be checking out those “things” right and left. Here’s an issue that the ID dataweb community must grapple with: As organizations expose/share/protect more of their fine-grained data resources through XRI/XDI, how are they going to manage the massive databases underlying the humongous “directories of things” that result?

Oh…that was unintended…Stevie had an album called “The Secret Life of Plants.” I cycled subconsciously from the Wonder of Motown to the wonder of ID dataweb, and then back again.

Oh well. There you have it. Stranger things have happened.

Jim

fyi Microsoft turns spotlight on its search engine

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2005/0201microturns.html

Kobielus kommentary:
Here’s a search-engine feature request from me to MSN: make it easier to search for spyware/adware signatures. During my recent, nasty infestation by these beasties, my anti-spyware programs (I have several, and use them all, every day) have been only intermittently helpful. They’ve found some problems, but have overlooked others. Often, I’m surprised to see some new icon on my desktop, or new program in my registry, or some new folders and new exe’s, or some irritating new error message upon boot or crash. Having only these scattered bits of text to go on, I’ve had to resort to Google to find out if they’re friend or foe, and often to find out that they’re the latter. Google has pointed me (on some but not all occasions) to tools to fix them, or simply manual procedures that I might try. Given Microsoft’s woefully vulnerable OS, they should make their search engine their “malware annihilation nerve central” for empowering besieged end users (in addition to beefing up their anti-malware tools and protection features in Windows). BTW, I’ve tried their beta Anti-Spyware tool, and running its scan gives me the Blue Screen of Death every time. Often, people are at wit’s end, exhausting all personal resources on these problems. People are feeling precious little love for Microsoft these days, and it all comes down to their security problems’ impacts on their lives and nerves.

Jim

imho Critique of Cameron’s Seventh Law

All:

Pointer to blogpost:
http://www.identityblog.com/2005/02/06.html#a129

Kobielus kommentary:
I don’t think Kim’s seventh law is necessary. I agree with its thrust, but I think it can be resolved to the three identity governance principles I proposed.

First, consider Kim’s wording of his new law:

• “The Law of Harmonious Contextual Autonomy: The unifying identity metasystem MUST facilitate negotiation between relying party and user of the specific identity and its associated encoding such that the unifying system presents a harmonious technical and human interface while permitting the autonomy of identity in different contexts.”

Put more simply, identity environments must not constrain the ability of people and relying parties to arrive at a mutually agreeable handshake on the identities appropriate to particular transactions.

Now, consider the three laws I proposed:

• “Law of identity federation: Domains must be able to establish trust relationships under which they can choose to accept each other’s identity assertions and honor each other’s identity decisions--or reject them--subject to local policies.
• Law of identity assurance: Entities must be able to unambiguously ascertain, resolve, and verify each other’s identities, and reserve the right to refrain from or repudiate interactions in which such assurance is lacking.
• Law of identity self-empowerment: Humans must be able to self-assert their identities, and reveal or conceal as much or little of their identity as they wish, at any time, for any reason, from any other party, for any duration, and also to unlaterally defederate from any domain that deliberately or inadvertently compromises or violates these rights.”

This formulation asserts the critical importance of “local policies”—i.e., those of the identity owning party and the identity relying party—to any identity-based interaction. This is the “context” that Cameron, Lewis, Lemon, and others discussed. It needn’t be a “community context.” Rather, reduced to its simplest, it’s simply the converged interaction-specific contexts of the identity relying and owning parties.

It’s identity impedance matching:

• Sez the identity-owning party: “Here are the identities I might choose to present to you, the relying party.”
• Sez the identity-relying party: “Here are the identities I might choose to honor from you, the identity-owning party.”

If there’s an intersection between those two sets of identities within the context of a proposed interaction, there’s a basis for further negotiation. Hence a basis for further interaction.

Jim

P.S. BTW, do people realize I’m looking for a job? I’m looking for a position in the IdM industry. Are my ideas not sufficient to show that I know what I’m talking about? Please call me. 703-924-6224. james_kobielus@hotmail.com. AIM screen name: "Jim Kobielus"

poem Sustain

SUSTAIN

Sort we each to fate
and fascinations,

daily dissolutions,
a sure surprising recrystallization,

assorted morning faces
we make to sustain,

each in our own ways
straight and strange.

fyi SAP plans new platform as competitive weapon

All:

Pointer to article:
http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/erp/story/0,10801,99400,00.html?source=NLT_EB&nid=99400

Kobielus kommentary:
I find this story misleading, but not deliberately. It's the sort of cockeyed spin that sometimes gets placed on an important vendor roadmap direction when filtered through CEOs, marketing communications people, and semi-informed reporters.

For starters, SAP does not plan a "new platform." SAP's platform--now and through the remainder of this decade and beyond--is NetWeaver, which is not a single product but an application, integration, orchestration, and development suite. SAP has not changed its direction at all. NetWeaver is the platform.

Next off, SAP does not plan a "new system" by 2007 on which all of its apps and NetWeaver components will run. Rather, it's continuing to enhance the componentry within NetWeaver and all NetWeaver-based SAP apps (mySAP apps, xApps, etc.). The "new system" to which the article alludes is simply continued aggressive enhancement of the SOA, composite app development, and orchestration features of NetWeaver and NetWeaver-based apps. And to be even more painfully specific, SAP will continue to decompose its NetWeaver and mySAP functionality as reusable, recomposable service primitives, which will have their fine-grained APIs exposed via WSDL service contracts in NetWeaver's UDDI registry. This is something SAP has been working on for a while, and have discussed in public for well over a year, including at the recent SAP Analyst Summit in Scottsdale AZ (attended by yours truly and many others).

And this is a great strategy, targeted both at existing SAP customers as well as channel partners who are screaming for SAP's platform/apps to become ever less monolithic and ever more flexibly reusable. But it's not a new strategy, new platform, new component, or new development paradigm for SAP. It's simply a sign of how seriously SAP is implementing SOA throughout their architecture.

I don't doubt they'll make significant progress toward this goal by 2007. But I wish that articles like this would clarify rather than cloud what this important platform/app vendor is doing.

Jim