How IT Increases Productivity

Hmm... I have to agree with this but I do wonder how much actually gets done?

What technologies did you look at? We asked employees how they were spending their time and where they were getting the greatest value: internal databases, external databases, other technologies, phone, face to face.

And you found a correlation between IT use and productivity? Absolutely yes, though not always as we had expected. If you look across e-mail and social networks, database and phone, the surprise was that overall, IT use is not associated with an increase in speed. In fact, it’s associated with slower speed. But we found that heavier IT users are much heavier multitaskers, so over time, they’re completing more projects and bringing in more money for the firm.

http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyId=14&articleId=281734&intsrc=hm_topic

Google Apps for Businesses

Cool stuff, and this may be the thing to finally break Microsoft's stranglehold on IT.

On Thursday, the Googlers launched their long-awaited attack on the Microsofties' 800-pound-gorilla dominance of the business software gold mine. You know, the software behind that monitor sitting on your desk at work.

Both schemes use the Internet to store the software and documents created by users instead of Microsoft's traditional system that is nailed down to the server computers owned by the business in question.

http://www.latimes.com/technology/chi-0702240245feb25,1,4648171.column?coll=la-utilities-technology&ctrack=1&cset=true

Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind

Excellent work. Seriously. If you've ever asked yourself who we are as a species, where we came from, and why we're so downright odd compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, check out this book.

The basic premise is this: the human animal has been anatomically the same for almost 200K years. Including the brain. So why did we not have art, writing, culture, and religion until about 25K years ago? What happened?

Additionally, why is most prehistoric cave art so similar? And strange?

The answer: drugs. We discovered hallucinogens and started tripping out. If we take them now, we see similar things that people painted on caves 25000 years ago. This is when we became spiritual beings, when we took hits of mushrooms and other plants and saw spirits. So all religion, and really all creative expression stems from this drug use -- it kickstarted the unimaginitive human brain.

Now here's the odd part? Why is it so similar? Why do people report seeing such similar things that art seperated by tens of thousands of years and continents look so similar?

The answer, Hancock posits is because we aren't seeing stuff that's generated by our chemically altered brains, we're seeing self-consistant evolving worlds in altered realities. In essence, we're changing from "channel normal" to "channel mushrooms" or "channel ahayuasca" and seeing real, living entities there. Not sure about this last bit, but he raises some interesting points, like why would evolution give us as a species the ability to hallucinate similar events? What reproductive advantage would that cause?

Great stuff!

http://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Meetings-Ancient-Teachers-Mankind/dp/1932857400/sr=1-1/qid=1172182111/ref=sr_1_1/103-8294158-2783832?ie=UTF8&s=books

Users Who Know Too Much (And the CIOs Who Fear Them)

Really good article on partnering with the business on technology, rather than dictating it's use:

As irrelevant or irresponsible as some shadow IT projects seem on the surface, it’s important to accept the fact that users do things for reasons. If they are e-mailing critical files among themselves, it’s because they need to work on something from a different location and that’s the most direct solution that they can come up with. IT’s job shouldn’t be figuring out how to prevent the user from accessing and moving files, but rather to find a solution that lets him take that file home in a way that doesn’t make the company vulnerable and isn’t any more complex than the method that the user discovered on his own.

That last part is important. “No one,” says Flynn, “will jump through hoops.” They’ll go around them...

IT has a natural tendency to think about technology in a system-centric way. Systems automate workflow and control access to information. And for a long time these systems made work and workers more efficient. “But there has always been a bright line between IT systems and what people really wanted to do,” says Babson’s Anderson.

“I used to have users come to me as if I was the almighty IT god,” says Israel, who recalls those as “the good old days.” But in that sense, god is dead, and IT’s authority and sense of purpose can no longer derive from controlling how people use technology.

“IT can’t insist on doling out IT,” says Gartner’s Smith. “The demographics of the workforce are changing. Younger people who are more familiar with technology are coming in, and they will not sit still while [CIOs] dole out corporate apps. If you want to retain the best and the brightest, you can’t lock down your environment.”

Smith advises CIOs to try to stop thinking about technology as something that must always be enterprise class. There are plenty of Web-based tools that can meet their users’ needs and not cost the company a dime. “Be open-minded and bring them in where appropriate,” he says.

Does that mean that the enterprise is going to become a messier place? Absolutely. That’s an inevitable consequence of user-centric IT. But messiness isn’t as bad as stagnation.

“Controlled chaos is always OK,” says Gold. “If you want to be an innovator and leverage IT to get a competitive advantage, there has to be some controlled chaos.”

 

http://www.cio.com/archive/021507/fea_user_mgmt.html?action=print

Commercially Available Quantum Computer Demoed

 

It looks like this might be real -- a Canadian company succesfully demoed a 16-qubit quantum computer which solved sudoku puzzles, seating plans, and solving topology matching of complex molecules. All of which are computationally NP-hard. Sounds interesting.

 

Researchers believe that by combining many of these quantum bits, or qubits, they will be able to perform certain tasks that are currently out of reach. Chief among them: the ability to swiftly crack encrypted communications.

D-Wave is pursuing a different method that is easier to implement but cannot break encryption schemes, although simulations suggest it could solve other problems extremely rapidly. In most prototype quantum computing systems, researchers hit atoms with lasers or use other means to excite particles into fuzzy quantum states. But in a technique called adiabatic quantum computing, researchers cool metal circuits into a superconducting state in which electrons flow freely, resulting in qubits. They then slowly vary a magnetic field, which lets the qubits gradually adjust to each other, sort of like people huddling in the cold. In 2005 German researchers built a three-qubit adiabatic quantum computer.

 

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa001&articleID=BD4EFAA8-E7F2-99DF-372B272D3E271363

P2P File Sharing Has No Effect On Music Sales

Stating the obvious, but maybe it's because the bulk of music played on the radio sucks? There is a lot of good music out there -- it's just hard to find.

The study reports that 803 million CDs were sold in 2002, which was a decrease of about 80 million from the previous year. The RIAA has blamed the majority of the decrease on piracy, and has maintained that argument in recent years as music sales have faltered. Yet according to the study, the impact from file sharing could not have been more than 6 million albums total in 2002, leaving 74 million unsold CDs without an excuse for sitting on shelves.

So what's the problem with music? The study echoes many of the observations you've read here at Ars. First, because the recording industry focuses on units shipped rather than sold, the decline can be attributed in part to reduced inventory. Gone are the days when Best Buy and others wanted a ton of unsold stock sitting around, so they order less CDs. The study also highlighted the growth in DVD sales during that same period as a possible explanation for why customers weren't opening their wallets: they were busy buying DVDs.

 

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070212-8813.html

Ultraviolet

Avoid at all costs. This movie is badly written, produced, acted, and doesn't even make sense.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0370032/

MI III

Not a good movie. Cruise is terribly self indulgent with a clone of his new real-world bride. He has also seem to lost track of why MI II was good. Good hong-kong style action done with hollywood budgets. Give this one a miss.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317919/

The Illusionist

A pretty decent movie with a good premise - a boy falls for a Dutchess in Eastern Europe in the turn of the century. Of course their childhood romance is torn apart as his pedicree simply isn't up to snuff. Of course this boy grows up to be a famous illusionist who runs into the Dutchess and they rekindle their romance. One problem, though - she's to be engaged to the heir to the throne. Along the way, mystery and intrigue along with some truly spooky special effects (that no illusionist today can match), we get interesting characters in an interesting time. Well worth a look.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443543/

Random Slashdot Story Generator

A good one:

Hethrir writes "Apparently Google is tired of waiting for NASA to send a manned mission to Mars. They announced plans to use their expertise in getting babes to get Linus Torvalds on Mars by late 2005." I'm all for space exploration, but don't you think we should send a ferret up there first? The announcement is here.

http://www.bbspot.com/toys/slashtitle/index.html

Software As A Service And The Future Of Computing

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun's CEO) notes in his blog:

We just had our annual analyst conference - where we bring together financial and industry analysts for a day, and engage them in a dialog around our direction and perspective. Presentations are here, for those interested in what we had to say.

I thought the best presentation of the day, by far, was Greg's - on the coming explosion in our industry, and the separation of a class of customers that care about scale and efficiency in ways historically unseen in the IT industry. We call it the "Redshift."

For those that didn't know, Greg's a (former?) card carrying MIT professor. You can watch him here, well worth the time. And you'll definitely get a sense for where we're applying R&D for the next 10 years...

 What pisses me off is that I can't watch this from work (streaming media is blocked). So I don't know if it's good. But it sounds interesting.

http://www.sun.com/events/sas2007/index.jsp?intcmp=hp2007feb06_sas

ACS Aikido Class Feb 8

Techniques:

1. Yokomenuchi Nikkyo and Sankyo
2. Hanmi Handachi Ushiro Wasa Kotegaeshi
3. Ushiro Ryotedori Juji-garami

Attendance:

1. Jim
2. Ivy
3. Aaron
4. Fred
5. ??

 

Conservatives Hose Us With Net Neutrality

Gee, do you think that Telus might throttle Skype so you can't use VOIP for free when they offer a competing service? How stupid can this be?

Internal documents suggest the Tory government is reluctant to impose consumer safeguards for the web because it wants to protect the competitive position of businesses that offer Internet access.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press indicate that senior advisers to Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, who has previously declared a "consumer first" approach, are carefully heeding the arguments of large telecommunications companies like Videotron and Telus against so-called Net neutrality legislation.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/cp/business/070206/b0206149A.html

ACS Aikido Class Feb 6

Attendance:

1. Raul
2. Tamago-san
3. Omar (new)
4. Ivy
5. Aaron
6. Fred
7. Martin

Techniques:

1. Gyaku-hanmi Katatedori Iriminage (3 ways for Fred)
   
2. Gyaku-hanmi Katatedori Shihonage Ura (+ Omote for advanced students)
3. Gedan Tsuki Hiji Kime (Nikkyo for Fred)

Extra:

Test run through for Fred

Canadian Movie Piracy Claims Mostly Fiction?

I knew it...

"Michael Geist's weekly column dismantles recent claims [CC] that Canada is the world's leading movie piracy haven. The article uses the industry's own data to demonstrate that the assertions about movie bootlegging and its economic impact are greatly exaggerated and that the MPAA's arguments about Canadian copyright law are misleading. I particularly liked how Geist dug up the fact that the MPAA itself says [CC] that there have only been 179 movies recorded with a camcorder over the past three years out of the 1,400 that the Hollywood studios released."

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/05/166216&from=rss

CRM Appliance

It begins.

Flexible Deployment Options

Why should your CRM provider decide how you manage your customer information? At SugarCRM, the customer is in control.

Choose Sugar On-Demand, if you would like SugarCRM to host your information. Choose Sugar Cube, if you need a plug-and-play CRM appliance inside your firewall. Choose Sugar On-Site, if you want to manage Sugar on your own servers.

Do not let marketing dollars and bold pronouncements fool you: if a vendor tells you there is only one way to deploy software, it is more about their business model than yours.

 I don't know if these guys are good or not, but this sure seems like the direction that SAP and Oracle are terrified of. A CRM appliance. Or on-demand. Whichever. 

http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/crm-products.html

Star Trek Cribs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBXal1GAA4A

Software is Hard (Still)

It's almost absurd that after decades of debuggers, IDEs, and "Computer Science" writing software is still hard. Really hard. And what's even odder is that management still doesn't get it.

The fact that we were undertaking this thing that many people had done before us, we weren't the first, and that it could be so out of control, so unpredictable -- that threw me. I thought, OK, I don't know anything about this, I'm a writer and a journalist. I'm ignorant, but let me go educate myself. And so I did, and the first book I read was "The Mythical Man Month" [Frederick Brooks' classic study of the difficulties inherent in large software projects]. And I quickly realized that our experience was not unique at all. In a way it was the norm.

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2007/02/03/leonard/?source=rss

ShuttleCar

 

 

Uh, OK...

The Spice Girls Roller? Chas and Di’s Landrover? Nope far and away the coolest vehicle to be sold on eBay this week is this Shuttlecraft from Star Trek. Ok, calm down Trekkies, cos according to the owner it was never finished so never graced a movie or even a TV episode. Nevertheless it is undeniably cool and it does actually move, though it has no road licence. So should you wish you could use it to chase Klingons round your, err, local car park. The starting price is $2,600 which sounds ridiculously expensive though, but hey you can have a lot of fun in car parks.

http://www.bayraider.tv/2005/07/star_trek_shutt.html