One you may have missed … 6 Nov 2009
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… as I nearly did. My post from a year ago on reCAPTCHA is still one of the most visited on this blog, and you can see reCAPTCHA in action on my own main website where I use it to protect my email address from spambots.
Well, in mid September reCAPTCHA was acquired by Google. The story’s in Computerworld or on the Google blog. And as Computerworld comments, it’s a little component of Google’s mission to make all the world’s content accessible. The world is full of scanned archives of not-entirely-readable text (machine readable that is). reCAPTCHA helps to crack that problem. As it scans the world’s archives, Google will put it to work way beyond the academic sector where it originated.
Links:
• Google acquires reCAPTCHA in two-for-one deal, Computerworld, 16 Sep 2009
• reCAPTCHA uses one problem to crack another, ITasITis, 27 Nov 2008
• Teaching computers to read: Google acquires reCAPTCHA, Official Google Blog, 16 Sep 2009
• reCaptcha
Windows 7: an analyst case study 5 Nov 2009
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A couple of weeks downstream from the official launch, it’s worth taking a look at the commentary around Windows 7. Where are the insights relevant to enterprise deployment? Who’s providing good coverage?
I’m not looking at consumer-level information. Oddly enough, that actually broadens the review: counter-intuitive it may be, but of course the enterprise analysts have been working forward to the event for some time. But what’s the picture now, since Win 7 has seen the official light of day? Where might you go for ongoing advice, as you plot your strategy?
ITasITis regulars will remember I did a similar review of coverage of the Satyam debacle, earlier in the year. This time, there seems to be a lot less to review from the insight providers. News coverage of course is significant; and at the business end, Wharton Business School’s Knowledge@Wharton emphasises the commercial importance of Win7, for Microsoft, after the generally agreed lack of impact from Vista. The article gathers various opinions and research that suggests a better reception this time. But this isn’t the coverage that will be of most benefit to IT strategists.
So: where will you go for advice? Primarily, it’s the two majors: Gartner and Forrester. There’s a significant difference in approach in their mainstream research; and, also, in the flow of ongoing advice.
In official research, Gartner suggest that enterprises should plan an 18-month project to migrate to Win7. Starting now, presumably, since the research is dated 1 October. As Steve Kleynhans points out (and comment is pretty much unanimous on this) this will be the first major migration since the adoption of either Win2000 or XP in most enterprises.
More recently still, and in research available to a free account, Gartner advise that “Windows 7 is unskippable”. This paper advises that it’s “conservative” to plan to eliminate XP by mid-2012, when problems with third party applications may start to appear. So if you’re on the 18-month project, there’s time in hand – but not too much, given the annual-or-longer IT planning horizon. For other Gartner research, especially if you’re an account holder, drop onto the site and just search for “Windows 7″.
For sure, if an enterprise is intending to roll out Win7 across the organisation then the various stages of preparation, inventory, development, testing and rollout have to be gone through. So Gartner are giving thorough advice if your enterprise is still of a mind to create a corporate desktop image and roll it out everywhere.
But second, and importantly: Gartner are also blogging, though (typically) it may not be obvious. They are using Brian Gammage’s blog to capture thoughts on Win7 as the story unfolds. For ongoing insight from the majors, if you don’t have a Gartner account – or even if you do – this is the place to start. Remember, the blogs are not “published Gartner research” – they may give a different picture from the considered reports.
And a sideline. If you want to search Gartner blogs, there’s now a custom search on the InformationSpan Analyst Blogs index. Try it!
Forrester Research, in a piece published just a few days before the official launch, are much more inclined to get the train moving now and move it a bit at a time. Their advice is that enterprises “should: 1) start or accelerate application compatibility testing [...]; 2) plan for rolling out [...] small batches on new hardware initially; 3) weigh the costs and benefits of upgrading existing machines with at least 2 GB of memory; 4) start developing training sessions and tips and tricks guidance; and 5) prepare for — and embrace — empowered users who want to be early adopters.” Looks like they agree with Gartner about development, integration and testing but take more account of XP being long in the tooth; this advice will get experience moving.
A search on Forrester’s site reveals a steady flow of research and opinion over at least the last year, and if enterprises have been following this they should have a fair idea of what their strategy is (not “will be”) and of what they need to do to get there. Forrester do note, in a report from June, that both Vista and MacOS were picking up traction in the enterprise as XP declined.
What else is out there? Actually, not much unless you’ve got accounts with other providers; in which case you’re probably aware of it already. For serious enterprise advice about Windows 7, the two major providers appear to be the only shows in town. If you want an easy-access outside thought, though, have a look at today’s Guardian which reviews Windows 7 against the latest Ubuntu Linux and throws in a mention of MacOS Snow Leopard for good measure. OK, it’s from the personal perspective, but it’s worth remembering that Macs are variously reported as making a stealthy comeback in the enterprise.
Links:
• Opening Windows: Knowledge@Wharton, 22 Oct 2009
• Prepare for Windows 7 in Three Phases, Gartner document G00170151, 1 Oct 2009 (link is to a Google cache copy, so isn’t guaranteed; this report is not openly available on gartner.com)
• Reasons to Care About Windows 7, and Reasons Not to, Gartner document G00171872, 19 Oct 2009
• Windows 7 Commercial Adoption Outlook, Forrester, 15 Oct 2009; the report is quoted extensively in XP to lose adoption war to Windows 7, Computerworld, 20 Oct 2009
• Corporate Desktop Operating System Trends Q3 2008 To Q2 2009, Forrester, 22 Jun 2009
Other reports:
• Breaking the Windows XP Ice Pack: Can Windows 7 Turn Up the Heat on Replacements?, IDC, October 2009, primarily a market research perspective
• Windows 7 or Ubuntu 9.10: battle of the operating systes, Guardian Technology 5 Nov 2009
• Windows 7 Update Advisor, Tom Austin, Gartner Blog Network, 2 Nov 2009
The ambulance down in the valley 8 Oct 2009
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Basex is a tech research and reporting company whose regular newsfeeds I scan and, from time to time, report from. They track and report on information management and particularly on solutions to “information overload”.
Jonathan Spira’s TechWatch newsletters focus often on an issue which afflicts most of us – too much incoming information. The list is long: not just email but blog updates, tweets, personal network posts, messages through other applications, and more. These days, it’s not just the inbox although we can choose to flow a fair amount of it that way or to keep it out.
Well … There’s an old story about a road along a dangerous cliff, with a regular series of accidents due to people walking or driving off the road. The local people decided something needed to be done, so they clubbed together and supported the provision of an ambulance to be permanently stationed down below in the valley. Till someone else pointed out it would be much better and, probably, cheaper to put a guard rail at the side of the road at the top.
That’s where we’re at with incoming overload; except that every attempt to erect a guard rail is frustrated one way or another. The volume just grows, and things fall off the cliff because they get overlooked. So the ambulance helps handle the results; and Basex recently profiled two ambulances.
One is Gist, which just launched (Google-style) a public beta service of an app which is web based, and which reads your email and all those other feeds, prioritises the content, and delivers you the top stuff. There’s a video on the Gist website which of course talks up the service.
The other, Liaise, is an add-on for Outlook that scans your incoming messages specifically for action items, and creates a to-do list. It’s not entirely automated; from the video, it looks as if the message originator has to select sending via Liaise to capture the key points (that’s not exactly how it appears from the Basex description; but Jonathan may have seen the actual product, and I haven’t). It does appear, once messages are set up in Liaise, to have significant capability for team, task and action management. Sounds brilliant, but I can foresee spammers figuring out how to craft emails that get actions into people’s lists.
And it just seems to me that if the number of similar tools grows (as Basex seem to think it will) then we’ll need a tool to manage the output from the tools …
Links:
• In the Briefing Room: Gist, Basex 17 Sep 2009
• In the Briefing Room: Liaise, Basex 24 Sep 2009
• Gist (you might want to go to the Blog, and page down for the initial launch announcement and video)
• Liaise
Scale out, not up: the Cloud mindset is different 16 Sep 2009
Posted by InformationSpan in Consumerization, ITasITis, Impact of IT, Managing IT, Tech Watch, Technorati.add a comment
Just come off a call with a group which meets regularly by phone to think about the issues of moving corporate IT services to the cloud.
The debate is moving on. Originally, it was triggered by the emergence of Amazon’s EC2 and S3, and similar services, which enable individuals to have easy by-the-drink access to high powered and flexible compute and storage power.
Then, it was key questions about how to enable enterprises to move services to “the cloud”: what do you move and how, and what are the risks that have to be understood and managed?
Now, there’s an understanding that a hybrid model will have a lot to recommend it. Cloud services offer flexibility, and that’s more important than cost saving. The question is no longer “In-house or cloud” but “How do we integrate cloud with in-house, for flexibility and overflow”. You set up multiple-hosted services so that when in-house runs out of capacity, the request is routed seamlessly to a cloud resource.
Someone on the call characterised this as “Scaling out, not up”. And it requires a different mind-set when applications are created. Something which recalled to my mind the “reverse assumptions” for heterogeneous wide area distributed systems, created by the UK/European ANSA project something like 20 years ago. I said I’d re-publish them. Here they are.
| When building a distributed system, a number of assumptions which are commonly made when engineering systems for single hosts not only become invalid, but have to be reversed. The most important of these are: | |
| • | local >> remote more failure modes are possible for remote interactions than for local ones |
| • | direct >> indirect binding configuration becomes a dynamic process, requiring support for linkage at execution time |
| • | sequential >> concurrent execution true concurrency requires mechanisms to provide sequentiality |
| • | synchronous >> asynchronous interaction communication delays require support for asynchronous interactions and pipelining |
| • | homogeneous >> heterogeneous environment requires common data representation for interactions between remote systems |
| • | single instance >> replicated group replication can provide availability and/or dependability |
| • | fixed location >> migration locations of remote interfaces may not be permanent |
| • | unified name space >> federated name spaces need for naming constructs which mirror administrative boundaries across different remote systems |
| • | shared memory >> disjoint memory shared memory mechanisms cannot operate successfully on a large scale and where remote operations are involved. |
There was, and is, another one as well. When you’re creating an application – any application! – don’t assume it will always stay with the localised architecture you’ve created it in. The gotcha assumption these days is that the app is being created with links to a private cloud not the public one, so it’ll stay that way. Deal with it – interfaces, databases, security, the whole nine yards – as if, one day, parts of it will sit on public infrastructure.
Links:
• ANSA project, 1984-1998, document repository (now free access)
• ANSA: An Engineer’s Introduction to the Architecture, ANSA project, Nov 1989 (see section 2.1 p 3 for the reversed assumptions)
• Distributed architectures: reverse assumptions, still relevant, my previous post (ITasITis, Jan 2008)
Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity University, Silicon Valley 7 Sep 2009
Posted by InformationSpan in Impact of IT, Tech Watch, Technorati.Tags: Cerf, Google, Kurzweil, Media-X, Moffett, Singularity University, Stanford
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Getting back to earth after a great summer culminating in the wedding of my elder son, I came back to the Guardian’s report of this summer’s Singularity University summer school in Silicon Valley. At first view, it sounds like geek heaven: nine weeks in the former Moffett Airfield base, with high profile names like Vint Cerf, Nobel prizewinners and investors; and covering topics from the sub-microscopic (nanotechnology) to the super-macro scale (space science). Participants paid US$25K to attend. What’s it about?
Singularity University (SU from now on) has as its masthead mission: “Preparing humanity for accelerating technological change”. At greater length, this becomes: to “assemble, educate and inspire … leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies in order to address humanity’s grand challenges”. The masthead is somewhat misleading; this is about leading and driving technology, not just reacting to it; but it is about using technology to respond to and overcome “some of the planet’s major problems”.
It was, the Guardian says, the brainchild of the legendary Ray Kurzweil (Chancellor) and space flight pioneer Peter Diamandis (Vice Chancellor). There’s significant support from Google and from Stanford University; Cerf, of course, is now on the Google staff and Stanford’s links include their Media-X research mediation network for industry.
I won’t go over the list of ideas and projects which the Guardian’s report describes; follow the link below to read the article, or go to SU’s overview video linked below.
But the article is perhaps misleading. When I read it, I had the impression of a one-off summer school. Far from it: SU runs ongoing executive programmes and graduate programmes, and the reported graduate session this year was a pilot for an annual event. The pilot was limited to 40 students. In future, the numbers will be treble this.
Check it out! And by the way, when you land on the home page, there’s a rotating series of photos from this year’s event. There are three panels at left. Two of them link to intake information. It isn’t immediately obvious that the third is the caption for the current pic. The Overview, from the top menu, provides a list of SU’s guiding lights.
The singularity, if I’ve understood it correctly (and only from the outline, not from reading the book), is the point at which human intelligence becomes primarily non-biological: the future Kurzweil envisages is one where the electronic brain-power we deploy comes to dominate human intelligence. So you might also like to look at Ray Kurzweil’s singularity.com website, with details of his book “The Singularity is Near” and links to notes which are, in his view, pointers in that direction.
Links:
• Singularity University
• A school for changing the world, The Guardian (Technology section), 3 Sept 2009. There are links to coverage in The Guardian’s weekly tech podcast, and to a picture gallery
• The Singulary is Near: book, and other resources
