Software

I am constantly surprised at the number of corporate phone systems that ask you to enter your account number, and then as soon as you get a human (if you get a human), they ask you to enter the very same number again.

Okay, the title of this article is a bit misleading. There will be no pictures of robots exposing their system memory or putting their power supplies on public view. Wired reports on a "robotic" car park system in Hoboken, New Jersey that trapped a bunch of cars in the lot for days. It is one of these systems that optimizes the space available for cars by eliminating ramps. Cars are gobbled up by the machine and stuffed into high rise storage slots.

Much discussion is beginning to develop online as beta versions of the new version of Microsoft Office are getting tested. The new software introduces new default file formats that are not backward compatible with older versions of Office. You can save your files in the old version, but this requires an extra step and is a nightmare if you are trying to send a file to other people--it is impossible to know what version of Office everyone has.

In an interesting tale of two companies, Apple has dumped its experiment in offshoring telephone support to India after just one month. Meanwhile, Dell is rapidly expanding its offshore tech support. What's going on? Apple, while not perfect, consistently gets high ratings from consumers for support. Dell, on the other hand, has been receiving a steady stream of criticism lately for poor customer support.

In the bottom story of the day, heavy-handed search powerhouse Google is complaining that Microsoft doesn't play fair. In a NY Times story that probably won't be available for very long, Google is upset that Microsoft intends to make MSN Search the default search engine in the next release of Internet Explorer.

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, Apple has officially announced that the company's new Intel-based Macintosh computers can run Windows. I thought it might take as long as a year for Apple to get around to offering this, but Apple often manages to surprise everyone.

What was left of Bill Gates' headless body exploded in a puff of smoke after word was received that a Web-based word processing program compatible with Microsoft Word is being offered for free.

AJAX is a collection of software technologies that allow Web-based applications like word processors to have much better interfaces and to work much more smoothly. Ajaxwrite.com is a new Web-based venture that is offering a Web-based, Word-compatible word processor for free.

As we move more and more of our financial transactions away from cash and toward end to end electronic transactions, our systems have to become more reliable and more secure.

But a lot of systems were designed and implemented prior to ubiquitous worldwide access via the Internet, and the security that worked okay then has to be regularly scrutinized and tested today.

Cisco is the biggest network equipment company on the planet. They sell lots of the equipment that powers the Internet, and many of these boxes are called routers, which act as traffic lights for Internet data. Routers route, to coin a phrase. The boxes, often not very big, sit quietly in closets and data centers all over the world and look at every single data packet passing through the box and decide where to send it.

By way of Slashdot, this article reports that CIOs at UK companies are up in arms about Google Desktop.

When someone uses the "search across computers" feature of Google Desktop, it copies files from the local computer to Google's servers--usually a breach of security for most companies, who don't want confidential files copied to servers outside the company. Google's popular desktop utility is being banned in many companies because of the security problem.

The General Services Administration has signed a contract to use mySQL. The GSA manages bunches of government services and databases, and is only one of the latest Federal agencies to dump proprietary databases for the Open Source database system. The Department of Defense, NASA, the Census Bureau, and Los Alamos National Labs are among current users.

The state of Wisconsin has passed a law requiring that all software used in voting machines be open and accessible to the public. This is the right thing to do. Voting is the bedrock of a democratic republic, and how votes are tallied cannot be held close by a private company.

Researchers at Clarkson University have found it is trivially easy to spoof some of the current biometric security systems that use a finger or thumb print as an identification mechanism. They found that making a mold of a fingerprint using modeling clay (e.g. Play Doh) was effective 90% of the time in fooling the hardware.

Firefox 1.5 has been released, and it is noticeably faster loading pages. If you are not already using Firefox, it is well worth a try. I'm always experimenting with different browsers, and Firefox is very reliable and works well on virtually any site. It does an excellent job blocking popup ads, spyware, and viruses--especially pop up and pop under ads. It also has a new Software Update feature that makes it easy to keep the software up to date.

A North Carolina judge has jumped hard on Diebold, the leading manufacturer of electronic voting machines. This issue is a state law that correctly requires voting machine manufacturers to escrow (provide) all of the code used in a voting machine so that it can be audited by an independent third party.

The Register has a hilarious list of reader-contributed definitions of Web 2.0, which is the current buzz phrase for a whole new deluge of technology "solutions" in search of a problem. Web 2.0 offerings typically include other buzzphrases like "live" applications (apparently everything we've been doing has been dead), AJAX (not a soap, but a new set of programming tools), and the always delightful but overused "usercentric."

Some might view it as a cynical marketing ploy, but Apple Computer has taken its own products off the main portion of its home page and replaced it with a photo of Rosa Parks. It is a worth a moment just to reflect on the courage of this woman, and how insignificant all our gadgetry and Internet toys are compared the what she did and how much she made America a better place.

Xerox has the world's worst customer service, largely because they have the world's worst IT infrastructure.

I've been trying for two days to get a toner cartridge for my printer/copier (which is a terrific piece of equipment). But Xerox has a maze of disconnected phone and Web services that don't work with each other or with the company's internal customer tracking and billing systems.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering a move away from Microsoft Office and toward Open Source products like Open Office.

Microsoft's proprietary XML formats that are being used in current and future versions of Office to store Word and Excel documents, among others, are licensed to users. What this means, basically, is that you have the right to open and use your own Word documents only as long as Microsoft allows you to.

The state government of Massachusetts is worried, and rightly so, that public documents may become inaccessible either legally (if in the future the state does not continue to renew MS software licenses) or may become incompatible and therefore unreadable because MS has changed document formats.

Google apparently plans to take on PayPal, which is owned by eBay. PayPal is the only online payment system that has been successful, despite dozens of schemes, some of which were very well-funded. PayPal has been successful in part because it is relatively simple--it bypasses credit cards completely and debits or credits your checking account. It is fast and simple, and the online reporting of transactions is excellent.