New Search engine

I recently learned about Cuil, a search engine founded by Google spin off employees. The hype about having the biggest online catalog, outperforming Google any time.

I tried it

Searched for my name, I received one result page with approximately 7 teasers. Over all the page claims to have found 2.806 results (as opposed to Googles 840).
1 Teaser had nothing whatsoever to do with me, the rest was pretty mundane stuff. I could not browse the promised 2.806 results, had to stick to the 6 correct references. Googles results immediately were relevant and pointed to material that referred to me as a person or my work.

Verdict

Cuil is simply not worth the effort (this is why there is no link to the page)

Later I learned that Cuil was seed funded. This explains why there is so much hype about it. They have to earn their money the hard way. Hopefully this is not the start of another dotCom bubble.

The end of the Domain concept?

Late 1999 I held a presentation about future developments in computer security. By then, there was an overwhelming hipe in firewall installations. During my speech I was asked about my personal opinion about how firewalls will develop in the future.

My response was quite surprising to the audience.

Firewalls and Virus protection are as protective as a perforated condom works for saver sex.

The audience was not happy. They came for support in their next major investment. Speakers before and after me were praising the techology as a panacea for any sorts of protection.

After my presentation a professor of the local university approached me. He congratuated me on the overall speach but commented, that I was completely wrong on my deduction that firewalls would be unnecessary devices in the future.

9 years after

The Dot.Com bubble was building up, Application Service Provisioning was on the verge, it was clear by then that most communication in the future would traverse through three ports only: HTTP/HTTPS and SMTP (well, there still are some more around).

If so, every communication channel would be redirected in the future to use one of these channel (it proved correct as we see large scale spam and web site attacks and only a few successful expliots).

9 years from now

Where's the point?

Systems cannot be protected at the perimeter any more. Protection schemes have to be introduced into every software service and application. With the increasing offerings of Web Services, boundaries between companies vanish (yet the title). Our carefully crafted computer domains will erode. As soon as they are consolidated (after mergers and company consolidations) they will be obsolete.

We have to use services and data across company boundaries. Small companies have to share information in order to withstand the pressure introduced by large multination enterprises.

If so, this raises the question of who has and who owns information (in the form of data).

DRM becomes DARM

What we see in the music industry is an absurde effort to protect rights. DRM, Digital Rights Management (or restriction of rights of the owner) is a technological approach to manifest control over the use of data.

DARM, Data Access Rigths Management (sorry, I did not come across any suitable term so far), will be the next development. What ACLs are to the operating system, DARM will be to information.

DARM will not only cover the rights to access information, but also timing information and environmental parameters that allow for viewing the content (similar to cascaded style sheets on steroids).

In this future, the concept of computer domains makes no sense.

Notebook users (especially those using Microsoft Windows) have trouble traversing domains. Trusts on the domain level have to be set up or the user will not be able to access any peripherals or services provided by the local domain.

With the concept of Service Oriented Architecture carried on, the IT of the company of the future will pretty much look like an encapsulated ISP. Services will be offered to anyone subscribing to it.

• Questions about ownership of data and services have to answered.
• Issues of multi cultural access and presentation have to be solved.
• Problems relating to the timely validity will arise.
• Censorship and circumvention of it will be on the agenda.
  

But I doubt that in 9 years from now we will see a logon dialog that offeres the domain as third parameter to authentication.

I'm not reading mags

I stopped reading magazines years ago for several reasons:

1. they distract from the issue
2. their net ratio of information transferred is bad
3. cost per page of information is beyond acceptable ranges

Let me elaborate on this.

Magazines usually cover just one or two subjects that interest you or that are helpful to your current situation. The rest is either unsolicited input or, worse still, advertisement. I don't need advertisement. Who wants to learn about the n-th version of a charting package that can be embedded into your source code or the umpteenth version management with pink color coding of source files ending with the letter x. Take away cover, index, imprint, the info per pages ratio lies somewhere around 3%.

Even if an article covers an issue right in your focus, usually the issue is large enough to be broken into several articles. Publishers do not want articles to extend two pages and they want to sell the next issue as well. So, the article consists of 30% intro and repitition, 60% information and 10% links to supportive web pages, half of them not online otherwise you would have found them in previous web searches. So the info per space ratio lies around 60%.

Your average magazine costs about € 10,- for around 60 pages. This makes 17 cent / page.

Compared to a book with 1.000 pages (e.g. O'Reilly JavaScript Reference, € 46,99) the price of a magazine is about 3,5 times as high.

All that said, I found a magazine and an aspiring magazine that are worth reading:

dotnetpro is a magazine that concentrates on .NET software development. Much to my surprise it also covers Mono (in those much-hated multi-issued never-ending article-threads). On average, I can read 4 to 8 articles in it that interest me and the quality of code is more than acceptable.

pythonmagazine is an effort to get a Python developer magazine up and running. Issue 1 can be downloaded in PDF and offers an interesting blend of Python issues.

I am not going to change my mind: I read books, no magazines.

But I will keep an eye on the two.

Customer Service

I read this excellent article on customer service. While at my company I try to enforce good customer support, I never had my quality standards laid out in such an easy list of steps to follow.

Thanks to Joel Spolsky, here it is. Read, enjoy and act on it.

Are you Enabler or Disabler

I consult small and medium sized companies regarding IT, organisational and process management topics. When I enter the clients premises for the first time, I search for signs of IT empowerment or disablement respectively.

Signs of Enablers

IT as enabler allows employees to work faster, smarter and more efficiently. IT architecture usually is open, access restrictions mostly secure the perimeter, hardly ever access rights are set up within data structures. They allow their users to experiment with new application in test bed situations. They commonly question their users for new ideas on how to make life easier. And they suggest improvements on their own.

This does not mean that users are allowed to install new and/or rogue software freely. But generally the corporate culture allows employees to identify themselfs with the company and its respective success.

Signs of Disablers

Sometimes I hear people talk about who they could not get access to a document they previously wrote themselfs and then stored them on a file share. They have a three level authorisation process for updated web pages (absurdly they are only visible on the intranet). Marketing uses a special graphics application (like Photoshop) and sends proofs to the sales department. However, Sales do not have ... you guessed it ... Photoshop.

When the PC in Marketing is replaced due to hardware failure, guess what. Photoshop is missing in the installed suite.

Here, IT is definitely a disabler.

Usually I recommend firing the responsible IT manager and getting some user to do the job.

I have not come across a client to follow my suggestions. Top managers usually find excuses why they keep IT managers that cause huge amounts of monetary losses to the company.

Maybe top management is not as innocent after all.

What's wrong with Microsoft?

First, Microsoft offered Mozilla development team a free office inside the Microsoft HQs. Then CEO Steve Ballmer embraced open source as the new panacea for solving document exchange and software virtualisation. Microsoft will provide ODF document filters for OpenOffice. The Open Specification Promise is yet another step towards an open software development. Interoperability suddenly is important to the worlds largest software company.

Only recently, Microsoft announced the start of Office Live, an online office suite targeted at customers currently using Googles online office tools.

Has Microsoft changed?

Does Microsoft see the advantages of open software development?

Has Microsoft earned enough money to provide us with free software in the future?

Rest assured, nothing has changed!

If Microsoft wants to play a significant role in Europe in the future, they have to prove that charges against them for exclusive and uncompetitive business bare any substance.

While in the US it suffices to claim open business conduct and bribe their way through the current administration, the EU does not work like that. Actually, the rest of the world does not work like that.

So, Microsofts move towards Open Source is just a marketing trick to circumvent EU embargos, a door opener into shops that switched to Open Source recently and most of all a convenient way to keep a close eye on the development of new technologies.