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10% of Americans use wireless networks :: AO
ITFacts.biz
Newsteam | ITFacts [] | POSTED: 02.28.04 @16:30
A recent survey done by InsightExpress found that 10% of online Americans currently use wireless technology.
More than three in five (61%) home Wi-Fi users indicated that they are more productive, and almost two in five (38%) say they work more because of Wi-Fi. Similarly, Wi-Fi use outside the home is also on the wax. WiFi users who have accessed a Hot Spot outside their home (40%) signal real opportunities for restaurants, hotels, and other public businesses to attract customers. Almost half (45%) having accessed a public Hot Spot say they're more likely to patronize a business that offers WiFi. Business opportunities don't stop with public establishments, as more than half (51%) of Hot Spotters would choose an ISP with Hot Spot access over one without.
February 29, 2004 at 10:22 PM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (115) | Top of page | Blog Home
Microsoft enlists developers in security push | CNET News.com
By Martin LaMonica
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Microsoft is readying updates to its programming tools that will be released in tandem with Windows XP Service Pack 2, a security-oriented release of Windows due later this year.
The company is building service packs for its Visual Studio.Net 2003 development tool and the .Net Framework--the software plumbing, or "runtime," needed to run Web services applications on Windows, a Microsoft executive told CNET News.com. The changes, which are designed to guide developers on how to use the latest security features, are slated for release around the middle of the year, which is when Microsoft plans to ship Windows XP Service Pack 2.
"We're going to aim to have the release of (Windows XP Service Pack 2 and the tools service packs) as close as possible. Ideally, they'll come out together," said Tony Goodhew, product manager in Microsoft's developer edition.
The tools service packs will help developers determine whether existing applications need changes to run on the upcoming update to Windows XP. It is also meant to encourage developers to exploit the planned security features, Goodhew said.
In conjunction with the updated tools, Microsoft is offering free Web-based training and documentation on its developer Web site, which describes the implications for developers of the security changes due in Windows XP Service Pack 2. This is the first time the company has offered free training around a service pack, the company said.
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates last week detailed a number of changes due in Windows XP Service Pack 2 to make desktop PCs applications, such as the Internet Explorer Web browser and Outlook e-mail program, more secure. The company has enhanced its firewall and made changes in how Windows interacts with a computer's memory to prevent "buffer overruns," a commonly used technique by malicious code.
Goodhew said that providing service packs for Visual Studio.Net and the .Net Framework is important to adding security to Windows desktop applications across the board, not only those written by Microsoft.
"We realize that security is a developer issue. It's not just us--it's an industry-wide thing. We want to be good citizens in making our own software more security and (also) assist our customers--developers--to write more secure applications," he said.
As the operating system, browser and e-mail get more secure, hackers will turn their attention to other applications, Goodhew said. For example, the Slammer worm, which caused widespread disruption last year, exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft's SQL Server database, which runs on server computers, he said.
February 29, 2004 at 09:23 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Enthusiasts Call Web Feed Next Big Thing
Sat Feb 28, 3:57 PM ETAdd Technology - AP to My Yahoo!
By FRANK BAJAK, AP Technology Editor
NEW YORK - E-mail is crippled, concussed by an irrepressible spam stream. Web surfing can be equally confounding, a wobbly wade through bursts of pop-ups and loudmouthed video ads.
And that may explain the excitement these days over a somewhat crude but nifty software tool that automatically delivers updated information to your computer directly from your favorite Web sites.
Enthusiasts see these Web feeds as sketching the outline of the next Net revolution.
The technology behind them is called RSS and I rely on it daily to consult The New York Times, the BBC, CNET News, Slashdot and a few dozen other Web sites that employ RSS to make the very latest news stories or bits of commentary available for the plucking.
Aided by software on my computer that goes out and retrieves my feeds, I swiftly sort through headlines and summaries. By clicking on included hyperlinks, I can visit originating sites for more detail.
"For an average Internet user who regularly visits about 50 Web sites, rather than have to go visit those 50 sites wouldn't it be cool if those sites could somehow visit you? And not only that, but if they could also tell you when they've changed?" said Greg Reinacker, head of NewsGator, which sells an add-on for Microsoft's Outlook e-mail client that offers one leading way to read feeds.
Hundreds of thousands of Web feeds are available, spurred by the popularity of Web logs, which account for their bulk. One site that has been sorting feeds since 2001, Syndicat8.com, added 7,326 in January — its biggest monthly jump — to its collection of more than 53,000 information streams.
Some of that upsurge was election year fever as Democratic presidential candidates led by Howard Dean (news - web sites) daily turned on the RSS spigot to "broadcast" to supporters.
But Web feeds are no Howard-come-lately. Info generators of all kinds — big media, government and non-profits alike — are embracing them.
Disney leverages the technology to deliver video clips for ESPN.com and ABCNews.com. Apple's iTunes generates a feed to alert subscribers to its latest sounds.
Anyone who builds a Web site can incorporate Web feeds. If it lives on the Web, it can be brought to your desktop — or to your wireless device, for that matter.
Human Rights Watch keeps activists current with feeds sorted by region. The U.S. Geological Survey (news - web sites)'s feeds let seismologists immediately know where the world is shaking.
The U.S. Product Safety Commission just began providing recall notices via RSS. General Motors offers feeds on topics including safety and automotive tech. And a growing number of companies use feeds to disseminate info internally.
"If you're not reading it in RSS you're wasting your time," declaimed Microsoft's blogging evangelist, Robert Scoble, who says he subscribes to nearly 1,300 feeds.
RSS has been called the TiVo (news - web sites) of the Web, the first "killer app" of the anticipated automation of social and commercial transactions online using the Web's second-generation XML (extensible markup language) standard.
Alas, you'll not find the tools for handling RSS in your Microsoft Windows operating system. Not yet, anyway.
You've got to go out and get them, just like you had to download Netscape or one of its competitors in 1994 when you wanted a Web browser.
But the writing is on the wall. And it's not graffiti; the feeds are spam-free — though advertising may be pumped through some eventually.
Yahoo and Google recently embraced Web feeds, and Microsoft is expected to incorporate tools for managing them in its next-generation operating system, code-named Longhorn.
Yahoo's new search engine trolls through RSS feeds in addition to Web pages. And a five-person company called Feedster.com is trying to build a business around customizing searches of 500,000 feeds — and then delivering you the search results in a single feed.
RSS feeds vary in length and capability. Depending on how a Web site decides to serve them up and how a given aggregator wants to organize them, feeds can be simple, spare text or bold and multimedia-flashy.
And that's what makes them both exciting and frustrating.
First, it's not simple for the non-techie to configure RSS. If they're obvious on a Web page, the feeds generally are offered as orange buttons that read "XML" or "RSS." There's no uniformity to feeds, though the best include a good headline and a succinct summary. You can choose to have feeds delivered to your desktop or gathered by a Web-based service.
"It can be really hard to get people to look at it. I tried to get my father, who is a news junkie, to look at it and he wouldn't," conceded blogging guru Dave Winer, who created the Web-based aggregator Radio Userland.
Programmers who've developed rival versions of RSS since its 1999 invention — primarily by Winer and folks at Netscape — can't agree on what RSS is supposed to stand for. Winer's preference is Really Simple Syndication (RDF Site Summary and Rich Site Summary are the other options).
At least it's nothing like the fiasco of 1997 known as "push technology" and incarnate in PointCast, which wrote its death warrant by clogging hard drives and crashing operating systems as it delivered updated information to subscribers.
RSS is more pull than push. Your aggregator retrieves the updated material from the feed-offering Web site at set time intervals.
For an introduction, My.Yahoo.com offers a dumbed-down beta version. Web-based aggregators including FastBuzz.com and Bloglines.com are popular because there's no software to download — and they're free.
FeedDemon, a downloadable cross between an e-mail client and a Web browser, is feature-packed and costs $30. NetNewsWire for the Mac, also a download, costs $40.
If only the RSS prophets would stop squabbling.
Winer is among those who consider the standard complete; others insist it must become more versatile if it's to be an engine of the next-generation Internet — a smarter, two-way street rather than just a blind delivery vehicle.
Anil Dash, vice president of business development for Six Apart, whose Movable Type is among the Web's leading blogging products, says RSS is broken. He promotes a more robust and flexible alternative called Atom that got a big boost when Blogger.com, Google's blogging service, began supporting it in January.
As with most technologies, the market will settle these scores. But first, the market itself has to develop.
Major content providers want to ensure that any feeds they offer drive traffic back to their Web sites.
"The benefit to us is we're distributing our headlines and the users come back to the site," said Catherine Levene, vice president for business development at New York Times Digital, which has been quietly offering feeds for two years.
Many RSS-watchers predict Web feeds will eventually morph into ad-delivery vehicles because it can be expensive to run a Web site that serves up hundreds of thousands of feeds daily, draining bandwidth.
Nevertheless, boosters like Jeremy Zawodny, a software engineer at Yahoo who promoted RSS feeds there, are convinced that 2004 will be the year the technology goes mainstream.
"Remember when you first starting seeing URLs appear on billboards and at the end of movie trailers?" Zawodny wrote in his blog in December. "It's going to be like that. One day we're just going to look around and realize that RSS is popping up all over the place. And a couple years later, we'll all wonder how we ever got along without it."
___
Frank Bajak can be reached at techeditor(at)ap.org
February 29, 2004 at 12:57 PM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - For Windows Users, 'Browser Hijacking' Is Only the Latest Threat
Sat Feb 28,10:19 PM ETAdd Technology - washingtonpost.com to My Yahoo!
By Rob Pegoraro
The ongoing Internet-security freakout for anybody using Windows keeps getting worse. Every other week yet another part of the online world gets a warning label slapped on it -- downloads, e-mail attachments, instant-messaging file transfers and now Web pages themselves.
"Browser hijacking" is as bad as it gets: Like the Blaster worm, this form of trickery can take over your software silently and invisibly.
Typically, users discover what has happened only after the actual hijacking: Their Internet Explorer home page and Web searches have been switched to strange sites, a flock of pop-up windows follows them around, their lists of favorite sites have become a catalogue of porn purveyors -- and none of these changes can be undone without tedious debugging.
These attacks differ from "spyware" invasions, which can have similar effects, in that victims never took the conscious step of downloading a program and then running its installer.
In some cases, the only mistake a user made was to click an "OK" button to allow what they thought was a change in home-page settings or an addition of a Web toolbar -- not knowing that the site would do much more than that.
This can be an understandable error when you look at the ways sites attempt to fool users; the sleaziest sites won't include a "no thanks" button in their pop-up alerts and will prevent users from closing these windows. (If that happens to you, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Internet Explorer from the list of active programs, and click the "End Task" button to bail out.)
Often, though, the problem can be attributed to going online with an out-of-date copy of Windows, allowing a hijacker's site to exploit old vulnerabilities to worm its way into the PC.
(I've yet to see any reports of Mac or Linux (news - web sites) browser hijacks.)
None of this has to happen. Beyond the usual precautions of running an up-to-date antivirus utility and firewall program and regularly downloading Microsoft's critical updates (windowsupdate.microsoft.com), two of the biggest security flaws behind browser hijacking can be fixed with a pair of quick downloads.
A third can be remedied by installing a newer, better browser, and your risk drops to nearly nothing.
Step one is to stop sites from throwing pop-ups at you in the first place. Not only will this make the Web vastly more pleasant, it will eliminate the ability of a would-be hijacker to badger you until you accept a software download or home-page switch.
The easiest pop-up blocker to adopt is the free Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com); you do, however, need to run Internet Explorer 5.5 or newer to get this feature. Or install any other browser -- IE is the only one around these days that still lets in pop-ups. (I'll get back to this in a moment.)
Step two is to update the Java software on your machine. Java lets you run entire programs in a browser window and, when done right, it's not risky. Its developer, Sun Microsystems, designed it with tight limits on what a Web-based application can and can't do. But these limits must be enforced by a "virtual machine" program that runs on your own computer, and the one Microsoft developed contained a couple of bugs that hijackers abuse.
If you've been keeping your computer's software current with Windows Update, you should have a fixed version of this Microsoft virtual machine. But the better option is to download and install Sun's own, free Java virtual machine (www.java.com), which is both safer and more up-to-date than Microsoft's aging software.
Step three is to get away from something called ActiveX. Developed by Microsoft to compete with Java, it allows a similar sort of Web interactivity, but without any of Java's fail-safe limits: An ActiveX program in a Web page can do anything that a regular Windows program could do on your hard drive.
This can have legitimate uses. For instance, Windows Update uses ActiveX to scan for out-of-date components in your copy of Windows, and an ActiveX installer makes it easier to add Sun's Java software to Internet Explorer.
But ActiveX is exceedingly dangerous overall, since it relies on users to make the right call when they are presented with a "do you trust this publisher?" alert from Internet Explorer. Once they click "yes," the ActiveX program can do whatever it wants.
Updates to IE have limited ActiveX's reach, and an upcoming "Service Pack 2" revision for Windows XP (news - web sites) will add still more restrictions. But it's wiser to use an ActiveX-free browser for everyday Web activity, reserving Internet Explorer for Windows Update and the occasional site that, because of its authors' inattention, works only in IE.
For most people, the best IE replacement is a free copy of Mozilla (www.mozilla.org), the descendant of Netscape. If you don't mind using a preview release, however, the faster, simpler and also free Mozilla Firefox will be a better fit (www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/).
If your computer has already been infected, your antivirus program should clean it out. But you may need to resort to such specialized hijack-removal software as Hijack This! or CWShredder (both at www.spywareinfo.com/merijn/downloads.html).
Whatever software you take with you on your Internet travels, you also need to bring some common-sense skepticism. Pushy salesmanship by a strange site deserves the same reception that an aggressive telemarketer would get in the real world: "No."
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
February 29, 2004 at 12:56 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home
A diverse piece which nontheless manages to capture the problem we face today with learning, and I suggest, knowlede management in large organisations.
I've not yet, and may never do so, reach any conclusions about what I'm considering currently. The more I look at, and have experience of using or enhancing, weblogs the more educational potential I see in this genre. I'm certainly not going to put them forward (yet) as full-blown Learning Management Systems but as candidate engines for alternative and perhaps more satisfactory virtual learning environments? ... probably yes.
Weblogs (blogs) are web sites that are automatically archived, searchable, and time-stamped. The underlying blog server formats the content into headlines and articles/stories, with the user only needing to enter text and perhaps images.
I find a certain irony in the way that most vendors of mainstream proprietary learning environments appear to designate a minor supporting role to their 'Announcements' or 'Noticeboard' aspects of their offerings. As a result these tend to be minor stopping points on the way to the 'much more important' course material or content.
In the weblog, however, the announcements, articles, stories are the raison d'etre' so much so that, not satisfied to present articles from one source, the weblog has the temerity, due to the adoption of the RSS standard, to receive syndicated stories from other sources and, in turn, offer it's own portfolio of articles for use by others. For example, a blog supporting a programme or module could be the vehicle by which faculty post date and time-stamped short articles relevant to the course but which also link to related, but distributed, learning resources which are presented via RSS feeds. Such feeds can be static or dynamic so that updated RSS formatted information will be reflected in whatever application is displaying it, e.g. a la Auricle's RSS Dispenser.
Here then is the basis for a distributed, not centralised, information and learning object system.
Blogs, and RSS in particular, exhibit a feature which is critical to future development of distributed systems, i.e. the ability to provide a unique address for an information or learning object; a point which has not gone unnoticed by some new actors in the knowledge management and portals sector, some who view existing systems as inflicting mortal wounds on knowledge capture and sharing.
"Portal and KM vendors could learn a few tricks from emerging technology segments like RSS, RDF, and the blogging community. These initiatives have stumbled upon [what I consider] the single most important aspect of network dynamics - the discrete addressability of information objects."
http://myst-technology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/5936
"…e-mail is where knowledge goes to die … In most companies annotations and observations are typically created in e-mail with some messages containing links that point out to specific information objects relevant to the message. Aside from the message itself, the knowledge dies a slow death in the inbox of office workers and executives. Creating a process so that annotations and business observations may live as uniquely addressable information objects, clearly has greater advantages; especially for portal users." (ibid)
I also kind of like the idea of the weblog as a disruptive technology which unexpectedly comes in from 'left field' and upsets the status quo.
"Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream."
Source: Christensen C (2003), The Innovator’s Dilemma, HarperBusiness) http://mysttechnology.com/mysmartchannels/public/blog/11678?model=user/mtp/web
So what's the catch? Let's take Auricle as an example.
Auricle is a blog with a restricted number of article authors but with commenting privileges open to all readers. I suspect that the Auricle model would be quite popular amongst certain faculty in my own institution, but I'm guarded about wide internal marketing of this approach. Why? It's got a fairly low barrier to entry and it's minimalistic interface doesn't eschew the provision of content, it just connects it to an article which sets the context for the content.
The main problems I foresee are related to user/group/cohort management and how well the model scales up to handle potentially hundreds of blogs and a multitude of authors. The collaborative weblog engine we use currently is pMachine (www.pmachine.com) which is absolutely fine for what Auricle is doing but we really need a locally controlled system which makes it really easy for faculty (or students) to set up and maintain their own collaborative weblog and populate it with users (authors and commentators) and syndicated feeds. Furthermore, like Auricle the basic site should be enhanceable so that other web applications, e.g. Poll, SoundBlox can be added easily. What is required here is an enhanced institutional version of the way online services like Blogger.com enable a user to create their own weblog.
If anyone can suggest a weblog engine or open source content management system which they feel is already up to the job please post a comment.
February 29, 2004 at 12:58 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home
This paragraph from Christian's new site pretty much defines what I believe Knowledge Management ought to represent today. Its much more than the traditional view of merely storing data in a convenient to locate fashion.
Its about the knowledge/ information being instantly available to the right people, at the right time, and in the right way.
The Samaritan-Web Project: In the beginning...
I believe there is an opportunity beyond these tools and websites to reach people. The underlying premise to my work is that people want to help people - but unless it is easy for people to find service opportunities, they won't necessarily seek them out. Existing tools are fine for people looking for opps, but I am interested in finding ways to make it more viral - using network science and collaboration technology to push knowledge of these service opportunities out to a broader audience.
February 28, 2004 at 10:25 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
A new take on convergence. Christian's site suggests he is evangilist for levering software to better manage the complexity we face today, and thus achieve better results.
What he does well in this post is articulate the convergence required between PLM (product lifecycle management), SCM (software configuration management), and KM (knowledge management).
The Samaritan-Web Project: Convergence
For those of you who could not attend the PLM SIG event I moderated Thursday evening, we discussed the parallel if not converging paths of PLM (product lifecycle management), SCM (software configuration management), and KM (knowledge management) solutions, and the implications of the social software paradigm shift affecting how people connect online in non-business settings.
February 28, 2004 at 10:18 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
ALA | Internet Resources: Knowledge Management
&RL News, February 2004
Vol. 65, No. 2
by Michael M. Smith
Knowledge Management (KM) is one of many important topics being addressed by companies in today’s complex business environment. KM has spawned a new legion of consultants, it has provided a new direction for many software companies, and it has given purpose to many technologies that previously appeared to be only expensive executive toys. However, KM is nothing new. It is a synthesis of many ideas which when brought together create an exciting new paradigm of research. KM is multidisciplinary and draws from communications theory, organizational dynamics, and information organization. KM incorporates the concepts of Senge’s Learning Organization, builds on the foundation of intellectual capital management, and draws from business intelligence practices.
The underlying goal of KM is to use the knowledge embedded in the organization to maximize the effectiveness and competitiveness of the concern. This goal appears much too simple to have spawned such a massive movement. However, the current business environment requires new practices to accomplish this fundamental goal.
There are many excellent resources on the Internet addressing the many aspects of KM. The resources listed below offer a wide variety of information on KM provided by academic/research organizations, information portals, consultants, and governmental and nonprofit organizations.
February 28, 2004 at 10:11 PM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
KOREA PRESS: Korea-US To Share Wireless Internet Standard
Saturday February 28, 12:27 am ET
SEOUL -(Dow Jones)- South Korea and the U.S. have agreed to adopt each other's wireless internet platform standards, resolving a disagreement that had threatened to trigger trade tensions, reports the Maeil Economic Daily.
In line with the agreement, Korea and U.S. have decided that BREW, developed by Qualcomm Inc. (NasdaqNM:QCOM - News) , and WIPI, developed in Korea, are acceptable standards, the article said.
The newspaper reports that the Korean Minister of Information and Communication Daeje Chin asked the chairman of Qualcomm to develop a version of BREW that can be compatible with WIPI which the chairman accepted.
-By Sue Chang, Dow Jones Newswires; 822-732-2165; sue.chang@dowjones.com
February 28, 2004 at 01:50 PM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home
The Long and Winding Windows XP Road
By Mary Jo Foley
From Microsoft Watch: Microsoft's got some serious marketing challenges ahead with Windows XP. And the Redmondians know it. We take a look at some of the hurdles, of which deciding when and whether to release an interim Windows release before Longhorn is but one.
What can Microsoft do to breathe new excitement into a three-year-old product (that needs to look fresh for another two)? Redmond is weighing its options.
When Microsoft's top brass admit the company has done a less-than-stellar job of marketing its flagship operating system, something's got to give.
Last summer, the company replaced Rogers Weed, its then-head of Windows marketing, with Tom Button, the man who helped build Visual Studio into a major brand for the company. As of July 1, Button became the corporate VP in charge of Windows client product management, with responsibility for all aspects of marketing, product management and product planning for Windows client.
Button and his crew immediately faced some tough issues. And the result has at times appeared topsy-turvy.
For one, Microsoft was set to phase out support for Windows 98, Windows 98 SE and Windows Millennium Edition at in January. But in the eleventh hour, Microsoft decided to give users reticent to upgrade to Windows XP a bit of a reprieve and extended paid support through June 2006.
Read "Windows 98, ME Users Get a Reprieve (Sort Of)
During the next few months, the squeeze on the Windows client team will get even tighter.
According to industry insiders, a large number of contracts for Microsoft's Software Assurance (SA) licensees will come up for renewal over the next two quarters. If these customers decide they aren't getting enough bang for their annuity-licensing buck, they might drop their SA contracts—or, in the worst case for Microsoft—switch to another vendors' products.
Microsoft has a handful of smaller Windows client launches on its plate for 2004. It is poised to deliver Service Pack 2 for Windows XP; the next version of its Tablet PC operating system (code-named "Lonestar"); its next rev of its Media Center platform (code-named "Symphony"); and its 64-bit Windows XP releases for Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Intel Corp. 64-bit processors. All of these products will be based on Windows XP.
In the interim, Redmond is stepping up its XP marketing pitch via its "Why Windows XP?" Web site. Microsoft isn't going so far as to push the "Why Windows" site the way it has its "Get the Facts" Windows Vs. Linux site. But like the "Get the Facts" site, the XP marketing site does include a number of third-party "lab reports" designed to help customers evaluate when and whether a move to XP is right for them.
Check Out the 'Why Windows XP?' Site Here
On the site, Microsoft features several top ten lists that the company and its reseller partners will likely rely on to evangelize XP in the coming months. Among them are: "Top 10 Reasons for IT Pros to Move to XP" and "Top 10 Reasons for Small Businesses to Move to XP."
Microsoft's new message: better security, improved reliability, increased efficiency and measurable performance improvements make XP the best choice for every type of customer. At the same time, users are clamoring for not only XP's improvements, but for those promised for Longhorn, as well. This could encourage those inside Microsoft pushing for an interim release.
"I'm personally ready for Longhorn," said Peter Marshall, who does IT technology research for Royall & Company, a Richmond, Va., college-recruitment firm.
"I had a catastrophic failure of XP due to a corrupted registry and am fed up with that part of Windows. XP has been running on my PC for over two years without a rebuild, so I guess I should have seen it coming. And that is quite an accomplishment considering I used to rebuild 95/98/2000 on what seems like a quarterly basis," Marshall said.
Exactly what that "thing" will be is tough to pin down right now. Microsoft is weighing a number of options, ranging from new mechanisms to deliver functionality "out of band" before Longhorn ships, to an interim Windows release, a la Windows 95b or Windows 98 Second Edition.
Read More on the Rumored Interim Update Here
A growing number of developers and customers said they would welcome such an interim release called by some "Shorthorn." Others said they would just be content for Microsoft to simply fix bugs and apply security features and hold off on another full version of Windows until Longhorn is rock-solid.
"I'm afraid we'd likely pass on 'Shorthorn' unless it really delivered value to us. I just don't see how a little update to XP is going to do that," said Anthony Frausto-Robledo, director of information technology with the Lexington, Mass. architectural firm of Morehouse MacDonald & Associates Inc.
Regardless of which of the so-called "XP Reloaded" options Microsoft selects, the company's Windows client unit has an uphill battle ahead.
Earlier this week at a dinner with Redmond, Wash.-area journalists, Jim Allchin, Microsoft's group vice president for software platforms, admitted that Microsoft had failed to do a good job in getting the word out on Windows XP's myriad features.
Read Here What Allchin Said
Allchin's criticism comes at a time when Microsoft is still touting Windows XP as "the fastest-selling operating system ever."
Between October 2001, when it launched XP, and September 2003, Microsoft said it sold more than 130 million copies of Windows via retail and preloaded on new PCs. However, this figure does not include the copies of XP that enterprise customers purchased as part of their volume-license agreements.
Still, Microsoft needs to find ways to maintain interest in the three-year-old product until it delivers its next major Windows client release, Longhorn, which isn't expected until 2006 or perhaps later. And it needs to do so in a time when IT spending still remains depressed.
Last summer, at the company's annual financial analyst meeting in July, Allchin said he planned to keep the XP fires burning in a few key ways:
Devise ways to convert the 350 million PCs running Windows NT and other Win9X versions of Windows to Windows XP;
Foster new "breakthrough" form factors that will ignite both consumer and business interest in Windows XP and its variants (such as Windows XP Media Center and Windows XP Tablet Edition);
Create strategies to convince consumers they should buy multiple PCs for their households;
And finally, tout the "value proposition" of deploying Windows XP and Office XP together. However, based on Allchin's assessment this week it appears that Microsoft decided over the past six months that these strategies didn't go far enough.
February 28, 2004 at 11:19 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
An Interim XP For a Delayed Longhorn?
By Susan Kuchinskas
Microsoft (Quote, Chart) is mulling changing its operating system product roadmap and delivering enhancements to its Windows XP operating system, according to a company official, which could come after its long-awaited XP Service Pack 2 ships this year ......
February 28, 2004 at 11:11 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
vnunet.com Egg fails to crack TV
By Dinah Greek [27-02-2004]
Poor customer take-up forces digital TV banking service to shut down
Online bank Egg is to close its digital TV banking service after failing to capture its target audience.
But just 1,300 of Egg's 3.2 million customers made use of the service, which was launched in December 2000 and accessible via Sky TV.
Using a special keyboard or their TV remote control Egg customers could request information via their digital set-top box, with data sent to Egg in encrypted XML format using the internet data transfer standard, HTTP.
"It sounds like one of those great ideas but people don't use it," a spokeswoman for Egg told vnunet.com.
"We have found they like to keep their leisure activities and business activities quite separate."
The service will close on 15 April. Egg has emailed all of its customers informing them of the decision.
February 28, 2004 at 01:35 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
A personal anecdote from Tim Bray which totally supports my rant about Microsoft interfaces the other day.
ongoing · Fourteen Years of Pain
I’m busily editing a fairly complex tech spec written in Microsoft Word. (Word generally sucks for tech specs except for this one is being team-edited with little infrastructure, so we needed the revision-marking feature.) When I first ever used Word it was in 1989 on a Macintosh; this first brush with competent WYSIWYG changed my thinking about interfaces and documents. There was a problem: back then the handling of numbered lists in Word was buggy and fragile.
Today, fourteen years later in a recent rev of Office, numbered lists are still buggy and fragile. Innocuous changes—simple cut/paste, joining paragraphs, applying the formatting palette—intermittently send Word into psychotic spasms, in one case renumbering the list starting at 65, in another mysteriously removing the colour-coding from all the text in the doc, in another re-indenting dozens of apparently randomly-selected paragraphs. I suppose if it hasn’t gotten fixed in a decade and a half my grandchildren will probably be stuck with it. But I have hopes that the world will learn the valuable lessons Word taught us all about the interfaces between humans and texts, and for God’s sake move on to something better.
February 28, 2004 at 01:09 AM in @ My Views @ | Permalink | TrackBack (19) | Top of page | Blog Home
Wi-Fi Networking News: Texas Shopping Mall Experiment
A 2,400 square feet area at the Shops at Willow Bend will offer free Wi-Fi, printers, live news, conference tables, loaner laptops, and actual cubicles.
The companies backing the experiment, including Best Buy, IBM, Microsoft, Panasonic, and Cisco want to see if this type of environment, which offers more than just a wireless connection in a cafe, is attractive to mobile workers. Kinko’s says that traveling business people already have shown they like that type of environment. Kinko’s is attracting so many laptop users with its Wi-Fi network that it is considering offering coffee, newscasts, and conference tables.
If the price is right, these are interesting ideas for offering an office away from the office for business travelers. Sometimes meeting in a casual cafe atmosphere works but at other times a more professional atmosphere may work better.
February 28, 2004 at 01:05 AM in Wireless | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
Transforming Data into Intelligence Enters New Era With Acxiom Customer Information Infrastructure
`The Unimaginable Can Now Be Imagined,' Company Leader Tells Executive Symposium
LITTLE ROCK, Ark.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 26, 2004--Advances in technology are finally allowing companies to transform data into the intelligence needed to drive better business decisions and build more valuable relationships with their customers, says Acxiom Company Leader Charles D. Morgan.
"Businesses have more data than ever, and that data will multiply in the years ahead, but realizing the power of that data has been limited," Morgan said. "Today, I can tell you that the impractical is now practical, and what was unimaginable can be imagined."
Acxiom's Customer Information Infrastructure (CII), a grid-based solution architecture, redefines how data is managed, Morgan said, enabling data analysis, modeling and applications at previously unachievable speed - and with a lowered cost.
With CII, data storage also is less expensive, allowing businesses to redirect those resources to more modeling and analysis for marketing effectiveness, he added. CII also provides duplicate storage for a failsafe environment.
Morgan's comments came in Orlando, Fla., at Connections 2004, Acxiom's annual symposium in which leading information technology and marketing executives and experts discuss trends and advances in customer data management.
"Imagine being able to rescore your entire prospect universe in seven hours rather than seven days at a lower cost per run. Imagine 10 years of promotion and transaction history rather than a simple snapshot in time. Imagine a full database update delivered as often as you want," Morgan said.
He said Acxiom, which began deploying grid-based computing more than two years ago, is itself realizing benefits of the technology, including advances of its own InfoBase® family of data products.
"The key is how we all adapt and use these changes to create an advantage in your business, and help you build valued relationships with your customers," Morgan said.
About Acxiom
Acxiom Corporation (Nasdaq:ACXM - News) integrates data, services and technology to create and deliver customer and information management solutions for many of the largest, most respected companies in the world. The core components of Acxiom's innovative solutions are Customer Data Integration (CDI) technology, data, database services, IT outsourcing, consulting and analytics, and privacy leadership. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, with locations throughout the United States and Europe, and in Australia and Japan. For more information, visit www.acxiom.com.
Acxiom and InfoBase are registered trademarks of Acxiom Corporation.
February 28, 2004 at 01:00 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
Emerald statistics reveal the top five subject areas researched by its customers during 2003 were innovation, organization, knowledge management, as well as marketing and business intelligence. The article downloaded most often from the Emerald database was "From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing" by Christian Gronroos and published in Management Decision.
Emerald, the leading international management and information science publisher, released its 2003 usage statistics, which show more than 7 million articles were downloaded from its database, Emerald Fulltext. The number reflects an eleven percent increase over 2002 for the same 12 month period.
"We believe information professionals will find our statistics a critical tool for evaluating and planning their service subject coverage", said Gill Crawford, Head of Corporate Communications for Emerald. "The shear volume of downloads lends a high level of confidence that our usage statistics can spot trends and help our customers stay ahead of the curve."
The usage statistics are also valuable indicators for journal editors and members of the research community. Authors wishing to write articles for 2004 publication will benefit from focusing their efforts on innovation, organization, and knowledge management, as well as marketing and business intelligence topics. Researchers looking for areas to investigate will be well served to consider the hot topic areas to ensure their findings yield useful results with immediate insights.
Reflecting Emerald's international customer base, top usage came in from Malaysia, Australia and the UK, lending a global perspective to the statistics and subject interest areas.
The top-ranking article in the Emerald database for 2003 was "From Marketing Mix to Relationship Marketing: Towards a Paradigm Shift in Marketing" by Christian Gronroos. It was published in Management Decision, which ranked number one among all journals in 2003. The article can be viewed at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/00251749410054774
February 28, 2004 at 12:47 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
E-learning visionaries look to the future
By Lisa Neal, Editor-In-Chief, eLearn Magazine
What directions will e-learning take in 2004? Will we still call it e-learning? Will there be more or fewer vendors, products, or—most importantly—jobs? Will subject matter experts develop courses instead of instructional designers? Will we all play games and discover along the way that we learned more than ever before—and had fun in the process? Read on for predictions from some of the most thoughtful and opinionated people in e-learning.
“The most central issues to e-Learning over the next year will be context management (context is queen!), learning integration (with systems, but also with work processes and content), and readiness. Increasingly, organizations will use contextual learning—much as the military does today—to ensure that they are ready to hire/deploy, change business models, respond to competitive threats, and enter new markets. By leveraging web services, learners will increasingly be untethered from the classroom and even the desktop, as learning becomes accessible though mobile devices.”—Elliott Masie, President and Founder, The MASIE Center, Saratoga Springs, NY
“In 2004 colleges and universities will finally stop thinking about using information technology (IT) and start thinking seriously about how IT can be used to improve student learning, increase student retention and serve students more cost effectively. IT will be viewed as a vital institutional investment rather than an operating expense.” —Carol A. Twigg, Executive Director, Center for Academic Transformation
“I see things coming together that have been operating separately, for example, knowledge management practices integrated with structured learning events such as courses; Web-based technology used in the classroom; formal and informal learning integrated in the same overall activity or course; and learning objects found or created by the learners themselves as the results of learning activities. Should any of these be called "e-learning" Or all of them? We need a new name for these sorts of synergies.” —Betty Collis, Shell Professor of Networked Learning, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
“2004 will bring a makeover for Training & Development. And, you might not recognize the new look! Three factors will change the face of traditional training and development: increased global competition, outsourcing and smart suites. The most visible of the three, smart suites, will integrate learning at the desktop with an employee’s other tools such as e-mail, calendaring, IM, and document management. In this environment informal learning is pumped-up and the line between learning and doing fades.” —Margaret Driscoll, IBM Global Services
“We will rediscover individual differences, such as visual processing, as an important instructional variable in the design of instruction. This will not be limited to Web-based learning, but learning and teaching in general. I predict that the education and training communities will begin to seriously use games to teach important skills and knowledge.” —Ray Perez, Office of Naval Research
“The looming problems of copyright and patent law will gain widespread attention in 2004. People will come to understand that we are really selling eTeaching and not eLearning (a misunderstanding that contributes greatly to our ongoing problems with ROI). The market may realize that products sold to academia and the corporate world SHOULD be different since they aim at different goals. More people will understand that there is a difference between gaming, game-based learning, and gaming technology. And companies will grow who realize that cultural change MUST accompany an "e" implementation for it to be successful.” —Mark Oehlert, Booz Allen Hamilton
“In 2004, information technologies will become even more critical to teaching and learning. Beyond basic literacy, digital literacy (the ability to articulate an information need and navigate electronic resources to find and use the information to satisfy that need) will become the single most important skill for both students and teachers. School library media specialists will play a key role in ensuring digital literacy is achieved within their schools.” —Ruth Small, Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University
“There will be a dramatic fall off in the purchase, by K-12 schools, of laptop computers—don't even think about TabletPC's. This year, the lion's share of their purchasing dollars will flow into handheld computers for students. Handhelds are economically compelling and functionally appropriate—and educators are amazingly quickly seeing the logic in that statement.” —Cathie Norris, University of North Texas & Elliot Soloway, University of Michigan
“E-learning will replace and/or supplement school learning and e-learning will provide the social learning that forms the basis for a better life. The former will be based on the traditional e-learning system, while the latter will be based on experiences in both the virtual and the real worlds. Hence more use of ubiquitous computing technology will free students from the desktop and let them learn in a real situation with a portable device in hand.” —Masaaki Kurosu, Professor, National Institute of Multimedia Education, Japan
“The benefits of learning objects in courseware development will come into scrutiny. Particularly, the much publicized benefit of reusability through learning objects will be questioned, leading the discussion to the ill-defined concept of learning objects, which is convenient for talking about them but of little use for developing real-world courseware.” —Kinshuk, Associate Professor and Director, Advanced Learning Technology Research Centre, Massey University, New Zealand
“Learning objects will come to the fore in 2004, but not as cogs in a centrally packaged learning design. Learning objects—or, as some will start calling them, learning resources—will begin to reach their potential outside the mainstream. The demand, and therefore the production, of learning objects will increase dramatically for people who use informal learning—as much as 90 percent of learning, according to some estimates.” —Stephen Downes, National Research Council Canada
“Organizations and participants are no longer impressed with 'cool' technology. The delivery methodology has to provide more than cost savings with a pretty interface—the demand will now be for more collaborative and result-oriented technologies. Whether asynchronous or synchronous in nature, online events will become less of a presentation and more performance oriented. To achieve this, one hour stand-alone modules will start to take a secondary role to blended initiatives during which participants will need to be more active and contributive. This is the year true best practices will start to become apparent.” —Jennifer Hofmann, President, InSync Training, LLC
“Among ordinary organizations, I see more of the treading water seen in 2003. At the low end of e-learning, PowerPoint (used with Breeze and similar software) will become the most popular authoring tool, enabling subject-matter experts to design e-learning (and creating further employment challenges for instructional designers). At the high end of e-learning, designers are still digesting technological and business developments that proceed at a rate much faster than they can adopt them.” —Saul Carliner, Assistant Professor of Educational Technology, Concordia University
“In 2004, applications of e-learning or "collaborative learning" will go well beyond the initial uses for which the technology was originally conceived! We'll see greater adoption in senior levels of organizations for information tracking and reporting to gain insight into organizational capabilities and operational effectiveness. We'll also see greater adoption in higher education to bring activities such as mentoring, office hours, and parent-teacher conferencing to the Internet.” —Leon Navickas, Founder, Chairman of the Board and Chief Strategy Officer, Centra Software
“Over the next 12-18 months the end game will finally begin to come into view, as traditional learning structures give way to more powerful performance support integration. Personalized solutions will be seen as driving the bottom line with increased agility and competitive advantage and will attract the attention of the CEO and Board. Finally, third-world nations will begin to comprehend their own ‘leapfrog’ advantage inherent in national taxonomies and technology-enhanced on the job training supported by alternative learning models.” —Jonathon Levy, Senior Learning Strategist, The Monitor Company Group LP
“A woman twirled proudly in front of me. "Weightwatchers.com," she crowed. She did it online. Same was true for a friend contemplating a trip to Singapore. ‘What about SARS?’ Could my brother-in-law's career get a pick-me-up via financial planning courses online? He's favorably disposed. In 2004, more individuals will tend to their own needs, including learning, via the Web. In the past, organizations, credentials, and certification were the middlemen. While that will continue, we'll see people pursue their goals online, on their own.” —Allison Rossett, Professor of Educational Technology, San Diego State University
“New embryonic forms of online learning communities will emerge that support the dynamic forming and reforming of cliques as well as 'cocktail party' behavior. This will be much friendlier than threaded discussion groups and much less taxing on reading time than blogs. From this will emerge new study groups for students, creative knowledge exchange for teachers and researchers, and new business teaming opportunities.” —Richard Larson, Professor of Engineering Systems and Founder and Director, Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC), MIT
“As e-learning professionals in 2004, we must develop more effective evaluation strategies or risk irrelevance. Executives, deans, managers, directors, and, most importantly, learners are demanding “proof” that e-learning increases performance and changes behavior. To answer this demand, we must directly link e-learning objectives to measurable outcomes, metrics, and performance improvements.” —Karl M. Kapp, Assistant Director, Institute for Interactive Technologies, Bloomsburg University
“In 2004, the importance of online pedagogy and motivation will be reflected in online instructor training programs, research, and conference keynotes. In addition, open source courseware such as Moodle and the SAKAI Project will attract extensive attention. Finally, the huge growth in online certification programs, associate and master’s degrees, and blended learning will continue.” —Curt Bonk, Professor, Indiana University, and President, SurveyShare, Inc.
“We see 2004 as a year of polarization as the major virtual classroom providers (Centra, InterWise, LearnLinc, and Elluminate) back off from the Web conferencing market and refine existing and develop new classroom coordination features. We see this being driven by a host of new, more aggressively priced and less robust Web conferencing products entering a market where, currently, 80 percent of users use only 20 percent of Web conferencing features.” —David Collins, CEO, Internet University
“Rapid e-learning will become a red-hot market and companies will struggle to implement authoring processes for subject-matter experts. Blended Learning will continue to grow. The term ‘blended learning’ will evolve from instructor-led training with e-learning added to a mix of a wide variety of technologies and media. Live e-learning will mature and the market will continue to grow, with companies implementing these systems as part of their corporate infrastructure, not only as training-specific systems.” —Josh Bersin, Bersin & Associates
“Universities will now out-innovate corporations in the area of educational content. India will be to traditional e-learning content what Japan was to manufacturing, building more direct channels into U.S., in some cases competing directly with former partners. LCMS will collapse as a distinct concept and segment. Price wars in virtual classrooms will drive ubiquitousness through increasingly non-traditional alliances.” —Clark Aldrich, author of Simulations and the Future of Learning
“The convergence of e-learning and knowledge management technologies will continue in a much faster pace. There will be intensive focus on the content and quality of e-learning courses. Attention will be increasingly paid on the role of emotions and affective dimension of learning in e-learning designs. Much more effort will be spent on measuring ROI of e-learning (or figure out practical ways of measuring it) on behalf of organizations that use e-learning as an alternative or supplementary mode of training.” —Panagiotis Zaharias, ELTRUN, Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece
“Last year, online colleges became more aggressive and effective at online advertising. As a result, many schools now get thousands of new student inquiries each month. In 2004, as these institutions compete for the same potential students, their focus will shift inward. Those that become most effective at prioritizing their inquiries and converting them to enrollments will thrive at the expense of the rest.” —C.J. DeSantis, President, eLearners.com, Inc.
“Consolidation will accelerate because customers are looking for industry-leading solutions from companies that can provide experience, expertise, and financial safety. Learning analytics will become a required component of any software selection; analytics can tie employee performance to business results and allow a company to optimize their training expenses by spending on the right training and by offering training that has the most impact. Integrated suites will become a requirement for organizations seeking a learning and performance solution, including LMS, LCMS, Knowledge Management, Authoring Tools, Virtual Classroom, Performance Management, and Analytics.” —Sanjay Dholakia, VP, Marketing and Business Development, Docent, Inc.
“Schools will invest in creating classroom environments that allow for true technology integration. The traditional whiteboard and five computers in the room will be replaced with electronic whiteboards that allow all students to participate wirelessly with the large image. Teachers will create group activities that engage, involve, and instantly assess students and do less slideshow presentations.” —Steve Brazier, Executive Vice President, Promethean, Inc.
“The learning industry has been through a period of significant technological innovation and way too much hype. With the recent economic downturn fresh in our minds, in 2004 we'll see learning organizations really searching for, and mastering, the use of proven strategies and technologies for designing, developing, and managing e-learning. The main goal of all this effort being, of course, to improve the quality, usability, and most importantly the effectiveness of the finished product.” —David Holcombe, President & CEO, The eLearning Guild
“Instructional design will become learning design, bringing innovation and creativity to online courses much like the best teachers do in the classroom. Online courses will provide layers of information to encourage exploration, use rewards, surprises, and humor to increase engagement and enjoyment, and support peer learning so that students learn together as well as from each other.” —Lisa Neal, Editor-in-Chief, eLearn Magazine
Pasted from
February 28, 2004 at 12:46 AM in Knowledge Management | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
out-law.com - legal news and business guides
26/02/2004
The on-line banking service of NatWest has been praised by national computing and disability charity AbilityNet in an accessibility review of the sites of ten major UK banks. However, the other nine are potentially breaking the country's Disability Discrimination Act.
NatWest, owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, had the only site that, in AbilityNet's view, met the basic web site accessibility needs of users with visual impairment, dyslexia or those with a physical disability making mouse use difficult. The rest, it said, are effectively barring millions of disabled people from their sites.
The NatWest site gained a three-star rating on AbilityNet’s five-star scale. It was described as meeting "a base level of accessibility," with a clear navigation scheme, links that indicate when they open new browser windows (important for blind visitors) and shortcut keys for main links which help those not using a mouse. It was not without flaws, however: it lacked a site map and uses invisible images to govern page layout which lack the labels that are important to blind visitors.
The sites of Barclays, Lloyds TSB, Smile, Egg, IF and First Direct could only obtain two stars. The remaining sites – HSBC, the Halifax and Cahoot - scored only one star, designating them ‘very inaccessible’.
Robin Christopherson, AbilityNet’s Web Consultancy Manager, was not too discouraged by the results, however:
“The on-line banks score significantly higher than the sites tested in our previous surveys focusing on airlines and newspapers, none of which reached minimum accessibility standards.”
In these earlier studies, the sites of easyJet and The Guardian were each rated poor – but still the best among their competitors, while the sites of Virgin Atlantic and The Sun were among the worst offenders.
“Banks have realised quicker than other service providers perhaps, that the end user is looking for critical functionality – to check their account and make transactions – rather than to be impressed and entertained by ingenious design and creativity,” added Christopherson, himself a blind internet user.
Smile, LloydsTSB and Cahoot gave undertakings to improve their sites' accessibility. Smile was the only firm to do this with reference to the W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative, undertaking to design future service developments to W3C Priority 1 recommendations, its base level of accessibility.
Typical problems encountered by Christopherson and his team include the widespread use of pictures as links to other pages. The ‘tool tips’ upon which blind visitors and text browser users rely for spoken descriptions of pictures were often virtually absent. Without these spoken labels, both the images and the links are invisible and the end user excluded as a result.
AbilityNet also found overuse of pictures of text instead of actual text. This not only means that the user cannot modify font size or colour contrast – essential for those with a vision impairment or dyslexia – it also prevents screen reader users from reading the content when so often these images also do not carry tool tips.
Other drawbacks common to several of the sites tested include the reliance on JavaScript – small programs that are built into a page and often not recognised (and therefore rendered unreadable) by many older browsers, or some specialist browsers used by those with vision impairment.
The entire sites of Halifax, HSBC, Smile, Egg, IF and First Direct, including their application processes for new products, depend on JavaScript.
Finally, the text size on most sites has also been ‘hard-coded’ so that it cannot be easily enlarged – vital for many visitors who have a vision impairment.
With a potential market of 1.6 million registered blind users as well as a further 3.4 million with disabilities preventing them from using the standard keyboard, screen and mouse set-up with ease, e-businesses are losing out on some £50 - £60 billion per year buying power.
Shuna Kennedy, AbilityNet’s chief executive, said:
“For thousands of disabled people, especially those with restricted mobility or visual impairment, direct on-line access to their finances and the ability to manage their money autonomously is critical to their peace of mind.
“Internet access to information for disabled people isn’t only a commercial and moral duty of care. Like other suppliers of goods and services, web sites have to be accessible as a matter of law under the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act.”
Last year the Royal National Institute for the Blind supported a court action under the Disability Discrimination Act against a firm for its inaccessible web site, the first action of its kind in the UK. The firm settled the action with an undertaking to make its site accessible. As part of the terms of settlement, its name has not been revealed.
Editor's Note: We have begun work on improving the accessibility of OUT-LAW.COM. We recently achieved Priority 2 / Level AA conformance with our sister site, AboutCookies.org.
February 28, 2004 at 12:37 AM in Financial Services | Permalink | TrackBack (7) | Top of page | Blog Home
Received this email just now. Blogrolling is acquired by Tucows. Blogging is not going to go away, as the "big guys" continue to pick up the original movers.
Yahoo! Mail - xcrh73@yahoo.com
Hello!
You may have already read that Tucows Inc. has acquired
Blogrolling.com. As a Blogrolling.com subscriber, I thought it was
appropriate to drop you a quick note introducing myself and Tucows. I
also want to provide you with a brief overview of our future plans for
Blogrolling.com
Important things first - Tucows is planning to run Blogrolling.com *as
is* for the foreseeable future. We will continue to evolve the service
and ensure that it gets the care and feeding our subscribers deserve.
We will *not* limit or disable the service in any way or prevent users
of specific weblog/website management tools from continuing to use or
access the service.
Our immediate priority is to take care of a few small housekeeping
items and then turn to start building out the service in a way that
really leverages the uniqueness and utility of Blogrolling.com's
tools. Stay tuned to http://www.blogrolling.com/news.phtml for details
as they develop.
As for me - I'm here for you. If you have any questions, comments or
concerns about Blogrolling.com, Tucows or life in general, don't
hesitate to drop me a line (especially if you are a Blogrolling.com
"Gold" subscriber). For Blogrolling.com support, please continue to
use the Blogrolling.com website support tool at
http://www.blogrolling.com/contact.phtml
Thanks for allowing me this brief interruption - I now return you to
your regularly scheduled weblogging.
Take care and have a great weekend!
--
Warm regards,
-rwr
February 28, 2004 at 12:31 AM in Blogging & feeds | Permalink | TrackBack (14) | Top of page | Blog Home
Yahoo! News - Microsoft Aims to Bridge Windows 5-Yr Release Gap
Thu Feb 26, 8:41 PM ET
By Reed Stevenson
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT - news) will make a renewed effort to promote and update Windows XP (news - web sites) before the arrival of the next major update to its flagship operating system, code-named Longhorn, it said on Thursday.
Called "Windows XP Reloaded" inside the headquarters of the world's largest software maker, the effort would bridge the gap between Windows XP, which launched in 2001, and Longhorn's expected debut in 2006.
"There a bunch of work being done on Windows XP," said Greg Sullivan, lead Windows product manager, adding that Windows XP Reloaded was a marketing effort as well as a plan to enhance Windows XP software.
"We're looking at how to deliver that, but calling it an interim release is overstating it," Sullivan said.
Several technology publications reported on Thursday that Windows Reloaded would be an interim release of Windows XP.
Microsoft had repeatedly brushed off speculation that it would issue an update to Windows XP, but the operating system that dominates the personal computer market with a 90-plus percent share is facing increasing competition from Linux (news - web sites), the freely available operating system that can be copied and modified freely, unlike Windows.
Microsoft is planning to release a minor update to Windows XP, called a service pack with enhancements to fix software bugs, later this year.
Service pack 2, scheduled for release around the middle of the year, is aimed at enhancing the security of the operating system, a major priority for the company under its two year-old Trustworthy computing initiative to make its software more secure and reliable.
RELOADED ROLL OUT
Windows XP Reloaded is scheduled to roll out toward the end of 2004, Sullivan said.
Analysts have said that the long gap between Windows XP and Longhorn would make it more difficult for Microsoft to defend itself against Linux, and Microsoft is also faced with the challenge of getting more users of previous versions of Windows to upgrade to Windows XP.
Jupiter Research analyst Joe Wilcox said that Windows Reloaded was "more evangelism program than anything else."
"They recognize it's a long time between Windows XP and Longhorn and you can't just go five years without doing a marketing promotion," Wilcox said.
"That doesn't mean there won't be an interim release .... Windows Reloaded could be a marketing effort, or they could bundle up a bunch of add-ons and release those either for free or charge for them."
Microsoft's Sullivan did not disclose whether customers would have to pay for any software shipped as part of Windows XP Reloaded, or how it would be delivered for customers.
Service packs are provided by Microsoft for free, or bundled into the latest shipments of software.
February 27, 2004 at 07:38 AM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
Seems there is quite the debate going within Microsoft, which seems to net out that they have been so focused on Longhorn, which is due out in 2006, that they forgot the issues customers are having with XP, notably that most have no idea of what XP does. Similar concerns are being expressed about Office and the lack of knowledge about the functionality therein.
This is an intersting concern. Software is supposed to be seamless; or is it. Reality is that software training doesn't happen. We all get MS Office and XP on our company laptops, but most people probably use 5% of the available functions.
Case in point: how may people use styles within Word to create reports? I would guess 1 or 2% maximum. Yet styles have been a core part of Word for several versions. Who knows what is being missed in Word 2003. And the the most common accolade I hear for XP is that its stable, and doesn't crash! Ouch .....
Either we all get training on Microsoft products on a regular basis, or the new functionality will continue to be lost on 98% of the users. The addition of new complexity coming within Longhorn and the paradigm shifts anticipated within that platform with regard to browsers, for example, could generate an enormous demand for training ..... or companies will choose to not spend that money, and will avoid the upgrade. Worse they will upgrade just to keep current with the enterprise license, and users will contunue to use the product just as they used the first version they encountered, probably three or four back.
This is going to be a challenge for Microsoft - the world is getting very complex, and maybe its time for simplicity and seamless functionality. How about customer user-testing of the interface just as we do with web sites?
The Microsoft evangelism approach is fabulous, and I happen to be a Microsoft fan. But the model needs work, and the strategy re-thought. Microsoft is too big to just be a software developer. They need to get outside that box.
Michael Gartenberg: More on XP Evangelism or lack thereof
Allchin was bemoaning the fact that few users were using MovieMaker 2 and other Windows XP features. I suspect the reason is no one told them they were there.
February 26, 2004 at 11:17 PM in @ My Views @, Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
There is some controversy around this move from MS, but I like it. Hiding stuff in URL's isn't necessary.
InfoWorld: Microsoft: Change to IE will block some Web URLs: January 29, 2004: By : Security
By Paul Roberts, IDG News ServiceJanuary 29, 2004
BOSTON - Responding to a wave of online scams, Microsoft Corp. said that it is fixing a flaw in its popular Internet Explorer that makes it easy to mask the real address of a Web page displayed on the browser.
Microsoft will soon release a software update for IE that will end that browser's ability to accept Web URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that hide the address of the Web page being displayed using the "@" symbol. The update will remove a feature that is being exploited in scams that use spoof Web sites to harvest personal information from unsuspecting Internet users, Microsoft said in a note posted on its Web page Tuesday.
Microsoft has not released the software update yet, but is giving users and Web designers advance notice of the change so that they can review and update Web sites that may have URLs that use the formatting in question, the company said.
Uniform Resource Locators are addresses for files, such as Web pages, on the Internet. For example, the URL for Microsoft's Web page is http://www.microsoft.com.
At issue are Web URLs that include user login information, often entered by Web site visitors, in the form http://username:password@webaddress. For example, Internet Explorer and other browsers interpret the following URL as a request to go to www.microsoft.com and log in as customer1 using the password abc123: http://customer1:abc123@www.microsoft.com.
In so-called "phishing" scams, con artists take advantage of the liberal way Internet Explorer interprets these URLs, substituting the username:password part of the URL with the name of a legitimate Web site, then hiding the address of their Web site after the "@" symbol, said Nick Fitzgerald, an independent antivirus researcher.
A scam artist targeting Paypal customers might create a page that looks like Paypal.com, with fields asking for a Paypal customer's username and password, then link to that site using URLs that look like they point to the real Paypal.com Web site. For example: http://www.paypal.com@phishersite.com
Internet users who see the address assume, wrongly, that the browser is going to www.paypal.com, when it is really going to www.phishersite.com.
With most commercial Web sites and search engines dynamically generating HTML content, Web surfers have become accustomed to seeing long, complicated strings of characters in the Address bar of their Web browser, Fitzgerald said.
"This stuff is just completely meaningless to human beings. People have slowly come to expect that this is gibberish that computers talk," he said.
Making matters worse, a recently-discovered flaw in the way that IE parses URLs allows scam artists to completely replace Web URLs that use the username:password@ formatting with a URL of their choosing, regardless of which Web page is actually displayed in IE. Microsoft was criticized in recent weeks for not moving to patch that vulnerability when it released its other January security updates.
Microsoft, like many other browser makers, based its support of the username:password@ syntax on Internet standards documents, such as Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) documents RFC (Request For Comments)1738, which specifies how URLs on the Internet should be formatted, and RFC 2616 that specifies how HTTP URLs should be formatted, Fitzgerald said.
The change announced on Tuesday will violate some of those specifications, but benefit consumers, according to Russ Cooper, TruSecure Corp. Surgeon General and moderator of the NTBugtraq security discussion group.
"No doubt some who will cry foul...or sob because needed functionality is now gone or Web sites have to be recoded," Cooper wrote in a message posted to NTBugtraq Wednesday. "To them I say a big 'Too bad!'. The average user, the victim of phishing scams, isn't going to miss the functionality but will happily miss the scams."
That said, Microsoft should try to find a way to safely handle URLs with passwords in them, Cooper said.
February 26, 2004 at 09:41 PM in Microsoft | Permalink | TrackBack (9) | Top of page | Blog Home
From Dan Gillmor about a leading newspaper in Korea of all places, which is written by its readers, and now its online. Big parallels to Journalism blogs here.
Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Korea's Online Newspaper Goes International
Korea's OhmyNews, the pathbreaking online newspaper written largely by its readers, is creating an international edition. Here's the beta site. I visited and wrote about the publication last year in this column.
February 26, 2004 at 09:35 PM in Journalism | Permalink | TrackBack (1) | Top of page | Blog Home
ONA 2003 Conference and Awards Banquet
By Lily Fu
November 15, 2003
EVANSTON, Ill. -- Weblogs can offer journalists an alternative means of reaching global audiences while promoting reader interaction and debate, according to writer Andrew Sullivan, who keynoted the Online News Association conference on Saturday.
Sullivan writes "The Daily Dish" at AndrewSullivan.com, a blog, or an online journal, that explores topics ranging from religion to the war in Iraq. In the early 1990s, Sullivan, a former editor and writer for The New Republic, became known for pioneering discussion on controversial issues, such as gays in the military and same-sex marriage. Now in its fourth year of operation, "The Daily Dish" is one of the most read and influential blogs on the Internet.
Sullivan files several short paragraphs everyday that link to various Web sites on topics he writes about. He touted the nascent blog format as a low-cost way of reaching a mass audience.
"In general, the overhead is minimal, but the reach is infinite," he said.
Sullivan said his Web site now has a larger audience than The New Republic. He said bloggers are taking power away from editors and publishers, and that traditional media's way of expressing opinion will be outpaced.
"The op-ed column is a dinosaur as a genre," Sullivan said. "I think that in the future, newspaper editorial pages will have five bloggers rather than five columnists."
Blogs offer users the opportunity to pick sources they trust and come to respect, forcing writers to be personally accountable information they post online. One of the ways blogs enforce this is through Web links that appear with each entry. Sullivan said this is important so that readers are given the tools to form their own opinions. Sullivan believes the public is often skeptical of traditional media, which he referred to as "the man behind the curtain."
Sullivan said his blogs invite people to respond to items he posts. In the process, his site becomes a portal of other people's ideas and comments. Oftentimes his readers offer him comments, tips and links that he otherwise would not find.
Unlike traditional columns, blogs invite ongoing discussion and acknowledge that human thought is not final. "A blog doesn't need to make that commitment," he said. "Let's continue this conversation onwards."
Indeed, conversations frequently continue for an extended period of time and Sullivan said his blog accumulates facts, vocabulary and even inside jokes.
Even with the freedom blogs offer, Sullivan reminded the audience that he is dependent on classic reporting because the very nature of blogging calls for issues to be commented on and responded to.
Despite being the voice behind one of the most popular blogs, Sullivan admitted that there is no clear business model for blogging success. Sullivan currently solicits donations from his users and conducts pledge drives.
As for the future, Sullivan envisions that there could be magazines driven entirely by blogs, confessional blogs, as well as blogs of pure fiction.
But one thing he was certain of is that blogging has taken over his life. Even on weekends while out with friends, Sullivan jokingly said that he reminds himself, "You could be posting right now."
February 26, 2004 at 09:31 PM in Journalism | Permalink | TrackBack (18) | Top of page | Blog Home
vnunet.com VeriSign under Oath for stronger ID checks
Vendor unveils reference architecture to ease authentication deployments
Security vendor VeriSign has unveiled its Open Authentication reference architecture (Oath), designed to help companies deploy strong authentication technology across different devices and networks.
Oath uses open standard protocols including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service, so that secure user and device credentials can be provisioned and verified by a wide variety of software and hardware products.
VeriSign said a more stringent level of security, combining user identity with a software or hardware 'token', is needed to fight hackers.
The company claimed traditional IT security approaches, where online identities are verified by static passwords, are becoming increasingly vulnerable to attacks.
"As we've seen with personal computers, networking and other advances, ubiquitous adoption of any technology requires a fundamental shift from proprietary to open architecture," said Stratton Sclavos, chairman and chief executive of VeriSign.
"The Oath architecture calls for a new, more versatile generation of physical tokens that can combine three authentication methods, including one-time password, public key infrastructure-based authentication and Sim-based authentication (for GSM and 3G networks)," the company said in a statement.
"Armed with such flexibility, the same device will be capable of securely authenticating an end user across multiple networks and applications with much greater flexibility and interoperability."
February 26, 2004 at 09:25 PM in Security | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
InfoWorld: U.S. e-commerce to hit $100B in 2004: February 26, 2004: By : E-business Strategies
Number of U.S. Internet users has grown dramatically in the eight years to 150 million
By David Legard, IDG News ServiceFebruary 26, 2004
The number of U.S. users of the Internet has passed 150 million, more than seven times the number recorded in the initial 1996 study of the Internet carried out by comScore Networks Inc.'s Media Metrix unit. And from a fledgling industry in 1996, overall spending online in the U.S. is set to top $100 billion for the first time in 2004, comScore said.
At the time of that first study, broadband Internet access was virtually unknown in the U.S., but now 35 percent of U.S. home users have cable or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) access, comScore said.
The number of users has grown dramatically in the eight years of the Media Metrix studies, and so has the scope of the application of the Internet. In the mid-1990s, the most-visited sites included ISP (Internet service provider) sites, search engines and university sites. Eight years on, the popularity rankings are dominated by information and content delivery sites and e-commerce sites, comScore said.
In January 2004, 55 percent of the U.S. Internet population -- 83.5 million people -- visited the eBay Inc. or Amazon.com Inc. sites, pushing these companies into the forefront of U.S retailing. The travel industry is a major beneficiary of the switch to online services, rising from almost nothing in 1996 to US$41 billion in consumer sales in 2003, according to comScore.
A great deal of consolidation has happened among Internet properties in the last eight years. Three of 1996's top ten sites -- AOL.com, Netscape.com and Compuserve.com -- plus the 49th-ranked Pathfinder.com, are now all owned by Time Warner Inc.
AOL.com, the top site in 1996, reached around 6 million people, or 40 percent audience reach. The top-ranked site in 2004, owned by Yahoo Inc., is a network of sites which reaches over 100 million people per month, more than 70 percent of the Internet population, comScore said.
February 26, 2004 at 07:49 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
By Tim Richardson
Posted: 26/02/2004 at 15:11 GMT
The Register Mobile: Find out what the fuss is about. Take the two week trial today.
TESCO.COM - the online grocery business of the UK supermarket giant chain - has topped annual sales of more than £500m.
The world's biggest online grocer, Tesco.com now delivers more than 110,000 orders a week, the company said in a short statement today.
And, er, that's about it. Except to say that Tesco.com was launched in 1995 and covers 96 per cent of the UK population. It also operates in South Korea, the Republic of Ireland and as Groceryworks on the West Coast of America.
Two years ago Tesco.com announced that it was profitable generating 85,000 orders a week and sales of £356m.
Last year those lifestyle gurus at Good Housekeeping described online grocery shopping as "a stress-filled chore" that can take longer to do than a trip to the supermarket. ®
February 26, 2004 at 07:37 PM in eCommerce | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home