To date, I've been a big fan of this device. For about 300 bucks it lets you hang a terabyte of storage on your network. Well... at least until the HD crashed. That's my current assessment as the drive makes the tell tale clicking noises when booting.
Enter LaCIE support. In time, we'll see how well they do... look for a report... and potentially a review of this product soon.
We all have to deal with it... and some use real company dollars to fight spam. Companies like Postini and SpamSoap have clients all paying hard earned dollars to prevent it from entering their email environments. We've certainly had decent success using SpamAssassin and filtering rules and such.... But many of our clients continue to ask why do we get it.
Based upon this white paper, WPA is now hacked. Long seen as a good alternative to WEP encryption, it's now just another encryption that's been hacked. The answer? a rather obvious migrate to WPA2 as quickly as possible.
While we're not sure if this is still an issue, we did have some problems a while back getting a windows XP machine to connect to a WPA2 protected wireless network provided by an Apple Airport Base station... We'll test this again later in the week.
Here we area again. For the second time in it's life, my MacBook Pro's 17" screen has gone blank. Zippo... dark... blank. During my last tangle with them, I was less than pleased with their in-store support. So, this time my machine is headed to Texas.
We've been plodding along over here... working on what was the latest generation of MacBook Pros.. and being relatively happy with them.. and their quality. Sure, we've had a couple of issues with this one machine, but Apple remedied the issues and all is functioning well.
All was going relatively well, until the new MacBook Pros were released. We love everything about them... with one major exception. The lack of Firewire 400 could be a significant problem. See, firewire 400 has been around so long that many people have these drives all over the place. Upgrading to to a new MacBook Pro means either replacing the external drives with FW 800 devices.... or... well... having to finally use that ExpressCard/34 slot.
Yet again, our brethren from Redmond feel the need to issue an emergency patch. Robert McMillian states in his article that it's an emerency patch that Microsoft will rush out. Microsoft has deemed the patch to be critical and will issue an emergency patch shortly. Microsoft's advisory about the issue also states that the patch will be available sometime on October 23, 2008.... today. Enjoy!
In our latest Vista update, we now have Steve Ballmer (CEO of Microsoft) stating that, "it's okay to wait for Windows 7." Wow.. so much can be said about this. For us, this means that Vista is so bad, that even the CEO of the company has given up trying to convince customers that it should roll out Vista.
With Vista's limited appeal to the business community, we never expected businesses to embrace Vista en masse anyway. There are very few compelling reasons and many more problems with a Vista rollout. The ROI just isn't there.
The general concession here is enough to convince us that there is no reason for any of our clients to implement Windows Vista today or at any time in the near future. We recommend to continue waiting until Windows 7 before any enterprise deployment be considered.
According to this BBC article, someone picked up some networking gear that still had proper access to the "home office" environment. Wow, this should be a clear reminder to wipe all gear before being sold to the public. Of course, this does bring up the possible scenario that the user selling the gear was an ex-employee which opens up a plethora of problems.
In recent, not really IT related news, Microsoft is switching gears with their new Ad campaign. Semi-substantiated rumors have them "moving to phase 2" of their 300 million dollar campaign which includes a change in strategy. Rumor has it they're ditching Jerry in favor of trying to change the "I'm a PC" tag from negative to positive. There are clearly times when we wish we were Jerry Seinfeld. 10 Million dollars for 2 ads... that's good work if you can get it.
PHPLive! appears to be a rather interesting product. For about 90 bucks you can purchase the software for this rather full featured chat client. Live chat is growing each and every day. In fact, we're testing this application for clients before we recommend they load it up on their sites.
If you'd like to help us test it, head to our website and click on the chat client on the right. We'd appreciate your thoughts about this and any other chat product.
So... Google has thrown their hat into the ring with a brand new browser, Google Chrome. This is going to make things most interesting to watch as we move forward. Microsoft's IE already has serious competition from the primary tier in Firefox and Apple's Safari.. and now Google is in the running. We expect Chrome to immediately take users away from IE while having minimal effect on the rest of the browser community.
It has long been held that Apple gear is more expensive than building your own.... or is it? We regularly hear complaints about how Macs are so much more expensive. Usually, those complaints are combated by ensuring that a true (sorry for the pun) Apples to Apples comparison be conducted.
In most cases when that's done properly, the Macs work out to be about the same price, but what about homebuilt machines. PC enthusiasts have built their own machines for quite some time claiming better product cheaper than can be provided by the Dells and HPs of the world.
We've just completed a seamless, relatively quick upgrade to our older, original iPhone. This update went without issue at about 7PM EDT. While this is not a blanket endorsement to go ahead and upgrade your phone, it appears that Apple may be on the down side of the issue.
We'll take some time with the 2.0 software and write a brief review. Assuming that upgrading is really a no-brainer here, we won't spend all that much time on it. We noticed a number of odd error messages during the day with our older software. For example Visual Voicemail returned an "unavailable error" on one of our units consistently throughout the day.
Hopefully, all of these issues have been resolved. Good luck with your upgrade to iPhone 2.0.
Fondly, I remember yelling at my bricked, brand new iPhone while I stared at an all, but useless iPhone for 3 days after purchasing one. It appears that lightning has struck twice.
Several CIO Podcast associates have reported issues related to upgrading to iPhone firmware 2.0. At this time, it appears that Apple has taken down the 2.0 update for older version iPhone users.
Dr. Evil has certainly come out to play with Apple once again.
Earlier this week a colleague asked me how I am as successful dealing with executives as I am. Basically, the answer to that is education. No, not formal business education, but education about the issues that CEO's and employers are facing today.
But, sometimes that's not enough. As IT Leaders we need to be responsive to our businesses needs. People ask how I keep in touch with the business leaders I view as my clients.
Microsoft XP formally ends general availability. Even the OEM version will be available only until the end of the year. This combined with Gates' "retirement" truly marks the end of an era at Microsoft.
Arguably, Windows XP was the best operating system Microsoft has ever released. It's taken years of bug fixing and continued development to get it to be as stable and secure as it is today. Yes, in spite of this, Microsoft pushes all clients to its questionable Vista environment.
In a recent conversation about investing in Macs vs. PCs Microsoft Silverlight was raised. What is it? Silverlight appears to be an "applet" that allows .Net developers to release websites for heterogeneous environments from Safari, Firefox to IE and even for cell phone based browsing. Oddly, this product was raised by the Microsoft "side" as a way to prevent purchasing Macs. The argument is lost on us.
We can't help but imagine that with the changing of the guard at Microsoft that Microsoft itself is in need of deep change. Ray Ozzie has the technical reigns and perhaps he'll be the savior.
Apple recently announced Snow Leopard, their next version of OS X. Version 10.6 will contain a couple of new "under the hood" items that most users will likely not notice and a couple of very prevalent items that they will. While the computational power addition of using the GPU is strong, the most compelling reason for this release will be it's integration with Microsoft's Exchange messaging platform.
We're currently dealing with a client situation related to a merger of two companies with very different IT systems and philosophies. The "Merger" is a hard and true Microsoft shop, while the "Mergie" has been happily a Mac shop. Of course, there's a new implementation project that's spawned the age old Mac vs. PC debate for the new sites. And wow, what a political football it has turned out to be.
Here it is folks... the day that Firefox 3.0 is released. We've seen this browser grow up over the years and it's now a viable alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. So much so, that with about 18% market share, websites need to be compatible with Firefox.
I'm always interested in reading strategy postings by other CIOs. Recently Susan Cramm started a blog on the Harvard Business Reivew site. Her first two posts are insightful and dead on advice for people outside of IT dealing with IT. Definitely worth checking out and following her coming posts.
Now, how do I forward them to my CEO clients without offending them?
Here we area again. For the second time in it's life, my MacBook Pro's 17" screen has gone blank. Zippo... dark... blank. During my 
Yet again, our brethren from Redmond feel the need to issue an emergency patch. Robert McMillian states in his 
So... Google has thrown their hat into the ring with a brand new browser, 
Fondly, I remember yelling at my bricked, brand new iPhone while I stared at an all, but useless iPhone for 
In a recent conversation about investing in Macs vs. PCs Microsoft Silverlight was raised. What is it? 
Apple recently announced Snow Leopard, their next version of OS X. Version 10.6 will contain a couple of new "under the hood" items that most users will likely not notice and a couple of very prevalent items that they will. While the computational power addition of using the GPU is strong, the most compelling reason for this release will be it's integration with Microsoft's Exchange messaging platform.
