December, 2007

10 Reasons IT Should Not Support the Apple iPhone – Forrester

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CIO reports on Forrester's study on the iPhone's shortcomings as a corporate solution.


From Forrester:

A high volume of IT operations professionals have reached out to Forrester over the past few weeks asking if Apple's iPhone should be on their list of internally supported devices. Not surprisingly, they're being challenged by their users to support the iPhone so employees can have their corporate email on the same device that allows them to listen to their favorite tunes and watch the hottest YouTube clips. Unfortunately, there are some limitations with the first generation of the iPhone that should prevent it from being added to enterprises' white list. Here's a top 10 list of reasons why Forrester recommends that IT not support the iPhone and why we don't consider it an enterprise-class mobile device. Despite this, Forrester predicts that the iPhone will find its way into many enterprise environments — if it hasn't already — because C-level executives are buying them and expecting support from IT. It's only a matter of time before the iPhone filters down the corporate pyramid, and IT should have a strategy to handle these requests.



As Ars Technica points out here,

...Forrester's report lists current shortcomings of the iPhone—even ones that -may be remedied in the future. For instance, the iPhone gets dinged for the lack of an official SDK for third-party applications, even though we know one is coming in a couple of months. The lack of extensive Exchange support is also mentioned, despite Apple job postings to the contrary.
The report does make a few good points, however, by mentioning both the lack of data encryption and the lack of any ability to remotely disable iPhones if they are lost or stolen. Most of the remaining reasons listed are design flaws more than IT-specific issues, such as the non-replaceable battery, carrier locks, and the multi-touch keyboard.

The Forrester report costs $295, so you might as well start with the CIO magazine article.

30 Years of LucasFilm Christmas Cards

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Slashfilm offers a review of Christmas cards from the LucasFilm archive. (Warning - site is kinda slow...)

Slashfilm

Holosonic audio spotlight ads hit the street in NYC

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Ad Age had this last week:

For "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week, a billboard using technology manufactured by Holosonic transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium.

That's generated some privacy-related discussion on Slashdot, as well as the usual mentions of Minority Report.


Advertising Age abstract (subscription required to read full article)

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Holosonic press release


Don't Use iDisk via .MAC on a shared machine.

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As computing becomes more cloud-like, so security becomes more difficult...


Here's a great bit from thebadapples.info:


Apparently if you use a browser to access your iDisk, there's no way to log out. That means the next user on that system can just go to your browser's History section and get right into your account. (Personally I just mount the iDisk on the local desktop, then dismount it when I'm done, but I wonder if there's an issue with that as well...)


So this is just a friendly reminder to anyone with a .mac account to be careful when checking your account on someone else's computer, especially a public one! If you do check it on someone's non-Mac, then make sure you have the ability to successfully clear the browser's history and cache. And go to apple.com/feedback and tell them that a company advertising above-average security should have simple security devices like "log out" in place!

Most disturbingly, Apple seem to have deleted discussion of this from their forums: according to this Slashdot post,

[P]odcaster Klaatu (of thebadapples.info) posted this on the discussion.apple.com site, only to have his post removed by Apple.


thebadapples.info

Datamancer's Steampunk Victorian Laptop

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I've posted about Steampunk elsewhere, and there a good collection of notes about it on BoingBoing.

This project begs for special mention, though - not only because of its general excellence, but also because of the in-progress pics available here:


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Datamancer

Brass Goggles


Tiger Team - IT Security as "Reality" TV

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Court TV is touting a new series, apparently following a group of penetration testers around as they try to test organizations' security using social engineering, wired/wireless penetration testing, and physically defeating security mechanisms (lock picking, dumpster diving, going through air vents/windows).
(via Slashdot)

Quote:

This vérité action series follows Tiger Team – a group of elite professionals hired to infiltrate major business and corporate interests with the objective of exposing weaknesses in the world’s most sophisticated security systems, defeating criminals at their own game.


Slashdot post

Court TV site

30 More Excellent Blog Designs - Smashing Magazine

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Eye-candy time.

I can't help thinking some of these are trying too hard to be Art, but of course your mileage may vary, as they say...

Smashing Magazine



Four Rules for Career Success

Nice short piece on Advergirl - Four Rules for Career Success:

  • Never be silent in a meeting. You're there for a reason. Participate. Add value. Take notes.
  • Always build trust. Demonstrate that you understand the business - the entire business, not just your department - and your boss's painpoints. Take actions that show you're a responsive steward of the business, the brand and your boss's sanity.
  • Keep generating ideas. New ideas. Fresh perspectives. Not just words/pictures/projects/research or whatever the details of your job description mandate.
  • Learn to read a room. Nothing will get you farther in business than empathy. Stop talking when eyes glaze. Offer solutions when brows crease. Pay attention to all the nonverbal feedback coming your way and act on it.

Hmm... seems like posting to a blog could cover lot of this, eh?

  • Bloggers are speaking up, not being silent, by the very act of blogging.
  • A well-considered post demonstrates understanding of what's important to the business and readers, even if the blogger is just noticing something and saying "Hey, look at that!"
  • The best bloggers notice several things at once and connect them on the fly - a great way to generate new ideas.
  • Empathy is the toughest one - how can we tell if our posts are connecting with anyone? Comments? Trackbacks? All too vulnerable to spam. Do editors and writers have ways of putting themselves in the reader's shoes? Instinctively I think they do, but I have no empirical evidence for this. Maybe it's what happens in the revision process?

Link

Desktop vs. Online, Microsoft vs. Google - NY Times

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Worthwhile article from the Times on the tension between online computing and the desktop model.

Clearly the graphics industry will lag behind a little in moving everything online, mostly for bandwidth reasons - but that move is afoot as well.

Quote:


The growing confrontation between Google and Microsoft promises to be an epic business battle. It is likely to shape the prosperity and progress of both companies, and also inform how consumers and corporations work, shop, communicate and go about their digital lives. Google sees all of this happening on remote servers in faraway data centers, accessible over the Web by an array of wired and wireless devices — a setup known as cloud computing. Microsoft sees a Web future as well, but one whose center of gravity remains firmly tethered to its desktop PC software. Therein lies the conflict.


Link

More on the Wiii shortage - NY Times

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Estimates are that the inability to meet demand is costing Nintendo as much as $1 Billion in sales, not counting games.

Meanwhile, people are tracking the movements of UPS trucks, trying to figure out what stores will have one and when.

Clearly this is the classic "Nice problem to have"... but is there a residual effect when customers try so hard to give a company money, to no avail?

NY Times article