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Battling the WhizKids: How I kept my website up in spite of the Prime Software Contractor

1999, the lead up to Y2K was a horrendous year for me. Too many long weeks, too much travel, tight deadlines, multiple competing projects, not enough sleep and a level of exhaustion that compromised my short-term memory and took around 5 years to mostly recover from... So at the end of 1999, when a long term friend, Peter, offered me a part-time contract looking after a few web-servers, it sounded like a doodle. Easy work, reasonable hours and good people to work with. What's not to like?!?! I got more 80+ hour weeks, a horror project and an exceedingly difficult Software supplier to work with. But because of my efforts, the site stayed up, remained usable and our area was the only part of the overall project to not make the papers (in a bad way). Apparently the project won a Gold Government Technology Award as well. I presented a paper on the Performance aspects at CMG-A and a presentation . All this and a very high-profile website: the first large-scale on-line Transaction of th...
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Microsoft Troubles XVII: Vanity Fair on what "Felled a Tech Giant"

The mainstream media has released an major investigative report on Microsoft. The link is "a teaser", not the full article. Microsoft’s Downfall: Inside the Executive E-mails and Cannibalistic Culture That Felled a Tech Giant by Vanity Fair 12:00 AM, JULY 3 2012 Analyzing one of American corporate history’s greatest mysteries—the lost decade of Microsoft—two-time George Polk Award winner (and V.F.’s newest contributing editor) Kurt Eichenwald traces the “astonishingly foolish management decisions” at the company that “could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success.”  [italics added]  Relying on dozens of interviews and internal corporate records—including e-mails between executives at the company’s highest ranks—Eichenwald offers an unprecedented view of life inside Microsoft during the reign of its current chief executive, Steve Ballmer, in the August issue.   Today, a single Apple product—the iPhone—generates more revenue than all of Microso...
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IPV6: Adoption driven by smartphones?

Horace Dediu of asymco charts commodity computing up-take (as yearly sales) since 1975 in  " The evolution of the computing value chain ". It includes personal computers, smartphones and more. Current PC (desktop+laptop) and Android sales are about equal at 350MM/year, with iPhones ~150MM/year and iPads closing in on 100MM/year: or near 1Bn new personal compute devices per year. With current growth rates, how soon will we saturate the IPV4 address space? There are two questions in there: How many IPV4 addresses are left? Where? Each region has its own challenges. How fast is the demand for Internet addresses growing? New Sales are not the whole story: replacements account for most sales in mature markets. The active PC fleet is now somewhat static. When the smartphone and tablet markets mature, Sales will still hold up with replacements catering for the 2-5 year product life. The 32-bit IPV4 address space can assign no more than 4Bn unique identities. My guesstimate of realis...
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Microsoft Troubles XVI: Hard Data is emerging

Horace Dediu of asymco has written two recent posts on Microsoft: " The evolution of the computing value chain ", and  " Who will be Microsoft's Tim Cook? " I find Dediu's work outstanding: he provides hard data for the points he argues... " The evolution of the computing value chain " - the graph, although log not linear sales, seems to show three things: Past product rarely 'plateau', they move from growth to decay in a single, sharp step. PC's as a proxy for MS-Windows + MS-Office has had decades of ramp-up and seems to have plateaued. Already, the longevity and plateauing mark PC's as 'different'. Other products, smartphones and tablets, are in strong growth phases and surging past PC sales. What the graphs can't show is "what will be?": predict the future. My view is that Desktops aren't going away, especially the Corporate Desktop, but they will morph and take on characteristics of competing, new dev...
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Cyberwar: paper-tiger or real threat?

Marcus Ranum, renowned IT Security expert, has interesting views on Cyberwar. It's a lot more nuanced and subtle than "One Big Attack". Where I diverge: a Big Event is a great distraction for really 'interesting', subtle actions - and can be just as simple as the First Worm by Morris. Oooops, it wasn't meant to do that... Things you should read or view: RSA Conference, 2012, On Cyberwarfare Fabius Maximus posts on cyberwar You must Be >this< Tall To Play Cyberwar (has DoD grown enough yet?) Cyberwar: The Pentagon Cyberstrategy Cyberwar: About Stuxnet‏, the next generation of warfare? Congress Authorizes Pentagon to Wage Internet War  [Wired. Ryan Singel] M.R. on rearguard-security: Cyberwar
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NBN, stuxnet and Security: It's worse than you can believe

What  did US Intelligence tell the Australian Government about Real Network Security  when a chinese vendor was vetoed  as supplier of NBN (central?) switches? Now that we have O'bama admitting " we did Stuxnet, with a little help ", we know that they aren't just capable and active, but aware of higher level attacks and defences: you never admit to your highest-level capability. Yesterday I read two pieces that gave me pause: the first,  the US Navy replacing Windows with Linux for an armed drone was hopeful, the other should frighten anyone who understands Security: there's now a market in Zero-Day vulnerabilities . The things the new-world of the NBN has to protect us against just got a lot worse than you can imagine. Links in that article: Google's responsible disclosure  [and payments] “The Hackers Who Sell Spies The Tools To Crack Your PC (And Get Paid Six-Figure Fees) " “Shopping For Zero-Days: A Price List For Hackers’ Secret Software Exploits ...
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NBN: Will Apple's Next Big Thing "Break the Internet" as we know it?

Will Apple, in 2013, release its next Game Changer for Television following on from the iPod, iPhone, and iPad? If they do, will that break the Internet as we know it when 50-250MM people trying to stream a World Cup final? Nobody can supply Terrabit server links, let alone afford them. To reinvent watching TV, Apple has to reinvent its distribution over the Internet. The surprising thing is we were first on the cusp of wide-scale "Video-on-Demand" in 1993. Can, twenty years later, we get there this time? Walter Isaacson in his HBR piece, " The Real Leadership Lessons of Steve Jobs " says: In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In 2001 portable music players ... , leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store. Mobile phones were next. ... At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click...
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