Will Kumar refund? IBM eats own dog food. Interop 2006. EFF neutralized by DOJ secret weapon?
It's been close to six months since I turned off all of my instant messengers. Yahoo? Off. Skype? Off. MSN? Off. AIM? Off. Sometimes, when I need to get in touch with someone, I turn them on. But I unload them as soon as I'm done (side benefit: my machine seems to go longer without reboots). You should try it sometime. So quiet is my display, I'm not sure what to do with myself. OK, well, not quite. But today, I glanced around our network of nearly 40 bloggers to see what was up.
In the Fox Watching the Henhouse Department, I was pretty dismayed to learn from Richard Stiennon's Threat Chaos blog about a little known weapon the DOJ has at its disposal: one that apparently can ixnay a lawsuit (like the one filed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation for AT&T's role in wiretapping on behalf of the NSA) should that suit involve state secrets. Over in The Division of Eating Your Own Dog Food, Joe McKendrick says that IBM isn't just trying to sell you it's brand of Alpo (service's oriented architecture aka SOA), it's practicing what it preaches internally as well. Shouldn't all vendors practice what they preach?
At the Check Your Pockets Before You Leave Window, Jason O'Grady refers to TomTom's $499 GO 300 portable GPS receiver as "economical." I think he's nuts. Like the way DVD players are a dime a dozen when they used to cost a fortune, the price on these will eventually drop to nothing. Until then, I'll take Rand McNally's Road Atlas ($10.37 on Amazon) or the like. Over at The Gimme My Damn Refund Desk, Josh Greenbaum asks convicted embezzler and ex-Computer Associates CEO Sanjay Kumar when he's going to give back that bonus that was calculated on the basis of cooked books. Years from now, will Sanjay and Ken team up, write a book, and do the Kumar & Lay Show (advice on how to swindle your stockholders?).
Finally, from the What happens in Vegas Stay in Vegas Unless You're a Blogger Policyholder's Group comes a picture of Real World IT blogger George Ou rubbing shoulders with Cisco frontman John Chambers. George says he'll be posting some detailed slides in the next few days. Looking forward to it. But I also liked the slide in the background behind him and Chambers that says "Interop makes you smart." By way of a cut and paste error however, the tagline that said "It's just the blackjack dealers here in Vegas making you look dumb" is missing.