Denise Dubie of Network World reports:
According to published reports from Gizmodo, Microsoft stopped production of its planned double-screen tablet that had some industry watchers excited about its potential to increase competition in the tablet market. Courier, along with the HP Slate running Windows 7, the Dell Streak running Google’s Android OS and Lenovo’s IdeaPad U1, had industry watchers projecting that competitive offerings would bring down the cost of Apple’s iPad. [Read More]
Meanwhile, my iPad 3G has been shipped and arrives today!
This is my first blog post from within Microsoft Office 2010. I am impressed! I like having a File menu again. It will be hard to go back to 2007 after this.
For those who have criticized Apple for the company's position on Adobe Flash content, Steve Jobs recently published this essay:
I wanted to jot down some of our thoughts on Adobe’s Flash products so that customers and critics may better understand why we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. Adobe has characterized our decision as being primarily business driven – they say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues. Adobe claims that we are a closed system, and that Flash is open, but in fact the opposite is true. Let me explain. [Read More]
This is good reading. The fact is Flash is old technology. New open standards like HTML5 are going to confirm Flash's status as legacy. Especially in education, it's time to prepare our students for life after Adobe Flash. We need to be teaching HTML5!
As the state budget is tightening the CSU is looking for ways to save money. One of those ways appears to be outsourcing to supposedly free service providers. Various campuses in the CSU system are outsourcing, or planning to outsource soon, employee and/or student e-mail to Google and/or Microsoft.
Reportedly the vendors are going to be doing this for free. But, is it really free? According to the editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson, who also wrote the book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, "All forms of free boil down to shifting monies around...cross-subsidies." In other words if they give something away, they have to be making money elsewhere off the free gift. Where are Google and Microsoft making money on this? That question has not been adequately answered as of yet.
The outsourcing also has other unanswered questions; like, what do we do if the plan fails? It is amazing for such a big plan to be executed without a back out plan. One of the basic principles of change management is the need to plan for the unexpected. This includes the need to provide back out if the plan fails and the need to define the criteria on which a decision to back out will be made. So, what is the back out plan? That question has not been adequately answered as of yet.
A mystery also surrounds the issue of displacement of university staff. San Jose State University has already outsourced its student e-mail to Microsoft and is in the process of outsourcing faculty and staff e-mail to Google. SJSU has recently announced the layoff of 73 staff members, 21 of these are from unit 9. SJSU Chief Information Officer William Maguire said in a meeting in early 2010, “100 techs at SJSU support e-mail.” If each of tech supports legacy e-mail ten percent of the time, on average, that is the equivalent of ten positions supporting e-mail. Few may actually be supporting e-mail 100 percent of the time; but when the work is contracted out and the positions are cut, it is hard to argue there is no impact.
The classification of the people doing the work also comes into question. Typically the top-level people running the e-mail servers are Operating System Analysts. When there is a problem with an e-mail server it is an Operating System Analyst that fixes it. When that work is contracted out someone will still have to be reporting problems to the vendor, but; it is not likely that person will that be an Operating System Analyst.
A lot of information sent via e-mail between students and faculty is very sensitive. Security and privacy is a major concern. On April 19 privacy and data-protection officials from 10 countries, including Germany, Canada and France sent a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt. The officials said Google "too often" forgets people’s privacy rights as it rolls out new technologies.
According to a post by Ellen Messmer of Network World, Cloud computing makes IT access governance messier. Messmer said, "IT professionals are finding it harder than ever to set up access controls for network resources and applications used by organization employees, and cloud computing is only adding to their woes, a survey of 728 IT practitioners finds."
Not everybody is finding outsourcing to Google to be the slam-dunk it appears to be in the CSU system. According to a March 30 article by David Tidmarsh of the Yale Daily News at Yale University, "Information Technology Services has decided to postpone the University’s move from the Horde Webmail service to Google Apps for Education." The article went on to say, "Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said, “There were enough concerns expressed by faculty that we felt more consultation and input from the community was necessary.”
Few answers to these questions and issues have been forthcoming about these so-called free solutions. There is an old saying, if a deal appears too good to be true, it usually is. As SJSU appears on the verge of leaping into the pool of free e-mail for all, maybe we should be looking a little more carefully beneath the surface.
I spent my lunch hour today in front of the student union at SJSU where we leafleted, passed out information about the rally 11:30 Thursday at the Student Union amphitheater and spoke to employees that will be affected by the layoffs. We plan to be in front of the Student Union Tuesday and Wednesday as well.
Commentary:
Some faculty have expressed disagreement with the California State University and our staff union's seniority based layoff process for staff university employees. Some folks in the campus community have said bad things about our staff employee's union regarding it. I wrote about this here on my union blog [Read More]
NOTE --> These are my own personal opinions, views, information and perspectives regarding the labor movement in general and our local union, Chapter 307 of CSUEU, the California State University Emplyees Union at SJSU, San Jose State University, San Jose, California. This is NOT meat to represent the official union position on this matter.
According to an Associated Press story in the Mercury News by Barbara Ortutay:
Officials from Germany, Canada, France and seven other countries are raising privacy concerns about Google's mapping service and the company's fumbled foray into social networking. [Read More]
According to Ortutay, "The bulk of the complaints are over Buzz, which Google launched in February as part of its Gmail service."
Here is a Web page with Webcasts that provides information on the planned rollout of Google at SJSU:
Welcome to University Technology Services' temporary Google Apps Implementation project page. When the new UTS website is rolled out, more comprehensive documentation will be available. [Read More]
When the new page is available I will link to it.
According to a post by By Ellen Messmer of Network World, Cloud computing makes IT access governance messier. Messmer said:
IT professionals are finding it harder than ever to set up access controls for network resources and applications used by organization employees, and cloud computing is only adding to their woes, a survey of 728 IT practitioners finds. [Read More]
SJSU is about to embrace cloud computing in a big way with the move to Google.
According to an article by John E. Dunn of TechWorld, "Apple antivirus company Intego has discovered a backdoor malware attack targeting Mac users." Dunn said the attack is:
Able to infect both PowerPC and newer Intel-based Macs thanks to being written as a universal binary, OSX.HellRTS.D sets out to take complete control of an infected machine, setting itself up as a server capable of doing pretty much what it wants. This will include, downloading software, spewing email, set up screen sharing, accessing files on the Mac, and copying anything it finds on the clipboard.
The concept of security by obscurity has been used by Mac owners and system administrators as an excuse for not protecting computers. According to security expert Charlie Miller, Apple continues to tell users that its OS is safer than Windows. Miller has claimed that it has 20 zero day security flaws. Security by obscurity is not security. Reportedly Miller said, "Mac OS X is like living in a farmhouse in the country with no locks, and Windows is living in a house with bars on the windows in the bad part of town."
Coming to a university near you?
Click on the picture to see a video on YouTube on the new version of Google Docs.
According to the Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal SJSU is going to cut, "approximately 76 staff members and reassign 48 more in accordance with labor agreements effective July 1." Some employees are being brought in at 1:00 p.m. today to be given the news. The Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal said:
Facing a projected 2010-2011 shortfall of at least $18 million, San Jose State University said Thursday it will implement layoffs, eliminate vacant positions and reduce spending on part-time temporary faculty members. [Read More]
It is my personal hope that the situation will improve when the Leg Analyst office announces it's May revise in mid-May.
It is too soon to tell
It has not (yet) been resolved, the device is too new and frankly the killer 3G version has not yet been shipped. It is not known whether native apps (iPhone type apps developed using Objective C and Cocoa) or Web apps (like Google Docs and Calendar) will dominate in the iPad world.
A lot of folks are assuming that iPad utilization will be like IPhone utilization with folks using native apps predominately on the iPad, like folks do on the iPhone today. I think this will be the case in the short term, as these devices are viewed as big iPhones in the iPhone paradigm.
I am not sure that is the case for the long term, though. Just because the device runs the iPhone OS does not mean these are iPhones. Perhaps the iPhone paradigm will dominate when the devices are used for content consumption (like books, movies and the like.)
But, I also suspect you are going to see more folks using these devices as thin clients in a cloud computing model. The larger screen enables much more functionality for using Web applications in the cloud (with local caching, like Google Gears.) Ubiquitous connectivity using 3G + WiFi makes it practical.
That is why I am waiting for the 3G model. Comparing an iPad with WiFi to one with 3G to me is like comparing an iPhone to an iPod touch. In my opinion, it will not be long before a WiFi only iPad is considered pretty lame.
If you want to develop for the iPad I suggest HTML, CSS, Javascript and in the long term; HTML5.
Monday is the launch for Adobe's new version of creative suite; CS5. This is way more exciting to me than the launch of a new Apple or Microsoft Operating System. Here is a page where you can register for the Monday launch event and learn about new features in CS5.
According to an article by David Tidmarsh of the Yale Daily News at Yale University, "Information Technology Services has decided to postpone the University’s move from the Horde Webmail service to Google Apps for Education." The article goes on to say:
Deputy Provost for Science and Technology Steven Girvin said, “There were enough concerns expressed by faculty that we felt more consultation and input from the community was necessary,” [Read More]
Dave Kearns of Network World wrote a different perspective of this when he said, "Privacy and cloud computing have recently been in the news, with stories coming out of academia (Yale University) and government oversight agencies (Canadian Privacy Commissioner). Both, in my view, got it wrong." [Read More]
Will it blend?
I have long been a fan of Blendtech's "Will It Blend" Videos. The first one that caught my eye was when they blended an iPod. Well, they have blended many things since then! Of course they wasted no time testing their super powerful blenders on one of Apple's new iPads.
Buyer beware!
The book features of the new Apple iPad really hold the potential of mainstreaming the EPUB ebook document format. At least with Adobe InDesign CS4 creating EPUBs is not as easy as exporting to PDF. Here are some guidelines for producing them using ID CS4 from Adobe.
Adobe InDesign CS5 is scheduled to be released on April 12. I really will be looking to see how this format is supported in this new version.
Apple is not the only organization that has done it again with the iPad!
What a surprise it was for me to see another photo of Robert Scoble in the Mercury News coming out of an Apple store with another apple gadget.
The Scoble with an iPad photo (Sunday April 4) is a different angle of the Scoble with an iPhone shot the Merc ran in 2007 when the iPhone came out. I guess the SJSU J&MC alum, and former voice of Microsoft, is the newspaper's model for new Apple technology. When Apple comes out with a new product it looks like the Merc loves to shoot Robert coming out of the Palo Alto Apple Store with it! Way to go Robert! Way to go San Jose Mercury News!
Maybe next time Apple comes out with a gadget you can just Photoshop it into one of your older shots. In this time of fiscal austerity for newspapers it might be a good idea!
Technorati Tags: Microsoft, ipad, Apple, Scoblizer, Scoble, ssloansjca
According to Adam Ostrow on Mashable, Facebook is introducing community pages. Ostrow wrote:
It’s for the hordes of “unofficial” Pages that have been created by users in support of topics or causes. There’s a big difference in functionality too –- Facebook says that if a page becomes popular enough, administration will be handed over to the Facebook community. In other words, Community Pages become a whole lot like a wiki once they reach a certain threshold. [Read More]
