Mac OS X Backspace and Delete For Old Unix Geeks Like Me

 Below is a picture of my toolbar:

As you can tell, this is not your typical toolbar on a MacBook Pro.  I have demoted the standard Apple apps and promoted applications such as:

1. Terminal
2. Console
3. Network Utility
4. System Profiler
5. Activity Monitor
6. Techtool Deluxe
7. VirtualBox
8. Spaces
9. Time Machine
10. Opera
11. Chrome
12. Firefox

So, I am not your typical Apple Fan Boy user is my point.  I like the power tools of life.  I like saving time.  I love that my MacBook Pro runs Unix underneath.  I am more and more impressed with Mac OS X until I ran into the no damn BACKSPACE key on the MacBook Pro.  That was a stupid design decision.   Please don't tell me how Steve Jobs is god and that whatever decision he makes are great.  I will show you the Apple Lisa in my father's basement.  I will show you pictures of the Newton.  Even Apple can make mistakes.  Don't get me wrong, Steve Jobs is a marketing genius, but he is not god.

I am an old Unix guy.  I have been using Unix since 1981.  That is a lot longer than most, but not as long as some.  What I love about Unix is its simplicity.  It is elegant in its simplicity.  Everything is a file with Unix and that makes it very extensible.  It is exponentially extensible.  I love power tools that just work.  I am a vi person and up until recently a Pine person for email.  Why?  Huge capabilities with absolute minimal key strokes.

Bill Joy used to send his emails with lower case only because he calculated that he saved something like 27% by avoiding the short pause to hit the shift key at the beginning of sentences.  I think he is probably unique in that style :-)   If you look at vi, you see an extremely powerful editor.  Speaking of vi, there is a long standing story about Bill writing vi in a weekend.  He did not.  See below.

Below is a short snippet from an interview with Bill Joy on the creation of vi that was reproduced by SoftPanorma which was reproduced from Linux Magazine November 1999 FEATURES onThe Joy of Unix: 

Linux Magazine: So you didn't really write vi in one weekend like everybody says? 

Bill Joy: No. It took a long time. It was really hard to do because you've got to remember that I was trying to make it usable over a 300 baud modem. That's also the reason you have all these funny commands. It just barely worked to use a screen editor over a modem. It was just barely fast enough. A 1200 baud modem was an upgrade. 1200 baud now is pretty slow.

9600 baud is faster than you can read. 1200 baud is way slower. So the editor was optimized so that you could edit and feel productive when it was painting slower than you could think. Now that computers are so much faster than you can think, nobody understands this anymore.

The people doing Emacs were sitting in labs at MIT with what were essentially fibre-channel links to the host, in contemporary terms. They were working on a PDP-10, which was a huge machine by comparison, with infinitely fast screens.

So they could have funny commands with the screen shimmering and all that, and meanwhile, I'm sitting at home in sort of World War II surplus housing at Berkeley with a modem and a terminal that can just barely get the cursor off the bottom line.

It was a world that is now extinct. People don't know that vi was written for a world that doesn't exist anymore -- unless you decide to get a satellite phone and use it to connect to the Net at 2400 baud, in which case you'll realize that the Net is not usable at 2400 baud. It used to be perfectly usable at 1200 baud. But these days you can't use the Web at 2400 baud because the ads are 24 kilobytes.

Back to the point of this blog post where I am admittedly jumping into some historical rat holes :-)  I have been using Unix since 1981 and have always used the DELETE key as the Unix intr and the BACKSPACE key as the erase key.   What does this mean in English?  The DELETE key interrupts or basically kills what you were doing on a command line.  The BACKSPACE key will backspace to the left of where you are on the line and remove whatever it backspaces over.  Some individuals use CONTROL-C as the Unix intr function.  I never liked that because that involved pausing and hitting the control key then the C key.  Like Bill Joy, I believe shorter is better.

On the MacBook Pro there is no BACKSPACE key.  This is stupid.  Apple easily could have put a BACKSPACE key on the keyboard.  Why do I need only one FN key, one CONTROL key, but I need TWO COMMAND keys and TWO ALT/OPTION keys?  I realize that the Apple Fan Boys and Apple Sycophants will go nuts over this heresy, but it makes no damn sense....

BUT, there is a solution.  After googling my brains out and going down many, many wrong paths, I have found a solution that works for me.  Now, for the average Apple user, this may not be the solution, but for old Unix geeks, it is a very clean solution.

You need to do three things:

1. Turn off the keyboard shortcut for the F12 key that pops up the Dashboard.  You do this by going into System Preferences--> Keyboard --> Dashboard & Dock then deselect the Dashboard F12 function.  See below.

    2.  Select the Use all F1, F2, etc. as standard function keys.  What this means is that to use the functions that are represented by icons on your upper row function keys, you MUST first hold down the FN key.  No big deal to me, because these keys are not used that often for a typical Unix geek.  Your typical Apple user might freak out though.  Your typical Apple user is not using a Unix terminal all the time like I am though either.   You do this by going into System Preferences--> Keyboard --> Keyboard then select the Use all F1, F2, etc. as standard function keys.    See below.

   3.   Redefine the F12 key by going into the Terminal Settings--> Preferences --> Settings --> Keyboard  and redefine the F12 key to be a CONTROL-H which shows up as a \010  as you see below.

   3.  Then make sure your  stty looks like the following in your .cshrc file   stty  intr '^?'
         The system defaults to having CONTROL-H as the backspace key.  In other words, the system puts in the equivalent of     stty erase '^H'

Now, when it hit the DELETE key it will operate as an intr and when you hit the F12 key it will operate as the erase function as all of us old geeks are used to.   Three easy steps.....

                      

When Big Parts of Your Past Are Closed Down

This past week it was announced that the Kansas City, MO School System will close down 29 of its 61 schools.

In this group of closures is the High School I went to Hickman Mills.

What is interesting about this is the following about my youth:


        Westridge Elementary School CLOSED
        Baptiste Junior High School CLOSED
        Hickman Mills High School CLOSED

The numbers are devastating:

  * Kansas City has 61 schools
  * 29 schools will close by fall
  * 700 jobs will be lost
  * 25 million dollars will be spent on the transition
  * KC had 75,000 students
  * KC now has less than 17,000


I went to 6th grade at Westridge, all three years at Baptiste and one year at Hickman Mills during a five year stint my father was assigned to Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base which is also CLOSED.   The shopping center near our house had so much crime that ALL THE STORES CLOSED.

When I took my family on a trip about ten years ago, I took them to Trenton, Illinois and Kansas City, Missouri to show them where I lived.  We did this during the summer.

In Trenton, 30 years after my parents left, NOTHING HAD CHANGED.  The people who purchased my parents house were still there.  All the neighbors were still there.  The population of 2,100 had not changed. It was simply surreal to go back to a small town and it was as if time had stopped.

We go to Kansas City, Missouri.   I take them to Westridge Elementary School and it is closed.  I take them to Baptiste Junior High School and it is closed.  We go to Hickman Mills High School and it is open.  I decide to take my family inside.   One of the stories that my boys did not believe was that teachers were allowed to hit you with a board in Kansas City, MO.   So, I asked some of the older teachers to tell my sons that it was true that you teachers used to be able to hit kids.  The teachers at Baptiste Junior High called hitting kids with a board "swats".   The number of "swats" you would get was typically 3 or 5 depending on the "crime".   Mr. Bennett, the music teacher, used to pull kids out and give them one swat if they were not singing loud enough.   I witnessed this many times.

The swats I got were for fighting in gym class with my best friend.  He did a power drive on me and nearly knocked me completely out and I got swats for it.  The other time I got swats was for refusing to speak to the Principal Mr. Shipley when he asked me to identity who the smokers were on a field trip.  I got three swats for both crimes from Vice Principal Mr. Hamm.   Mr. Hamm was a large man who probably was about 230 pounds versus Mr. Shipley's 165 pounds.   When I got swats in gym class, I was wearing shorts that had less thickness than a kleenex.  Mr. Hamm did not hit me on my zero percent fat rear end, but instead on my ham strings.  I have to be honest, it hurt like hell.   Many of the teachers had their own paddles.  I remember Mr. Cox, the science teacher, had a custom paddle with holes in it.  He said it allowed him to swing it faster.  He kept this big paddle on his front desk every day just to remind everyone to not screw around.   What Mr. Cox did not know is that we paid attention because he was a good teacher, not because we were afraid of his paddle.

I did watch Ron Britt's father throw Mr. Hamm up against a wall when he came in to school to clearly send the message that if Mr. Hamm ever touched his son again that he would "kick his sorry A$$".   Ron Britt's father was absolutely right.

Anyway, back to the scene at Hickman Mills High School.   The teachers there looked at my three sons and said, "Absolutely kids used to get swats if they were misbehaving.    It was very common.  They no longer hit kids in Missouri, but Missouri was the last state to outlaw corporal punishment."

What is interesting regarding Corporal Punishment is that according to WikiPedia:

Corporal punishment used to be prevalent in schools in many parts of the world, but in recent decades it has been outlawed in most of Europe and in Canada, Japan, South Africa, New Zealand and several other countries (see list of countries, below). It remains commonplace in a number of countries in Africa, south-east Asia and the Middle East (see list of countries, below).

In the United States, the Supreme Court ruling in Ingraham v. Wright (1977) held that school corporal punishment does not violate the federal Constitution. Paddling continues to be used to a significant extent in a number of Southern states, though there has been a sharp decline in its incidence over the past 20 years.

 That night I went to a bar in Kansas City with my best friend when I lived there.   There was no one in this bar and pool hall.  It was a large bar and pool hall so I asked the person behind the bar, where was everyone.  I will never forget her answer, "Two people were kill last night next door, so attendance is down.  Can I get you a beer?"

There  was an article in the paper that listed the neighborhood that we lived in was ranked #2 in total crimes for the 180+ districts in KC.

The best summary line of that trip was my middle son Michael who said about Kansas City, "this explains a lot about dad...."  :-)

Virtual Photons in Quantum Biology

I was reading an interesting white paper (it is posted as a white paper but appears to be available in book form as well)  at Global Quantum Quest titled "An Advanced Treatise in SUBSPACE and QUANTUM ASPECTS of BIOLOGY" and specifically Chapter 6 on Virtual Photons.

The excellent white paper is written by Professor William C. Nelson, The College of Practical Homeopathy, London England.

The explanation of what happens with an MRI was particularly well written:

"The detection of particular body-made photons has become another paramount science in the utilization of magnetic resonance imagery (MRI). In MRI, when the body is exposed to a large magnetic field, the protons of the hydrogen inside the water molecule, the two protons next to the oxygen, will move with their magnetic moment, to parallel the magnetic field. When the magnetic field is removed these protons will jump back to their original state, and in so doing, will release a photon. The photon that is released is vibrating at 64 megahertz, and has a wavelength of approximately 3.8 meters. The magnetic resonance machines will then intake this photon and, through sophisticated computerized processes, be able to describe the amount of water and the location of the water via the triangulation theory used within the computerized software."

Above is just one example of the clarity of Professor Nelson's writing and the entire white paper that is posted is very well written.

A Fine Line Between Clever and .... Stupid

OK, so the actual quote by David St. Hubbins in the movie Spinal Tap is "It's such a fine line between stupid, and clever. "  Now that I have addressed the hard core Spinal Tap fans :-)


What I am referring to is a security issue that some people don't even think about.  The social networking sites and activities are extremely popular as we all know.  Millions of people are on facebook, twitter, myspace, LinkedIn, Flickr, or insert your favorite site here.  Everyone likes to share in in an open way.  

The problem is that the average user either does not know know or has not taken the time to think through some of these seemingly innocuous actions.  For example, you are on vacation and keep sending out tweets on what a great time you are having with a bunch of long time friends. You have turned on geotagging on your twitter account because you feel it adds to the personal nature of your tweets.   You think, what's the big deal, geotagging simply means you add your location to your tweets by automatically using the location feature built into your smart phone.

Now, before you think that websites should do a better job of warning the user - many already do. If you check out the warning twitter.com on geotagging, it is very clear, for example, just one part of the twitter site states:

When using Tweet With Your Location, please keep in mind:

Your exact location will be stored with your Tweets, and your exact location or place information may be publicly displayed based on your application settings.

Once you post your location, it’s public. Even if you delete it later, it can remain in third-party applications or other external sources, like search results.

twitter makes it very clear.  Twitter makes it extremely clear and shows exactly how your tweets will appear with your location.  This is also an "opt in" decision, so the default is to not have geotagging turned on.  However, this does not mean that the user reads the warning, nor that the user understands the warning.  This is not twitter's fault.  This is not the users fault, but it is just a fact of life with new technology.

To show how this information can be used in ways that most users would not not suspect, you only have go to a site call RobMeNow.com 

When you go to RobMeNow.com, it has a very succinct message:

Geotagging is a fun way to show burglars when your not at home.  Think before you geotag 

RobMeNow.com really drives home the point that you need to think about the possible secondary and tertiary affects when you make social networking decisions. 

History Of Sun Microsystems Stock

This graph of the entire history of Sun Microsystems stock price I found very interesting.

Temple Grandin: The world needs all kinds of minds

My wife sent me this TED video on a Temple Grandin who is a lady with autism.   This is a must watch as is the HBO movie titled Temple Grandin.

TED brings out the following:

"Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works -- sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss. She makes the case that the world needs people on the autism spectrum: visual thinkers, pattern thinkers, verbal thinkers, and all kinds of smart geeky kids."

 My wife teaches autistic children is how she came upon this very interesting and fascinating person.

How The Daily Show Finds All Those Clips....

I was listening to This Week in Tech (TWiT), (thanks npg for turning me on to Leo Laporte and friends) which, IMHO, is the best podcast on the net.

Leo was told on this Sunday's podcast that The Daily Show uses SnapStream to find all of those snippets.  SnapStream allows you to enter text then searches TV streams for occurrences of that search string.  For they have a free test  example, this is a search of "Health Care".

They have both consumer and enterprise products.   I thought this was interesting to show what tools that the comedy writers at The Daily Show likely use on a hourly basis.

Investing In a Clear and Compelling National Security Strategy

This past Sunday, Mike McConnell wrote an article titled: To win the cyber-war, look to the Cold War.   Mr. McConnell is the former director of NSA and the former Director of National Intelligence (DNI) during President Bush's second term.

Mr. McConnell brings out the point:

"The problem is not one of resources; even in our current fiscal straits, we can afford to upgrade our defenses. The problem is that we lack a cohesive strategy to meet this challenge"

I am personally not convinced that resources are not an issue.   I think we have a severe lack of security experts in this country in the commercial world.   I would like to say a lot more invested in colleges and universities in terms of security courses and better collaboration between the three letter agencies, industry and academia.  Security must be baked in from the beginning, because if you do not, you can never go back and insert it later with any real success.  Java is a great example of designing security in from the beginning.


A very interesting topic that Mr. McConnell brings up is the Cyber ShockWave simulation at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

I was disappointed that Mr. McConnell did not discuss the importance of open source in security.  Security through obfuscation never works.


A statistic to put this in context was brought out at the Wall Street Journal's blog page by Sarmad Ali is the following:

"There were 54,640 total cyber attacks against the Department of Defense in 2008, according to the report. In the first half of 2009, the number of attacks targeting the department was 43,785. The report maintained that if the influx of incidents continued for the rest of the year, it would represent a 60% increase over 2008"

As devices get smarter and smarter, devices will be suspect to attacks as well. 

The Importance of Bringing Manufacturing BACK to the US

I was at Boeing Tuesday evening attending an event on investigative journalism.  In Boeing's lobby they had this great model of a Boeing jet that has listed on it (in very small print) many of the companies that work together to make a Boeing jet.  The text above says it all in terms of the importance of bringing manufacturing back to the US.

It takes 10,000 American companies providing jobs in all 50 states to help Boeing build an airplane for export.

Investigative Journalism Panel With Washington, DC News Legend Gordon Peterson

Thanks to my long time friend, John Gardner of Boeing, I attended a very interesting event last night in Rosslyn, VA.   John also invited Joy Warfield and Dave Ellis to attend.  All four of us worked together at Sun Microsystems for many years.

The primary speaker was Gordon Peterson, Senior Correspondent and Anchor of ABC 7/WJLA-TV News here in Washington, DC.  Gordon Peterson is known as the "Dean of Washington, DC News Anchors" with 41 years of experience.  Jeanne Cummings, POLITICO's assistant managing editor in charge of Enterprise, was also there with Mr. Peterson.  The event was called the:

Rooms With A View

Leadership in Political Journalism 

Below is Gordon Peterson and me after the event. 

 The event went for about an hour and half with Mr. Peterson discussing in detail what happened in the Scott Brown election in Massachusetts.  As a native of the bay state, Mr. Peterson was able to bring great personal insight into what really happened in that election.  The bottom line was not a statement against President Obama, but rather Martha Coakley was a simply awful candidate who run a terrible campaign and Scott Brown was a good candidate who ran a great campaign.

Most interesting to me was the state of investigative journalism in this country. As I am known to do :-), I asked a question of both Mr. Peterson and Ms. Cummings.  The question I asked was:

Before I ask my question Gordon, I was hoping you could share with us your favorite Glenn Brenner story if you do not mind.  (Glenn Brenner was a legendary sportscaster in DC with the quickest sense of humor of anyone I have every seen).  I am curious on your thoughts on the current state of investigative journalism in the country today.  Specifically, I have an ongoing discussion with a friend of mine who believes that with all of today's social media, twitter, facebook, blogging, etc. that we are witnessing better investigative today than ever before.  He uses the Iran protests and the tweets coming from there as an example to make his point.  My counter is that those tweets from Iran could be coming from an eleven year old boy in Ashburn, VA - you simply do not know.  My primary counter is that we are seeing the death of so many local and regional papers that are not being back filled by any credible sources that true investigative journalism is taking a real hit in our country.  What are your thoughts?

Mr. Peterson said that it is very expensive to have reporters at newspapers and on TV doing real investigative journalism.  He said that even the Boston Globe is having difficulty financially.  He said there is no question that we are seeing a drop in true investigative journalism.  He did say that POLITICO is one of the new and upcoming organizations that he admires for their investigative journalism work.  Ms. Cummings said the death of the regional papers is very serious.  She mentioned a number of examples of the work that POLITICO has done.  Mr. Peterson mentioned Real Clear Politics as a site that he feels is a very good political information site.  Both emphasized their real concerns going forward.

At then end of his discussion on my investigative journalism question, Mr. Peterson said, "so, you want to hear a story about Glenn Brenner?"  I replied, "please".  Mr. Peterson started with:

OK, I have a thousand Glenn Brenner stories, so let me share one with you.  Glenn Brenner was a pitcher who has a record that still stands to this day.  When Glenn was in the minor leagues, he was and is, the only pitcher to hit the on deck hitter during the game while on the mound.  When I asked him what happened he showed me the motion and I interrupted him.  I said, wait, you pitch right handed but you are left handed?  Glenn said that he was left handed but pitched right handed.  I said to him, "well that's the problem, you were pitching with the wrong arm!"

The banter between Glenn Brenner and Gordon Peterson was amazing for 16 years from 1976 to 1992 before Glenn Brenner died of a brain tumor. 

 Glenn Brenner had one of my favorite lines of all time when talking, during his sports segment, about Mookie Wilson, a Mets outfielder. Brenner looked at Gordon Peterson and said, "Mookie Wilson?, Does anyone really believe Wilson is is real last name?"  Gordon Peterson just cracked up as all of us watching did as well.

I found the story below by Gordon Peterson at Washington DC Metblogs:

There will never be another Glenn Brenner. But there are a lot of good people out there doing sports. Let me tell you a story about the time of his last illness. He was lying in George Washington University Hospital, after the doctors had learned that he had an inoperable brain tumor. He was in a coma, and many of his friends were at his bedside around the clock. I ran home for a quick shower in the wee hours of the morning one day, and as I returned, I noticed a homeless woman sitting on a wall outside the hospital. She had a small portable radio, and as she walked by, she said, I’m praying for your buddy. I broke down on that one.
                  Former W*USA sports anchor Gordon Peterson on a washingtonpost.com Live Discussion

It was a very interesting night and always fantastic to see John Gardner, Joy Warfield and Dave Ellis PLUS getting to meet and get my picture taken with Gordon Peterson.  When I was speaking with Mr. Peterson after the event, (when I got my picture taken with him), I said to him, "hey, can I get my picture taken with you?"  He said "sure!".   I said, "great, I just went up seven points in my parents book if I can get my picture with you."  Gordon laughed.  Dave Ellis took our picture, I shook his hand and thanked him.  As I was walking away, Gordon said to me, "hey, good questions by the way."  I turned back and smiled and said thanks.  My night was made :-)

The Greatest Soldiers - Good Luck, Safe Travels and God's Speed To Chris Edstrom

My cousin Chris Edstrom is headed back to Afghanistan.  He has already done two tours of duty in Iraq and one in Afghanistan.

This will be his fourth tour of duty in a war zone.

Tom Brokaw coined the term the "Greatest Generation" - a term which represents  the Americans who grew up during The Great Depression and then went on to fight in World War II.

There is no question of the sacrifices of that generation - both abroad and at home.  Americans were asked to sacrifice at home to help those soldiers abroad.  Americans were previously asked to pay for the wars - something George W. Bush should have absolutely done.  To put ANY WAR on the credit card of our children, grand-children, and beyond was an egregious and reprehensible decision.  If we ask our young men and woman to sacrifice, then so should the Americans back home.

My personal belief is that the sacrifices we are asking our young men and woman today are greater than those of World War II.  Yes, I realize I am opening myself up for flames, but that has never stopped me before, so let me explain.

In previous war efforts, soldiers would do a single tour of duty.  More than one tour would be (typically) at the soldiers choice.  You never heard of a soldier doing four or five tours of duty in Vietnam for example.   The soldiers in Vietnam did not have the support of the American people.  Can anything be worse than being drafted to fight in a war then be spit upon when you return?  The Vietnam Vets did not get parades when they came home - the got agent orange dropped on them in Vietnam and got chronic lymphoid leukemia (CLL).

Ask my father about his two tours of duty in Vietnam and CLL...


The soldiers  in today's wars - Iraq and Afghanistan - such as my cousin Chris Edstrom - are the greatest soldiers.  These soldiers are asked to do the impossible.  They are asked to do the impossible every day and are asked to to go on multiple tours of duty.  They do not know who the enemy is as soldiers did in previous wars.  Fighting in Europe, the pacific rim or Vietnam would be considered a vacation spot (and is) versus Iraq or Afghanistan.  They have to deal with the constant pressure of never knowing where the next  IED might be found all while not just fighting a war, but being asked to rebuild nations at the same time.  

No soliders have had such adverse set of circumstances placed on them and they are doing tremendous work.  This is why Tom Brokaw was right about the "Greatest Generation", but I believe today's soldiers are the "Greatest Soldiers".


Good luck, be safe and God's Speed Chris....

MTConnect's Tipping and Inflection Point

It is coming up on four years ago, March 2006,  when I was asked by the Association of Manufacturing Technology to line up a Sun Manufacturing Executive to speak at AMT's Annual Member Meeting in October 2006.  I have twelve suggestions at the end of this post that I believe are needed to take MTConnect to the next level.

Before I jump into the title of this blog post, let me recap how we got here....

Every time I  had a Sun Manufacturing Executive lined up to speak, a few months later that Sun Exec was either RIF'd or quit.  I was running into "Murphy's Law" in terms of securing a speaker :-)   When my third contact at Sun was no longer available to speak, I called the President of AMT,  John Byrd, to apologize that we had let AMT down.   After finishing the half-hour long conversation with Mr. Byrd, Peter Eelman, VP of Marketing for AMT, called me and asked if I would like to do the keynote. While I was flattered that I would be asked to give this keynote, I explained I would need to get up to speed on the machine tool industry.  Peter said that AMT could make that happen.

To prepare for the Annual Meeting, I spent two days in Chicago at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS) meeting with a number of companies in mid September.  IMTS is the world's largest trade show of machine tool companies. I was very fortunate to have Paul Warndorf, ATM's CTO, taking me through IMTS introducing me to the largest as well as the most influential hardware and software machine tool-CAD/CAM companies.

At the end of the second day I met with John Byrd, along with a number of his VPs, to discuss what I had learned.  I told them I felt the machine tool industry did not have a manufacturing problem, but a computer science collaboration problem. I told John that the machine tool industry was 12 to 15 years behind the computer industry.   When I inquired on the economics of our industry, I was told that the American machine tool companies have seen their domestic market share go from 70% in 1986 to 15% in 2006.

I made two suggestions for the machine tool industry:
1) They needed a wakeup call to start a revolution.
2) They needed to hear from someone who has led technology revolutions.

I said that, with proper preparation, I could do the wakeup call. The real challenge was that I knew of only one person who had the credentials to discuss the technology revolution that the machine tool industry CEOs would be able to fully appreciate.  That person was Dr. Dave Patterson of University California at Berkeley. I told AMT about Dr. Patterson's leadership with RISC and RAID. I said I would reach out to Dr. Patterson, but I felt the odds that Dr. Patterson would be available to do this, in a little over five weeks time, would be a long shot at best.

Fortunately, for the American machine tool industry, Dr. Patterson agreed to change his busy schedule to come to speak at our member meeting.

There were numerous emails, con calls and meetings during that brief five week period to bring both Dr. Patterson and me up to speed as well as to collaborate on the wake up call and the revolution or "moon shot" as I called it.  I worked closely with Dave and we "hit it out of the park" at the Lake Las Vegas AMT Members Meeting.

The real key turning point, immediately after Dave and my presentations, was when Doug Woods, then  Chairman of the Board for AMT and now President of AMT along with John Byrd said they would invest a significant amount of money to make MTConnect a reality.  Lots of time, money and passion has gone into MTConnect.  The real driver in all of this has been Will Sobel who is the President and CEO of System Insights.  Will's expertise and insight (pun slightly intended here) was absolutely key to reach the point where we are today.

Back to the point of today's blog:

MTConnect's Tipping and Inflection Point

MTConnect  has been a huge success by any reasonable metric.  MTConnect has seen a number of significant events in a short time period:

• My suggestion, in September 2006, to the AMT Executives that they needed an open and royalty free machine tool standard to compete globally in the 21st century.
• In October 2006, the "Dave and Dave" Show (Edstrom and Patterson) at the Lake Las Vegas Members Meeting was a big success and a clear inflection point.
• Doug Woods and John Byrd investing in the creation of MTConnect.
• In early 2007 it was Paul Warndorf who led the creation of the MTConnect Technical Advisory Group (MTAG).
• Many meetings in 2007 and 2008 helped create MTConnect. Will Sobel worked closely with Paul Warndorf to make this a reality.
• IMTS 2008 was MTConnect's coming out party thanks to Peter Eelman's insight into having The Emerging Technology Center as the focal point for MTConnect.
• December 2008 MTConnect 1.0 was officially released.
• There was a GREAT article on MTConnect in  Modern Machine Shop that is titled:  "MTConnect is For Real".

So, what is the next inflection or tipping point trigger that is needed to take MTConnect to the next level of adoption?  I think there are actually multiple areas that need to be addressed.

• MTConnect needs a clear set of metrics for success in 2010.  My favorite quote in terms of metrics or planning is:

To measure is to know.  
      
If you can not measure it, you can not improve it.

In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it.  I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be.
    Lord Kelvin - Sir William Thomson

•  MTConnect needs multiple success reference customers in a variety of geographies and disciplines.
• MTConnect needs more end user customer involvement.
• MTConnect needs more software ISV involvement.
• MTConnect needs more involvement from large software companies such as IBM, HP, SAS, Google, ....
• MTConnect needs an End User Community framework and venue.
• MTConnect  needs a University/College outreach program.
• MTConnect needs to brain storm on creative ways to fund future R&D.
• MTConnect needs a Java agent.
• MTConnect needs a full time global evangelist.  Someone who is out meeting with customers, the press, machine shops, partners, CxOs, government groups, R&D groups, software companies, hardware companies, universities, colleges, ....
• MTConnect needs more companies like System Insights to help companies transition to MTConnect.
• MTConnect needs to educate the cloud computing companies about MTConnect because MTConnect and Cloud Computing is the perfect marriage.  
• When I was asked the obvious question, "why is Sun Microsytems involved with a machine tool standard?"  My response was always two words: Cloud Computing.   The reason I felt (and feel) this way is that when MTConnect is implemented throughout a plant, the data needs to be turned into information.  Manufacturing plants and machine shops do not want to spend the capital on a bunch of hardware to analyze the data.  What they want is for the data to be sent, safely and securely, to the cloud so they can analyze their plant or machine shop without incurring the huge upfront and unpredictable costs associated with large server procurements.

Water Droplets at 2,000 Frames Per Second

My father sent me this video of water droplets shot at 2,000 frames per second. This is a great example of how much we do not know about some of the most common everyday occurences we witness countless times per day....

LogMeIn: Maybe the BEST Time Saver EVER

For geeks like me, it is typical that you are the sysadmin for family, friends and relatives.  Parents are a unique challenge shall we say.  After all, you can blow off everyone but the two people who have the ultimate trump card on you and they can play it again, and again, and again, again:  "if not for us, you DON'T EXIST! FIX MY DAMN WINDOZE PROBLEM!!!!"   :-)

The challenge in being a remote trouble shooter is that you can not see the screen and can not touch the computer, so this requires a logical set of questions:

• What were you doing at the time of the error?
• What exactly does the error message say?
• What are you trying to do?
• Why are you trying to do that?
• Have you tried this before?
• What was different this time?
• What else is running on your computer?

As you can see from just a small set of questions, it is not easy being the remote trouble shooter.

Now all this has changed for me with LogMeIn.  NOTE:  I do not own any stock or have any financial interest in LogMeIn - I am just a HUGE fan :-)

I heard about LogMeIn on Leo Laporte's This Week In Tech (TWiT) podcast.  I thought I would give it a try as Leo has a great reputation in terms of his likes and dislikes regarding technology.  Cars - he should sell his new Mustang GT and get a Corvette :-)

The install really could not be any easier.  You install LogMeIn on the remote system you want to manage and install a plugin for your browser on the system you will be using to talk to the remote system.

After you login, below is an example of what you see.  This screen shows the three computers at my parents house.

 

The window above shows the screen after you login to a specific system.  In this example I logged into the old Dell.  As I move the mouse, my parents can see what I am doing.  When they move the mouse, I can see everything they are doing.  The response time is very good.  It is amazing how well this software works.   Please notice that the image above was when LogMeIn was providing the Pro version during a trial period.  I find the standard free version very nice and I could easily see why someone would want the Pro version.

On the window below there are many options that provide additional data on what is happening on the remote system.

Finally, LogMeIn does offer a paid for Pro packages that provide additional capabilities     These additional capabilities such as file sharing, remote printing, remote backup, iPhone client, cloud backup, additional help, .... LogMeIn does a very nice job balancing the free and premium/paid for capabilities.  Very cleanly delineated are the differences between the two classes of software.

It used to take me 45 minutes to drive to my parents house, another 45 minutes trouble shooting, then 45 minutes home.  This was if there was no traffic and the problem was reasonably straightforward.  It could easily be four hours.  Now with LogMeIn, even during this past week's multiple blizzards, my parent's three computer systems are simply a click away.  PLUS, I can be pro-active and make sure the systems are running fine whenever I want to check on them.  

Yes, there are other programs out there, but LogMeIn is the best that I have seen or used.....

The Blizzard of 2010 for Washington, DC

Snow started lightly at 10am yesterday and picked up last night.    The final snow tally was 34" here in Ashburn in this blizzard of 2010.

UPDATES on The Blizzard of 2010 in Washington, DC Area.  The Tuesday after we received 34" we got another 10" in Ashburn.  44" of snow in five days.  During the 10" second snow, the wind was gusting to 50mph with blizzard conditions.  Snow has been on the ground here in Ashburn since the December 5th five inch snow and will be here on March 5th barring the mother of all warm stretches.  Washington, DC broke the 100 year old snow record of 1898-1899 already....    We also set a record where there was snow on the ground constantly from December 5th through March 5th.....

Below is the front of our house still early on Saturday after about 22 hours of snow with another 8 hours more coming that day.

Below is a view of our backyard.

My late uncle Stanley "Tat" Thompson had a great phrase for this type of blizzard:

"The forecast is CLEAR and STILL.   Snow CLEAR up to your A$$ and STILL coming!" :-)

My youngest son Tim learned how to run my John Deere DE 924 9hp snow blower today.

Below is a picture of my beautiful bride of 26.5 years standing out in the snow in our front yard.

Below is a view out of John's window showing my over-the-air HD antenna that is mounted on our porch.

Dr. Dennis Govoni of IBM Speaks at VT's ACM Meeting

Dr. Dennis Govoni, of IBM, spoke to Virginia Tech's Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) meeting this past Tuesday evening.  Dennis did a GREAT job as he always does.  I asked Dennis if he would like to speak at VT and he agreed.  My oldest son, John, is a CS Major and President of the ACM for VT.  John is currently finishing up his BS and working on his Masters in Computer Science specializing in computer security.

Dennis and I have been long time friends from our days at Sun Microsystems.  Dennis and I were one of three individuals promoted to the level of Technical Director when the position was first created.  Technical Director was the same as a Distinguished Engineer but customer facing.  Dennis and I were somewhat [in]famous for our practical jokes and spirited discussions :-)

The students asked many insightful questions during and after his hour plus presentation.  I paid for pizza and soft drinks, which went quickly :-)  Afterwards, we took a few of them to a local restaurant where we discussed the computer industry and we offered our advice on careers.

Below is the description of the evening's event:

The world is becoming flatter, more complex, more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. Dr. Govoni of IBM will discuss these challenges as well as the leading-edge thought coming out of the IBM Research Labs. 

Dr. Govoni will share with the VT students a global technology outlook. IBM refers to this global technology outlook as "The Smarter Planet". "The Smarter Planet" is about taking on these global challenges all while be socially responsible. To meet these challenges, the world will be using innovation in technology, and virtual teamwork. 

The challenge for the CS students at VT is how will YOU solve these monumental problems?

Come learn, discuss and challenge Dr. Govoni all while enjoying free sodas and pizza this Tuesday, February 2nd, at 7:30pm in MCB 126. 

Bio: Dr. Dennis Govoni Executive IT architect, National Security and Justice, IBM Federal
Education: B.S. Marietta College, Marietta, Ohio M.S. Ohio University, Athens, Ohio Ph.D University of Nebraska, Lincoln. 

Dr. Govoni have been working with computer technology since 1967. His early work involved plant populations analysis through computerized numerical approaches for which a number of papers were published on this.   Following this research, he became Associate Professor of Biology at Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973 where he introduced timesharing computing into both the business and academic areas of the college. During his 10 year tenure at VWC, he received a number of grants to write computer assisted instruction programs for students. 

After leaving VWC in 1983 to work full-time in the computer industry, he joined Prime Computer, Inc. where he became the Networking and OS specialist for the Mid-Atlantic Area. Responsibilities were in both the government and commercial worlds. Upon leaving Prime, he joined Tandem Computers, Inc. in the Telco District as a Senior Analyst supporting the new fault tolerant Integrity UNIX line. His main responsibility was pre- and post-sales activity with Sprint, MCI, Bell Atlantic and Nynex in implementing fault-tolerant solutions. 

In 1992 he joined the Federal Area of Sun Microsystem Computer Company as a network specialist. He has worked with many Government agencies on implementing solutions in support of agency missions. 

In 2009, Dr. Govoni joined IBM Federal as an Executive IT Architect with responsibilities to help customers understand and implement IBM technologies to solve National Security problems. 

Below is a picture of the students who hung around for more time with Dr. Govoni.  Over 40 students attended this event, which was especially impressive because the weather was very nasty and it was snowing all day in Blacksburg.

Below is a picture of my oldest John and Dennis after the presentation/Q&A.

Ford Fusion Hybrid Engine and Scuderi Air Engine

I went to the DC Auto Show with Steve Ferry and his son Matt.  Both Steve and Matt are car experts and just really good guys.

It is always interesting to just walk around to check out the new models.  What was most interesting this year, in 2010, is the hybrid technology.  There was an entire section devoted to a variety of green, hybrid technologies.  They called this section the Advance Technology Super Highway.  What I found most interesting were in two areas:

• My Ford Fusion Hybrid's Motor Video
• Scuderi Air Engine Video

The video above I took showing the cutaway of the engine that really drives home the relationship between the gas engine and electric motor.


The Scuderi air engine is very innovative design and shows the benefits of rethinking the four cycle engine

My Signed, Cross Licesned Sun Microsystems Blog License

Sun Microsystems was a very, very forward looking company.  A great example of this was Sun strongly encouraging employees to blog.  I, along with a few hundred Sun employees, were regular bloggers at blogs.Sun.com.  I was very pleased to see Sun come out with a cross license blogging agreement for Sun's bloggers in September of 2009.   This was a win/win decision by Sun that would allow the content a Sun employee created while at Sun to be cross licensed.  I thought it was very nice and very forward looking for Sun to do this prior to Oracle acquiring Sun.  Below are both pages of my signed blog license with Sun Microsystems.  Why did I do this?  Just in case I am ever asked if I have a Sun Blogger License Agreement by Oracle, I can simply point them at this entry.

A Little Bragging on My Two Oldest Sons at VT

Both John and Michael are at VT this year.  John is a Senior and Michael is a Freshman.  BOTH made the VT Honor Roll.

Julie and I could not be more proud of our oldest two sons....

After Almost 23 Years, My Last Day At Sun Microsystems.....

I sent this note out today to Sun's employees after almost 23 years at Sun Microsystems....

-->From dedstrom@sun.com Fri Jan 29 10:19:15 2010
-->Subject: Thanks and Farewell


I received notice yesterday that Oracle and Dave Edstrom are going their separate ways and today is my last day at Sun/Oracle.

Let me just say right up front that after watching the five hour Oracle/Sun Roadmap presentation on Thursday, I could not be more impressed with Oracle's leadership team.  Oracle is very focused, they clearly know how to integrate companies.  Both Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy have genuine leadership qualities that one can only have by choosing their parents wisely aka you are born with it.   I sat in the back of the McLean, VA conference room watching the broadcast and it was great to see so many Sun employees nodding their heads in approval on Oracle's decisions.  It was even better watching all the Sun employees laugh when Larry Ellison was going after the competition.  Oracle will give Sun back its swagger.  I am 100% convinced that Oracle and Sun are going to kick butt and have fun!  I truly wish everyone the best.

Words can not express how grateful I am for having had the opportunity to have worked at Sun Microsystems for almost 23 years.  I have had more fun, learned more than anyone thought possible, and made a ton of lifetime friends.  My wife and I have been to 7 SunRises and were able to see parts of the world we never would have seen without Sun.  My oldest son, John, became Sun's Campus Ambassador at Virginia Tech and had a blast doing that for Sun.
I have been asked many times over the years (especially during the tough times at Sun):

       "Why do you stay at Sun?"

My response has always been the same:

       "Scott McNealy and Sun's employees."
When they would ask me to expand, I would tell them about all the things that were/are so great about Sun - the people, the mission, the products, the integrity of the company, and it all starts with Scott.  Scott will always be a hero to Dave Edstrom.

Personally, the biggest regret I have today is that I will no longer be working for James Hollingshead.  James is the best leader that I have ever worked for and IMO, the best leader at Sun.

I know that I was VERY fortunate to be work at Sun and I am extremely thankful for it.  It was PRICELESS to be paid for something that you LOVED doing.

I am going to miss the Sun employees the most.  Sun employees were/are the most creative, passionate and absolutely brilliant people on planet earth that would bend over backwards to help anyone.
Thanks so much everyone and please stay in touch - the computer industry is a very small world.

Best Regards,

Dave Edstrom
emp# 3705  :-)

EdstromVette@gmail.com
LinkedIn:       http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/DaveEdstrom
Google Profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/edstromvette
Personal Blog:  http://PhotonsAndElectrons.BlogSpot.COM/

Rest In Peace Sun Microsystems

Last week James Gosling posted a very creative and touching image that really summarizes how a great many of Sun employees (current and former), Sun Partners, Sun customers and the millions of individuals who were touched by Sun Microsystems.

Note you can order t-shirts, mouse pads, mugs, etc. all with the image on it.

As I have previously stated, I would be a liar if I did NOT state that I am bummed that Sun Microsystems had to end this way.  As the often quoted old poem by John Greenleaf Whittier. (1807–1892) goes:


"Of all sad songs of tongue and and pen, the saddest are these, what might have been....."




OK, time to look forward to new challenges as I stated in my early January blog post with the highlights of my next company below:

               1) I want to work for a great company.
               2) I want to work with creative, smart and passionate employees.
               3) I want to work for a company that is truly making a
               difference in the market place and is growing.
               4) When John Gage coined the term, "The Network is the
               Computer" in 1984, that phrase summarizes my belief where the
               most interesting opportunities are today and will be tomorrow.
               Cloud Computing is simply the latest manifestation of John's
               vision.
               5) I want to work for a company that believes in open systems.

               6) Most importantly, I want to make a difference.

 

Oracle and Sun Strategy Event on January 27th, 2010 at Noon Eastern

This is public information that we, Sun employees, were specifically asked to spread the word on:

Oracle announced they will host a live event for customers, partners, press and analysts to unveil the Oracle + Sun Strategy.  The event will take place on Wednesday, January 27, from 9:00 AM - 2:00 PM( Pacific) at Oracle's headquarters in Redwood Shores, California. Larry Ellison, along with executives from Oracle and Sun, will outline the post-close strategy for the combined companies, product roadmaps, and how customers will benefit from having all the components -- hardware, operating system, database, middleware, and applications -- engineered to work together.   The event will be broadcast globally.

Invitations will be sent via email to Oracle customers and partners, and Sun customers and partners,
encouraging them to register for the live event via the oracle.com/sun website.

There are many individuals looking forward to this event.

2010: 50th Anniversary of the LASER

The Washington Post reported this week that in 1960 the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) was invented. As the article in The Washington Post states, "In May 1960, Theodore Maiman, a physicist at Hughes Research Laboratories, constructed the first laser that emitted light in the visible range"

The reason I call my blog Photons and Electrons is because of the importance of the relationship between the two in our everyday lives.  I even named one of our labs Photon - much to the dismay of my three sons and wife :-)  What I really like about this article is how clearly it explains the key aspects of electrons moving to and from the different levels or shells (K, L, M, N, O, P, and Q) inside the atom and what the photons are doing as these moves occur.

Below is from the Post article (note that I highlighted the key aspects):

Zap a few atoms with the right amount of energy -- including energy from light itself -- and their electrons will absorb the energy and jump up to excited levels, the original "quantum leap." 

But they won't stay there. That's because, as the parent of any teenager can tell you, it is the natural tendency of things in this universe to preferentially seek the lowest energy condition, which is why water always flows downhill, shoelaces never re-tie themselves and your check is still in the mail. So the excited electrons soon drop back to lower levels; in the process, they spontaneously shed the surplus energy in the form of photons, the smallest individual units, or quanta, of light. The size of the drop determines the wavelength of the emitted photon. That's how light emerges from a flickering campfire, the surface of the sun, the bulb in a lamp or the screen of your TV.

If you google LASER, you will get 126 MILLION hits.  The uses of LASERS are simply amazing and it all comes down to electrons and photons.

EU Clears Oracle to Buy Sun Microsystems

The Wall Street Journal is reporting:

BRUSSELS—After a drawn out investigation, the European Commission on Thursday unconditionally cleared U.S. software giant Oracle Corp.'s move to take over smaller rival Sun Microsystems Inc. for $7.4 billion.

"I am now satisfied that competition and innovation will be preserved on all the markets concerned," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said. "Oracle's acquisition of Sun has the potential to revitalize important assets and create new and innovative products," she added.

See the entire story here.

Open Source Healthcare Software

I was having a discussion with a customer the other day about open source and the topic of Healthcare software came up that was open source.  Just looking at Wikipedia's entry on open source Healthcare software is quite impressive.

If Congress is able to pass Healthcare, it will be very interesting to watch what happens in this market.

SoftWare Technical Roundtable (SWTR) - Global Technology Weekly Webinar

For almost five years  I have been hosting a weekly technology webinar called the SoftWare Technical Roundtable (SWTR).  The SWTR has evolved from initially Sun only to a global Sun and Sun's Partners Weekly Webinar showcasing Sun's software technologies.  I have really enjoyed this and I know that we have created a tremendous amount of IP over the years.  We would also use the venue to provide organized feedback into Product Management for software product futures.

Last month, the SWTR became part of Sun's Continuous Engineering Conference (SCEC) joining Sun's System and Storage Lines Of Businesses.  These sessions typically run about two hours with the emphasis on hands-on, deep dive technical sessions led by Subject Matter Experts (SME).  We record these sessions for those who might miss the sessions.   Partners can learn more here at onestop4partners (login/password controlled).

If you are a Sun employee or a Sun Partner and would like to join the SWTR, please let me know.  Sun employees and Sun Partners know how to reach me :-)

ZL-1 Corvette Stingray and the Corvette ZR1

I get a number of Corvette magazines and auto magazines each month.  The February 2010 Motor Trend has an article on Spectacular Supercars.  Number eight on the list is the 1969 ZL-1 and at the 20th slot is the 2009 ZR1.  I have never seen a ZL-1 live, but I have seen multiple ZR1s live. 

I did not realize that the ZL1 engine was available on Camaros as well during that time frame.  What is most interesting about the ZL-1 is that there is a widely held belief that there were only two ever manufactured - a yellow one and a white one.  However, the article below points out that there was a ZL1 engine option available for $4,700.   That was a LOT of money in 1969 for a single option on a car, even a Corvette's racing engine option.

If money was no object, I would buy a new ZR1 3ZR (high end option) and use it as my daily driver.  I would go with the Cyber Gray Metallic or Black exterior color option.   I think the ZR1 is the absolute best bang for the buck of any car out there.  The Nissan GT-R owners might argue with me.  I would argue that while the GT-R certainly has impressive numbers, however, if it has four seats, it ain't a sports car :-)

Since it was 48 degrees today, I washed my Corvette and my wife's Mini Cooper S so I guess I am thinking about sports cars....

Information on the ZL-1 Corvette Stingray can be found here.

Information on the ZR1 can be found here.

DARPA States Geek Shortage is National Security Risk - Funding Opportunity

There is an interesting article in Wired.com's Danger Room regarding a shortage of geeks in the US.  The key point is that:

"fewer American kids are growing up to be bona fide computer geeks. And that poses a serious security risk for the country, according to the Defense Department."

There is a pointer in the article for a funding opportunity that universities and colleges should check out:

DARPA-RA-10-03 Computer Science - Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (CS-STEM) Education Research Announcement (RA) for Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

 

Below is from the above document:

 

The United States has entered into a significant national decline in the number of college graduates with STEM degrees. This downward trend is an issue of national importance as it affects our capacity to maintain a technological lead in critical skills and disciplines related to CS-STEM. Our ability to compete in the increasingly internationalized stage will be hindered without college graduates with the ability to understand and innovate cutting edge technologies in the decades to come.

The downward trend in college graduates with STEM majors is particularly pronounced in Computer Science (CS). While computers and internet connectivity become daily fixtures in the lives of Americans, we are steadily losing the engineering talent to project these systems. According to the Computer Research Association, there were 43% fewer graduates and 45% fewer CS degree enrollments in 2006/2007 than in 2003/20041.

In addition, our systems are becoming more complex, requiring more people with the software engineering talent to manage and maintain them. Finding the right people with increasingly specialized talent is becoming more difficult and will continue to add risk to a wide range of DoD systems that include software development.

Recent studies conducted by DARPA revealed that public perception is a critical issue. Study participants believed that the “dot-com bust” and “international outsourcing” have led to fewer computer science jobs. In fact, the opposite is true: the U.S. Department of Labor lists “Computer Software Engineers, Applications” as the fourth fastest growing occupation in the country in November 20072. Verbal reports from industry partners, as well as the presence of constant job openings, indicate industry is having difficulty finding software engineering talent to develop and maintain their software systems.

NeuStar To Work on Movie Download Anti-Piracy System

One of the smartest and most interesting companies that I have had the pleasure of every working with is NeuStar.  I think it was around November 2001 that I first met Mark Foster.  Mark was CTO for NeuStar at the time. To this day, Mark is one of the absolute smartest individuals in technology that I have ever met.

In 2001, when Mark explained to me the history of number portability, I was amazed with the elegance of NeuStar's design and implementation.   At that meeting I said that NeuStar should consider joining Project Liberty.  After returning to I called John Gage and said that I would like to introduce John to the NeuStar Executive team.   NeuStar ending up joining Project Liberty and was a key contributor on the Discover Specification.

An article in the Washington Post details NeuStar being selected to implement a movie download anti-piracy system.  As the article by Mike Musgrove brings out:

"The Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem announced this month that Neustar, formerly a division of Lockheed Martin, will operate an upcoming "digital rights locker" system, designed to let users who legally purchase movies online view that content on smartphones, laptops or the living room TV.

The DECE technology, which is in the design stage, aims to give consumers more flexibility with the content they purchase while still employing digital rights management tools designed to discourage piracy. "Buy Once, Play Anywhere" is the marketing pitch; a launch date has not been announced."

I love the "Buy Once, Play Anywhere"  Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from? Sounds a lot like Java's "Write Once, Run Anywhere" to me :-)

If any company can tackle this very important and tough challenge, it is the brilliant individuals at NeuStar.

10 Year Anniversary of the Failed AOL/Time Warner Merger

On January 10th it was the 10 year anniversary of the failed AOL and Time Warner merger.  The NY Times has a nice article and detailed time line here.

I was in New York City shortly after the deal was announced.  AOL was a huge Sun customer and Time Warner was also a Sun customer.  What I remember wa the excitement at AOL and the stated reservations at Time Warner.   AOL employees were just giddy about the prospects of being combined with Time Warner.

The telling comment to me was from a number of Time Warner employees who said that the deal would fail because "there are simply too many silos at Time Warner that AOL will never be able to figure out."

That comment proved to be quite prophetic....

AOL's inability to transition from dial-up, where they essentially controlled everything, to broadband was a large contributing factor as well.

My experience with mergers is that they fail for non technical reasons with a culture clash being reason #1.

WKA: Wireless Knowledge Architecture

On November 25th, 1999 I wrote an article for Sun Microsystems Sun Journal where I coined the term WKA: Wireless Knowledge Architecture.  Since it has been a decade and with so much discussion on new smart phones being introduced, I thought it would be a good time to review my 1999 article to see if anything I wrote still matters :-)

At the time I was the Chief Technologist for the Southern Area at Sun which was a $1 billion a year business for Sun covering commercial and Federal customers as well as partners.

Below is the original article as it I noticed it has somehow dropped from Sun's site.   Please keep in mind I wrote this in 1999 :-)  I was right about a lot of things but wrong about the specifics of Jini taking over :-)

November 25th, 1999 article for Sun Journal:

Many people believe that the wireless Internet market will be the next digital gold rush. According to one estimate, the wireless market will encompass 1 billion subscribers by 2003. Dataquest believes that the market for wireless-data subscribers will be $3 billion by 2003. Growth rates of 35 percent or more are projected by market survey organizations.  The third-generation (3G) wireless devices developed for this market will be more than 38 times faster than today's wireless devices.

A major aspect of the new wireless landscape will be Wireless Knowledge Architecture (WKA). WKA is defined as the people, technology and processes needed to enable, capture, and transform information into knowledge that can be managed in a 3G wireless world where roles at work and home are converging.  Until now, wireless data communications have been an expensive and slow alternative to wired.  However, wireless communications will soon emerge as both cost-effective and capable alternative to wired technologies.

A driving factor behind the 3G wireless market is the obliteration of the work/home boundary.  Tomorrow's knowledge workers will demand cutting-edge high speed wireless devices that provide complete access to all the tools and information they have in the office.  This work from anywhere at anytime atomosphere provides the opportunity to significantly enhance the employee's life by enabling more flexible work and personal scheduling.  WKA will become a significant recruiting factor.  Companies without WKA plans will find it more difficult to recruit and attract the best knowledge workers as well as remaining competitive in their industry.

WKA Technologies

Among the important technologies required to make scenarios such as the one outlined in "A 3G Wireless Device in Action" a reality will be the Java language, the Java platform, Jini, Bluetooth, Mobile IP, Shared Wireless Access Protocol, Service Location Protocols, and smart cards.

A driving force of the WKA will be the Java language and platform.  The leading consortium for the development of 3G wireless systems is the Symbian alliance, created in 1998, with members Nokia, Ericsson, Motorola and Psion. In March of this year, Sun and Symbian announced a plan to put Sun's Java technology as part of Symbian's standard EPOC platform solution for future smart phones and communicators.  "With the number of mobile phone subscribers forecast to reach one sixth of the world's population in the year 2005, the potential impact of the Sun and Symbian alliance on the wireless market is enormous," said Scott McNealy, Sun's CEO. "The Wireless Information Device is likely to be one of the most influential networked devices to drive customers into the Post-PC era, providing a vast new market for wireless networked services and applications."

A crucial technology for ubiquitous spontaneous 3G PDAs will be Sun's Jini.  In the previous edition of Sun Journal, Bill Joy said that "in the Jini world, the important concepts are objects, mobility of code and spontaneous connections between things." This ability to spontaneously make connections, communicate and move objects between devices that have never "met" whether in a hotel room, in your suppliers conference room or at the park, will represent a radical a shift in how we live and work.  Joy often talks about the change from task-oriented computing to activity-oriented computing.  Activity-oriented computing is a key aspect in WKA. In a task-oriented world, you must initiate your activity. An example of this is printing a document or saving a file.  You initiate this action, then it happens. In a activity-oriented world, the devices spontaneously communicate and take action that is correct in the context of time, location, devices available and importance of the action to extract knowledge from the information available without a human initiating the action. As time progresses, we will continue to rely less on our own memory and more on the memory of the wireless network for personal and business needs.

Equally important to the growth of wireless devices is the continuing growth of the Internet and the number of application services available.  The technology exists for corporations to provide access to their most important systems through Web technology. The marriage of these new wireless devices and the Internet will make any time, anywhere knowledge flow a reality. Application Service Providers (ASP's) will find huge markets for this new generation of wireless devices.

Knowledge workers will be demanding complete autonomy, because the technology will exist to allow it.  Today users consciously need to remember where the current state (most up to date copy of their data) of their mobile devices is in relationship to a docked system, whether it is their home desktop or office servers. This is a source of confusion for many employees. State will becoming floating, and the need to manually sync will go away. With technologies such as Jini, state will live on the network and move to the wireless device the knowledge worker happens to be is using at the time. 

WKA Security Issues

Technology and security will present management challenges.  Determining what level of privacy that is needed will continue to be a taxing issue.  From a security standpoint there will always be difficult balance between providing your employees with all the tools and data they will want in a wireless world and protecting the corporate knowledge treasure chest.  Corporate users are more aware then ever that security must be designed into the business policies and processes as well as into the design of systems and networks. What boundaries there may have been between businesses are dissolving as teams link up and share information electronically. The corporate network is no longer defined by the physical boundaries of specific locations as it is stretched to embrace mobile users and telecommuters across the world.  Businesses created as virtual corporations use partners and contractors who are not employees but who need to share much of the same information as regular employees. Further, businesses use public communications networks shared by thousands, including their competitors. All these situations present security issues.  Balancing the three major aims of security--confidentiality, integrity, and availability--means that security is no longer a single product. Security has become a process to be managed alongside other high-value corporate processes.

WKA and Knowledge Management

Rob Wells, a director at Knowledge Management Solutions International, defines KM as creating an environment in which the flow of information and knowledge interacts efficiently to enhance the growth of corporate competence, revenue, or R&D. The clear challenge with WKA will be the number of and type of wireless devices and the software tools necessary to enable, capture, manage and protect a corporation's knowledge.

As companies bring more information into forms that can be handled electronically, keeping it all meaningfully organized becomes more challenging, and more necessary. Initially WKA will be a driving force in publishing information in critical areas of Knowledge Management (KM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Customer Relationship Planning (CRM).  Up to this point, KM has been tied to the idea of creating Web-based systems, which created a proliferation of Web servers in companies as individuals and small teams seized this new means of publishing information. The result in some corporations has been chaos.  Information is easily available through Internet/intranet, but it is difficult to find, organize, assimilate. WKA involves understanding where information lives, who uses it, why and when it is used.  Today ERP ties together the back office functions of finance, human resources, manufacturing, and supply systems to create a coherent real-time view of the business. The increased number of 3G wireless devices communicating with ERP systems will raise the importance of the servers running ERP applications.

CRM systems combine detailed customer information, channels of contact, and processes that provide a coherent view of customers.  Customers interact with a business through a variety of contacts: personal, telephone, letter, e-mail, and fax. CRM integrates front office functions supporting customer service, marketing, sales, and technical support. CRM enables a complete view of a customer and the customer's dealings with the business. CRM follows the ERP wave of corporate systems.  WKA represents another step toward the goal of enabling users to quickly and easily obtain answers to questions that help them solve business problems. This is also a step forward for managers who want to profile organizational knowledge and leverage corporate memory.  Knowledge workers are seeking full access to their information and tools from anywhere.

The challenge with KM is and will be metrics. The first set of metrics is the meta information such as how, where, and when wireless devices are used. To a lesser extent, what information is used and why can be quantified. This information can then be used to create better modes of communication among employees as well as to seek out and make improvements to processes. Keeping groups working efficiently drives new systems such as those underpinning the WKA.  Two major design areas exist within the WKA. The first, the systems architecture, covers technical aspects of the systems, while the second, the "people" architecture," covers the organization, its culture, and practices.

Systems Architecture Issues

Application servers must be designed for RAS (Reliability Availability and Serviceability) and scalability of solutions.  Tightly and loosely coupled clustering will be needed to provide true application datatone.  System predictability will need to come from policy based quality of service dynamic resource allocation monitoring.  It will be necessary to consolidate then duplicate systems and applications to streamline and provide the necessary service levels for WKA.   This demand for always available application services is why more corporations are looking at out sourcing and why ISP's understand why they must quickly become ASP's as well.

In reality, many process requirements are either not determined or poorly understood. Systems supporting the WKA provide information on demand from a merge of structured and unstructured data. The underlying issues will be what data is needed, how should it be presented, and where and how are structured and unstructured information merged? This merge could be made at several different levels within an organization.

People Architecture Issues

Two of the most important issues for success of any project are management buy-in and culture. Without management buy-in and a receptive employee culture, WKA will not succeed. Employees must be convinced that the capture of information is not used as an employee measurement tool but rather as an efficiency tool. Surveys must be done on a regular basis with timely summaries to all with dated action item lists. In other words, employees must know that their suggestions will be taken seriously.

Summary

The ability to work effectively anywhere at any time will determine quality of life for tomorrow's knowledge workers as well as providing companies a new architecture to improve their competitive advantage. The companies that provide the most current wireless tools and environment will be able to attract and keep the best knowledge workers. The new world of 3G wireless devices will create unheard of productivity improvements both at work and at home but at the same time will produce a greater management and security challenges as companies try to capture and use corporate knowledge. Now is the time to start planning for your WKA.

**************1999 AUTHOR BIO*********************************************

Dave Edstrom has been with Sun since early 1987 and in the computer industry since 1978.  He is a six time Sunrise winner, recipient of the 1996 SE Creativity Award and has been involved with Sun's future products since prior to the release of the 4/260.  He has degrees in Data Processing and Business Administration.  He lives in Ashburn, VA with his wife Julie and his three sons John, Michael and Timothy.

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I would like to especially thank Brian Carney for his wisdom and invaluable assistance with this article.  I would also like to thank Rob Wells, Director from Knowledge Management Solutions International, for his many suggestions and guidance with this article.  Rob is an internationally recognized world class expertise in the area of Knowledge Management.  For more information on the various topics referenced in this article, the following urls will provide appropriate entry points.

www.sun.com/java
www.sun.com/jini
www.symbian.com
www.bluetooth.com
www.ietf.com

Harvard Computing Group www.harvardcomputing.com Knowledge Management Magazine www.kmag.com
(Knowledge Management Magazine is an excellent source for KM issues.) Knowledge Management Solutions
International www.kmsi.com.au
Rob Wells, Director

The author would appreciate any comments you have on this topic and can be reached at:
dave.edstrom@Sun.COM

A 3G Wireless Device in Action

You arrive at the airport with your new 3G personal digital assistant (PDA), which incorporates the multiple devices business people used to carry with them, such as cellular phone, limited function PDA, and notebook computer. The 3G PDA makes a wireless spontaneous connection to the airport schedules and directory services. It beeps; you respond, "Hal, talk to me." The 3G-PDA then relays the message "It is 12:25, your flight 962 to Dulles is on time and at gate 78, boarding is in 1 hour and 5 minutes, the flight is 60% booked at this point, the Red Carpet club is located on the main level near gate 72, the movie today is "Toy Story II," there is a Barnes and Noble bookstore located near gate 86, a deli is located on the ground level, weather in Ashburn is 78 degrees and fair skies, your son's baseball game is scheduled for 6:15 at Crittenden." Obviously you could have found all this out by looking at monitors, asking for directions, calling home, looking at the weather page on USA Today--but you didn't. It took 12 seconds for Hal to give you contextually appropriate, timely information that made profile-based decisions and then provided you with the information that you needed at the time. 

The Five Rs of Knowledge Management

As the number of wireless devices increase, it is important for businesses to clean up the information knowledge workers will be demanding. The Harvard Computing Group has written an excellent white paper, "Knowledge Management--Return on Investment," that posits the Five Rs of Knowledge Management.

1.    Recycle--use the same content in many places.
2.    Republish--publish the same content in many forms.
3.    Reduce--create a single source for content.
4.    Remove--utilize a streamlined process for content management.
5.    Relevance--apply standards for content quality and usefulness.


WKA Design Rules

1.    Downtime is not an option.  Use an ASP if your company can not design or support a zero down time solution.  Think clustering.
2.    Use the Java language for everything. In her book customer.COM, Patricia Seybold states that the Java language is the most important language you should be developing in.
3.    Design for "stateless" technology. The days of manually syncing devices is rapidly coming to an end.
4.    Design highly focused customized real-time portals available anywhere on any device at any time.
5.    Capture the meta information of wireless transactions.  Seek out or write software that will provide the infrastructure to capture this information.
6.    Expect most devices to be wireless in 2 to 3 years.   Expect the concept of an office to become obsolete.
7.    Design for simplicity. Wireless devices should use technologies such as Jini and Bluetooth that allow for spontaneous wireless device discovery and communication.
8.    Expect data to be in structure and unstructured formats.  WKA clients will want access to systems and applications that are currently not easily accessible today.
9.    Expect in the next three years to see the demand for multi-level security operating systems to increase dramatically.   The high demand will be triggered by the balance between knowledge flow and security that can only be addressed by compartmentalized virtual private networks. 
10.) Design knowledge management and security into business strategies and application services.