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Tuesday, September 17, 2002 |
"Can't we just all get along?"
Wall Street wants IM standards: IM giants told to work it out .Instant messaging is one of those technologies that a lot of IT people don't get; it's as though there's a big barrier splitting us into the Email and Post-Email generations. I'm on the fence, myself; I've had periods of using it, but frustration with the lack of stability of early clients eventually burned out most of my friends who might use IM so I'm not sure who I'd talk to most of the time.
It's kind of scary when I'm at a meeting of technical and decision-making people and ask who uses IM: usually, no one does. The high school students who are in our mentoring program, on the other hand, all use IM. Cue Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, from Dilbert: "Admit it. You're losing your technical edge. Time to go into management."
"Everybody look what's going down"
Intel is tossing about a lot of PR about their new hack-proof chip designs. In practice, of course, these designs will do nothing to stop the large numbers of viruses and worms that attack our current infrastructure, since most virus/hack troubles stem from design flaws in code from "real" developers at places like Microsoft: signing bad code won't fix it.However, putting a certificate into the chip will make it much easier to support schemes that allow large corporations to deny you your rights, by letting them decide to break your machine if they don't like what they think you might be doing. Copyright is a two-way street, but the media conglomerates are doing their best to end your rights in the deal.
As Thom Bishop used to sing "She said, the future has just happened, and the worst is yet to come."
[ via Red Rock Eater Digest: Intel reveals share denial PC scheme
]
