[ngw] Google and Mcafee

Sun Apr 25 03:47:22 UTC 2010

Very well said.  

In the case of George Lucas: Yes not the best but the other writers of the books -they do a good job.  LOL.

Take Care.

Gregg A. Hinchman 
Consultant
Gregg at HinchmanConsulting.com 
www.HinchmanConsulting.com
A Novell Consulting Partner
317.329.0288 Office
413.254.2819 eFax

"Courage is doing what is right." 

"Do not be bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means, not absolute truth."  Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk.

Book Travel @: www.booknewtravelnow.com

>>> 
From: Randy Grein<randygrein at comcast.net>
To:ngw at ngwlist.com
Date: 4/23/2010 12:00 PM
Subject: Re: [ngw] Google and Mcafee
Well, I'm a fan of the classics - and while I don't know your track record I find my predictions have been routinely ignored by customers and managers. As for Star Wars, while Lucas is a great film maker his plotting and writing skills leave a lot to be desired. Google Star Wars and David Brin, he explains it better than I can. (grin)

In large I agree with your views on cloud computing. We have all been around long enough to live through several waves of consolidation/dispersal, this is just a twist on that and not even a new one. The move to PCs in the early 80s was a response to the lack of response by IT, networking brought connectivity which magnified the resulting benefits - and IT eventually enveloped the discipline, swallowing the budget as well as the responsibility. IT then pushed for a move to 'all microsoft, all the time' which drove costs out of sight; virtualization was in part a response to this and (as far as I've seen) has not resulted in reduced costs, reduced complexity and only marginally increased reliability. In search of those advantages (mostly cost) we now have cloud computing - virtualization of the entire network. The cloud can be internal or external and the differences should not matter except for cost; if any difference is discernible then the cloud metaphor breaks down and we need to think of computing quanta in decision making.

To answer Richard's later post on the subject he too makes several solid points but fails at others. It's true that relatively few IT departments engage in the kind of disaster planning and testing they need to ensure continuous operations, but on the other hand neither do many 'cloud' suppliers. About 12 years ago a client lost most functionality in their Eugene, Or. office when the primary ISP providing bandwidth to the town abruptly closed. The entire area went from good bandwidth to crowding onto a single T1 connection. User login (netware) was still possible but moving files or remote access was not; the partial outage lasted for months. Or a couple years ago I was consulting part-time for a VOIP provider (cloud services if ever there was one). Shortsighted contract negotiations for bandwidth caused sporadic jitter problems that shot call quality all to hell; the problem took close to a year to resolve because the company had no control and next to no instrumentation.

Or there's the Northwest problem - last I checked our nexus here is housed in one building in downtown Seattle; a single terrorist attack or earthquake of sufficient magnitude to take down that building cuts off the Northwest from the rest of the world. The same building houses many cloud service providers. Are people worried about it? Sure. Are they doing anything to fix the problem? Probably not, it's 'someone else's problem by contract.

This is, of course a third part of the equation. Within Washington State I have certain specific rights for privacy as long as I deal instate, if OTOH I deal with a company based in another state my rights may be different, and enforcement will be complicated by interstate commerce. Worse, if an extranational is involved in practice my rights and recourse may be cut to near zero. One of the scariest things I heard about when working for an accounting firm 4 years ago was the practice of offshoring tax returns. Processing was being done in areas where privacy rights were limited at best and international treaties made legal recourse impossible.

While it should be clear that an outside party specializing in security and reliability CAN do better in these areas than a smaller and generalized IT department it's a big, big step from can to does. (The current financial meltdown should be ample evidence of the falsity of economies of scale.) I will continue to be skeptical of 'the next thing' and insist on some evidence before buying. 

Randy Grein

On Apr 21, 2010, at 8:59 PM, Gregg A. Hinchman wrote:

You know I prefer a different name than Cassandra -if you will.  LOL.  I think more along the lines of Qui-Gon Jin --maybe Yoda -but really Yoda did not see the evil in front of him -yet Qui (assuming you read Star Wars as I have been) had some thought on it.  I like to base my thoughts in the 'Living Force' known as the 'here and now' or reality...with just about a 5 min. glimpse at the future Force.  Because to quote Yoda -"Always in motion the future is".  

People can say what they want, time will tell. But reality is -we will move to cloud only to find that we will move back to self-supported IT in the future much like the PC movement was away from centralized computing and the VM movement is a move back to it.  Frankly I start to wonder if its the Emperor playing 2 sides against the middle for increased revenue....ah...but that's just a bit more Star Wars in reality than we all need.  LOL!!

Oh and that reminds me -US travel adversary for India -New Delhi.  Apparently attacks are 'in the works' and Americans may be the target.  Guess that's better than it happening in Bangalore.  Think about that 'unthinkable' moment in US Tech Support and see where it takes you.

Take Care.

Gregg A. Hinchman 
Consultant
Gregg at HinchmanConsulting.com 
www.HinchmanConsulting.com
A Novell Consulting Partner
317.329.0288 Office
413.254.2819 eFax

"Courage is doing what is right." 

"Do not be bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means, not absolute truth."  Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk.

Book Travel @: www.booknewtravelnow.com

>>> 
From: Randy Grein<randygrein at comcast.net>
To:ngw at ngwlist.com
Date: 4/21/2010 11:36 PM
Subject: Re: [ngw] Google and Mcafee
Greg, you echo my thoughts exactly. Which unfortunately means you are a Cassandra and will be ignored as irrelevant, foolish and 'lacking in understanding of business matters'. That you're spot on seems to have no bearing....

Randy Grein

On Apr 21, 2010, at 5:19 PM, Gregg A. Hinchman wrote:

I thought these were both interesting.

First -Google and its continue non-protection of privacy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7612988/Google-not-interested-in-privacy.html

My opinion:
I am not a fan of the 'cloud' mentality because no one can protect a companies -let alone a persons data as well as the individual person or corporation -because they have 'skin' in the game.  And then there is the 'connection' issue.  When an organization jumps on the path to 'cloud' all data so they can eliminate IT -or much of it- they forget that in an outage of the Internet -they have lost all communication both to the outside world and between their own employees.  Now I know my opinion will sound like its old fashion but let me ask -have we ever had internet outages? Or, complete air traffic outages?  Thinking the unthinkable seems to be what takes place more often then not these days.  Consider back a few years when the Internet DNS servers had a 'hack' built into them that would have easily exposed us all. Or now - http://news.techworld.com/security/3218219/domain-registrars-lagging-behind-over-dnssec-security/?olo=rss .

Second -Mcafee -can you say 'Ooops!'

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100421/ap_on_hi_te/us_tec_mcafee_antivirus_flaw .

Limited Opinion here: You need AV but yet a company should do better testing before releasing.  You cannot tell me this could not have been caught in the lab long before release.

Just two interesting events.

Take Care.

Gregg A. Hinchman 
Consultant
Gregg at HinchmanConsulting.com 
www.HinchmanConsulting.com
A Novell Consulting Partner
317.329.0288 Office
413.254.2819 eFax

"Courage is doing what is right." 

"Do not be bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. All systems of thought are guiding means, not absolute truth."  Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese monk.

Book Travel @: www.booknewtravelnow.com
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