A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears | NYT 11/24/2009
Posted by thaadsma in mobile web.1 comment so far
My daughter and I were talking Friday night and she clued me in on the latest cellphone secret in her high school… Teenagers have started to use a high-frequency ringtone that, apparently, adults are unable to hear:
“In settings where cellphone use is forbidden — in class, for example — it is perfect for signaling the arrival of a text message without being detected by an elder of the species.
“When I heard about it I didnt believe it at first,” said Donna Lewis, a technology teacher at the Trinity School in Manhattan. “But one of the kids gave me a copy, and I sent it to a colleague. She played it for her first graders. All of them could hear it, and neither she nor I could.”
The technology, which relies on the fact that most adults gradually lose the ability to hear high-pitched sounds, was developed in Britain but has only recently spread to America — by Internet, of course.”
Click here for a recording of the sound. I’m way over the hill, cause I can’t hear a dang thing.
COMMENT if you can hear anything!
via A Ring Tone Meant to Fall on Deaf Ears – New York Times.
Innovation, Healthcare & Future Answers 11/22/2009
Posted by mritsema in healthcare.Tags: Business, entrepreneurial, healthcare, Technology
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I remain adamant that the answer to the majority of our societal and economic problems lie in entrepreneurial innovation and private sector free market competition.
Here’s another example of individuals taking personal risk and innovating with new ideas to deliver value to mankind. Apply economies of scale to healthcare and deliver superior quality at lower prices. Read about it in the November 21, 2009 Wall Street Journal:
The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery
In India, a Factory Model for Hospitals Is Cutting Costs and Yielding Profits
Six million people are expected to travel outside the United States to acquire innovative and less expensive medical care. Costa Rica, Mexico and soon the Cayman Islands will offer high quality low-cost procedures. These procedures can cost as little as 10% of the cost in the United States!
No, I wouldn’t risk my health to save $100,000 on heart surgery … but if I believed I could get a Lexus quality procedure for one quarter the price of an AMC quality USA production, I might consider this alternative.
Apparently a whole lot of people already are.
I repeat, private sector and free market options do have answers for many of our toughest problems.
As we say on the golf course, let the big dog hunt.
Michael Ritsema i3 Business Solutions, LLCSteak & Storage Lunch ‘n Learn | All Beef and No Bull – December 2009 11/19/2009
Posted by mritsema in web.Tags: Management, Technology
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Sink your teeth into some “meat” at our steak and storage lunch |
Join i3 Business Solutions and Compellent Technologies for a steak lunch at the location most convenient for you:
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Tuesday, December 1, 2009 - Grand Rapids
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Louis Benton Steak House 11:00 am - 1:00 pm
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Wednesday, December 9, 2009 – Kalamazoo
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Kalamazoo Country Club – 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
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Wednesday, December 16, 2009 – Traverse City
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Park Place Hotel – 11:00 am – 1:00 pm
Looking to lower storage management costs? Looking to reign in the explosion of data storage creep? Looking for a state of the art storage solution?
We have have teamed up with Compellent Technologies to hold 3 “Steak & Storage” executive briefings across Michigan in December.
Compellent is a leading provider of enterprise-class network storage solutions that are highly scalable, feature-rich and designed to be easy to use and cost effective. i3 Business Solutions, llc is Compellent’s premier West Michigan partner for products and services.
Find out how Compellent’s innovative technology automatically manages block level data and is designed to significantly lower storage and infrastructure capital expenditures. We believe Compellent’s flexible Dynamic Block Architecture makes it the ideal data storage engine for a cloud computing environment, and it is also efficient in a more typical virtualized enterprise data center. Compellent features – like automated tiered storage, thin provisioning and thin replication – can optimize performance, lower energy costs, and provide a cost-effective storage solution.
To see if you qualify for this event, e-mail tslaughter@i3bus.com or call Tracy Slaughter at 616-719-4100 by 3 days prior to event
For other questions, please contact Tom Greening at tgreening@i3bus.com or call 616-719-4135
Michael Ritsema i3 Business Solutions, LLCTop Database Threat? Legit Users & Sloppy Company Policies! | bMighty.com 11/04/2009
Posted by thaadsma in security, web.add a comment
A report from Dark Reading, Protecting Your Database From Careless End-Users pins the data vulnerability tag on a handful of common problems and weaknesses:
User Ignorance: Employees who have access to company data may not have had security training; yet when employees are trained in basic IT security practices, serious security breaches decline.
Poor Password Management: Another familiar tune, password policies so strict that users write their passwords on a Post-It and post it on the back of their monitor (or, in tighter security environments, on the bottom of their keyboard) where it’s easily found; or policies so lame that passwords are easily cracked or even guessed. Password policy is balancing act,and many if not most companies are off-balance.
Rampant Account sharing: Data access accounts and log-ins get shared, sometimes widely and sometimes wildly, with everyone in the company, it seems, knowing how to access the sensitive stuff.
Unrestricted Access: The only people who require access to sensitive data are the ones who work with the sensitive data. And that tends to be a far smaller number of people than the number who can access the confidential files.
Excessive Data Portability: The amount of storage employees carry for personal, much less business purposes, has become staggering. High capacity thumb drives, iPods, phones, you name it and it has the potential to become a vehicle for transporting sensitive data out of the supposedly protected environment. Yet database activity monitoring and access controls and other security tools remain sparsely implemented.
UPDATE: Here’s a nice little eWeek checklist, 10 Essential Things Companies Should Teach Employees About Security.
In Case Of Disaster, Turn To Cloud | bMighty.com: Blogs For Small Business and Mid-Sized Business 11/03/2009
Posted by thaadsma in SaaS, infrastructure, managed services, security.add a comment
Still using tapes for backup? There’s a far better way to protect your data assets. At i3 Business Solutions we’ve been working with customers over the last 12 months to move away from unreliable tape to the the reliability of offsite backup and disaster recovery.
The bMighty blog has a nice summary of a Forrester report and what this means for you:
”How The Cloud Will Transform Disaster Recovery Services identifies a gap between old-school recovery from tape, which is affordable but doesn’t offer much in the way of continuity protection because it takes so long to restore; and very expensive, enterprise-targeted high-end recovery services.
Forrester foresees existing online backup providers plus new entrants into the market starting to leverage cloud storage to offer reasonably priced options with reasonably quick recovery times that might entice SMBs away from their tape backups.”
via In Case Of Disaster, Turn To Cloud | bMighty.com: Blogs For Small Business and Mid-Sized Business.
Clash of the clouds | The Economist 11/02/2009
Posted by thaadsma in Linux, broadband, ibm, infrastructure, managed services, microsoft, security, web, web services.add a comment
Cloud computing generates a lot of heated discussion, and through all the technical arguments, issues of security and trust, and battles over control, one topic keeps getting overlooked: cost.
Reducing business cost is what’s really driving us toward cloud computing.
We will all eventually adopt cloud computing, simply because the current model of scaling servers up and down is very expensive. IT departments try to buy as many servers as they think they’ll need for computing power during estimated peak capacity. But we don’t need that capacity most of the time– so lots of servers sit idle.
Cloud computing can reduce costs, becauses it provides more capacity during the peak times, so we simply pay for it on-demand. When the peaks are over and less capacity is needed, the cost then goes down. From a business perspective, this allows a company to move much of its infrastructure costs from being a capital expenditure (CAPEX) to an operating expenditure (OPEX).
The Economist published an excellent overview of how industry giants are reacting to this massive trend:
Clash of the Titans
“The rise of cloud computing is not just shifting Microsoft’s centre of gravity. It is changing the nature of competition within the computer industry. Technological developments have hitherto pushed computing power away from central hubs: first from mainframes to minicomputers, and then to PCs. Now a combination of ever cheaper and more powerful processors, and ever faster and more ubiquitous networks, is pushing power back to the centre in some respects, and even further away in others. The cloud’s data centres are, in effect, outsize public mainframes. At the same time, the PC is being pushed aside by a host of smaller, often wireless devices, such as smart-phones, netbooks (small laptops) and, perhaps soon, tablets (touch-screen computers the size of books).
Although Windows still runs 90% of PCs, the fading importance of the PC means that Microsoft is no longer an all-powerful monopolist. Others are also building big clouds, including Google, a giant of the internet, and Apple, renowned as a maker of hardware, with a market capitalisation that now exceeds those of both Google and IBM, its original arch-rival (see chart above).
Granted, there are hundreds if not thousands of firms offering cloud services—web-based applications living in data centres, such as music sites or social networks. But Microsoft, Google and Apple play in a different league. Each has its own global network of data centres. They intend to offer not just one or two services, but whole suites of them, with services including e-mail, address books, storage, collaboration tools and business applications. They are also vying to dominate the periphery, either by developing software for smart-phones and other small devices or by making such devices themselves.”
Read the whole thing, of course… Cloud computing: Clash of the clouds | The Economist.
