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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (24531)	8/9/2003 11:47:06 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

'C' word use shocks IT industry By Cormac O'Reilly theregister.co.uk Posted: 08/08/2003 at 08:22 GMT Opinion As the "C" word creeps into everyday IT conversation, the confused get scared, and the squeamish, squirm. Of course we are talking commoditization, which not only heralds the end of big margins for the IT establishment, but ultimately the demise of the in-business IT community. Let's look at the IT establishment, and the rush to get into EMC's big margin knickers. How exactly do you make big money on disk storage when it costs less than $1 a gigabyte? Good question, especially if your business model was developed in the halcyon days when a terabyte fetched $1m. Hyping up clever software and mission critical hardware as a value proposition? I don't think so. No matter how hard you multiply small numbers, they still give small results. Today's news is just duplicate and triplicate everything, as it now costs virtually nothing. Spoil your databases with as many storage mirrors as you want, for that matter, and forget the bread around the sandwich filling. Why even bother backing up to tape? The economies and logic don't work anymore - now wasn't Legato such a great acquisition! Well, the best you can do, as in its acquirer (EMC's) case, is remind the business community that actually their information is not a commodity. If bullshit sold by the pound I'd buy EMC stock. And what about those desk top costs -- two years ago, running at over $2,000 per user. With 20 years of PC literacy, increasingly stable cheap PCs, and everybody and their uncle running home computer set-ups with more muscle that at the office without any IT support, how is it all justified? Well it’s not, and the money saved will be welcome by business managers who are stretching to add every penny to the bottom line. In fact I still can't understand why businesses don't insist that employees use their own PCs, rather than provide them. I don't think there's a college in the USA which does not insist that students provide and support their own, and they seem to manage fine. Add a computer allowance into the salary, for crying out loud! Save capital and apply the tools of the trade rule. And what about those in-business networks. What is all this crap about private networks being more secure - have folks been asleep and not noticed standard integrated encryption (especially PPTP) and the collapse in Internet access prices? Or the fact that 30 million homes in the USA run network connections this year that are eight times the speed/capacity of the average company site, and cost one tenth the price. Is it a redundancy or management tools issue? Get real, just buy a second (or even third) access link and have a $600 semantic router handle everything including automatic load balancing. Oh, secure means the networking wonks; now I understand. Finally, baseline services. Am I the only one who has noticed that all the "file and print" services are now bundled into the PC? What are all those costly-to- support servers doing? Wide area print sharing? Nah, that's the job of now-established IP printing. Or unattended, remotely managed shared office disk storage? Hey, even Linksys is bringing one of these devices out. And what about eMail, iMessaging and VOIP? Well, duh, these are now commodity services. You get messaging for nothing, but you can spend as much as $100 a year should you need to. Company directory? Give HR an LDAP service and let them get on with their jobs. VOIP is today's business bargain; have employees buy a Vonage service and tote around the small network device between home and office, and on the road - their phone and calls will go with them, and their voice mail is integrated in their eMail. Oh, in the USA that's another $25 per month bundled with virtually free nation-wide, and rock-bottom international calls. Just add that lot to the salary reimbursement scheme and think of all those servers, telephone switches, administration and hassle saved. Done the math? For historic $2,000, read a lot under $500. And that comes with some kick-ass performance and reliability improvements. You would have to be another type of "c" word not to see it. ® About Cormac O'Reilly: Late sixties IT industry entrant with early developer gigs in London at Abbey National, Unilever & BOC. Senior IT oil field trash in the eighties and nineties; Schlumberger (Houston TX) and Shell (The Hague). Board IT big-wig at Costain (London) before CIO/CTO at Digital and Wang Global/ Getronics (Boston). Non-exec director at two flame-out dot.coms; now spending ill gotten gains and being provocative in Newburyport, MA

To: TigerPaw who wrote (24531)	8/10/2003 2:46:39 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Bush's lies never seem to catch up By Tom Brazaitis © Copyright 2003 Cleveland Plain Dealer Date: 08/03/2003 cleveland.com Time now for "Lies and Consequences," the game show for presidents. Our first contestant is Richard M. Nixon, who once famously declared, "I am not a crook." Wrong! Nixon lied to cover up a burglary. Nixon paid for his big, fat fib with impeachment proceedings that eventually forced him to resign the nation's highest office. Our next contestant is William Jefferson Clinton, who still is ridiculed for asserting, "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Gotcha! Clinton lied to cover up a sexual affair with a White House intern. His lie led to his impeachment and the ruination of his presidency, although he managed to finish his second term. Now comes George W. Bush, who did not so much as blush when he solemnly told the nation, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Not true! Those 16 words delivered in this year's State of the Union address were part of the president's sales pitch to persuade the nation of the necessity for a pre-emptive war against Iraq. Consequences? CIA Director George Tenet took responsibility. He says he should have caught the error in the speech. Bush immediately forgave him, pooh-poohing speculation that Tenet would be forced to resign and declaring that he gets "darn good intelligence" from the CIA. When that didn't quell the political storm, Stephen Hadley, deputy director of the National Security Council, stepped for- ward to say it was his fault. He should have caught the error. Bush did not demand his subordinate's resigna tion. Everybody makes mistakes. Now the finger of blame is pointed at Bush's national secu rity adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who must have known that the accusation in the State of the Union speech was false, yet let it slide. Bush defends Rice, a loyal and trusted adviser. "I take personal responsibility for everything I say, absolutely," the president finally said. Meanwhile, the White House has orchestrated a counterattack that goes something like this: "Do you or do you not think the world is a safer place without Saddam Hussein?" Who can deny it? But what about those lies, not just the 16 words, but the blatant lie that Saddam Hussein aided and abetted Osama bin Laden in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, that Saddam could unleash weapons of mass destruction on 45 minutes' notice, that the United States had to act before our wake-up call was a mushroom cloud? The Bush administration would have us believe that the end justifies the means, and the public seems to be buying it. The majority, according to pollsters, believe getting rid of Saddam Hussein will have been worth it even if we never find weapons of mass destruction, and even if it is costing us $1 billion a week and a growing American death toll that has surpassed the first Gulf War's. British Prime Minister Tony Blair is paying a price for his complicity. His popularity rating has sunk to new depths. Yet our president appears unscathed. "Bring it on," says the president. And the nation applauds. Bush has accused his accusers of writing "revisionist history," yet it is Bush himself who seems to want to correct the record with outright fabrications. At a recent press briefing with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the president raised some eyebrows with a strange assertion about why the United States had to topple Saddam Hussein. His actual quote was, "We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in." Where did we get the idea that Saddam had let the inspectors in, but that Bush opposed letting them stay because he thought they were incompetent? On the domestic front, we seem to have bought into another big whopper: the claim that cutting taxes will raise government revenues. Hardly a week passes that government accountants don't increase the estimated budget deficit ($450 billion this year and $475 billion next year are the latest guesses) yet the public is complacent. Bush claims that his economic policy "over time will yield new jobs," yet he may be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss in jobs. Lyndon Johnson was so damaged by the lies he told about Vietnam that he had to withdraw from the race for a second term. But the current fabricator-in-chief has set out to raise between $200 million and $300 million to ensure his re-election, which some predict will be a landslide. So, who pays the consequences? We do. Brazaitis, formerly a Plain Dealer senior editor, is a Washington columnist. Contact Tom Brazaitis at: tbrazaitis@starpower.net, 202-638-1366 © Copyright 2003 Cleveland Plain Dealer independent-media.tv --------------------------------------------------------------------------------