Talk Now Mark II limps out
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JUST HOW MANY times can you &#39;soft launch&#39; a product? Well, Orange has already launched Talk Now - its Push-to-Talk (PTT) service â-wice this year.
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(InfoWorld) - Timed stock market trades will go awry. Manufacturing lines will grind to a halt. Perplexed executives will hold court before empty conference rooms. These are just a few of the doomsday scenarios that have been tossed out in advance of Daylight Savings Time, which has been bumped up by two weeks this year by order of the U.S. Congress.  The warnings recall the Year 2000, or Y2K, hysteria that reigned at the turn of the Millennium, when some worried that the computer systems that were programmed to recognize two digit years and that were used to run just about everything would suddenly stop working. But executives and enterprise IT professionals contacted by InfoWorld say that the Daylight Savings Time (DST) change, while a nuisance, is no Y2K, and they expect few disruptions to their businesses come Monday. The new, accelerated time change is the result of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which lengthened Daylight Savings Time in an effort to curb U.S. fuel consumption. IT vendors and industry groups recognized the potential for confusion, with many operating systems and applications programmed to use the old Daylight Savings Time date, and started warning about potential disruptions from DST just after the New Year. In a February alert to its members, the IT ISAC (Information Sharing and Analysis Center) said that the new Daylight Savings Time could "affect all consumers from home users to large enterprises," with problems ranging from missed appointments to system failures where correct time stamps are needed to store, monitor, or operate critical infrastructures. IT-ISAC members were encouraged to identify any systems that were time dependent and request patches for affected systems. Large platform vendors like Microsoft have also been sounding the alarm on DST in recent months, especially about the impact of the change on older versions of Windows and Microsoft Office. Windows Vista and Office 2007, released in January, are programmed to use the new DST schedule. "We've heard a wide spectrum of comments from customers," said M3 Sweatt, chief of staff for the Windows Core Operating System Development Group. Some companies have been working on the problem since last November, when Microsoft first issued patches for Windows to address the time change. However, other firms have waited until just recently to tackle the DST change, he said. "Some companies look at this as an extraordinary situation, whereas some have just incorporated it into their regular maintenance windows," he said.  One of the companies treating it as an extraordinary event is Microsoft, where administrators designated a whole weekend to roll out DST patches across the company's infrastructure, he said. More recently, Microsoft set up a Web site for customers with information on the implications of the time change and links to product patches and other advice for consumers, as well as IT professionals. Despite two years of lead time, however, the Daylight Savings Time issue only made it onto the radar at many enterprises in the last week or so, after the press began covering the issue more closely, said Patrick Foxhoven, CIO of CentraComm Communications, a managed security services provider in Findlay, Ohio. "The biggest headache has just been clients contacting us who are concerned because of all the hype," he said. Centracomm said that it was initially concerned about the impact of the daylight savings time change on security event correlation tools that it uses, but has since then received patches from the necessary vendors, as well as infrastructure vendors it depends on like Juniper Networks. Centracomm is ready to go for the DST change, as are the systems it manages for its customers, he said. But over at Ce De Candy, in Union, N.J., Daylight Savings Time may result in the burning of some midnight oil before Sunday, said IT manager Rick DePinto. "It's a big pain in the neck," said DePinto, who said changes to the company's payroll system and a matrix of Microsoft patches still need to be implemented. Ce De pays its workers hourly and bases the time worked on a time clock system that takes the information from the clocks and uploads the data to the program on a PC, which in turn uploads it to the ERP system on the back end. "All of these time-related payroll issues have to adjust when daylight savings goes into effect," said DePinto. Unfortunately the instructions Ce De got from the payroll vendor are not clear on what needs to be done. "We've been spending a lot of man hours on this," DePinto said. Scheduling anything in Outlook is also a problem. Shift schedules and appointments are all done in Outlook and there isnât one simple patch from Microsoft. "They have a multitude of different patches that you have to download and it is very involved," DePinto said. For now, changes to Outlook are being done manually at Ce De. Although there is a patch that will push out a change to all the desktops, installing it so complex that DePinto prefers to let his team update the PCs one desktop at a time.Â  Still, most enterprises are taking the change in stride and betting that disruptions, if they occur, will be minor, according to those interviewed by InfoWorld. "It is not on a Y2K scale," said Ray Repic chief technical architect at Coca-Cola Enterprises. "The only item that is a bit of a pain is with our calendaring capabilities for people who have scheduled meetings out beyond March 11." "To be honest, I've been so busy, I haven't even thought about it," said Sean Marsh, CEO of One Mortgage Network. Marsh said that outsourcing much of One Mortgage's IT operations and using service-based software like Salesforce.com has spared him some worry about the DST issue, but he's betting the downside won't be catastrophic even if he's caught unprepared. "The reality is, a one-hour difference is not going to cripple our company," said Marsh. In a worst case scenario, IT staff can manually update systems that can't be patched, then turn off the Daylight Savings Time feature so that clocks are changed again when the old DST date comes around, he said. Ultimately, scheduling will be the biggest problem for companies that haven't addressed the DST issue, so enterprises should make workers aware of the change at the very least and scrutinize appointments and meetings in the weeks in between the new March 11 Daylight Savings Time change and the old DST change in April. "The Boy Scout's model is to be prepared, and I think that's a good model for this: Plan ahead and be prepared," Sweatt said.
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Not quite the usual conference call.
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Jim Posner sent me a link yesterday to an MP3 of a conference call between the press and two members of the Clinton campaign. It's really illuminating.  There are controversies the press isn't reporting, esp betw the Clinton campaign and NBC. Will there be a debate on Feb 26 and will CNN host it or MSNBC? There's some doubt, but you can't see it when you watch the broadcasts.  I'd love to subscribe to a feed of these conference calls, but we only happened to stumble upon this one. This morning on MSNBC they were talking about a conference call with Hillary Clinton, they said she sounded tired. I'd like to hear that for myself.  There's a difference in 2008, the campaign is not just being covered by the professional media, the people are doing it too. Even if we don't have our people on the calls, I'd still like to hear them.  So, if you have an idea how we could catch a stream of these, please post a comment. Thanks. PS: I archived the MP3 in case the link above goes bad.
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Must protect customer data better in future TalkTalk and its parent company Carphone Warehouse have been slapped by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for failing to look after customers' data properly, in breach of the Data Protection Act.â¦
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School's been blown to pieces 7,500 UK schools using the email services of RM Plc, the UK's largest education technology supplier, have been without communications this week.â¦
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GRAND PRAIRIE, Texas (Ticker) - After further review, Better Talk Now proved to be the best after all. Overcoming huge favorite Kitten&#39;s Joy, Better Talk Now pulled off a surprising upset in Saturday&#39;s $2 million Breeders&#39; Cup Turf at Lone Star Park.
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On the surface, speech technologies make a lot of sense. But it may still be too early for them to make it in prime time.
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When the FTSE Aim All-Share index last month fell below the 1,000 mark at which it started in 1995, the sound was lost among the louder market crashes elsewhere.
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Business & money: Â· Credit crunch creates Â£210bn backlog of buyouts Â· US sub-prime crisis claims more jobs and firms
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Plus: Motorola profit shrinks, phone forecast dims...Apple posts good Q1, despite slow iPod sales...Microsoft expected to post healthy profits...Seagate turns in mixed report.
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Handsets pulled to apply audio glitch fix, reports suggest
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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A major upgrade of HTML is in the works but won't emerge for at least two years.
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Blog: With two hours to go, the line starts getting too long so Apple moves everyone closer together. Unfortunately, a lot of people smell kind of funny.
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Over the last 24 hours Twitter has been down as much as it's been up. As always this gives us a reason to think about what the world would be like without Twitter and then those of us who are engineers or would-be engineers, start thinking about ways to fix the problem, whatever it is. The Twitter folk say that the recent problems are related to an infrastructure overhaul. Of course I believe them, I take it at face-value. I think the MacWorld Expo outage was about traffic, I don't think last night's Republican debate took Twitter down. Anyway, I'd like to really understand what's going on behind the scenes at Twitter, Inc. They say they're confident the new infrastructure will hold up better, I'd like to understand why. Can we have a meeting, with a few people from the tech community who actively use Twitter and a few people from the company, to be briefed on what's going on. The same way the President briefs Congress when there's some kind of international crisis.  Twitter wouldn't exist without its users. Everyone wants to know what's going on. Let's have some real honest direct communication?
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Plus:  EarthLink trims outlook...AT&#38;T posts $7.1 billion loss...Lucent sees first profitable year since 2000...EMC issues sunny report.