Tag: microsoft

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Talking Microsoft Surface and Fairfax on ABC Local Radio

I spoke about two things on ABC Local Radio earlier this week: Microsoft’s Surface tablet-cum-laptop and the staff cutbacks at the Fairfax media group.

I’d covered Surface in this week’s Patch Monday podcast, so my comments on air with Dom Knight reflected the feedback I’d received.

And the comments I made about the Fairfax cuts was based heavily on what I wrote four years ago, “Trouble at t’paper”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (7.8MB)

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, archived here because it isn’t being archived anywhere else.

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Weekly Wrap 103: Cold, cockatoos and codeine

My week from Monday 21 to Sunday 27 May 2012 saw me return to my usual writing levels — despite continuing pain from my shoulder and a lingering cold which, as I write this, threatens to turn into bronchitis. It’s been rather cold and windy here at Wentworth Falls.

Sadly that meant I didn’t make it to the planned paintball session with Eugene Kaspersky on Wednesday night. It seems that I’m fated not to spend any quality time with Mr K on this Australian trip. I daresay I’ll catch up with him another time. Is that a hint? Der. Of course.

Podcasts

  • Patch Monday episode 139, “War talk dominates AusCERT 2012”, the first of two episodes based on material recorded at the information security conference. The overall theme is that infosec is becoming militarised. We no longer talk about “information assurance” but “defensive cyber operations”. Click through for the full list of speakers.

Articles

There’s one more long story emerging from ideas presented at AusCERT 2012 that was filed late Friday. It will appear tomorrow morning at ZDNet Australia.

Media Appearances

None. Which makes up for last week’s heavy media load.

Corporate Largesse

  • On Thursday I went to a media briefing by Optus Business at Australian Technology Park. They provided lunch, and afterwards a couple of coffees. They also gave me an autographed copy of Peter Hinssen’s book The New Normal: Explore the limits of the digital world. No, me neither.

The Week Ahead

It looks like the coming week will be significantly less intense for me, with a more gentle workload and, with luck, better health.

The only fixed-schedule items will take place during an overnight trip to Sydney on Wednesday. That evening there’s a Sydney Talks seminar entitled It Won’t Happen to Me: Cybercrime Myths and Concepts at the University of New South Wales. (Does anyone want to join me?) Then on Thursday morning Samsung is launching… well, they won’t tell me what, but I suspect it’s their new Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone.

I may well be in Sydney on the weekend too, because Bunjaree Cottages is full up both for that weekend and the following Queen’s Birthday long weekend. Stand by.

Elsewhere

Most of my day-to-day observations are on my high-volume Twitter stream, and random photos and other observations turn up on my Posterous stream (or they used to before my phone camera got a bit too scratched up) and via Instagram. The photos also appear on Flickr, where I eventually add geolocation data and tags. Yes, I should probably update this stock paragraph to match the current reality.

[Photo: A young Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus funereus) swoops low overhead at Bunjaree Cottages near Wentworth Falls.]

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Talking AusCERT 2012 and cyberwar on ABC Local Radio

My full output from the AusCERT 2012 information security conference has yet to appear. Stand by. But last night I did a half-hour conference wrap with Dom Knight on ABC Local Radio.

We spoke about the conference atmosphere itself, cybercrime, cyberwar, the risk of Cybergeddon (yes, I know), and the claim by Eugene Kaspersky that Apple is ten years behind Microsoft when it comes to security.

Not that Mr Kaspersky would ever, like, troll the entire planet.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (15.5MB)

What we didn’t talk about, really, was the two stories that have been published so far:

The audio is of course ©2012 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, but as usual I’m posting it here as an archive.

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ZDNet Live: Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth

Thursday’s ZDNet Live panel discussion went rather well — even if it was another goddam thing about the cloud — and the video is posted below.

The topic was “Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth”, and the panellists were (left to right after me) Greg Stone, chief technology officer at Microsoft Australia; Zack Levy, chief commercial officer of Bluefire; Vito Forte, chief information officer at great big evil mining company Fortescue Metals Group; and moderator Brian Haverty, editorial director, ZDNet Australia.

If the embedded video isn’t working properly, or if you’d like a slightly bigger version, click through to ZDNet Australia.

More comments will doubtless appear over there too. With luck some of them will be a little bit more insightful than the childish “Microsoft bad, Linux good” platform zealotry of the first one, from jonalinux.

Cloud computing using Microsoft… you’re joking right. I guess it might be reliable if they double the amount of machines compared to Linux.

I recall when Microsoft bought Hotmail and switched over. It crashed immediately and in order to cope with the load, Microsoft had to double the amount of machines.

“When Microsoft bought Hotmail”? That was 1997. I reckon that if you’re going to have a go at someone’s technology in a grown-up conversation then your example should be just that little more recent than 14 years ago.

And was that even true?

Sure, as Microsoft initially replaced FreeBSD and Solaris (not Linux, note, so we have further evidence of jonalinux being an arsehat), Windows servers proved unable to handle the same level of traffic so the plan was delayed. But “switched over” and “crashed immediately” strikes me as complete bullshit — if for no other reason than that’s not how you manage a large-scale transition.

Yes, reliability problems plagued Hotmail a decade ago. When it had 30 or 50 million users and ran on Windows 2000. Today it has ten times the user base and technology ten years down the track. Decade-old misinformation from a zealot is such a waste of space. I’m sorry I even copy-and-pasted it in now.

[Update 0945: Added text of jonalinux’s comment and my response.]

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Beware, I’m on another cloud panel

Watch out! I’m on the panel for the ZDNet Live event Bringing the Cloud Down to Earth on 1 December.

There are so many types of cloud out there and so many steps along the way. Are you setting out on the right path to the cloud for your organisation’s needs? In an upcoming live panel discussion, to be broadcast right here on ZDNet Australia, we look at the criteria you should be looking at.

Other panellists are: Zack Levy, chief commercial officer, Bluefire; James Turner, IBRS analyst (and ratbag); Greg Stone, Microsoft CTO; and moderator Brian Haverty, editorial director, ZDNet Australia.

Click through for the details. I couldn’t be arsed even copy and pasting them.

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Talking smartphones and time zones on ABC Gold Coast

This was unexpected. A call yesterday from ABC Gold Coast to talk about whether smartphones were smart enough to properly handle the change to daylight saving tomorrow — or, more correctly, to deal with the situation when the Gold Coast doesn’t change time but locations just across the border in NSW do.

The short answer, of course, is “It depends”.

The long answer was what I discussed with Bernadette Young, whether the phone is set to get its time automatically from the network or from the tome zone manually set by the user.

We also mentioned that stuff-up in 2006 when Victoria changed the end date for daylight saving at the last minute to make life easier for Commonwealth Games attendees, and confusing for everyone else.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.9MB)

The audio is ©2011 Australian Broadcasting Corporation, presented here as always because the ABC doesn’t generally post these live interviews and it’s a decent plug for them.