|
|
Intel Introduces 3D Mapping Software
By Charles King
Intel has introduced software that allows developers
to build interactive, 3D graphics that correctly model the way light reflects
off of real objects and surfaces. Based on Light Field Mapping (LFM)
technology Intel introduced last year, the new software is available at no
cost through Intel’s Open Source LFM toolkit (Open Light Fields) which
consists of software for composition of 3D images from digital photos and
code for playback of the LFM objects. Developers can use the code as is or
modify it for use in their applications. In addition to working with graphics
hardware suppliers to ensure LFM is compatible with their technologies, Intel
is collaborating with Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab on future enhancements
of LFM including the ability to visualize objects with complex geometries
(such as those that occur in nature), and with Stanford University to develop
technology for compressing and streaming light fields.
At one level, Intel’s LFM announcement appears to be
little more than a geekier-than-thou tidbit with limited appeal to anyone
outside the 3D graphics community. But to our way of thinking, the story
provides an example of how Intel is stepping strategically through the door
of a high-profile and highly profitable market sector. By way of explanation,
it should be pointed out that 3D graphics development has traditionally been
the purview of RISC-focused vendors, with SGI leading the pack by a country
mile. In fact, SGI’s position as Hollywood’s graphics hardware vendor of
choice provided the company enormous PR and marketing value over time. But in
the past three years, the terrain has been moving under the feet of SGI and
other RISC-based graphics vendors as Intel-based technologies have become
increasingly powerful and sophisticated. That tectonic shift became apparent
in July when George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic announced the
replacement of 600 SGI workstations with Intel-based machines.
So how does Intel’s LFM announcement fit into the
bigger 3D picture? Light field mapping is a highly complex operation that
typically requires costly proprietary software toolkits. In essence, by
taking on the cost of developing Open Source LFM tools for their own platform
and distributing them freely, Intel is giving graphics ISVs both an early
Christmas present and a good reason to develop products for the Intel
platform. This shows smart strategic thinking on Intel’s part, and also
demonstrates the inextricable synergies between hardware and software
development. By making life easier for ISVs in a sector where they are
beginning to develop traction, Intel is helping to make sure that the road
ahead is smoother and more scenic than it might have been otherwise.
|
|
|
You Can’t Fight City Hall, But You Can
Email ’Em
By Clay Ryder
This week the Pew Internet Project announced the
findings of its latest survey, which queried 520 randomly selected local
elected officials from around the U.S. about their use of the Internet. This
first-ever survey of mayors and city council members of the National League
of Cities by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reveals a high
level of online activity at the municipal level. According to the survey, 88%
of respondents use the Internet in the course of their official duties, 90%
use email in their official duties at least weekly, and 61% use it daily.
Nearly four-fifths of those surveyed have received email from citizens/groups
about civic issues and 25% receive email from constituents every day. In
addition, 73% of online officials note that email to and from constituents
help them better understand public opinion; 56% cited improved relations with
community groups; and 54% say email has brought them into contact with
citizens from whom they had not heard before. However, the study also noted
that traditional communications with City Hall such as meetings (55%), phone
calls (49%), and letters (27%) respectively carry the most constituent weight
compared with only 14% of local officials who stated that they assign a
significant amount of weight to emails received.
A common perception about governments of any kind is
that they are inflexible, bureaucratic, and behind the times. Bureaucracies
are often well entrenched, and laws, ordinances, regulations, etc. are
inflexible by definition (they are laws after all), but this does not
necessarily mean that government officials are the Luddites of the
information age. Some simple math shows that just over half of local
officials use email on a daily basis which, not too surprisingly, is about
par for the use of email by the general public. So what is the big deal?
Actually not too much, except for another reminder of the oft-repeated if
seldom remembered lesson of technology deployment. The lines between worker
and consumer are increasingly blurred, especially for remote and
telecommuting workers. Technologies such as cell phones, email, etc., often
mirror the progress of the early days of PCs. Formal organizations had
nothing but disdain for these devices, so workers simply brought their own
and, as a result, changed the workplace forever. Likewise, given the usage
level of email by general population, it should not be a surprise that
roughly the same proportion of government officials (who also are part of
that general population) as citizens use email on a daily basis.
Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that email is still
considered a “courtesy” communication as opposed to a definitive statement of
the general masses. Showing up to public meetings still carries more weight,
as does making a phone call or writing a letter, likely in part due to the
relative level of effort required by the sender. As most wired users have
experienced sometimes regretfully, whisking off a quick (and often negative)
email is almost as easy as whining and is therefore as easily discounted, whereas
making the effort to attend a meeting tends to separate the blowhards from
committed civic (and likely voting) participants. Thus, while local
government may be taking a measure of the community spirit via email as
opposed to walking the streets or eavesdropping at the hair salon, at the end
of the day, these opportunistic interchanges with the public remain just
that. If one really wants to get attention, one personally engages City Hall
in its natural setting — confirmation that people like to be courted in their
roles on their turf. Thus, we are reminded yet again that for all that
technology can deliver, people are still people, and for the most part
continue to place more value on personal as opposed to technological
interactions.
|
|
|
Technology to the Rescue? This Time,
Maybe
By Jim Balderston
According to published news reports, IBM will
release next month a new privacy management product under the umbrella of its
Tivoli product line. The Tivoli Privacy Manager is designed to allow
enterprises to classify information by privacy levels as determined or
dictated by company policy or existing laws. The privacy manager is under
development now, and is being tested in pilot programs with some of IBM’s
clients, notably Travelers Property Casualty Corp. and Marriot International
Corp. Both companies sit on IBM’s Privacy Manager Council, formed late last
year. The Privacy Manager uses W3C’s Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P)
to denote the privacy level on stored data. The privacy-labeled data is then
screened by rules enforcement and creates audit trails of the use of the
data. IBM is hoping to develop the Privacy Manager to work with as many
different systems as possible.
We have often seen technology rolled out with great
fanfare only to wonder which specific problem this gleaming, muscular new
piece of universal goodness was actually going to solve. We don’t believe
that there is a deficit in the need for this product; we suspect the need for
it is going to make its full and complete development a bit of a challenge.
There exists a strong possibility that states will begin to pass and enforce
more stringent — and varied — privacy laws making the matrix of applicable
law on any single piece of data ever more complex. That being said, the
rising tide of privacy concerns on the consumer, legislative, and corporate
front are going to make privacy management a key element of future data
collection and distribution.
Essentially, we see IBM adding another
classification to any piece of data, one that addresses not specifically
technical issues but social and legal ones associated with the gathering and
use of that data. As we already noted, such issues are only going to increase
in the coming years, with enterprises facing growing legal liabilities as a
result of inadvertent (or purposeful)
misuse of sensitive information. While we think IBM is well positioned to
move forward with this offering, especially as part of its Tivoli product
line, we suspect the demand for such offerings in the present — and future —
will draw other vendors into the fray. And in that sense we say the more the
merrier, as we see one of those rare instances where technology can actually
solve a real-world problem that predated the delivery of the technology
itself.
|
|
|
Symantec Attempts to Tie It All
Together
By Jim Balderston
Symantec has announced its Security Management
System, designed to simplify the management of a broad array of multi-vendor
security products. Key to the system are its Event and Incident Managers,
which tie together security applications such as firewalls, anti-virus and
intrusion detection that give detailed, but aggregated reports on
security-threatening activity as it occurs. The Event and Incident Managers
will measure the effectiveness of existing security, respond automatically to
threats based on the severity of business impact, provide real-time alerts
and incident monitoring, and report on metrics of the response to further
tune response settings. Symantec indicated that its new offerings would
interoperate with as wide a range of vendor offerings as needed.
With the drumbeat of “digital Pearl Harbors” and
cyber-terrorism fresh in their heads, it would come as no surprise that many
enterprise IT folks are scratching around looking for some way to bring down
the complexity — and in many cases ineffectiveness — of their security
environments and the management of the same. Why we are sure that the recent
alarm bells sounded around new millennium threats have moved some IT folks to
begin this search? We suspect that most have been looking for some way to
improve their security deployment and its management for years, if not
decades. This is an old problem, and one that grows harder to solve with each
passing day (or new security technology deployment).
Enterprise IT managers have been fed a pretty steady
diet of promises to simplify their security headaches over the years. In most
cases this diet has had very few calories, indeed. While there is clearly a
need for this type of offering, Symantec is going to have to overcome some
significant, well-entrenched skepticism in the marketplace. If, however, they
can demonstrate a real value proposition, it could be a real boost to IT
managers and for Symantec itself, as it moves forward with its security
consulting and implementation services initiative. This product will certainly
open some doors for these service contracts, but the product itself will have
to carry a good deal of the load. Enterprise IT’s
ability to endure (or pay for) never-ending implementation projects is as low
as the NASDAQ these days; Symantec’s ability to quickly show the value
proposition of these new offerings will determine their ultimate success or
failure.
|
|
|
IBM, Intel, and Microsoft Announce
Datacenter Initiative
By Charles King
IBM, Intel, and Microsoft have announced an
initiative to speed the development of Intel Xeon MP and Microsoft Windows
datacenter solutions. The firms are working with systems integrators and ISVs
including J.D. Edwards, SAP AG, and SAS to provide a portfolio of business
application solutions running on IBM’s eServer xSeries 440 systems. The goal
is to develop a solutions-based approach to high-end Intel-based servers that
combines hardware, operating systems, software applications, and middleware
with systems integration, marketing, and sales support. As part of the
announcement, IBM unveiled a new customer solutions lab near Microsoft
headquarters in Redmond, Washington that offers customers, ISVs and
integrators access to IBM and Microsoft products and support.
To begin, the IBM/Intel/Microsoft initiative is
essentially about increasing sales of high-end Intel-based products and
solutions. By working closely together on the development end with
integrators and ISVs, the Three IT Amigos hope to remove a bit of the sting
customers might experience from deploying powerful, complex Intel/MS-based
datacenter solutions. Fair enough, but while this is hardly the first such
initiative IBM, Intel, and/or Microsoft have embarked upon, the effort does
have a bit of an interesting twist that makes it worth further consideration.
Said interesting twist is the Intel Xeon MP, a high
end 32-bit server processor enhanced for back end business solutions such as
transaction processing. Despite a good deal of press and a great deal of push
from Intel, the Xeon MP has been relegated to 2-way machines by vendors
including HP and Dell, who prefer the Pentium III version Xeon in their
multiple processor Intel servers, while IBM (via the x440’s modular building
block architecture) and Unisys have developed Xeon MP-based products that
scale to 16-way configurations. Does this really matter? Well, no. Not unless
said vendor claims to offer a range of back end business IT solutions. Dell’s
lack of interest is not surprising since the company tends to avoid markets
until they mature, but HP’s absence (given the company’s very public embrace
of the Intel platform) is curious. These vendors’ decisions also have real
world consequences for their customers. In the case of solutions from SAP,
SAS, and the like, server scalability is critical to application scalability.
In the case of back end deployments like enterprise datacenters, the 30%
performance boost Xeon MP offers over Xeon PIII is more than a little
significant. What does the Three Amigos’ announcement mean in this context?
While the current economy has inspired IT vendors of every kind to tighten
their belts, the smart ones are keeping an eye on the future and actively
partnering to extend their reach by developing powerful, flexible solutions
that meet their customers’ datacenter needs. Simply put, by working together
today, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft are positioning themselves to reap future
benefits.
|
