My G+ Profile
« June 14, 2004 | Main | June 16, 2004 »
June 15, 2004
Beyond Bullets
From Robert Scoble I learned of Cliff Atkinson's PowerPoint blog Much of what I read on Cliff's blog and Web site remind me of two of the most effective users of PowerPoint I know: Doc Searls and Larry Lessig.
01:40 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Archiving CDs and DVDs
I've been seeing a lot lately on how to get better results when using CD and DVD media for archiving digital data. Today, my feedreader offered up this article from PCWorld.com on CD and DVD media quality. The article largely focuses on some efforts by NIST and others to create a standard rating system for recordable media so that we're not left guessing in the dark:
But NIST's Byers is seeking to change that. At an OSTA meeting in San Francisco this week, Byers is proposing an industry-wide grading system to indicate disc quality.
Byers is motivated by the desire to see a uniform mechanism in place to guide institutions and individuals who'll be storing data, music, videos, and images for long periods of time. "They need to be confident in their purchasing, so they can plan for their strategies in storing their information," Byers says. "Long-term storage has different meanings: For some, 30 years might be enough. For others, 50 or 75 years might be archive, or long-term, quality."
Under Byers's proposal, a series of tests would be developed to determine whether a DVD would last for a given number of years. "If you were to purchase a disc in a store with a grade that indicates it has passed a test to last X number of years, it removes a lot of uncertainty for the consumer, and it can save some expense in premature migration [to a new storage technology], or loss of data because they waited too long [and the disc was no longer playable]," he says.From PCWorld.com - Burning Questions: When Good Discs Go Bad
Referenced Tue Jun 15 2004 11:00:31 GMT-0600
Byers has conducted tests and has data, but he's not naming names. For now the best approach is to buy high quality media that matches your drive speed and is produced by a vendor who manufactures their own disks (like Maxell or Verbatim) so that you get consistent quality.
11:03 AM | Recommend This | Print This
Federation Acceleration
Ping ID Corp released the results of their quarterly survey on federation today. The results of the survey of 100 corporations show a federation acceleration and increased planning for future federation projects:
- End-user convenience, better partner integration, and a reduction in overall IT costs were cited as the top three drivers of federation.
- The number of federations in production increased from 1% in Q1 to 7% in Q2.
- Over 50% surveyed were planning to participate in between 1 and 3 federations within the next 24 months.Ê
- Approximately 48% of those surveyed believed each of their federations would contain between 1 and 3 organizations within 24 months.
- 21% were being driven to federate by partners, while 72% were being driven to federate by either an internal business group or their IT department.
- Interest in deploying the SAML 2.0 and WS-Federation specifications rises significantly in Q4 of 2004 and continues through Q2 of 2005.
- Ease of Integration and Vendor Interoperability were cites as top characteristics desired in federation products.
The survey was quoted in a TechUpdate article by Dan Farber where he gives some background on the current state of the protocols:
ÊCurrently, SAML 1.1 is the dominant protocol used for federation. Vendors have announced support for the Liberty Alliance Liberty ID-FF 1.1, but few are shipping in a substantial way, according to Eric Norlin, senior vice president of marketing at Ping Identity. The survey indicated that interest in SAML 2.0 and WS Federation will begin to ramp up significantly in the latter part of 2004 and continue throughout 2005.
However, even with standards like SAML 1.1, interoperability problems crop up. Developers tend to create custom extensions or modify the code in a way that requires compliance testing and tweaking every time a node is added to a federation. Liberty Alliance is attempting to fix that problem. WS-Federation, according to Norlin, is very broad in its semantics, and doesn't become interoperable until profiles are defined that ride on top of the protocol.From Federation acceleration - TechUpdate - ZDNet
Referenced Tue Jun 15 2004 10:45:12 GMT-0600