In the first video, Liz Murphy, marketing VP of InPhase Technologies, describes the world’s first commercial holographic storage system at NAB.

We define a holographic disk drive, the practical implementation of the technology, as “a holographic storage device that uses a laser to store data to optical media in three dimensions, maximizing storage capacity by using the media’s depth. Most optical media, such as CD, DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-ray only offer bit-at-a-time surface or dual-layer writing capacity. A holographic versatile disk is just slightly larger than a DVD and can store 30 times as much data.”

If you want a blast from the past, watch the video below to see Liz Murphy in June of 2007 explaining how HD holographic storage (will) work. She’s interviewed by Scott Jacobs for Futurepeak. (Click ahead to :30 to avoid some shaky handheld camera work.)  There’s a good explanation for how the technology works and some historical perspective on its development later in the video.

There are certainly programmers, mathematicians and assorted savants out there who can write and translate directly to and from binary code.

I am not one of them.

If you, too, need to occasionally convert binary to ASCII text or, alternately, amuse yourself by converting especially colorful jokes into safe-for-works form… well, you too might just find this binary to text translation tool useful.

Now you, too, can tell ask your friends to
01110011011101000110111101110000001000
00011100110110010101101110011001000110
10010110111001100111001000000110110101
10010100100000011100110110100101101100
01101100011110010010000001000110011000
010110001101100101011000100110111101101
111011010110010000001110001011101010110
10010111101001111010011001010111001100101110.

[Image source: ThinkGeek]

Oversi’s technology is designed to help companies deliver video over the Internet.

From the shownotes on YouTube:

This presentation shows how Oversi’s platform works; enabling service providers to manage the huge increase in traffic, enhance customer satisfaction and increase ARPU (average revenue per user). It also discusses the way that service providers can benefit from the new revenue streams of digital media, rather than be mere bandwidth conduits with no financial gain.

This animation was presented at IEDM 2006 to show how phase change memory (PCM) devices switch between amorphous and crystalline states.

Our sister site, Bitpipe.com, just sent me an email informing me that I could view a video of John Cleese offering advice on data distribution systems. (You’ll need to register but, IMHO, it’s worth it. Cleese in a unitard is a sight to behold.)

The video is the next in a series of dependably droll, frequently hilarious spots that follow Cleese’s work as “Dr. Harold Trainwreck” in  The Institute for Backup Trauma  and as the host at the Friendly Advice Machine.

Here’s Dr. Trainwreck on “Rule 26,” wherein he provides advice for corporate counsels and IT managers:

And more of the good doctor, this time providing a (mock) tutorial on how to botch data management.

Captains of Industry created the campaign for Iron Mountain.

Joe Tucci (Chairman of the Board at EMC) tells Bob and Joe to get rid of some tapes.

Who knew storage guys were so much fun?

Simply put, it’s doing in your homework. Just look at this sample M&A due diligence checklist.

In IT and the law, of course, the term “due diligence” has considerably more precise meanings. WhatIs.com’s definition for due diligence states it as:

…the process of systematically researching and verifying the accuracy of a statement. In everyday language, due diligence is synonymous with “the degree of effort required by law or industry standard.”

The term originated in the business world, where due diligence is required to validate financial statements. The goal of the process is to ensure that all stakeholders associated with a financial endeavor have the information they need to assess risk accurately.

When due diligence involves the offering of securities for purchase, as in an IPO (initial public offering), specific corporate officers are responsible for the proper completion of the process…

As is the case with so many other things in life, context matters. In general, due diligence includes the careful identification and evaluation of data sources, identification of potential risks and any other issues relevant to the statement or scenario in question.
Civil litigation and real estate law are even more specific, as you’ll read in our definition.

IT, as ever, is its own beast.

[Cartoon Credit: ScienceCartoonsPlus.com]

In the context of information technology, due diligence could mean determining whether a new operating system would be incompatible with important existing legacy applications, if a new developer understands the difference between Javascript and Java or whether new servers will fit on existing racks in a data center.

Due diligence can also be applied to careful testing of data or network security, disaster recovery preparedness, or any other critical infrastructure asset.

Failure to meet proper due diligence in these areas could leave the organization or client in question open to data breaches or malware infections.

In this sense, completing due diligence can be taken to be completing the steps that are “industry standard” in a particular area, like penetration testing or other code validation. Software companies that do not meet these goals may be liable for zero-day attacks, customer data breaches or other losses of mission-critical functions that could have been prevented with more stringent preparation.

It’s might be fair to say, for instance, that if TJX had had a better IT audit that mandated a switch to WAP instead of WEP security, one of the biggest data breaches in history might have prevented.

Or maybe not. Either way, the relevant IT guys probably should have done better due diligence before transmitting customer information over a wireless network protected only by weak encryption.

Any DB that doesn’t do due diligence testing to ensure that a database is recoverable from a major hardware of instance failure is similarly negligent.

There are plenty of examples out there. AstuteDiligence.com hosts a list of more general due diligence horror stories, with specific company and individual names redacted. There are some classic scenarios listed — the acquisition of a software company based upon a flashy demo, good PR and a well-designed website that turns out to be a maker of vaporware.

CFO Magazine ran a feature story back in ‘04 about companies that installed safeguards against merger surprises after due diligence failures.

In many circumstances, of course, due diligence works quite well, as Jan Stafford reported in a story about how a bank’s senior systems architect, sought and found a virtualization technology to help facilitate hardware consolidation and operating expenses low during system upgrades.

As Joseph Bankoff, a partner in the intellectual property and technology practice at law firm King & Spalding in Atlanta put it in a 2006 Infoworld article on the topic, “Due diligence is going in and digging a hole in the ground and seeing if there’s oil, instead of taking someone’s word on it.”

After all, you wouldn’t like it if someone else drank your milkshake.

What can I say about Facebook that hasn’t been said? Newsweek has placed Mort Zuckerberg, the founder of the social networking giant on its cover. And the press has been hyperventilating about Facebook for months.

So what is Facebook? It’s a simple idea, done well: move the “facebooks” of incoming college undergraduates online, with headshots and interests constituting a basic profile, and then create the tools for nodes on the network to interact and browse each other’s profiles.

It’s also my “latest discovery,” as I joined earlier this spring, egged on by a neighbor. Back when I went to college, we had such a thing, printed on “paper,” bound and distributed to the freshman class (and just as quickly appropriated by upperclassmen frequently interested in more than discovering who else was into rock climbing or Pearl Jam). Facebook was, at its inception, a social network for college students, with access limited to only students in the same institution. Now, Facebook has laid claim to being a “social utility,” bidding to become the platform or framework we use to organize our online lives.

Audacious, perhaps, but not unprecedented. Friendster had the early start in filling that role but never recovered from an inability of its original technical architecture to scale to massive traffic demands or challenges from MySpace and other networks.

To be fair, over the past spring and summer, the social networking phenomenon has continued to explode in popularity and innovation, but Facebook has grown much faster and pulled in the digerati like no other.

Why? There’s no single reason. While the decision to open the formerly closed network to the Internet at large is an obvious place to begin, instead of limiting membership to isolated pools of collegians, other factors are in play. Making APIs available to developers resulted in a tsunami of applications that help to further interconnect nodes within each social network has attracted enormous amounts of energy (and, increasingly) venture capital to the platform.

Choosing to keep a clean, easily navigated interface has mattered as well. While MySpace is still the biggest social network — and by most measurements, the most popular site on the Internet, the contrast between the two services couldn’t be much larger, aesthetically, as Facebook (by comparison) radically limits the visual control a user has over a profile. It doesn’t hurt that all of the young college graduates enter the workforce with profiles, either.

If you need a sense of how bound into the tech community Facebook has become, consider how Silicon Valley reacted to a recent Facebook outage.

There’s plenty of evidence too that spending time on Facebook has also evolved into a significant productivity drain (though some disagree) and security risk. (If you’re wondering which companies lead in embracing Facebook, along with the most risk, just read Elisa’s post). The trouble is that sysadmins with itchy trigger fingers may not be able to quickly shut off the flow of bandwidth by firewalling Facebook. Unlike other more informal networks, many professionals have been using to “friend” their coworkers, clients and collaborators, along with former college roommates and dorm buddies. While LinkedIn has long been the social network of choice for many professionals, Facebook has begun eating into that market. In the online social media world, the gaps between online and offline networks are continuing to close, along with whatever space remained between work and personal lives.

Netizens my age (proud members of the “XY generation” that bridges the gap between Gen X (children of the 80s) and Gen Y (folks who don’t remember life before CDs and email or who said “trust but verify“) and older may find some elements of Facebook surprising, though perhaps not more so than MySpace. Older users are joining, however, and finding a place. While privacy options for profiles exist, unlike MySpace, there’s significant potential for embarrassment and even calamity for college or career prospects for those who aren’t wary about posting photos or blog entries that don’t put them in a good light, to put it mildly. PR professionals and marketers would do well to consider the advice of social media gurus. And, as neighborhood applications crop up, there are also alarming security concerns regarding personal safety and property, given that clever criminals can posit where and when individuals are away.

While much of the value of joining these networks can be found in keeping touch with friends and alumni — and making new ones from within that social network — the amount of information that many people are adding to their profiles has also been identified as a valid phishing risk, with significant potential for social engineering hacks that allow access to corporate networks.

What to do? As is the case with the rest of the Web-based applications that have made their way into enterprise and personal desktops alike (users keep outwitting IT when installing consumer apps, apparently), the key is likely to be adaptive security policies that both recognize the increasingly blurred boundaries between work and personal life while respecting both the bandwidth limitations high usage may inflict upon a network and the need to limit the leak or theft of potentially damaging proprietary or personal data. No one is suggesting that developing, implementing or enforcing such a policy is easy, but the consequences of failing to try may extend well beyond a public relations disaster to the organization or individual who doesn’t consider Facebook to be a risk.

There are also no shortages of critics who view the closed nature of Facebook with some distaste — “yet another profile to populate” is a new form of fatigue in the digital age. Personal data portability may become a online movement. It’s certainly been the inspiration for a business plan or two. The founder of LiveJournal, for instance, has published a mini-manifesto for portable, open social networking, according to Mashable. (It may help that Google appears to be backing him). Other observers have noted that Facebook hasn’t been proven to be a rewarding platform for advertisers yet either, though the model is still evolving, as described in this excellent article from Business.com, the Facebook Economy.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy watching classmates and friends pop up on Facebook; lest you wonder, you can find me there as well. Be warned: I’m sticking with adding friends, coworkers and neighbors, lest I develop social networking fatigue myself.

One of WhatIs.com’s faithful readers wrote in recently with a suggestion for a much-beloved IT sniglets page (go take a look if you think words like CrackBerry, AlzIMers, IMglish or prairiedogged are a hoot): sneakernet. We love that sort of thing, of course (write to us!) but in this case we already had a definition for sneakernet: a method of transmitting electronic information by personally carrying it
from one place to another on floppy disk or other removable medium. The concepts certainly doesn’t seem many years removed from the days of copying working files onto a 3.5″ floppy disc at the end of the day in the computer room — or even of writing simple algorithms to the cassette tapes attached to the ancient PET computers next to my classroom in the late 80s.

As is so often the case, technology and life comes in cycles. In recent years, the explosion of cheap, removable flash drives (or jump drives, so some folks call them) has allowed mind-bogglingly large sneaker-borne file transfers copied over speedy USB 2.0 ports. iPod owners have long since discovered that those giganormous 80-gigabyte hard drives also make fantastic data warehouses for easy travel and transfer (as long as you don’t forget the cord!) and of course, it’s a cinch for most PC owners to burn a copy of a file to a CD and walk it over to another desk or office. That sort of thing can result in podslurping, of course, as network admins know. Entire operating systems can be carted around as LiveDistros, along with whatever portable applications a user might desire. I won’t even touch, of course, the multitude of flash memory formats that inhabit cameras, smartphones, GPS devices and other electronica, each a potential method of data transfer in “the sneakernet.”

(BTW, hat tip for the cool sneaker image goes to ProZak on Flickr)

So sneakernet is definitely not dead (as noted in this tip from SearchNetworking from 2005). The prompt provided by the reader email did, however, recall to my biological RAM an e-column I read just last week from David Pogue, the witty and frequently funny technology reviewer over at the New York Times. David recently wrote about a trip to California where he managed to forget a folder of 2 GB of digital photos he’d taken of digital SLRs he was reviewing in that week’s paper. With the help of a marvelously patient wife, he managed to get the files transferred over to his laptop from home using a nifty little shareware application called Pando. Pando provides, as David says, “a free, cross-platform, super-simple program designed expressly for idiotproof file transfers, even big ones.”

You can learn more at (you guessed it) Pando.com.

The only snag is that for the service to work, both users have to download and install the client, a step and hitch that David rightly suggests is a potential hindrance, or even impossible for some end users without admin privileges. That being said, Pando worked well for David and is allowing thousands of users to easily backup, transfer, recover and (yes) trade quite large media files. Color me a fan.

Aside from discovering Pando (thanks, David!), the process Pogue worked through is remarkably similar to one that plays out in classrooms and cubicles daily. How to do it? Sneakernet and removable storage is certainly one way, though I hear that the “Interwebs” is an attractive method these days as well. Here’s a crack at a list of ways to make a hypothetical transfer happen. If you have more ideas, please add them in the comments.

For instance, gmail has changed the way that most people think about using email to send attachments, with its remarkably large capacity (convertible to online storage, as I’ve blogged about before, with Gdisk), though I agree with David that 2 gigs is a tag weighty to send this way.

Also like David, I’ve been using FTP for a long time to download and upload files online, though I’ve endured timeouts, unexpected logouts and all manner of file corruptions over the years. I still have fond memories of the early versions of Fetch, including the happy dog icon that accompanied the app. David’s second idea, using an IM-client to transfer files, wasn’t a bad idea at all, though that kind of P2P file sharing isn’t likely to fly on many corporate networks.

As David discovered, however, IM and large files size don’t mix well for file transfer.

Command line geeks know about how to use Secure Shell (referred to as SSH or secsh) to securely access a computer remotely, a method that isn’t exactly for the technically faint of heart but allows direct access to the other computer’s directories. Rajpaul Bagga offers a Secure Shell (SSH) howto if you’re interested.

How else can you transfer large files? The list isn’t short, to be sure, even after touching on CDs, iPods, flash drives, P2P file sharing apps, FTP clients, iPods and IM.

.Mac users can also set up a public folder on their iDisks, which allows them to post large files for others to download, securing them behind password-protection as necessary.

Networking geeks can directly connect one PC to another with a crossover cable. And, as many will point out, a server or shared hard drive can be set up for file sharing as well.

You can use the IrDa port on your PDA and laptop (if they both have one!) to swap files using infrared.

And (of course) Bluetooth can be enabled to allow easy transfer between PCs, PDAs and printers, though bluesnarfing should worry users with proprietary or sensitive data.

Some smartphone users can use MMS to send files as well, most often pictures or (very short) videos taken with digital cameras. Unless you’re on an EV-DO, HSDPA or some other 3G wireless network, however, this won’t work particularly well with larger files.

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments!

In this line of work, I can’t help but encounter an awful lot of IT buzzwords. I even write a newsletter dedicated to picking the latest and greatest of ‘em. Thankfully, one of the guiding principles of WhatIs.com has always been to decode the tech jargon and spin and explain what something is, who invented it, how it works and why it might be important. Some concepts, like Web 2.0 or SOA, can be a bit tricky to tackle, nearly defying definition. That brings me to the subject of this post: cloud computing. The meme isn’t from just one company or tech visionary trying to gain momentum, either.

Google’s Eric Schmidt is talking about cloud computing, in the context of search and advertising networks — and in the wake of a (predicted) partnership with Apple as the good folks at Cupertino revamp a somewhat tired .Mac offering before the iPhone debuts, it’s not hard to see why.

George Gilder (one of those tech visionaries, without a doubt) thinks the desktop is dead and extols the coming age of the Internet cloud in the pages of Wired, certainly no stranger to cyber-utopian manifestos. In “Information Factories,” he makes quite a case for the upcoming “Petabyte Age”:

We’re all petaphiles now, plugged into a world of petabytes, petaops, petaflops. Mouthing the prefix peta (signifying numbers of the magnitude 10 to the 15th power, a million billion) and the Latin verb petere (to search), we are doubly petacentric in our peregrinations through the hypertrophic network cloud.

Dell has established a cloud computing page for data centers, capitalizing on the trend.
Amazon.com takes it one step further, offering up the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, “a Web-based service that allows business subscribers to run application programs in the Amazon.com computing environment. The EC2 can serve as a practically unlimited set of virtual machines.” Jason Kolb thinks that this is an important idea to track, one that will “completely change the face of hosting and how we look at servers. “

I can’t help think cloud computing is simply utility computing repackaged in a more attractive (if gauzy) name. Tech evangelists, marketers and CEOs may prefer to talk about computing resources “in the cloud” rather than as humdrum “utilities.”

For reference’s sake, WhatIs.com defines utility computing as:

…a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a flat rate. Like other types of on-demand computing (such as grid computing), the utility model seeks to maximize the efficient use of resources and/or minimize associated costs.

The word utility is used to make an analogy to other services, such as electrical power, that seek to meet fluctuating customer needs, and charge for the resources based on usage rather than on a flat-rate basis. This approach, sometimes known as pay-per-use or metered services is becoming increasingly common in enterprise computing and is sometimes used for the consumer market as well, for Internet service, Web site access, file sharing, and other applications.

What do you think? Is on-demand computing from the likes of Google, Apple, Dell and Amazon the future of the Web? Or is it an outgrowth of the utility computing that Sun and HP have been experimenting with for some time? (The Wikipedians seem to agree, at least today, that utility computing = cloud computing). Will small businesses and organizations eventually never buy or see the servers they use, nor need to worry about supporting that expensive hardware ? Is “the cloud” just hype — or do we need to write up a definition?