FOSE Opening Keynote: David Girouard

Written by Jerry Stern

Google sent the Vice President in charge of their Google Enterprise division for the first keynote address and slide show of the FOSE conference at the DC Convention Center. According to David Girouard, the future is in the clouds. Well, cloud computing. Yes, this speech was given on April Fool’s Day, also known as the 4th anniversary of the launch of GMail, but what he was promoting was the migration of documents onto the ‘cloud’ (storage on the Internet) and positioning Google as a SAAS vendor.

Those of you who attended the Software Industry Conference during the years it was in Florida around ten years ago will remember that SAAS, or Software as a Service, was really big back then, but it resulted in very little. Now, bandwidth and connectivity for business users is good enough and fast enough that SAAS may be practical for specific applications.

Putting documents into the cloud is already what Google is living on. All their documents, spreadsheets, slide shows, etc, are hosted live on the Google Apps site (www.google.com/a). Nothing is stored on workstations, and their technology now includes sharing of documents between collaborators, with tracking of edits and changes.

Girouard reports that lots of business notebooks are lost worldwide, usually with business data. He had one stolen from a parked car the day before a big meeting. The next morning, he stopped by the Google IT department, picked up a new notebook, switching to a Mac while he as there, logged in to Apps, and was up and running immediately, with less than half an hour lost.

This isn’t just Google eating their own brand of dog food. Girouard showed an impressive list of Fortune 500 companies that are using Google’s GMail with Postini spam filtering for 100% of their email storage. It’s all online, manageable and controllable by corporate management.

Grinding your Personal Information– Your Tax Dollars at Work

I’m back from my annual one-day jaunt down to Washington DC for the computer show formerly known as the Federal Office Systems Exposition. Now, it’s just FOSE, pronounced ‘fah-cee.’ You can get a good feel for what’s happening in the government computer markets based on what’s showing in the DC Convention Center.

This year, the main hall of the Convention Center was busy, but only at about 2/3 capacity. This show has never filled the new convention center–the old one was retired a few years back and two blocks south, and that one was always full. But this is a bigger building, and the show is smaller than it used to be. Actually, the show floor covers two city blocks, below ground, and if you go up to the registration area or up another floor to the keynote and conference rooms, it’s clear that it’s really two buildings. There’s even a DC Metro train stop at one end of the building, shared with Mt. Vernon Square.

For the last two years, the dominant items on the show floor have been removable storage devices with security features, and eGovernment systems for converting agencies with actual people into web sites with actual forms and automation. That’s progress in the US capital, maybe.

This year, regulations have changed regarding the destruction of personal data. And the US military is being more careful too. So, the item that wasn’t visible in previous years, that was everywhere this year, is demolition of computer hardware, shown by at least seven companies. First, there was a degaussing machine (OK, three different machines), that rotate a hard drive through a massive magnetic field. I fed in a hard drive, but there was no visible change–their demo didn’t actually show that the drive had lost all formatting, including servo tracks.

Degaussing isn’t visible enough for government use, apparently. They want to look at a device and SEE that it’s not readable. In the dark, apparently.

That means there was a vendor that sells a machine (with a hidden sound-muffled hydraulic compressor) that folds hard drives in half, the long way–it’s a clean 90 degree bend. Another had a hard drive destroyer that pushes a 2″ blunt cone down into the center of the drive until it becomes visible on the far side, shattering the platters. Again, it’s pneumatic, using a compressor.

There was another machine that folded drives, but electric or hand-crank operated for field use in a battlefield. There was a truck-mount hard drive shredder that reduces the drives to 1″ or smaller chunks–that one wasn’t on the show floor–it’s driven to clients for mass destruction of drives. And another portable device snipped the drives in half with a hydraulic claw.

Not to be outdone, another vendor had samples of what comes out of their computer shredder. Yes, the entire computer. But wait, there’s more… one supplier to the US government is actually doing it right–they shred the entire computer, grind it into fine dust, sort it both magnetically and by density into its component bits of metal alloys, plastic, gold, all the good stuff, and recycle it. They showed off clear containers of the various sorted powders.

So, your next appliance may contain 5% recycled US military computer parts and data. Guaranteed unreadable by the current level of technology.

Elsewhere at the show, there were the usual vendors, a mixture of the software companies you know, and the government specialists that build their offices around the edges of DC–locally, they’re called ‘Beltway Bandits.’

Last year, Google had a shared area in a small booth, showing off their hardware search technology that they install on client sites for searches of private networks–it’s called a ‘search appliance.’ This year, they had one of the largest areas on the floor, with seating for seminars in groups of around 50 people, and they gave introductory lessons on buying adwords, and showed what Google Earth could do for the military, and demonstrating the new real-time Google Earth weather alerts.

More tomorrow…

Nero 7 Essentials

I’ve been getting some very specific complaints about Nero 7 Essentials. “The computer slows down. It crashes. Started with the new DVD writer.” All the drives in question were bundled with the OEM version of Nero 7 Essentials. Time for another test. Test box for today is running an Athlon XP 1900+, Windows 2000 Pro with Service Pack 4, no antivirus or security software whatsoever, lots of memory and drive space, and not much on the hard drive.

Before the install, I ran Hijack This and added everything to the ‘ignore’ list, and ran CCleaner, and accepted every registry issue found–it’s a clean test box, so there wasn’t much.

Started the install:
Nero 7 Welcome Screen

I chose all the default options:
Nero 7 typical install

At the truly arrogant file options, I made no changes–Nero wants to be your program for everything related to content. Apparently it’s more than a DVD burning program, in the opinion of the publisher.
Nero 7 file options

At the install options, I again made no changes. Note the “Nero Scout” item at bottom left, unchecked by default.
Nero 7 options

The install completed without problems. I restarted the computer, and went looking. No new system tray icon appears, and no indication that I’ve installed anything more than a DVD burner. But wait, there’s something–in the Windows menus, in the Nero group, I see Nero Scout. Ooh, options. Here’s the view–it’s ON by default, and installed without asking:
Nero 7 indexing without asking

Ran HijackThis again. There are only two new entries:
O4 – HKLM\..\Run: [NeroFilterCheck]
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\Lib\NeroCheck.exe
O23 – Service: NMIndexingService – Nero AG –
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\Lib\NMIndexingService.exe

So my DVD burner software includes a full indexing scan for files, also called ‘desktop search’, on by default, of all types (it’s on that ‘Files’ tab), with no system tray icon, and no obvious place to type in a search. What does this have to do with burning a DVD? (Nero, if you’re reading this, send me an answer–I’ll post it.)

I won’t comment much on the functionality of the product, except for one item: DVD-video functions (Nero Vision and some other areas) work for 30 days, then display an expired message. OK, I have no problem with a vendor trying to upsell, but announce that the product is half real and half 30-day trial in advance, and give me an option to uninstall the dead software chunks–I don’t need all this clutter.

Uninstalled. No error messages. Restarted the PC. Ran HijackThis a third time, and both autostart entries have been removed–good so far. Under C:\Program Files, there’s a leftover folder “Nero” containing 4 files and 2 more folders. Sloppy, but not unusually so. There’s a file left in the c:\WinNT folder, “NeroDigital.ini”.

Ran CCleaner, and checked the registry. Remember, I cleaned it before the install. There are now 380 registry errors. These are in the categories of:

    ‘Unused File Extension’ mostly for graphics still formats,
    ‘ActiveX/COM Issue’ for ‘AppCore.MediaSource,
    ‘Invalid or empty file class’ for CDmaker, and
    several hundred “Open with Application Issue’ entries, pointing to “HKCR\NeroExpress.Files7…”

Overall results:
Is it startupware? Absolutely. It adds two autoplay entries, one totally unrelated to the program’s function, doesn’t ask permission before adding the unrelated functions, and turns on a processor-intensive application by silent default.

Recommendations–

First, don’t install with the defaults. Uncheck every file format on ALL the pages in the install options, except those that you’ll really use the program for. If in doubt, uncheck it.

Second, check off that box: “Configure Nero Scout on first usage” and then disable it.

Or find the autoplay entry for Nero Scout, it’s in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Services, NMIndexingService–choose stop, and disable. Then find and delete the file:
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Ahead\Lib\NMIndexingService.exe

And finally, consider some other program. This install doesn’t inspire trust.