Context & Continuity

eWeek, 12/15/03: HP Melds Services, Systems

December 15, 2003
By Jeffrey Burt, and Paula Musich

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s decision to fold its services and enterprise systems into a single unit is being met with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism.

Chairman and CEO Carly Fiorina announced the move to combine one of HP's stronger departments—services—with its embattled hardware groups at a meeting with financial analysts in New York last week. The new unit will be called the Technology Solutions Group and will encompass services, software and hardware servers, and storage devices.

...

The merger of the groups won't change what HP is selling, only how the products are sold, said Kevin Francis, president and CEO of IT outsourcer CenterBeam Inc., which uses HP blade servers. "HP is moving to a customer-centric organization focused on delivering the best possible value to its customers, and that is completely aligned with CenterBeam's 'customer-first' philosophy," said Francis, in Santa Clara, Calif.

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The New York Times, 12/14/03: The Year in Ideas

It's taken me a couple of days to digest this, the annual inventory of The Things You Should Know. For me, this is Received Word about what's in and out, equal to the late lamented W In/Out issue. So, in case you haven't made the pilgramage, then do so now.

From the introduction:

Each December, The New York Times Magazine looks back at the year through an unusual lens: ideas. We send out a team of researchers and reporters to investigate the latest thinking in every subject imaginable -- not just war, medicine and politics but also cosmetics, literary theory and Wiffle-ball technology -- and to bring back the most innovative, intriguing, mystifying and promising ideas they can find. Then we boil that vast intellectual stew down to the issue you hold in your hands: an alphabetical encyclopedia of the 67 inventions, breakthroughs and theories (big and small, nice and nasty) that made a difference in 2003.

Although the predictable big thinkers are represented here -- Paul Wolfowitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr., the editors of US Weekly -- an unusual proportion of this year's crop of ideas comes from lone-wolf thinkers of one stripe or another: basement tinkerers, armchair philosophers, mad scientists.

Take Michael Kennedy, a professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, whose big idea this year (G.I. Bill for College Athletes) had absolutely nothing to do with geography but might offer a solution to the conundrum of big-money college athletics. Or consider Frank Polifka, a Kansas wheat farmer, who invented an industrial garbage disposal that works like a contained cyclone (Tornado in a Can). It functions brilliantly, pulverizing waste of all kinds into a fine dust -- but no one (Polifka included) can figure out why. And then there is David Stevenson, a professor at Caltech, who in May came up with a real-life plan to accomplish a longtime dream of science fiction writers and 10-year-olds everywhere: drilling straight down to the center of the earth (The Jules Verne Project).

This issue, then, is not just a compilation of the year's most significant and thought-provoking ideas. It's also a salute to the schemers, oddballs and other unorthodox geniuses toiling away in their labs and libraries, bent on changing the world armed with nothing but a brand-new big idea.
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Computerworld, 12/15/03: Outsourcing Support an Option, Too

Story by Patrick Thibodeau

DECEMBER 15, 2003 ( COMPUTERWORLD ) - Some users say the best way to reduce costs may be to outsource their desktop support to near-shore or offshore providers.

Last spring, Curtis Helsel, vice president of data and technology management at the University of Colorado Foundation, was facing a 30% budget cutback for his Boulder-based organization.

The foundation laid off 55 people, including 12 help desk and network administrators in Helsel's IT department. It was part of a plan to outsource much of the organization's IT infrastructure to San Jose-based CenterBeam Inc.

CenterBeam uses a near-shore facility in Saint John, New Brunswick, to manage PCs, servers, firewalls and backups and to handle patch management. Local Boulder contractors hired through CenterBeam take care of physical hardware problems, but for everything else, users turn to the help desk for support.

Helsel estimates savings to the foundation of about 35% to 40%, most of it in salary costs.

Returning to in-house support "would be extremely expensive for us," he said. "There is a real sense that we are locked into this for the long term."

The Wall Street Journal, 12/5/03: Flights of Angels in Need of A Rest

By DOROTHY RABINOWITZ
[snip]
The film's opening scene, set at the funeral of the young hero's grandmother, finds the rabbi delivering a eulogy that pierces the ceremonial stupor settled over the sparse family of mourners -- a speech whose acid eloquence renders it countless cuts above all the other sermons to follow in the course of these six hours, and there are many. Under a disheveled beard, Ms. Streep disappears into this character so cunningly it becomes easy to forget she's there, the voice of this rabbi's charged reflections about a generation of immigrants -- and their children and grandchildren here in America. That voice comes in heavily accented English so effectively complicated it's impossible, without serious effort, to discern more than a bare trace of a note recognizable as that of Meryl Streep.
[snip]

I've watched the opening sequence described above twice. First, late at night in my home. Second, in the kitchen of the synagogue with my Rabbi. The second time, my eyes teared up when I realized it could have been written for my wife's grandparents.
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