There's a short but important discussion here about the ethical and moral implications of using email in the realm of healthcare.

The story is about medical research, but it spreads to any environment where you want some guarantees about senders and recipients. For example, I welcome the idea of being able to talk to my GP or even just my surgery by email, but irrespective of the level of the discussion, I'm not sure I'd want the content to be read by anybody, casually or otherwise.

There are lots of issues here that go beyond the realms of the current technology. For example, it's all very well for me to encrypt the email I send from my computer so that only my doctor can read it, but how do you ensure that it's me sending the mail, and my doctor receiving it?

Tom Adelstein has a discussion on Microsoft's Get the Facts campaign.

In case you think you've seen it elsewhere, it's also covered at digg.com and there's a shorter piece at O'Reilly's Linux Dev Center.

I've talked about the problems with the approach Microsoft is using on Get the Facts before. Some of the points Microsoft makes are perfectly valid - but only from a very specific (and often unrealistic) position. Therein lies the major problem with the approach and the TCO studies which it uses to support the point of view.

I remember when I first came across Slashdot.org. It was years ago - it must have been, I was still an employee as opposed to my current freelance status - but one of the main focuses of the Slashdot website was free software. At the time Linux was relatively new in the conciousness of the IT professional, even those of us who had been using free software for years at the time.

They key to slashdot was that it aggregated news items from a huge variety of sources and topics into a single feed that would appeal to the Geeks among us. It covers a lot of material - everything from space exploration and science through to BSD, Linux and Perl.

I love my USB drive - it's only 1GB, and I don't use it to transfer files around between machines (I have a network for that), but what I do use it for is a backup of my important files that I can pick up and take away with me (it's on my key ring, so it's hard to forget).

I also keep a copy of my resume on there, just in case while out on a job I need to hand it out (and I've done that a number of times).

However, I can also appreciate that in a typical company, especially when most companies have removed or disabled their floppy drives, allowing individuals to use USB drives is not a good idea. From the simple angle preventing the introduction of viruses and trojans, through to the more complex problem of preventing individuals stealing software and company information.

I've just read Douglas Schweitzer's piece about logs, and the related pieces.

Keeping logs is not as difficult as it seems, but some companies have an interesting approach. I keep logs of everything - I've mentioned before some of the steps I take to keep a record of the IT stuff I do, like using WordPress to store information, particularly changes.

Logs I process on a weekly basis, and I extract the information from them that I feel is valuable (for example, I have records going back years of the emails going to and from the internal network. These are retain indefinitely (they are in a DB so I can search and report on them.

One of the elements of IT that I have never been able to understand the is the use of delaying tactics during a support call. Sometimes the tactics are due to bad training, bad staff or simply inexperienced staff, but sometimes I'm sure it's deliberate.

I'll give you two examples - the first is an 'external' delay with a supplier. A piece of hardware failed, and it's under warranty. I filled in the online form (which you do after registration, where they take all you details). What happened over the next few days could have easily been turned into a IT sitcom. First, by email, I was asked to confirm the serial number of the unit. The fact that I'd filled in this information in both the registration and original support request had been ignored.

There have been many stories recently about how open source is beginning to 'legitimize' itself, how commercial companies are beginning to take open source and Linux in particular seriously, and how open source is itself starting to be a viable business model.

Actually this has been 'coming' for some time - you can look back as far as 2002 when the mainstream media started picking up what the effects of the Linux and open source model would be. For example, read Linux battle becomes political or Linux goes from strength to strength and you'll begin to see where we were header all those years ago. More recently the BBC has again examined the open source world with Open source turns money-spinner.