There's a fascinating piece here about how outsourcing doesn't always work.

I haven't experienced this directly (I'm usually the person brought in on outsource, rather than outsourcing work myself), but it does highlight what is probably an ongoing problem in the outsourcing workspace.

I've spoken before about clearing up after other people's messes, and my wife has in the past experienced issues with some outsourced companies, so I have second-hand (but a very good one) experience of the problems faced.

I hate Internet advertising - not only do I not like seeing it, I refuse to have on any of my websites either.<!--break-->
Why? Mostly because the content of the ad rarely matches the content of the website. Even with the clever work that Google does to target ads according to content, it only takes a few odd words on a site for the content to be strangely irrelevant. For example, visit a specific Jumbo Joke page and you'll get adverts for 'Find your Child', 'Is your teenager taking drugs' and 'Spoiled Tonkinese kittens'.

I hate Internet advertising - not only do I not like seeing it, I refuse to have on any of my websites either.

Why? Mostly because the content of the ad rarely matches the content of the website. Even with the clever work that Google does to target ads according to content, it only takes a few odd words on a site for the content to be strangely irrelevant. For example, visit a specific Jumbo Joke page and you'll get adverts for 'Find your Child', 'Is your teenager taking drugs' and 'Spoiled Tonkinese kittens'.

I visited my parents at the weekend, and as always one of the things I did while there was to do some admin on the computer. Their virus software - CA's ezTrust - had expired (actually, I think the product had been canceled, after them giving it away free through a deal with Microsoft after the SP2 launch). I replaced it with Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus solution - partly because it was easiest, partly cheapest, and partly because it's a product I feel I can trust my parents to use effectively and that will protect their machine without too many potential problems. Personally, I don't use it, both my desktop machines and the servers doing email scanning use ClamAV.

I visited my parents at the weekend, and as always one of the things I did while there was to do some admin on the computer. Their virus software - CA's ezTrust - had expired (actually, I think the product had been canceled, after them giving it away free through a deal with Microsoft after the SP2 launch). I replaced it with Symantec's Norton Anti-Virus solution - partly because it was easiest, partly cheapest, and partly because it's a product I feel I can trust my parents to use effectively and that will protect their machine without too many potential problems. Personally, I don't use it, both my desktop machines and the servers doing email scanning use ClamAV.

Getting a suitable backup solution right often relies on getting the right device, because that device will in turn determine your capacity, rate and the number of tapes required to backup your system.

Tape technology has, for a while, been behind the capacity of the drives on which we store the information, and I've always felt that on a busy disk you need at least it's current capacity plus about 25% to account for changed files.

With individual drives available in 500GB capacities, a milestone in storage is when we can store as much on a single tape as those 500GB drives. Even ignoring the singe drive capacity, it's not uncommon to see half, single or multi-terabyte storage arrays. Now Sun, through their StorageTek division, have achieved that native capacity (up to 1TB compressed) with the new T10000 drive.

Getting a suitable backup solution right often relies on getting the right device, because that device will in turn determine your capacity, rate and the number of tapes required to backup your system.

Tape technology has, for a while, been behind the capacity of the drives on which we store the information, and I've always felt that on a busy disk you need at least it's current capacity plus about 25% to account for changed files.

With individual drives available in 500GB capacities, a milestone in storage is when we can store as much on a single tape as those 500GB drives. Even ignoring the singe drive capacity, it's not uncommon to see half, single or multi-terabyte storage arrays. Now Sun, through their StorageTek division, have achieved that native capacity (up to 1TB compressed) with the new T10000 drive.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has a blog post about office productivity and the vision for sharing information over the Internet as your 'workspace'.

Using Internet storage is something that many different companies have tried over the years, and the level of success and usability depends on a number of different parameters.

First up, the services themselves are varied, but are often based around a single idea that can be extended or expanded into other areas. For example, Apple's .Mac service is based around the iDisk concept, which is then married up with additional functionality like email, Photosharing, web sharing and synchronization and backup services designed to improve the integration and functionality of Mac OS X. For example, I share my address book, mail account info, keychain (stored passwords), and bookmarts between my desktop and laptop.

Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, has a blog post about office productivity and the vision for sharing information over the Internet as your 'workspace'.

Using Internet storage is something that many different companies have tried over the years, and the level of success and usability depends on a number of different parameters.

First up, the services themselves are varied, but are often based around a single idea that can be extended or expanded into other areas. For example, Apple's .Mac service is based around the iDisk concept, which is then married up with additional functionality like email, Photosharing, web sharing and synchronization and backup services designed to improve the integration and functionality of Mac OS X. For example, I share my address book, mail account info, keychain (stored passwords), and bookmarts between my desktop and laptop.

Many people are surprised and fascinated when I tell them that I met my wife on the Internet. That isn't strictly true - we met while both talking at an Internet seminar and only got to know each by email - but people are even more surprised when I tell them we've been married for 10 years and together for 11.

At those Internet seminars - for we went on to do a number of them over the first couple of years - we used to give out copies of Zen and the Art of the Internet. First published in 1992 by the infamous Brendan P Kehoe, Zen taught people about the basic functionality of the Internet and how it could be used.