This week, I have had to return to some networking fundamentals to emphasize a few points regarding how much an IT department can and should do themselves when it comes to network cabling.

At first glance, pulling your own network cables seems like a cost effective way to save money for a company. Many might make their own patch cables, after ordering the cable in bulk. While the fundamentals of the “do-it-yourself” network cabling project are straight forward, there are a few considerations that go into choosing the right cable for the job which often get overlooked.  This may help you when you are staring at that box of network cable, wondering how it compares to the box right next to it.

It can also be used as material to present to management if you change the title to “Why organizations should outsource network cabling projects to people who know what they are doing.”

Patch Cables are not for Wall Cabling

There is a difference in patch cabling versus normal wall cabling.  Don’t buy one for the other.  It is as fundamental as the reason an electrician use different wire in the wall than you do for an extension cord.

Wall cabling is made of solid wire.  Just like the electrical wire in your home, it is expected that this wire will sit unmoved as it connects the connection in the wall back to the source or patch panel.

Just like the extension cords in your home or on your appliances, Patch Cabling is made of stranded wire.  Many small wires wrapped together make continuous movement of the cable possible; reducing the likely hood it will break.  This is the wire that goes from your computer, back to the wall, or from the patch panel, back to the network switch.

The physical differences are enough that you don’t want to change the roles of these two types of cables.  The cabling has an entire industry of connectors relying on the wire to be solid or stranded in order to successfully connect and stay connected.

Pre-Decision on UTP Cat5e

There are different grades of cable available when you approach your networking project.  I will fast forward the conversation as most people find themselves looking at Cat 5e UTP cable as a standard.  The UTP is Unshielded Twisted Pair, and the category number represents the performance of the cable as it was tested and approved.  Yes, there is category 6, but the release of category 5 enhanced (that’s where the 5e comes from) has been approved for gigabit traffic and has such an arguably close tolerance to category 6, that most people find themselves at category 5e.

UTP Shielding Options

Here is one of the more overlooked options that seem to be overlooked.  While the internals of our Cat 5e cable defines the quality of the data that runs over it, there are different jacketing materials and classifications for the outside of the cable itself which can be important.   Most of these derived from general wiring requirements for fire code.

All bulk format UTP network cable comes with a different rating in order to meet different UL-NEC requirements.  This is the rating of the National Electric Code, which is published by the National Fire Protection Association.  The majority of what you find available will be labeled CM, CMG, CMR, or CMP, while you might stumble upon a CMH or a CMX.

The good news is that you can put them in a ranking order, with CMP at the top, but when you consider cabling an entire facility and you don’t need CMP, then the cost is significant enough to recognize the alternatives.

The ‘P’ in CMP is for Plenum.  In HVAC world if any part of your air flow that would go through your heating or air flow system is referred to as plenum.  This would include inside of the ducts themselves or in areas where return air is cycled above ceiling tiles.   These cables are meant to have a low-smoke and are less toxic when the jacket material burns.

The ‘R’ in CMR is for ‘Riser’.  Riser cables are designed to prevent the spread of fire from floor to floor and are setup for vertical shaft applications. If you are running cable from one floor to another, CMR would the minimum.  They may be overkill in a residential application, as they were designed to separate fire zones.

CMG and CM are the general cables to be used everywhere else.  They pass the vertical flame tests, and most likely the cables you will install in a residential application.

US & Canada Fire certifications (Source – Wikipedia)

Class            Acronym                        Standards

CMP            Plenum                        CSA FT7 [11] or NFPA 262 [11](UL 910)

CMR            Riser                                    UL 1666

CMG            General purpose            CSA FT4

CM                                                   UL 1685 (UL 1581, Sec. 1160) Vertical-Tray

CMX            Residential                        UL 1581, Sec. 1080 (VW-1)

CMH                                                  CSA FT1

Testing 123

While most departments have a cable tester able to light up a fancy LED light when their cable is successfully connected, few possess the equipment to truly diagnosis network cabling.  Unshielded Twisted Pair cable is designed to have different twists of cabling in order to prevent noise or attenuation in the cable.  While a blinky LED light will tell you if you have the right cable hooked up at both ends, it falls short on telling you that you have a connection capable of transmitting data across.  After you invest the money in the material, the time, and the equipment to make your cabling project come true, you might want to consider outsourcing it next time to a company specialized in network cabling.

If you haven’t watched this video on hard drives in copiers, take 5 minutes and have a look. It is a quick glimpse into how vulnerable the information that is stored on copiers really is, because they store nearly everything you do on a hard drive.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

After a few months of showing presentations out about the HITECH Act, this adds fuel to the fire of how loose our data control really is.  As hospitals, or in my case non-profit health care providers work to comply with regulations, it shows how mis-applied the regulations are to preventing data loss.

How exactly does this affect HIPAA & HITECH?

This constitutes a breach of confidential information, putting you right in line with the provisions regarding secure data loss and your control of that information.

Anybody who has access to or deals with Personal Health Information, including vendors who support systems that control such information need to sign a business agreement, now holding them liable for the same extortion level fines that the covered entity.  Before you run out and try to find your local HIPAA certified copier technician, I will give you a clue.  The copier resale industry is not anywhere close to recognizing the impact of this.  While I may retire from my job tomorrow to open a copier technician company revolving around securing and encrypting copier drives, the real copier industry just isn’t there yet.

That is not to say the copier companies themselves aren’t aware.  In fact most manufacturers offer encrypted drives and systems that wipe the information from any form of buffer.  The problem is that nobody buys a copier direct from Xerox any more and  you will find that your local copier resale rep knows less about encryption or media sanitization than the Buffalo Police department.

How do we react, while we wait for the industry to mature enough to have this problem taken care of?

• Contact your copier lease company and inform them that all hard drives will be removed before returning the copier.  Frankly at this point, you should’t care what the lease terms say regarding this.  Run them through a validated media sanitization company, with the rest of your hard drives.  Don’t rely on any claims that the copier company will handle the destruction, until they are a signed Business Associate, placing them in fiscal responsibility.
• Prepare  you copier reseller for the discussion on a business vendor agreement surrounding the regulations of HIPAA, if they aren’t already.
• Keep a log of any support calls for the copier and approach each technician who shows up to work on that copier with legal disclaimers, ensuring the same HIPAA partner agreements.
• Possibly tag or mark the hard drive inside of the machine itself, taking inventory of it’s serial number for tracking reference.
• Wait for the same episode to come out regarding how insecure faxes and fax machines are, because we choose to ignore that too.

Despite what is happening in technology on a global, corporate, or even economic scale, there are a few questions that people never stop asking that bring it all back into reality for me.  Only slightly less popular than “what computer should I buy” is the age old question of “What anti-virus software should I use?”.  For the record, I don’t like any of the anti-virus software available. Knowing that, my selection process is which one seems to be the better of the worst options available.  I wouldn’t pay for any of the commercial ones available, so up until now I would recommend AVG’s free anti-virus.  It seems that Microsoft themselves have brought a formidable solution to the table and decided to offer it for the right price to pay attention to…free.

In October of 2009 Microsoft released their Microsoft Security Essentials software as an anti-virus solution for Windows XP, Vista and 7 machines.  After 5 months of poking it with a stick, I have changed my recommendation to anybody who asks what anti-virus to use.  Microsoft has filled in a large hole with in their missing suite of security and delivered it quietly.

I rarely throw Microsoft’s name into the same sentence as security software.  I also think the big names solutions miss the mark when it comes to filling in only the missing holes in an otherwise stable operating system. Over the past 5 years the anti-virus market has turned into bloat-ware, delivering solutions that took over every aspect of your operating system from networking to browser applications. Somewhere in these bloated suites they also have anti-virus software, setup to monitor and scan for known infected files.  As a consumer it has almost been difficult to find a solution that only offers anti-virus.

Don’t I need all of that other stuff?

Service Pack 2 in Windows XP marked a pivotal moment in security for all Windows machines. It was this update which turned on your Windows Firewall by default.  I remember what life was like before that update, as virus protection was a serious problem as viruses spread through networks like wildfire.  Adding another layer of software and protocols on top of the ones already in place risk bringing things to a crawl.

What it does right

• Free always sits well with people.  I learned a long time ago that some of the best software available is free. It certainly makes it attractive to not have to pay a yearly extortion fee for software that might catch the viruses.
• It is simple to install. I sent my mother-in-law a 4 step instruction of download – uninstall old – reboot – install and I got an email back 20 minutes later with her telling me it was done.
• It let’s you control what you want to scan, where you want to scan and when you want to scan.  The simple settings that can either strangle a piece of software or set it free.
• It is happy running quietly in the corner. There are few annoying pop ups telling you to buy into something or to allow something to happen.
• It is lite.  By allowing the operating system to use it’s naturally established utilities like the firewall, it doesn’t seem to completely strangle the operating system.  Somebody more ambitious than I am will need to run some statistics on that one.

Why haven’t I heard about this?

You might begin to wonder why Microsoft doesn’t just build this into their operating system suite.  After years of anti-trust agreements and the creation of a software security industry, the software giants hold more control of this fact than Microsoft does.  Microsoft needs to leave this as a third party application to keep the major powers at peace. It also attributes to why Microsoft isn’t pushing the marketing of this software or why you might not have known.

I do not think Microsoft Security Essentials is the final answer in security, but I think it is the best option off the market to fill in that void of protection for home users.  Without some standardized practices like maintaining your software updates, isolating your computer from the Internet and not clicking on everything you are presented with from a webpage, this software will not save you. Neither will that other software you paid too much for.

Dear Toyota,

I am sorry. I am sorry that you have to sell your cars to a society that no longer knows how to to drive. I am sorry that there is somebody that exists out there that would sit back and let a car take them up to 90 MPH without realizing there is more a brake pedal and a gas pedal available to them. The fact that nobody had enough common sense to put the car in neutral, or even turn off the engine while that car sped up escapes me. I am also sorry that we hand out drivers licenses to anybody who asks for one and performs a 3 point turn…once.

This is not a complete pity party because the Toyota ABS does in fact suck. My wife and I have an 2008 FJ Cruiser, and last weekend I drove a friends 2005 4 Runner. Both vehicles experience the same crappy experience in the snow, which I can reproduce for you once the snow returns. Add a slight inclined hill and speed under 15 MPH, hit the brakes, and the car will not stop. The ABS goes through some sort of seizure maneuver and actually feels like it speeds up the vehicle by ignoring the next 5 seconds of input from the sensors. It may not seem significant at slow speeds, but on snowy roads, it means you are in the intersection if you don’t react to the braking failure. I realize these vehicles haven’t made the recall list…yet.

No two vehicles ever have the same experience driving. The first snowfall of the year we took the FJ Cruiser out and learned how it was going to react. Although we weren’t thrilled about the lack of ABS at low speeds, we modified our expectations and driving patterns to adjust.

Perhaps it is your fault for making the Prius too easy to drive. You have started to feed a condition that seems to be sweeping across america like an epidemic.

I was grateful to hear that you stood up for yourselves this week, disputing the claims from James Sikes regarding his runaway car…for 30 miles.

While it will be difficult to ever identify what really happened that day, I can tell you with confidence that it was not driving.

I have written posts in the past about Facebook, giving advice on how to manage and secure your profile. For the most part it was mean to cover your everyday stalker or control the face time you have with somebody you barely remember from high school 20 years ago.
Today I had the same Facebook presentation with a much more serious context.  Instead of protecting your Facebook profile against weird acquaintances from high school, imagine throwing a layer of HIPAA on top of that concern.  Not to be taken lightly are the legal ramifications it has if your friend request is from a patient or consumer. Protecting the confidentiality that you can even acknowledge you know this person will get you into hot water with the strickest compliancy officer.

Unfortunately my presentation and speech were as un-0fficial as I could make them placing me once again in the secret change agent role.  So why the secret identity or even the un-official nature of a corporate discussion on Facebook?

The Love Hate Turmoil over Facebook

Every organization, corporation, medical facility around the country is undergoing a state of mental turmoil over social networking and Facebook.  The problems are easy to identify from the shoes of the HR department.  They struggle against the losses in productivity, legal risk of what employees might say online, and the negative impact it has on the company name.  Pitted up against this struggle is the risk of loosing employee moral, the legal ramifications of policing an employees personal opinion, and really the inability to try and control something, which, can not be controlled.

Protect Thyself

While the HR department fights to come up with policies on social networking, there is still an important need within the walls of organizations around the country.  Teach the people who use Facebook how to protect themselves, and you will protect the organization.

Today’s presentation was a play on the basic premise that seems to be working.

Create Lists > Add People to Lists > Restrict Content to the list

Start with Greg’s Facebook Survival Guide which links to the two other posts on Facebook Protection. While Facebook continues to update their interface, the process is the same.

Here is the presentation itself from today, as a PDF file. Facebook_Survival_Guide-10March2010

Questions and Answers

Block it ALL? - While I have a lot of people and am rather protective of the content I put online, an excellent perspective came out of today’s discussion.  Block everything, and add people to groups to gain privileges.  By nature, this plays into how the lists work, and IS a natural setup and progression. As of right now, if you add somebody to TWO lists, the applied permissions take the least restrictive perspective of the two.

Check my Public Profile? – By nature when you click on the View my Profile button available in the

Privacy Settings, you are looking at your public profile.  If in doubt, you can logout and navigate back to your own page.

I managed to loose half of my day yesterday, thanks to a malware infection on the One Lap blog.  It was more like an irritating rash really, but one that scarred our front page with a link to some off branded male enhancement drug.  I wish you could just buy the little blue pills like Advil, as it would eliminate 90% of SPAM, malware and exploits on the Internet.  It almost pains me to put the name of the site in this post, as I know they win by propagating their name once again.

After backing everything up and changing all of the account logins, I had the not-so pleasant task of finding the infection. Following the path of most repair work, I started with Google.  I also found a lot of dead ends and blanket fixes.

I figured I would dump some of the more useful links I could find up here, to help the next soul looking to get rid of the annoying link on the top of their website for kamagra.  Most of the first searches out there, have you hacking away at unknown base64 files, eventually resulting in a complete lobotomy of your site functionality before it is rebuilt with new files.

Run through some best practices first and reset your account passwords for the site, including your FTP accounts.  Realistically the attacker used an SQL injection, allowing them to write straight to the database.  These holes are common during the flexible days before the patches are released.  If you were lucky, the only thing that was added was an annoying link.  So far, that is the only thing I have found.

The code was found in the WP_OPTIONS table in the database, which is where the plugins and other toys get to write to for WordPress. Search through the table for some key words and you will find the inputted entry.  Delete the entire entry and the text goes away. It sounds much easier, now that I know where to look.

Here is the discussion again, between a site owner who knows more than the people offering advice. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/304847

There were a couple useful tools to help parse through this crap.  The Exploit Scanner Plugin, helped draw out some of the code that didn’t look right.  Use with caution and don’t just delete everything it says.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exploit-scanner/

That helped me pull out the code that was not supposed to be there, allowing me to find the first post of where it was hiding. Their example didn’t have the little pill as the problem, so I didn’t see it initially as I was searching for our miracle drug.

The Morning After

Having a small celebration after getting the malware off of your WordPress site, only to find the next morning the code is right back on the top of your site?  Well we only removed the entry in the database on the first round. Now we need to get rid of the code setup to run to put it back in place on a scheduled basis.

Now we need to dig into where this is being initiated from.  If you search through your files for credit_text2, you won’t find anything.  That is because they have encoded the text itself inside of a function file you don’t actually need.

Inside of the header.php file, there was a call to a start_template() function, directly after the body.  If you open up the

start_template.php file, you find a pile of encoded garbled junk.

Take the meat of that junk, and use one of the freely available Base 64 Decoders online to decode the file.

http://www.opinionatedgeek.com/dotnet/tools/Base64Decode/

In this particular case, the code was coded twice.  So take the output of the first round of decoding, and run it through the decoder again.

That presents us with the following code. If you notice the time reference, you now see why this annoyance comes back around.

Now our second round of cleanup to see if we can last 24 hours without getting a return of the exploit.

• Delete the function call out of the header.php & remove the call to the require_once line that names the license file.  There are valid calls to these files in my theme, which tells me the entire theme may have been exploited.
• If you delete the start_template.php file and it breaks the site, it is probably being called as required once some place else.  Start by removing everything from the file, or leaving only the PHP call in the file.

My role as a secret change agent takes on many disguises. My technology credentials are strong enough to move me throughout the nerd community undetected.  As technology brings businesses, communities, and people together, I am able to stretch my legs into new areas, leveraging my technology credentials as  a form of VIP card.  Now I find myself in a new, though not unfamiliar role inside of the world of medical legislation. With an official title of IT Coordinator, I now carry the badge of HIPAA security officer.  Take the fast moving world of technology, watch the reaction when you mix in government legislation and the medical community, and you have the perfect train wreck for a change agent to prevent.

One year is a lifetime for technology, but one year moves really fast in the world of legislation.  While HIPAA policies are based off of legislation, meetings and adjustments representing a rather painful process from a change agent perspective, the technology screws were tightened this year, causing some growing pains throughout the HIPAA community.  Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of the HITECH Act, which also marks the deadline to implement the Act. Before we celebrate the anniversary, let’s run down what this means and what we missed.

The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH Act) was part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA)of 2009 or the economic stimulus plan that came about in February 2009. It has a series of dates and deadlines throughout the year, bringing us to this 1 year anniversary on February 18th, 2010 when it goes into effect.

If HIPAA was the neighborhood watch, setup to protect us in the medical world with rules and guidelines, the HITECH Act would be Tony Soprano, coming to break your knee caps if you weren’t playing by the rules. It doesn’t tell you how to fix everything wrong with your HIPAA policy, but sets up some pretty strict penalties for when you get it wrong.

Let’s review what happened so far…

February 17, 2009 – HITECH Act Enacted

April 20, 2009 – (60 Days)

Human Health Services must set forth a list of technologies and methodologies that render information “unusable, unreadable or indecipherable.”

Result: section 13402(h) of the Act, which really should be called the “Oh, that’s what encryption is” Act. While the tech industry knew what encryption meant, the medical world didn’t want to listen. Frankly, they made up their own interpretation of what encryption was and it was painful.

HHS & FTC Guidance Rules

August 18, 2009 – (180 Days)

HHS and FTC must each publish “interim final” regulations on breach notification. These regulations apply to breaches discovered on or after the “interim final” regulations have been published.

Result: Section 13402 of Subtitle D

There is an entire layering system defining who you are required to tell and notify if you loose information, starting with the owner of the information you lost. It is rather thick, but on the scary side of things people are legally bound to notify the news media if you breach over 500 records.  The new focus is also on the Burden of Proof, requiring everybody to prove that they notified everybody and that the message was received.

December 31, 2009 -

Due date for the HHS to adopt rules for the first set of standards regarding disclosures and accounting for disclosures. Then they have a 6 month stopwatch starting which requires them to implement the standard.

You are going to want to read up on Sec. 13405 for this one.  That defines what the HHS needs to have in order to process all of this information they are about to unleash.  This covers what needs to be disclosed, what can’t be disclosed, how long you need to prove that you disclosed the information and a few other guidelines to make sure you follow through. I read through it and ran out of white boards to draw the number of clauses.

February 18th 2010

This marks the date when everything is adhered to and organizations are responsible for following the legislation. The HIPAA Survival Guide site, setup a great breakdown of what just happened and what is about to take effect and do a much better job tying it all together, but here is the summary of what is happening.

• Organizations are to apply the rules, are accountable for their consequences along with all business associates.
• Patient’s right to restrict disclosures to health plans.
• Deeming of limited data set as satisfying the minimum necessary standard.
• Patient’s right to electronic access to, and an electronic copy of, their health record.
• Clarification regarding marketing provisions.
• Opt-out for fund raising communications; HIPAA’s current provisions regarding fund raising remain in full force an effect.
• Clarification regarding the ability to impose criminal penalties against individuals.
• Civil monetary penalties and settlements flowing to HHS/OCR (Office of Civil Rights) for enforcement.
• Requirement for HHS to begin conducting mandatory audits.

The last one is important. (hence the powerful red color) No longer does the HHS only hold the right to conduct audits, they are required do. Now that the legislation is in place for the monetary values, they will hold audits, and they will collect your money.

What do I expect to really see out of this?   6 months from now, they want to review all of the initial findings from the audits and report back to the federal government.  I would predict that things will not be as secure as they “envisioned” when they wrote the act in the first place.  The government will tighten the screws a little more, legislation will react, and we will fall into a cycle that keeps us chasing stronger regulations.

That prediction isn’t what will happen, because there are factors in the mix that nobody wants to acknowledge.   Without tipping my entire hand, let’s just say that my work as a secret change agent is just beginning.

Regardless, nobody wants to be involved in the first round of audits, including the auditors.  So expect some scrambling around and tidying up as the first wave reaches the shore.

Facebook allows anybody to start a Group or a Page, but is not until you have actually created one do you understand which direction to pick.

Adding a Facebook Page should be part of every business owners “list of free tools I should take advantage of on the Internet to enhance viral marketing”.  As of this post, you can not magically transform a group into a page without having some sort of VIP card into the support team of Facebook, so I wanted to offer some insight as to why your business should have a page setup.

Search Engine Journal has a nice comparison chart between a group and a page if you are still the fence about which one to choose.

From a marketing perspective, the Page offers a few distinct advantages.

1. A page can be viewed by non Facebook members.  Among a list of reasons why that is powerful is the fact that it opens up the page to be indexed by the search engines.
2. A page will provide statistical analysis in terms of users, time online, demographics, all in the form of what they call “Insights”.

Don’t laugh too hard that I have two empty graphs here.  I created this particular Facebook Page while I wrote this post. The idea is that I can return to you in 6 months and show you how to interpret the trends and turning them into useful information.  That is of course if I get anybody to add the page.

Last year we took an epic journey into the racing world by establishing a team to run in the One Lap of America.  We started a Facebook group, allowing us to coordinate members of that group, schedule meeting events, and create some communication paths for people to follow us.  We didn’t know it then, but what we needed was a page.

Facebook Page of RochesterDSM One Lap Team

While we were not a business, we wanted to use the page for the same reasons, which was to promote our escapades across the country.

The Facebook Page becomes a free extension of your own website, allowing you to have instant access to a photo gallery, discussion boards and resources that allow fans of your product to keep up to date and help spread the word.

Updating the page is amazingly easy for a team traveling across the country with limited internet access, as they allow you to even post updates by providing you with an email address.  Setting up the page to tie back into Twitter and becomes quite a useful resource for getting information updates published.

If you own a business, setup a Facebook Page. If you want to promote a brand, setup a Facebook Page.  If you want to have closed door meeting, allowing select members into those meetings without the prying eyes of the Internet, setup a Facebook Group.

In case you missed the technical specs of the new Apple iPad, you may have overlooked the word “micro” in front of the SIM card slot on the iPad.  That can be read a couple of ways, and certainly will be touted as a move to the new standard by Apple and AT&T.

It really can’t be a standard, when the rest of the planet still conforms to a standard SIM card size for every device. The Micro SIM has been slow to adopt, because it is frankly not needed.   Apple’s move to put the Micro SIM card into the iPad can be seen as nothing more than a blocking attempt to keep current data users from putting taking their SIM card out of their iPhone and putting it into the iPad.

That doesn’t mean people won’t try and make it work. The micro SIM card is smaller, yet retains the same contact patch for connectivity. I would certainly trim down a SIM card to see if it works.  You would need to create an adapter ring to put it back in the iPhone.  Seems a little more reasonable than paying for another unlimited data plan.  The industry really needs to stop using the word unlimited in describing anything.

In the mean time, good luck finding a carrier who knows what a Micro SIM card is.  While T-Mobile announced some platform movements in that direction at CES this year, the low availability of the cards themselves, will cause some hiccups on rolling out the iPad.  While the rest of the devices on the AT&T network use a normal SIM card, having one device that does not, will certainly cause complications.

In the realm of technology, I consider Apple to be what BMW is to automobiles.  They both make beautiful and well engineered hardware which induces an experience more evolved than mere driving or computing.  Apple has done it again this week when they announced their new product, the iPad.  Lying somewhere between a tablet computer and an eBook reader, the iPad is another showpiece of Apple engineering and design.   There was only one flaw in the logic when creating this new revolutionary device.  Apple has gone and created the most beautiful piece of hardware, which nobody needs.

Whether you know it or not, the iPad has many battles on it’s road to gaining consumer acceptance. With such a grand build up of publicity, the expectations are that this device will do more.  More than what we already do in an E Book reader, more than what we already do in a tablet computer, and certainly more than we can do in a netbook.

Where the iPad looses the eBook battle.

The Kindle didn’t win over the market for the excellent hardware design.  With awkward buttons conveniently placed where you need to hold onto the device, the Kindle is no challenging threat at all. Putting the iPad next to the Kindle would clearly expose how superior the Apple product is yet again.  Right?

The widespread adoption of the Kindle had little to do with the hardware.  As long as Apple captures everything that the Kindle does within the eReader experience, they should have no problem winning over that market.  First on that list, is it’s ability to be always connected.

It was impressive that Apple was able to get AT&T to setup non-contractual terms for the iPad. Unfortunately, contract or not, nobody wants to deal with AT&T to get, well, anything.  Especially when the agreement for the data connection on the Kindle all happens in the background.  Having an always connected service is far more magical than my ability to pay AT&T more on a monthly basis.  When you can buy a Kindle and get to download content indefinitely, it doesn’t look good to pay $29.99 a month, or $360 for the first year for unlimited data.

The Apple iPad will have a 10 hour battery life, while in use. Certainly they must mean 10 days, right?  Today most eBook readers last a week without charging.  The entire advantage about NOT having a backlit screen is to use the E ink technology to deliver content without using a lot of energy.

Talking about that E ink technology, don’t expect to bring this iPad outside to the beach, where the glaring sun is really going to do a number on a big glossy display screen.  Not too many people curl up to read a book and look for darkness.

Apple may have missed the book reader demographic, but surely this is a revolutionary tablet computer.

Where the iPad looses the Tablet battle.

I am not sure there is a tablet war. You see, this tablet concept is not new at all.  I still have my Honeywell Webpad from 10 years ago.  While they have gotten rid of the pen for the interface, the iPad misses some key elements if it is to revolutionize the tablet platform.

In true Apple fashion, they couldn’t have just stuck a standard SD card slot or even a USB slot into the side of the iPad. That may have actually made it useful to offloading camera pictures, or replacing that electronic picture frame on the mantel, which is even capable of such an easy task.  Luckily it looks like Apple is nice enough to sell an additional adapter at an inflated cost that will allow that SD card hookup and it comes with one adapter for USB.

It may not be a prominent feature, but there has to be a large concern about dropping this thing. It doesn’t come with the case to protect it, which I can pay for, and I suspect there will be a large after market surge of protective cases. How about a lanyard hookup? I know it sounds like a step backwards, but when I spend that much money on a perfect piece of hardware, I would feel more comfortable falling back to a good string to keep it safe.  In Apple world, I would suspect to see an anti-gravity kit selling for $59 in the Apple store.

Where is the camera?  If the iPad survives it’s first year, the next version better have a camera.  As I was thinking of what this thing could bring to the tablet market, I kept returning to videophones and web conferencing.  Using Skype and webcams to communicate has only made it into the homes the past couple years.  Put that in a wireless device I can walk around the house with, and you may have opened a useful feature on the list.  While my old tablet didn’t have this either, it was 10 years old.

Where the iPad looses the Netbook battle.

Apple refuses to acknowledge my ability to buy a completely usable notebook computer for under $400.  It doesn’t dismiss the fact that I can.

A large part of the Apple presentation was to show off how you can buy iWork for the iPad, indicating that you might be ready to type up your next novel or prepare a presentation on this “revolutionary” platform.

As soon as I finish retro-fitting my entire office with bean bag chairs and turning my typing productivity down to a crawl, I might be ready for an iPad.  It would appear my options are to use my lap, brace the device with one hand, or to purchase a kit that allows me to type with a keyboard.  They have those devices already, in the form of laptops and netbooks. While the iPad would look really cool around that college coffee shop, it would frustrate me as a platform to use regularly for work.

Will the iPad win the war?

We have this beautifully engineered piece of hardware, which we hopefully have under-estimate in potential.  With so many strikes against it, before it hits the actual market, Apple has some work to do in order to make it a success.  As we have learned with the iPhone, the majority of the success comes through a viral adoption of the technology.  So now the pressure falls to the reaction of the consumers and the app developers.  The platform will only survive if it becomes more than it was sold for. That will not happen when it reaches the shelves.