Examples include:

• GSM mobile phones have an identifier for the phone (separate from the identifier for the user) that can be blacklisted when the phone is stolen.
• Some car radios will stop working when the battery is disconnected, and only start working again when a numeric code is entered. This is intended to deter theft of the radio.
• In Windows Vista, Bitlocker can be used to encrypt files. One of the intended applications for this is that if someone steals your laptop, it will be difficult for them to gain access to your encrypted files.

Ross told a story of what happened when he needed to disconnect the battery on his car: the radio stopped working, and the code he had been given to reactivate it didn’t work - it was the wrong code.
Ross argues that these reactivation codes are unecessary, because other measures taken by the car manufacturers - such as making radios non-standard sizes, and hence not refittable in other car models - have made them redundant.

I described how the motherboard on a laptop had needed to be replaced recently. The motherboard contains the TPM chip, which contains the encryption keys needed to decrypt files protected with Bitlocker. If you replace the motherboard, the files on your hard disk will become unreadable, even if the disk is physically OK. Domain-joined Vista machines can be configured so that a sysadmin somewhere within your organization is able to recover the keys when this happens.

Both of these situations suffer from classic usability problems: the recovery procedures are invoked rarely (so users may not know what they’re supposed to do), and, if your system is configured incorrectly, you only find out when it is too late: you key in the code to your radio and it remains a doorstop; the admin you hoped was escrowing your keys turns out not to have the private key corresponding to the public key you were encrypting under (or, more subtly: the person with the authority to ask for your laptop’s key to be recovered is not you, because the appropriate admin has the wrong name for the laptop’s owner in their database).

I also described what happens when an XBox 360 is stolen. When you buy XBox downloadable content, you buy two licenses: one that’s valid on any XBox, as long as you’re logged in to XBox live; and one that’s valid on just your XBox, regardless of who’s logged in. If a burglar steals your Xbox, and you buy a new one, you need to get another license of the second type (for all the other people in your household who make use of it). The software makes this awkward, because it knows that you already have a license of the first type, and assumes that you couldn’t possibly want to buy it again. The work-around is to get a new email address, a new Microsoft Live Account, and a new Gamer Tag, and use these to repurchase the license. You can’t just change the gamertag, because XBox live doesn’t let the same Microsoft Live account have two gamertags. And yes, I know, your buddies in the MMORPG you were playing know you by your gamertag, so you don’t want to change it.

At the moment, event correlation and event analysis is Gartner’s closest magic quadrant (MQ)  that relates directly to complex event processing (and event processing in general).    

A number of our friends and colleagues would like to position CEP as BRE, BRMS, BPM, SOA, algo trading and just about every other technology under the sun, except event correlation!

In a nutshell, the state-of-the-state of CEP/EP is that a number of firms in the software industry have found some “uncharted magic quadrant waters” and are positioning themselves to be “chart worthy”. Instead of competing head on with the experienced players (event correlation and analysis) that have been in the event processing field for many years.   

As I have mentioned a few times here on The CEP Blog, if the current generation self-described CEP engines were leading the industry in event correlation and analysis (CEP’s core technology domain) they would be either be on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Event Correlation and Analysis, or possibly acquired by a one of these large giants in event processing to solve complex event processing and event correlation problems that remain, for the most part, still unsolved!

“I have quite a few other concerns the with EPTS Member Agreement.   Basically, the agreement needs to be written with an eye toward a more flexible, open and inclusive process that puts the future of the EPTS square into the hands of the event processing community, not a small group of well intended folks who represent a small part of the overall event processing community and worldview.”

Opher’s reply was to just dismiss these comments, a bit surprising since I served the CEP/EP community on the EPTS steering committee; worked quite hard as a matter of fact, for a number of years.   Opher’s appreciation for the years of work is to just off-handly dismiss my comments.

Then in On faithfull representation and other comments and On Top Down and Bottom Up Opher does the same thing, he simply dismisses my comments, defensively, adding humor, sarcasm and fallacy.

I am sorry Opher is so defensive of his narrow society; however I will not yield, because I do not need to resort to sarcasm, fallacy and ad hominums; the facts obviously support my view.  For proof that Opher has a narrow view of event processing, go no further than look at the companies he hand-picked for his EPTS Steering Committee; most startups (or with startup products) in the event processing space, working on common messages to distinguish themselves in a market with much more mature players excluded - classic “not invented here,” isn’t it?

Opher’s claims the EPTS view on event processing is quite general, but the  majority of vendors on the EPTS Steering Committee members are selling similar platforms, a very narrow segment of the CEP/EP space.    Opher claims that he agrees that other domains (like sensor fusion) are significant to CEP/EP, but he simply dismisses my advice to create a true, general EPTS, inclusive of the prior-art and science of CEP/EP (before the marketing folks took over).  He insists on having the EPTS “reinvent the wheel” and develop their own vocabulary, as if event processing did not exist prior to one book on CEP.

Opher’s fun-to-read blog counterpoints to my concerns are evolving to a mixture of ad hominums and sarcasm, sometime wrapped in a defensive tone.   I think we can do better and we must be more inclusive of the other prior-art.  I say we, because I am also a founding member of the EPTS, althought I suspect Opher will banish my name from the membership for trying to diminish the “not invented here” attitude that seems to dominate the EPTS since inception.

The truth of the matter is that the EPTS has a relatively narrow view of event processing, evident by the makeup of the steering committee and the focus of their discussions.    It is not a technical society about event processing, per se; it is a marketing society with a narrowly focused membership that discounts most of the prior-art in the event processing space, it is really, an Event Processing Marketing Society (EPMS) for a narrow group of niche players.

The event processing domain is much, much larger.   The art-and-science of event processing is deep and mature, much more mature (and inclusive) than what we see in the EPTS. 

I think Opher (and the EPTS committee) should take these comments seriously and not discount them with sarcasm and subtle ad hominum replies.