I am currently without a phone and would appreciate a speedy reply.

I have been a Verizon Wireless customer for over 5 years and my monthly bill easily averages over $200 during that time frame.  While I love your network, I have been completely unsatisfied by your selection of phones.  It is a stretch to say that my last phone worked—it had a feature called a battery that allowed me to switch from the car charger to my office charger without dying.  And I waited—under duress—until I was allowed to purchase a new phone with the discount.

My current phone has a wonderful battery life, but this is the 4th time the charger has snapped off in the phone.  The phone is fine, but I keep paying $30 for new chargers.  I refuse to purchase another or wait until February when I will be eligible for a new phone.  You sold a phone with a design flaw, and I’m not even asking for a refund or a free phone.  Just allow me to take a chance on a new one at the 2 year contract renewal rate. 

If not, I will gladly pay the early termination fee and leave Verizon.  On general principle, I will spend more money canceling my account with you than I would likely receive as a discount on a new phone.  As a customer, I consider it unacceptable that you sell inferior phones and leave me with no recourse.

The first time I waited haplessly to become eligible for a new phone.  I will not suffer a second time.  If you don’t like the fact that you will end up losing money by allowing me to purchase a new phone early, I suggest you take it up your vendors who supply you with awful products.  I can promise you that we will both lose more money if you don’t.

Sincerely,

Eric Marvets

adaptive process management (n.) an element of resource and business process management, adaptive search and event processing. Sometimes referred to as “Level 4” event processing or process refinement.

application concept (n.) a definition of a set of properties that represent the data fields of an application entity. An application concept can describe relationships among themselves. For example, an order concept might have a parent/child relationship with an item concept. A department concept might be related to a purchase requisition concept based on the shared property, department_id. Application concepts can include an application state model.

application state modeler (n.) a UML-compliant application that allows you to model the life cycle of a concept instance — that is, for each instance of a given concept, you can define which states it will pass through and how it will transition from state to state. States have entry actions, exit actions, and conditions, providing precision control over the behavior of an event processing agent. Transitions between states also may have rules. Multiple types of states and transitions maximize the versatility and power of the application state modeler.

derived event (n.) an event that is created as a result of processing one or more other events.

complex event (n.) an event that is a situation-entity abstraction of two or more simple, derived or other complex events.

complex event processing (n.) CEP is a technology for extracting information from message-based systems. CEP is primarily an event processing concept that deals with the task of processing multiple events from an event cloud with the goal of identifying the meaningful events within the event cloud. CEP employs techniques such as detection of complex patterns of many events, event correlation and abstraction, event hierarchies, and relationships between events such as causality, membership, and timing, and event-driven processes.

event (n.) a instance of an event definition. It is an immutable object that represents a business activity that happened at a single point in time. Just as one cannot change the fact that a given activity occurred, one cannot change an event — events are immutable.

event aggregation (n.) the aggregation of simple, derived or complex events into higher levels of event abstractions.

event definition (n.) a set of properties related to a given activity that represents an important or interesting change of state in a human, system or computational activity. An event definition includes event properties such as event priority, event time to live (TTL), and a description of the payload, which is comprehensive information related to the activity that occurred. Events expire when the TTL has elapsed, unless the event processing agent has instructions to consume them prior to that time.

event channel (n.) a communications channel in which events are transmitted from event source to event receivers, typically received as electronic messages. Each channel can have multiple destination and. events can be configured to transmit to a default destination. JMS is an example of an event channel.

event cloud (n.) a partially ordered set of events (poset), either bounded or unbounded, where the partial orderings are imposed by the causal, timing and other relationships between the events. Typically an event cloud is created by the events produced by one or more distributed systems. An event cloud may contain many event types, event streams and event channels. The difference between a cloud and a stream is that there is no event relationship that totally orders the events in a cloud.

event-driven (n.) the behavior of a human, system or computational entity whose execution or actuation is in response to events, typically received as electronic messages.

event-driven architecture (n.) an architectural style for distributed computing applications in which some of the components are event-driven and communicate by means of events.

event processing (n.) computing that performs operations on events, including modifying, creating and destroying events.

event-object (n.) an software object that represents an event, generally for the purpose of computer processing, that exhibits both encapsulation, inheritance and polymorphism.

event prediction (n.) computational activity where the impact of events, complex events, and situations caused by events identified, including both opportunity or threat. Sometimes referred to as “Level 2” event processing, impact assessment or predictive analytics.

event pre-processing (n.) computational activity where events are cleansed or normalized to produce semantically understandable data. Sometimes referred to as “Level 0” event processing.

event processing (n.) computational activities on events dealing with the association, correlation, and combination of event data and information from single and multiple event sources to achieve refined identity and situation estimates for observed event objects, and to achieve complete and timely assessments of opportunities, threats, and their significance. Event processing is characterized by continuous refinements of event estimates and assessments and by evaluation of the need for additional sources, or modification of the process itself, to achieve improved results.

event processing agent (n.) an EPA is a computational entity that performs event processing.

event processing network (n.) a set of event processing agents and a set of event channels connecting them.

event properties (n.) data representation of an event, typically by name-value pairs of type string, integer, real, boolean or a complex data type.

event refinement (n.) filter, identify and track events & make initial processing decisions based on association, correlation and state estimation. Sometimes referred to as “Level 1” event, or event-object, track and trace.

event stream (n.) a time-ordered sequence of events. An event stream may be bounded by a certain time interval or other contextual dimension (content, space, source, certainty), or be open ended and unbounded.

event stream processing (n.) a time-ordered sequence of events. An event stream may be bounded by a certain time interval or other contextual dimension (content, space, source, certainty), or be open ended and unbounded.

rule (n.) defines what triggers unusual, suspicious, problematic, or advantageous activity within an event processing agent and what the EPA does when it discovers these types of activities. Rules execute actions based on certain conditions on events, instances, or a combination of both. A rule includes a group of condition-rule statements and action-rule statements. The condition statements instruct the EPA what to look for in events, and action statements instruct the EPA how to respond when conditions are met. If all the conditions in a rule are satisfied by events or instances or both, the EPA fires the actions. The action might be to execute tasks, create an event instance, modify property values in an event instance, create and send an event, or something else.

rules engine (n.) a type of event processing agent that uses a declarative programming model to process events. Formally described as “an abstract structure that describes a formal language precisely, i.e., a set of rules that mathematically delineates a (usually infinite) set of finite-length strings over a (usually finite) alphabet“. Informally, it can be any system that uses rules, in any form, that can be applied to data to produce outcomes.

rule language (n.) is an artificial language that is used to control the behavior of an event processing agent. Rules languages, like human languages, have syntactic and semantic rules to define meaning.

situation refinement (n.) identify situations, or complex events, based on event clustering, event-event relationships and relationship analysis and context. Sometimes referred to as “Level 2” event processing.

simple event (n.) an event that is not an abstraction or composition of other events.

virtual event (n.) an event that is imagined, modeled or simulated.

The company shuffled its products into three versions several weeks ago: Eye-Fi Home ($80), which uploads only to a specific computer over a local network; Eye-Fi Share ($100), a rebranded version identical to its first offering last year, which can upload to photo-sharing services or a computer or both; and the Explore. (You can purchase the Eye-Fi Explore from Amazon.com, as well as the other models.)

I reviewed the Explore as a geotagging system for The Seattle Times this last Saturday; I'd reviewed the original Eye-Fi (now Eye-Fi Share) for them last year as well. You can read that review for my take on geotagging, or skip to the bottom of this review, as well.

The hardware is apparently the same or nearly so, and it works just as well as it did last year. The biggest improvements, however, are a few workflow tweaks that make it far easier to manage and track uploads of pictures without draining your camera's batteries down to zero.

iPhone tethering application up, down, up, down: The NetShare connection-sharing application from NullRiver has made a couple of appearances on Apple's App Store, the only authorized place from which owners of iPod touch and iPhone devices can purchase software for uncracked equipment. NetShare appears to violate the terms of service for AT&T, although this wouldn't be the case with all carriers worldwide, by bridging 2.5G and 3G network traffic via the Wi-Fi connection on the iPhone. A laptop or desktop needs special configuration to connect to the iPhone, but various reports show it works fine. AT&T offers tethering with other smartphones - but not the iPhone - for typically about $20 more per month, comparable to a national hotspot aggregated subscription.

Speaking of AT&T, they like WiMax as a wire alternative: AT&T is bullish on WiMax, but the fixed kind used to replace wires in places they have no cable.

One of my favorite banks in Thailand is K-Bank. With K-Bank I can simply walk up to an ATM machine and pay a mobile phone bill, purchase mutual funds, buy insurance, or transact an ever-growing list of services payable at the modern and sleek K-Bank ATM.

For example, tomorrow I fly to Chiang Mai in Northern Thailand and found K-Bank’s service amazingly better than in the US. For example, I booked my flight as usual (over the phone, but could have used the Internet) and told the reservation agent I was going to pay by ATM. He simply gave me a PayCode and told me I had three hours to go to the ATM and enter the PayCode to perfect my reservation.  I also got the PayCode via SMS.  This gave me the time I needed to make sure I had booked the perfect boutique hotel in Chiang Mai, the Fern Paradise.

Then, I went out into the beautiful Thai weather and completely my airplane reservation at the ATM machine; which also printed out a receipt with my flight details and reservation number.

It sometimes amazes me how much further advanced some services are in Thailand compared to the US. To me, it feels more secure not to use an on-line payment center or give out my credit card details over the phone. I can simply book a ticket, take a PayCode, and complete the transaction at a nice modern, shiny, K-Bank ATM machine.

Who knows, maybe soon I can select the perfect window seat at the ATM and the receipt will act as my boarding pass!

• Certified Information Systems Auditor (CISA) : http://www.isaca.org/cisa/
• Certified Information Systems Security Professional : https://www.isc2.org/cissp

Are You Ready ?
A few basic questions to ask yourself to gauge how ready you are:

• Do I meet the spirit, and not just the letter, of the experience requirements ?
• Has there been sufficient diversity in my experience ?

Five Step Approach to CISA or CISSP Exam Preparation

1. Perform an initial benchmark and assessment of your readiness
2. Read a “survey” level preparation guide cover to cover
3. Perform a secondary benchmark, and compare your readiness
4. Review official, or “deep dive”, preparation materials on areas identified as your weaknesses
5. Re-benchmark, and repeat targeted reviews until ready

CISA and CISSP Preparation

Who doesn't remember the cone of silence from the original Get Smart TV series.  Whenever Max and the Chief had something important to discuss they would lower the cone of silence so that no one else could hear them or eavesdrop. So it is only fitting with the recent release of the Get Smart movie, Meru Networks has released a wireless cone of silence.

Meru is one of few stand alone wireless companies still hanging on out there.  So they need to be innovative to survive.  Their latest product, RF Barrier puts antennas around a physical plant to dampen and make it impossible to to listen in on wireless data exchanges.  They claim this is a first of its kind.  Thinking about it though, I don't see a big barrier to other companies having similar technology. I don't think you have to be a genius to broadcast traffic that puts out "noise" to hide legit traffic. I think the real special sauce is that this works in conjunction with Meru's other security products like wireless firewalls and secure access points.

With Motorola's recent purchase of AirDefense is having wireless IPS soon going to be table stakes in the wireless provider game?  I think it is and while Meru's RF barrier is a nice story, they are going to need to have some sort of IDS/IPS in their product line to keep up.