Articles by Ed Moyle

Physicists tell us that time is not constant. Interesting as that may be for physicists, it's also a concept that the rest of us can get behind once we put a little bit of a different spin on it. I'm not suggesting that we should all get out our lab coats and play make-believe cosmologist. Instead, I'm suggesting that we put the scientific implic...

Want to try an experiment? Part 1: Get yourself a crowd of willing co-experimenters (about 20 to 30) and tell them that you're going to ask them a trivia question. Tell them you're going to read the question to them and when you count to three, everyone should shout out their answer at the same time. They should all shout out a guess -- even if t...

Nobody likes it when people renege on a promise. You don't have to look very far to see how we as a society view people who lie, break promises or misrepresent themselves. In movies, the bad guy is always dishonest. In books, liars invariably get clobbered: Iago gets tortured, Claggart gets walloped, and Dante puts the liars all the way at the bottom of hell. In fact, even our English word "hell" is derived from the Old Norse "hel" -- a place for punishing "oathbreakers and criminals."

Ever heard that story about the mother who lifted the car off of her son? I thought it was an urban legend until I looked it up. But apparently it's true: In 1982, Angela Cavallo saw her son being crushed by a 1964 Impala. Seeing that happen brought Angela to a state of panic so severe that she (temporarily) gained superhuman strength -- enough strength necessary to lift the car off her son...

Have you seen that movie "Groundhog Day?" You probably have, but on the off chance that you missed it, it's the movie where Bill Murray's character (who's kind of a jerk) wakes up every morning to find that it's the same day -- Groundhog Day -- over and over again. He's forced to relive the same day repeatedly, and as he does so, he slowly learns enough about life to transform into a pretty likable guy...

"Do you remember where you were on Y2k?" Ask that of most IT professionals and you're almost sure to get a conversation started. While the non-IT crowd was off partying like it's 1999, many of us spent the new year in the office, on call or tied to our pager. Even those of us who weren't directly involved in the actual change-over probably still re...

For some people, November is all about festivity: turkey, cranberry sauce and the start of the long ramp-up to the December holidays However, that's not always the case if you happen to be in IT security....

Have you seen the "change of plans" commercial? I can't remember what it's an advertisement for, but the ad consists of a series of clips of two businesspeople in a series of airports talking to each other via cell phone. Every time they talk, they say things like "change of plans, going to Singapore" or "change of plans, on my way to Australia." Like post-modern "Carmen Sandiegos," they "pop" around the world from city to city, never quite knowing where they'll wind up...

It sounds tremendously obvious to say it this way, but applications are everywhere. Think about it -- your office suite, your e-mail reader, even the software you're using right now to read this -- these are just a fraction of the thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of applications you use daily both personally and professionally For those of...

Do you remember the "Perfectly Normal Beast" from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series? If you haven't read about it (or don't remember), the Perfectly Normal Beast is a fictional creature -- kind of like a buffalo -- that migrates twice a year across the fictional "Anhondo Plain." It's (ironically) called "perfectly normal" because it spontan...

It seems like everybody's talking about e-discovery nowadays -- just take a look at any IT trade journal or IT news source and you're likely to see at least one article about what e-discovery is and how to prepare for it However, despite all this attention, both in IT and legal circles, there are still a number of unanswered questions from folks se...

It goes without saying that most IT shops operate in a high-stress, high-workload environments. As technologists, we have limited budgets, limited staff, and dozens of projects on our plate -- it often feels like there aren't enough hours in the day just to keep up with today's workload, never mind planning for tomorrow's Just ask yourself when the...

We don't typically stop to think about it, but we all need feedback in order to succeed. Imagine, for example, trying to cook a meal without periodically tasting it to see if the spices are right. When it comes down to it, trying to do anything -- even the simplest of tasks -- is much more difficult without empirical validation ("feedback") Of cou...

Open source software -- it's fast, it's popular, it's practical, and, best of all, it's free Chances are (if your firm is like most) you're using some of it somewhere in your enterprise; in fact, you're probably using it in multiple places. One of the most frequent questions security professionals get asked is how open source software compares to ...

Five years ago, it was the rare technologist who spent much time dealing with compliance and regulatory issues Up until relatively recently, only a handful of technologists in certain highly regulated sectors -- such as financial services or government -- spent much time evaluating regulatory issues, ensuring adherence to defined legal or other man...

If you're like most of us in IT, you probably have a relatively small number of individuals in your firm that you're used to working with fairly closely For example, if you're a development manager, you probably work closely on a daily basis with the business folks to understand their requirements for the systems you develop. If you're a network ar...

One hundred million -- that's a pretty big number. It's roughly three times the population of Canada, about a third of the U.S. population, and roughly equal to the population of Mexico It's also the number of notifications that have gone out to individuals in the United States informing them that their personal information has been lost or stolen ...