IT things to be thankful for . . .

In my role as the Rev. Gibbs of the Church of IT, I will lead us in prayer: Our network technologies which art in the enterprise as well as in the home, hallowed be thy implementation. Thy features come. Thy operation be done in the real world as they were done in the brochure. …

Seeing as how Thanksgiving has just shot past and your nominations for the Golden Turkey Awards are still flooding in (make sure you vote!), it may be a good time to consider what we are thankful for. So in my role as the Rev. Gibbs of the Church of IT, I will lead us in prayer:

Our network technologies which art in the enterprise as well as in the home, hallowed be thy implementation. Thy features come. Thy operation be done in the real world as they were done in the brochure. Give us this day our product’s ROI. Forgive us for not reading the manual, as we forgive those who made it unreadable anyway. Lead us not into desperation but deliver us from the support line. For thine is the information, the data and the metadata, at least until lunch time. Our network.

We are thankful that Sony is about to get smacked around in the courts for its arrogant acts and behavior (see BackSpin and Gibbsblog). Had it got away with its nefarious plans, the door would have been opened for the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America to act in similarly aggressive and restrictive ways. Given that these groups have a number of politicians in their pockets, we can all feel thankful that the public got this technology issue and responded appropriately.

We are thankful that VoIP is inexpensive, because if we were paying much more than the rip-off would be really distressing. Following my recent BackSpin columns on the topic of consumer-grade VoIP I had a lot of feedback and the readers had remarkably different experiences: Those on cable seemed generally happy and those on DSL seemed mostly unhappy.

The theory that you can improve the experience by getting VoIP from your DSL provider apparently doesn’t hold water. Reader Walt Tetschner wrote, “I’ve used Verizon VoiceWing . . . for the last seven months. My conclusion is that VoIP is an absolute fraud!” See Gibbsblog for more on Tetschner’s comments. I will most likely switch back to plain old telephone service until reliable consumer-grade VoIP appears, because I need to keep my wife happy and she is now not happy with Vonage.

We are thankful to discover that the wretched Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is flawed. A summary report from the University of Southern California Law School’s Intellectual Property Legal Clinic and the University of California, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall examined more than 900 take-down notices (formal cease-and-desist requests from copyright holders) sent to ISPs and search engines. They found that a significant percentage were not clear DMCA violations or clearly illegal. If there was ever proof that the DMCA is flawed, abused and a bad piece of legislation, this report is it. We will be thankful when the DMCA is overhauled.

We are thankful that the video iPod has finally been launched so that we don’t have to hear any more theorizing about an iPod that does video.

We are thankful that TiVo exists because we spend way too much time in front of the PC and without it we’d usually miss “The Daily Show.”

We are thankful that open source is starting to get the attention it deserves. Another few hundred years and we will all be wondering why we ever had to buy proprietary operating systems and applications.

We are thankful that Microsoft is a little nearer to the release of Windows Vista because we know the innumerable bugs, gotchas and other problems involved in migrating to this new operating system will assure the IT industry a few more years of steady employment.

It is for these and the many other blessings of our industry that we give thanks. At least until next Monday.

What are you thankful for? Tell backspin@gibbs.com and check Gibbsblog.