Mark Eppley has been around the PC business almost since day one, when he invented a special cable to enable two computers to transfer data between them. Laplink went on to be one of the longest-selling brands in PC history, eventually selling more than 30 million copies, and Eppley became a fixture at industry conferences and events.

Now the venerable pitchman is running a new business called SC-Integrity that has nothing to do with laptops, cables, or computers – directly. Call it LoJack for finding lost tractor trailer freight loads. The problem is that more than 100 truck loads a day on average are lost or more likely stolen from America’s roads. These aren’t just some random pickup, but full 50-foot trailers that can carry anywhere from $100,000 worth of clothing to multi-million dollar loads of pharmaceuticals. And recovering these stolen goods is all being done with hi-tech that until recently wasn’t even possible.

The idea is fiendishly simple: place a tracking device of about the size of a deck of cards  deep down inside a pallet of goods that is carried by trucks around the country. The device sends out a signal every 30 seconds telling the central monitoring command center where it is located. If it goes someplace unexpected, call the cops.

“A pallet of Viagra is worth $1.2 million on the retail market, and there are 28 pallets in the average-sized trailer,” said Eppley.

The problem is that all this missing merchandise is the result of some very determined and clever crooks, and Eppley’s company is using tech to track them down and stop the losses. So far this year they have recovered more than $7 million in goods. “The problem is that trucks and their trailers are almost always recovered, but not before they have been emptied out of their freight,” he says. The FBI says that all it takes is $5,000 in cash offered to a driver, and he’ll gladly leave his motor running at a truck stop when taking a break.

“You can have professionals unload a truck in about five minutes,” says Eppley. “We get a fix every 30 seconds on our trucks. If there is a problem, we can immediately detect that within one minute and notify the proper authorities.”

Why so many missing trucks? First off, drivers are infrequently prosecuted, and when they are state laws let them get off lightly. “The problem is that in many states, vehicle theft is not a felony and many people are just prosecuted for the value of the empty trailer and not the freight, which can be at most $25,000.” Your average BMW costs more than that. Several states, including California, are passing harsher laws to make it more risky for stealing freight. But clearly, theft is on the rise, and the bad guys know how to game the system.

When Miami cracked down on freight theft earlier this year, the thieves moved north to Atlanta, who had more lenient laws. “Things do change and the crooks do move around, although a lot of the theft is centered around the port cities,” said Eppley.

And despite the popular image of Italian-surnamed thieves and the mob, Eppley paints a picture where many gangs are involved. “It is highly organized, and it is ethnic based. Everyone — Cubans, Latin groups, whatever — they all specialize and have their network of fences for the stolen goods and particular kinds of goods that they steal,” he said.

Some of the goods get sold by being incorporated back into legitimate distribution systems, he said. “There are many retailers who will buy merchandise from a distributor that they know is hot, especially clothes and shoes. This just goes back into the stores. We all end up paying for it in the costs of goods and in the vendor’s insurance premiums,” he says.

So how does it work? The devices, called SC-Tracker, are self-powered and don’t require any external antennas. Part of the challenge for the tracking device is battery life, as any of you would instantly recognize. “Our device gets a seven day minimum life on a battery charge. Our closest competitor says that they generate 700 reports, but we generate 20,000 reports over the week that the device is active.” The issue is that you have to be paying attention to where you load is going, and make sure that you can quickly get a fix on its location.

“It doesn’t work to get a report once a day or once an hour. The truck could be emptied by then. You need to be almost constantly in touch with where it is,” said Eppley. To do this requires what he calls “geo-fencing” meaning putting in a very specific route profile into their systems, so when a truck veers off that course an alarm will sound and they can figure out what caused the event. Also, typical rest periods for the driver are included, so unscheduled stops also create alarms.

They use multiple radio modes to broadcast their location, and are designed to be durable, small, and work under many adverse conditions. Like a LoJack unit, they are placed without the driver knowing where they are located inside the truck’s trailer load, otherwise thieves could easily find and remove them. “We have a hybrid solution, because no single technology will work in the environments that our customers put them in,” says Eppley.

And the solution is working. In the short time that the company has been in business, they have gathered their share of customers, who are paying them six-figure annual fees. In one noted event, their technology figured prominently in the capture of more than a million dollars in Microsoft software that was repacked on a different truck and taken to the Chicago area. It turned out that more than a dozen arrests were made, including some sheriffs from the Cook County police department.

The company has been operating in stealth mode for at least two years, but is now getting noticed and gathering steam. Eppley, who is the president of the company, co-founded it with Dennis duNann. And unlike typical hi-tech firms, you won’t find any management bios on their Web site, or other identifying information.

“We are one of the only companies that have delivered this solution. Our competitors will say that they have certain capabilities and accuracy levels, but when you get under the covers and do the tests, you don’t see the same stuff that we have.” Eppley mentions how GPS truck tracking has been around for more than a decade, but only with miniaturized technology and longer-lasting batteries and better wireless products has he been able to produce an entire solution. “All of this has only been possible in the last couple of years It is a simple concept, but has very difficult execution. We are as accurate 5 to 200 meters, depending on where you are, density of cell towers. We also are integrated with our clients’ business services and security services and have a proven ROI record too,” he says.

What does the former CEO of HP have to tell anyone these days about how to run an IT organization? That was the question I had when I heard that Carly Fiorina was going to be in town this week, keynoting at a small conference called the Internet Telephony Expo. Given her turbulent tenure at HP, I joked with one of my colleagues that probably the best strategy for anyone at the conference was to listen to what she had to say and do the exact opposite.

And while that seemed somewhat gratuitous, after the speech I was left with a cloying feeling, like having too much MSG after a big Chinese meal. What she had to say was interesting: the nut graf, as we journos say, is that the coming digital revolution will involve transforming every piece of content and the processes that use them into portable, personal, and virtual constructs. What this means for me is a world in which we are our own IT managers, and in charge of our own digital destiny. It is a heady notion, and I for one am not sure I am ready for this level of responsibility.

At first blush, you might think this is heresy, especially coming from the guy that runs a Web site for people who do nothing but take charge of their digital domains on a daily basis. But hear me out. The job that you really have isn’t your own IT manager, but the manager for your friends and family.

Take one aspect of my digital life – my home telephone. I have been a customer of Vonage for several years, and while it hasn’t been effortless, I have enjoyed a certain freedom to never talk to a Baby Bell sales rep ever again, especially when I want to make changes to my phone features like call forwarding, voice mail and call pickup. Some of the Bells are getting this religion: last month I saw some advanced features from Verizon that allow you to make custom feature configurations via the Web like Vonage and the other IP tel providers have.

What about digital photography and music? Having all our CDs encoded on our home PC is very liberating, to be sure. I wouldn’t go back to the analog world for anything. But it has been a painful process in getting my wife on board, and it had nothing to do with technology or the bit rate the files are encoded or which music player we are using or whatever. It was all about cataloging the songs into their appropriate genres, so my wife could play blocks of music that fit her mood. You could say that as the home IT manager I forgot to do the requirements analysis, but the hard part is knowing the right questions to ask in our digital transformation.

In both cases (and I could on with other examples, but I’ll spare you), the downside is that when something goes wrong, I have to go into debug mode for my family and that isn’t a job that I relish. Particularly if I have to call the same providers that I just got freed from talking to their support reps, or spend time at night taking apart my PC.

Carly was big on transformations, which is ironic because her biggest one (in folding Compaq into HP) was far from successful. Certainly, HP has held on but has not hit any home runs then or since. Part of making transformations successful is understanding the end state of what you desire: and I think in the case of HP as well as our 100% digitally pure content world of the future, neither was a slam-dunk.

Look how much promise VoIP is, even now. While no one can argue that more businesses and individuals make use of the technology, it is far from stable and far from being universally deployed. And even in 2005, creating a single network infrastructure to operate both data and voice networks is tricky, and many IT organizations are still not up to the task of designing robust enough networks to handle both kinds of traffic.

Part of the problem is that while VoIP is a network application, it is an application that stresses networks in new and different ways that traditional IT folks don’t usually get until they are deep into the project. Second, network security takes on new levels of urgency and complexity when VoIP is running over these networks. This gets back to what I was saying about transformations.

Carly spoke about customer enablement, whereby VOIP and other disruptive digital technologies are incredibly powerful tools, helping business to compete and consumers to prosper. She mentioned how ‘this nation cannot maintain our competitive leadership without this enablement.” But I am not really sure she understands the path that we have to take to get there.

We are in the midst of a digital revolution, to be sure. But there are still many bumps along the road, and we still need better tools, too. And while “the cell phone with the camera on it has become the single most ubiquitous photography device in the world,” making use of all those digital photos and organizing them and keeping track of them is far from perfect. What we have done is created the digital equivalent of a dusty shoebox in the attic. We still need to transform the collection and display process too.

I first met Tom Schelling when I was on my second job after grad school, toiling in the public policy fields of Washington, D.C. I was working at a leftish think tank, working on what would prove to be a futile effort at getting our government to adopt residential building energy efficiency standards similar to what we still have with those yellow appliance labels. One of our projects was trying to join together with business leaders on energy conservation and for this work we had contracted with Professor Schelling to lead some focus groups that brought the bunny-loving, tree-hugging, energy conservation crowd together with Big Oil, Big Banking, and Big just about everything else representing those captains of industry.

Even at that tender age, I could see that the Professor (no one really thinks of him any other way) had a lot to teach me. I went out and read his seminal work, “The Strategy of Conflict” cover to cover. I still have the book, and have gone back to it several times to refer to my favorite passages. Here is one puzzle that will delight you that I remember from the book, because I got the wrong answer.

You and a friend agree to meet in New York City on a given date in the future. But when the time comes, you both realize that you have forgotten to communicate a place and a time. Yet you end up meeting each other just fine. Remember this is in the day before cell phones, BlackBerries, and other modern communicating devices. Where and when do you meet?

I will give you the answer at the end of the column, but this is the sort of stuff that Schelling is famous for. He is one of these deep thinkers that understands not only human nature at its best, but also at its worst.

Still trying to figure out the puzzle? Remember, no communication between you and your friend is allowed. Okay, I will give you a hint. Schelling has taught countless students at Yale, Harvard and now the University of Maryland. At the time he wrote his book, he was teaching at Yale in New Haven, Conn.

Schelling shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, and is an interesting choice. He has consulted for presidents and policy makers and for those same captains of industry that we met with in my early career. His work in game theory, arms control, environmental policy, and criminal behavior is far reaching, influential and deep. As an example, you are kidnapped and you are given two choices over whom the kidnapper should call: your mother (who presumably loves you) or your mother in law (who presumably doesn’t). Schelling’s theories show that your mother-in-law is the far better choice to get your release for both you and your kidnapper, and proves this conjecture with panache, wit, and solid thinking that just about anyone can understand.

It isn’t often that a Nobel winner can write well, have deep thoughts that almost any lay person can grok, and not be such a specialist. I salute their choice, and glad to know the Professor is still teaching plenty of pupils. Go pick up his book today and see if you find it as interesting as I did.

So what was my answer to his puzzle? I thought noon at the main information concourse of Pennsylvania Station, because being from Long Island that is where I enter the city when I take the train. But Schelling’s answer is noon, under the clock in the middle of Grand Central Station. For his students at Yale, it was the one place they would guarantee of entering the city, and noon is as good a time as any for two people to meet. So I almost got it right, and you could argue that if my friend was also coming from Long Island, chances are we would have met in Penn Station rather than Grand Central.

Many of us have been loyal Firefox users for the past year, and stats from Tom’s Hardware server logs show an early interest in Firefox from our readers as well. With all the attention on Firefox, we took time to interview one of the program’s creators, Blake Ross. Ross is currently on leave from his studies at Stanford University (where I went to grad school in the distant past) to work on another startup and had lots to say about where he is taking the browser and his thoughts about competing with Microsoft.

1. What are the biggest differences between Firefox and IE in your mind, and where do you see any advantages that IE has these days?

There are plenty of feature comparisons on the Web, so I’ll spare readers the marketing charts. The most important difference lies in the intent of each product.

Microsoft is here to win. That’s great if you’re a shareholder, but how many users appreciated that attitude when spyware and pop-ups filled their screens four years ago, and Microsoft, having crushed Netscape, abandoned the market? The company is back now that competition has arisen, but where will it be in four more years?

The Mozilla Foundation isn’t fighting a war on competition; it’s fighting a war on complexity. Our users are our shareholders, and as long as the Internet is frustrating, we’ll be here.

2. I’ve had to update my copy of Firefox numerous times over the past year to handle security loopholes and exploits. How can you stay ahead of these issues in the future?

We have a number of safeguards in place. First, our Bug Bounty program pays security experts $500 for each exploit they uncover, provided they notify us early enough that we can protect our users. Second, our open nature allows us to test builds much more rigorously than our competitors. Hundreds of thousands of advanced users test each beta build for exploits before it reaches consumers. And finally, as strange as it sounds, the fact that you’re receiving those updates means the Firefox security team is doing its job. All browsers have security exploits; it’s just a reality of networked software. The real question is how long it takes the vendor to offer a patch, and Firefox excels here.

3. You talk about making the web easier to use. Given the growing complexity of browsers with plug ins, security settings, helper apps, etc. is there hope of having an easier to use experience?

Complex software is produced by lazy developers who aren’t willing to face the complexity themselves and instead shovel it onto the user. I can’t tell you how many hours some of our engineers have spent going above and beyond the plugin specs so Mom could watch her dancing Flash M&M’s without being bothered. Every additional hour you spend at the office is another hour you’re saving her down the road.

4. How do you manage your source code with a global development team?

We use CVS for source control, LXR for code cross-referencing, and blogs, mailing lists and newsgroups for team coordination.

5. What percent of the code in Firefox do you personally touch and work with on a regular basis?

Firefox is enormous, so like most of our developers, I work with a small fraction. Most of my development time now is spent on a software company I recently cofounded with another Firefox engineer. We’re always looking for talented developers.

6. What is the main development machine and OS that you use on a daily basis? Have you ever overclocked or water cooled any of your gear?

I mainly use a 19” Compaq laptop, P4 3.4 GHz with 2 GB of RAM. It’s a “laptop” in the sense that Manhattan is a suburb.

7. When I was at Stanford many years ago, CroMem was the nerd dorm (I was in the engineering grad school). Is it still that way, or have nerds taken over campus?

Stanford has plenty of nerds, but they’re cool nerds. You can change the topic to music and they won’t start singing a MIDI version of Super Mario Brothers. I wasn’t in CroMem, so I guess that means they’re everywhere now.

8. I persevere and use Firefox as my main browser, even though we run an Intranet here that uses Sharepoint and works better in IE. What can you do to be more IE-compatible in the future?

We used to have a full evangelism team that worked with IE-only companies to support Web standards. Fortunately, we’ve reached the tipping point in terms of market share where companies are now forced to open up or risk losing 10% of their clientele. So while we still make evangelism efforts, these kinds of problems are beginning to disappear naturally.

We also have a special rendering mode called “Quirks” that we use to support some IE-only programming features. Because we prefer to stick to the standards, however, this is a last resort.

9. Are there any non-open source products that you use on a regular basis?

Sure. Development model doesn’t factor into my choice of software. I use Microsoft Word, Trillian, Visual Studio, iTunes. There aren’t too many consumer-friendly open-source products, unfortunately.

10. What are some lessons learned from developing Firefox that you can share with my readers who are working on their own projects?

The things you never think about are the ones driving users nuts. For example, a developer making an e-mail client might spend 6 hours designing the compose window, and 5 minutes hooking up the “Attach” button to the Windows Browse dialog. But it’s that Browse dialog that’ll give people gray hair over time.

The fact that the dialog is a standard part of the OS is no excuse. In fact, software is often weakest where its developer settled for something prepackaged. Consistency is important, of course, and should always be a factor. But it’s your responsibility to make the best software you can, and if you’re delegating to the OS without question, your competitors already have a leg up on you. In Firefox, we threw out the Find mechanism applications have used for decades because, frankly, it sucked.

The Web is a great place. It can turn two twenty-something slackers from Toronto into underground heroes. All it takes is some videos and viral word-of-mouth marketing. Meet Jeremy and Kyle, the stage names (or whatever you call them) of the guys behind the PurePwnage.com video series on what the life of a “pro” gamer is really like.

The duo, who are RL (that’s real life for you noobs out there) roomies, got the idea a little more than a year ago when Kyle borrowed a camera for a film school class assignment and “was looking for stuff to film and wanted to try out some editing software.” He began shooting a “pilot” with some test footage following around Jeremy and a day in his life. The video was so well received (at least, according to the duo) that they went on to make seven episodes, and more are in the works. Each episode, which last about 10 minutes, are better and more sophisticated (at least, according to my taste) than the previous one.

Jeremy in his usual garb. Kyle doesn’t appear before the camera,

The shows have amazingly good production values for something done on the cheap. “We use Adobe Premiere to edit the videos, and it shows that you don’t need a lot of money to make short films on the Internet. Our startup costs are only a few thousand dollars, and most of that went to buying a camera,” says Kyle.  And that is dollars Canadian, which is even more impressive given what you can buy there.

I spoke to the two guys, or at least two people that sounded like the guys in the videos, last week. Unlike most of the interviews I have done, the guys didn’t give me their real names, phone numbers or other identifying information, but I had fun interviewing them none the less. Part of the fun was doing real-time translation of leetspeak (the gaming lingo that Jeremy uses both in the videos and for the most part in RL too) and trying to not appear like the old fart that I really am. But that is the wonder of the Internet: you can always appear to be something that you yearn to be.

The videos are entertaining slices of life, mostly following Jeremy around with a hand-held camera as he slacks off, “owns noobs” (that means trounces unsuspecting opponents) with his game of choice, Zero Hour, and his advanced “micro” (meaning keyboarding) skills. They are funny and sad at the same time. The last episode 7 sees Jeremy in some hospital ward as he tries to break out of a catatonic state, and is jump-cut with scenes from a game where his character is being interviewed by a nurse, mirroring the actual RL scene shot in the movie. Hollywood SF could do no better, and what is impressive is how these guys have accomplished some great storytelling on a less-than-shoestring budget. It helps if you are familiar with gaming lingo but you can still enjoy the flicks for what they are, a romp around a brave new world where gamers rule.

The duo has started a cottage industry to be sure. The first month they released episode 7 more than 300,000 people downloaded it, and the audience has been doubling from episode to episode. They are using a variety of technologies to distribute their videos, and are looking to get more sophisticated by using an RSS feed and other improvements. “We don’t know where it is going to saturate,” says Kyle. “No one has ever done this before and had a reality TV show that has been this viral and spread this quickly.” And unlike the more expensive reality shows that are on broadcast TV, it is done without script doctoring or any visible writers.

Does Jeremy talk leetspeak all the time? “What are you saying?,” he asked me. “If you watch the show, well, yeah. I own, and yeah. When I meet fans in RL they seem kinda shocked when they meet me – they thought the show might not be real and when they meet me and then they are in total awe of how much I own and its good.” You dig?

Kyle is certainly more used to talking regular English, even though in the videos you rarely hear from him. The concept is similar to that of Penn and Teller, for those of you geeks old enough to remember them before their TV shows.

The guys are actually big Tom’s Hardware readers. “It is something we read whenever we are buying new hardware pretty much,” says Kyle. “But not a regular thing we read. Jeremy was looking at Tom’s when he was looking to buy a new video card.” Jeremy then piped up “Well, Kyle that was a year ago so it isn’t exactly new, but I got my 5950 and lots of stuff thanks to Tom’s.”

Jeremy builds his own PCs “Because I don’t have a job and like, you can get a lot better performance for your dollar if you build your own PC. If you are not a complete noob it is completely easy.” He doesn’t overclock that much. “I just make sure my rig is good enough to run games at like decent resolution because you don’t want to be totally noobing at 800×600 or something. I keep most of my hardware kinda default.”

The guys get lots of fan letters. “Jeremy gets a lot of marriage proposals over email. It’s actually kinda interesting. Supposedly from women. Some women send their pictures but it probably the guy’s sister or whatever. But no one is emailing me with their pictures,” Kyle says a bit peevishly.

“Obviously I am going to get most of [the proposals] because of my sexiness,” says Jeremy modestly. Indeed, one of the more humorous bits is in one episode with a series of  interviews of some girls. The girls talk about their interests in guys who are gaming addicts and their reactions to some of the gaming lingo. Kyle actually has a steady girlfriend in RL, or so he says. “As for Jeremy, you have to watch the show to see what is going on.” Jeremy obviously doesn’t want to disappoint any of his potential suitors.

“Most of my time is actually spent playing games, because I don’t have a job,” says Jeremy, reinforcing the cinema verite of their ouvre. “Pure Pwnage is actually turning into a job,” says Kyle, where he spends his non-studying time answering reading inquiries, sending off swag and editing the videos. He actually is in his last year at film school and promises that more episodes are on the way when he can get the time to produce and finish them.

Where do they get the idea for the videos? “Kyle comes over and, like he says be real funny and I’ll film you,” says Jeremy. “And then he comes back later and we watch the show. My life is pretty interesting. Most people would be shocked at how close to our real lives the show is, really. Well, some of it is exaggerated a bit.”

What does Jeremy’s real parents think of these efforts? “At first my mom was kinda embarrassed,” says Jeremy. “I don’t think she liked the idea much that all these people were watching me own, she was never too proud of that. She always thought that school and like, good jobs were like, the way to go. She is kinda traditional. She would tell me to play sports and throw a football around and like. And I would try to explain to her that mom, you would rather have me owning games all day and that I get some skills that would be applicable. As times have gone on, and both of my parents have seen what has happened, they are very supportive and looking back they are glad that I didn’t play football and instead play e-sports.”

A big part of the gaming lifestyle is going for long stretches of time without sleeping or eating. “It was like 54 hours was my longest single session,” says Jeremy. “I ate once, a couple of bathroom breaks, playing Zero Hour. By the end I was kinda seeing stuff, I decided that I should probably sleep. But don’t tell my mom that because I told her it was only 36 hours and she was pretty mad. She thought I went to school that day, but I didn’t leave my room for like two days. It was good times”

Jeremy in RL plays more than Zero Hour, which is what he is known for in the video series. “To be honest, I own most games that I have played. But typically anytime I pick up a game, I seem to just own anybody at it. Enough to make a show I guess. Everyone takes a couple of losses here and there – you are tired, you had some drinks, I don’t know.” His confidence is both charming and cute, without being a big ego trip. I think that is part of why I enjoy watching the series so much.

“I have been playing games my whole life, it is all I have really done as a hobby. Pong was my first game, I picked it up when I was about two years old, all the adults were laughing at me,” said Jeremy. He got his first Atari when he was 4 or 5.  What about Kyle? “Some of it has rubbed off on me. I like Civilization, played a lot of that, but don’t have the passion that Jeremy has for games.”

I asked Jeremy what the stupidest thing a noob has ever done to him, and he was quick to reply, “Besides entertaining the notion that he has a chance [at winning]?” Many of you might think that his braggadocio is bigger than his actual RL scores, but Jeremy maintains that he has real skills. “I never hacked myself in the game to make the world think you have skills that help you in the game. If you got the skills, you don’t need the hacks. That is what noobs do, they can’t accept the fact that they don’t have skills.”

Of course, trying to prove that he does deliver the goods may not be easy, even for this reporter. Jeremy doesn’t use the same identity in each of his games, even though he goes by the tag the_pwner in the videos. “I never used the_pwner tag in an actual game. Don’t want to break any hearts. I usually switch my names, if you get crazy stats people don’t want to play you when they see your record.”

Any suggestions for the noobs out there who are just getting started with RTS games? “Focus on your micro – make sure you use the keyboard shortcuts, don’t use your mouse,” says the pro gamer. And also watch plenty of replays of other pro’s sessions too.

Better yet, download the videos from their site.