* Posts by Brett Brennan

189 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Apr 2007

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HP steals agenda setting crown from IBM

Brett Brennan

It's all in the results, you know

Data center transformations are all huge, failure-prone undertakings. They are usually kept quite until after the termination of the project - then victory or blame are appropriately claimed or assigned.

HP has some leadership that has the history of getting big things like this done. Mark turned NCR around (well, for a while at least), and Randy was key in promulgating this type of change at Wal*Mart and (possibly - too early to really tell yet) at Dell.

However, HP's latest foray into IT management needs to be examined beside IBM's latest anouncements on their services offerings that, in the end, should lead to the same results as HP's. Both are claiming reduced costs, lower maintainence, more focus on business because of lower IT costs. Each is approaching the problem from a different direction: HP from data center consolidation and technology streamlining, along with services to perform this tranformation; IBM from cleaning up the maintenance and support first, then moving the efficencies back to the data center.

I'd really like to see the suggestion made by the anonymous poster above carried out: monitor HP over the next year and keep us posted. Also, monitor IBM over the same time frame: see how IBM takes its own medicine. And finally, I think we have two sumo-wrestlers about to go at it here: maybe the Reg can do a point-by-point comparison of the offerings by both companies so we can see just how each apporach weighs in before the fight.

However you slice it, the next year is going to be an interesting one in the data center. Hope Simon is sufficently prepared...

Google search rivals full of sound and fury

Brett Brennan

What the world needs is a good five-cent search engine

With so many sites gaming the searches to insure higher placement, in addition to the paid-for placements, it's hard to see any search engine getting materially better any time soon.

On the other hand, better AI interpretation of complex human-language requests would be a very nice improvement. The ability to type something like "Find information about which diesel cars have the best overall Carnot efficency" and NOT have everything that includes all the nouns and adjectives in any position (or worse, some of the nouns and adjectives) would be a major discriminator...possibly enough to seriously challenge Google. Hell, even adding a ordering requirement and a proximty descriptor ("diesel,car,Carnot,efficency within 10 words") would be a major improvement.

However, this would remove "serendipidious" click-throughs to paying sites, reducing revenue.

There was a search engine some time ago that ranked results by the amount that the site was paying for placement - and displayed the amount with the result so you could understand how it got ranked. I don't know what happened to it: it was fairly useful when looking for purchase items, as the sites paid more for a click-through the more specific the match was. I could usually find what I wanted to buy in the first 4 or 5 results, and the merchant site usually paid less than a US dollar for the placement. Not a bad deal in my book.

(To put this in perspective: a direct marketing company gets paid between US$40 and US$150 for a successful qualified sign-up solicited through phone marketing, and about half that for a snail-mail sign-up. A couple of bucks for a customer that is ACTIVELY searching for you is not a bad price.)

In fact, I'd be willing to pay a fee (less than Lexus/Nexus!) for monthly use of a search engine that would provide even the basic ordering and proximity features I note above. Maybe that's where Yahoo! or MS are missing the boat: offer a clearly superior service for a fee that offsets the lost advert revenue. Again, this is a volume issue: US$5/mo from 1,000,000 "subscribers" is US$60M each year. Make it part of an ISP fee or something like that...well, you get the picture.

I hope to live long enough to see something like this: at that point the computer will finally be doing something useful in everyday life.

Celebrating the iPhone's Newtonian past

Brett Brennan

What the world needs is a new NewtonPhone

I was an early adopter of the original Newton. I still have it, upgraded, and actually fire it up once a year to see if it still works (it does).

I've said the following before in comments here in El Reg, but it's worth repeating:

A tool that uses a new paradigm to perform its function will NOT be popular and may fail, simply because the majority of people will not break from their habits to try the new paradigm.

The Newton was just such a device: more than a PDA in that there were numerous applications that went beyond the simple text-only address books and PDAs of the time - from a Washington, DC Metro map that was interactive to various VT100 terminal emulators (for use with the 2400 baud modem) and email apps. It was BIG, relatively speaking (I had a custom-made belt case for it since it would not fit in most pockets), but it did A LOT in a very compact space. Using only 4 AAA batteries.

However, it was NOT what people expected. The handwriting recognition was quirky until you had trained the recognizer sufficiently, and even with decent recognition, it was still difficult to use it as a VT100 terminal - pretty much an "emergency" device in that respect.

It did allow you to do many documentation tasks that usually required pen and paper back then - like take e-ink notes at meetings and then save them as a file as part of a project docs folder, make quick sketches that could be plugged into other documents. You could even print from it directly (which helped distribute meeting notes to those Nimrods that couldn't read their own handwriting).

However, the paradigm was too far beyond the majority of people that would want it: needing to take a couple of hours to set it up was "too much work".

The same holds true for Mr. Gates Tablet PC. I use a tablet DAILY - I've had one since 2004 that has been doing daily service. Same as the Newton: it does many things superlatively, but it is NOT a PC replacement. It COMPLEMENTS a PC by allowing you to do "human" things in a very portable form factor and integrate them with "computer" things in a way that gets the best of both. However, it requires thinking in a new paradigm - not forcing the Newton or Tablet to do things that it can't or won't.

The iPhone, however, is completely different. It really has no "new" breakthroughs that other phone devices don't already provide; or, rather, it uses new technology to provide the same paradigms that other devices provide. I don't expect the iPhone to suffer the same fate as the Newton. If the iPhone fails it will be from cost/service issues, not a new interaction paradigm that no one "gets".

Finally, if Apple would revive the Newton and add cell phone capability to it (well, and update it to current technology standards) it MIGHT have the true KILLER device of the early 2000's. Imagine: a hip-worn device, larger than a phone but smaller than any tablet PC that uses Bluetooth headgear to allow phone access (with Apple's much improved voice recognition), the ability to control it completely with voice command without opening the belt-case. Out of the case it could do 85% of what a tablet PC does, and 100% of a internet phone and iPod do. Stylus input as well as "finger" pointing, on a REALLY nice size screen (maybe even 1024X768 in a small screen) - we'd have a real paradigm shift to a convergence device that isn't a crippled version of a laptop or an overly poky cell phone.

Just thoughts, randomly. I certainly would pony up €1500 for this type of convergence. After all, I bought a Mac just to be able to dock my Newton...

Netgear promises 3G femtocells by end of year

Brett Brennan

PCS repeaters already available

While Netgear's concept is a much better approach in that it integrates the 3G with wireline and 802.11 wireless, there are already "microcell" repeaters in the 1.2GHz (I think...above 900 MHz...) band for rebroadcasting your up and down link from a PCS cell phone or EVDO modem. I currently use one to improve coverage inside our RVs when we're camped at the edge of a MMA (the usual spot to find campgrounds) and need the extra "punch" to get out. I don't think the power is that great, but a 3dB external antenna makes a BIG difference...

BTW, the repeaters are on sale without license from major electronics resellers here in the U.S.

Google abstains from blades, VMware and the rest of the hype

Brett Brennan

How soon we forget our history

There is nothing (historically) new here. Back in the dark days of the 1970's, AT&T built UNIX for essentially the same reason: they needed LOTS and LOTS of switches, and figured it was cheaper to develop a small, portable operating system that could be used to create a switch from any piece of hardware. AT&T went on to develope the "B" series of computers (1B, 3B, 5B, 10B and 15B) to allow them to deploy any size switch anywhere they wanted, and put UNIX on all of them. That UNIX also worked as a general purpose OS was a side benefit (part of the "D" in "R&D"), but the "B" series was serious "iron" in its day.

When I worked in banking during the 1980's many large banks did the same thing. At Security Pacific we had purchased a mish-mash of hardware from General Automation, Control Data and Interdata and built our own custom branch automation system, including our own highly customized version of the GA CONTROL operating system. MUCH cheaper, faster, and most important, USEFUL than any solution from IBM, Siemens, NCR or other "turn-key" vendor.

While Google's work is impressive by any standard, we in the IT community need to keep in mind what they do and WHY they need to do it that way. Custom technology ALWAYS has a place in the extreem limits of any human endeavor. We don't think twice about space craft having custom computer and sensor systems, nor do we think twice about custom-built construction equipment for road building or skyscraper construction. We don't even consider all the "custom" computers that are embedded in cars, trucks, dishwashers, microwave or cell phones - again, something that can't be done with "COTS" (Common Off The Shelf) solutions.

The only thing that makes Google catch our eye is the scale: whole DATA CENTERS that are composed of custom hardware for a single purpose. Yet, to my "old guy" mind, this is nothing I've not already worked with nearly a dozen times before.

The most important lesson we can learn from Google's endeavor is how Google thinks: if the box won't work, think up a solution outside of it.

(I should stop here...but...)

Our biggest problem today is trying to force solutions to our problems to fit into nice, neat "boxes" of products that we can conveniently buy off the shelf at Wal*Mart. (Or HP. Or IBM. etc.) Most companies won't even consider an idea that doesn't have more vendor logos on it than a NASCAR racer. Build it in-house, for one purpose? You've got to be CRAZY!

And in most cases it's NOT necessary. But, if you do your planning and design right, and you DON'T see a solution that fits, and the prize is big enough...anybody got a hammer to help me break this box?

Jury spanks Lexmark in toner refill case

Brett Brennan

Open-Source printer anyone?

At the root of this issue is the chip in the toner cartridge, or in most of the other printer consumables. Regardless of the merrit of such a device and the marketing gulag it creates, if the device is legally patented, the protocol patented, and the user license constrains the use to legal replacements, anyone infringing on the patents or circumventing the license is comitting a crime.

Npw don't hit me! I'm stating the legal obvious. If you don't want to pay platinum prices for little bottles of food coloring with a fancy anti-piracy chip, don't buy a printer that has this restriction.

Unfortunately, I believe, all major manufacturers incorporate some sort of anti-refill technology, or make their cartridges literally only useful for one cycle. Unless you want to get out an old dot-matrix, line printer or teletype, you're pretty much hosed.

The "correct" response is to follow the lead of the open source hardware community (already making unencumbered boot roms and other bits to prevent vendor lock-out of open source software in the future). Using public domain technology, an "open source" printer device needs to be developed and offered either as a kit or assembled unit. This would eliminate the problems associated with "bugged" ink or toner cartridges and bypass the license issues that would surround a "remanufactured" printer that has the lock-out chip removed.

Sure, the "open source" printer would cost more, but a decent design for the print mechanism (has the original Xerox patent expired yet?) would permit using any good quality ink or toner, offsetting the initial higher hardware cost. Especially for business where the cost of expendables far outstrips the hardware cost in short order.

Of course, we'll then see Canon, Lexmark, HP, etc. buy up the paper mills and incorporate a shrink-wrap license on all paper...oh, wait: paper IS in the publice domain...

Mobile device mayhem, or...

Brett Brennan

The user is a key part of the solution

Although I am in a very small company, we've been on the leading edge (sometime bleeding) of mobile communications use for well over a decade. And we have had minimal problems with our service over this time - even though we upgrade technology at least on an annual basis.

I feel that the reason is that our staff ("users") are "part of the process" - not simply dictated to by IT and Accounting.

I treat our user community as adults. That means that I (as CIO) discuss their needs with them, listen carefully to what they want and what their issues are, then provide a list of solutions that covers their needs. Things like security, confidentiality, improper use of corporate assets - these are open and thoroughly explored, with feedback from the users individually as well as a community incorporated into our mobile technology planning. And it has paid off handsomely for us: our users understand the fundamental issues we're addressing from the company standpoint and have been remarkably resistant to misuse of corporate resources - mainly because we insure that the company takes care of their personal needs as well. We have a consistent set of policies that cover ALL aspects of personal communications, most of which reflects the user's requirements as well as the common corporate goals.

We use a single carrier (SPRINT) for all our devices, and this is pretty much the only restriction. All of our users have new (< 1 year old) multi-media devices with full 3G capability, and are subscribed on unlimited or nearly unlimited usage plans. We let the users choose their own device - as long as it meets the minimum corporate requirements I don't have a problem with it - and as adults they are aware of what their responsibilities are in choosing and using the device. (I have Blackberry, Palm, WM5 and Motorola based devices in the mix and so far with 10 years of allowing this I've had only minor issues to deal with - usually carrier issues at that.) We run our own email and data services and do not use Exchange, so many security problems are eliminated right there, and other issues (like ringtone purchases, games, etc.) were eliminated by educating the users on how to use alternative tools (like rip and download their own music to their phones) which they actually prefer to the wonky vendor-supplied commercial sites.

Yes, it costs more per month to do this. Probably double per user what most companies pay for mobile solutions. However, our pay-back is measured in simplified accounting (consistent costs), near 100% availability of staff 24/7, and a user community that actively works to improve the way these services work in our business. And we consistently delight our customers by being able to leverage this technology to help us provide better service.

Summarizing: if you treat your staff as adults, allow them to drive the technology with open education and feedback and a minimal set of standards that give them a lot of choice you can eliminate the "control" problem and get deep and broad use of the technology - which, after all, is the whole point of having it...

Ebuyer in hard-drive warranty debacle

Brett Brennan

OEM drives NOT covered for 5 years?

This surprises me: I nearly *ALWAYS* buy OEM drives from resellers here in the U.S. - and they have the manufacturer's stated warranty - typically 3-5 years for newer hard drive kit. And yes, they DO occasionally fail: out of an 18 drive RAID I built, I had two drives that were DOA. These were WD, and, when registered on their OEM WEB site, they were immediately replaced - no questions asked.

I can't believe that Seagate would not honor their warranty, unless these specific SKUs are only warranted for 1 year. Unless Seagate is getting that cheezy with their manufacturing that they only warrant the consumer devices for a decent amount of time. (Of course, the consumer box items are more expensive...maybe it's not just the plastic filler and the razor-sharp "security" packaging that's inflating the price?)

Operating systems are old and busted

Brett Brennan

Teradata already did it...

Many years ago, Teradata built DBMS platforms that were stripped to the bare essentials to support their DBMS. Custom "OS" and a single application.

About 7 years ago the concept was ported onto UNIX: the UNIX kernel and basic scheduler and I/O and a "virtual" hypervisor loaded on top of it that allowed virtual machines to run amok on top of the host OS. Today this has moved onto Linux, and does essentially all that Rosenblum ascribes to the hypothetical "thin server". It works well enough to allow complex SQL to process millions of rows in 4,5,6 or more way joins in a few seconds - on paltry dual CPU Xeon boxes at the low end and huge MPP clusters with over one hundred CPS (and a thousand virtual processors) on the high end.

Yes, it 'tain't cheap - but if you're looking for a balls-out database demon this is where you end up.

Rosenblum's vision fits into the concept of "utility computing": each of the "virtual" applications runs on an "expensive" purposed host, but the cost is shared among thousands or millions of users. Picture Google running farms of purposed servers for each of their desktop applications for their future virtual office suite. Works for me.

And speaking of things like clipboard and other functions: there are several models that come to mind for handling this type of functionality, from "local" functions that use the primitives in the display station to handle data exchange to specialized protocols for moving the data from one application to another.

Now, if only someone can fix the internet to support this like electricity...Al, you done messing around with the environment yet?

Fancy some hot buttered storage?

Brett Brennan

Speaking of hammers...

I will try to find the actual device and photo it before the week end, but...

Back in 1977 I had the dubious title of "Systems Software" at a small start-up satellite imaging company in the U.S. midwest. At the time we were constructing custom hardware based on PDP-11 half-rack systems, along with our own solder-wrapped custom AtoD and digital video image processing hardware and software. (We were even building our own frame buffers and shading correctors - that's how far back this goes!)

Anyway, we also used 4 128KB 8" floppy drives in the kit, mounted behind a nice cut-out panel on the front of the console pedestal. However, the cover panel was rarely ever "square" to the drives, and required some puonding to get the diskettes line up through the slots.

I had brought a 5-pound hand sledge in to "assist" with the alignment of the covers: it worked beautifully, as one tap would generally do the trick. I usually left it sitting around in our demo room, as, invariably, we'd be rushing a system out of "manufacturing" directly into the demo area minutes before customers arrived to do acceptance on the system - hence the need to quickly get covers "tapped" into place.

One day, some "boys" from the NSA showed up for their system, but entered the demo room slightly before I had finished the setup. They heard me banging on the cover plate from the hallway, and entered just in time to see the system coming up...and a 5lb. hammer sitting on the console table.

"What's that used for?" one of the "boys" asked.

"Disk drive alignment tool." I replied, truthfully.

They required we provide them with "the tool" as part of the delivery package.

The next day, our Marketing department gave me a hand-made wooden box with the company logo labeled "Disk Drive Alignment Tool Kit", containing a brand-new 5lb. hammer with the company logo painted neatly on it.

So, I guess this is the true source of the US$500 hammers that you hear about so often...

And the "alignment tool" still works great for removing the knock-offs from my 1956 MG wheels...

Microsoft versus BlackBerry versus, er, BlackBerry?

Brett Brennan

RIM to WM and back to RIM?

We have a small business (less than 10 employees), but have been using mobile technology since the CDPD days. We were VERY early adopters of RIM devices (857, 957) for two-way communications and access to other, non-wireless applications via special-purpose application gateways - mostly self-hosted.

I moved us off of RIM at the beginning of this year (to Motorola "Q" devices) primarily as part of a move from iDEN to PCS - and the fact that at that moment, RIM was somewhat behind the handset offerings of other vendors with the combination of features we wanted in an integrated phone/email/web/PIM device. Specifically, battery life was atrocious, lack of camera and multi-media were becoming a real issue, and the premium price for the devices was unjustified against the rest of the market.

As mentioned before, we self-host our own gateways, but are primarily a LINUX shop - so no MS Exchange or Exchange clones. That being said, one of the selling features of the Windows Mobile platform was the ability to easily integrate non-proprietary mail and web services - although in actual practice this has proven to be very Microsoft-limited. I have had to get Windows in dual-boot configuration throughout the company in order to support the WM5 platform (SynCE is just a bit too far behind to fully support the "Q", and Motorola does not allow access to updates on their web site from non-IE platforms. At least they now allow access from Vista - THAT was blocked when we first migrated to WM5! Bad Motorola - VERY BAD!!)

I am now considering a move to either the new RIM devices (the Curve) or possibly to a Linux-mobile platform from the WM devices. Yes, WM has proven to be THAT much of a disappointment: slow, unstable, requiring a great degree of user interaction with the platform to keep it operating. (BTW, this is NOT a Motorola issue: the same problems occur on ANY WM5 device we've tested. The "Q" is an excellent device on the phone side - except where a WM "feature" gets involved - then it's a dice roll as to whether the device is going to be there when you need it. 10 minutes and two reboots to dial 911 - real-life experience- is NOT acceptable performance.)

As far as service from carrier - Sprint has provided excellent support in all aspects for us, especially on the data side of the equation. EVDO works - period. Data rates are excellent - not DSL, mind you, but consistent 50-100KBpS even in rural markets - plenty of band width for the uses we have.

To summarize: if your business is built on the Windows mono-culture, you have a variety of choices for integration with your mobile communications, albeit with plenty of work to keep your in-house IT support busy. If you are outside of the Windows environment, you are faced with a much narrower choice of handset technology, although the pieces to support it (POP3 from the device, SSL tunnel, custom web-based apps and device-specific applications) are available. If you MUST use a WM device, thorough vetting by in-house IT is a *MUST*, and customized in-house developed training for using the device is a *NECESSITY*.

Oh, and get Opera on there ASAP. It is a FAR superior browser and web-enablement tool than IE on WM. Worth the cost from Opera, even in a large deployment.

Orange goes green for festival phone-fuelling

Brett Brennan

Can we get this in "Cash 'n' Carrion?

This is a swell little accessory! Can El Reg offer it up through Cash 'n' Carrion for those of us Colonists that aren't Orange subscribers?

Acer outlook not so sunny after all

Brett Brennan

MS FAILED to push Vista?!?!?

Well, this is an interesting twist - MS accused of NOT whipping hype over its product into a frenzy! I suppose MS COULD have used the (unpaid) EU fine monies to purchase every single advert spot in the Free World for the entire year to insure people got the message that Vista is a "necessity".

Oh, wait, they already did that...

Embedded problems: exploiting NULL pointer dereferences

Brett Brennan

This is SO retro!

As an old (52) guy, this is one of the first "new tech" exploits I intuitively understand. It goes back to work I was doing (before getting my "Management Lobotomy") back in the '70s and '80s - "When Men were Men and Computers had WIRES". I would regularly "write" a debug "hack" (toggled in from the front panel switches on my PDP-11 or GA-440) to patch address 0 with a JSR or JMP to another address for debugging. Zero was (usually) the HALT location for a system - a bad stack pop would usually load the PC with zero and JMP. Zero usually came with all zeros in it - to stop execution and halt the system, because as we all know, a scrambled stack is BAD. Putting a JMP to a toggled-in debugger was an honored way of getting hold of the system to let you trip through the (hopefully) uncorrupted stack trace to see where things went wrong.

Ahhh, I remember doing this many, many nights. In fact, this is how I "won the heart" of my wife of 22 years: she would drive up to the plant to visit me while I was in the midst of a long debug session, and, having nothing better to do, would "help out" by writing RATFOR routines to assist in my efforts. This got her to change her major (yes, it was THAT long ago!) from Preschool Teaching to Computer Science...and she's now CEO of our company.

Not much of a comment on the content here, but nice to see something that has a bit of disco dancing associated with it...

Google Maps aids terrorists, NY lawmaker warns

Brett Brennan

It's not the sawdust, it's the wheelbarrow...

My favorite quote of the week.

The politicos are like H/Bollywood stars: they need to keep being quoted in order to build up a chunk of "I was for/against..." sound bytes for campaign purposes.

It wouldn't matter at all what the subject was - as long as Assemblyman Mike Gianaris can be quoted on something that has the words "terrorism" and "security" in it, he'll be counted as being a "good guy" protecting his constituents.

So, once again, it's not the "sawdust" of the actual words, but the "wheelbarrow" of being in the media eye that matters...

Project over-runs make US IT workers scared for their jobs

Brett Brennan

It's all about timing, then...

I have a -LOT- to say about this - however, it's too depressing to discuss. Suffice it to say: in most Fortune 100 companies, IT projects get a schedule and a budget BEFORE they get requirements. Period. And managers NEVER pay for failure. (Well almost never, but never above the Group Manager level.)

I often have discussions on the lack of work ethic among younger IT workers (under 30) with my contemporaries (over 45). All I can do is point to these projects where whoever gets assigned to them is going to get crucified - so who is going to bust ass when all it will do is get them fired quicker?

Kids get early start in electronics

Brett Brennan

Downsizing the "One-Eye-Nanny"

There are two pieces to this observation: if my memory serves me, 2-9 year-old children don't have their own American Express cards quite yet. The parents are (obviously!) purchasing this technology for the children.

The point here is that much of this "new" technology provides the parents with their most valuable commodity: "silent children". A 6-year-old sitting in the back of the auto with a PSP is a silent 6-year-old: something any parent will tell you is worth at least US$1000/month or more.

Having observed technology penetration into my friends lives with and without children, the ones with kidz are usually the ones that have a high incidence of personal and household entertainment electronics. And the Family friends are the ones to most likely utter "go watch (TV, PS3, DVD, PC, etc.) because mommy is busy" when I'm visiting.

Now, I'm a "closet" BOFH, the "malo tio Brett" (bad uncle Brett), so I try to engage my young friends in "educational" discussions rather than let the "one-eye-nanny" take them away. Things like "do you know how to make a sling-shot?" or "do you know how to make a burglar alarm out of empty tin cans?" - much to the "delight" of their parents. (The best is "Ice Fishing" taught to 1 year olds - how to pull ice cubes from a water glass at a restaurant and fling them on the floor...) I've already been warned that if I try to give the children the "Dangerous Books" that they will arrive on my doorstep for the entirity of Summer Vacation...

Chip start-up could ignite Blade PCs

Brett Brennan

IBM already did this...in 1964...

If my memory servers me, IBM had deployed a very similar technology, albeit INCLUDING virtualization, back in the 1960's. It was called SNA, and deployed using "dumb" terminals (3270) on every desk top. Instead of work-group Ethernet switches, IBM used a 3274-xx controller box for every 8/16/32 terminals that was connected via a semi-high-speed cable (typically 2780/3780 RJE) back to the mainframe. The 3270 terminals were connected to the 3274 via a coax cable that transmitted video over baseband and returned key strokes that were mapped to "unprotected" fields in the display by the 3274.

Toward the end of the 3270 era (1980's), IBM pushed out colour terminals that had VGA graphics ability, and large screen plasma displays (3279 and 3290 respectively) that included light pens - but no mouse.

At the same time, AT&T went one further: they had a square CRT terminal that DID include a mouse and "high-res" graphics - and it could be connected remotely via a 56KB connection to the UNIX "mainframe" (5B15).

So, verily, there IS nothing new under the sun (or SUN)...hardly...

Google beats chip and server makers to the future

Brett Brennan

It's not the sawdust but the wheelbarrows...

I think Ashlee hit the nail on the head in the article: Google didn't acquire PeakStream for their expertise in mult-core and multi-thread optimizations, but for the UNDERLYING skills that allowed PeakStream to develop their tools. Compilers, JIT compilers, high-performance RNG software - these same skills apply to Google's search parsers, result evaluators, load balancers, security systems, etc. Getting this kind of talent that already has several years of team experience and repurposing it to solve their problems shows, as Ashlee put it "how smart the company seems to be and how it will continue to outflank the likes of Yahoo! and Microsoft."

Google bought "wheelbarrows full of sawdust" not for the sawdust, but for the wheelbarrows. Not for the ability to get the hardware components to work better but to improve their similar complex search software.

OK, now that's obvious: so what's the problem here?

At present there is only one other serious company in this market niche: RapidMind. However, there may be other "not so serious" companies out there, including some in the Open Source universe that, while not as far along as PeakStream or RapidMind, will now have an opportunity to grow into the void caused by PeakStream's departure. Indeed, there may be MORE than two vendors in this space within another year - something that having two highly visible strong players tying up capital and IP might have prevented.

However, the REAL problem here is, as it always is these days, the IP "rail car" that the software "wheelbarrows" were sitting in - and that Google also got in the acquisition.

A far greater threat to the improvement of muti-core and multi-thread processing is the potential for "blocking" patents that prevent late-comers from using the best - or only possible - algorithms for optimizing the threading processes. If PeakStream has patented processes that are key to the use of the next two generations of processors efficently, Google can effectively use these to extort royalties out of anyone else that wants to actually develop these tools. A Jupiter-sized patent Troll sitting on the Google spider web. (And what do you bet that they use their own search engine like a spider to get the earliest "wiggle" of anyone that might be a possible "fly"?)

On the other hand, if IBM, AMD, Intel, SUN and Microsoft all looked at the company and passed on it (or at least didn't respond to a Google bid that quickly) there's a good bet that PeakStream did NOT have any earth-shaking IP to use as a bludgeon on competitors. I hope that is the case: if so, the field PeakStream left so hurridly is still ripe for picking. It's just that Google is off picking in another orchard...

Long Beach cops boast first Segway-borne bust

Brett Brennan

Casino Royale, er, Segway

Where I'm from (the Mohave desert, near Las Vegas) the Segway is actually a fairly common sight - in casinos! Yes, the brick-and-mortar (well, glass and glitz) casino operators all keep a small fleet of Segways active 24/7 patroling the gaming floors, grounds, etc. AND, with the addition of the optional trailer hitch, the secuity guards can tow heavy money carts around.

I've seen the Seqway guards run down nee'r do wells in the casino - very handy for getting around through a crowd, believe it or not. And they're the only effective defensive system to pursue and capture escaping power wheel chairs (Stephen Hawking, you are served notice here to not try to outrun casino cops!)

So what's in a URL? The Reg URL?

Brett Brennan

Keep 'em ALL - let GOD sort 'em out

As an "early" internet adopter, I have had .com, .us, .net and .org domains forever. I tried - unsuccessfully, BTW - to get a .co.us domain (not available - go figure THAT one out!) as part of an expected move into Ireland (.co.ie) in the near future - to be able to differentiate us as both a US and Irish company.

The point here is: if you need to have coverage in all the territorial domains in order to prevent squatters, you certainly *MUST* get the registrations and keep them. However, I feel that redirection to theregister.co.uk is the appropriate result of the "bald" name in all TLD - that is, theregister.co.eu or theregister.com should display theregister.co.uk upon redirect. "Regional" editions should be accessable either as a link on the home page or via a regional sub-directory (theregister.co.uk/us or /ie). Although I fear that most readers don't really care that much about regional-specific stuff (except regulatory or legal).

I read El Reg *BECAUSE* it is International. IT *IS* International, and El Reg is one of the few news sites that truly appreciates this. I'd even go so far as to say "BOHF without Borders".

As has been forcefully stated earlier, you're BRITTISH, DAMN IT, and should be PROUD of the fact that, unlike us Colonials, you still have attitude that pronounces the name of a historically famous river like it's some red-neck's fishing hole. (Thames, that is...)

HTC jumps on touch-screen phone bandwagon

Brett Brennan

If only it was 3G

Adding 3G would have made this a true iPhone spoiler: OK, well, I'm not on AT&T (oops -at&t) - but I can get an iPhone clone - AND it has 3G, so I can watch those pesky value-add TV shows!

This might just be the moment that we'll point to later and say "HTC ALMOST won the handset battle..."

Now, if they offer it in a CDMA version...

The growing pains of RFID

Brett Brennan

The Y2K (and now RFID) Acid Test

Back in 1999, I used a customer's (ie, company's) Y2K preparedness as an indicator as to the state of their IT management - and, consequently, the problems that I as a consultant would have in implementing "new" technology at their facilities. The less that they had prepared for Y2K (meaning how many out-source coders I found stuffed into corners and lunch rooms) the worse I knew MY projects were going to fare. I used this to properly configure project plans and pricing - and was pretty much dead-on with the estimates.

Fast-forward 8 years. Today, examining a producer/retailer embracing or resisting RFID is filling the same benchmark for me. RFID provides immense benefit to a company -IF- they have a proper appreciation and preparation of the support components - and business process re-engineering - that is required to USE this information. Few outside of Wal*Mart, P&G, etc. have made the necessary preparation to use the flood of data that RFID provides.

The real cost to a company that is required to implement RFID tagging in their products is the support infrastructure to give them benefit from the technology. Many do not understand how RFID in every individual produce can help them in managing their business in real-time: they are still in the "batch mentality" that says "well, monthly reports are good enough". It takes not only the sensors, communications and tracking systems, but a thorough re-work of the back-ends and the entire production and inventory management process - as well as a GOOD data warehouse - to truly benefit from this technology.

I mention all this together as the resistance to RFID from a corporate stand point is an indicator that the company's systems are still probably at a 1980's level of sophistication. Current industry best practices usually perscribe near-real-time tracking of inventory, WIP and materials stock in order to support flexible manufacturing, JIT delivery to manufacturing, WIP control and short-medium term ERP to name a few. If you're not doing these things WELL today, you're going to get your lunch eaten by other companies that are.

So for the next two years RFID will be my benchmark for deciding to take on a new client. If they ain't "got it" then I ain't going!

Bill Gates nicks Larry Ellison's health center

Brett Brennan

Something about Vanderbilt and Rockefeller here...

If I recall my history properly, the last "big wave" of philanthropy of this scale was promulgated by those wonderful humanitarians with names like Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Peabody, etc. You know, the ones that caused the passage of the Sherman anti-trust act and regularly sent out squads of hired goons (Pinkertons) to coerce their workers back into death-trap factories. Ah, yes, a fine American tradition is being upheld...

Sirius and XM's star-crossed merger

Brett Brennan

XM & Sirius merger - is this a problem?

Much of the "hoo-hoo" about XM and Sirius merging has been "FUD" perpetrated by the "incumbent" terrestrial broadcast community ("free radio", except in the U.K.) who have been lobbying the U.S. Congress since the merger proposal was announced. Terrestrial broadcasters are in absolute terror of a merged XM and Sirius: they see it as a death knell for terrestrial radio.

So, if the competing radio services are scared to death of satellite radio, why does everyone think that the merger is going to be a failure?

Oh, and remember, the terrestrial broadcasters are the ones that supported the increace in royalties on internet radio - because THAT scares them to death as well.

(A reprint of an editorial I had in Radio Broadcast Review on this very subject...)

Having followed the Luddite implementation of HD radio so far, I have to ask the question: is the merger of XM and Sirius a "serious" problem for terrestrial broadcasters, or just another excuse for the poor performance broadcast has been turning in the past few years?

Let's face reality: the DARS went out on a very thin limb when they started broadcasting: huge (and as yet unrecovered) costs for infrastructure, customer capture and advertiser recruitment. Yet they chose to make the unenviable investment in innovative technology, breaking ground in a completely new medium that happens to target a market already served by incumbent terrestrial broadcasting. DARS paid heavily to break this ground, and, if the market doesn't turn around for them soon, we may see several new meteors as the satellites are deorbited.

So why the concern from terrestrial broadcasters? DARS does NOT serve the majority of the listener market - only 10-12 million subscribers, and the actual listening numbers less than that. The advertiser base (on XM at least) is only about half a dozen cross-channel clients, and given the large amount of fill around the adverts, even these are being spread thin to fill the medium. With the additional hurdles of requiring cost-plus receivers and subscriptions from consumers, this is very much an up hill battle for the satellites to fight.

The only POSSIBLE threat to incumbent broadcasters is IF the satellite services are doing a BETTER job of providing service to the consumers, and actually taking listeners away from the terrestrial market.

Hmmm...could this possibly be the case? Could it be that this "upstart" pair of services has found the "sweet spot" that allows delivery of content consumers WANT that is unavailable from the incumbent broadcast base?

Oh, here's another clue: if terrestrial broadcast were providing the content that consumers wanted - both in content and delivery - would iPods be such a big problem? Is it possible that the iPod "phenomena" - and the huge set of issues surrounding content ownership and licensing - are indicative of the larger problem of broadcasters (and their suppliers/advertisers) losing sight of the SERVICE that they are supposed to be providing: consumer ENTERTAINMENT?

Come on, folks! Get a clue! Broadcasting is NOT the business of driving profits for investors - it's the business of providing ENTERTAINMENT to consumers that generates a profit from consumer DELIGHT, not legislative lock-down.

If the satellite services can't provide better entertainment than terrestrial services, they will fail - quite spectacularly - without any legislation. They are almost there now, and a merger of XM and Sirius will not change the outcome - except to accelerate it as the "choices" that each offered are eliminated to "streamline" operations.

On the other hand, if DARS IS providing superior customer service...well, the same melt-down can happen in terrestrial radio.

I'll conclude with my vision of broadcast entertainment in 2015:

The "Big Four" broadcasters - AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and Microsoft - provide 70% of all terrestrial broadcast content;

30% of broadcast content is obtained by consumers from "local" content providers via Bluetooth and WiFi "zone" broadcasts operated by individuals, clubs and retailers;

95% of the US population gets its entertainment via "real-time Podcasting" on their broad-band/Bluetooth/WiFi mobile phones that "dock" in their vehicles and homes;

The US Department of Commerce's Traffic Watch and Navigation satellites "Rock" and "Roll" are replaced after 20+ years of service with new satellites "Lost" and "Found";

The AM and FM spectrum is reallocated to Amateur Radio to develop a use for this "unused and useless low-information-density" spectrum;

Hey, it might not be true yet, but that's the way I see 'em.

DHS calls in sci-fi writers as consultants

Brett Brennan

SSPS power satellites

Back in 1976 I interviewed some folks at NASA's Lewis (I think) facility in Cleveland, Ohio about the Satellite Space Power System proposal, which was targeted for deployment via the space shuttle some time in the late 1980s or early 90s. The design was quite elegant: I believe it was a 1GW platform that would directly transform solar radiation into a microwave beam collected on the ground by a very large dipole array out in the country. (Suspended above cropland, I believe). The cost was projected to be competitive with a similar size nuclear plant. And as a previous poster noted, the microwave radiation density was very low.

Most surprising, the efficiency of this system was well over 90% end-to-end. The collector/microwave emitter itself was something like 97%, with minimal losses to the receiver on the ground. And as safe as the radiation we get from cell phones today.

Alas, Challenger ended any hope of this even being tested.

On the other hand - Heinlein also described placing nuclear power plants in orbit beaming power to earth ("Blowups Happen" in Expanded Universe) - for safety reasons. I've seen no mention of this possibility in the "green" press, even as nuclear becomes more and more of an option for carbon reduction. Could it be that there's too little opportunity for graft and corruption if we could safely remove most of our "dangerous" energy production off-world?

Dell goes direct into Wal-Mart's clutches

Brett Brennan

Randy must be pouting...

...or he's smirking behind Mark's back. This is, of course, referring to Mr. Mott's former life as both VP/CIO of Wal*Mart and Dell.

Of course, Dell is now "playing with the big boys" in retail. Wal*Mart is the TOUGHEST company to work with as a supplier: their low price promise is strictly enforced by POUNDING their suppliers to cut everything to the bone. And Dell will need to match up with Wal*Mart's supply chain - arguably the finest in ANY industry.

On the other hand, as an anonymous vendor rep once told me as I gave him a ride from Fayetteville to Bentonville one dark and stormy night: "Wal*Mart forces us to nearly lose money on everything we sell to them - but the VOLUME we do with them is so huge it is worth the loss of margin to maintain the relationship." Selling through the world's largest retailer does have some compensation: as Sam Walton once said "Sell 'em cheap and blow 'em out the doors!"

Expel the IT bodgers, says Microsoft

Brett Brennan

Already been done...

Nearly every vendor has a "certification" of competence program in place. Even Microsoft, with the MSCE and other certifications.

The problem: *ANYONE* can take a "cram course" to pass the exams without actually learning the detailed information that is required. And, to make matters worse, re-certification when new features are added, is generally only provided much after the fact - too late to remove the cram boyz from the department until after the damage is done.

Finally, to add insult to the injury these certifications already do: most vendors look at their certification program not as a way to increase the quality of support for their products, but as an incremental revenue stream. In my field (data warehouse), the vendor I work with most charges about US$1000 for all the tests required for their top certification...BUT...these include information that is *NOT* covered in depth in the vendor's own documentation. In order to "pass" for certified, you ALSO need to attend several vendor provided education classes - at the cost of US$1500-3000 per class per person. And that assumes that the outsourced teachers remember to cover the "secret sauce" needed for the exams.

Or you can take a US$2500 "cram" course and have a 90% chance of passing the exam.

See where this has gone?

Internet radio stations rebuff pigopolists' 'compromise'

Brett Brennan

The death of terrestrial radio

Terrestrial broadcasters, including television, but primarily radio, are failing left and right. Read any day's "Radio Broadcast Review" newsletter to get a feel for how bad times are.

Right now the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is petitioning the US Congress to block the merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio, saying it "creates a monopoly" that is a threat to terrestrial broadcasters. Internet radio is viewed in the same vein, and is being treated equally rough by the NAB and its minions.

The bottom line: terrestrial radio broadcasters pay NOTHING for music, have infrastructure and license costs that are competitive with internet broadcasting, and have less competition in any market than either internet or satellite broadcasters (fewer channels than either satellite or internet on either AM, FM or HD radio bands). Period. Yet they can't turn a profit any more, or at least can't unless they are part of a huge, nation-wide consortium.

Internet broadcasters and satellite have, by any measure, an uphill struggle before they can even begin to approach broadcast radio. Satellite requires an incremental equipment purchase and subscription to the service just to RECEIVE the programming - listeners must truly "opt-in" with their purse - as opposed to having a listening device built into every car for them by default.

Internet listeners must have a PC (an extra cost), a high-speed internet connection (an extra cost), THEN they have to find internet broadcast content. The latter is a serious problem: unlike a car radio or satellite, you can't just "scan the dial" for internet broadcasts: you have to explicitly connect to them.

Yet these "extra cost" services are perceived as a threat by terrestrial broadcasters...because terrestrial broadcasters are failing so miserably to deliver content that their audience wants that they cannot get advertisers to sponsor them any more. An advertiser would much rather have a 5 second spot at the beginning of an internet stream where it *WILL* be seen and heard as opposed to 50 spots on the radio that might get broadcast, but probably not paid any attention to.

The internet radio community is morally "right" to fight the ruling for new charges, but they will get killed anyway because the NAB is a BIG lobby in the US Congress - not to mention that they insure that politicians get free spot time on radio and television.

So, once again, we Americans are showing the world that we truly are led by the decedents of Al Capone and Bugsy Segal. I wish it were otherwise.

Sin City director to remake Barbarella

Brett Brennan

It's IP all over again...

The really sad fact is that the American entertainment juggernaut has NOT run out of ideas - rather, they have perfected the idea of maximizing profits by reusing paid-for ideas of the past. Many of the "remakes" in recent years have been driven not by a dearth of new story ideas, but the fact that the studios OWN these properties outright from years ago. They can now re-issue these ideas as "new" films with very little expense to obtain the rights of reuse, and, with the huge profits from market tie-ins, make even more without needing to compensate the original authors or developers of the content.

A key indicator of the depth that this idea has taken in Hollywood is the fight that the Screen Actors Guild went through in its last round of contract negotiations. The major sticking point was not payment for current works, but who "owns" the imagery of actors captured in the motion picture and ancillary production works. The actors are very aware that Hollywood would just as soon make one film with, say, John Travolta, then use CGI reprocessing of these frames to "reuse" Travolta's doppleganger in many other films - without the inconvenience of having to pay the actor for his work. Precedence has already been set: Ted Turner was able to colorize many films over the "dead bodies" of their original producers, simply because the laws of a simpler time never imagined that they could be reused in another context.

So it's just more of the same that we read elsewhere in El Reg. Where will it all end...

Antigua calls for pirates to return to Caribbean

Brett Brennan

The Dutchy of Grand Fenwick?

Is Antigua the "mouse that roared" here? Could they have found the loophole that the rest of the world (and many in the U.S.) have been looking for to force the U.S. to fix broken IP laws? Or will it simply get the U.S. to fix the gaming laws that are intended to prop up the American brick-and-mortar casino industry?

In any event, some good can come of this, either in a sweeping reform of IP or in allowing online casinos. I hope.

On the other hand, there is precedence of the U.S. gaming industry taking a dim view of someone that impacts their profit line...our old friend Fidel has been paying for THAT transgression for nearly 50 years...

Sun warns Microsoft - 'You'd be wise to listen to your customers'

Brett Brennan

The Three ways to Beat Competition

Schwartz is peg-on the mark with his response. He also illustrates two of the three pillars companies can use to beat back competitors:

You can litigate them, either directly (SCO/MS threat to open source) or indirectly (RIAA suing customers to stop piracy caused by third-party products);

You can legislate them by getting onerous laws passed that favor your product/company over others (NAB petitioning US Congress to prevent the merger of Sirius and XM satellite radio - even though terrestrial radio is either dying or merging into an oligopoly rivaling the satellite services);

Or, you can continue to provide meaningful solutions that get the customer to favor your product over a competitors. This includes mergers and acquisitions to strengthen your customer relationship through additional products and services.

The only problem with the last is that even the best companies can make mistakes innovating, and, unlike the first two choices, there is no "partial benefit" from either scaring off customers from other solutions (even if litigation fails in most cases) or from getting some favorable treatment from legislators (and costing competitors some large chunks of change to pay THEIR bribes). Unless you can leverage the IP you generated in a failed R&D effort to litigate against others...

(A point on the latter: most people don't realize that, in addition to patents for innovations, most large companies insist their inventors patent FAILURES as well. This allows the original company to sue a competitor that succeeds where they failed - and prevents a possibly better solution from replacing the lame-ass one they chose to pursue. See the litigation between RCA and Philo Farnsworth over raster-scan television that ran for decades as RCA tried to protect a clearly inferior rotating disc television system.)

Mr. Schwartz needs to be congratulated for his poignant rejoinder to Microsoft, and Mr. Vance should be given free drinks for life for bringing this to our attention in small words us management types can understand.

Dataupia: a utopian vision for databases?

Brett Brennan

Threat to Teradata

Dataupia is potentially the biggest threat to Teradata - much more so than the HP NeoVision offering - in that it allows customers to "standardize" on a utility DB like SQL Server and still reap the benefits of an EDW in a heirarchical environment.

The key is the ability to reduce or eliminate porting of existing application - especially Common Off-The-Shelf (COTS) packages and tools that use a standard API to Oracle or SQL Server. Uptake of these tools for Teradata or DB2 has been limited by the number of vendors that have spent the time to add the merchant DB back-ends and custom features to their tools. Dataupia makes this a non-issue.

There are two issues that Dataupia must prove itself in before the threat materializes. First, it must prove that it integrates into a heirarchical environment, where local stores - such as cubes or specialty applications that use a "local" DBMS - can be tied back into the EDW transparently and managed. This is as much an attribute of the vendor database as anything else, but is a key piece to making the use of Dataupia worth while.

Second is the perennial question of scale and complexity. Can Oracle or SQL Server back-ended by Dataupia scale to 100+TB -AND- support the very complex DSS queries and normalized models that merchant DB like Teradata and DB2 support?

If Dataupia simply allows expansion of data by adding more and more denormalized views to the data (and more and more indexes) then it will fail over time simply because it will consume more and more resources to simply stay in one place. If it can allow the existing databases to realize their inherent optimization by better managing the time-consuming aspects of complex joins, then it is a real winner.

Only time will tell - give it two years...

HP Neoview comes out to play

Brett Brennan

A bit more work to do at HP

While the specifications of NeoView are qute interesting, there are still a few things HP has to get the ticks in the box on. First, demonstrating some massive workloads - in the 100TB+ with thousands of updates per second. With Mark and Randy at the helm, this is an obvious chore to get completed: how NeoView will fare in a head-to-head with a big Teradata installation - especially one that has been going for some time - has yet to be seen.

Second, handling complex DSS reporting, both from tools and "hand-crafted" reports. These are the stock-in-trade of the typical large Teradata installation, especially one that has been running for more than a few years. Teradata has some killer abilities with fully-normalized and near-normal data in huge complex joins - and TDAT customers DO take advantage of this type of query in daily operations. Again, nothing the the leaders don't know about, but still something that has to be passed.

Third, will HP provide a reasonable migration path for some of the key Teradata and DB2 accounts? HP is actively recruiting former Teradata folks for the new services support for NeoView, so familiarity with the competition and the complexities therein will be available. However, "the best intentions" and all that: migrating a large Teradata or DB2 installation is not something for the faint-hearted. If there is a need to keep TWO massive data warehouses running at a customer site (both the encumbent Teradata and the new NeoView) for anything over a year, there could be some issues.

Finally, there is the market for massive databases itself. Teradata and IBM have survived the purge of nearly all the competitors back in the 1990s, and, even with appliances making some inroads into the "big iron" DW market, it's still a rarified customer base that HP is looking to enter. Even Teradata has been "down-scaling" its sales into smaller customers (the 1-4 node installations with a few tens of terabytes) because there is only so much revenue at the top. Of course, at this lower end you also have Microsoft, Oracle and the appliance vendors. Quite a crowd here, and, even more interesting, HP may have to canabalize some of its own sites, moving Oracle or SQL Server on HP hardware to NeoView on HP hardware. It's still a "win", but one of those "wink-wink nod-nod" deals that the hardware vendor can make by juggling margins and pricing within their product lines.

So HP will have a bit of work cut out for them. I personally do not expect to see "big things" out of the HP camp for at LEAST two years: the purchase cycle of the realy key customers will take that long to complete. I DO expect HP to start moving some targeted smaller systems into the Fortune 100 realtively soon; "beach head" systems, pretty much "freebies" along with some heavy-duty free services support to "shake the tree" and get both visibility AND some inside information on just what needs to be moved out of the Teradata or DB2 warehouse in order to take over the account.

Spitzer stargazers find hot, windy planets

Brett Brennan

Sounds like they found HELL

Well, if a hot, dark planet is out there as "Spicy" is described, I'd say this is a good candidate for the proverbial HELL we've all been told we're going to.

Now, if only they can find a cool, bright place with lots of harps...

Red Hat CEO deaf to VMware's giant sucking sound

Brett Brennan

It takes a Village...

...to create virtualized systems: both a virtualizer compay like VMWare and the host/virtual OS like Red Hat. The fact that VMWare is more profitable than Red Hat is, I think, a side issue.

No one seems to complain that MS Office, or Oracle, or anything from Computer Associates is *MUCH* more costly than the OS, or that these companies (except for vertically integrated Microsoft) make far more revenue and profit than the host platforms do. That's the nature of the game: the vehicle is considered to be less valuable than the contents it transports.

Although RH may want to re-examine their pricing model in light of this revelation, I doubt that they will. As Wal*Mart demonstrates daily, low margins X large volume = big profits. As long as RH is holding or expanding market share and is making a reasonable profit, well, if Oracle and VMWare make BIG money off of their system, as long as they're the "truck" that's hauling them they're going to be just fine...

Nothing to do with the technology or the rest of the article. Just my 5p.

Acer acquisition will be bigger than a breadbox, smaller than Gateway

Brett Brennan

I'm betting on...

Either Clevo or Sager as the take-over target. Both of these companies have a great reputation in the "white box" marketplace with a range of excellently-spec'd system, innovative designs and small but healthy market shares. They would compliment/expand Acer's high-end footprint (Sager) and their convertible market (Clevo), and would effectively remove multiple house-brand competitors in one stroke. This would also allow Acer to tap into the low-margin/high-volume rebranding market...someplace that Acer has had experience in past lives.

Of course, I can't rule out something obtuse like buying Asus (and getting a whole lot of OTHER markets in addition to high-end laptops) or even Twinhead - my own personal machine label - a specialist in toughened portables for hard service and harsh environments. (Not an earth-shaking area to expand into, but one that's apparently attracting attention from the big names like HP and Dell).

Tough to call, but Clevo or Sager would give them a good mix to further beat up on Lenovo and add a good customer spread to their OEM house.

(BTW, I buy Acers for my family - like Mom and Dad. Great machines for the price, and run Linux well out of the box too!)

HP: 'IT, as we know it, is over'

Brett Brennan

Sounds familiar...

This is the same type of model that Teradata used to grab sales in the DW marketplace. More specifically, TDAT consultants would perform assessments of a customer's warehouse and model strategy against a "standard" industry model, point out where it could be improved, and back the whole thing up with a session in the demo room (the Benchmark Lab) where they could bring a couple of terabytes of real data and see it dance in an environment that mirrored what they could purchase.

The strategy worked well: if a customer made it to Benchmark, there was about a 90%+ chance of a sale closing.

The truth of the whole "BT" thing is that an integrated methodology for creating an information infrastructure - be it a data warehouse or a complete IT/BT department - is not just a key to success, but is almost a slam-dunk to accomplishing it. Using a set of standard "templates" for operational areas, field-developed strategy and techniques for actual implementation, and integrated services for deployment and training provides an almost unbeatable machine for delivering success to customers.

HP's concentration on several well-established IT hot-spots - Exchange, SAP and Oracle - gives it all the pieces to build a successful offering in these areas. These are, of course, the "low-hanging fruit": most potential clients have "painted themselves into a corner" in higgeldy-piggeldy deployment of these technologies over time, and, with much of their business hinging on getting data out of these tools, are ripe for having someone provide a clean roadmap - and do the dirty work - of cleaning out the rubbish and getting a "new" implementation up and running.

The only problem is being able to say "NO!" when you have a customer that doesn't fit or want to take advantage of this assembly-line implementation. Too often sales will out-sell the capabilities of a carefully crafted solution with the promise of even greater margins. Once the first successes are past, it becomes much more difficult to deliver a one-off that is not-quite a match for the service offering. We shall see if HP succumbs to this revenue-stuffing temptation.

Please don't get me wrong on this: what HP is offering, while it seems "fluffy" actually DOES work - if done properly. I've been part of developing, delivering and tuning these types of methodologies over the past 10 years, and have had a higher percentage of successes when using a detailed, pre-designed tactical plan than "winging" it to what a customer tells you they need. HP has the resources and the business drive - especially from their senior leadership - to put this together and deploy it.

If you fit into the parameters HP is defining for this type of deployment, certainly go see them and get a good assessment of your needs. However, if you don't fit the model 90%, do yourself a favor and don't take ANY vendor's word that "it's OK, we'll make it work". Use the information HP or IBM or Teradata gives you as your starting point, and finish the job for yourself, using their templates but reworking it with your architects and management.

My nickel's worth. I hope this helps.

On the Office format wars

Brett Brennan

Now is not the time...

...for this argument between OpenXML and ODF to arise. The time for this exchange to occur was back when the ODF standard was being proposed and in review.

Very simply put, if Microsoft had a reasonable set of extensions that Microsoft felt were needed to provide enhanced functionality to XML, they *SHOULD* have proposed them for inclusion in the initial draft standard. This would provide Microsoft with the extensions required for Office, and maintained a single standard for all users.

Users don't buy software on the basis of underlying standards, this much is absolutely true. The distinguishing features of the user interface and integration with other applications are the key determinants for acceptance of *ANY* software in the real marketplace.

Microsoft *WOULD HAVE* continued to dominate the office tools marketplace even with ODF as their standard for document storage. Period. No, make that *WILL* dominate, regardless of the outcome of this standards argument.

HAVING SAID all the above, Occam's Razor provides some logical insights into the standards battle today:

Microsoft COMPLETELY FAILED to grasp the importance of XML as a fundamental technology;

AND/OR

Microsoft RECOGNIZED AN IMPENDING BUSINESS PROBLEM in the sales of Office, either CAUSED by XML or other Microsoft marketing/sales/design/management issues.

There is also the fundamental difference between a corporation an a standards organization. A BUSINESS exists TO MAKE MONEY for its STAKEHOLDERS. A STANDARDS BODY exists to SAVE MONEY for its STAKEHOLDERS. These goals are usually congruent, especially if the stakeholders are of relatively equal stature in the standards organization, but are often at odds when there is a split among the standards body members about the BUSINESS ADVANTAGE that a particular standard conveys. (See OSF-1 from POSIX as an example of the latter.)

Microsoft Office is a KEY REVENUE STREAM for Microsoft, and one that has been troubled time and again by inter-interoperability and cost issues. (How many organizations still use Office97 formats as their "standard" for document production due to incompatibilities in newer Office versions?) Microsoft has already publicly discussed sales issues with Office 2007, and Vista has taken far more resources to launch than was anticipated, making the adoption of Office 2007 a competitor for sales, marketing, development and maintenance resources.

My conclusion is that Microsoft has correctly identified ODF as a threat to its hegemony in the office suite market. It is a threat of the same form as .pdf, another "standard" that caught Microsoft by surprise, driven by the needs of the market rather than the need of Microsoft. (Microsoft still does not provide native support for .pdf files in Windows...isn't that a bit odd these days?)

Microsoft, in my opinion, feels that ODF threatens the uptake of Office 2007 significantly. Microsoft also recognizes that it made a strategic error in not dealing with XML decisively early on.

OpenXML is *NOT* and attempt by Microsoft to defeat ODF or XML at this late time; rather, it is simply a "stalking horse" to *DELAY* the uptake of ODF until such a time as Office 2007 is back on track to replace existing Office as the de-facto productivity tool. At that point, I expect Microsoft to jump up and shout "JUST KIDDING!" and "embrace" the "standard".

Meanwhile, if OpenXML becomes a competitive standard, well, all the better for accelerating the uptake of Office 2007.

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