Posts by W.Hower

Event warning... Serverless Computing London early bird offer about to expire

Old school

One persons 'buzzword bingo' is anothers early retirement. I like opportunities like that, they keep me at a premium.

I'll see you on the beach.

Salesforce CEO Benioff: Win 8 is 'the end of Windows'

Re: Salesmen

No doubt.

Education Secretary Gove: Tim Berners-Lee 'created the INTERNET'

Re: Err...

I don't mean to be a pedent, but I think you'll find that Techies can be dicks as much as the next department, impenetrable legalese, financial jargon, marketing nonsense.

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Re: Irrational rationing

I wish I'd said that. I hate them too.

Sonos - wireless streaming recommendations?

Sonos - wireless streaming recommendations?

Is it just me that fell for Sonos? It all looked like a such a nice, easy and reliable gig. It's not so bad, given how rarely used it is. But I'm an audiophile by nature and just feel that I've gone down the wrong track with this one.

A proprietary network, no integration with iTunes, slow controller apps - I know audiophile and itunes don't naturally go together either but I use n iPhone so I'm locked into that nonsense too - it all feels so wrong.

Am I missing the point of Sonos? I'd like not to smirk at it, thinking 'your time is up sucker,' when I see it gleaming the corner of the room.

If I have, as I suspect, backed a wong'un, what would you suggest for wireless streaming - I mean from the NAS to the eardrum?

The desktop lifecycle: How long is it anyway?

The desktop lifecycle is no more

Forgive me for getting all 'strategic' in my thinking. But I think the desktop lifecycle is obselete.

We're running quite a few pilots at the moment, delivering all kinds of apps and services through all kinds of models - thin client, SaaS, virtualisation. The device is near enough irrelevant. It just needs some power really, the chip/ OS/ storage is a done deal if we choose it to be so.

What's in your datacentre?

me too

...very helpful. It's something far too many take for granted as they charge around our DC ordering all kinds of kit that, rightly or wrongly, ends up in my DC. I'll be steering my division at it.

How's your desktop support service desk looking?

Creep with me

Spiceworks is a bit too low-end for me. We've got thousands of desktops to support and we can't have things that like creeping around our network. I'm not allowed to say what we use, but it's pretty good - ties the entire infrastructure reporting to end users and service desk. We can get stats by almost every measure possible.

The problem though is, as you say, users, lack of tools and, more often than not, simple shortfalls in the OS - badly structured management process typically that hinder our ability to deal with issues effectively. We can develop workarounds and more often than not we have. But as desktops creep, problems creep and capabilities creep in the other direction. I'm reasonably hopefuly that Windows 7 will give the whole thing a kick in the rear and advance us a little further. But that's still always a short-term solution. That's the nature of the beast. Hardware or software comes in resolves old problems, creates new ones so unless you multiple management and resolution tools coming in from all kinds of different angles.

Still, it never gets any easier........

Counting the cost of virtualization

Freedom

I'm very much of the opinion that the basics of running a virtual machine should absolutely be free. The notion of paying for hypervisor is simply ludicrous. There's nothing to it. Management is another matter, as some of the pioneers of this latest wave of virtualization seem to have recognised some years ago, if you can integrate the management of these virtual platforms and environments into a broader suite of solutions it's real value add - hence it becomes a chargable effort, and something that I'm prepared to pay for.

What have we learned about managing outsourcing?

hear hear

I've certainly got better at it over the years!

Reg readers: Distributed software development is hard

@Solomon

Good to see your a big developer Solomon. Not only do you fail to understand the premie of the points being made, but you also completely fail to understand your own point.

When it says, 'Social Networking' tools it's not talking about facebook you. It's talking about collaborative work environments and, as I'm sure you would be aware if you'd ever developed any software with a team, collaboration environments are critical.

You're comments are particularly poor since the entire article is about distrbuted development which explicitly requires some form of centralised collaboration environment - how else do you document, detail, discuss and resolve the challenges, over the phone?

That aside, I actually through this was a really interesting article that I for one will certainly be using to justify plans that are in my budgets for next year.

Polish teen derails tram after hacking train network

A Job?

A bloody Nobel I reckon.

DoubleClick caught supplying malware-tainted ads

AdBlock is for idiots

The blissful ignorance of Web 2.0 jockeys. Yeh, yeh, you all know how the Internet and its business models work don't you? You've been surfing for years right, and you've even written some PHP script? Experts. I knew it.

Lusers.

Who pays for the websites you enjoy? What enables you to enjoy the websites you love for free? Subscription is the answer right - as WSJ, FT, NYT have discovered right?

Bite the bullet. Lose the adverts and you lose the web.

Microsoft versus BlackBerry versus, er, BlackBerry?

Choice is the absolute key

The choices are available are fairly rudimentary. Don't do proprietary - else you're locked in for years and face a nightmare task of migrating at some point - unless you're a fully fledged MS shop. Note I'm not even including the toy that is blackberry.

Once you've made that choice it's a questions of what you actually need - if this is just for email then it's very easy. Web interface and browser - all data stays on the server so no there's no security issues no matter what happens with the device.

We went IMAP a couple of years ago for around 80 users and have had no problems - apart from the odd drunken email written out of hours. But that would have happened with a laptop anyway.

The key is keeping it in line with organisational usage generally - once your users are educated in a standard you've got to keep it there.

Winning the (propaganda) war on cancer

Very good, very depressing - what about the charities?

Headline says it all really.

The one thing i'm ot entirely grasping however is how the charity fits into the equation? Are they just funded by the pharma industries? Or are they, as i've long suspected, simply pointless entities with no clear goals, no tangible knowledge providing jobs for people with double-barrelled names?

Obviously it's not directly related to cancer, but we really should ban these damned charities -- smeering the world in their particular brand of middle-class vanilla smiles and, it would appear, misinformation.

Enthusiastic power users still a danger?

Business benefits from BI

Business Intelligence is a beautiful thing but so few businesses - my own included - understand how to make it so. There's 3 problems as i see it:

1. Soooooo much data

2. So many people thinking they need that data

3. Getting that data into something useful

To give detail on that, the amount of data a business generates is something of a self-perpetuating ritual. Everyone thinks they need to know everything about everything. But clearly they don't.

I'm currently working on a major BI case across four business units - all baying for data. The rule of thumb I apply, and indeed my mantra is:

' How will you action that peice of data into something that delivers a business benefit.'

That throws a lot of people. But if you start off with the major list and then work it through into:

Data X will enable us to deliver a 0.1% improvement on ROI via department Z and - person A will be responsible for that delivery.

That sorts the wheat from the chaff. It keeps everyone focussed and makes them realise that, half the time, they just want data to feel important.

Knowledge is power - but only if you know what and how you'll use it.

Mobile email: Let's have a heated debate

Secure? Hardly.

Email security on mobile devices is a difficult one. We now have a mobile workforce that’s topping 100 and, whilst we can keep the transmission and delivery pretty secure, it’s lost devices that are a problem. Mobile operators have for years promised to do something to lock these things down but nothing’s happening. Why? Because it’s damned near impossible unless you can come up with a way of the device knowing when it has been stolen or lost. Having the ability to fry the system, and obliterate all data, by text message would be a great bonus. But that rather assumes the device is switched on, and that someone doesn’t just rip the sim and all the data without switching it on.