Posts by Unknown Error

US military debated hacking Libyan air defenses

The U.S. has also seriously considered nuking Libya

It would be news if the U.S. DID NOT plan to hack Libya.

The US has planned to nuke Libya nad it has not taken this off the table. Now, THIS is fact and this IS news. It's a few months old, but still interesting.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24049

Here are the latest FACTS from Libya:

http://nsnbc.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/neo-colonialism-subversion-in-africa-and-global-conflict

http://counterpsyops.com

http://ozyism.blogspot.com

http://www.youtube.com/user/108morris108 (this one is very good, regularly updated)

Would you let your car insurer snoop on you for a better deal?

Any provision lowering the premium paid by the customer usually decreases the scope of the cover or releases the insurance company from some obligations. This turns out to be tricky in the most unwanted circumstances. Having a history of driving collected automatically gives an insurer a legal weapon to excuse themselves from ANY liability in the court. You can be always portrayed as a careless driver with a long, recorded history of exceeding speed limits etc. Jury won't be happy to see your history of friving. They would not be happy even to see their own driving history.

Apple to buy Sony? Good one!

EA, anyone?

I think hardware-wise Apple can only be expected to buy IP and small, specialised players who fit their overall great plan. Besides, hardware is easily outsourceable once hou have a proper design. Then, I would argue Apple's major investments will go into software and/or content.

Think EA, a major game producer or a similar company. Games have become biger a market than music and iPhone/iPad are the devices used increasingly to play games. If you own a game producer you control for which platform the games are made, or are made FIRST for.

This would decrease the value of Sony (and others, like Microsoft), obviously, making them besieged and prompting them to think hard about their core markets.

Also, owning major gaming assets would be similar to owning major movie assets and would mean a lot of control over the market.

I believe the retail story is off the mark. They want a no hassle reseller arrangements or just do the thing exactly their way, that is build their stores by themselves, organically, I think.

Prof: Carbon sequestration 'as bad as nuclear waste'

Freshest facts on CCS and other issues (a blog, not mine)

http://nohotair.typepad.co.uk/no_hot_air/2010/06/time-to-call-it-a-day-on-ccs.html#trackback

CO2 storage is a scam you and I will pay for

Here is why: Imagine you have to pay for a right to emit CO2. It's costly, so you know today you will not be able to pay for it once limits are fully in force. What do you do? You go to your governemnt and seek help. No direct subsidy allowed in EU. What then? Let's not emit CO2. But the green energy is much costly, especially in conmparision to fossil fuels. The solution? Make fossil fuel more costly than a green generation.

How? Well, start a nation- or EU-wide mandatory scheme which is very expensive for generating companies. CO2 storage is very complex and energy hungry. Any of 3 major CCS methods takes about 40% (!!!) of energy produced by a generation plant to take CO2 off the exhaust and store it somehow, probably in a liquified form. There are estimates saying that converting one plant to CCS will be 1 billion pounds. That's direct costs, only, I bet. So total costs will be HUGE.

Energy tariffs are based on cost so the prices will have to reflect the cost sooner or later. And there you go. Green becomes cheaper than fossil. That's how you subsidize green industry and let the old fossil industry live in the transition period. Expect lots of FUD. The time is now.

Unknown Error

IBM taps Red Hat KVM virt for dev cloud

Watching others do it is no option for IBM

IBM wants a cut on any infrastructure build-out in the world, no matter what ideology or purpose stands behind it. If the current market trend is to build clouds, IBM will happily do it, giving to the partners the parts it is not convenient with (competence-wise or cost-wise) at the moment. In the long term, if the business turns out to be sustainable, IBM will acquire the crucial partners. Remember also IBM has no choice, in a way - it needs to keep acquiring current competence to go head to head with other market players to stay relevant and get the upper hand in hard sales talks with customers.

As for mainframes, this all comes down to maturity of the needs. If the cloudy apps become crucial for the businesses thet deploy them IBM can easily migrate them onto "Linux on mainframe" type of infrastructure. Notice, for IBM the very process of migration is also a business. So, low and medium importance apps can go to the general cloud and critical apps will eventually go to mainframe cloud.

Unknown Error

ERP checkpoint

Putting business processes into code ever again is a sure recipe for a failure

I would say implementating an ERP system the "normal way", with business processes defined in the code alongside many low level and unrelated functions are just sure way to get into another trouble. Only this time, as things have sped up in the business in general, this trouble is going to surface sooner rather than later.

So what to do?

I would suggest taking only financial modules from the original package as bookeeping and other finance functions do not eveolve fast. The rest, and especially all market-related processes (as CRM and even production and other processes that are definitive for the chosen business model) are ever changing so process engines seem the only good bet in the long term. How processes defined in those engines are presented to users is another question (some kind of portal, probably). The real issue is this: making process definitions modifiable on a daily basis and without the need to ask a vendor to do it.

Unknown Error