Posts by Dare to Think

UK's big-spender councils shovel IT workers into a skip

Re: Serious contradiction of figures

Well, Gordon 10, offshoring has been much a buzzword like "leverage, ecosystem, and agile" Back in the good ol'days (2003 - 2007) companies were eager to jump on that bandwagon and offshore the call centre to South Africa, manufacturing to China, HR and IT to India, and accounting to the Philippines. And our good politicians believed the story of "we no find skilled labour 'ere in da UK".

Ensuring long term intellectual capital? Building a broad skill base? Training up skilled labour? Generating wealth? Not at all.

Germany's long term success comes from keeping their engineering base and therewith their intellectual capital within, well, Germany. They are able to provide their young people at least some hope with apprenticeships and savings and loan schemes for their first house.

The perspective we provide to our young people are stacking shelfs in a supermarket - if they are lucky, and that job is not taken by a guy from Russia.

I ask every reader, who is the loser, when there is a non-EU company, taking over that IT service contract, fires people and offshores highly skilled jobs, and channels the profits out of this venture again offshore to avoid UK tax?

Do our politicians tax outsourced or ICT-abused jobs? Not at all.

Is there an insourcing move right now? Yes, to the companies' branch in Hungary, or Lithuania.

Ubuntu 12.04 LTS: Like it or not, this Linux grows on you

Don't understand what beef you guys have with Unity or HUD

Does it really matter if there is this bar appearing or disappearing at the left? What matters is that there IS some UI development. What is far more important are things, like: no add-on-marketing-bloatware, cool shell scripting, strong file attributes (security, anyone?), a choice of filesystem formats, free encryption, and other industry standard tools and toys (pdf print, pdf manipulation, DNS, NTP, NFS, SSH, rsync...), which are so easy to set up and mostly free, tons of online support and geek pages which outnumber the ones for RHEL/CentOS....

What could also be mentioned is the increasing number of applications for Ubuntu Desktop that are now taking the innovation crown and yet are mostly free. One example is Calligra Suite, by all means this still has a long way to go and is not as polished as LibreOffice, but from a technology perspective breathtaking.

Getting rich off iPhone apps is b*llocks, say UK devs

what shall I read out of this?

Does this report basically say that thousands of young, enthusiastic developers have wasted their time developing apps that are mostly junk, are in the end left with dept and with the ever increasing capabilities of the phone browsers many apps are or will soon be obsolete as we will be using the same web pages as on our PCs?

In other words, the real innovation is still the phone hardware, the 000s of apps around it is mostly huff and puff, and only comparatively few are of real value?

Is that it then - in the long run we're better off developing tunnel driving, photovoltaic, gear mechanism technology, and the like?

Metro breakdown! Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

Looks lika a brushed up Win 3.1 UI

Now what - a cluttered icon graveyard is not bad UI design, it's a modern feature? And you have to pay for that pain? I for sure wont be queuing around the block in freezing rain for that. Pass that Ubuntu CD, at least Unity is free.

ISP Be admits crippling iPlayer demand burst its pipes

Either it's Be/O2...or Akamai

If the bandwidth to Akamai is saturated, what is the BBC or Be/O2, or other telcos holding back setting up their own replication sites?

See a need - fill a need.

IT staffers on ragged edge of burnout and cynicism

Any IT staff?

Made similar experiences. There are wrong perceptions in the industry that we get first class quality IT service by deploying ISO9001, project management for everything the techie is laying his hands on and ITIL . More often than not, ISO9001 turns out that we have now meticulously documented that we are doing $h1te, techies have the pleasure to write the project plans for the project managers and ISO20000/ITIL is an exercise in spending hours filling in BMC Remedy forms. And only after that the IT guy is allowed to do actual productive work, like training up the people from the outsourcing company who will take his job.

It is just that ISO9001 and in large parts ITIL was never meant to be a writing-essays-exercise, the idea was to create a knowledge database, a configuration management system, develop in-house technological excellence.

ITIL advocates very much a long term view of service strategy, design, transition, operation and - most importantly - continuous service improvement - and not pleasing the short term quarterly profit report to some stock exchange.

The PRINCE2 project management methodology lives by the rule "management by exception", which means skunk works, don't let anything interfere with the creativity of the IT guy.

History proves that companies that have taken a long term view and developed and kept their knowledge in-house succeeded most in long term: e.g. Toyota, and Google. This may also be the reason why we see somewhat an insourcing drive in recent years.

Death to Office or to Windows - choose wisely, Microsoft

Re: Linux was, is and remains a toy

"Linux is best suited for small task computing"

Goodness, no: think of all the Oracle, SAP instances running on RHEL, think of HPC computing, the biggest supercomputers on this planet run Linux, Google runs their business on Linux...the list is endless.

But I agree with the latter part of your comment: when you write a simple letter, nothing beats a well sized keyboard - which is why I think - and similar to the netbook craze some years ago - tab computers will morph into ultra-light laptops (again).

No, Matt, porting does not matter

Matt, MS can port their Office applications to any platform they like - this does not matter. What matters is that they still have a USP - a unique selling point to convince people to pay for their product. Microsoft successfully extended that USP by adding more features to their Office suite - one example being Visio, the other Office Web Apps. Libre Office seems to have achieved quite a maturity and feature richness that we can say that Office software has become a commodity - and it covers word processing, spreadsheet and math calculations, presentation, drawings, visio import, and database client frontend. Calligra Suite - if it is eventually released - has cutting edge Qt design and has even more applications than MS Office (Braindump and Plan). I therefore cannot see where MS Office' USP is now. And I haven't even started about Evolution, Thunderbird or Roundcube mail clients.

You should actually know this from your time at Alfresco: What is now MS Sharepoint's USP in the face of Alfresco, or Twiki?

You work at CIO level, would you go for a widely used, stable propriety solution with licensing costs and litigation if you have installed too many copies, or would you install a widely used, stable free solution with no licensing costs an no threat of litigation?

Oracle: 'US Navy tricked by illegal Solaris touts'

How easy is it actually to write your own SQL database?

Seriously - the most successful companies on this planet (e.g. Google, Facebook) don't outsource, build their own hardware and write their own software and thereby keep their technological knowhow in house.

With databases structured in tables being around since the 1980s, this is a fully researched domain, it therefore should be possible rather than buying a COTS solution that gives us 70% of what we want to write our own DB and applications that give us 100% what we want. And put it on our own commodity hardware.

The developer and sysadmin salaries are easily saved by not having to pay licensing and support fees, and out of support charges. How many developers and syadmins can you pay for that £2m license and support contract a year? And both are fixed costs.

Intel joins The Document Foundation, pushes LibreOffice

Who would have thought that.

Have I jumped into a parallel universe? Microsoft advertising Windows on ARM and Intel advertising alternatives to MS products? What will be next - Intel producing ARM processors? MS Office for Debian? VMWare offering KVM? IBM building SPARC servers? Oracle giving away their RDBMS under the LGPL license?

Is that Nazareth in the background playing "Dream on..."?

Ubuntu for Android: Penguins peck at Nokia's core problem

A new ecosystem in the making?

Could it be we will soon be able to buy a smartphone and then decide which OS it is running? Or better, we will be able to assemble, configure and upgrade our smartphones ourselves?

I better get going on my Linux distro....

Apple 'seeking part makers' for 8in 'iPad Mini'

Nothing new....just product variations

Apple is again following marketing by the book and offering the same product in different sizes. It may even be that the motherboard is the same or very similar in all of these iPads, just the screen and the housing is different.

What is astonishing, however, is that someone else did product differentiation first: Samsung with their Galaxy Tab range.

UK.gov: We really are going to start buying open-source from SMEs

Good effort, but it's just a rewrapping of the old...

I don't see how British SMEs are being helped when

. the hardware comes from HP, IBM, Oracle...

. the software comes from Oracle, SAP, Google...

Where is the research project for a parallel filesystem going to a British SME, like FhGFS in Germany?

Where is the protection of promising companies from takeovers from companies outside the EU e.g. IBM buying Transitive?

Where is the development of the UKGov OS, which ensures no Windows malware works on UKGov's desktops? It's called compartmentalization and is e.g. is a project of the Chinese government.

IBM: We do server flash already...

Easily outgunned....by DIY

Why does IBM need hot swapping for SSD, does IBM's solution lead to more SSD failures?

The throughput is easily outgunned by the 410,000 IOPS and the 2,800MB/s read and write of a 1.6TB SSD PCIe.

Looks to me if you want to have a decent server you, er, take your earthing kit and screwdriver and build it yourself.

Hitachi GST pushes out boosted SSD

What do we actually need SATA/SAS for?

It's all good and well if we still have a controller on the PCI bus between the RAM memory and the hard drive, as long as the hard drive is a spindle.

With SSD I don't think there is a need for a SATA or SAS controller, which architecturally slows down IO transfer to and from the SSD memory chips anyway.

Until we have the Exabyte storage chip solded onto the motherboard, SSD memory should be on PCIe cards.

Prove me wrong, in my opinion the days of SATA are counted, I guess.

Resellers: Microsoft price hike was 'demanded by Euro country bosses'

Quite honestly, where is the USP?

Let's mix monetary with the technical aspects: With Microsoft, we have a proprietary platform, which costs a great deal of licensing fees and comes with a bit of software. As it is globally deployed, the virus a frustrated student writes in Elbonia will work anywhere on this planet. That's why we have a massive proliferation of malware, viruses, internet worms, etc. for the Windows platforms. To protect against this, corporations will have to spend even more money on local anti-virus and encryption software - there are even industry standards for this, such as PCI-DSS. Whenever I ask why companies still slap MS Windows and MS Office on their laptops, the answers I get are a mixture of "'cos we've always done it this way" and "it's because of MS Office". Therefore, the MS Windows platform is an agglomeration of several licenses and internal as well as external support contracts with a bit of software.

Where then, is the Unique Selling Point of the Windows platform, since ever more powerful tools and operating systems are freely available, the innovation there is mind blowing (since not controlled by any corporation) and if you absolutely want you can purchase external support for these, too? LibreOffice, Debian/Ubuntu, and hopefully soon Calligra Suite are a few of the many examples on how to save on licensing fees on the desktop with an enhancing effect on productivity, and the client/server concept is being widened if not replaced by SOA and it's web interfaces. LAMP/LEMP servers within KVM are widely deployed already. SAP and Oracle run on Linux, too.

Can someone tell me the reason for MS Windows?

Nokia posts 'major' Sym... er... smartphone OS update

You talk nonsense....

They will not kill it from one day to the other. Period.

Symbian will live on!

This article about killing Symbian is just wishful thinking by someone who does not know strategic marketing - there is still a global mass market for low-end and midrange mobiles. If they "killed" Symbian, Nokia would be completely going against their gowth-share matrix and leave millions of customers to their competitors from the far east. They are not going to do that.

The world does not revolve around iOS and Android, that's why for example Samsung is quietly building up their Bada OS.

MasterCard joins Visa in pushing PINs into America

Goodness...

Yeah, right, a PIN with an easy to copy magnetic strip. Hopefully they learn from the mistakes the EU has done, such as not encrypting the PIN on the card and checking the console for transmitting devices sending card details to organised crime.

iPhone 5 rumoured to be packed with pay-by-bonk tech

Good move

Nokia brought out the C7 with an NFC chip in 2010....never mind the Nokia 6131 which was the first NFC phone in 2006, which shows again how advanced actually Nokia is. But admittedly, a good marketing move by Apple Inc., convincing all fanbois to dump their iPhone 4 and hand over hard earned cash because the iPhone 5 is soooo much better....it now has NFC.