Cliff Saran’s FUD blog

Earlier this week I met up briefly with JP Rangaswami, managing director of BT Design.
and a former CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

He was speaking at a Computer Weekly event on social networking. JP made a good point about the likes of Facebook that I'd like to share here.

He said that social networking on a website is no different to a conversation people have by the water cooler, or for that matter, down the pub, or outside when they are having a ciggie break. Now you can't stop people talking, so why are we so afraid of them using Facebook?

 

I think security companies grabbing headlines with horror stories of social networking misuse are missing the point.

This afternoon I was at the launch of a family of business laptop PCs from Sony.  Powered by the latest generation of Intel Centrino and Core Duo chips, the new Sony Vaios offer fingerprint recognition, a trusted computer module for encrypting data and the high-end model includes a SIM card for 3G wireless internet.

But you get this kind if stuff on certain HP and Dell machines. So what's special? Well first these are Sony laptops. Each machine in the line-up looks great. It's not quite drop-dead gorgeeous like the Apple MacBook Air, but in terms of good looks and street cred, I think the Vaio family is a definite 8/10. And of course it's a Sony, which means the screen and video are going to be superb. But unlike the more expensive MacBook Air, Sony appears to have made its machine corporate friendly.

Now this is great news for execs who lusted after the Apple MacBook Air but were told by IT that MacOS was not a supported platform. The businesses Vaios will run both Vista and XP Pro and there's a downgrade disc in the box.

So I guess IT departments won't so easily fob off exec users with the excuse that it's not supported. With a manufacturer price of under £850 for the basic Vaio, IT departments could soon find a stampede, as users demand sexier laptop models compared to the dull grey and silver HP and Dell machines.

Now I just need to get my hands on one to try out the Vaio for myself.

There's a buzz in the blogosphere. Apple's iPhone 3 arrives in the UK tomrrow. BA has created a flight info application for the iPhone. It's available from Apple AppStore site. Here's a screenshot from  smimoof:

 

 

 

Imagine if there was a resurgence of mainframes. IBM says they are greener than Unix and PC servers, and the savings in electricity are substantial. Could environmental savvy IT directors migrate applications onto the mainframe to lower their data centre electricity bills.

 

The mainframe is based on virtualisation technology that has evolved over the last 40 years, which makes it a great platform to run and manage virtual machines. IBM even sells IPL, an add-on  processor dedicated to running Linux applications. A single mainframe can run hundreds of Linux virtual machines.

 

The green mainframe argument simply states that it is possible to replace hundreds of physical Linux-based PC servers with a single mainframe. The total electricity and cooling costs of running the Linux PC farm is far greater than if the same software environment was ported to the mainframe and run as virtual Linux machines.

 

This may have made sense a couple of years ago. However, thanks to VMWare, PC server virtualisation is mainstream. IT departments can run many copies of Linux (or Windows) on the same physical hardware. So if the green sums are calculated now, is the mainframe really greener compared to a modern (ie green) PC server running multiple copies of Linux on top of VMWaare or Xen?

It's been a good and bad day for businesses running BEA products. Oracle unveiled its strategy for BEA, following its $8.5 billion acquisition of the company.

There are no surprises that WebLogic become Oracle's strategic Java Enterprise Edition platform, after all, that's why it bought the market leader. Tuxedo also gets a boost.

However it's a bit of a kick in the teeth for Aqualogic customers. While Oracle probably would be loathed to lose them, its strategic roadmap says very little about the Aqualogic product family.

This does seem really bad luck for those businesses that stuck with the portal product when it was owned by Plumtree, through the BEA acquisition in 2005, which led to an injection of investment, renewing interest in the Aqualogic product set. Oracle's the new owner now, and it doesn't need a portal product.

When I interviewed Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC for a podcast earlier this week. He mentioned that as IPv4 addresses run out we could end up with a free market where enterprise users are charged for new IP addresses. At the moment businesses pay a nominal admin fee to obtain a block of 255 addressses.. But as numbers dwindle, market forces, supply and demand could lead to users paying large feess for IP addresses.

Worse still, a black market could emerge if ISP are unable to obtain IP addresses for enterprise users. Huston believes buying and selling of IP addresses in an uncontrolled manner could irreparably damage the internet.

Dear Bill

I'd like to thank you and Microsoft for helping to turn the computer industry around. Software used to be bundled with hardware. IT was extremely expensive. But Microsoft separated the software from the hardware, and with IBM, created affordable computing for the masses.

 

In the last decade, with the boom in home PCs (many of which run Microsoft software), and the internet revolution, I'm glad that Microsoft has made software that has simplified programming, helping software developers to create applications to meet user demands.

 

I guess it is fair to say you have made computers easier to use - but lack of ease-of-use is my biggest issue with Microsoft software. I often find functions in Windows that do not do what they are supposed to. Plug and Play was a great innovation, but how many hours have been lost, when Windows fails to detect a perfectly working device? Plug and Play has to do just that, plug and play - 100% of the time.

 

I also like the idea that Windows offers a fairly well integrated software stack. Wouldn't it be really neat if the whole world ran on Microsoft software? But it doesn't and today, IT departments need to support many other types of software. I wish you could have made it easier for Windows and the server products to co-exist and integrate better with other software.

Writing about you and Microsoft has kept me busy for the last 18 years. I appreciate you and Microsoft has done a lot to make computers affordable by separating software from hardware. But now Google has created an entirely different business model where software is effectively free, subsidised by internet advertising.

I think Microsoft, as a company, needs to evolve to embrace the internet and open standards completely.
.

 

 

Users of Oracles database products could see their licence fees rise by 20%, The company has increased the price of a number of products  in its June 2008 price list. Users of Oracle Standard One Edition will see an increase of $800 on the per processor license fee from $4995 to $5800. The cost of application adapters for Oracle's Fusion midddleware has increased fom $15,000 to $17,500.

The internet is running out of addresses. This should be a well-known fact. As it stands today the internet can support four billion addresses and Geoff Huston, chief scientist at APNIC estimates that there won't be any left by 2011.

The internet needs to move from IPv4 to IPv6 in order to fuel the predicted explosion of internet connected devices.  Every man, woman, child and device will need to run IPv6 .

Worryingly, Huston says the industry has not done enough to migrate people across. In this video of his speech at the OECD in Seoul, he explains why.

My question is why are  leaving it to the last minute. And if network equipment, operating systems and the various internet protocols already support IPv6, why haven't we switched yet?

I still run Windows XP SP2 at home and at work. I'm pretty happy with the performance of the OS on my three year old hardware and it does all the things I expect from an OS.

 

I would upgrade, but Vista seems too unwieldy and has many feature - which I may one day find useful - but they are certainly not essential. I'd upgrade more frequently if Windows was simpler. My ideal Windows upgrade would:

 

1. Be easier to upgrade.

2. Run on my existing hardware

3. Componentised so I can choose which features to install, to improve security, stability and simplify patch management

4. Licensed so that I only pay for the functionality I require

 

5. Remove Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player from the core OS