Cliff Saran’s FUD blog

Where next for Aqualogic?

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 22:03:46 +0000

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.

A blackmarket for IP addresses?

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 10:50:27 +0000

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.

Open letter to Bill Gates: what would you say?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 12:20:23 +0000

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.
.

Oracle database price hike

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:41:29 +0000

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 will collapse unless we all move to IPv6

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 09:12:18 +0000

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?

Windows 2012 wishlist

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 10:14:19 +0000

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

Apple delivers enterprise IT on iPhone

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:07:57 +0000

Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 3G yesterday in San Francisco. In terms of features, Apple looks like ity is catching up with Nokia and Blackberry. The iPhone 3G offers 3G networking, built-in GPS, and a software development platform, iPhone 2.0.

For enterprise IT, the software development kit could be significant, because it will allow users to integrate the iPhone into corporate IT and run third-party applications.

The iPhone 3G also supports Microsoft Exchange and ActiveSync - which means it is able to connect to desktop PCs and synchronies email messages, contacts address books and calendars with an Exchange Server. Push email is also available.

All of this sounds very exciting I'm keen to see how quickly the SDK gets adopted by enterprise users. It represents another mobile platform for the IT department to support. Businesses already support the Blackberry Enterprise Server, probably Nokia and some even run enterprise applications on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.0 platform.

Better battery life for the eeePC

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:38:29 +0000

I have been usng the eeePC 701 for a couple of months and I have to say, I barely get two hours of useful battery life from it. Now this is a a real shame. The eeePC is a great machine for the type of work I do. I travel to and from the office by train and I often attend conferences. A small light PC is an ideal travellling companion.

But, even when the trains arre perfect, my journey time to work is an hour and twenty minutes each way. So I barely have enough charge on the eeePC to work on the train. Naturally, I try to get all work done and press SAVE before the last ounce of battery life drains away. Still, living with the eeePC would be much easier if battery life was significantly longer.

So I was pleased to hear today that Asus has developed a new generation of eeePC with technology it claims will improve battery life to 7.5 hours. Well, even with the generous estimates PC makers usually slap on their machines, this seems pretty good. Personally, I'd be happy with anything that gave even half that amount consistently.

Undelete woes

Wed, 28 May 2008 21:31:53 +0000

It's am easy mistake to make. I put the SanDisk Compact Flash card in the memory card reader this morning and moved a WAV file onto our shared server at work. I then opened the WAV file with Windows Media Player and checked it played okay. Then I accidentally hit the delete button.

I'm not sure if I was prompted to make sure I really wanted to delete the file - it's all a bit of a blur. But, once I had confirmed to delete, it was well and truly gone.

A call to our IT support desk confirmed I had no chance of recovering it.

"We only back up at 7am and 5pm, anything done outside these times is lost," the IT support chap replied.

Still, I thought it would be possible to find an undelete program on the Internet and use that to recover the file - as files aren't really deleted are they? So I did a Google search for Free Undelete a really useful little porgram I had successfully used in the past to restore accidentally deleted files. But this could not get data back from the SanDisk CompactFlash memory card.

My colleague suggested a shareware program called Disk Internals which appeared to offer a feature to restore files from memory cards. The only problem was that my new office PC was locked down and I needed local system admin rights to run it

So I called the help desk again, explained my dilemma. "No I'm not trying to install a virus, I just want to recover an afternoon's worth of work that has been accidentally deleted."

Finally, I was granted 15 minutes of local admin rights. The software did indeed install and find the deleted file. But I needed to register and pay $39.00 before I could actually retrieve the deleted WAV file. Luckily DiskInternals takes Paypal, but it was a close call, as my 15 minutes of local admin rights had almost expired by the time I got the registration key that allowed me to undelete the file and store it on a nice safe play on my C: drive (which isn't backed up). Altogether, the whole affair took almost two hours.

Okay I've learnt my lesson, but I wish Microsoft or our IT admins made it possibe for deleted files to remain in the Recycle basket.

A business case for Vista

Fri, 23 May 2008 10:10:31 +0000

Vista is doing well, according to John Curran, director of the Windows group at Microsoft UK. Curran was in London this week for a roundtable with customers, analysts and press, covering Vista deployments.

16 months since Windows Vista was launched, Curran says that Microsoft has sold 140 million licenses of Vista. "We are seeing very broadly adopted from consumers, enterprise and public sector. Windows Vista has been the safest OS in the market and with Windows Defender, it is 60% more secure than XP SP2."

I don't think people are buying it for the great new features Microsoft promotes in Vista. Adrian Davey, head of IT at Tube Lines, for instance, says "By having a standardised platform, in terms of hardware and software, Vista is paying for itself."

Vista is juts one component of Tube Lines' IT infrastructure. Davey is happy to buy the whole Microsoft software stack - Windows Vista, SharePoint, SQL Server etc. He argues that businesses can reap genuine benefits when these products are combined.

Oracle readies Web 2.0 for business

Mon, 19 May 2008 16:13:21 +0000

Charles Phillips, Oracle's president, was in London earlier this month at a meeting for bloggers. He was over meeting Oracle's customers, talking to them about their plans for Web 2.0.

Not surprisingly few companies see a genuine business benefit of Web 2.0. Oracle is looking at Web 2.0 in the enterprise and Phillips wanted to discuss what would make Web 2.0 useful to businesses.

An obvious example is keeping in touch with developers. Oracle is using this internally to make sure its onshore and offshore developers can collaborate easily. This could easily be extended to the Oracle Developer Network, where people implementing Oracle software could speak directly to the Oracle product development team to discuss the issues they face and possibly request new features.

A related area is how Oracle keeps in touch with user groups. Wikis and Web 2.0 collaboration could provide a powerful platform for the user groups. Oracle is also looking to revamp its OpenWorld conference. Imagine, it may only be a matter of time before Oracle Openworld is hosted in Second Life, or delegates are able to participate without physically having to travel to the conference.

Phillips appears to be serious about moving Oracle into the Web 2.0 space and he said Oracle would be forming a Web 2.0 organisation to provide businesses with Webcenter, a new platform for building wikis, blogs and content management for Web 2.0 collaboration. He said, "Over the next few years we will be building collaboration into our enterprise application products."

In-car BMW prototype could lead to PCs in cars

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:02:44 +0000

I was at a meeting yesterday in Munich where carmaker BMW discussed how the car industry needed a standard platform for in-car IT.

Along with the computers that monitor the sensors and safety systems, cars are getting Internet access; they have GPS-based navigation and car radios have become in-car entertainment systems with DVD players, CD players, DAB radios and iPod connections.

Graham Smethurst, who works as the programme lead at BMW for its car IT collaboration project with Intel and is general manager of BMW's infotainment division presented the case. He said motorists were increasingly looking to connect mobile devices into their cars. However, while in the mobile industry, devices are churned out very quickly, cars take several years from design to the day they appear on a forecourt. This means that a car designed for mobile devices of 2008, probably won't be much good in terms of connectivity when it goes on sale in 2013, because the mobile device industry would have moved on. What's fashionable today - say the iPhone, is unlikely to be de rigueur in five years' time.

So BMW has worked with Intel to develop a prototype in-car computer system, based around Intel's Atom processor, which is capable of running PC applications on top of a standard software stack.

If the car industry adopted this platform Smethurst believes software companies would see the benefit of creating in-car application. For instance, the in-car navigation system could provide an add-on that told the motorist where the nearest petrol station was, or the cheapest price for petrol on his journey.

It sounds a bit like the start of the PC industry, when IBM and Microsoft created a standard hardware and software platform for software applications. It took just one killer application, the Visicalc spreadsheet, to seal the fate of the PC, paving the way to the ubiquitous workhorse it is today. Let's hope the car industry can agree on a standard, because if it is does, someone will inevitably develop a killer application, that could benefit us all.

Plug and pay

Wed, 07 May 2008 08:54:02 +0000

The long weekend gave me a chance to tidy up the house, clear out the clutter and try to make the most of the stuff that I had managed to collect over the years. Well one such item was a NetGear MP101 wireless media player. I once had an idea of streaming MP3 audio around the house to Hi-Fi's in different rooms. I originally began using a long digital coax cable to link the digital audio output on the PC's soundcard to the digital audio input on my Hi-Fi, which was located in the bedroom. This worked and I was able to control Windows Media Player 11 on the PC using Rudeo, a Windows Mobile application. It worked because there is a standard for universal plug and play (UPnP) which allows media files to be streamed using a UPnP server to a media play that is compliant with the UPnP Renderer standard and control playback using another device as a remote control through the UPnP controller standard – and all of this worked over Wi-Fi. So I was able to use Rudeo on my XDA Orbit to control playback of music from a PC running Rudeo's UPnP -compliant media server software located in a different part of the house. The digital coax link from the PCs soundcard to the Hi-Fi simply kept the sound quality high and meant the MP3 files weren't physically streamed over Wi-Fi. So this weekend I wanted to go one better. Surely I could connect the NetGear MP101 to my old Hi-Fi and have MP3 music files streamed over the Wi-Fi network? I was surprised the level of networkign competence needed to get the NetGear to see my secured Wi-Fi network. The NetGear MP101 was designed by geek engineers for geek users. Am I using encryption, if so, is it WEP or WPA? Is MAC address filtering enabled on the router? Do I have a DHCP server? What IP address should the MP101 be manually set to? Now, all of this could have been made a lot simpler, particularly given that my router was also from NetGear. Once the Wi-Fi connection had been configured I needed to install a UPnP media server. The MP101 does ship with one, but since the MP101 was supposed to be UPnP-compliant I decided to install OnShare Pro, a media server I have used in the past. This worked and I was starting to feel that streaming media over Wi-Fi wasn't so bad. I could start OnShare runninng on the PC in one room and then play music over Wi-Fi in another part of the house, and browse my Windows Media Player 11 library on the Netgear MP101. Excellent... However, since the user interface on the MP101 was pretty poor and the infrared remote control was all but useless, I decided to try using a UPnP controller, to control playback via Wi-Fi. The one I installed was Cidero, a Java-based UPnP controller which runs on Windows and Linux, and which works surprisingly well on the eeePC. I used it on the eeePC with my previous setup to control the media player, where the PC with the UPnP renderer (actually Windows Media Player 11) was physically connected to my Hi-Fi. Now I wanted to use Cidero with the NetGear MP101 to play music and control playback over Wi-Fi.

Software must be made green

Fri, 02 May 2008 06:35:36 +0000

Last year I met with Charles Phillips, president of Oracle and asked him about whether the company's flagship database was green. As I recall, his response was that green IT was something the hardware guys had to deal with. This was not the answer I expected since efficient software design goes hand in hand with green hardware. A few days ago attended a meeting where investment bank Lehman Brothers described its approach to sustainability. Rather than charge business departments for data centre resources based on rack space, Lehman Brothers has a charge-back model for IT services based on the power consumed by data centre applications used by business departments. Assuming users do not incur a surcharge on legacy applications and Lehman Brothers has a fair and balanced approach to measuring net power consumption of applications, then, this model, I think this is a very clever appraoch as it encourages businesses to find more efficient ways to run applications, faster and tighter code. Well I'm meeting Phillips again next week. I wonder if he has changed his approach to green software?

Skip Vista - you know it makes sense

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:49:21 +0000

With the first service pack now available, I wonder how many businesses are going to be upgrading to Vista? Not many it seems. Some businesses are not at all keen on Vista. Let's face it, what's the best way to break a modern PC...install Vista. All the tweaks Microsoft has made to make its desktop operating more intuitive, more secure and do more cool stuff means that the processor has to perform more tasks and you need more memory and faster graphics. So a PC that runs XP well, will be truly sluggish if Vista is installed. It's no wonder Dell and HP and going to continue preinstalling Vista. If you are in the business of selling new PCs, next generation hardware usually equates to greater performance. Sadly, Vista saps all that power, making the new PC perform far worse than the machine it replaces. And for Dell and HP, that's not encouraging, hence their decision to offer XP instead. Now for business users, why bother with Vista at all. PC upgrades are unnecessary expenses during these difficult economic conditions. Any IT manager attempting to replace desktops when trading conditions are poor, must be mad, or a genius, or both. No one in their right mind should be looking at refeshing the desktop unless the future of the business absolutely depends on Vista. And how likely is that? Perhaps it is better to defer any decision to upgrade until trading conditions improve. Better still, don't upgrade to Windows Vista at all. Why not wait until the next release, Windows 7, comes out.