AutoMotoVelo: января 2008

четверг, 31 января 2008 г.

News.com Extra: Einstein was wrong, and right

Also: What color is your cell phone, and why? See what people are saying on News.com Extra.

Photos: Cracking open the Iomega Zip drive

TechRepublic cracks open another gadget--this time, one of the first Zip drives widely available.

Microsoft's sees future of ads beyond search

Microsoft is hoping to get advertisers to think beyond search.

In an e-mail sent to reporters and analysts on Thursday, Microsoft's Brian McAndrews said the company is working on a new technology that will better measure the indirect role that online ads play in leading to a sale, a field known as "conversion attribution." McAndrews, who was chief executive of Aquantive when Microsoft bought it for $6 billion last year, said Microsoft has a new product that will enable advertising that is better at "giving credit where credit is due."

McAndrews, who heads Microsoft's advertising tools business, also predicted "significant growth" for online video advertising and said in-game advertising will "also begin to make meaningful in-roads," saying that there are now seven-figure deals in that space as well as better metrics to make them pay off.

"That said, we're not discounting the importance of search as it continues to drive a lion's share of digital advertising budgets," McAndrews said.

McAndrews has been sending out annual e-mails to reporters for several years, though this is his first since joining Microsoft.

Ubuntu is on the rise

Ubuntu is making inroads at IBM, with IBM making a significant commitment to lift Ubuntu out of its alleged "community" status to true enterprise status. (It's already enterprise-class, but perception lags technology.) IBM's reason for its Ubuntu move? Customer demand.

Here's another data point. I just got this data from Alfresco's chief marketing officer, Ian Howells, and it shows Ubuntu exceeding Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the first time in Alfresco's community:

(Credit: Alfresco)

Remember: While we're only one company, the data still has significance as our deployments tend to be with the Global 2000 and a significant portion are mission critical. (When a company's website is their business and that business is worth billions each year and that site is managed with Alfresco, I consider that mission critical.)

That said, a (big) caveat is in order. This is not a representation of how much Ubuntu has gone into production with Alfresco. It's a snapshot of our content community (i.e., those who register with Alfresco for white papers, documentation, etc.). It may well be that 100% of our RHEL community represents production instances and 100% of the Ubuntu community represents evaluation instances. I don't yet have that data. (However, even if true, the same could be said of Windows, as a majority of our evaluations are on Windows but a majority of our production deployments are on Linux.)

Still, I can't help but look at this data with surprise. I don't think it portends doom and gloom for Red Hat at all. But it does say a lot about the rise of Ubuntu. Ubuntu should be taken seriously by Red Hat, Novell, Sun, and Microsoft. But it should also be taken seriously by enterprise customers.

That's how I read the tea leaves.

Oh, and one more thing. The chart as a whole demonstrates increased viability for Linux across the board. Part of the growth on the chart can be ascribed to Alfresco's community growth. But looking at the growth of Linux versus the growth of other operating systems with Alfresco shows Linux growing at a faster pace. (I'll try to create a chart to show it.)

Like attracts like. Open source is a magnet for other open source.

Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET.

Vista's big upgrade! (Not so big, and not worth the wait)

Stephen Wildstrom over at Businessweek has news for Microsoft Vista hangers-on: it's not worth the wait.

Expectations for Vista SP1 may be unreasonably high because Windows XP had such a successful overhaul in a 2003 upgrade called XP Service Pack 2. In contrast, Vista SP1 is mostly a bundle of bug fixes and performance upgrades, many of which had been released previously. There's a lot of improvement under the hood in the form of better stability, security, and compatibility, but very little of it is in a form users will notice.

Microsoft is telling the world that Vista sales are roaring, but the truth is somewhat murkier. Vista isn't blowing the doors off, but the doors are also not falling off due to rust.

It's just a new product, and one that isn't nearly as innovative and intuitive as Microsoft may have hoped. But then, neither is Leopard, Apple's new operating system.

It seems to me that we've reached the end of the road of desktop innovation qua desktop innovation. Desktop innovation in the future will likely happen in the cloud (i.e., web-based applications/services).

In the meantime, if you have Vista Microsoft has an update for you. It won't be anything to write home about. But then, neither was the original product.

Closing the tech waste loop

This last weekend I spoke at the first UT Austin Sustainable Business Summit and it was an interesting and stimulating event that brought together a diverse group of speakers and audience members to think about different aspects of environmental sustainability, social resonsibility, and business. It was put on by the McCombs business school and largely organized by students, and they did a great job of organizing it.

One of the first panels had to do with computers, waste reduction and energy usage. It had a bit of tension to it as one of the panelists was from Dell, and another was an environmental activist who has been pressuring Dell for several years on energy reduction, take-back schemes, and overall sustainability issues. They handled it professionally, but you could tell there was some history there!

The other panelists were from IBM working on low power CPUs for servers, and from a company called Verdiem that makes software to centrally manage large installed bases of PCs in corporate environments. Such installations use massive amounts of electricity for prolonged un-necessary periods (such as at night), creating part of the big draw of "phantom" or "vampire" energy. The software allows central control of shutting down un-necessary machines while still allowing maintenance upgrades.

There was discussion of options for renewable energy sources for large data centers, and in fact an article in today's USA Today illustrates the attention being paid to this issue:

Intel is now the largest corporate user of renewable energy in the USA, the Environmental Protection Agency said this week. The chip giant plans to purchase more than 1.3 million kilowatt hours in wind, solar and other types of green power each year. That's enough energy to power about 133,000 households.

Intel won't say how much extra the green power costs. But the company considers the purchase an "investment in the renewable energy market," spokesman Bill Calder says.

This article also highlights one of the other themes that came up in the panel: business will be an earlier large adopter of green technologies than consumers, because the business case is easier to make and corporations are more familiar with thinking about total cost of ownership rather than up-front costs, which dominate in a consumer retail world. Companies are comfortable with the concept of amortizing capital costs over several years and can easily roll that into their tax calculations. Consumers, not so much.

The other theme that came up was that so goes Europe, so goes the rest of the world. Europe, and in particular Scandanavia, are really driving the legislation on curbing energy, forcing take-back schemes, and in general prodding industry to be more responsible. (The US laws are very weak in most regards in this area, California being a common exception.) But since manufacturers like Dell, HP and IBM have global supply chains and distribution channels, it doesn't make economic sense to make different models for different markets. So they go with the high-bar set by Europe and the US benefits.

But this is just a cop-out on the part of US government. In fact, according to one of the summit panelists the US is one of only three countries not to sign the Basel treaty on internation hazardous waste trafficking (where toxic waste is just dumped on another country's shore). Who are the other two? Haiti and Afghanistan.

We should be matching the European legislation to show commitment and to avoid things falling through the cracks. If we match it (as opposed to creating slightly different rules as we do with car crash tests for example), it will make everything easier and do more to encourage sustainable practices.

Adam Richardson is the director of product strategy at frog design, where he guides strategy engagements for frog's international roster of clients, envisioning and creating new products, consumer electronics, and digital experiences. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network.

Siemens разрешил своим сотрудникам покаяться в финансовых махинациях

Концерн Siemens продлил сроки амнистии для тех сотрудников, которые признались, что были в курсе финансовых махинаций, ставших причиной коррупционного скандала в немецкой компании. Об этом сообщает Reuters.

К настоящему моменту 66 сотрудников Siemens сообщили отделу, ведущему внутреннее расследование, что знали о незаконных действиях менеджеров компании.

Напомним, что в ноябре 2006 года полиция начала проверку офисов телекоммуникационного гиганта. Выяснилось, что менеджеры компании давали взятки государственным чиновникам России, Нигерии, Ливии и еще ряда стран. В общей сложности Siemens признал "подозрительными" транзакции на сумму в 1,6 миллиарда евро, проведенные в период с 2000 по 2006 год.

четверг, 31 января 2008 г.

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четверг, 31 января 2008 г.

среда, 30 января 2008 г.