Locking down IT or blocking creativity
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Enterprise, Business, Hardware, Networking on
Is a Windows desktop an expensive and insecure liability that you’d like to get under control, or a flexible and powerful tool that lets your employees work, play and be productive? Martin Banks reported recently on an insurance company who rolled out two whole new overseas offices without leaving the office by shipping out thin clients. You can’t complain about the efficiency for the IT team but I wondered about the difference for the end users. Did they have as much freedom and flexibility - in terms of trying new things or in terms of being allowed the level of personal use people expect (in the UK at least)?
If they can’t, some IT teams might be quite happy, Martin told me. Flexibility and personal use
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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The ISP Sandwich
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
The UK government wants ISPs to control the traffic of illegal file sharing through their networks. If they don’t, the government is planning to introduce legislation to ensure they do. I’m left stuck with an image of King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Failed business models don’t need to be propped up with legislation…
So why isn’t it going to work?
First, some basic numbers. The BBC article on the government proposals suggests that there are 6 million broadband accounts downloading illegal files every year. That’s a hefty proportion of the UK’s 15 million or so broadband users. While broadband analysts Point-Topic predict that number to grow significantly over the next few years, it’s reasonable to expect file downloading to grow at a similar (or, More likely, faster) rate.
Then there’s the problem of identifying the traffic. While it’s possible to roughly identify the application sending each packet, it’s impossible to say exactly what it’s being used for. There’s no point in just labeling BitTorrent connections as illegal downloads, especially as many open source projects use it as a tool for reducing the load on their servers and for giving users faster downloads. There’s also the issue of identifying BitTorrent connections, as many clients connect on random ports and encrypt their connections. To a packet monitor a BitTorrent client delivering a copy of Open Office looks much the same as the latest episode of Doctor Who.
Traffic volume isn’t a signifier, either. That big download could be an MSDN file transfer of an ISO of Visual Studio or Windows Server 2008. It could even be someone using a cloud storage service like Mozy to upload several gigabytes of photographs to a secure online backup service. Or perhaps it’s someone using 4OD or the BBC iPlayer to download a TV programme they missed. With consumer DSL finding a business role as a tool for connecting branch offices it could even be an estate agency updating its database (with the myriad digital photos a house sale needs these days), or an insurance broker delivering a batch of scanned and signed forms to head office.
The bottom line is quite simple: it’s virtually impossible for ISPs to economically identify and filter user actions that infringe on copyright files. The cost of implementing filters is prohibitive (look at how long Google took to even start filtering YouTube), and the time needed to identify exactly which users do what over the network will detract from actually managing and running a commercial network.
There’s also another part to this story.
Running a consumer ISP is hard enough without having to cope with the additional demands of regulators. Customers are on the phone 24×7 demanding service levels that any business IT department would find impossible to implement. An increasing range of IP connected applications and services are stretching thin budgets to the very limit, as network engineers try to emulate a Star Trek chief engineer putting the Enterprise back together with nothing but string and sealing wax.
It’s an issue I’ve had personal experience with, as I used to run the technical side of UK Online - and that was back when dial-up connections were the norm. If it was virtually impossible then to manage usage, what’s it like for today’s ISPs that see an explosion of protocols and packets across their fragile networks.
Illegal filesharing is the least of an ISPs problems. Legal file sharing is a much bigger problem, as the protocols used by services like the iPlayer are inefficient compared to BitTorrent, and the expected traffic volumes are more than likely to overstress existing interconnect and backhaul bandwidth. It’s probably fair to say that ISPs are now finding themselves squeezed from both ends.
If bandwidth is an issue, then ISPs will find ways of controlling it. Plusnet is traffic shaping to reduce network load at peak times. It also produces graphs to show just what type of traffic is used - and when.
Plusnet also produces indivudual reports for each user to show what traffic they were generating. It’s an approach that helps users schedule their own downloads to appropriate times - reducing overall load, and letting users choose their own quality of service.
If
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Employees are our most valuable asset (snigger)
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Applications, Enterprise, Business on
Actually, if you’re read your Dilbert, you’ll know that’s not true and it’s really photocopiers; employees come in around number nine on the list (and a copier manufacturer once sent me the statistics to back it up).
But number one or number nine, your employees are the source of your business’s knowledge and ability; you may think you have business processes but it’s your employees who actually get things done (often by entirely different methods). So what technology are you using to manage that asset and how much more can you get out of it?
HR isn’t just there for the nasty things in life; if you use it properly, HR could be a repository for useful information about the skills in your organization, the candidates who turned you down but might be worth approaching again in a year’s time - and when the most people will be out of the office, if you’re trying to pick a good time for a major network upgrade. The HR team knows when new employees will start work; you could get the manager to ask the IT team to order them a PC while the facilities team books a desk and a phone line - or you could have a system that does it automatically when HR enters the day they’ll start work.
You need to know when people actually make it to work, when they’re on holiday, ill or just AWOL. Do you let them enter that into the system themselves, or have them fill out a form, show it to their manager and send it on to a third person to put into the system? Sounds like an obvious choice but according to Chris Berry, MD of HR automation specialists Computers in Personnel, efficiency isn’t what a lot of companies are thinking about. At one large company that he’s too polite to name, when Berry suggested an automated system employees could use directly, the head of HR told him they couldn’t consider it; after all, what would the 50-strong admin team do then?
You can’t leave everything up to employees; there have to be checks and approvals for some processes. But there are plenty of approvals that can be automated as part of a workflow without taking up two people’s time. If I’m putting in an order through a purchasing system and it’s under my sign-off level then it shouldn’t need to be countersigned. If I want to update my bank details, I shouldn’t have to mail it to someone who prints of the email, hands it to an admin and has it typed in ‘to make sure it’s right’. I’m motivated to give you the right details in the first place, because I want to get paid, and if I get them wrong, I’m motivated to come back and correct them - or I don’t get my money. And if I’m using a self-service system, the form can have validation built in so I have to type in a sort code with six digits; you can’t do that in email!
It’s joined up business; not only do you save on admin time and get more of your data right first time, you’re bringing another layer of information into systems where you can analyse it. Usually we think about upgrading technology to make a server or application run better rather than because it’s slowing individual employees down; but if you could see that you get more transactions through a
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
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Wherever I go, there I am wanting context
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Windows Mobile, Identity, Applications, Laptop, Wireless, Microsoft, Mobile, Apple on
My phone knows where I am, and when I flew to Geneva the other week it knew what time it was; the operator pushed a time signal and Windows Mobile 6 happily picked it up. It confused me when I took the phone out to change the time - but it also meant the appointment with the contact number for the taxi driver was up on screen where I needed it. I connected my PC to the Orange World Wi-Fi in the hotel (at the fifth time of asking; if you’re using a mix of numbers and letters as your username and password, please use a font that allows the user to distinguish 6 and G ). My PC sat there stubbornly believing it was on UK time, even though it had a French IP number.
I’m not expecting every PC to have a GPS in, and it doesn’t need to. Never mind battery life, it’s useless inside anything bigger than a garden shed and even in a city canyon it’s impractical; it took my O2 XDA Stellar 15 minutes to get a GPS fix in Covent Garden this week. What I’m after is a utility that uses the location services like Spotigo, Aruba, Navizon, PlaceSite, Skyhook and all the rest that give you location based on your IP address/what wireless access points you can see and when it gets a location that’s different from the time zone Windows is set to, up pops a prompt asking if you want to change it. If you want to be all social networking about it, the utility could upload my location to services like Facebook - or preferably just my timezone, as I’m sure burglars read Facebook too. I could have a widget in the Sidebar showing who’s in the same timezone as me or get an alert if someone I know is in the next street.
I’ve used Navizon
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Getting ready for a server migration
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Business, Server, HP on
Mary and I are a small business, and we rely on our workhorse of a server. Currently running Microsoft’s Small Business Server, it sits in the corner of the office and looks after our mail and our files. Sadly, though, it’s getting close to retirement. A solitary Athlon isn’t really up to today’s workloads, and many of the features we want from Exchange are only in the latest release - which is 64-bit only.
Our new server has arrived, and it’s surprising what a few years have done to the SMB server market. We’d had to build our original server ourselves, but this time we’ve ended up with a dual-core Xeon system from HP. I’d been delaying purchasing a new server as I was expecting to pay through the nose for my hardware, but when I started looking at current prices I found I couldn’t have been more wrong.
That HP server? With 512MB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive, it cost us less than
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i-mate lets you customise your smartphone, NVIDIA makes you want to
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Windows Mobile, Mobile, Microsoft on
If you get a smartphone from work, you may not get exactly what you want, but at least the IT team will set it up for you and deal with things if you lose it.
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CUDA - let the GPU take the strain
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Processors, Silicon, Applications, Business, Server on
The barracuda is the wolf of the sea, a slim silver dart that hunts in deadly packs. It’s perhaps not surprising that NVIDIA has taken part of its name for its GPU-based supercomputing tools.
On a recent trip to the US, Mary and I met up with some of the folk behind CUDA at NVIDIA’s Sunnyvale headquarters. It was a fascinating conversation - if only because I used to write scientific computing software, and something like CUDA would have sped up my work massively. When a problem takes days to solve, something using something like CUDA to accelerate processing makes a lot of sense.
Prior to CUDA, NVIDIA had tried to use GPUs for compute, but had run into architectural problems. Things changed with their series 8 GPU, which was very different to anything they’d built before, being designed for compute as well as graphics. That’s lead to some tradeoffs - there’s silicon on the GPUs that’s unused when it’s used as an accelerator (and vice versa). However NVIDIA makes so many chips, there’s not really any financial issue, it all comes out of the economies of scale.
CUDA is more than just a set of chips - it’s a language framework for working with GPUs, that can andle both sequential and parallel code together. Developers don
Rated: 90% (2 votes)
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Microhoo!
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Anyone who’s listened to me rant over the last couple of years will have heard me say that I expect Microsoft to takeover Yahoo!. With Google’s dominance over search, and Yahoo!’s success at what Microsoft wants to build into Live, there’s a certain logic to a merger of the two businesses. Yahoo needs the R&D boost that Microsoft can give it, and Microsoft needs the online presence of Yahoo!.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Microsoft has made a formal offer to Yahoo!, offering $44.6 billion for the company.
Microsoft’s been playing nice with Yahoo! for some time. It’s Windows Live Photo Gallery handles uploads to Flick, andWindows Live Messenger can talk to Y! users. The love goes both ways too, as Y! is one of the first applications to really take advantage of the Vista UI enhancements.
Reading Steve Ballmer’s letter to Yahoo! this morning I noticed a couple of quotes.
The first is the one everyone’s expecting. Microsoft needs Yahoo! to compete with Google:
While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:
Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.
Microsoft has been talking about online advertising as a key play for some time. There’s a lot of advertising money out there, and even if you add in the efficiencies of online over other mechanisms, not enough if it is going to the online side. Google may have a lead at the moment, but it’s one that can be eroded. Besides, there’s enough money out there for everyone to do very well thank you.
The second quote is, for me, the more interesting:
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