HP seems to have something for everyone. Want a netbook? They've got whole bunch. Servers? The company has 'em from low-end to mainframe-class. They can fully equip your home or datacenter. And if you don't want racks of HP Itanium servers tied to HP SANs, the company can set up a cloud instead.
This week, HP announced cloud services for small and medium-size businesses, as well as for large telecom providers. It also now allows customers to use HP cloud tools but have those clouds reside with a third party such as Amazon.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/18/20090 comments
Azure is getting pretty good early reviews. The only problem is that the tools and platform require the application to be hosted in a service provider's datacenter, not your own. Meanwhile, competitors like VMware, HP and others are more than happy to let you build private clouds.
Early next year, Microsoft will begin beta testing Azure services that can blend private and service providers' clouds, letting your internal app -- say, a database -- access and update the larger cloud database. Unfortunately, the ability to build a purely private Azure may take a bit longer.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/18/20090 comments
Doug was willing to give Microsoft a pass regarding the Plurk code it admits to stealing. But other readers weren't so quick to let the company off the hook:
Or one could argue that once Microsoft was caught, the theft was so obvious that there was no hope of even trying to deny it.
-Anonymous
I don't give Microsoft a pass on anything and neither should you. No, Microsoft and that monkey boy Steve Ballmer need to get kicked in the balls a few times for some of the idiotic things they've done to their core cash providers -- like this ridiculous service pack they are calling a new OS.
Microsoft assessed the damage from Plurk and decided it was an easy gimme to lull the media into seeing it as a kinder, gentler Microsoft when nothing could be further from the truth. Don't fall for it. It's more smoke and mirrors from the guys who invented the ploy.
-Benjamin
You have got to be kidding! Let Microsoft off the hook? Come on! Microsoft is guilty AGAIN and it needs to be held accountable for its actions. At least once, it needs to know that what it did was wrong and it should have to pay for its transgressions. But once again, the giant will just keep getting away with it. Next time, it will be something a little worse and softies like you will just allow it to happen again and again.
I understand that you could say this was the act of just a few rogue employees that were acting without supervisory approval, but what they did got published and was presented as the work of Microsoft. Someone, somewhere up the food chain should have noticed and either didn't, or didn't care.
-Steve
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/18/20090 comments
I regularly get accused of two things: being a Microsoft shill and being a nattering nabob of Microsoft negatism. I'm either, depending on the day, though lately I've been kinder to Redmond than I ever have before.
I covered the investigations by the FTC and Justice Department; I saw some pretty cool companies put six feet under by Microsoft's ruthless and efficient shovels. But now I see a somewhat different Microsoft. Steve Ballmer is less ruthless than Bill Gates, and there are legitimate alternatives to Redmond's various and sundry monopolies such as Office, IE and Windows.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/16/20096 comments
Microsoft gave in to the relentless demands of European Union (EU) authorities and will no longer strong-arm customers in using IE. Under a recent settlement, Microsoft will let users pick from a menu of nearly a dozen browsers that can be installed when setting up a new machine.
The decision formally does away with an approach as old as Windows 95, when Microsoft argued that the browser was an intrinsic part of the OS and just as critical as the file system. That's now history -- except for the fact that it doesn't take a rocket scientist but a highly skilled IT pro to de-install the bulk of IE from Windows.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/16/20095 comments
Gregory takes issue with Doug's stance on Google's news aggregation and how it affects the journalism industry:
The issue of declining newspaper sales and the struggle for a profitable model is a complicated one, and it deserves honest debate. Your take on it does not help. I understand you work for a pro-Microsoft outlet, and while I appreciate the informational tidbits you provide, your blind fealty to the company has become distracting.
Here and elsewhere, you imply that posting a link which relocates the end user to the Web site hosting an article is stealing. Either you believe this, and therefore obviously never post links in your own articles, or you are merely providing us with paragraphs of anti-Google bluster. Both options are a waste.
-Gregory
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/15/20090 comments
Office 2003 offers a nifty way to protect files with the so-called Directory Rights Management (DRM), not to confused with the similarly named Digital Rights Management (also DRM).
It seems that when you protect Office docs with DRM, they can get overprotected. Often, you can't even save or open your own files! Office 2007, which I'm now on and slowly getting used to (I never got used to Office 2003, either), isn't impacted.
If you have these issues, contact Microsoft and get ready to tell them about three Knowledge Base articles that contain all the fixes. You can get all the details here in Kurt Mackie's fine report.
Posted by Doug Barney on 12/15/20091 comments
I took a couple of days away from Redmond Report and immersed myself in the topic of datacenter efficiency. You can reap the fruits of my labor in the March issue of Redmond magazine. And if you have datacenter efficiency/green tips and experiences, please e-mail me at [email protected].
This distraction meant I couldn't take Google's Eric Schmidt to task for his inane, insane, imbecilic, illogical, insipid and idiotic comments (and no, I didn't look up those words on Google).
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/15/200913 comments
Doug's still out, so covering once again is Jeff Schwartz.
Last week, I moderated a webcast exploring the topic of business intelligence and the growing trend of enterprises rolling it out to the masses, referred to by some as self-service BI.
The majority of those surveyed in a quick spot poll during the webcast said they see it as a priority to extend BI throughout their organizations to give stakeholders the ability to query and share data. Still, that only represented 32 percent of those responding. Another 23 percent said they had no BI infrastructure to date and 17 percent aren't yet sure. About 21 percent will beef up their BI offerings for a more restricted user base.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/14/20090 comments
Doug's still out, so covering once again is Jeff Schwartz.
Amazon this morning said it's testing a new service called Spot Instances that will let customers and developers apply the auction model to acquire capacity.
In a nutshell, here's how it works: Amazon will let those with non-mission-critical tasks bid for available capacity residing on Amazon's EC2 service. Spot Instance prices can fluctuate depending on supply and the demand for capacity at the time a bid is placed. The customer must place a request specifying the region, instance type, number of instances and the maximum price he or she is willing to pay per instance in a given hour.
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Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 12/14/20091 comments
After Intel debuted its 48-core processor recently, Doug wondered what that kind of computing power could do for everyday users. Here's what some of you had to say:
Well, on many people's desks, nothing much at all. But for researchers, quite a bit. Individual researchers now need to share supercomputers with other people. With this sort of thing, the individual researcher could run drug simulations or weather models. The creative animator could render in real-time a movie from a 3-D model and try out different blocking/scene changes/lighting/etc.
This isn't to say that games couldn't be extended into realistic 3-D animations with artificial intelligence, but there are other applications than just more gaming.
-Anonymous
Most people don't do enough with their computers to drive more than two or three processors at any one time, let alone 48. And with vendors trying to move the processing into the cloud on the Internet with subscription-based software, would there be any point to having a supercomputer on every desk?
Hoardware vendors seem to want ot put more power on the desktop, while software vendors seem detemrined to get everything off the desktop. With people pulling in oppostie directions, we'll probably remain in the same general state for a long tme to come.
-Bob
I am a power user, and am fortunate enough to own the i7 Extreme Edition processor. I use it for a multitude of things -- I run Second Life, Photoshop, Outlook 2007, IE 8 and Sound Forge all at once, with no apparent slowdown!
For power/business users, multicores are the way to go. One day soon, apps will take advantage of the multicores and computing will be unlike what we are used to now. Soon, we will be saying, "Remember back in the day of the single-core Pentium processor..."
-T.R.
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Posted by Doug Barney on 12/14/20090 comments