POS Systems Pay Off (Baseline magazine)

Point of sale (POS) systems are what we used to call electronic cash registers, which really weren’t much more than a cash drawer bolted onto the bottom of a PC. But as these systems have gotten more sophisticated, they’ve played an ever-increasing and important role in how a business can integrate its accounting systems, cut operating costs, track inventory and improve its supply chain partners’ efficiency. You can read more in my article in this month’s Baseline magazine here.

An IT Management To Do List for 2009 (Baseline magazine)

I want to ring in the New Year with some suggestions on technologies to check out and strategies to pursue that will help improve your own IT efficiency. Things like outsourcing email, dynamic virtual machine provisioning, and other items can be found in my article in this month’s Baseline magazine here.

UVerse vs Tivo: Remote DVR Programming

I recently started getting AT&T Uverse TV programming, after many years of being a DirecTV customer. The cool thing about Uverse — perhaps the only cool thing — is being able to remotely program your DVR using just a Web browser and your AT&T/Yahoo account. You can see a screen shot at left that gives you an idea of what is involved. You can use the search function to find a particular actor or the name of a program and then schedule the recording for any show that is going to be broadcast within the next two weeks. One thing missing — among others — is being able to understand how much storage you have consumed and what you have left over, that is nowhere to be found on this UI or the screens that show up on your TV, which of course are slightly different. 

 Tivo recently announced that they will offer something similar from using mobile phones.

PC Magazine going Web-only in January

It makes me sad, although not surprised, to see that Ziff Media will stop printing the paper edition of PC Magazine soon. For sentimental reasons, here is a copy of the cover from their very first issue, back in 1982, that features an interview with a very young Bill Gates talking about how his mother would have trouble using the early PCs, a report on the first Comdex, and ads for VisiCalc, AST memory boards and Amdek monitors (that displayed text in green characters only), and a review of Easywriter word processing software.

Here is the announcement over on Paid Content,  including an interview with Jason Young, current CEO.

I didn’t do much work for Mag, as we in the biz called it, but that was more a matter of circumstance and timing than anything else. When I started at PC Week, Mag set the standard for lab tests and comparative reviews. Here are some commentary from people that worked there during the go-go years, when issues would stretch to 400+ pages and hundreds of products:

• Bill Machrone, the second EIC after David Bunnell left to start PC World 
• Michael Miller, former EIC during the 1990s
• Larry Seltzer, lab director during the same time
• Barbara Krasnoff, who worked there briefly
• Steven Vaughan-Nichols, long time freelancer

Feel free to post your own memories here in the comments section.

If you want to see other computer magazine covers from the early days, check out the ones that I have scanned here.

Saving money inside your wiring closet

Here is a brief exercise in how to save some money for your company, and make yourself a hero at the same time. Do a quick census of the gear inside all of your wiring closets. You don’t have to be too anal here: just quickly estimate the number of ports, regardless of whether or not they are in use. Now use some fudge factors for the number of watts per port – if you have this information, fine, otherwise for the purposes of this tally, use 50 watts for unpowered Ethernet and 500 watts for powered ports, and add in the power consumption figures for anything else that is plugged into an electrical outlet.

 

Now add up the kilowatt hours and multiply by the cost of electricity in your area. If you don’t know, say 15 cents per kwh. Surprised at how big this is? Now here is where the hero part comes into play: suggest that you replace some of this gear with switches that can turn themselves off during off-hours.

 

Hunh? “Our networks have to operate 24×7” you say. “We can’t turn anything off. What about the people that come in on the weekends?”

 

Still, think about it. I got the idea after visiting Adtran this week, and they were showing me some of their switches that do just that. You can set up profiles for particular ports on the switch to shut off at certain times of the day, or to provide less power to those ports that are just running to ordinary PC endpoints. You wouldn’t think this would add up to a lot of saved juice, but if you have a lot of powered Ethernet ports – say supporting Wifi access points and VOIP phones – it can really add up quickly, into the tens of thousands of dollars a year. This could easily pay for part of the upgrade to your infrastructure.

 

Switches aren’t the only things that can cycle their power loads down these days. Intel’s latest multicore chips have the ability to turn off several of their cores to save on electricity, or to funnel processing to particular tasks to match their computing loads. There are virtualization provisioning products that will automatically spin up virtual servers to match increased loads, and then spin them down when the loads drop.

 

It is funny, when you think about it. Going green these days means getting a more powerful box and turning stuff off. Makes you stop and think, doesn’t it? Oh, and when you are done, ask your boss to give you at least a third of the savings as a bonus, and tell them I put you on to the idea. You can thank me later.

Eos Wireless Multiroom Audio On the Cheap (Tom’s Guides)

A recurring dream of my wife’s is to have a whole house music system, so she can listen to the same song playing in more than one room concurrently. Until recently, satisfying this dream has meant we would have to spend a lot of dough for a system that processes music streamed over WiFi. But there is another solution on the market, a new product from IntelliTouch called Eos Wireless speakers that  allows you to distribute audio to as many as five different rooms of your house.

You can read my review on Tom’s Guide here.

Calculating TCO without the need for new math

You are all familiar with those studies from industry analysts that show you what the “true” cost of owning various IT equipment. I am visiting Adtran today and one of the things they talk about is how easy it is to figure out the total cost of ownership (TCO) without having to apply a lot of airy-fairy multiplers or other fudge factors to really get to the bottom line. Here are some quick ways that won’t require you to go ask your fourth-grader to do the calculations for you:

• Does your vendor offer extended warranties that really cover maintenance for five years at no cost, or do they require hidden maintenance contracts?
• Does your vendor offer free firmware upgrades for as long as you own their gear, or do you have to pay after a year or two to keep current with their upgrades?
• Does your vendor offer toll-free support both before and after you buy their product, and does the support team live somewhere in the US rather than overseas?
• How does your vendor pay its telephone support staff, by per call completes, by customer satisfcation, or by some other metric?

I think you can see where I am going here. The more stuff that is included in the price, the less funny business you have to deal with when you are four, five years out and have to keep things running. (Too bad the American automobile industry hasn’t yet figured this out.)

Ways to transfer files to your iPhone (TidBITS)

I have been a latecomer to the iPhone party, but one of the things that I first noticed, apart from the lack of any cut and paste ability, is a more important omission: I want to be able to make copies any file that is on my main Mac desktop and be able to view the file on my iPhone when I am away from my desk. While using iTunes and iPhoto library is relatively easy to move photos, videos, and music that are stored on my desktop Mac over to the iPhone, I want access to all the other data that I have on my desktop, too. 

In this review for TidBITS.com, I examine five different apps that you can use for this purpose on your iPhone.

It takes a long-tailed village

You are by now no doubt familiar with the concept of the long tail, the ability of the Internet to support the most microcosmic segment, specifically targeting (say) yellow VW microbus owners or people that walk their cats on leashes or whatever oddities you can assemble. But I found myself in a conversation this week about a very different aspect of the long tail, with a deputy city manager of a small community outside of Columbus. As in Ohio.

I was in Columbus on behalf of their chamber of commerce, to visit with hi tech companies, old and new, big and small. I know, I get to go on some great junkets as a journalist. At least it wasn’t Yet Another Vegas Trip. And I actually had a good time, even got to visit a few data centers (and you know how much I love being on a raised floor, breathing in all that A/C) while I was there.

Columbus has a lot going for it as an IT destination. Cheap power, smart people, big college talent pool, and some high-profile companies that employ thousands of IT workers, including Nationwide, OCLC, and others. But it was my briefing with Dublin’s deputy city manager, Dana McDaniel, that stood out.

Dana was talking to us about how Dublin was trying to woo various hi tech companies there. It wasn’t anything I hadn’t heard before. Clean, white collar business, blah, blah, well educated, yada yada, high salaried this and that. But then he started talking about the long tail, and how he wasn’t focused on the Fortune 1000 or any other big-ticket company that could be wooed there with big tax breaks and other public give-backs. “I want the long tail,” he told us. “I want the two guys in their garage that will eventually expand and become the next big win.” 

Those firms are a lot harder to find, and once you find them, they are a lot harder to keep in town. To demonstrate that what he was saying wasn’t just the usual politico hot air: he actually helped a 4-person firm stick around and now they are a 20-person firm, on the second floor above a Starbucks. (And they allow Starbucks in their town, too!)

You need to have a lot of different things that have to do with quality of life, such as a business district that has multiple eateries and bars (and with a town named Dublin, you can only imagine the choices), congestion-free travel to and from work, and mixed residential-business zones so people can live close by the office, once they move out of the garage and down the street.

Yes, you need great Internet infrastructure, and Dublin has their fiber rings, their connection to bandwidth hotels, and is even putting together muni WiFi that will cover not just the business parks but its subdivisions too. They even built a business “accelerator” that will rent out offices to up-and-coming businesses and has a full complement of services and IT support techs that are on premises. Those are the good things, the necessary things even, that today’s community needs if they are really going to make a go out of having IT people stick around, and attracting more of them from places that are high-cost, high-hassle like the coastal cities where we usually think all innovation happens in this country.

But there are more subtle things happening too. And this is where that whole long tail mumbo jumbo starts to be more meaningful. Dublin can piggy-back on the larger Columbus metro area that can fill in the gaps with people who have the right specialized knowledge that can help run companies. The area has begun a series of informal meetups and unconferences to bring together nerds of all walks of life. There is the benefit of having a big college and a federal research lab nearby but not too close, so that Dublin canpick up some of the crumbs of the attention, federal grants, and research projects that come into Columbus but not get bogged down into chasing the big ticket science that OSU and Battelle need to keep their lights on. And it helps to have a solid series of IT training classes, that are offered by TechColumbus, the downtown incubator and entrepreneurial engine that has established a branch office in Dublin.

So yes, it does take a village, to coin a phrase, one person at a time. But the next time you hear an economic development guy praise the long tail, stop and listen, because they so get what the next decade of employment opportunities is going to be.

Making backups with Symantec Protection Network Online Backup

Symantec Corp. http://spn.comSummary:An online backup service that works automatically in the background to make copies of your most critical files and is very easy and economical to use. Online backups have several advantages:– To aid in recovering files from a lost or stolen laptop– To provide a simple but effective offsite storage solution for your data– To keep the costs of backups low and within reach of most businesses Requirements: Windows 2000/2003 Server, Windows XP, Windows Vista with latest service packs installed, with at least 15% free disk space on the volumes that you want to backup.Price: $9.99 a month for basic service for 10 GB storage. Premium service is $35 a month for 10 GB with seven year history of backups. Additional fees for more storage capacity, remote access, and online storage for Backup Exec v12 users. Pros:– Easy to setup and operate– Free 30 day trial helps you test out the service and become familiar with its operation– 24×7 support includedCons:– Requires a fast broadband upload connection particularly on the first backup or for very large file collections. Only incremental changes are sent on subsequent backups — Lack of progress indicators make troubleshooting more difficult

more about "Making backups with Symantec Protecti…", posted with vodpod