It’s been one of those weeks where I have been buried in the realms of DAO, ADO and somebody else’s programs. As I have been working my way through the process I have also been thinking about programming languages and how they have developed.
I started my programming career coding in Assembler, APL and Basic. In University there was Fortran, C, Pascal, Prolog, Lisp and Cobol. Later there was C++, object orientation, object databases and then the development platforms like the James Martin IE, Visual Studio and the Delphi IDE. Over the years there have been other languages like mainframe scripting, JCL, JavaScript, VBScript, HTML, ASP and others.
Working on the migration project raises a number of issues that have to be solved like the differences in access SQL versus T-SQL. It's been my experience that the date handling parts show the biggest difference. There are also some subtleties when working with sub selects in SQL. Sometimes the differences are very minor but essential to get that part of the project working.
The IT industry in general is always trying to push people to the next greatest thing. For Microsoft this is SharePoint. For others it is the latest iteration of Java. Not so long ago it was Web 2.0 and Ajax. Ironically many like myself spent a great deal of time migrating older systems to newer platforms. For the current project this is Access to SQL Server. Since Delphi 5 is so old without a complete platform change the project needs to stay in Delphi and because of the way component packages work is cannot even be moved to a later version.
This kind of restrictions can raise all sorts of tricky barriers. Delphi 5 marked the first entry of Borland into ADO. Since ADO is the best option this means the developer is stuck with the best implementation available. At the time of writing the current owners of Delphi have not been able to find the necessary components because the platform is simply too old. In this situation it often boils down to some creative programming. When not rewriting a whole system is also necessary to quickly come to grips with the pieces that need to be changed and how the last programmer put them together.
In this case the previous programmer was one of those what I call "clever" programmers. Instead of using the simplest and most direct solution they leverage all the tricky pieces of the development environment. For example instead of directly calling a new form a call in action list which then calls the form. It's clever, it works, but it is unnecessarily complex and provides no real benefits.
As I was thinking about these things I read an article about the need to COBOL programmers in Australia. The Sydney-based company Object consulting has produced a paper outlining those languages they believe will no longer be supported in the near future. These include .NET 2.0 and Cold Fusion. Their view is that programming languages typically have a three-year shelf life. So if you have a built-in FoxPro, Pascal, RPG or Smalltalk you should get rid of it and implement something newer. They have some valid reasons like non support and no further development of such environments. Of course they also specialise in moving applications from older to newer architectures.
The problem with such altruistic opinion is that there are still a huge number of legacy systems written in the old languages like COBOL. The biggest problem is that the programmers who knew these languages are getting old and retiring. The new programmers coming up through the ranks have never been exposed to such languages and now there is a serious issue of maintenance.
It is estimated that nearly half of the current systems in major organisations are still COBOL and RPG based. In Australia this includes all of the major banks, all of the large insurers, and more than half of the government systems. This means that legacy COBOL, Fortran and say Delphi applications are becoming more difficult to maintain. I worked with COBOL for four years but I would find it difficult to jump right in and maintain an application.
So the question becomes should young people be trained in such languages so that they can migrate to more easily. Or will the future be a large series of major redevelopments, almost from scratch, to provide applications for the future. The longer these large organisations wait to bring their applications into the modern age the more difficult will be because those that know the old languages will have retired. On the plus side for these experts they will be in demand and there should be some lucrative offers to entice them out of retirement.
Another issue is what to do when such a system fails and is no one there to fix it or repair it. This could be very costly in say the banking or insurance worlds. So if you are a young programmer reading this my advice is learn as many of the old languages as you can, why you are learning new ones. With such a skill set it will be easy in the future not only to find a job but a good one with a high salary. It might be more fun to code in Ruby on Rails or JavaScript but the real money will be in these legacy migrations.
Industry News
Somebody has found a privacy hole in Apple's iTunes Store. If you know what to do you can find out what someone else has purchased. Ironically the technique was discovered by Andrew McAfee through the gifting interface. The privacy ‘hole’ was set up with the intention to warn you if your gift had already been purchased by the recipient. Personally I do really care if somebody knows what kind of music I like that the privacy advocates to.
If Apple notified the recipient to somebody who tried to send them or enquire about their gifts this might be better but that doesn't happen. There are also some legal concerns in places like the US where the Video Privacy Protection Act makes it illegal for those buying a ‘video tape’ to provide information about the customers viewing habits which is what this hole does. Just ask Netflix what happens when you provide seemingly innocent details about what their customers are watching. Amazon has a clever solution for Kindle gifts. If the recipient already has its they get a credit for the value of the purchase.
On the subject of privacy is apparently quite difficult to wipe sensitive data, or any data, off a flash drive. Some of those white coat wearing people have worked out a traditional disk erasure techniques do not work very well on flash media. Even when files are shown is deleted the majority of the data may still be present even if they are "securely erased". It is something to do with the way that the data is stored on the technology used compared to traditional hard drives.
The researchers found example as much a 67% of the data stored in the file remained from an SSD using say the secure erase feature found on Apple's Mac OS X. Different technologies and products varied in general it was always more than 50% of file left after the operation. Even defragmentation utilities did not wipe the data. Even degaussing did not work as well as it does on a hard drive. The best solution still seems to be keeping encrypted information and then deleting the encryption keys so that the data will remain encrypted forever. The data storage capabilities of flash drives increase this will become a more important security issue for the future.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
BLOG – Currents – 16 Feb
My father's Kindle had a problem with screen recently. I got him to try a hard reset the screen was still full of lines. It still connected to computer and you could access the files but it obviously had a fault. I thought that since he lived in Australia is going to have problems with getting it fixed. Instead the response from Amazon demonstrated why they have become one of the largest online retailers.
A call to the Amazon helpdesk resulted in a new unit being shipped immediately, the UPS return label being sent to my e-mail and one of the easiest replacement instances I have ever faced. UPS even came round and picked up the package for free. My father should receive the new Kindle in a few days. I can't think of any other company or supplier that provides es such excellent service. This should be a representation of the future of online selling. It is easy to imagine that a service provider who can't match this kind of performance would easily drop well those that do.
I also learned this week that no matter how old an application or a development platform might be their are organisations that will hang on to them and try to prolong their life. In this instance it is a Delphi 5 application running against an Access database that needs to be moved to access SQL Server instead. It also needs to run under Windows 7 which means the old BDE approach is no longer valid. In this case one appropriate technology is to use ADO to provide direct access through the inbuilt Windows layers.
Delphi 5 is no longer supported as a development platform. Version 7 however is still going strong. The problem with Delphi 5 is that it was the introductory platform to many of the technologies like ADO. The standard version had no such components. The professional version didn't come with a standard that back then you could download SQL express. Today however it is almost impossible to find this download even by contacting the organisation currently owns Borland products. There are still VCL components you can buy to support ADO and is even a freeware set works perfectly well. If I can't get the update from Embarcardo then in this case that will be the VCL set that will be used.
This piece of work has also shown me how important it is that a programmer produces some kind of documentation to leave behind for those that follow. In this case there is no system documentation and worse no comments in the code itself. This presents me with a long task of working out what the previous program was doing, without any hints. While I enjoy the challenge it is a reminder that some programmers are only interested in getting what they're working on working while having no concern for those that follow.
I don't know how many have been following the Wikileaks Assange saga but more and more I see this individual as do as I say not as I do character. Every time anyone looks at him and what he is doing the man whines about it. Someone wrote a book about him and his activities and the screaming blue murder, under the pretence of a few poorly translated sentences. I've never been fond of hypocrites and in this case the individual wants everything else to be exposed but his own personal activities in life to remain a secret. All in all it's pretty pathetic. Those from the Left had been supporting him primarily because what is been leaking has been about the US. In actuality there have been leaks across a number of different countries but the media has given all of these cursory coverage of best.
Dell has announced a 10 inch Windows 7 tablet. IA will be interesting to see how the power requirements vary from the Windows 7 units and those running Android. The unit should be available in a month or so and will run on a new low-power Intel chip. Hardware wise I expect it will be similar to their current Android units.
It is on is preparing a new firmware upgrade for its Kindle. When I caught up about my father's unit I mentioned the fact that it was hard to navigate to pages in a book because there are no page numbers such, just location numbers that don't follow any logical sequence. Ironically the new update will provide page numbers that correspond directly to the page numbers in the printed text. Not only will it useful for people like myself but also those following more scholarly pursuits enabling them to use the Kindle version researching say a masters degree paper.
Apparently Apple is feeling the heat from not only the Android-based units but also the upcoming Windows models. Some punters guessing that this one won't come to a head until about 2012 – 2013 but I expect the current, and rapid increase in Android units that this might come to a head earlier than that.
Facebook is now estimated to be worth around $60 billion, bet you wish you thought of it first. I know I do.
Microsoft is planning to personalise the Bing search engine's result sets. So far I have not been terribly impressed with the Microsoft search engine and still prefer to use Yahoo or Google.
Your iPhone may not be as secure as you think. For quite a while now many people have had the impression that Apple technology is more secure than others. Researchers have recently figured out a way to stealing passwords stored on locked iPhones and iPads. This is not require the device's passcode to be hacked first. The good news is that a remote hack is not possible as yet and it takes about 6 min if they have access to your iPhone. What this does mean is that devices that are lost, stolen, or temporarily out of sight would be easy to target and the stolen information is not easy to detect. Ironically the decryption is done with the help of functions provided by the operating system of the device. The exploit was demonstrated on a locked iPhone 4 running the latest operating system. As I have said many times in the past if its digital it can be hacked. If its popular is hacked even faster.
Remember that Man versus machine Jeopardy match? Round one was a draw with the machine tying with one of the two human contestants. Watson, the computer made a few wrong guesses as the questions got harder. The remaining rounds have yet to be played.
Finally for this week Telstra in Australia has announced the rollout of their 4G wireless network that can provide greater than 100 mbps if the load is not too heavy. This is in line with the US imitative but fully at odds with the government’s mostly fibre network. Still, the amazing thing about the fibre network is that about a quarter of it will be strung between poles instead of being laid underground.
A call to the Amazon helpdesk resulted in a new unit being shipped immediately, the UPS return label being sent to my e-mail and one of the easiest replacement instances I have ever faced. UPS even came round and picked up the package for free. My father should receive the new Kindle in a few days. I can't think of any other company or supplier that provides es such excellent service. This should be a representation of the future of online selling. It is easy to imagine that a service provider who can't match this kind of performance would easily drop well those that do.
I also learned this week that no matter how old an application or a development platform might be their are organisations that will hang on to them and try to prolong their life. In this instance it is a Delphi 5 application running against an Access database that needs to be moved to access SQL Server instead. It also needs to run under Windows 7 which means the old BDE approach is no longer valid. In this case one appropriate technology is to use ADO to provide direct access through the inbuilt Windows layers.
Delphi 5 is no longer supported as a development platform. Version 7 however is still going strong. The problem with Delphi 5 is that it was the introductory platform to many of the technologies like ADO. The standard version had no such components. The professional version didn't come with a standard that back then you could download SQL express. Today however it is almost impossible to find this download even by contacting the organisation currently owns Borland products. There are still VCL components you can buy to support ADO and is even a freeware set works perfectly well. If I can't get the update from Embarcardo then in this case that will be the VCL set that will be used.
This piece of work has also shown me how important it is that a programmer produces some kind of documentation to leave behind for those that follow. In this case there is no system documentation and worse no comments in the code itself. This presents me with a long task of working out what the previous program was doing, without any hints. While I enjoy the challenge it is a reminder that some programmers are only interested in getting what they're working on working while having no concern for those that follow.
I don't know how many have been following the Wikileaks Assange saga but more and more I see this individual as do as I say not as I do character. Every time anyone looks at him and what he is doing the man whines about it. Someone wrote a book about him and his activities and the screaming blue murder, under the pretence of a few poorly translated sentences. I've never been fond of hypocrites and in this case the individual wants everything else to be exposed but his own personal activities in life to remain a secret. All in all it's pretty pathetic. Those from the Left had been supporting him primarily because what is been leaking has been about the US. In actuality there have been leaks across a number of different countries but the media has given all of these cursory coverage of best.
Industry News
Dell has announced a 10 inch Windows 7 tablet. IA will be interesting to see how the power requirements vary from the Windows 7 units and those running Android. The unit should be available in a month or so and will run on a new low-power Intel chip. Hardware wise I expect it will be similar to their current Android units.
It is on is preparing a new firmware upgrade for its Kindle. When I caught up about my father's unit I mentioned the fact that it was hard to navigate to pages in a book because there are no page numbers such, just location numbers that don't follow any logical sequence. Ironically the new update will provide page numbers that correspond directly to the page numbers in the printed text. Not only will it useful for people like myself but also those following more scholarly pursuits enabling them to use the Kindle version researching say a masters degree paper.
Apparently Apple is feeling the heat from not only the Android-based units but also the upcoming Windows models. Some punters guessing that this one won't come to a head until about 2012 – 2013 but I expect the current, and rapid increase in Android units that this might come to a head earlier than that.
Facebook is now estimated to be worth around $60 billion, bet you wish you thought of it first. I know I do.
Microsoft is planning to personalise the Bing search engine's result sets. So far I have not been terribly impressed with the Microsoft search engine and still prefer to use Yahoo or Google.
Your iPhone may not be as secure as you think. For quite a while now many people have had the impression that Apple technology is more secure than others. Researchers have recently figured out a way to stealing passwords stored on locked iPhones and iPads. This is not require the device's passcode to be hacked first. The good news is that a remote hack is not possible as yet and it takes about 6 min if they have access to your iPhone. What this does mean is that devices that are lost, stolen, or temporarily out of sight would be easy to target and the stolen information is not easy to detect. Ironically the decryption is done with the help of functions provided by the operating system of the device. The exploit was demonstrated on a locked iPhone 4 running the latest operating system. As I have said many times in the past if its digital it can be hacked. If its popular is hacked even faster.
Remember that Man versus machine Jeopardy match? Round one was a draw with the machine tying with one of the two human contestants. Watson, the computer made a few wrong guesses as the questions got harder. The remaining rounds have yet to be played.
Finally for this week Telstra in Australia has announced the rollout of their 4G wireless network that can provide greater than 100 mbps if the load is not too heavy. This is in line with the US imitative but fully at odds with the government’s mostly fibre network. Still, the amazing thing about the fibre network is that about a quarter of it will be strung between poles instead of being laid underground.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
BLOG – Currents – 09 Feb
One of the good things about this article moving into blog form is that I can move a little sideways in some of the subject matter. As last week's blog showed I can also spend a few more words in putting them together.
I recently watched a documentary from Frontline called The Vaccine Wars. The subject matter was essentially about the supposed link between the Measles Mumps Rubella or MMR vaccine and autism. The Internet play the large part in this process as special-interest groups used websites and other techniques to spread their message on this issue.
It all started with a report published in the medical Journal Lancet by a doctor who had supposedly performed a study that linked the MMR vaccine with autism. Because of this children all over the planet will not given the vaccine because their parents believed what was said in the study. Sometime later it was revealed that this doctor had used a sample said of less than 10 children most of home had been referred by a lawyer currently involved in action against the pharmaceutical company that made the vaccine. Years later the report was removed by Lancet, a publication that has very well-defined political leanings and has been caught out quite a number of times in the last years.
In the documentary at least six contries had performed Independent studies that all concluded the autism levels and those that took the vaccine and those who didn't with the same. In other words the vaccine could not be said to be responsible for the autism.
The Internet however has turned into a powerful force to the spread of information valid or not. In the right medium, at the right time, the right message (even if it is the wrong one) can reach millions of people in a very short time. It is the nature of people that some of them will believe anything in the case of this vaccine autism link the belief is strong in a significant number.
There is no police force for the Internet and I for one support this in almost all instances. Exceptions are of course paedophile networks and a few other areas like this that are contrary to international law. I do believe in the free exchange of information and as such I expect to see information that is patently incorrect. One example of the moment is just about all of the world's mainstream media who are currently, with very few exceptions, all from one political side of the spectrum. The gaps today are taken up by various blog sites.
In the case of the vaccine example many websites still exist that support this link for the simple reason that those running them have a child with autism and that child had the vaccine. Science is irrelevant where emotion is involved and we are in the developmental stage where what people read must automatically be true. This is of course a generic observation but the Western post-modernist’s world does not require proof, fact checking, verification, or investigation to accept what is being said as fact.
Yes the Internet should remain free but with the amount of information it now contains the user needs to be more discerning. The very nature of the Internet makes it much easier to verify facts or get alternate opinions are explanations. Not to do so is simple hubris or in some cases abject laziness. In the world of reporting is becoming more common for a presenter to grips information off the Internet, a Twitter feed, and blogs often as a single source and present this to the public as fact. The art of the journalist is a vanishing one. The days of multiple sources and cross verification are slipping away.
Thankfully, for the most part, the world of information technology, and technology in general is a clear-cut one. If you can ignore the moral aspects that may be associated with the technology reporting is fairly simple. You do the research and you report on. A hard drive is a hard drive, monitor is a monitor, and a computer is a computer. When you start getting into services and software that can be some grey areas but in general if it doesn't work, or doesn't do the job then it is probably not a good product.
According to the people at IDC in the fourth quarter of 2010, 100.9 million smartphones were shipped compared to 92.1 million PCs. This is the first time that smartphone sales have been bigger than PC sales. Comparing the whole year the PC is still one 346 to 302 million but the trend is clear. Nokia is still number one but fading fast compared to Apple. Linux has been performing very strongly in the smartphone market in the form of android. The reason for this is simple phone users don't care what operating system is being used all I care about are the applications. Android is providing a huge number of applications that don't require the mandatory step of stopping by an Android only store to purchase. Prediction: Apple will never change this policy and so they will never be the leader of the pack.
Sir Elton John made a comment recently that indicated an April release for the iPad 2. The unit is expected to have a web cam on board, finally. There is no confirmation of this release date but it will be one year from the release of version 1.
Mozilla is planning to release for new versions of Firefox this year. Until now uses her to wait about 12 to 18 months for a new version of the browser. I suspect that Google had some influence on this because they release a new version of chrome every couple of months or so. More frequent releases are well within the Web 2.0 paradigm. Firefox 5 is expected to have a new account manager a better user interface and support 64-bit Windows. They also expect to include full CSS/HTML support in the near future.
The new range of cheaper Blu-ray disc players are coming out in the lower price bracket. What has not been improving our Blu-ray disc sales. It doesn't matter that the hardware is getting cheaper only that the discs are generally more expensive than the DVD equivalent. For many people DVD quality is still fine.
On the subject of smart phones when it comes to security they tend not to be, so much. If you think about it security concerns for your PC or notebook are very similar to what they were 10 years ago. Most people know about firewalls, anti-malware software, backing up their data and tiding up from time to time. By comparison many users have very little about the smartphone, particularly when it comes to security.
You occasionally see the term "super phone" to mean something generation above the earlier smart phones. These typically have full Wi-Fi implementation, direct connectivity to an applications store, advanced multimedia capabilities, and all sorts of other connectivity options and layers that just weren't there in previous models. In a small environment, particularly business one, this is probably not much of a problem.
At the enterprise level things become a little different. It has been my experience over many years that executives in particular like to have everything included in their portable device. Let's face it the modern smart phone is really a full-blown computer. Also everybody wants a slick looking, nice new phone. The problem is that malware is now being specifically designed to target an extract data from them. There are a raft of privacy concerns. The smart phone, or super phone, is fast becoming the biggest headache for the enterprise IT systems manager.
The glasses free 3-D TV bubble seems to have burst. Okay not really a Toshiba only made half the sales are expected of units sporting the new technology. To be fair the screen sizes available at the moment are only 12 and 20 inch so until a larger units become available I don't expect to see any significant sales. Also the new sets are only available for sale in Japan where everybody wants the
I recently watched a documentary from Frontline called The Vaccine Wars. The subject matter was essentially about the supposed link between the Measles Mumps Rubella or MMR vaccine and autism. The Internet play the large part in this process as special-interest groups used websites and other techniques to spread their message on this issue.
It all started with a report published in the medical Journal Lancet by a doctor who had supposedly performed a study that linked the MMR vaccine with autism. Because of this children all over the planet will not given the vaccine because their parents believed what was said in the study. Sometime later it was revealed that this doctor had used a sample said of less than 10 children most of home had been referred by a lawyer currently involved in action against the pharmaceutical company that made the vaccine. Years later the report was removed by Lancet, a publication that has very well-defined political leanings and has been caught out quite a number of times in the last years.
In the documentary at least six contries had performed Independent studies that all concluded the autism levels and those that took the vaccine and those who didn't with the same. In other words the vaccine could not be said to be responsible for the autism.
The Internet however has turned into a powerful force to the spread of information valid or not. In the right medium, at the right time, the right message (even if it is the wrong one) can reach millions of people in a very short time. It is the nature of people that some of them will believe anything in the case of this vaccine autism link the belief is strong in a significant number.
There is no police force for the Internet and I for one support this in almost all instances. Exceptions are of course paedophile networks and a few other areas like this that are contrary to international law. I do believe in the free exchange of information and as such I expect to see information that is patently incorrect. One example of the moment is just about all of the world's mainstream media who are currently, with very few exceptions, all from one political side of the spectrum. The gaps today are taken up by various blog sites.
In the case of the vaccine example many websites still exist that support this link for the simple reason that those running them have a child with autism and that child had the vaccine. Science is irrelevant where emotion is involved and we are in the developmental stage where what people read must automatically be true. This is of course a generic observation but the Western post-modernist’s world does not require proof, fact checking, verification, or investigation to accept what is being said as fact.
Yes the Internet should remain free but with the amount of information it now contains the user needs to be more discerning. The very nature of the Internet makes it much easier to verify facts or get alternate opinions are explanations. Not to do so is simple hubris or in some cases abject laziness. In the world of reporting is becoming more common for a presenter to grips information off the Internet, a Twitter feed, and blogs often as a single source and present this to the public as fact. The art of the journalist is a vanishing one. The days of multiple sources and cross verification are slipping away.
Thankfully, for the most part, the world of information technology, and technology in general is a clear-cut one. If you can ignore the moral aspects that may be associated with the technology reporting is fairly simple. You do the research and you report on. A hard drive is a hard drive, monitor is a monitor, and a computer is a computer. When you start getting into services and software that can be some grey areas but in general if it doesn't work, or doesn't do the job then it is probably not a good product.
Industry News
According to the people at IDC in the fourth quarter of 2010, 100.9 million smartphones were shipped compared to 92.1 million PCs. This is the first time that smartphone sales have been bigger than PC sales. Comparing the whole year the PC is still one 346 to 302 million but the trend is clear. Nokia is still number one but fading fast compared to Apple. Linux has been performing very strongly in the smartphone market in the form of android. The reason for this is simple phone users don't care what operating system is being used all I care about are the applications. Android is providing a huge number of applications that don't require the mandatory step of stopping by an Android only store to purchase. Prediction: Apple will never change this policy and so they will never be the leader of the pack.
Sir Elton John made a comment recently that indicated an April release for the iPad 2. The unit is expected to have a web cam on board, finally. There is no confirmation of this release date but it will be one year from the release of version 1.
Mozilla is planning to release for new versions of Firefox this year. Until now uses her to wait about 12 to 18 months for a new version of the browser. I suspect that Google had some influence on this because they release a new version of chrome every couple of months or so. More frequent releases are well within the Web 2.0 paradigm. Firefox 5 is expected to have a new account manager a better user interface and support 64-bit Windows. They also expect to include full CSS/HTML support in the near future.
The new range of cheaper Blu-ray disc players are coming out in the lower price bracket. What has not been improving our Blu-ray disc sales. It doesn't matter that the hardware is getting cheaper only that the discs are generally more expensive than the DVD equivalent. For many people DVD quality is still fine.
On the subject of smart phones when it comes to security they tend not to be, so much. If you think about it security concerns for your PC or notebook are very similar to what they were 10 years ago. Most people know about firewalls, anti-malware software, backing up their data and tiding up from time to time. By comparison many users have very little about the smartphone, particularly when it comes to security.
You occasionally see the term "super phone" to mean something generation above the earlier smart phones. These typically have full Wi-Fi implementation, direct connectivity to an applications store, advanced multimedia capabilities, and all sorts of other connectivity options and layers that just weren't there in previous models. In a small environment, particularly business one, this is probably not much of a problem.
At the enterprise level things become a little different. It has been my experience over many years that executives in particular like to have everything included in their portable device. Let's face it the modern smart phone is really a full-blown computer. Also everybody wants a slick looking, nice new phone. The problem is that malware is now being specifically designed to target an extract data from them. There are a raft of privacy concerns. The smart phone, or super phone, is fast becoming the biggest headache for the enterprise IT systems manager.
The glasses free 3-D TV bubble seems to have burst. Okay not really a Toshiba only made half the sales are expected of units sporting the new technology. To be fair the screen sizes available at the moment are only 12 and 20 inch so until a larger units become available I don't expect to see any significant sales. Also the new sets are only available for sale in Japan where everybody wants the
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
BLOG – Currents – 02 Feb
BLOG – Currents – 02 Feb 2011
The Information technology sector continues to be one of the most rapidly evolving. Every year the same product is less expensive for the same money you often get twice the value. If you remember any of the things I wrote about the Web 2.0 environment when it comes to online development things are also evolving rapidly. I don't see this changing any time in the near future.
Why then are some areas of the industry seem to evolve and adapt to the glacial place. The most common examples include those in the media industries in particular movies and music. Today however the focus on the more traditional application developers. Many years ago someone came up with the idea of open source software development. Without open source products like MySQL would never have evolved to the level they are today. Think about Linux is another example, or the Apache web server. Where would the Web development industry be today if these three products had never been developed and handed out for free?
Why is it then that many application developers seem to be stuck in the past with both their development models and their pricing structures. Pick any subset within the IT product set, how about customer relations management software. If you go online to find a number of these in the commercial space ranging from three digits on up in price. Quick search in the open source community will provide you with products that challenge even the most expensive of these for a fraction of the price.
As the consumer becomes more aware of the depth available from open source products they then go back to their suppliers with the quite reasonable question why are your products are expensive when I can get almost the same thing for a small amount of money. Even more if I put in a request there is an excellent chance the additional features I'm looking for will be provided in the next release. A release cycle that is often far faster than the commercial equivalents.
Another traditional area tends to be abused is that of maintenance. I have worked from large organisations who have paid large sums of maintenance where even after 18 months there has not been an update. In recent times the response from the traditional lenders has been to do an audit. This means is that the application developers are placing demands on their customers to prove that each and every installation of their product is fully pay for a licenced. So instead of looking after their customers they are placing extra burdens upon them. Perhaps it is time that the customers started auditing their suppliers to make the improve that they are indeed providing value for money.
According to TechRights big names like SAP, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Cisco Systems have been seeing customers drop off their membership lists. At the same time more and more organisations are handing over the bullying of customers to groups like the Business Software Alliance. In the process the BSA has seen its reputation diminish as it's gone after grandmothers and single mothers. When people find out that a particular organisation has been driving the BSA then their reputation has also suffered.
This process is one of the reasons that organisations like Microsoft are pushing to make their applications service on the Internet. Rather than installing a product, possibly a pirated version, customer must pay to access the equivalent service online. Like anything in the digital world this kind of system can be bypassed or spoofed but for the time being is less prone to such use.
The online service on its very nature provides inherits maintenance as each time you access the system a new update or version may be current. The other advantage that the customer is that they can get a reasonable amount of value for a smaller amount of money and only when their needs expand will cost more. Consider all the upgrades of say Microsoft Office that had been purchased by organisations with the new features have hardly ever been used. The upgrade applied simply to stay current with the latest file formats.
Imagine a world without piracy. A significant portion of the world's population would never become familiar with an application or game. To some extent pirates provide free marketing reaching people that the traditional models may never reach. Some of these people even pay for the product increasing sales to the developers. These would otherwise be unrealised revenue. At the smaller end of the market some clever developers encourage users to share with their friends thus expanding the market and increasing the likelihood of more sales. This may sound counterintuitive that there had been developers who count on this kind of model.
If you think about it even organisations like Microsoft, while not actively doing so, has tacitly encouraged piracy especially in places like China. This is provided the opportunity for some larger organisations in such countries to adopt the real version of the product. It is also limited the spread of alternatives like Linux. Why would you install Linux when you can get the Windows OS for free? Or so if the piracy young person when they get older and more established they are more likely to buy the real thing because it's something they're familiar with. They may also encourage their organisation to buy the product because of familiarity. There is also a group in the middle, not pirates, not customers who could flip either way and end up paying for the application because they've been exposed to it through their friends.
We've entered the age where people are not going to buy Oracle just because they have a big-name. Worse to such developers people are becoming very wary of proprietary products be day database formats, Codecs, or just about anything else if they can find an open alternative that works and has been tested.
While the traditionalists are bemoaning the change in the software industry many others are taking advantage of the new paradigms. In reality now is a great time to be writing software. The markets are larger, the delivery mechanism is easier, a number of pricing models have increased, and through the Internet you can make your product a service. People who are still in the business of stopping people from making copies and charging people for every upgrade should not expect to stay in business for very much longer. These are the ones that just don't get it but then the future will sort them out soon enough.
Industry News
Egypt. The Egyptian government has restricted Internet access and mobile phone coverage because of the demonstrations that are going on there. The Internet is supposed to be an open system accessible by all with minimal filtering. Over the past few years we've seen filtering in China, Australia, Thailand, Pakistan, Iran and a number of other locations around the globe. About the only website available in Egypt at the moment is a stock exchange. According to the CIA World Fact Book there are over 20 million Internet users in Egypt.
When it comes to USB 3 external drives Kingston Tech is about the only one with an SSD unit. Iomega has just announced their range in 64 128 and 256 GB versions. In England the latter will cost you something over £600. That kind of money you would be expecting a fairly impressive drive. In this case all you get are 191 Mb/s read speeds and 130 Mb/S writes. The other main benefit is no moving parts so if you accidentally bump or drop the unit it should still work. There are other faster units on the market at the moment pricing puts it out of the range of the casual adopter.
The Digital Video Broadcasting Project has added 3-D to their DVB Digital TV technology standard. This defines how broadcasters should transmit 3-D TV programming and how a set-top box should pick it up, decoded, and then displayed on your TV. The standard is compatible with a standard 2-D HD frame. This should allow any existing hardware to upgrade to 3-D with a simple software update. The new specification includes resolutions up to 24Hz 1080p side-by-side frames.
Notebook manufacturer Toshiba has come up with a notebook lid that changes colour. The T750, which is only available in Japan comes with a 2.66GHz Intel Core i5-480M, 4GB of DDR 3 memory, a 750GB hard drive, a 15.6in, 1366 x 768 LED-backlit display, Harman Kardon speakers, 2.4/5GHz 802.11n Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, USB 2.0 and eSata ports. The colour you see depends on the viewing angle giving a metallic effect that ranges from turquoise to purple.
The world needs more DRAM and the reason is an increase in the popularity of the tablet computer. Since this year's CES in Las Vegas and the introduction of units from Samsung, Dell, Motorola, RIM and others demand for DRAM is expected to grow over the next few years. This is good for the manufacturers have seen falling markets over the last couple of years. Of course forever person buys a tablet that is potentially one less person who buys notebook or a PC. Logic says that there will be a drop in memory requirements of these units so perhaps the DRAM manufacturers shouldn't be counting their profits just your.
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