For the programmer this is where they find out if what they had written actually produces the results required. At the same time the BA sits down and checks the results and where incorrect works out what formulas have to change or what new rules are required to get the outputs necessary.
The database individual tries to work out how to speed things up, what tables are required and based on what the BA tells them may need to massage the data in some way. Then it all has to be moved onto a presentation notebook where other issues can arise.
The person looking at the presentation itself, often a PowerPoint like solution is concerned with how pretty it looks; something the programmer probably has had little time to focus on busy making changes on the fly and on demand.
In the end the result may be something cobbled together to last the presentation after which all the things that are held together by patches and fill in code need to be fixed. The outputs as presented will need to be matched by the programmer in code and the database returned to a normal and often fuller state. It is common for example to strip out data that will not be used to speed things up in the demo.
The rules for a presentation are simple get the outputs working the way the boss wants them and pray that nothing goes wrong. Even the best of the best have had demo issues. Jobs, Gates and others have had the screen suddenly vanish, display an error message or do the wrong thing. This is where the terms “beta,” “demo version,” and “the final product will work a lot more smoothly” are often heard. Others include: “I have an old notebook,” “Looks like I have a lot of old data in the database slowing things down,” and “Squirrel!” the latter being a movie reference.
In Australia the big department stores and others are finally pushing for parallel imports. This will of course simply add to the existing parallel imports, a.k.a. Internet ordering. Places like Singapore, Australia and others pay a premium for printed books because of a long term tie back to the UK. Strangely even though this is so you can often order books online from the UK and have them shipped to Australia for less than the price of a similar product there.
I predict that once this gets through and the parallel importing of books is allowed that it will open the floodgates for all manner of products. As people become more Internet aware and the payments systems get tighter in terms of security then more people will buy online.
I mostly use eBay and PayPal as my ordering and payment systems. I use PayPal because it allows me to pay directly from my bank account and I only have to provide my credit card details to one place, once. Every time you order and provide your credit card is one more chance that someone can get your details. As far as eBay goes I almost never bid for anything but instead use the Buy It now approach. This saves the hassle of bidding and in all cases I am happy with the price before I buy.
As an example I recently purchased some of those five toed ‘barefoot’ running shoes. Local price over $220, price online less than $90 including shipping so I did very well from the deal. I probably purchase about 90% of things online these days.
The traditional retailer is going to have to change with the times, to a certain extent at least. There are still a lot of products that require the customer to touch, see, smell and otherwise interface with them. The second time they need the same thing however it is online for a quick order that does not require driving to the store, paying for parking and fighting with other shoppers.
I was reading an ad for a portable 2TB drive at under $100 i.e. close to 3000 Baht and remembering just how far we have come in the It world over the past couple of decades. I remembered buying a 500MB drive for just under U$1000
Industry News
So the iPhone 5 is in production, in a factory in Taiwan called Foxconn. They are apparently making about 150K units per day at the moment ready for the release at the end of September when a few million will be ready. For their part Apple hasn’t even announced the release as yet. Not many are falling for the ‘accidental’ loss of the unit in a bar, it appears to be a pre-release publicity stunt, just like the last time. Exactly when the iPhone 5 will be released is still a secret but the smart money is on early October. Apple is expecting to move over 20 million units this year.
Windows 8 is getting closer to reality and the big ticket item appears to be the fast boot times. What it does is write the kernel state to disk at shutdown. Instead of a hibernation like scenario Windows 8 will just write the state of driver, services and items like that back into memory to facilitate the fast start. The rest is compressed and uses the parallelism of the latest CPUs to uncompress quickly. The result is a 30-7- percent faster boot time. Faster is you have an SSD instead of a regular hard drive of course. If your machine has UEFI firmware rather than Bios it is faster still because the former uses later more optimised code sets. A regular cold boot option is still available and all of the post log in start-up will be at the same, sometimes glacial, speeds. Perhaps they will address that with Windows 9?
Want a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1? Don’t bother looking for one in Germany. A court there determined that the "smooth, simple surfaces on the 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet copied the minimalist design of Apple's iPad.” It also said that other designs could have been used by Samsung. This is getting so bad that long time Apple supporters are starting to come out of their daze and are starting to attack Apple as being as bad as Microsoft ever was. The rest of Europe has lifted the sanctions however so if your are in Europe, minus Germany, you may already be enjoying your new Samsung tablet.
As Samsung rightly pointed out by imposing the injunction based on some very generic characteristics the ruling has restricted “design innovation and progress in the industry.” Apple is now gong after the Galaxy S2 the phone most likely to take down the iPhone for sales. Yes Apple has degenerated into a very nasty type of company that is using frivolous lawsuits to stifle competition and hold their market share. Perhaps this is the real reason Job is moving out, again.
Finally for this week Seagate is working on a composite 2.5 inch hard drive SSD hybrid for notebook computer and similar. The plan appears to be to add SSD memory to their thinner single platter Momentus range to target the emerging ultrabook category. So we should expect to see something like 250-400GB of disk merged with 4-16GB of flash sometime in the next few months. This will provide a lower price point than the pure SSD units while speeding up boot and some applications.
I love this industry, something new every day.
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