This is a classic case of problem spinning. This is a programmer with a problem that they keep looking at but do not see. Usually someone else comes along looks over their shoulder and says something like “should that line of code really say that?” In this case it was someone running a trace program to see what was causing the data to change.
Ok it’s official, I hate Microsoft. I tried to upgrade from SQLServer 2005 to 2008 R2 and I ended up with no database server at all. Sure I had a lot of services and tools and all sorts of other things but no actual database server I could use to create say, a database. Of course I tried uninstalling and then starting over but by that time it was impossible to get a working version of SQLServer on my computer. Microsoft installation, upgrade and uninstall processes are mostly useless. The only remaining option is to do a complete os reinstall of find some kind of utility that will clean out all traces of SQLServer, any version, so that I can do a clean install. Yes, that last one was of course a joke.
What do large applications, financial institutions and a rapidly changing regulations mean for IT systems? Well not to put too fine a point on it, a big mess. Large systems and large organizations, at least the traditional financial ones, have never been very fast to make changes to their systems. Let’s face it most of them still run either COBOL or RPG based systems, yes even today. Most of the world’s stock exchanges are running 30 year old systems and banks are mostly running on old mainframes.
Sure we keep hearing about “innovation” and “better customer service” but once you strip away the platitudes and marketing speak the It systems are still old and creaking under the weight of change. ATM’s are mostly low bandwidth point to point networks. The database schemas have been modified so many times they can be mistaken for Australian Labor Party policy diagrams and the poor systems staff must surely be all bald by now with all that hair pulling. Every upgrade is a careful and hopefully process that will hopefully still have running systems at the end of it.
Now add in those older managers attending presentations from organizations like Microsoft and others that promise the latest and greatest solutions to all their problems. It may be the Cloud or a new kind of database platforms, a fast San network or a development platform like SharePoint. These managers return to their organizations and ask their system people to get cracking on using the tool of choice to fix all their problems, yesterday. If you think that I am joking peruse your current It job ads and check out how many times legacy data migration is mentioned. OR how many times experience with the latest Microsoft development platform is requested.
Industry News
You may have noticed by now that hard drive prices are rising. In particular the Barracuda range from Seagate. One example is the 3Tb drive that has moved up nearly 70 percent in some places around the world. The reason? Simple, the floods in Thailand, that submerged the Seagate factory cutting production down by a large percentage. The real question is if Seagate will refurbish the factory or simply up sticks and build one in a country nearby. With the changes in government treatment of foreign investors over the past few years I’m guessing that Seagate and a number of others flooded out will be moving out of the country.
Yap, no not the island, the voice recognition company, has been purchased by Amazon. The strange part of this news is that Yap merged with Dion Acquisition Sub Inc. and moved to 410 Terry Avenue, North Seattle, i.e. Amazon. This all happened quietly under the cover of darkness, no not really but it did happen without any announcement from Amazon. It was the CTL Blog that picked up on it because both it and Yap are and were, based in North Carolina. The company has a nice suite of voice to text services and the new organization will be called Yap Inc. The smart money seems to be on voice based searching and it will be interesting to see where this somewhat secret acquisition goes in the future.
Many devices have fingerprint scanning and security that can be based on the technology. My Samsung S2 phone has an app that will pick up fingerprints. What is can’t do is detect the presence of opiates, cannabis, or cocaine in the sweat on a user's fingertip. But what if you recently shook hands with someone who was using, you ask? This unit works on output from the sweat pores themselves and so it will avoid most of the false positives. So your ID and your drug content in a single scan I guess this will soon be coming to a police check near you.
The company is Intelligent Fingerprinting and the testing device is sensitive enough to pick up some reasonably small compounds and while the focus is on illegal drugs there are possibilities that the same system can be used to detect hormonal markers like pregnancy, cancer and other possibilities.
Sony is planning to increase the production of its image sensor chips by as much as fifty percent in the next couple of years. This would seems to support the trend that the bigger Asia consumer electronics makers of Asia are moving away from PCs and televisions into the portable market. Gen Y is fixated on the portable and mobile devices and they after all are the emerging buying generation.
It appears that there has been some excitement over the release of the Amazon Kindle Fire. Not only amongst the consumers but also the developers. In a recent survey from IDC and Appcelerator globally the Kindle Fire came in second behind the Samsung Galaxy Tab even though the Fire was not yet released. In the US it ranked number one just beating out the Samsung device. One key thing to take away from this was amongst Android developers. Given this level of interest it could be a good thing for Android tablet makers in general. They key factor for the interest? Price. At $199 and with the range of content Amazon can provide the Kindle Fire could be a great product not only for Amazon but for the Android platform in general.
The same survey found that Blackberry interest had waned and the movement of developers to the latest PlayBook platform was not encouraging, for RIM that is. Interestingly as Rim drops Microsoft is picking up their figures due to the partnership with Nokia and the interest in Windows 7. This is mostly in Europe and some in Asia. I guess if, as some are predicting, Europe crashes in the near future these figures will change rapidly. Then there is Windows 8 that seems to promising a lot more for the mobile market as well. We will just have to wait and see.
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