The Hardware Hustle

Is it just me or is there some kind of conspiracy in the air right now?  In the last few weeks pretty much every IT news and online resource I use has carried an article on the dangers of aging hardware.  I attended a shin-dig just this Thursday where one speaker managed to get a reference in to the topic as well despite it not being on the agenda.  However as he was from one of the hardware companies I suspect it’s always on his agenda.

Is this just a chance confluence of events?  Or is the hardware industry trying to drum up trade using scare tactics?  You gotta know which one I favour.

You see I am employed to get a job done, and to get it done at the lowest overall cost to the company who employ me as I can.  We are not a charitable foundation established to keep Hewlett Packard or Dell sales bonuses high for Christmas so little Timmy can have an iPad.  We are here to align the business need to the available technology.  And if, in hardware terms, that means 5 year old technology then that is just what I will use.

Let’s talk about the environment.  I like “sustainable ICT”.  I follow the mantra of all the Rs.  (or is that a mantra that’s all a load of arse?  I do struggle to remember these days)

Reuse

Repair

Repurpose

Refurbish

Recycle

Replace

But it makes economic sense as well.  I am particularly fond of HP’s DC7600.  It’s a desktop PC from maybe 4 years ago.  I own a couple of hundred of them.  And I bought maybe 50 more of them off eBay for £70 a pop.  They are the backbone of my workforce PCs.  They slog on and they do the job.  They require no hardware maintenance because (and I hate to sound like I am the HP fanboi here) HP built them well, very well.  We bought cheap RAM, and didn’t scrimp on CPU when we bought them and guess what?  They run Vista and W7 just fine.  We don’t permit local storage of data and our principal business applications are web delivered (hey I can maybe pass this off as private cloud and look tech-sexy?) so the tiny hard drives common to desktops 4, 5, 6 years ago work fine for me.  They aren’t great if you have users who need a power user type machine or workstation so for those users we give them a new (or at least newer) PC.  Job done.  Seriously, we have had one pop a fan, and one fail a HDD, and that’s about the lot.

I hear people bleating about difficulty of managing old PCs.  Well, you are doing it wrong then.  We got off XP and W2K because W2K is old and sucks and XP does not enable a lot of the ace features in Windows Server 2008.  We had a business case, we went for it. Also a nice thing is that “longhorn” era OS are hardware agnostic.  One image to rule them all my precious.  And get your patching, updates, inventory management up to scratch and you can manage an estate of disparate hardware of various vintage and it’s no real bother.  There are some great tools from Microsoft to help you do this, as well as a bunch from freeware and cheap third parties. 

I hear further bleating (or scaremongering) about the fact that these old PCs are terribly insecure.  This is on the assumption that you are running a mish-mash of badly patched semi-obsolete OS platforms and so forth.  There is no reason you can’t run a decent OS on an old PC.  The FOSS camp will encourage you to run some Red Hat or Ubuntu estate, carefully crafted to maximise performance but I don’t think you get the easy management that way.  Prove me wrong and I’ll become a convert.  Pick the OS which works for your shop.  Avoid bloaty security products and stick to the ones which do what needs to be done and you’ll have the resources to run a secure network on old kit.  Also the older PCs won’t have come with DVD writers and so forth as default, non-delete options so you are at a lower risk of data theft.  Use W7/WS2008R2 group policy to manage data via USB and you are golden.  Older kit with a CD ROM only is actually more secure!

Energy use is often cited as a reason to replace your old kit.  While I am committed to every possible avenue to reduce energy consumption in my business (especially in our data centre where power = heat = more air conditioning = more expense = more power used = power circuit upgrades = more expense etc.) I am unconvinced by the argument that I need to rip and replace to save a fortune on PC desktop power consumption.  I have looked at people presenting figures on this in the past and on each occasion I found the numbers to be flawed or just plain wrong.  The last one I looked at actually worked back to say that our PCs used 40% more power than the whole power consumption of our company in total.  Beware the “assumptions” people build into these proposals.  If you have a nice modern OS and a nice modern server OS then you can manage Windows Power Management by group policy, and do it moderately well.  The newer the combo of client and server the better the results seem to be but this is still an area where the real world application falls short of the advertising.  Good power management is important for good patching.  Wake on LAN has to work.

This whole thing is starting to be less relevant because of the cloud.  Some CIO of note who’s name and company I immediately forgot says that Windows 7 will be the last mass OS deployment. In the same way that many (including Bill Gates interestingly enough) predict that Blue Ray will be the last disc based distribution format.  Certainly the variety of devices upon which corporate data is being accessed is broadening daily.  And I have to ask if you can pick up email and review a word document on a 600Mhz processer mobile phone why do you suddenly need 4 GB RAM and a 4 GHz processor to do the same job on a PC?

The workforce we manage tomorrow will be working in very different ways, or they will be Chinese. I doubt very much that the PC platform and the traditional server hardware will be what we are talking about with any great relevance, not in the mainstream of IT services anyway.  This push for hardware sales is possibly a death throw of an old industry.  Look how the big PC manufacturers are repositioning themselves as “business services” and cloud providers and the like.  Look how IBM, HP, Dell and the like have been reshaping their businesses.  I think that probably tells you as much about the importance of the old fashioned hardware refresh as does my ramblings...

This is how ecommerce is supposed to work.

I use a company called Rock Auto LLC who is based in some far off part of the USA.  I use them because it’s quicker and easier and often cheaper to deal with them than it is to deal with a local supplier here in the UK.  A couple of years ago I’d never heard of them, but now they are on my MVP list.  Why?  Because I appreciate the fact they have ecommerce down right.  Let’s take a look at the Rock Auto customer experience and you’ll see why I am impressed.

It'll never go back together again...

The website is not flashy, it’s not gimmicky. It gets straight down to business.  It’s easy to look at and easy to work out where you go to get what you want.  It’s equally easy to browse or search depending on your preference on how you want to shop.

Once you have drilled down to the parts you need for the car you have you are presented with a range of choices based on the manufacturer of that part, shipping location (vital information for an overseas customer, you want all your bits to ship from the same location to keep the costs down) and you can even see photos of the part, diagrams, spec info, etc.  Everything you need is there to make it easy for you to select the part you need.

You can select prices to be in US Dollars or converted to your local currency (in my case GBP) although they still bill in US Dollars so the price in your currency is indicative rather than precise.

When you get your basket together you select your shipping options. There is a well placed link to explain shipping options in terms of shipping time and cost.  Most shipping options then allow prepayment of the import duty and VAT (taxes for any non-Brits reading this).  This may seem like a small point, and to some an annoyance if they are hoping to sneak parts through the postal system without getting caught for import taxes but it really is a good thing because most carriers charge between £6.95 and £15.00 to process import duty and VAT at this end.  Pre-paying saves this charge.

The basket also allows you to include items “saved” (by entering a quantity of zero) so you can pick them up next time without searching, just go into your basket and change the quantity back to 1, 8, 16, whatever.

There is a live chat option which I have never used but seems a good idea too.  I have no idea what hours it is manned though, so those of us shopping in different time zones may not be able to use this feature as easily.

Once your card is processed and your order is on the system you get useful update emails automatically generated.  They are well thought out too.  For example your confirmation email gives a link back to each item you purchased, order status and separate link takes you directly to the tracking section of the carrier’s website which is shipping your order, right into your actual shipment.  It’s all just so seamless, its “joined up” and it works.

When there is a query on your order, for example I ordered a rotor arm as part of an order and this part was actually out of stock at their warehouse despite having been listed as available on the website, a real person sent me an email and the email contains hyperlinks back to my order and the item in question.  My options are explained and I just have to ping an email back to confirm my choice.  Easy.

None of this is rocket science.  This is just good ecommerce design/practice.  So why do so many other companies utterly PHAIL to offer a good web experience?  I’m afraid I have to name and shame JC Whitney as an utterly frustrating company to try do business with as an international customer due to the convoluted and slow methods of getting international shipping prices and options and placing an order to ship to UK.   Jegs and Summit also need to get demerit points because they charge a surcharge (around $20) to international buyers for no other reason than I guess they just can.  Summit were at least offering online international shipping options although that appeared to have gone last time I used their website. 

I have no idea how big Rock Auto is and how many people it employs.  It does however prove you don’t need to be the size of Amazon to offer a proper online shopping environment which supports your customers and has them coming back time and again as well as telling their friends how good it is and even writing blog posts on the subject...

Britain's angriest drivers, apparently.

It's good news for the persecuted white van man as a recent poll by insurance website Gocompare.com has revealed BMW drivers to be the UK's angriest. Although the white van man still features highly on the list, he has been overtaken at some speed by BMW drivers. Over half of the 3000 drivers who took part in the poll said that they had suffered at the hands of a BMW driver with the most frightening of behaviour being tailgating (58%), drivers pulling out in front of people (40%) and speeding (39%). And BMW drivers find that they are not the sole German manufacturer in the top 10, Audi, Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz drivers are considered to be fiery tempered when they get behind the wheel.

See where you fall among the top 10 angriest drivers -

1.      BMW

2.      White van

3.      Audi

4.      Ford

5.      Land Rover

6.      Lorry

7.      Vauxhall

8.      Range Rover

9.      Volkswagen

10.    Mercedes-Benz

What rattles me about these kind of press releases (you want to guess who released the info quoted above? Huh?) is that it’s just rubbish research.  It’s nothing about the driving ability or “anger” of BMW drivers but it’s all about the social attitudes towards BMW drivers.  You take a straw poll of a bunch of people “which drivers are worst/angriest/most aggressive” and even worse give them a list to pick from and I bet that people would pick BMW and white van even if some bizarre act of parliament had banned all BMWs and white vans from the roads a year previously.  It’s just ingrained to believe all BMW drivers are...  because we like to stereotype people.  The BMW sticks in the mind more when it happens “Oh, typical BMW driver” but the 10 times you were cut up or tailgated by a Honda, Toyota, Fiat, VW, Skoda etc. does not really register.  You will note when ever these “worst driver” polls are conducted you will find “premium” brand cars make up most of the list.  That should tell you something.

If you want to know who Britain’s worst drivers are by brand of car they drive then ask the Association of British Insurers.  They keep records and stats on how many of what type of car get involved in accidents.  It’s how they work out “risk” which then goes into the grouping system which calculates insurance premiums.  

Steampunk Morris and other fables

OK, now I’m impressed.  I love that whole “Steampunk” thing and this Morris Minor has certainly nailed the steam part of that, STAT.  I just can’t imagine how cool you’d be chuff-chuff-chuffing through the traffic in this one.  It’s just beyond cool.  

I’d be tempted to livery it up in the logo of the Sodor Steam Railway Company or some such.  It starts my mind idly wandering to other oddball engine technology transplants.  I have often thought it would be a chuckle to make one of those huge mid 70s FWD Cadillac Eldorado into a Hybrid. My thought is using the electrics to run the rear wheels using a RWD rear axle should make it a fairly easy conversion.  Control systems would be a challenge though. 

While we are on the subject of steam on the roads, this caught my eye from yesterday’s Metro. Not so much the runaway train as the runaway traction engine but even so probably one of the most unusual accidents of the week...

In car computing - OEM style?

I’ve been musing what I would want out of an online car for a while now, there are plenty of guys out there constructing “carputers” which are basically in-car installations of PCs, usually to provide a high storage MP3 / video facility in the car but also some integrate other functions such as GPS and even interfacing with the OBD module to provide vehicle data and stats on a nice PC based screen.  Mobile phone network 3 now offers a My-Fi device which takes a HSDPA (mobile broadband) data connection and turns it into a local wi-fi hotspot, these are available for walk-about use or in-car now.

There is an easier way to get a PC in a car...

Ford in the US has a system called MyFord which links some vehicle systems and entertainment functions with online add-ons too.  MyFord provides a Bluetooth link, GPS, entertainment system linkage and also web browsing in-car.  You can check out the video HERE

Google are reputedly in cahoots with General Motors to provide an Android based online dashboard for GM’s US prestige cars in a service which would presumably replace OnStar eventually.  No scoping has been published but I bet Google is eyeing all that lovely data it can harvest with a salivating tongue.   RIM (manufacturer of the Blackberry smartphone) has also bought out a manufacturer of automotive electronics recently.

Which brings me back to the question of what I would want in on online enabled car; perhaps the GPS could update Facebook Places with the exact location of my car so my friends know where I am parked and so TWOCers could come and lift it while my I am in the cinema (as my RFID chipped card has also updated Twitter that I am going to see “Battleship Potemkin 2:  This time its personal” at the Cineplex so I’ll be out of the way for three hours...)  Maybe not.

However...  I already have a CD/MP3 head unit which can control my iPod.  Bluetooth linkages with mobile phones are common enough.  Sat-nav is sufficiently common even my mate Steve has one (sorry Steve) and there is a proliferation of other devices which people are plopping into their cars (I am holding off on an in-car DVD until my daughter really, really demands one...)   The opportunity to integrate the control of these devices has to be a win.  Also there are loads of new services coming out the whole time, some location based, some not.  Subscribers to LastFM, Spotify and the like could have their music on the move as well as being able to access online content from your favourite WebTV providers, LoveFilm or whoever.  Ubuntu users can now stream music to Android devices and services like LiveDrive now support media streaming.  Maybe I could search for a restaurant close to my GPS position then check their menu and read a review and ask to find a route to it all in one interface.  I for one would like to dock my camera and upload photos taken at events straight to Flickr and update my blog...  Sure, I can do this from a netbook (if I owned one or wanted to carry one around, assuming I tethered it to my mobile phone, if I could be arsed), but this is all about the user experience. Putting the services where people want them and making them easily usable.

Maybe when you hear Apple has an agreement in place with Toyota then we can expect a fully consumerised UI?  

Review: Mankind Razor Pit

Mankind Razor Pit:  It will change your life.

OK, perhaps I’m overstating the case a little here, but even a little change is a change, right?  What we have here is the Mankind Razor Pit available from Mankind.  It’s a wonderful little gadget and its damned simple.  Basically this is a device to clean your razor blades.

Ever noticed how your razor gets “blunt” after it’s been used a couple of times?  You rinse it out and reuse it a couple of times but it begins to snag and not shave smooth or close.  So what now? You throw it away and use another.  And guess what?  Those blades are expensive.  You add up what you spend on blades and its quickly going to add up to the £25ish the Razor Pit plus P&P will set you back.

The thing is you see those “blunt” blades are not actually blunt.  You think your stubble is really hard enough to take the edge off stainless steel?  What has happened is that they are covered with a sticky icky residue made of body grease, hair, shaving foam, etc. which coats the blade and prevents it cutting.  What the Razor Pit does is wipe that gunk off so you can keep reusing the blade.

It’s so simple and it works so well.  Before I could get 2 or maybe 3 shaves out of a blade before it needed to be replaced.  Now I can use the same blade for maybe 2 months.  And I shave every day, sometimes more, I am one bristly mother lover. 

This is a remarkable return on investment, works on disposable razors and most types of blade, you’ll save a hod of cash and be far less likely to run out of blades at an inopportune moment.  Plus it means less waste which is better for the environment.  WIN all round.

Opensource – you can’t give it away...

I like a freebie as much as the next guy but I have never been much of an enthusiast for open source operating systems.  And neither is the rest of the world come to mention it.  Last time I ran a report over at NetApps it seems only about 1% of internet users have an Open Source operating system on the computer they use to browse with.  I’m going to be fairly cocky and state categorically that this means only about 1% of computers in the world run an open source OS.

Now if it really is the case that “everybody hates Microsoft” which we hear so often in the pub and on forums, why is it that we all still use Windows when there is a free alternative?  The open source guys will tell you a whole load of reasons why Linux, and specifically their favourite version of Linux is so much better than Windows as well as being free. 

One reason is that the blowhards and Linux fanboi types you meet on the internet or at techy conventions are a very small proportion of computer users.  If you asked my wife for example, she doesn’t give a monkeys what OS her notebook runs.  It just runs.  She can get on the internet and she can pick up emails and she can sync her iPod and copy photos off her camera etc.  Like most PC users she is interested in what it does not what does it.

Windows is the default because every new PC ships with an OS and that OS is almost always MS Windows. While the user is of course paying for the licence they don’t see it as a separate line item and as such regard it as free, or just a part of the package in the same way as you don’t get a separate bill for airline food when you fly long haul, the meal just comes.  You paid for it as part of the ticket, but it’s not charged for so it doesn’t feel like it cost you anything...

What is even more interesting is that (historically at least) people will pay extra for MS Windows.  I am reminded of the Netbook boom of a couple of years ago.  Many Netbooks were offered in Windows or Linux versions.  The Linux version was always cheaper because there was no OEM OS licence cost in there.  In fact, many Linux Fanbois point to the netbook boom as proof of the case for Linux.  What they don’t point out it’s that consumers rejected Linux. Figures from Best Buy show that the return rate on Linux netbooks was about 70-80% (you know I’d look way smarter if I could ever remember the exact numbers) and that most of the returns were exchanged for MS Windows versions...

OK, that was then, this is now.  Linux (and Windows) has moved on since then. But it proves that simply being free isn’t enough to make it happen. It also proves that all those advantages touted by Linux proponents are also not going to win any regular users over.

So what will?

User experience.

Ordinary non-techie consumers are going open source like you would not believe in one market sector:  mobile phone handsets.   Android has open source Linux at its core.   In the smart phone marketplace there are many established players such as Microsoft, Apple, Blackberry and Nokia.  Android is eating all of them for lunch, with the exception of Apple who it is saving for dinner.  How has Android got into this position?  Not by being free or even because of the ease of third party application development.  The answer is that some guys with a vested interest took it and made it work, and made it work well enough that it became an aspirational technology.  No longer do I want a smartphone, I want a GooglePhone.  Or more exactly in my case a HTC Desire-HD.  iPhone sells because it is aspirational as much as because it works or because of its app-store or whatever.  Android is just doing the same thing.

This is what the open source guys need to be doing.  And they are finally catching on.  Ubuntu 10.4 launched a while back and the interface was made over, the whole user experience was upgraded.  But still it did not quite seem to be consumer-ready, not in that same “ooh, must have that” way that the better flavours of Android are.  Now we have release 10.10 of Ubuntu and there is some really rather groovy thinking going on at Canonical.  Stream your own MP3s as a cloud based service to your iPhone or Android handset or to any other compatible device (PCs included!) which you may be using.  Inherent support for this sort of application and technology is what is going to make the Linux based OS the WIN for the consumer.  And while we are on the subject of MP3s and supported formats we need to get past the puritan nature of the FOSS crowd over what is and isn’t a “kosher” open format or standard. Sure, in an ideal world we’d all subscribe to the FOSS standards of freedom and openness but in the real world the consumer has DRM, MP3, AAC, MP4, AVI and Flash and wants access to that without having to hear a pile of whining about how it’s a closed standard and we should reject all but the true FOSS ideal blah, blah, blah.  But I just want to sync my iPod...

Security is an interesting issue with FOSS offerings.  Many Linux types seem to believe that they, or maybe their OS, walk on water. I have heard this from the Mac quarter as well. “You don’t need any security software on a Mac or Linux box because viruses all work only on Windows”.  This is not true.  The majority of viruses are written for Windows but there are viruses for Mac and Linux too.  Also remember specific malwares out there which run in a virtual machine like Java don’t care whether you are on Mac or Linux they run like the scripts on web pages run.  If you can access Web2.0 functionality of say Facebook then you can run the malware too.  “I don’t need security” is sloppy thinking and I just don’t like sloppy thinking.  Understand the threats and take appropriate action.  But recently, you know what?  There are some neat security suites coming out for the various FOSS operating systems.  I’m still dubious about open source in any environment which is really high security (I mean, you publish the source code, so only the good guys will read it?  Yeah?) but for the average user who isn’t running a nuclear facility or whatever, meh.  Secure enough... 

One of the big current barriers to Linux adoption though is the FOSS community at large.  At the moment FOSS fanbois are a fairly exclusive club. They like to explain how their stuff is better than Microsoft and so forth and they like to tell anyone prepared to listen how they should also switch to open source.  But really, I think they like their little club of l33t users...  I say this because most people I know, and I include myself in this, who have tried on open source OS or other significant product have come across the same issues.  The Linux guys will tell you “all the support you need is available free from forums etc.” and the problem is that, well, that.  Telling new users with queries that they are lame, n00b, need to read the FAQ or whatever when asking questions is not going to endear that new user. One line answers which are 99% code and 0% actual explanation are either stereotypical poor communication skills or a desire to look cool and clever rather than a desire to help and spread FOSS into the wider community.  Also the FOSS world needs to get over itself when talking about commercial products.  Telling someone to “ditch that MS crap in place of a proper FOSS product” is not going to fly.  Business users will very likely need to make FOSS products live in a mixed environment with Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, IBM, whatever.   Much as many of us would probably love to walk away from complex legacy systems with expensive bespoke support and development costs the reality is that business sponsors won’t pay and more often won’t take the risk.  Again, the consumer will have toys which run proprietary formats and drivers which aren’t part of the open source remit and won’t want to junk these (not while they are still fashionable anyway).

Many Linux proponents talk about the ease of making your PC dual boot so you can retain all the stuff which is unsupported in Linux.  This is the one big thing I think they are doing most wrong.  The minute you admit Linux can’t do what Windows does - you prove to 99% of the PC using world that they are better off sticking with MS Windows.  Most of us don’t want a dual boot PC.  It’s more complicated and it’s a faff.  You are in the middle of doing something and you need to do something else? Switch between applications is OK but between OS?  C’mon!  Again, some of the Linux distros seem to be looking towards more compatibility with the non-FOSS Windows stuff and this is a good thing, even if the die-hards will call it selling out the principal. 

To my mind I can see Linux moving forward in the work place first.  Most users will use at home what they use at work because they can’t be bothered to learn two systems so this will probably drive the home user too.  The joy of Linux for the business environment is that users will not be installing all their own junk on it, there just isn’t the same ability to grab unauthorised (and potentially malware ridden) software off dodgy websites and so forth.  There is less opportunity for them to be installing their own communications packages and operating outside of the corporate safety boundaries.  So long as you can configure your chosen distro and OpenOffice and any other items you may need for business use then you are in business and life is looking peachy. 

With the rush to the cloud and SaaS the OS itself becomes less important strategically.  So maybe for some businesses a free OS and maybe locally installed office suite would be attractive with them accessing their CRM, finance system and any other apps of that nature from the cloud.  The big killer for this idea though is the incredibly slick ways you can now manage Windows desktops either remotely or even via automation.  It goes without saying to get the best of this you need to be up to date with your desktop, server and management suite (let’s just say System Center Suite because it’s easier to say it than afford it) but there are amazing efficiencies which come through this tried and tested stuff which many CIOs are going to be reluctant to walk away from even for the price of a free OS.  I can see the enterprise level IT being Microsoft core for a long time.

We’ve had a decade or so of people centralising around a Microsoft core.  94% of Office “productivity suites” out there are MS Office.  Pretty much every data centre has MS server OS running in there, and for many it’s the exclusive OS of business.  Now my crystal ball suggests fragmentation of this homogeneous state of affairs with businesses looking to a range of solutions or blends of those and some new players will be seen as the heavy hitters (e.g. expect Amazon to be real big in the business services space before long).  If FOSS wants to be more than a niche player it needs to come up with a differentiator which is more than its purchase price.  It’s done that on the phone platform, but by allowing proprietary technology and monetisation thereof.  If it is going to have a real stab at the desktop and server market this is a lesson the FOSS community has to learn, and be able to stomach.