Barker Bites Back
A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
Tuesday 31 July 2007, 3:59 PM
IDE not dead, at least not quite
Headlines this week loudly claimed that IDE drives were dead, and died sometime round about Monday this week, or Tuesday, depending on which site you checked. They were sort of right.
A Seagate spokesman was quoted, sort of, as saying that Seagate had stopped producing the disk drive standard after 20 years sterling service.
We asked a Seagate spokesperson to give us the skinny. The spokesperson pointed out that 1) the company had stopped development on the things last year (so no news there then) and 2) would continue producing them until later this year, or possibly next.
Or as the spokesperson put it: "The company will continue to offer PATA drives until late 2007, possibly spilling over into the first quarter of 2008."
So certainly dead, but not quite yet.
Tuesday 10 July 2007, 4:46 PM
Capita see virtual benefits and pitfalls
No chance of falling asleep at the VMware conference thanks to Capita's Shaymus Kennedy. He works out of the financial services side of Capita in Dublin and proved a good spokesman for VMware. Capita have been using VMware for three years now and seeing very good results from it. But Kennedy was no, unthinking spokesman for VMware, pointing out, amongst other things, the poor support from the company for some time before it got it sorted out.
But he had no doubts about the results, citing server utilisation rates of around 5 to 15 percent prior to virtualisation, that are more like 68 percent now.
More from Kennedy tomorrow, but one take away was that the only way to succeed in virtualisation was to spend 80 percent of the effort on preparation and 20 percent on implementation. For that reason, "don't expect quick paybacks", he said. There are some, but the best will be achieved across a longer timescale, he said.
Tuesday 10 July 2007, 4:28 PM
How much is platinum worth for Intel?
On Tuesday, the irony of the day prize went to VMware and Intel. Remember that it had only just emerged that Intel had decided to invest a six figure sum in VMware. That has left VMware, that well know EMC company, with a load of cash to spend on getting more out of virtualisation.
Now VMware with all that EMC money behind them already, can sit and quietly count up all that case. Can a humble virtualisation company spend all that money? I am sure they will find a way.
Part of if is already spent with Intel as the only platinum sponsor of the VMware conference. Can nobody break into this cozy cash-driven circle. The rich do certainly get richer it seems.
Tuesday 3 July 2007, 3:44 PM
Fly me and hang the environment
IT people don't care about the environment apparently, at least according to the annual survey by the Chartered Management Institute.
Only 12 percent of managers in the sector intend to offset the carbon footprint created by long-haul flights, apparently. And we like long haul flights to Canada our second favourite summer holiday spot, it says in the press release. Along with the Greek islands.
And we will carry on flying to, at lease until the ozone layer coughs its last, because only 10 percent of us claim to have any intention of cutting back on the number of flights we take.
But where we are going to fit in all these flights is a moot point since 63 percent said they will not use their full holiday entitlement this year.
Now come on, boys and girls, who is trying to kid who here?
