Barker Bites Back

A Wolverhampton man has been sentenced to three years in prison for illegally copying and then selling software and DVDs worth a possible £1m.

Steve Adams bought an apartment in Spain, a Range Rover and weight-loss surgery while running a major film and software piracy racket the Crown Court in Wolverhampton was told on Friday. The operation which involved copying software and DVDs and then selling them over the Internet and at local computer fairs was eventually shut down by trading standards officers and the police.

The racket run by the 38-year-old bought him a life of luxury. This included, a £14,600 Rolex watch, a personalised number plate spelling out “England” costing £6,500, around £4,000 for his girlfriend Julie Frendo to undergo breast enlargement surgery (and £6,000 for Adams to have gastric band fitted) and the apartment in Spain.

Mr Barry Berlin, prosecuting, told the court Adams ran a “substantial counterfeiting operation all over the country, literally from Wolverhampton through to Carlisle.”

The prosecution estimated that the cost to the industry, “is in the region of £924,000” while the profit to Adams was around £200,000, at “a conservative estimate.”

An examination of Adams’ bank records showed some £627,000 was moved around accounts.

Adams girlfriend had a one year sentence suspended as did an accomplice.

Adams copied more than 30,000 discs the police believe.

The struggle for market leadership between IBM and HP burst out in the open on Thursday with IBM claiming that since 2004 it has replaced some 5,000 HP systems along with Sun Microsystems and EMC systems with its own.

The announcement came as part of IBM's marketing effort which has seen it launch The Migration Factory, the company's sales and marketing effort to show the benefits of its platforms. Key among the initiatives was IBM's effort to convince customers that there is value in its Series z mainframes.

According to IBM more than 150 customers have now migrated to Series z during this year. The company also claims to have mover 1,300 Power Systems customers worldwide and 2,900 storage customers worldwide, both over the past year.

Part of IBM's success, according to Doug Nielson, IBM systems consultant, is because, "customers are being more clear-headed about the cost of IT". He said that a big difference in systems now was that IBM could now migrate customers to systems that use, "one tenth the power and use one tenth the floor space of older systems".

Nielsen works with IBM mainframes an area that he believes is getting, "the right attention now".

Analyst Tony Lock of Freeform Dynamics says that he has, "seen this all before, many times".

One of the major vendors "takes a pop at one of the others and then that one pops back and on it goes".

But Lock said that he did believe there were some differences now. "They used to do this for the customers benefit but now they do it in public on the web", he said.

A rock concert to benefit self-confessed hacker, Gary McKinnon, is being pitched by the man who runs Glastonbury Radio, who is hoping to recruit bands like Marillion.

Ross Hemsworth is putting together the concert, he says, to draw attention to the plight of McKinnon and others who are scheduled for extradition to the US without having committed any offence any serious crime in the UK.

The concert, to be called ‘Rock Against Injustice’, is being staged at very short notice by Hemsworth, who says he plans to stage it within the month.

The concert does appear to be at a formative stage. When we asked to talk to someone who had said they would appear, Hemsworth put us in touch with Mark Kelly, who plays keyboards with Marillion.

“I don’t know what is happening there,” Kelly told ZDNet UK. “Sure, I am interested in getting involved but I haven’t heard anything since I said I was interested.”

Kelly, Hemsworth and McKinnon do have an interest in common. When he was first threatened with extradition by the US authorities, McKinnon said that while it was true he had hacked into secret US web sites at NASA and elsewhere, his activities were innocent, as he was looking for UFOs.

Hemsworth maintains that he is trying to recruit a diverse range of rock starts to do the concert including Sting, Mark Knopfler, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Dave Gilmour, Peter Gabriel and others.

The event, while drawing attention to McKinnon, is also intended to raise money for the charity to help those with Asperger’s syndrome. McKinnon has been diagnosed as suffering from Asperger’s.

The European Commission has said that it sees climate change as an issue which IT organisations and managers around the world should do their bit to tackle and it now has a plan to make a start on the issue.

On Wednesday it publishing its plan for the first time and has started the call for interested parties to contribute their thoughts and ideas.

“Many data centres operators are simply not aware of the financial, environmental and infrastructure benefits to be gained from improving the energy efficiency of their facilities,” the Commission said in its discussion document, ‘Code of Conduct on Data Centre Energy Efficiency’.

The issue is wide ranging, the Commission points our, and “even awareness does not necessarily lead to good decision making, simply because there is no framework in place for the operators to aspire to”.

Most IT companies are at least aware of the need for energy efficiency but do not necessarily practice it or even fully understand it.

One of the big issues as the EC points out is that many organisations sacrifice energy efficiency in favour of greater reliability of systems. “In most cases only a small fraction of the grid power consumed by the data centre actually gets to the IT systems. Most enterprise data centres today run significant quantities of redundant power and cooling systems typically to provide higher levels of reliability.“

One of the first organisations to welcome the EC report was the British Computer Society in the UK.

"This is a vital step forward for the industry in encouraging IT management and data centre operators to focus on the appropriate issues for data centres,” said Bob Harvey, chair of the BCS carbon footprint group.

"The BCS believes that it is important to develop an effective understanding of IT energy use and the development of best practice to improve efficiency,” he said.

The EC will be seeking feedback from organisations throughout Europe and will then draw up a report with ideas for organisations to follow. The Code of Practice is more than just a talking shop. It sets out specific guidelines for companies to follow and that they must follow if they wish to become contributing members of the EC’s scheme.

“Data centre owners and operators can become Participants by committing to a subset of the commitments [required by the EC] with an indicative timeline for implementing and completing actions where appropriate, and regularly reporting the result achieved in order to guarantee the energy and environmental “

For details of the requirements visit the EC site which is linked to here.

At the meeting with Bill Watkins, chief executive of Seagate, on Tuesday he did not just talk about solid state storage and its future. He is an outgoing and cheerful man who wants he started talking to a group of journalists showed no signs of wanting to stop anytime soon.

It would be a disingenuous to day that he “knows all about storage” but he does appear to know everything there is to know about bits and bytes on magnetic media.

After an hour of first outlining Seagate’s current position (it took 10 minutes) and then answering questions (an hour plus) he showed signs of stopping, slowing or running out of words. On the contrary in the end the journalists, including myself, ran out of questions.

Bill Watkins is, as they say, quite an act. Here are a few more thoughts from Bill and two of his managers, Pat O’Malley, chief financial office, and Pat King, branded solutions sales and marketing.

Watkins revealed early on that the company was looking at some form of network attached storage box. A reporter asked if it would include a media player like a TV player. “I don’t know about a TV player but if you look the Apple TV player or the like you need to have some sort of a box that can look at all the inputs you can have from TV, for music and all the other types of media, make it able to gather from all of these inputs, have some kind of a store and then move it back out when you want to listen to it or watch it or whatever.

"That concept or solution is something we are going to look at very, very carefully.”

One of the other executives went a little further and said, “it will be come sort of hard drive that will dock into your TV. You will see hard drives with remote controllers and user interfaces that help you organise the content.”

Watkins was asked if he was concerned that a Chinese supplier might spring up to compete with him. “I assume that they do,” he said. “The problem is that there is so much IP (intellectual property) in our drives.”

Does he see any more consolidation? “I don’t think so. The macroeconomics is such that people will stay where they are. That’s an absolute.”

What concerns Seagate? One of the issues Watkins said was the way the market was consolidated so that in some areas there was very little slack to call upon. As an example, one of the other executives pointed out that there was only one supplier of the magnetic heads that are used on every hard disk drive. As he pointed out, “if that supplier has a problem the industry has a problem”.

What is the future of the Northern Ireland plant? “It is a very good facility,” said Watkins. It is a massive investment on our part.”

The other place for Seagate to manufacture in the west is the US another spokesman said that it was not considered as good a place to manufacture since it “is not vey labour-competitive”.

It was put to Watkins that there were some markets that Seagate had missed out on, in particular, mobile phones and that it was too late for them to get involved? The problem, said Watkins, was that it was one thing to get into the market, to make money out of it was another. He believes that most of the companies he could compete with are selling at or below cost price and so losing money.

He said other companies would give customers the same storage at half the price where as the Seagate model was built on giving the customer twice the storage at the same price. According to Seagate there would be a point where the company would sell 500 GB on a single platter.