Technology can be a real driver of growth for small businesses — but putting IT to work can also throw up a whole new handful of problems. Tell us your war stories, share your problems and suggest solutions in this group blog, where you'll find others in the same situation.
Friday 3 July 2009, 3:20 PM
PreSales Canabalize Retailers' Opening Day Sales!
(My attempt at writing a tabloid headline.)
A Very Interesting Microsoft event just occurred. Microsoft is offering at a deep discount and through direct retail sale their FUTURE mainstay product. Since I deliberately avoid paying attention to Microsoft outside of office hours, I don't remember if they've ever done that before. Not quite a going-out-of-business sale but certainly one that ought to p.o. a number of the big computer manufacturers.
They aren't doing it in a small way either. Microsoft.com has the announcement taking up about a third of the top of the page. The expiration date of the deal though is only found in the small print on another page detailing pre-sales.
Win 7 Home at $49 US is a loss-leader for sure. It will cover the price to the OEMs, shipping & handling and their margin whatever it is. That is going to eat into Visaster sales between now and past Opening Day sales for DELL, HP etc. My guess is that Microsoft has already covered their backside with the major OEMs by offering to pay them part of the take of the pre-sales. I would suggest they do it as an apportioned measure of the opening week's worth of sales. (Since I'm offering free business advice! Ha!) By the end of the first week everybody will have forgotten the pre-sales.
Offering to hand out copies of Win7 to purchasers of new Visaster equipped systems is also part of this deal.
Why buy a new computer if you can put the deeply discounted Win 7 DVD on your old Visaster hardware? This deal though only appeals to power users, geeks and tech-savvy early adopters. (Was that redundant?)
Maybe they think they can generate some pre-opening chatter especially from the ones who down-loaded the RC.
I think Microsoft is running a little scared. They want to jazz the numbers with the pre-sales counts added to the numbers for the opening day stats like a movie opening up on a weekend. In fact Oct 22 is a Thursday, the traditional Movie Opening day in the US.
In some ways I feel like Microsoft is trying to do everything it can to erase the bad ju-ju they got with Visaster. Maybe this time they won't need to run those idiotic "Mojave" and Seinfeld ads! If we get lucky, maybe the ads will be even worse!
Update:
Ran across an ad on Office Depot's website selling Win 7. Looks like they've pulled out all the stops and the marketing is going full blast. Amazon, Office Max and practically everybody is selling Win 7.
Tuesday 30 June 2009, 2:13 AM
Windows 7 on a Read-only Flash Drive?
Considering that the price of a 4GB USB flash drive has been as low as 5 dollars on close-out specials, financially it wouldn't make sense UNLESS Microsoft decides to go into the Flash RAM business. The full Win 7 Ultra install DVD is 3.9GB large. Even stripped down it will be better than 2 GB so 4GB sounds like the right size for the Win7 USB Flash drive.
The price per Win 7 Starter license I was seeing for netbooks was around $3 each license in volume. That would mean the price of USB flash drives need to be much lower than that to make it possible to do economically.
Then think about what it would take to make a mass assembly line operation to clone the image onto USB flash drives thousands or millions of times! I suppose you could use something like Ghost to make 128 copies at a time through a massively wicked USB "router". The time it would take to plug in and out all the USB flash drives would be tremendous!
Actually its been done sort of by SanDisk. They have a number of U3-based USB flash drives that have a "read-only" partition that plays like a CDR. When its up and running, the USB flash drive looks like 2 drives, a CDR and a HDD. It has some software on it that makes Windows XP Pro work better when it comes time to unmount the USB flash drive. Actually fairly nice.
I don't know how they are doing it. There is likely some sort of JTAG software interface hidden in "plain sight" connected to the USB signal pins. With special commands to special hidden registers, part of the drive is marked as read only.
If you delete the partitions you kill the U3 interface. If you are careful, the read-write partition can be formatted in NTFS and it coexists nicely with the U3 CD-ROM type partition.
I could see SanDisk turning out millions of Win7 USB flash disks on the U3 read-only "CDR"-like partition for Microsoft. But to do it for a price the netbook owners will be willing to pay, hmmm, I don't know about that.
I think most likely Microsoft is going to make the netbook owners that want it on their old netbooks eat the price. It probably won't be available in anything other than download ISO form. Buy your own USB drive. Buy the download on Shop Microsoft. Copy the image over to the Flash. Use an updated tool based on ufdprep.exe to prep the flash drive. It will have a file converter program that will open enough of the image to mount a bootstrap loader on the netbook and then mount and install the ISO onto the system hard drive or internal flash drive or SSD. (Sounds like a job for a really small install of Linux!)
Don't expect this function above to be available until late in the year until after the retailers get an idea how netbook sales with Win 7 pre-installed are doing. Microsoft will think of the USB based install to be a loss-leader, a way to get users hooked on Windows 7 so they'll buy it pre-installed on their next computer or as shrink-wrap for their old desktops or regular laptops. That's what the Win7 RC is by the way, a form of digital "crack" to get the neighborhood geeks all hooked. Call it Windows 7 Express!
Its prettier than XP Pro but not faster. It is definitely better than Vista on substantial hardware, like a dual core CPU with 4 GB of RAM.
I have no clue how well it will work stripped down enough to work on a netbook. I've already had my taste of "Windows-7-crack". Would I buy it?
No.
Sunday 28 June 2009, 8:13 PM
Constricted Internet Connections
The MJ event and the Iranian and Chinese governments' choke-holds on its citizen's Internet connections demonstrate in two different ways how vulnerable network endpoint access really is for the entire world's Internet users. The death of a single individual managed to do in some measure worldwide what paranoid governments attempt to achieve within their own borders. To the user within those borders the effect of remote server congestion is the same as local government deep packet inspection.
No Internet server is directly connected to an end-user, there is a lot of intervening hardware and software impeding the flow of data. Users at the mercy of their government's control of the network will experience varying degrees of responsiveness from various remote servers. Between governments and commercial vendors controlling or regulating Internet access and unusual events bringing large sections of the network to a crawl or a complete halt, there isn't a truly open, full-speed network connection for any Internet user in every server situation.
Compounding the troubles on the network itself, the existence of zombies in parasitic botnets that siphon away even more computing cycles on infected systems contribute to the data flow throttling. Even non-infected systems are affected due to the need to run malware protection software and the effects of DDOS attacks on popular network servers. Anti-malware running in any of the server computers or routers in the data paths that make up the network connection serving the end-user likewise impede the data flow.
For typical Internet users, the result is varying speeds of access to differently sourced servers. For any given connection speed to an ISP there will be an constriction of data that can vary due to:
where the data is sourced;
the connection management policy on the server (does it impose throttling, limit the number of connections from a single IP, etc);
the content of the data (in deep packet inspection) ;
the paranoia of the local government;
commercial interests of the ISP itself (for instance, does the data displayed come with ISP generated advertising?);
is the connection being dynamically shuffled through different paths by routers? (ie a tenuous routing or using something like TOR will cause more traffic delays);
the effects of anti-malware software hosted at the ISP necessary to prevent the user from complaining;
and finally: the effects of the anti-malware software on the user's computer.
From an engineering perspective this suggests the twin concepts of network-access “impedance” and “data device impedance”. A low network access impedance would be when the data servers are providing data at the highest speed possible up the limit of the user's connection speed. If the connection never matches the connection speed then there is the effect of the “network access impedance”. Most of the network access impedance causes are out of control of the User.
Within the User's computer, the speed at which the data can be utilized would be a measure of how fast the data downloaded is displayed on screen, played through the speakers, or saved to disk. The concept could be applied to broadband, other wireless and wired network connections. This impedance could be different for every connection or connection type established by the user but is likely to be similar for most connections.
Some would argue that “network impedance” is simply a measure of system bandwidth. The problem with labeling it as “bandwidth” does not take into account the fact that the User might not be paying for a fully unlimited speed connection or that connected servers might be deliberately throttling speed. Most ISPs offer slower connections at discounts. Users on a budget will buy slower service. In addition, the data sources or the equipment in between the User and the server might be deliberately delaying the data stream. Presumably two systems with the same data device impedance would have similar network service quality when accessing the Internet through the exact same ISP connection.
A measure of specific system impedance with a known set of applications running and anti-malware measures running might give a more useful figure of merit, the “data device impedance”, to the potential Customer/User. The ability of the device drivers, the design of the radio components in the wireless Ethernet adapter and the operating system to deliver the desired data product to the User will probably be the major components of this “data device impedance”. A good chip set with efficient drivers will have a low impedance.
The release of the Intel Atom provoked this line of reasoning because it is designed to be specifically a single threaded processor. The ATOM question is; “How does the processor fare when compared to multi-threaded processors when running Internet related applications?” A number of reviewers were comparing the ATOM to (in one case a quad core CPU !) low power Celerons, VIA CPUs etc. Even in cases where the CPU speed was the same or nearly so, the tests did not really get into the operating mode of the intended device for the ATOM, a pda or netbook processor.
In areas of electrical engineering, the most efficient transfer of power occurs when the impedance of the source (Internet connection) and the impedance of the power sink (netbook or desktop computer) match. This might be stretching the analogy too far. However it stands to reason that a User intending to buy a netbook for an networking environment he's most likely to encounter could save quite a bit of cash by buying enough CPU and OS capacity to match his probable networking environment and not more. Especially true if the networking is less than optimum. Along with CPU speed, a “data device impedance” might be a useful characteristic.
Thursday 25 June 2009, 6:34 PM
Cloud computing for SMEs? Don't make me laugh...
Storage in the cloud. Has a nice cosy feel to it doesn't it? And it could save you money, they say. But is it real?
If you're a small business, it could just mean that you keep your backups on a simple storage service -- there's a number of them differentiated mainly on price.
Alternatively, you could think about going for a more managed service, such as the one that's launched: ThinkGrid. The pitch is that it's a "cloud storage service for organisations that need to retain ever-increasing amounts of data, but lack the capital to invest in high-cost, on-site storage", all paid for "on a pay-as-you-go basis".
ThinkGrid uses its own servers and MezeoCloud's software to provide the service. You can ship encrypted files, manage them, back them up and so on. It's being sold as a way of saving on file server hardware and management, as well as gaining you backup and disaster recovery services.
All well and good, and just what a small business often needs. In fact, you could argue that small to medium-sized businesses can garner greater benefit from the cloud than larger ones, although there are still other issues to take into account..
The problem is reaching the cloud. Most small business' connectivity uses the same technology as that of most homes and individuals. Yes, it's good old ADSL. For most folk, this means an upload speed of, at most, around 400kbit/s.
That's maybe in the morning before the US wakes up and the kiddies start downloading torrents of videos. By the end of the day, at a time when you might do your backups, you'll be lucky to see an upload speed of more than a quarter of the booked data rate. And while local loop unbundled connections can reach the giddy heights of 1.3Mbit/s or even more, but they're still rare.
What does it all mean? It means that, with a well-performing ADSL connection, you could upload a CD's worth of data in well under four hours, while a DVD would take over 24 hours -- assuming nothing else is using the connection during the transfer. With more than a couple of PCs to back up, those sorts of times will start to look forbidding.
Cloud is all the rage. But what helped to kill a similar industry movement, then dubbed ASP or application service provision, at the height of the dotcom boom almost ten years ago was a lack of bandwidth. The problem is, for the SME, that problem has yet to be addressed.
So is the cloud a working SME solution? Given the volumes of data even the smallest businesses now generate, I suggest that it's not yet there yet. Roll on universal fibre...
Tuesday 23 June 2009, 4:31 PM
The true value of customer service
Got a call from an occasional SME client whose anti-virus had past it's renew-by date, and this being a recession they had decided to renew it themselves. The reseller advised them the original product didn't suit their requirements, and pointed them at the vendors web managed "lite" solution instead. Their system administrator (who's also their accounts bod, phone technician, air conditioning expert, and general all round have-a-go hero) managed the removal of the old and the installation of the new. So far, so normal.
Some days later the new product caved in and refused to update. "Company key not valid!" it cried. Our have-a-go hero rang the vendors technical support line, only to be told they didn't have a license for the installed product which they'd purchased and downloaded only just the week before. They carefully provided all the relevant details to the vendor support people, but "computer says no" seemed to be the general approach of the vendor.
They were unable to progress the issue, and so it was that last week I found myself repeating all of the same information to an equally dis-interested technical support rep. I however, was able to discover that while they didn't have a license for the product they purchased, they did have a license for the current version of the original AV product. This was a good thing because the original product was a far superior (and more expensive) animal to the one they'd purchased in lieu at the reseller's advice. This was also a bad thing, as they didn't have the necessary access to download the installation files since they didn't have a technical support agreement for that product, but apparently did for the inferior one they'd purchased.
It took a frustrating afternoon of long distance calls to access the inner circles of the vendor in question, and thus to elevate the issue to someone with sufficient authority to untangle the wires and make the electrons flow again. It appears that the purchase which was intended to replace a previous product had instead been processed as a renewal of the previous product, something the technical support people were not empowered to correct.
Ultimately, the client ended up with a top drawer product at a bottom drawer price, (consultancy fees notwithstanding), thanks to the vendor making a gesture of goodwill and upgrading the client to the superior product free of charge.
There's a moral here for anyone who sells software. Make sure your back office operations match your front office aspirations. There's nothing in your product quite as valuable as the trust a customer places in your reputation.
Monday 22 June 2009, 10:56 AM
Does offshoring or outsourcing increase the data privacy challenge?
Last week’s IDG Research Services survey commissioned by RSA highlighted the lack of strategy in place in most organisations for outsourcing business services and information to the cloud. It is a reminder that offshoring and outsourcing present a real challenge to data privacy and data protection but is the risk any more than the risk of data that is not outsourced or offshored?
There are many risks associated with offshoring and outsourcing. The information security risk combined with operational risks including the risk of vendor concentration should determine the direction and pace of the offshoring strategy. Information security professionals must apply industry standard confidentiality (integrity, availability) principles in a risk assessment to ensure that corporate data is not exposed to unnecessary and unforeseen risk. For those professionals working in multi-national organisations, the topic of cross border data movement and data protection zones are not new. However, if data is made accessible to third party vendors or other combined legal entities (captives), the involvement of Legal professionals is paramount to understand processing and disclosure principles and policy.
The offshoring and outsourcing risk assessment may then reveal that existing cross border and service provider policies and standards are inadequate even for existing business processes. Thus confirming that outsourcing does not increase risk, but can actually reduce risk, by improving internal controls.
For Firms and organisations with a complex mix of environments and vendors, control “edge” solutions can be developed for the handling of data, based on “need to know” and “least privilege” principles, delivering sensitive data at the very last minute in the process, and linked to pre-defined and agreed data disclosure rules.
Offshoring and outsourcing programmes may increase the complexity of the environment, and can also increase the burden of supervision but do not increase information security risk. There is no hype with offshoring and outsourcing, rather basic control principles apply.
Alessandro Moretti, CISSP, Member of the ISC)2European Advisory Board and Executive Director, UBS Investment Bank, IT Security Risk Management.
Monday 22 June 2009, 8:51 AM
Is Website-Envy Provoking Digital Plagiarism?
Programmers involved in web design and development are arguably somewhat distanced from the nature, form and origin of much of the content that they make sparkle and shine. Should we be surprised then by news of data that shows an 89 per cent rise in the number of content disputes involving web sites over the past year and research showing that of 152 UK SMEs questioned, more than one third (39 per cent) admit to currently feeling envious of a web site belonging to a competitor. Could this envy be translating itself in digital plagiarism do you think?
Personally, I do a spot of copywriting for an RIA-specialist web design agency who look after clients including a well-known coffee brand. Although their site is super slick and sparkles beautifully with Flash, AIR and Silverlight goodies, I’m willing to bet that the design team doesn’t spend hours pouring (no pun intended) over the bean brewing content that they dutifully host up when they are given it. Not that that it should be their responsibility anyway.
Wasn’t it English author and Anglican priest William Ralph Ing who said, “What is originality? Undetected plagiarism.”
Technology journalism also suffers from this problem. As soon as I post this blog it will crop up as a headline on various ‘news-crawler’ type aggregation sites. I suppose the difference being that these sites will host a link directly back to the original source here on ZDNet.co.uk. What we are talking about in the wider sense here is the theft of whole chunks of content and the re-purposing of it under a completely new guise.
The aforementioned survey emanated from a web hosting provider called Fasthosts Internet Ltd. The company suggests that an alarming number of UK firms are finding that material (such as artwork, descriptive text or product images) has been copied from their web site and published elsewhere. The problem varies from the occasional image being used to entire web site designs being replicated. Fasthosts operates its own in-house ‘Abuse Department’ (no Monty Python argument jokes please) so I guess they would know.
Spending a lot of time looking at web developer and designer touch-points and always keen to examine the burning issues of the day as I am. I actually used Sunday to get in touch with Fasthosts through a friend of a friend and the company’s Steve Holford told me, “It is particularly the case that in a challenging economic climate such as now, that business owners may be tempted by the quick-fix of copying another firm’s work. Significantly, we found that 10 per cent of participants in our survey had at least one item of their own company web site copied by a third party between March 2008 and March 2009.”
I also contacted a quite prolific chap called Aral Balkan who describes himself as a ‘User Experience Designer and Developer’ on this subject. Aral told me, ”If you're producing online content, chances are that you will have to deal with plagiarism, copyright infringement and identity misappropriation at some point in your career. In my experience, very few content producers today are aware of their own intellectual property rights. Many don't even know that copyright is inherent in any work you produce, that you don't have to register your work. Even fewer understand the importance of licensing their work – whether under Creative Commons or a commercial license – and the differences between various licenses which can have a profound impact on the balance between the amount of control you maintain over your work and what other people can do with it.”
“At the very least, I would urge everyone – content producers and consumers (not that those two roles are mutually exclusive these days) – to read up on the various Creative Commons licenses and the differences between them and to always publish their work with some sort of license, even if it is a public domain declaration,” he added.
What’s the answer then? Surely we need automated tools to scrape the web looking for highlighted phrases in recently posted content to constantly look for plagiarised material. These must exist already but if they were used more would this make a difference? Sadly I think probably not. Perhaps the advent of web 3.0 will see much of this eradicated as the web becomes a more sophisticated and more fully evolved beast as it must logically do in the years ahead.
Sunday 21 June 2009, 6:39 PM
eASS (European Alphabet Soup Syndrome)
I used to think that NASA and the US Government was bad about 3 and 4 letter acronyms, well the EU has caught up and gone past. I tried reading a couple of "white papers" on this very site and they were essentially unintelligible and useless.
NASA at least publishes a glossary with definitions of every acronym used in a paper.
I went looking for enlightenment by clicking on the tags and was soon awash in a sea of even worse examples of IT double-speak and gobbledegook.
Obviously the "mainframe priesthood in white lab coats" is back.
When language is used to hide or obscure meaning, there is likely a bureaucrat mangling it to his own purpose.
What do you call a bureaucrat with a bunch of computers? An IT Admin.
Wednesday 17 June 2009, 8:47 PM
Small Business: Is Your Company Biker Friendly?
Small Business: Is Your Company Biker Friendly?
Author: Eric Everson
It’s that time of year again when motorcycles are out in full force. Whether you’re in the U.S. or the U.K. bikers are enjoying the warm weather after a long winter pause. For entrepreneurs and business managers alike, making concessions for motorcycle riders can greatly improve your business.
Though I am the innovative technologies blogger “Mobile Tech” my other great passion is motorcycling. Motorcycles have been a driving force in my life for as long as I can remember. All of my life, everything else stands still around me when a motorcycle comes into view. I’ve recently learned to harness my moto-obesssion in the form of BikerAwareness.com, so I’m staying professionally connected to what I love.
As a motorcycle rider I’ve seen an increasing number of businesses begin to recognize the buying power of the riding community. The reality is that the old U.S. Motorcycle Safety Foundation adage is actually true, “Motorcycles are Everywhere.” While this means you should look for us on the road, you might also do your small business a world of good by catering to us too. Recently I’ve seen parking roped off or especially designated for motorcycles in some very interesting places. From mega-malls to Main Street, businesses are making it easier for motorcyclists to access their businesses.
The good news is though the term “biker” often conjures up negative rough-and-tumble images, that perception is rarely the reality. In fact bikers are some of the nicest and most generous people you’re likely to meet. Add to that, bikers are a very tight knit community so when we find a local business that caters to us we’re quick to spread the word. If your small business could use a summer boost and you’re looking for a good way to differentiate from your competitive market, perhaps it’s time to consider that “Bikers Welcome” signage.
While I’ve got your attention, remember to look twice for motorcycles! If we could all get just one person to look twice for bikes, we could make a world of difference to preserve biker lives!
Cheers,
Eric Everson – aka: The Mobile Tech
Tuesday 16 June 2009, 3:22 AM
Clonezilla, here to stay, not fade away!*
Now that I've downloaded it and started testing it, I'm really impressed with Clonezilla. Running as a “Linux live CD” iso image just over 100 megabytes large, one method touted is to operate it on a USB drive pen. Since all the test-victims in-house have CDROM/DVD Rom drives, I tested it purely as a CDROM image and it works exactly as advertised. Since I have tried booting a Linux “Live CDROM” off a USB drive before, I didn't think it would be much of an issue. But I will be testing it that way soon.
There are multiple file formats supported. FAT, FAT32, NTFS, ext2 and ext3 all were listed and that sold me right off. Drive-to-drive, partition-to-image, drive-to-image, multi-cast and peer-to-peer-casting and probably a couple other methods that I missed are all possible.
I tried booting up the CDROM image on 4 different computers with 4 different NICs and all netted up without any issues. I used a Linksys router as a DHCP server for IP addresses et al and it worked each time without a hitch. It also accepts multi-cast DHCP addresses from a Linux server.
Debbietoo served as the server/target of the Clonezilla distro (http://www.clonezilla.org/) booted up on both paqman (old P3 Compaq Enpro with Ubuntu 9.04) and the Windows XP Pro box (P4) and got viable clones out of both of them. There is a script that gets made as part of the process that can be used for the same cloning operation at another time, but I haven't tried copying it from the RAM image to debbietoo for future use.
I've been using the Clonezilla CDROM iso as the boot disk to make the clones manually. The best trick would be to host the iso in a separate partition on each of the systems you want to clone and have a way to trigger a reboot into that partition at a specified time. Cron and at on the Linux and Windows systems would work for the scheduling. The rest could be handled by writing or renaming some files to cause them to be executed on the reboot. As long as you have enough drive space for the images, this could give you a way to do a full “backup” without user intervention required.
Automatic clones of system drives has been something I've wanted to do for some time now. It just never percolated up to the top of the “to-do” stack. Its at the top now. My son's Windows XP Pro box has become practically unusable AGAIN. I've spent a lot of time copying and cleaning drive space. His computer is not going back onto the Internet before I get a clone of the clean system so I can just “drop” it back onto the C drive and reboot. Clonezilla looks a lot like the tool I need to do it.
The interface is not as “clean” as Norton Ghost but it also doesn't have the dozens of command line options of Norton that allow for scripting but make it almost impossible to use right away. Most of the options are text menu driven so it is easier to use.
In the compression department, it doesn't use a proprietary scheme so single files can be extracted using the gzip or other zip type utility.
The image itself becomes a folder with files inside it. The bulk of the image becomes a single compressed file, or a series of sections sized by user's choice in the compression choice made by the user. Some are heavily compressed but slow but one option is no compression at all, which of course is the fastest. Going from Debian 4.0 on a Celeron server 2.4 GHz (debbietoo) to a Windows XP Home edition bare metal restore on a P4 1.2 GHz took an hour and a half over an Ethernet 100TX copper connection. The original image was over 33GB.
II haven't tested the entire feature set yet of Clonezilla but already its a keeper.
* a rip from Buddy Holly
Previous
