Ahead of the Curve | Tom Yager

The Green Delay: A timely proposal for IT energy conservation

Tom Yager — 2008-05-07T10:06:05-08:00

"I hope I'm dead before I'm 50." This was said in an entirely unemotional, matter-of-fact fashion by someone who had gotten a poorly timed, age-appropriate, red state public school treatment of both sides of the global warming debate. Is it, as was presented, more likely that natural cycles and the law of averages are to blame for melting glaciers and freakish weather? Either way, his lesson came one day before the horror in Myanmar. It awakened memories of Thailand and New Orleans. It put a different timbre to the voices decrying $120-per-barrel oil when the solution that seems so obvious to a kid--if you can't afford it, don't buy it--isn't on the table. This young man knows me, and he knows that I take as a point of pride that InfoWorld is uniquely outspoken on matters of green computing, and that my dedication to that cause predates InfoWorld's. When I write about it, I stay away from suggesting that there is any sort of "save the planet" global imperative that should drive IT toward consolidation and the purchase of more energy-efficient equipment. By pursuing energy-conscious policies, what a company conserves is capital. As energy prices inevitably rise, kilowatts, BTUs,... READ MORE

The view from Microsoft's Live Mesh and Apple's .Mac: Shared disks and remote desktop access, no VPN required

Tom Yager — 2008-04-30T03:00:00-08:00

Apple's .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way. Old-schoolers will tell you that there are only two places your important data should live: on your meticulously secured network behind a paranoid firewall, or at Iron Mountain. One must heed the old schoolers, for they shall keep the bitemarks off your backside, but their advice must be tempered with modern reality. Having data live exclusively within your domain presents thorny operational problems when two or more people need to get at it. If you want to selectively share files with temporary staff, business partners, external software testers, or employees who are on the road, you've got to find a way to publish it with a combination of easy access and tight security. If you've shared business data that can't easily be placed in a shared Exchange folder by putting it in a password protected zip file and stuffing it in your Yahoo! Briefcase or its like, you'd hardly be the first. Nor would you be the first to stay on the phone with that remote user until they verified... READ MORE

For server power measurement, there's only one shortcut

Tom Yager — 2008-04-22T11:52:19-08:00

On this Earth Day, let us examine the criteria that IT brings to its purchases and arrange to make power efficiency a top priority. All it takes is the will, a little homework, and the embrace of the delusion that there's any fit and fair way to compare the power consumption of two similar pieces of equipment. [ Discover the techniques used by InfoWorld's 2008 Green 15 winners to make their IT more energy-efficient. ] Last December 27, SPEC announced the availability of its SPECpower benchmark. One would think that having the heaviest of the benchmarking heavyweights pour concrete on that most slippery of metrics would give us something to go by. InfoWorld has been waiting for its copy of SPECpower, which SPEC acknowledges is a first step, since January, and I have a guess as to the reason we're still waiting. Perhaps some members of SPEC, which is primarily a consortium of vendors, have encountered the same issue that I have: Power measurement is only 5 percent process. It is 110 percent policy. The total exceeding 100 is appropriate, because like the predator/moron mortgages in which all American taxpayers are now unwilling investors, power benchmarking creates a debt that... READ MORE

Back to the Mac

Tom Yager — 2008-04-16T03:00:00-08:00

Several months ago, I determined that my years-long fondness required reexamination. I quietly took a break from the Mac to get some perspective, to check out Vista, AMD, and Longhorn (Windows Server 2008) untainted by Apple's PR and uninfluenced by other journalists and bloggers. I elected to take a break from reviews of new Mac hardware, the occasion of which always piques my interest in Apple's platform. There were times when I felt I'd chosen the worst possible time for this hiatus. I ended up passing on MacBook Air, Time Capsule, Harpertown Mac Pro, and most painful of all, the new MacBook Pro. It was difficult seeing InfoWorld pick up reviews of these from sister publications, but I take my responsibility to readers very seriously. I can't very well counsel you on technology choices if I consider the field limited to one worthwhile player, especially when that player projects the image that it competes only with the generation of systems that preceded what's presently sold. I found enormous value in my time away from Mac. I made the kind of discoveries I used to make routinely before I took on the Mac as a specialty, and as I take... READ MORE

Corrections to "Back to the Mac"

Tom Yager — 2008-04-16T01:49:54-08:00

I made a couple of statements in my recent "Ahead of the Curve" blog that Apple contacted me to correct. First, contrary to my claim that the iPhone SDK is the first time that Apple has released a public preview editions of Xcode in the past, Apple claims to have done so. Apple tells me that it is not incorporating FORTRAN into beta 3 of its iPhone SDK, a release that includes the newest stable build of the GNU Compiler Collection toolchain. MacOSForge lists FORTRAN as a default language in its distributions of gcc after v4.0, This accounted for my confusion. Note that while gcc 4.x will build for OS X, it is only supported informally by Apple, as are all Apple open source projects. My apologies for any inconvenience brought about by my incorrect information.... READ MORE

The return of Made in America

Tom Yager — 2008-04-10T15:33:39-08:00

If you feed an educated, socially connected populace a steady diet of war, dirty politics, greedy CEOs, job losses, zero wage growth, ecological mayhem, $3 per gallon gasoline, homeless homeowners, and whining predatory investors, you get about what you'd expect: Some really demoralized, anxious, fed up people. A friend put it this way: "it's not fun being an American any more." We're not sitting around moaning about it. Americans have their sleeves rolled up. I speak for a lot of you, I think, when I say that I'm resigned to working for the government for several years. Tax me. I know that the war, the bank bail-outs, and the rest of the deficit won't pay for itself. My American Dream is a simple one: To see this place cleaned up. Everywhere I turn I find that same brand of Yankee resolve, and nobody's asking who's voting for whom. Fun? Maybe not, but I am proud, and it's the first time in ten years that I've spoken to my neighbors. There is a real push to do something now, and some around me have decided that they're overdue for some fiscal self-discipline. If spending's going to be tight, why delay... READ MORE

AIR gets rich apps right

Tom Yager — 2008-04-02T06:00:00-08:00

Adobe's AIR is safe, fast, versatile, and open, and it will be the standard platform for rich Internet applications The modern browser makes an appealing client for Web-based applications, but even browsers like Safari 3.1 that incorporate features of HTML 5 and CSS 3 have limitations that keep them from competing with native .Net and Java desktop applications. In those areas where a browser falls short, such as video and audio playback and local file access, the developer must resort to a plug-in that is not fully controlled by the browser script, or ugly call-outs from script to native code. Browser-based applications can't be packaged or signed for consistent and safe installation, and the "click to launch" capability that users expect from native applications can only be approximated. When you're running a browser-based app locally, there's no mistaking it for native software. Adobe AIR is not yet widely known or implemented, but it solves all of the major issues keeping the browser from being a common front end for applications. Software written for the AIR run-time installs, launches, and feels like a native application. AIR is a WebKit-based browser, endowed not only with HTML and CSS but also SQL and... READ MORE

AMD's ready to scale you up

Tom Yager — 2008-03-26T03:00:00-08:00

When it comes to scaling x86 servers, it's smarter to think inside the box Architectural traits reaching back to Pentium remain present in the Intel-powered servers of today. The limitations of those servers aren't likely to be noticed as long as the routine of IT and commercial server buyers is to add capacity by scaling out, purchasing new two-socket servers. But the time will come when adding a rack server, or a rack of servers, is no longer the wise person's path to increased capacity. Smart planning will lead you to handle bigger workloads without more servers. The terms "scale up" and "scale out" are sometimes unfamiliar to x86 buyers. They refer to the locale of capacity expansion, computing ("thinking") capacity in particular. A server that scales up can be made to handle substantially higher workloads through upgrades inside the chassis. These systems cost more at first, but they're designed to have untapped capabilities that you can turn on with an incremental investment far less than that of a new server. Scale up is the factor that has kept proprietary Unix big iron in business. Linux on a commodity two-socket Intel server was supposed to push HP, IBM, and Sun... READ MORE

Apple's BlackBerry offensive

Tom Yager — 2008-03-19T03:00:00-08:00

Apple's market power derives not merely from its technology, but from its adeptness at reframing a familiar market to limit the field of competitors. In the most extreme example, Apple portrays its sole competitor as itself. The competitive messaging around MacBook Pro emphasized how it skunked PowerPC notebooks in performance. Later, Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was sold as far superior to Core Duo MacBook Pro. Apple is 2X faster than Apple, so clearly, the smart money's on Apple. At the press conference at which iPhone's Exchange Server connectivity and software development kit (SDK) were unveiled, Steve Jobs established and reinforced the premise that in eight months, iPhone redefined the entire smartphone market. Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 are now irrelevant, leaving only two relevant players, iPhone and BlackBerry. Given that BlackBerry is old, tacky, and unreliable, enterprises oughtn't waste time trying to prop it up. Out with the old, in with the new. [ Enterprise handsets are a special breed. See "Supersmart phones for extreme mobility" and "iPhone: The $1,975 iPod" ] This mirrors the swipes that Apple used to take at Microsoft. They're always delivered with the Jobsian wink and smirk, but they are far from the... READ MORE

Apple iPhone SDK upends mobile market

Tom Yager — 2008-03-12T03:00:00-08:00

Eight months ago, Apple was a nonplayer in the mobile space. Now, according to Apple, iPhone is the second most popular smartphone solution after BlackBerry. With all the hoopla he raised over iPhone at launch time, it's as if Steve Jobs saw this coming. What he admits he didn't see coming was the market's reaction to the lack of a software development kit (SDK) that would support third-party apps on iPhone. iPhone is the only smartphone platform without custom application support, and that fact locked Apple out of the fleet sales that are RIM's bread and butter. It also disenfranchised the Mac developers who put Mac on the map and keep it there with, wouldn't you know it, native applications. I have weighed in on the subject of an iPhone SDK for native software in my usual soft-spoken, dead-horse-friendly way. "Apple, don't brag that iPhone runs OS X," I said, "until developers can get at it." Come June, Apple gets a pass to brag about its mobile OS all it likes. That's when Apple is slated to deliver its SDK for iPhone, and from the work I'm doing with the publicly available preview tools and documentation, I can attest that... READ MORE

PCs approach Mac simplicity, courtesy of AMD

Tom Yager — 2008-03-04T18:17:44-08:00

It takes a chipmaker to make PCs as easy to set up and operate as Macs, and AMD's going to do it If the reality of the "standardized PC" were aligned with the rhetoric, no PC would ship with a separate driver disc. Windows XP would install onto a blank hard drive in the time it takes to copy the files. There would be no Found New Hardware Wizard, and if you inherited a PC with no discs or documentation, you could be certain that a store-bought Windows Vista DVD would be the only thing you'd need to make it work. That's the reality for every modern-era Mac. A used Mac, plus nothing but a generic copy of Leopard, is a working computer. On that Mac's first connection to the Internet, all of that specific model's latest device drivers and firmware are downloaded and installed in one hands-off operation. Surely, if someone were given a chance to lay out the requirements for a PC standard from scratch, this sort of simplicity would be among them. PC users can have computers that install from scratch with generic Vista or Windows media. If you knew that essential device drivers were on all... READ MORE

Microsoft opens up, just a little

Tom Yager — 2008-02-27T03:00:00-08:00

What's Microsoft's open source interoperability initiative? It's about lawyers I'd like to see the specifics of Microsoft's new open source interoperability initiative, but the link to the FAQ (frequently asked questions) takes me to a page that says, "We're sorry, but we were unable to service your request." I think that's the answer to my own frequently asked question: What is the open source interoperability initiative? You shouldn't draw too many conclusions from the fact that osi.org takes you to Ontario Swine Improvement, an idea that mystifies me more than Microsoft's OSI. OSI also happens to be the initials for Open Source Initiative, the body that determines the legitimacy of homespun open source licenses, of which Microsoft has two, called the Microsoft Public License and the Microsoft Reciprocal License. Both of these were filed late last year, and they are what I'd like all legal documents to be: concise. They offer royalty-free licenses of software and permit redistribution of derivative works, provided that attributions are maintained. Short and sweet, yes? There's a little catch in the language of these licenses in the phrase "licensed patents," defined to be "contributor's patent claims that read directly on its contribution." The contributor is... READ MORE

Vista SP1: Release to mob

Tom Yager — 2008-02-20T03:00:00-08:00

Microsoft's community engagement for Vista Service Pack 1 spurs outrage, not gratitude I've learned in recent days that my perceived paucity of Vista in the wild may be impaired vision (of the ocular variety) on my part. The merest whisper of the impending delivery of the first Service Pack for Vista kicked off a public rending of garments the likes of which I've not seen. Granted, Vista Service Pack 1 saves you the headache of downloading dozens of individual Vista hot fixes, and Microsoft sweetens the lot with feature and performance tweaks, but I wouldn't say it's the Second Coming. Apparently some people would, and they were pissed off that they weren't among the first invitees to the event. I am too mystified by the big picture of the meltdown that is the public reaction to Vista Service Pack 1, and Microsoft's reaction to that reaction, to do accurate reportage on the details. Here's what I do know: Microsoft announced that the RTM (release to manufacturing) of Vista Service Pack 1 will take place in March. This I like. New Vista systems shipped from manufacturers and discs supplied to developers and volume licensees will include the Service Pack. Rolling up... READ MORE

The mobile app gold rush

Tom Yager — 2008-02-13T03:00:00-08:00

Adobe, AOL, Google, and Yahoo see smartphones as fertile ground for rich and hosted apps and services Futurists' dreams of the wearable computer, constantly attached to its wearer and to the world, are realized. As foreseen, that technology has changed culture and, arguably, humanity. Professionals rely on smartphones and PDAs as more than aids to recall and communication. In metro areas where the reach of coverage and range of services are broadest, mobile technology outmodes itself. Texting? Bah. Now the low bar is HTML-formatted e-mail with Office attachments. Fifteen-second "Hi, mom!" video snapshots have lost their appeal. I watched two hour-long clips from Apple Developer Connection on my Nokia E61i during my recent flight to San Francisco (that was before I got my iPod Touch). Like everyone, I think, I've come to take such things for granted. When I do comparative reviews of devices, I don't rank them according to the presence of advanced capabilities like these, but how well they're implemented. When BlackBerry and Nokia started shipping movie transcoding software with their handsets, it was clear to me that a corner had been turned. A phone that can play a full-length movie won't have trouble with much else. Now... READ MORE

Windows Server 2008: Redmond's new server OS hits paydirt

Tom Yager — 2008-02-06T09:57:38-08:00

Microsoft asked IT what it wants from a Windows server operating system. That OS is here. Windows Server 2008 (WS08) has been doing an excruciatingly slow public striptease for five years. Now that the last patch of linen has been peeled away, we'll have a chance to see what thousands of man-years yields in terms of innovation. WS08 is loaded with Microsoft's good ideas, almost the way commercial Linux is, and this time Microsoft added the ingredient of wide-open, real-time public engagement in the development process. The people doing the talking in Microsoft's blogs are high-ranking types who could easily opt out of talking to the public. In a way, WS08 is a product of the collaboration between the world's largest software company and the people who use the products they make. It's pretty cool, and it goes a long way toward repairing Microsoft's reputation as an opaque, insular entity. The idea of having someone who says "I'll get back to you" actually get back to you about bug reports and feature requests is sort of a mind-blower. Microsoft's take on community isn't perfect; not all who raise their hands are called upon. That's not possible for people whose primary... READ MORE