Bladewatch.com

Check out this analysis of Windows 7, it’s an interesting read, I am excited to see what it’s like, if they’ve made many improvements over Vista. Vista on the whole is working ok on my recently purchased Dell Optiplex, a 745 if I’m not mistaken. I’m running Vista Business on it, apart from the odd sieze when it starts as everything loads it’s fine, though my main upset is the power button, why oh why are there so many options for shut down, also sleep/hybernate kind of works, but sometimes gets a bit emotional and requires me to F8 ignore what’s going on and boot please. But then you could argue it’s my setup, my install that’s at faulty, regardless let us welcome Windows 7, let us praise the innovation and improvements Microsoft have made and at the same time, can I wonder what the upgrade cost will be, or will I be buying a new pc in a year or so as it’s the same price?

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An article to remind us of the importance of applying security patches and hot fixes on all the servers in scope, whether they’re Windows, Solaris, Linux or any other Unix platform. Applying patches is first line best practice and often the cost of obtaining support when logging a call.

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There have been quite a few articles talking about the UK’s poor performance when it comes to WEEE or recycling our electronic waste, it’s very disappointing to see. There remains a few things that need improved, it needs to be made easier to recycle your products – an old argument I know, but let me give you my example. I have old headphones for my iPod. The left ear doesn’t work. Where do I recycle them? There’s nothing on the Apple site specifically about headphones, and the recycling sites mention nothing?

Have we thought of using councils and enterprise adopting a more direct approach – anything electrical, whether it’s your cooker, your radio, headphones or the seven Nokia chargers you have, send them to us or we’ll collect them and dispose of them. The thing is a lot of the equipment might be re-used or re-deployed where appropriate, but would we not be better recycling it anyway in terms of energy efficiency? Could we offer a trade in scheme for televisions, for mobile phones, printers and computers? £10 off for every device you trade in when buying a new device? Just you watch how many early Pentium to Pentium 4′s suddenly get swapped for that new dual or quad core pc. It’s £300 you say, there’s two mobile phones a LaserJet III and a Pentium 133, how much is it now?

• We need end users to buy-in to recycling and using more energy efficient products
• We need vendors to make it easier to recycle devices – no barriers to entry and the packaging used
• We need government/local government to make it easier to recycle everything and discourage non-recyclable packaging where appropriate – what about all those coffee cups that we can’t recycle is there really no alternative?

We need to remove the excuses for inactivity, make googling and recycling that bit easier – we also need to stop those practices where a recycling batch is binned because ‘it’s contaminated’, glass in the plastic bottle back, yes it’s irritating, we need to ensure proper labelling and information. Can we also at the same time make supermarkets, producers and service providers use easier to recycle packaging, reduce their packaging and switch away from those smaller packages for typical household products – would it not be better for everyone if my washing powder was sold by 8kg packs than 1kg? Do we not create far more packaging, energy footprint and everything else by selling more smaller packs?

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It will be interesting to see what comments or analysis are made in Finextra‘s event about IT outsourcing and capital markets space, certainly cost control and delivery will continue to be an issue during the current economic conditions. Whether it’s outsourcing that is needed, or genuine investment in specific areas of the application or the infrastructure to transform the way your technology integrates and operates within your financial and business constraints will depend on you and your business.

I often wonder if we find that outsourcing is used more to achieve specific goals in the IT function like cost reduction or upgrade projects – ask for three million to upgrade to Windows 2008 and IT might get told “Sorry, there’s no budget”. Get told by a service provider, we need to upgrade the operating system to Windows 2008 as everything else is out of support and the budget might be more easily obtained as a result of billing, or the fact that it’s like buying a mobile phone, it’s a fixed service with rules, you want support, you upgrade, next.

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An interesting video/article talking about the Intel 8 core processor which I’ve heard and read about over the last few weeks, do check it out. It will be interesting to see how an 8 core processor might perform in terms of performance and energy efficiency, as well as its operations in the virtualization or hpc field – as with all multi core processors, it’s important to ensure your layered components/operation system and application are able to exploit the extra cores.

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Check out this review of the HP DL380 G6, it’s always great to see what other people think of the different servers. Bringing the standardized power supply, extending the memory and storage support has to be a good thing for the end user in terms of scalability for those virtualization or hpc projects.

Refreshing your hardware to newer more energy efficient servers can provide an instant return on investment in terms of energy efficiency and direct support costs (the hardware maintenance costs or component upgrade costs). Combining a hardware refresh project with more effective cooling and virtualization could be a vehicle to extend the life of your existing datacenter, transform service delivery and move towards the concept of the dynamic infrastructure, where we can allocate more resources where the business need requires it.

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We see all the time about right sizing the organization, what about the IT?

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Apologies, i’m re organizing by it, can you call back?

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An interesting article talking about whether offshore call centers represent a risk, it’s talking in terms of financial and operational security, but I wonder if we could not say the same in terms of maintaining production. There’s no doubt that offshore helpdesks can be very effective and when given the right tools able to remotely provide all the support you need, however it is not the same as having teams on site, the ability to ‘be’ at the server, or interface directly with the application rather than through the lights out card or the application rather than the middleware/application code or database direct. We’ll have to see as the FSA, as regulations start being discussed in light of the market conditions recently, I wonder if we’ll see a change from one of do you have business continuity, to does your business continuity, there is a big difference between having an automatic failover available system and one that works in theory, providing the feeds are in place, that there is a clean application/middleware failover in specific orders – but then just how prepared are we to regulate – and who determines and signs off risk?

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http://bit.ly/18htP9
– IR35 tax law seems to be a lot of effort for marginal benefit

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