June, 2009

Overheard - VMware vs. Microsoft

“The video has ignited a longstanding debate within the partner communities of Microsoft and VMware over which company has the better approach to virtualization. In Microsoft’s view, virtualization is a feature of the operating system, while VMware represents an unnecessary — and expensive — extra layer. VMWare counters that Microsoft’s virtualization isn’t sophisticated enough for the needs of enterprises.” Kevin McLaughlin, VMware Apologizes To Microsoft For Hyper-V Bashing

Scott Drummonds, a technical marketing manager at VMware, admitted that he exercised bad judgment in posting the video and said he has removed it from Youtube. “Unfortunately, my intention to stir the pot with eye-poking banter has put my credibility and by association VMware’s credibility in question among some of you. For this I apologize,”

Overheard - server virtualization

In the absence of standards, users and administrators configure virtual machines on spec, often overallocating resources to VMs, which creates waste and inefficiency. This problem is exacerbated in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), in which large volumes of VMs are often created over a short period of time. Jeff Byrne, Curbing virtual server sprawl in growing virtualized environments

Overheard - Application portfolio management

And now with a huge portion of the COBOL workforce retiring (i.e. baby boomers) there is a sense of panic as the ecosystem is threatened by a looming shortage of staff and a scramble to snatch up those few green screen programmers remaining. So here are my questions: Did nobody see this coming? Was anybody paying attention? And what lessons will we learn from this that we can apply to our own little ecosystems of java, PHP, Ruby, and .NET? Kristina Podnar, A Call for Application Portfolio Management

Overheard - Discrete manufacturing

“There are far too many valuable resources, too much valuable capital and especially too much human skill and know-how embedded in America’s manufacturing sector to allow it to go to waste.” Vice President Biden, speaking in Perrysburg, Ohio

Tuesday, June 23rd, Vice President Biden and the Middle Class Task Force went to Perrysburg, Ohio to promote manufacturing.  The Vice President hosted a discussion on the state of manufacturing.  From what I could gather reading through the local news feeds,”retooling” and “renewable energy” were the buzzwords-of-the-day.  If you’re a discrete manufacturer for automobile parts, for instance, you might want to picture yourself making parts for wind turbines or solar panels instead.

Overheard: Memristor is the missing link of integrated circuitry

Electronic theorists have been using the wrong pair of variables all these years–voltage and charge. The missing part of electronic theory was that the fundamental pair of variables is flux and charge. Leon Chua as quoted in ‘Missing link’ memristor created: Rewrite the textbooks?

A memristor can be thought of as a resistor that changes its resistance depending on the amount of current that’s sent through it — and the big deal is that it retains its resistance even after the power is turned off.  Memristors are in the news again because engineers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed flexible memristor-like electronic memory chips.  It could be big news for consumer electronics because it opens up the possibility that memory chips can be printed just as simply and inexpensively as overhead transparencies.

Overheard - Is IT insourcing just a temporary solution?

Only 9% of CIOs said they planned to increase IT outsourcing this year, according to the latest update to Gartner Inc.’s 2009 CIO Agenda survey, and many are considering insourcing previously outsourced functions. IT insourcing can bring jobs, cost savings back in-house, experts say

The survey, which ranked CIOs’ top priorities, found that “improving business processes” topped the list once again this year, with 57% naming it as a top concern. Following that was “reducing enterprise costs” with 51% and “improving enterprise workforce effectiveness,” which was up three spots from last year and garnered 37%.

Overheard - Speech-to-text software

“My wife once clocked me at 120 words a minute, and that’s including making corrections. It’s just insanely fast (providing, of course, you know what you want to say).” David Pogue, Pogue’s Productivity Secrets Revealed

David Pogue says he uses Dragon Naturally Speaking!

The funny thing about using Dragon Naturally Speaking is that it’s tempting to look at the screen as you’re dictating to make sure the software is typing what you’re actually saying.

There’s something mesmerizing about seeing what you say appear magically on the screen as text. And of course you don’t want the Dragon to put down gibberish or make so small mistakes that it appears you’ve been drinking something stronger than coffee all day. So when you start using Dragon, it’s kind of natural that to want to supervise the software.

If you keep looking, though, you’ll probably negate any advantage the software offers. It’s too tempting to spend time self-correcting and self-editing and not enough time talking out ideas. And just like Narcissus, the guy who was fascinated with his own reflection, you’ll perish.

When you’re riding the dragon, you need to focus on flying ahead. My advice? Don’t look down till the trip is over.

Overheard - IT MOOSE management

“What we’re seeing is CIOs are working very hard to reduce the cost of their operations on a per-transaction basis. They’ve done a lot of that with virtualization and data-center consolidation.” Mark McDonald, as quoted in IT After The Recession

IT demand is very strong. Companies have had to work harder than ever to make money in this environment and also to be able to drive the types of innovation that will keep customers interested in new things they’re offering. But CIOs are meeting that demand with existing IT assets rather than buying new assets.

In other words, they’re managing the IT MOOSE and they like their MOOSE lean.

Mark points out that the number of IT transactions are increasing — but not all those transactions can be directly tied to revenue.  (That reminds me. I need to log on and check my bank balance.) As the number of transactions to support $1 in revenue continue to go up, Mark predicts that CIOs will be taking a hard look at infrastructure again.

The question is…whose infrastructure will they be looking at?  Their own — or Amazon’s or EMC’s or some other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider?

Overheard - TV over Ethernet

LG is shipping ‘broadband HDTVs’ that have embedded software for streaming movies and shows directly from Netflix over an Internet connection. Jeff Caruso, TV over Ethernet part of larger trend

Goodbye Roku!

Gesture control - using kinesics to create the uber-perceptual user interface

“The challenge with gesture control, as one panelist put it, is that we don’t have any universal body language for a lot of the actions we’d want gesture control to accomplish. For example, there’s no widely shared gesture that means ‘turn it off,’ so programmers would need to invent one, and then hope users would be willing to learn it.”  Gesture control: Is it the next big thing?

Today’s WhatIs.com Word of the Day is gesture recognition.