Software

Windows Home Server

I am thinking about getting the HP EX475 MediaSmart Windows Home Server.  I would replace our NAS with his server.  Also be able to install SqueezeCenter on it as well, and then I can disconnect the Mac mini.

I can use the Windows Home Server to share our photos, music and videos to our XBox for viewing on the TV.

Also, I was thinking that I could install some software that would allow my TiVo content to automatically be archived.

Upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04

This evening, I upgraded my laptop from Kubuntu 7.10 to 8.04.  I followed their recommended upgrade steps, where I used the alternate CD and then updated from that.  When I was prompted for conflicts for configuration files, I just selected "use the package mantainer's".  I was a little concerned about this, as this was necessary to get sound to work with Ubuntu 7.10, on my laptop.

After booting, everything seems to be working OK, including sound.

The only thing that I have had a problem with so far is that the upgrade upgraded my previous Firefox installation to the 3.0 beta.  Many of my plugins are not compatible with 3.0.  I know that this will be fixed soon.

Also, I haven't made the switch to KDE 4 yet.  I haven't configured it to how I like it, and until I do that, I will stick with GNOME.

Apple to the Core

Apple this week bought a fabless chip company called PA Semiconductor and pundits far and wide are trying to explain the deal with broadly varying ideas, some of which are close but none seem to really understand what the deal is about. In the short term this acquisition means precisely nothing to Apple users. In the long term it could be quite significant, however, and gives a number of tantalizing hints about Apple's hardware strategy.

Why would Apple, having already jumped from PowerPC to Intel, spend $278 million to buy a company that is best known for designing PowerPC chips? Are they preparing to dump Intel? No. Does it have anything to do with Intel? Yes.

This deal has Steve Jobs' fingerprints all over it. His first formal position at Apple was as head of purchasing and Jobs was known for pushing suppliers to ever lower component prices. He still brings to his work a purchasing manager's perspective and a desire to beat up suppliers whenever possible. So in that sense this acquisition is all about Intel. And the purchase price, which probably appeared to have been pulled right out of the air by Jobs, who then wouldn't budge from the figure, is really based on Apple's target savings over the next two years after forcing Intel to cut prices based on fear of a possible Apple switch back to PowerPC.

"We got it for free!" I'm sure someone at Apple said after factoring in the expected Intel price cuts. There is nothing that makes Jobs happier than forcing one supplier to effectively finance its own demise. It's that Devil thing again.

Whether PA Semi cost $1 or $278 million, Apple still has to DO something with the company and its technology and there has been some speculation that we're looking at the next iPhone chip, or perhaps the one after. That is very unlikely. PA Semi has aimed at workstation and server and high-power embedded chips that use far too much power for any iPhone. And while many pundits argue (and PA Semi even told some of its customers) that Apple was mainly acquiring intellectual property (IP), companies aren't typically bought that way these days. They are purchased for what they have already completed, not for what they might do in the future. There's a PA chip that Apple wants very badly but it won't go in an iPhone.

The fact that PA Semi told its customer that the purchase was about IP is meaningless. How could they know the motivation of this purchaser, especially THIS purchaser?

Of course that doesn't mean Apple couldn't switch to PA silicon for the iPhone over time. Once Apple has in-house this considerable design capability there is no limit to the good it could do on all platforms. But it is very unlikely -- almost impossible -- that this acquisition was based with the iPhone in mind.

Then why did Apple do it?

In the short term, it was to scare Intel into lowering prices by at least $278 million over two years. And in the long term it was to create a replacement for Intel as the prime CPU for Macintosh computers.

Here's the important part: CPU architectural advances are achieving minimal returns these days. It is all about multiple cores and clock rates, nothing else. This means that Intel chips are a commodity, and have become effectively interchangeable with those of AMD. I'm sure partisans on both sides would disagree, but my statement is still true. Except at the very top end of each product line, you can always find an equivalent Intel or AMD chip through balancing numbers of cores and clock rates. All that really varies is the price and that does darned little.

This commoditization means that what keeps Apple buying from Intel and Intel alone is only one thing -- money. Through whatever combination of discounts, non-recurring engineering, co-marketing funds, whatever, Intel is cheaper for Apple than would be AMD at this time. And as the only big all-Intel PC shop any more, now that Dell has succumbed, Apple has special value to Intel -- value worth $238+ million to retain.

But Apple having value for Intel doesn't at all mean that Intel has value for Apple. When it came to jumping from the PowerPC a few years ago, Apple had incentives on all sides. IBM was incapable of shipping PowerPC chips that would run reliably at higher clock speeds while Intel was already approaching 3 GHz. Intel was offering to throw money at Apple while IBM was distracted by manufacturing the PS3's Cell processor, based on PowerPC hardware and built in the same fab. Intel was offering higher performance at lower prices, so Apple made the jump. It was price and clock and nothing else and that's key, because Intel would like us to believe the X86 architecture played a role, too, which it didn't.

Apple is not in the least tied to the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA). Oh it worked out well and has helped Apple sell computers into Windows shops because of Boot Camp and the ability to run Windows as well as any desktop from Dell or HP, but this advantage is fading fast with the increasing popularity of virtualization.

Where Windows now runs better on an ISA (X86) chip, because that's what Windows was designed for, we are rapidly approaching the point where desktop virtualization will allow us to throw multiple cores at the problem, removing forever the X86 advantage, even for Windows.

The scenery is even more compelling looking from the other direction. Where X86 offers no true advantages for running OS X, it is easy to see that it could offer DISADVANTAGES, simply because OS X, as a Unix variant, was never designed specifically for X86, making a lot of Intel hardware simply unnecessary. If there are instructions that will never be used, why spend the silicon real estate to hard code them? CPUs optimized for OS X would be smaller, cheaper, and use less power than any Intel or AMD alternative simply because they could be simpler overall.

Which brings us back to PA Semi. In a world of multiple cores and high clock rates, PA Semi can produce a family of processors to drive everything from the Apple TV to the most powerful Xserve. Because they are not X86 compatible, these chips will run OS X faster on a per-watt basis, which is key for a computing world going largely mobile. Because they'll be Apple designs built on a competitive basis by almost any of the world's fabs, these processors will be cheaper MIPS-for-MIPS than anything Apple could buy from Intel or AMD, which Apple will convert into a profit-margin advantage, not lower system prices. If Windows performance suffers, that can be handled by adding more cores, but most users won't even notice.

Heck, by that time Windows will probably be virtualized anyway (what Microsoft should have spent five years and $5 billion on instead of Vista).

Apple is not tied to Intel or to X86. Jobs said they had OS X running on Intel for two years before announcing the shift, so it is logical to assume they have recompiled the OS to run on almost every competitive processor available today. OS X on the PS3? I'm sure it is running in an Apple lab.

Apple has changed processor families twice before in the Macintosh era so it is more likely, not less, that they will change again. It's even possible we'll see a jump to AMD for some machines before the final days of Apple/Intel. But just as the Intel changeover took a year and was predicted to take two, we're 3-4 years out on this transition. Your next Mac will probably have an Intel CPU, but the one after will be all Apple, through and through.

links for 2008-04-19

• Ubuntu Unleashed: Howto: Setup Vidalia TOR GUI with Ubuntu Linux, Tweak Tor for Speed and surf anonymously!
  (tags: linux privacy ubuntu tor vidalia privoxy)

The Truth About IT Consultants

These days everyone in IT is a consultant, employs a consultant, or both. I'm a consultant, aren't you? Outsourcing, offshoring, LEAN management, a lousy economy, and covering one's IT butt have led organizations of every type and at every level to look outside for answers to their IT questions and often even to ask those questions in the first place. This has led to the greatest disconnect I have seen between job requirements and apparent internal capability in the 30 years I've been around IT. It's scary. Hardly any organization can get by without using consultants and -- here's the bad news -- most consultants aren't very good. So here is my advice on how to select and use an IT consultant followed by a grim list of the 10 most common lies told by bad consultants.

What led me to write this column were the troubles of a local company here in Charleston -- American LaFrance, the storied maker of fire engines. American LaFrance was last year spun off from Freightliner, the big truck manufacturer, which agreed to maintain the company's computer systems for a few months while the new American LaFrance bought its own systems with the help of a big IT consultant that rhymes with I-B-M. At the time of the cutover the project was months late and millions over budget. The company suddenly had no idea where it stood in any part of its business and today is in bankruptcy likely as a result. The company is close to failure probably because a consultant didn't perform as it promised. The consultant didn't perform as it promised most likely because there was no way to do so and still make money on the contract, which was underbid.

Who does YOUR IT consultant really work for?

So here's my guide to the various types of consultants, what to look for, and how to get the most good and the least bad for your money.

There are generally three types of IT consultants, which I'll simply label A, B, and C.

Type A consultants are hired to do a specific thing -- set up an email system, design and install a network, put in a POS system, etc. Usually the customer knows what they want before they find a Type A consultant to hire.

Sometimes a customer does not know what they want. These customers start with a Type B consultant who is supposed to help them think out of THEIR box, develop an improved business or IT vision, etc. In the early days when finding ways to improve things was easier, good consultants came to a new customer armed with benchmark data. They could look at a company's various departments and give some good guidance on what areas needed work. They'd tell a customer they were spending too much or not enough on xyz. One of the biggest roles of this type of consultant was to help sell the eventual plan to upper management and secure funding.

These days it is doubtful that most Type B consultants can provide any good ideas. They are mostly expert at being salespeople. The solutions they offer are often what their firms have to sell -- not necessarily what the customer actually needs. This can get exciting when it comes time to implement the project, as Type B consultants tend to be very poor project managers. They don't fully understand the technology they are selling so overruns are common.

There is another class of consultants that are mostly project managers, which we'll call Type C. These folks are brought in as contractors to help implement a given project. The good ones are like Attila the Hun and can get things done even in a very uncooperative environment. They don't care about making and keeping friends, just getting the job done. This is both good and bad. Good project management is important, but equally important is the environment. Getting Attila may be a case of treating the symptom and not the problem. Why is it so hard to get things done in your company? Could that be what is really holding back your business?

Far too often projects fail at the requirements phase. That was most likely the case with American LaFrance. The new organization was probably incapable of setting its own requirements and the consultant didn't help.

The next common problem in managing both IT projects and the consultants who usually do those projects is scope. Projects are often too grand by design or by default due to a lack of requirements. In either case you don't know you've bitten off too much until it is too late. This causes many problems and often destroys the ROI value of the project.

Remember that more than 50 percent of big IT projects fail completely with an ROI of zero percent, so while succeeding is good, not failing is even better.

The best consulting efforts are the ones that take a long hard look at the ROI and have a proven track record of making it happen.

The best consultant I ever knew was Christine Comaford-Lynch, who is now an author and a VC and no longer does IT consulting at all. A key part of her success was her requirements gathering process. She turned it into a very effective collaboration effort involving the key people who would use the software. The requirements would be tight, the project would be highly focused, and there would be little or no scope creep. When it came time to implement the project her project managers didn't have to be Attila's -- there was cooperation and enthusiasm. The training and start up of the application was quicker and easier. There were few surprises that needed to be fixed.

The Holy Grail of IT has long been the convergence of applications and databases into a unified environment where everything would work together. The original hope was to use relational databases and base all future applications on them. Next was the ERP wave. Talk about a huge and expensive effort! Putting in ERP was like a Borg invasion. Today we have SOA, which is even more complicated and expensive code that is supposed to be the glue between disparate applications and databases. Most of these approaches follow the classic computer industry business model -- make the customer spend lots of money and invest in lots of consultant time.

There is an easier way to do this stuff. The best consultants are the ones who come with a portfolio of products and tools. Their trick is to have a really good portfolio of stuff that really works, is really good, and can be sold and implemented quickly in a very cost-effective way. So it isn't necessarily a bad thing at all when a consultant offers to sell you tools, as long as they are the right tools and the consultant really knows how to use them.

What's key to my simplified concept of IT consulting is adapting a limited number of very robust and proven products and to do it all in a reasonable amount of time. Having fewer choices is vital because many companies will spend months or years making a decision. And some consulting firms will bill these clients a small fortune as things drag on.

Now to the 10 most frequent lies told by IT consultants. When you hear these lines spoken you have two alternatives: 1) fire the consultant on the spot, and; 2) bring your smartest and most crotchety nerds into the room and make the consultant explain his or her statement to their satisfaction then back it up with some performance guarantee and penalty clause.

1) "This can only be accomplished through a large custom development project."

2) "Of course your data is safe."

3) "We'll need a day or two for optimization and debugging."

4) "Yes, we've done this before. There are several companies using this product (or technology). They really like it."

5) "Server consolidation and virtualization will save you money."

6) "Storage consolidation and virtualization will save you money."

7) "The upgrade (or change) will be seamless and will not affect production."

8) "The upgrade (or change) will be transparent to users."

9) "Yes, we tested this thoroughly before installing it."

10) "If you install Tivoli it will solve all your support problems."