Theres a nice little article over at the 360 blog here listing exactly what mobile operators frequently get wrong with their security architecture and execution. Once wonders if they understand the basics!
Theres a nice little article here (basic reg. required) contrasting VMware and Citrix XenServer, where the end user was forced to abandon VMware (their default choice) after suffering performance problems and after 6 months of back and forth with tech support and engineering at the vendor. In the end XenServer delivered 2x the real world performance on identical hardware with a default install. Not all workloads are equally well virtualized!
N.
If you'd dropped my company a line we'd have offered a supported trial with an allocated engineer (okay, time spent would depend partly on potential size of a deployment...) but you'd certainly have spent nothing finding out what the product could and could not do in a supported way. We'd probably both have learnt something, I love real-life tests:-)
Sometimes there are benefits in NOT buying direct off the vendor's web store:-) End of outrageous plug!
Oh, we also do VMware, I guess what Im saying is that deployment is about more than just the upfront sticker price of the product.
PK
it will provide free access to competitive technology, keep the established vendor(s) straight, and (eventually) will give rise to cross-platform management tools and frameworks.
At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.
I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I sincerely hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are guys!).
There was a balanced 2 minute comparison of Hyper-v, XenServer, and VMware over at the 360 blog here.
For the VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V fanboys (are there any Hyper-V fanboys yet?), calm down and take a tip from that blog:
"Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it."
The guys over at Three Sixty Information Security have published the results of their analysis on 7 of the most popular security tools in common use by systems administrators. The articles examines the tools on their merits and attempts to pull together common threads running through each. Finally they put forward their answer to the question "What makes this software so uncommonly good?"
What do users of Xen's flagship product Xen Enterprise 4 think of the deal. Is this good news for the products future? Where do you see the business going WRT Citrix and integration over the next few years?
Nick.
A blog entry over at the BackChanne breaks down just how many customers Postini had in the enterprise market, the only surprise for me was that Microsoft chose to take-out Frontbridge and not Postini. Whats next? Yahoo buys Messagelabs for 300M? Half the market share of Postini.
For those of you with click fatigue, the market rankings look like this:
Postini 49%
Messagelabs 22%
Frontbridge 21%
MXlogic 5%
Blackspider 0.4%
Earlier this year 360is.com published a brief note on clickfraud in their newsletter/bulletin thing, citing sources that Clickfraud as set to reach $1.8B by 2008. I expect we are going to see a lot more of this Fraud2.0.
Full report/page: here.
Nick.
I was surprised to learn that BT arent actually the number 1 provider of Internet Access to businesses in the UK, actually its Verizon through their UUNET/MCI/Worldcom acquisition last year. The info on exactly who owns what part of that market is here (registration required).
N.
Theres a different set of European and UK legislation discussed in an article here. Although there is increasing harmonisation of EU/UK/US legislation on this, there's still a long way to go and its important to know about what is specifically relevant to you.
I read some time ago that this legislation was having some effect. Theres a newsletter here that talks about the first Australian prosecutions of spammers in 2005.
I agree, having worked at an ISP... cracking down on the network operators just tends to lead to spammers migrating more and more frequently to new hosted servers and providers. Spammers find it pretty easy to up-sticks and leave at short notice, and most providers pride themselves on getting new customers up and running fast.
There was a newsletter I caught recently talking about some of the successful prosecutions for spam 'downunder'. It sounds like they are making progress.
Theres a good take on why this has started to happen recently on a blog all about the Telco/ISP struggles of late. Its just a side-effect of the increasing consolidation among those who "own the pipes", an inceasingly desperate act to sweat more revenue from their investments, rather like a historical land-owner putting up taxes for peasant farmers on his land.
Nick
If I understand it correctly from reading their site, this company agrees information exchange relationships with major online retailers for point of sale data, aswell as gathering 'truly public' stats on Ebay bids, Amazon stock levels, and other stuff that you can read on the net.
This idea isn't all that new, but its the first time we've seen it used across all industries. I remember an industry body for pharmaceuticals that used to ask its members for rolled-up numbers for drug sales each year, and then sell that information (suitably obscured) back to all the other drug companies. "You are number 2 in the market, and the next guy is miles behind you".
That sort of thing.
Theres a british company doing similar Internet data mining for the telecoms industry, with some data avaiable on their site.
Nick.
Theres another company doing similar 'evidence based research/reporting' specifically for the Internet industry here. In particular they publish the 'inside story' on recent M&A and flameouts in the industry.
I maintail a page of various GUI mechanisms and visualizations Ive seen, mostly around the information security space. When is it that people are going to realise that cool graphics are not about getting the most out of the computer, visual queues and visualization should be able getting the most out of the human operator of the system.
http://www.tauceti.org/research.html
UK Police forces arrest people for using browsers such as Lynx:
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/27/jailed_for_us ing_a_n.html
Apparently this guy got 2 years jail time, he's gonna have an arsehole the size of a clowns pocket by the time he comes out.
N.
There is a report here detailing the gender mix of bluetooth users and which devices they are carrying around with them. The survey was taken in central London using a passive collector but I'd assume the ratios are the same the world over.
N.
Did I just stumble out of my time machine and fall into the early 1980's. This is an example of just how bad the industry is at learning from itself, and how every app, OS, or system vendor believes they can learn nothing from the rest.
Ive got 3 words for you.
SET PASSWORD/GENERATE
The SET PASSWORD example is as follows.
$ SET PASS/GENERATE
Old password: YOUR_OLD_PASSWORD (actually not visible )
infrka
hewsed
iddege
saubcp
patlzu
Choose a password from this list, or press RETURN to get a new list
New password: patlzu (actually not visible )
Verification: patlzu (actually not visible )
$
Does anyone else think that viruses and worms will take on a more 'political' slant? Or at least more focused in their intent. The original WANK worm claimed an anti nuclear motivation, then came Bugbear and its list of banks, MyDoom brought payback for SCO and Microsoft...
I'm quite surprised we have not yet seen a 'Jihad', 'anti globalisation' or 'green' worm or virus attack so far. Any group that sometimes takes direct action perhaps.
I've been working on a presentation discussing this here (warning 500Kb powerpoint!).
My money is on the anti-global guys stepping up first.
Slashdot Mirror
Tune tastes nice and Escolar is served in fine french restaurants here.
Theres a nice little article over at the 360 blog here listing exactly what mobile operators frequently get wrong with their security architecture and execution. Once wonders if they understand the basics!
Theres a nice little article here (basic reg. required) contrasting VMware and Citrix XenServer, where the end user was forced to abandon VMware (their default choice) after suffering performance problems and after 6 months of back and forth with tech support and engineering at the vendor. In the end XenServer delivered 2x the real world performance on identical hardware with a default install. Not all workloads are equally well virtualized! N.
If you'd dropped my company a line we'd have offered a supported trial with an allocated engineer (okay, time spent would depend partly on potential size of a deployment...) but you'd certainly have spent nothing finding out what the product could and could not do in a supported way. We'd probably both have learnt something, I love real-life tests :-)
Sometimes there are benefits in NOT buying direct off the vendor's web store :-) End of outrageous plug!
Oh, we also do VMware, I guess what Im saying is that deployment is about more than just the upfront sticker price of the product.
PK
At last it looks like there will be a free, supported, commercial-grade virtualization solution for those of us who dont have the budget for VMware and have been disappointed with Hyper-V and its predecessors.
I can only imagine this is unhappy news for VMware who surely must now take a reality check on their pricing. I sincerely hope they do not go the same way as Netscape, having 3 strong vendors in the market stops a lot of the kind of bad behavior you see from ERP, CRM, and BI vendors (you know who you are guys!). There was a balanced 2 minute comparison of Hyper-v, XenServer, and VMware over at the 360 blog here.
For the VMware, Xen, and Hyper-V fanboys (are there any Hyper-V fanboys yet?), calm down and take a tip from that blog:
"Providers of the core hypervisor technology will continue to play a game of technical leapfrog with one another for at least a couple of years, while those with a management, enterprise framework, or suite will claim more strategic long-term positions around "liquid infrastructure" or something else suitably bendy. What is most important right now is that you have the right information processing architecture, not any one particular product within it."
AG
NH
What do users of Xen's flagship product Xen Enterprise 4 think of the deal. Is this good news for the products future? Where do you see the business going WRT Citrix and integration over the next few years?
Nick.
A blog entry over at the BackChanne breaks down just how many customers Postini had in the enterprise market, the only surprise for me was that Microsoft chose to take-out Frontbridge and not Postini. Whats next? Yahoo buys Messagelabs for 300M? Half the market share of Postini.
For those of you with click fatigue, the market rankings look like this:
Postini 49%
Messagelabs 22%
Frontbridge 21%
MXlogic 5%
Blackspider 0.4%
Nick
Earlier this year 360is.com published a brief note on clickfraud in their newsletter/bulletin thing, citing sources that Clickfraud as set to reach $1.8B by 2008. I expect we are going to see a lot more of this Fraud2.0.
Full report/page: here.
Nick.
I was surprised to learn that BT arent actually the number 1 provider of Internet Access to businesses in the UK, actually its Verizon through their UUNET/MCI/Worldcom acquisition last year. The info on exactly who owns what part of that market is here (registration required).
N.
Nick
Nick
There was a newsletter I caught recently talking about some of the successful prosecutions for spam 'downunder'. It sounds like they are making progress.
The full text of that newsletter is here.
Nick.
Theres a good take on why this has started to happen recently on a blog all about the Telco/ISP struggles of late. Its just a side-effect of the increasing consolidation among those who "own the pipes", an inceasingly desperate act to sweat more revenue from their investments, rather like a historical land-owner putting up taxes for peasant farmers on his land.
Nick
That sort of thing.
Theres a british company doing similar Internet data mining for the telecoms industry, with some data avaiable on their site. Nick.
Theres another company doing similar 'evidence based research/reporting' specifically for the Internet industry here. In particular they publish the 'inside story' on recent M&A and flameouts in the industry.
So when does Mr Burn's nuclear power plant get bombed?
I maintail a page of various GUI mechanisms and visualizations Ive seen, mostly around the information security space. When is it that people are going to realise that cool graphics are not about getting the most out of the computer, visual queues and visualization should be able getting the most out of the human operator of the system. http://www.tauceti.org/research.html
UK Police forces arrest people for using browsers such as Lynx: http://www.boingboing.net/2005/01/27/jailed_for_us ing_a_n.html
Apparently this guy got 2 years jail time, he's gonna have an arsehole the size of a clowns pocket by the time he comes out.
N.
There is a report here detailing the gender mix of bluetooth users and which devices they are carrying around with them. The survey was taken in central London using a passive collector but I'd assume the ratios are the same the world over. N.
Did I just stumble out of my time machine and fall into the early 1980's. This is an example of just how bad the industry is at learning from itself, and how every app, OS, or system vendor believes they can learn nothing from the rest. Ive got 3 words for you. SET PASSWORD/GENERATE The SET PASSWORD example is as follows. $ SET PASS /GENERATE
Old password: YOUR_OLD_PASSWORD (actually not visible )
infrka
hewsed
iddege
saubcp
patlzu
Choose a password from this list, or press RETURN to get a new list
New password: patlzu (actually not visible )
Verification: patlzu (actually not visible )
$
There are a bunch of different viz techniques listed on http://www.tauceti.org/research.html#vhere.
I've collected a few interesting forms of visualization, and introduced them via a semi-rant about lack of user interface innovation here. Nick.
I've been working on a presentation discussing this here (warning 500Kb powerpoint!).
My money is on the anti-global guys stepping up first.