Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Ensure that benefits and savings outweigh investment and upheaval of convergence
Ensure that benefits and savings outweigh investment and upheaval of convergence
Article I wrote about convergence and whether it's the right route for everyone. Full page in the printed magazine too.
Summary of the article: -
Three steps to convergence, non-converged, co-operative convergence and intelligent convergence.
Non-convergence is where a company has networks dedicated for different purposes, such as the internet, voice communications or a virtual private network. This can be inefficient as the company pays for multiple networks regardless of capacity used.
Co-operative convergence is the most common set-up today. Large corporations and public sector organisations work with carrier partners to tailor-make a set of metrics for all their network traffic. These ensure that business-critical data is prioritised over the shared network.
The in intelligent convergence, where the carrier's network will have the intelligence built-in and ascertain the type of traffic passing across it and treat it in an appropriate manner. They'll be "off-the-shelf" metrics.
The goes on about it's not all that simple and there may be large costs in re-engineering customer LANs to ensure they can maintain QoS metrics across their own infrastructure.
Article I wrote about convergence and whether it's the right route for everyone. Full page in the printed magazine too.
Summary of the article: -
Three steps to convergence, non-converged, co-operative convergence and intelligent convergence.
Non-convergence is where a company has networks dedicated for different purposes, such as the internet, voice communications or a virtual private network. This can be inefficient as the company pays for multiple networks regardless of capacity used.
Co-operative convergence is the most common set-up today. Large corporations and public sector organisations work with carrier partners to tailor-make a set of metrics for all their network traffic. These ensure that business-critical data is prioritised over the shared network.
The in intelligent convergence, where the carrier's network will have the intelligence built-in and ascertain the type of traffic passing across it and treat it in an appropriate manner. They'll be "off-the-shelf" metrics.
The goes on about it's not all that simple and there may be large costs in re-engineering customer LANs to ensure they can maintain QoS metrics across their own infrastructure.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Update on XP64
It really is fast, here's a spec of the system: -
Biostar K8NHA-M Grand motherboard which has an NForce3-250 controller.
70GB Maxtor SATA 10K RPM drive 1, 200GB Seagate SATA 7200RPM drive 2.
On board Ethernet, 8 x USB, 2 Firewire, sound etc ... 1GB RAM.
AMD Athlon 3400+ CPU.
Compared to my old Dell (dual PIII 500MHz), SCSI disks etc. stuff flies, open Outlook and it's there and ready maybe a couple of seconds after you've double clicked on the icon (it used to take maybe 15 to 30 secs).
There are pecularities though, some of the media files weren't linked to, and some of the system apps were also wrong (XP64 had them pointing in the WINNT directory, rather than under the WINDOWS directory). Media player was also oddly installed, and that had to be manually fixed, running it set the correct file type associations and all was happy.
Printers are also odd, it wont allows 2000/XP drivers to be used, so currently I cant print at all. Maybe MS will have a fix for this soon? Be nice to see some content on the beta windowsupdate site, I'm sure MS are doing things internally, they should release some of this to the public.
Version 1218 was PANTS, I really wouldn't install that, it should never have been made public it was so full of bugs.
This version is 1289 (build 3790) (RC1) and it's usable. As said, not ready for production, but usable.
Maybe I should install a UN*X variant, that should also fly (though I might have a few problems with the graphics drivers).
Biostar K8NHA-M Grand motherboard which has an NForce3-250 controller.
70GB Maxtor SATA 10K RPM drive 1, 200GB Seagate SATA 7200RPM drive 2.
On board Ethernet, 8 x USB, 2 Firewire, sound etc ... 1GB RAM.
AMD Athlon 3400+ CPU.
Compared to my old Dell (dual PIII 500MHz), SCSI disks etc. stuff flies, open Outlook and it's there and ready maybe a couple of seconds after you've double clicked on the icon (it used to take maybe 15 to 30 secs).
There are pecularities though, some of the media files weren't linked to, and some of the system apps were also wrong (XP64 had them pointing in the WINNT directory, rather than under the WINDOWS directory). Media player was also oddly installed, and that had to be manually fixed, running it set the correct file type associations and all was happy.
Printers are also odd, it wont allows 2000/XP drivers to be used, so currently I cant print at all. Maybe MS will have a fix for this soon? Be nice to see some content on the beta windowsupdate site, I'm sure MS are doing things internally, they should release some of this to the public.
Version 1218 was PANTS, I really wouldn't install that, it should never have been made public it was so full of bugs.
This version is 1289 (build 3790) (RC1) and it's usable. As said, not ready for production, but usable.
Maybe I should install a UN*X variant, that should also fly (though I might have a few problems with the graphics drivers).
Thursday, February 17, 2005
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Home Page
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition Home Page
Well it had to happen, my PC at work died today (it's been BSOD regularly for a while now), don't quite know what's wrong, but it's failed to boot properly after and it's in a horrid state so the people who look at these things took it away muttering. This is an old Dell running XP SP1 (SP2 failed to install - shows what a happy state it was in :).
Since I'm only here for another week, it's probably not worth trying to find out how to fix it, all my mail's on the server etc.
Anyway I bit the bullet and whipped out my AMD Athlon64 system out (which is my own system) on a NVidia NForce3 motherboard. It's got Windows XP Professional 64bit on it. Though I wouldn't recommend this for most people, when it works, it really does show off and is blindingly fast. Of course this is with the NVidia beta 64 bit NForce drivers too.
It is quirky, 32 bit drivers can crash it into a state where it's unusable (I had to go into safe-mode to remove them), I can still use ActiveSync and my iPaq with Outlook which is good, because I'd be lost without that. Logitech Camera, Plantronics headset and Wacom tablet (USB) weren't so lucky.
With the new NVidia NForce4 stuff coming out supporting single or dual single/dual core Opterons, with XP64 (or Linux/Solaris) they are really going to fly.
Well it had to happen, my PC at work died today (it's been BSOD regularly for a while now), don't quite know what's wrong, but it's failed to boot properly after and it's in a horrid state so the people who look at these things took it away muttering. This is an old Dell running XP SP1 (SP2 failed to install - shows what a happy state it was in :).
Since I'm only here for another week, it's probably not worth trying to find out how to fix it, all my mail's on the server etc.
Anyway I bit the bullet and whipped out my AMD Athlon64 system out (which is my own system) on a NVidia NForce3 motherboard. It's got Windows XP Professional 64bit on it. Though I wouldn't recommend this for most people, when it works, it really does show off and is blindingly fast. Of course this is with the NVidia beta 64 bit NForce drivers too.
It is quirky, 32 bit drivers can crash it into a state where it's unusable (I had to go into safe-mode to remove them), I can still use ActiveSync and my iPaq with Outlook which is good, because I'd be lost without that. Logitech Camera, Plantronics headset and Wacom tablet (USB) weren't so lucky.
With the new NVidia NForce4 stuff coming out supporting single or dual single/dual core Opterons, with XP64 (or Linux/Solaris) they are really going to fly.
Friday, February 04, 2005
Apple - Mac mini
Apple - Mac mini
Just got my Mac mini, it looks a lot smaller in real life, very cute, almost cuter than the cube which I always thought was one of the cutest machines ever produced.
There's a site showing how to overclock the mini, not for the faint hearted as you need to solder/unsolder tiny surface mount resistors on the mainboard. However if you're daring it does look like upgrading a 1.25GHz version to 1.42GHz is viable (which gives a 14% speed increase), while upgrading 1.42GHz to 1.5GHz only gives a 6% increase so is it worth voiding the warranty, fiddling around etc. Upgrading to 1.58GHz seems to make the system unstable.
I now have to open mine up, and replace the onboard 256MB memory with a Crucial 1GB DIMM (considerably cheaper than the Apple upgrade, and in theory can resell the orig memory - of course if anything goes wrong I should have the original memory installed for Apple to do anything under warranty). Hopefully install it all tonight.
Just got my Mac mini, it looks a lot smaller in real life, very cute, almost cuter than the cube which I always thought was one of the cutest machines ever produced.
There's a site showing how to overclock the mini, not for the faint hearted as you need to solder/unsolder tiny surface mount resistors on the mainboard. However if you're daring it does look like upgrading a 1.25GHz version to 1.42GHz is viable (which gives a 14% speed increase), while upgrading 1.42GHz to 1.5GHz only gives a 6% increase so is it worth voiding the warranty, fiddling around etc. Upgrading to 1.58GHz seems to make the system unstable.
I now have to open mine up, and replace the onboard 256MB memory with a Crucial 1GB DIMM (considerably cheaper than the Apple upgrade, and in theory can resell the orig memory - of course if anything goes wrong I should have the original memory installed for Apple to do anything under warranty). Hopefully install it all tonight.
Thursday, February 03, 2005
Redundancy
Well I'm not impressed :( Shame - I've really liked working at Demon/THUS but the "package" on offer, is minimal to say the least. Really encouraging for 10 years committment to a company.
Still looking for a new career, anyone need a "fluffy geek" (i.e. good understanding of technology, but more used to working in a strategy/marketing environment).
The telco market doesn't look that promising, but open to a change.
Quite like to get involved with start-ups, maybe in a non-exec role advising on future technology trends etc.
Please contact me if you'd like CV/resume details etc.
Steve
Still looking for a new career, anyone need a "fluffy geek" (i.e. good understanding of technology, but more used to working in a strategy/marketing environment).
The telco market doesn't look that promising, but open to a change.
Quite like to get involved with start-ups, maybe in a non-exec role advising on future technology trends etc.
Please contact me if you'd like CV/resume details etc.
Steve
