Office by Alex Penny
My name is Bill, I am a recent graduate in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University and this is a place for me to post or give my 2 cents on the fascinating world of technology. I am now working for a pretty big technology related company whose name I will leave out just to avoid any possible complications, however far-fetched them happening may be. Music gets included from time to time as well.
I used to work with a team that dealt with Oracle, I remember them talking about this coming up. It seems to me Oracle is trying to become the Apple of enterprise computing.
![theatlantic:
Marissa Mayer’s Job Is to Be CEO—Not to Make Life Easier for Working Moms
Marissa Mayer is a CEO first and a woman second. Indeed, she is a role model for many precisely because she made it to the top job. And as a CEO, her first job is to save her company. If she fails in that, the employees she is insisting come in to the office will have no jobs to come in to.
Read more. [Image: AP]
I’m of two minds on this. While we are certainly heading towards being able to telecommute as an industry standard, I feel like the circumstances of Yahoo justify Mayer’s decision. Yahoo is in a rebuilding stage where constant collaboration and teamwork is necessary, you never know when inspiration might strike. If there’s one thing I like about going into the office rather than working from home, it’s that I find I am able to get my day-to-day work done sooner and have more opportunity to communicate new ideas to others. Not to say you can’t be creative from home, but in Yahoo’s situation you need to be ready to communicate those ideas at any point. Hopefully one day technology will allow for us to perform any job from anywhere without a loss in communication, but as for now struggling businesses need to fill in it’s gaps.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/358c6d54b39a60fd325aff031a903b90/tumblr_miy8xgUZfd1qcokc4o1_500.jpg)
Marissa Mayer’s Job Is to Be CEO—Not to Make Life Easier for Working Moms
Marissa Mayer is a CEO first and a woman second. Indeed, she is a role model for many precisely because she made it to the top job. And as a CEO, her first job is to save her company. If she fails in that, the employees she is insisting come in to the office will have no jobs to come in to.
Read more. [Image: AP]
I’m of two minds on this. While we are certainly heading towards being able to telecommute as an industry standard, I feel like the circumstances of Yahoo justify Mayer’s decision. Yahoo is in a rebuilding stage where constant collaboration and teamwork is necessary, you never know when inspiration might strike. If there’s one thing I like about going into the office rather than working from home, it’s that I find I am able to get my day-to-day work done sooner and have more opportunity to communicate new ideas to others. Not to say you can’t be creative from home, but in Yahoo’s situation you need to be ready to communicate those ideas at any point. Hopefully one day technology will allow for us to perform any job from anywhere without a loss in communication, but as for now struggling businesses need to fill in it’s gaps.
Dear Microsoft,
A little over 5 months ago, you made an announcement that made me more excited than any human should be for an inanimate object. With the Surface came the possibility of what I had been waiting at least a year for. While others have come to love these glorified transitional products we call tablets, I maintain my position as a stubborn bastard and will settle for nothing less than a fully-realized PC/laptop replacement. I dream of the day that I can drive down the road to the local coffee shop, order a green tea and sit down not to merely watch youtube and peruse the internet in the presence of the public hoping some cute girl will walk by and against all odds comment on my excellent taste that she would have never noticed on my tragically not-quite-large-enough phone screen, but to do actual work. I want to put together that spreadsheet I couldn’t finish at the office, go through my project plan as I sip on my hot beverage, make a half-hearted attempt at designing an android app on the side. I believe it is time that we have both the portability of a tablet with the FULL functionality of the clunky laptop my company so foolishly entrusted to my care.
To give some more background, a little about myself. I am a budding IT professional 2 years removed from college. By no means do I so much as entertain the idea that I’m any kind of technical wizard (professionally the most technical task I have completed is writing a script that creates a CSV file with the sizes of all files in a directory) but I don’t think it would be narcissistic of me to assume that I understand more about technology than the average user. I do a fair amount of research and know how to apply these tools to what I need to get done. As such a user, I was immensely excited to read about the Surface tablet. Now don’t get me wrong, I was fully aware of the difference between the Surface and the Surface Pro. I even knew that the plan from the beginning was for the Surface Pro to debut 3 months after the Surface. While it bugged me that I would have to spend an extra 90 days with the bruised and battered soldier of a PC I am currently typing this on, I was fully expecting the wait to pay off. Sadly I can no longer say I maintain such expectations, and you seem to be doing nothing to convince me otherwise.
Last weekend, I made my way down to the one regional mall containing a Microsoft store. This is made more impressive by the fact that I live closer to 3 other major shopping malls. As I said, I have been fully aware of the differences between the Surface and the Surface Pro, but this also meant that I was aware of how good of a preview the Surface would give me. Now don’t get me wrong, as promised the Surface is a beautiful piece of technology. I felt like a child again playing with the magnetic simplicities of the snap-on keyboard and awesome stand. Unlike many I actually love the interface of Windows 8 and by extension Windows RT. However, it became more obvious by the minute that a device of this size, this rigidity and this keyboard could never become the object of all of my computing needs. If I am to believe everything I have found going through the tech blogs for the past 5 months all of these features will be the exact same on the Pro model. Perhaps my biggest annoyance however was the lack of knowledge by the staff. This certainly isn’t there fault, it’s yours for not informing them enough to handle those that have so patiently waited.
I am now at an impasse. I see many hybrid tablets and superlight touchscreen ultrabooks with all the capabilities I am looking for available. While I was prepared to wait just a little longer to see this baby fully-realized, I was also expecting to know quite a bit more about it at this point. At the very least I would have liked to know the price of the device I have seeked out every detail about by this point. While the size is admittedly another dealbreaker, should I be able to buy the Surface Pro in a slightly larger size and a price under $900, I would more than gladly wait through this holiday season to make my ultimate acquisition. Honestly, I might even drop the size issue if the price were to be as low as the rumors have some believing. Unfortunately, not even your store staff can give me assurance on these issues and as such may be driving me to another device by a different company. While I am probably not the most average of consumers, chances are most of those waiting specifically for the Surface Pro are thinking similarly to me.
The purpose of this letter is not so much to criticize your product as much as how you have campaigned it. I am loving my brief interactions with Windows 8 and most of my qualms with Surface RT are personal preference rather than critical issues. But like the english language, Windows is the choice of business. I believe part of the reason you have taken such a drastic change with your strategy as of late is to make sure your company continues to see growth. If you do not keep current and future leaders such as myself in the loop, this will not be your result.
Sincerely,
Bill
I believe the issue is that in the past the consoles or a pc were necessary to play any game. Now casual gamers have cheap and small alternatives in non-gaming devices. The Ouya actually seems like a better alternative as it is still cheap and allows for more expansive games to reside with the cheaper ones.
LEAKED: Myspaces master plan to raise 50 million and re-launch as a spotify killer
I think it makes sense to go after spotify rather than the traditional social networks if they’re going all in on the music part, though it’s really hard to see them getting past the prior image of the product. I always knew about the low royalties issue but I feel like spotify losing money just kind of popped up suddenly, really shows how good of a spin artist Daniel Ek is or how good he is at finding capital. If nothing else it would be nice if myspace actually added a more artist friendly aspect to the streaming model, which it’s social roots might give it an opportunity at.
IBM would like big enterprise customers to reconsider that whole distributed “private cloud” thing and go back to the original big data solution: mainframes. Today, IBM unveiled the zEC12, its next generation of the System Z mainframe platform. And like the Borg, IBM is hoping that companies will let the zEC12 assimilate their virtualization environments into a big, black cube.
With a new faster generation of CMOS processors and updated “hybrid” computing capabilities, the zEC12 is aimed at financial institutions, large enterprises, and government customers as a high-performance, high-security alternative to the “private cloud” model for performing large-scale analytics applications such as fraud detection. But IBM also has wider ambitions, positioning the zEC12 as a greener, faster alternative for nearly any set of enterprise applications. “When you have a product like System Z with its deep rich virtualization security, it’s possible to not only run traditional workloads but Linux and window workloads or aix workloads,” IBM General Manager for System Z Doug Balog told Ars in an interview. “It’s a fairly broad platform that can grow and handle all the sorts of workloads a client might want to run in a private cloud.”
The zEC12 mainframe server packs 101 CMOS processor cores, up from 80 in the Z196, the most recent IBM mainframe predecessor introduced two years ago. And its cores run at a clock-rate of 5.5GHz, a 25 percent boost in processing speed. Overall, said Balog, “that comes together to make about 50 percent total computing capacity growth.” That capacity, IBM claims, can handle thousands of Linux virtual servers, and makes it cheaper to deploy a load of Linux-based Oracle servers on the zEC12 than on x86-based architectures.
The analytical processing power of the mainframe can also be turned to examine itself. A new feature called zAware uses learning and analysis engines that came out of IBM’s Watson research to detect conditions and patterns in mainframe logs that can detect a problem as much as two months into the future. The software stores millions of records from the mainframe’s logs, including information about the state of virtual machines, and can alert operators well in advance and make recommendations on adjustments.
IBM also introduced a new generation of its zEnterprise BladeCenter Extension (zBX) for the zEC12, which provides for the integration of “specialty processor” blade servers into the mainframe’s infrastructure. The zBX Model 003 allows for “appliance” blades running AIX on IBM Power7 processors to integrate into the System Z environment, saving what IBM claims could be up to 55 percent of cost of ownership in comparison to a distributed data center model.
Excellent points, however I think the author misses one major component of the issue, and that is that in a lot of cases consumers aren’t technically customers. Sure Facebook and Google have to keep us happy to an extent, but ultimately the money is being made elsewhere. Unlike the tendency of others commenting on this dilemma I don’t see this as a definite threat, but it certainly creates incentives that could make decisions that are harmful to the single person enticing. It is still wrong for business practices to exploit and abuse the consumer, but what these businesses do has changed and that has played a major role in the shift in mindset.
It’s ridiculous that we’re still making judgements like this based on how someone dresses. Of course, knowing Zuckerberg’s background, the guy might have a point about him being a better product manager.
The IPO hasn’t even hit yet and the signs for the bubble Facebook’s IPO would bring are already showing. It’s funny how as much as people complain about Facebook being invasive and annoying, their breadwinner’s actually want them to be way worse.
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SPOT seminars and keynote speeches: the music industry at your fingertips. | SPOT Festival
Meet Gerd Leonhard in Arhus / DK, May 14, 2012
(via futuresagency)
