Does MS not like Ultimate Vista

z10 release date drawing closer

Business/Financial Desk; SECTC I.B.M. to Introduce a Notably Improved Mainframe By STEVE LOHR 821 words 26 February 2008 The New York Times Late Edition - Final 2 English Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved. The mainframe, the aged yet surprisingly resilient survivor of computing, is getting a face-lift. A model called the I.B.M. z10, which is being introduced Tuesday, is far faster and has three times the data-juggling memory of its three-year-old predecessor, the z9. But the significance of the new machine, analysts say, is that it is a big step in a broad campaign by I.B.M. to make the mainframe computer a high-performance, energy-efficient engine for running all kinds of nonmainframe software. The goal, according to I.B.M. executives and analysts, is to recast the mainframe as a nimble supercomputer in corporate and government data centers, running Web-based programs, Linux, advanced data mining and business intelligence software. To do that, I.B.M. has refined its mainframe hardware and come up with new software tools, as part of a five-year, $1.5-billion overhaul. ''The mainframe's ability to survive is only as good as its ability to innovate and compete for these new computing workloads of the future,'' an analyst at Forrester Research, Brad Day, said. ''And I.B.M. is starting to succeed at that.'' The stakes are high. Though the sales of mainframes account for less than 4 percent of I.B.M.'s revenue, the sales of mainframe software, storage and services are a big, profitable business. The overall business dependent on mainframes represents about 25 percent of company revenue and nearly half of its profit, said A. M. Sacconaghi, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. At Hannaford Brothers in Scarborough, Me., a supermarket chain with stores in five states, the company has consolidated many programs onto its two mainframes. They include its consumer Web site, its Web portal for tracking shipments from suppliers and store and customer data that were once housed on computers in individual stores. ''The mainframe has become very flexible and very scalable for us,'' said Bill Homa, Hannaford's chief information officer. Robert Woeckener, a senior technology manager at Nationwide Insurance in Columbus, Ohio, said his company had consolidated more than 1,300 programs onto 480 virtual computers -- software that emulates a machine -- that run on two mainframes. Nationwide began the program more than two years ago, projecting savings in energy, administration and other costs at $15 million over three years. ''We're probably running ahead of that,'' Mr. Woeckener said. I.B.M. competitors say that some individual success stories among mainframe users do not change the reality that the mainframe is in retreat. In 2004, Microsoft founded the Mainframe Migration Alliance, a group of technology companies that helps corporations move software applications from mainframes to smaller computers powered by low-cost microprocessors and typically running Microsoft's Windows server operating system. Microsoft tracked 85 mainframe migration projects last year, and the company says 55 more are under way. I.B.M., to the contrary, says that the mainframe is in the midst of a revival. It is adding customers in developing nations, the company maintains, as banks, corporations and government agencies expand and need the kind of reliability and security that the mainframe delivers. I.B.M.'s mainframe revenue in India, China, Brazil and Russia grew 18 percent last year. Six hundred software applications, it says, were introduced on the mainframe last year. Rising energy costs and environmental concerns are putting pressure on growing computer data centers, with their voracious appetites for electricity. The z10, I.B.M. says, delivers the computing power of 1,500 industry-standard servers, running on personal computer microprocessors, while consuming 85 percent less energy and covering 85 percent less floor space. So the mainframe, it argues, has become the low-cost data center technology, although the machines cost $1 million and up. ''The market economics are moving in our direction, and we're seeing a return to the mainframe,'' said James Stallings, general manager of I.B.M.'s System Z division. Traditionally, mainframe computers run at utilization rates of 85 percent and more. PC-style servers, by contrast, have had utilization rates of 15 percent or so, because they have been less able to run many computing chores at once, as if mimicking the work of several machines -- a capacity the mainframe has had for decades. But this so-called virtualization technology is increasingly coming to industry-standard servers, led by the software company VMware. Several computer makers, including Dell and Hewlett-Packard, are announcing Tuesday that they will embed VMware's basic software into the hardware of the server computers, with shipments to begin within 60 days. ''We can get up to 80 and 85 percent capacity utilization now,'' Diane Greene, chief executive of VMware, said in an interview from a company gathering for partners, attended by 4,500 people in Cannes, France. Document NYTF000020080226e42q00054

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Now, we'll see what it really turns out like.

Something free from Microsoft!?

M$ development tools free to students, if you have a Microsoft Live account:

https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/
--
Jim
Te audire no possum. Musa sapientum fixa est in aure

Outstanding tools for Mobile Phones (and other devices)

I'm particularly impressed with X-plore, a great little file manager for Symbian mobile phones, and Slick, a chat client you can use on the go. Haven't tried the music player or email client yet.

DVDVideoSoft News

All our programs are updated! Posted: 10 Feb 2008 03:00 AM CST Now you can run several instances of our YouTube download programs and download several videos from YouTube at the same time. Also we started to work at the batch mode, soon you will be able to schedule your YouTube download tasks. Keep up watching our news! The new version of Free Video Dub is more stable now and works correctly with more video files. However there are still lots of things to do. So if you find any problems, please write to support@dvdvideosoft.com. Your help is greatly appreciated. We strongly recommend to download and reinstall Free Video Dub and YouTube download tools: Free YouTube to iPod Converter, Free YouTube to iPhone Converter, Free YouTube to MP3 Converter and Free YouTube Download.

Online YouTube download service is online! Posted: 10 Feb 2008 03:00 AM CST Now you can download YouTube videos right from our site: http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/online-YouTube-video-download.php.

Free DVD Player Posted: 10 Feb 2008 02:59 AM CST Do you need a program to playback DVDs? Now you can find it on our site. Download and use Free DVD Player.

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Flock goes from strength to strength

Despite being another gecko based browser, there's something different about Flock. Features like mini toolbar, Media Streams, My World, Photo Uploader and Blog Post (which, as you probably guessed, I'm using to post this) feel more substantial than the average "add-on". The general browsing experience is good - as you'd expect from any Mozilla "flava", while the bugs are few and far between.

So it's great then. Wonderful. But is it as good as Firefox or Opera? Well, no. Firefox just rocks, thanks to being the biggest, meanest gecko on the block. If you want to be able to do something, chances are that there's a Firefox only add-on that will do it for you. You can harden Firefox up and tweak it just about as much as you could possibly need and there's the real sense of ownership you get when you take that basic Firefox shell and customize it to the hilt. On the other hand, Opera puts everything you could realistically need right at your fingertips without there being the slightest suggestion of clutter or claustrophobia (which is probably Flock's ultimate failing). Opera fills you with a warm glow and puts a serene smile on your face that makes passers-by think you've gone all weird and enlightened on them. So many Firefox add-ons are just trying to mimic something that The Big O does natively, while the IE7 extension suite IE7Pro tries desperately to turn IE into Opera - and pales in comparison (plus, they can't do anything about IE's continued instability and dismal CSS support).

It's an extremely pretty and useful browser: definitely better than Internet Explorer 7 (but let's face it, IE7 sucks something awful), possibly better than Seamonkey (but we like that one for it's plain, no-nonsense approach) but still not as good as Firefox or Opera. The great thing about browsers is that you can find a use for them all, and Flock has found it's niche in the area of photo account management and social browsing. I use it to keep tabs on my Photobucket and Flickr accounts and upload new photos there. Firefox is my general use browser and Opera is for mail and blogging (it has the best password wand in the business, so it's great for switching accounts).

Perhaps I should be comparing Flock to Maxthon... but I'll get to that browser in another post.

Blogged with Flock

Having Hell with your PC? Here's help

This is a good site to get help with PC problems

Free popup killer

Someone asked me today if I knew any programs that did a good job of killing popups.
I made three recommendations:

1. Switch to Firefox, or better still, Opera
2. Make sure popup blocking is enabled at the browser level
   
3. Install Ad Block Plus (a Firefox add-on)*

As for a program that will kill popups for you - this simply isn't necessary. If you have money burning a hole in your pocket, then get Spysweeper - it is a great anti-malware program that monitors your system for changes and blocks popups, amongst other things. Whether you have the moula or not, however, there is a no-cost solution for Windows users:

Edit the hosts file
Win XP: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Win 2k: Click Start, Run and type "notepad c:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts"
Now edit the file to map the domains of the nasty popups you want to block, like this:


Note the lines are composed of two columns. The left column is the IP address you want to map the hostname to, while the right column is where you enter the hostname/domain name.

The hosts file is basically a text file that maps hostnames to an IP address - it will be the first place your computer will look when a hostname needs to be resolved, so it overrides anything obtained from the DNS server.

So, when a popup from www.partypoker.com is triggered, it maps to 127.0.0.1, which is your computer's loopback or localhost address, but since the page does not in fact reside there, it cannot load, and you will at most see a page not found instead of a nasty, annoying and potentially malicious popup.

The downside with this approach is that it is manual, and you have to get the popup at least once to add it to the list of "blocked" domains. The upside, of course, is that it is free.

* if you insist on persevering with Internet Explorer, then get "IE-Spyad", a registry file that will add a massive blacklist to your restricted sites list in IE.

The future of webapps?

Mozilla Labs are busy doing something interesting with webapps at the moment:




Web applications can be run like standalone clients through Prism:

10 principles of effective web design

How do web users think? Or do they?