IT Manager's Journal

Telecom carrier solutions are a part of most IT departments' budgets and costs -- especially those associated with fiber optic networks -- can add up quickly. Some companies choose to use an in-house optical network but they are often complex to set up and difficult to maintain. Washington-based network equipment company XKL, L.L.C. recently rolled out new hardware designed to let IT departments create their own high-speed network that doesn't require a Doctorate degree in fiber optics to deploy.

Nokia researcher Jamey Hicks recently proposed a Open Source Hardware License (OSHL) for approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Is there a need for a hardware-specific license? If so, what makes hardware different from software?

The conventional method of benchmarking software application performance is a pretty straightforward process: run a single application, measure its performance, analyze the results, repeat as needed. Once you throw virtual machines running various applications into the mix, however, the process becomes unwieldy and the data less accurate. VMware wants to eliminate the guesswork with VMmark, a virtualization benchmarking tool designed to help IT departments make better decisions about hardware purchases and distributed workloads.

Do you know what happens to your used computer equipment after it has been discarded? The answer may surprise you. Even if you have tried to recycle it, your old hardware often gets shipped to a developing nation in direct violation of international law. Useful components are then extracted -- without safety precautions -- by locals earning pennies a day and who are exposed to a range of hazardous toxins that include lead, beryllium, mercury, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants.

Though slated to be banned over a decade ago, the practice continues and seems to be growing. North America, Japan, and South Korea are among the worst offenders. Solutions exist, and free software is a small part of them, but implementing them remains a painfully slow process.

Nationwide Insurance and Financial Services, a $21 billion company with 30,000 employees, has turned to virtual servers running Linux to gain more control over computing power and expenditures.

Oregon's Portland Community College is one of the largest community colleges in the country, with 90,000 students, five campuses, and a huge network to manage. PCC's policy is to use open source software whenever possible because of its enhanced value. When Technology Solutions Services Customer Support Manager Michael Heuer wanted to find a way to streamline network management, he turned to KBOX, an appliance built on an open source foundation.

As prospective developers learn more about the powerful new Cell processor, jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba, the strategy to create applications for the next-generation chip may embrace the Linux and open source community, similar to what IBM did with the Power processor.

Though it served me faithfully for nearly five years, it was time to send my old Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop out to pasture. As much as I like buying new toys, I wasn't looking forward to shopping for a laptop -- I thought I'd find something just adequate that would cost a ton of money. As it turned out, I spent less than I expected, and my new laptop system is as perfect as I need it to be. Here are a few things I learned about shopping for Linux-compatible laptops.

Some in the media and in the investment community are now saying they believe we are in for an extended period of component price declines -- after six months of expressing confidence that prices would hold up. We have been writing about component over-supply (and, by extension, softening process)

<slash type="image" id="4622b72b007ed4371cfefdcce9657e26" title="mel4">
Melanie Hollands

since August last year. The Oct. 7 column commented on the impact that declining demand and excess supply of component prices would have. (Insert stopped clock joke here.)

To revisit that Oct. 7 column for a minute: "… the inventory build is something that most don't want to acknowledge, and which can have a significant ripple effect … For OEMs, it's fairly positive, because they'll keep part of the price reduction and pass on the rest to the customer. When suppliers publicly admit they have inventory, it's always a bonanza for those who buy and use chips. Pricing becomes negotiable versus the previous year or so that parts have been on "allocation." Compounding the risk to the sector is buyers now have an incentive to wait, since prices seem likely to fall even further.

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.announced May 31 that it launched the next version of its dual-core processors for desktops and notebooks with its new Athlon 64-bit X2 processors. This pits AMD head-to-head against Intel in

<slash type="image" id="4622b72b007ed4371cfefdcce9657e26" title="mel4">
Melanie Hollands

dual-core, 64-bit computing. AMD's announcement came five days after Intel announced its own line of dual-core parts.

Three weeks after AMD's announcement, U.K.s The Register.com reported that AMD's new dual-core Athlon chips were all but sold out in Tokyo.

There's no question dual-core could be huge for AMD. Even a 10 percent share gain, just in the slow-growing desktop business, would flow right to AMD's bottom line. I have to believe they're in "Tokyo computer shops," because this is where the highest prices are paid. From Intel's perspective, desktops are the low ground. Dell is the biggest desktop manufacturer and is still Intel-only. The growth is in notebooks.

True to how some envisioned, the effort to gather support for a totally new architecture is leading backers of the innovative Cell chip to signal recently they would open specifications and software libraries for the new processor.

The reported forthcoming release of complete chip specs and libraries to the open source community, analysts said, is necessary to build support for the highly parallel, powerful, but as yet un-utilized Cell, which will appear first in the PlayStation 3 from Sony. The Japanese electronics and PC giant teamed with IBM and Toshiba to build the next-generation, multi-core chip, which features high-speed communications capabilities via its integration of 234 million transistors. Cell backers claim the chip will deliver better real-time response for entertainment and other rich media applications, boasting clock speeds above 4 GHz and performance "in many cases 10 times the performance of the latest PC processors."

AudioGlobe founder Jon Joye and his band sort of happened onto their desire to adjust the digital rights management (DRM) for their music in the same way members of the musical group tuned their instruments, mixing their melodies and rights management while releasing music for consumption. Now, with an eye on leveraging open source after witnessing its power, the Oregon State University

<SLASH TYPE="image" ID="43d9b8e75b5b79d3c583baf93c9da405" TITLE="audio.globe.logo2">

masters grad and Rip City rocker is poised to take AudioGlobe's patent-pending technology to investors, and then hopefully to more and more musicians and their listeners.

By building what the company calls "intelligent content" into music from the very beginning of digital recording, AudioGlobe's technology is an effort to separate application and content management, putting the content in control, rather than the application, explained Joye, a drummer in the three-man "heavy psychedelic" band Vincent Black Shadow, which is featured on AudioGlobe's site and currently needs a bass player.

"Convergence" has been one of the most overworked -- and I daresay, detested -- buzzwords for a long time. However, we keep seeing more of it everywhere we look, especially in all sectors of

<SLASH TYPE="image" ID="6bd72f5ac05330f2e1d55b1c48f100af" TITLE="cp.tie2">
Chris Preimesberger

consumer IT, so there must be a modicum of truth about it somewhere.

Hybrid cars are starting to get some traction, pardon the pun. iPods are the miniaturized convergence of music players and computers. Conveyors of content -- television, DVDs, video, radio, broadband cable, and digital data -- are being shoehorned into single-unit entertainment centers.

Mike Mitchell, director of Cisco Systems' in-house IPTV network, told me the other day that the convergence of all electronic communication to IP is inevitable. (I'm working on an article on this very topic now, to be published here on ITMJ soon.)

So, that point being made, here's another newsflash: Nokia, which already has a cell phone that doubles as a TV, has taken the convergence thing another step further with the new Swiss army knife of mobile phones it introduced this week.

Users' desire for additional computer speed is never-ending. As soon as vendors implement one technology that offers a quantum leap in processing power, users anxiously await the next. As a result, hardware vendors are now poised to introduce a new microprocessor design: dual core CPUs, which promise to boost the performance of Linux servers, desktop systems, and notebook computers.

Traditionally, the most effective method of boosting computer performance has been improving a microprocessor's clock speed. Essentially as clock speeds increase, chips process more data in set timeframes. Recently, clock increases have become more difficult to deliver: "In focusing on microprocessor clock speed, vendors have found it more and more difficult to solve the problems that come along with it, like the need for additional power and heat leakages," said Kevin Krewell, a senior analyst at market research firm In-Stat/MDR Inc.

Despite the amount of discussion about it, the Cell chip is still very much a mystery to companies, research organizations, or others who may soon be able to put the new silicon from IBM, Sony, and Toshiba to work. More and more is trickling out about the Cell technology -- which, while providing the promise of a new processor architecture capable of multiple streams of data, video, audio and more, also represents the unknown as the first chip of its kind.

While the first actual details of Cell came out last November, there remained some question as to where and how the chip -- billed as an "unsurpassed, high-performance processor" -- would be used. We do know the processor will be the heart of the new PlayStation3. There have also been references to home entertainment and multimedia computing, as well as enterprise computing, but IBM has yet not signaled what the strategy for Cell will be.

We're barely into 2005, and we're already seeing another landmark innovation in information technology: the new Cell chip, which could revolutionize our entire industry with its tremendous clock speeds of more than 4 GHz. It's been in R&D since 2001 and was developed by a consortium of companies:

<SLASH TYPE="image" ID="7e976d154dc7d3dcf88580b04b131fd4" TITLE="cell.chip2">
The new Cell chip, in relation to thumb pins.

IBM, Sony, and Toshiba.

The new chip, designed to power the upcoming PlayStation 3, integrates 234 million transistors and is fabricated with 90-nanometer SOI technology. Theoretically, it will be able to handle 16 trillion floating point operations per second. The Cell's multi-core architecture and ultra high-speed communications capabilities enable a vastly improved real-time performance -- often 10 times the speed of the newest PC processors.

Yes, these three conglomerates normally do compete with each other. So why did they hold hands to put this new superchip together? Were they trying to gang up on the establishment -- Intel, AMD, and the like? Possibly, but there's a larger vision involved here, I believe.

Most people in IT, and particularly those into Linux and open source, probably just got a giggle out of Mr. Bill Gates' recent crash course at CES. However, it suggests that -- at the same time there was an announcement of an appliance-like Linux home media hub from HP -- the "digital lifestyle" envisioned by Gates is fraught with peril.

In fact, the digital lifestyle looked like hell, a place where all of the problems of the PC world -- crashes and configuration riddles included -- would turn on us right in the middle of the presentation, or the climax of the movie, or the Super Bowl -- if we were as lucky as Bill.

Who wants their TV to crash?

The monitor and display segment and most of its component suppliers are in for a world of hurt over the long term. This space is analogous to the PC space in 1992 with hundreds of vendors, a fragmented market, and prices and margins crashing. Over the long term, I think displays/monitors will be a super ugly space.

Last year I tried NeurosAudio's Neuros HD MP3 player. It's a nice piece of hardware, but at the time, running it on a Linux box with a third-party application called Positron was a bit of a chore. Last month the company released its Neuros II player with enhanced capabilities, and there's a new third-party Java front end available that makes synchronizing with Linux a lot easier.

There is a joy to be derived from well-executed engineering. I've spent some time on this and other OSDN sites reviewing gadgets -- in particular mp3 players. All of them have suffered from some form of what maybe should be called iPod envy. Not so the Squeezebox, made by Slim Devices, Inc. I wanted to write up my experiences with it, but more importantly shine a spotlight on the way the company approaches software development and uses free software to advance its bottom-line goals of producing what many consider to be the reference implementation for an outboard mp3 player.