Watts Up! Newer PC's are more power efficient than older ones...right?

Newer is always better.  New cars are more fuel efficient, have lots of features we couldn't even dream of just a few years ago and are of course safer.  Although that last part just seems to underline how bad our driving habits have become.  Speaking of bad habits...   

Smart phones, well, they're old 10 minutes after you open the box.   You see the look on the Best Buy clerk when they proclaim your 6 month old phone as "ancient."

So if we took say a 7 year old PC with an Intel Xeon processor and compared it's power consumption with a newer PC, say a 7700K the results should be obvious.

Well, maybe so, maybe not.  Intel has introduced a new processor family almost every year for the past few years but the changes have really been minimal.

For Example, Sandy Bridge was the followup to the legendary Nehalem processors but for many fell short of expectations.  Yes the venerable 2600K came out of that family and for many nothing after it quite measured up.

The process technology has improved over the past 7 generations of Intel CPU which should translate to dramatic differences in power efficiency.  Operative word being, "should."

Watch the results below.

Yammer's back. Microsoft updates the de facto social media client for the Enterprise

If you work in a company of any size chances are Microsoft technologies are the backbone of IT which means there's probably an Office 365 enterprise subscription.

Far removed from it's humble roots as a standalone productivity suite with Outlook's public folders as your primary collaboration source we now enjoy collaboration features that we'd never dreamed of back in the old days.

It really started with OneNote, then came SharePoint to extend the fun to other people and with acquisitions like Skype and Yammer, collaboration is almost a given in the modern enterprise.

But some features worked better than others and Microsoft has a bad habit of changing things without notice or letting features die on the vine.

For awhile it seemed like Yammer was going to be one of those withering features until recently. 

In case you didn't know...

Yammer is a private social networking service that allows communication and collaboration between users in the same enterprise.  Before the Microsoft acquisition access was limited to those within the same email domain.  Microsoft tightened that up by using AD membership but there was still work to do in the 2 years since it became part of Office 365.

Today a major update was announced that allows even tighter integration on windows domains as well as new collaboration features and on the admin end the ability to merge yammer user domains.  A handy feature with all those mergers and acquisitions going on in the corporate world. 

The video below comes from Microsoft and does a better job of explaining the updates to the service than I could.  

It's worth a look...

9 comes after 8 and that's Windows' new name

Leo Laporte may have officially proclaimed the death of Windows 8 last year but Microsoft made it official this week.  The operating system previously known as "Threshold" has a real name, "Windows 9" and a real release target, April 2015.

According to Paul Thurrott, Windows 9 is meant to be everything Windows 8 wasn't.  For one thing, the desktop will regain its prominence as will the Start Menu.  Metro 2.0, as it's called, will be somewhat deprecated as more of a windowed app instead of a GUI mandate.

The bones have been rolled and the Shaman was right, Windows 8 couldn't succeed in spite of its futuristic aspirations.  It's not that Windows 8 is a flawed operating system, it's not and its performance and security underpinnings are second to none in the Windows world.  But that GUI...That collection of pulsating tiles that consumers were forced to swipe away just to get to their email spelled doom for the Windows known as 8.

Metro isn't a bad idea and I still hold firm to the belief that one day we'll see a workforce happily swiping, typing and talking to their monitors as easily as they send a text message now.  I get it Microsoft.  You were trying to push the concept of a Kiosk operating system that was not only visually attractive but with all those annoying menu bits out of the way. 

Microsoft saw how consumers eschewed scrolling down menus and tiny keyboards on their smart devices for simple taps and swipes.  The proof still exists with the success of Apple and Android devices while Blackberry languishes for all but the most faithful.

But it didn't translate well to the office.  With a stated 25 million copies sold with most of those likely pre-installs on new PC's (whose sales numbers were already suffering,)  Windows 8 just wasn't going to fly with the bean counters.

Incompatibility with legacy applications, an interface inconsistent with current workflows and no real justification to move from windows 7.  When you consider that many businesses are still just in the throes of moving off of XP, the  picture becomes clear.

Windows 8 was an operating system ahead of its time if not its market.  Consumers may be used to scratching and tapping away at their smart devices but not their PC's.  They still expect that "legacy" experience and that translates to corporate America as well. 

That's why 8 failed, If the Fortune 1000 isn't buying it, you just have to call a Microsoft operating system dead. 

Windows 9 is a pullback from the brink.  Still, in the long run the great experiment will cost them little.  There was no upstart, no competition waiting in the wings to unseat the giant from its throne.  Apple? the enterprise is more nuisance than market to them.  Expect OSX to disappear into an API for IOS within the next 10 years.  Linux?  If corporate customers won't tolerate a tightly integrated kiosk experience they won't stomach the wild West of an open source operating system either. 

At this point the best thing Microsoft could do to advance Windows is to split the development  between consumer and business releases again.  If you want one interface across all "consumer" devices then by all means do it.  Let it grace the likes of phones, tablets and yes, consumer PC's.  Just don't try to force it down corporate America's throat.

People don't like to be forced to do anything.  They need time to get used to it.  Windows 95 brought the desktop to the next step in its evolution.  It was more about clicks than menus and command lines.  Consumers got used to that and were soon demanding the same from their business PC's.  Thus came Windows 2000 which was really just windows NT with a facelift and some beefier networking bits. 

It was all about the interface and customers both corporate and consumer asked for it.  

That's the key, consumers have to feel like it's their choice.  If they want to be told what's good for them they'll buy an IPAD.  

Hyper-V on Windows Server 2012

This is the latest video series on Server 2012 and specifically Hyper-V.  If you've ever wondered about the Microsoft flavor of Virtualization I've gone ahead and took the plunge for you....

Enjoy this tutorial and overview.

Semi-Competent Tutorials for the mildly interested.... ;-)

Part 1...


Part 2

Server 2012 - Interface Tricks

A quick video containing some interface tricks that I left out of my other two videos.

Enjoy!

Hangin' with Server 2012

I've done a couple of introductory videos just so you can see what it's like to get around in Server 2012.  That means learning to use the interface, basic administration, adding roles and basic AD setup.  If you've managed a 2008R2 deployment 80% is the same but there are a few differences to take note of.  Check it out below.

Enjoy!

Part 1



Part 2

Windows Server 8, Microsoft's Attempt at a New Server Paradigm

Article first published as Windows Server 8, Microsoft's Attempt at a New Server Paradigm on Technorati.

Server operating system releases rarely garner much excitement outside of IT circles.  They are the necessary evil coordinating all or our messaging, file handling and online services vital for networked world.  Even if you don't spend your days in a cube for a living and prefer to store your files in the cloud there is a server somewhere making it all possible.

As such they tend to not be very sexy.  In the case of Microsoft, most server operating systems appear on the surface at least to be a stripped down purpose built version of their desktop counterparts.   At their core they are with some important differences..  The primary differentiation is that they've been optimized for better storage, memory handling and security.

Which leads us to the latest offering from Microsoft, Windows Server 8. 

Windows Server 8 Beta was released to the public on March 1st, 2012, one day after the Windows 8 consumer preview.  Hardware requirements are as follows:

Processor - Minimum: 1.4 GHz 64bit processor

Memory - Minimum: 512 MB RAM

Available Disk Space - Minimum: 32 GB

Optical Drive DVD-ROM drive

Display and Peripherals - Super VGA (800 x 600) or higher-resolution monitor

 Keyboard

 Microsoft Mouse or other compatible pointing device

Upgrade paths from Server 2008 R2 are supported with other versions of  Server 2008 allowed for the Beta release.  Microsoft makes available a 64Bit ISO and a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) file as the installation media options.   The VHD option assumes at least Server 2003 and Microsoft Virtual server 2005 (Hyper-V).  VMWARE test installations would likely be better served by mounting the ISO as the install medium for a new VM.

As with all Beta installs, Server 8 should only be deployed in a test environment as there is no installation roll-back functionality.

There are two installation options, Server core which offers little more than a powershell window and a GUI version which adds a system manager applet similar (if not a bit gaudy) to the Server 2008 system manager.  In my use the Server Manager is functional but counterintuitive due to the haphazard  organization of the applets.  As an aside it's not very attractive either, looking much like one of those bad Powerpoint slides we've all had to suffer in a sales meeting.

Microsoft has stated that they want to move away from GUI administration tools on the actual server and instead manage server resources remotely.  That would explain the prominence of powershell and the GUI as a now secondary option for installation.

Microsoft has also touted is Hyper-V version 3.0 as a real challenger to the virtualization space currently dominated by VMWARE.  The new virtualization framework touts better support for more physical CPUs, larger storage volumes and larger RAM sizes.  Improvements in SAN performance are also claimed utilizing ODX (offloaded data transfer) which basically sends commands to the SAN directly instead of attempting to read and write data as though the storage were local.  Hyper V virtual machines are also said to support up to four virtual Fiber channel Host Bus Adapters.

Improvements to Hyper-V may be of most interest to IT departments with complex Hyper-V deployments who will appreciate support built into the management GUI.   Hyper -V also supports a new feature called  Hyper-V Replica which can be thought of as a kind of VM failover mechanism utilizing two Hyper-V VM's that are constantly kept updated. 

Improvements in Microsoft's Web Server, IIS and Remote Desktop services (Terminal Services) are also included with this latest release but what may be most striking has little to do with the dry technical stuff.  Server 8, like it's desktop cousin, has inherited the Metro Tile interface.

You'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between Microsoft Server desktops at a glance from Windows 2000 on.  Aside from tweaks to the start button they generally don't include the flash of their desktop counterparts and as such are fairly plain.

Not so with Server 8.  The Metro Tile interface has replaced the Start button/menu and includes tiles to manage the basic functions of the server.  Additional administrative tiles are available by enabling the option giving you access to most of the familiar tools any Windows admin would recognize. 

At first blush this seems like a pointless addition and more than one IT peer has balked at it especially in light of Microsoft's desire to move away from graphical interfaces.  Take a moment to consider the minimalist strategy Microsoft is now promoting, however and it makes sense. 

The desktop in Windows 8 is little more than a convenience primarily existing for backward compatibility for applications that require it.  Desktop  based applications can create a tile in Metro but will launch on the desktop instead of directly from Metro.

With the Metro tiles, senior administrators now have more control over the level of administration they allow to junior staff.  With virtually all aspects of the operating system controllable via Group policy it's not inconceivable to lock junior IT staff into only those functions they need to have with no opportunity to circumvent their limited access. 

Microsoft has not yet set a release date for Server 8 but it's likely that it will be within a few months of the desktop OS release.  Does that mean that Server 8 will replace current installations overnight?  That's unlikely considering that many companies are only now moving to Server 2008 R2 as legacy applications catch up to embrace 64 bit platforms.  In my own experience, there's generally a 2 year lag before a new server operating system starts to gain significant market share over its predecessors.  The most likely driver will be the improved virtualization for companies looking to move from VMWARE and improved resource and access management functionality.

Time will tell if Server 8 is embraced as many IT organizations chose to ignore the last Microsoft server  release,  For many IT organizations Server 2008 offered no real advantage over Server 2003 other than better 64 bit hardware support.  Many organizations also choose to skip versions which may translate into better adoption of the new server OS for IT organizations still using Server 2003. 

The new revenue stream

Originally published on Technorati as "The New Revenue Stream."

Remember way back before the Iphone or the I anything for that matter?  Those were the days when we went out and bought a piece of technology and whatever else we needed for it and Boom! we were pretty much done.  When we wore it out we went and bought a new one.

Getting a cell phone was a pretty simple proposition.  You picked the device and how many minutes you thought you'd need and paid your bill every month.  Now you'd be hard pressed to find a phone without features you'll never use but are charged for anyway.  Not to mention overage charges for data or unlimited plans that really aren't unlimited either cutting you off or degrading your service over a preset limit.

Everything's a subscription now.  Seems like you never stop paying.  Services like Netflix started it.  Used to be you'd pay a small subscription fee and get your choice of DVD's every month.  What made them successful was the elimination of late fees and the highway robbery of the chain video rental stores.  Now it's streaming movies at 8 bucks a month to any device that can use the service.  Even if you don't use it.

Yes, it's wonderful that you can go to Itunes and just buy the song you like for 99 cents and leave the rest of the selections on the curb .  Of course you've bought a lesser quality version of the song for roughly the same price as the same song on CD but hey, it's in your Itunes now, so long as you don't lose your password...

You can even subscribe to Microsoft Office 365 to essentially "rent" the use of office applications.  Too bad if you miss that monthly payment and want to open your Word document.

I can go to carbonite.com and back up my computer to the cloud automatically, for a fee of course.  That fee goes up if I have more than one computer and/or external device to back up by the way.

Gee, used to be I got a backup program with my operating system or I could get a better one and that was it.  I didn't have to subscribe to anything.

Buy an IPAD or an Iphone and you're not likely to have much fun with it unless you visit the app store which generally involves a purchase or subscription depending on what you choose from it.  Oh, and don't forget that 2 year contract and/or ridiculous initial cost of the device.

Let's not forget that our workplaces will have limits on our bandwidth and most ISP's impose bandwidth limits on how much data you can use per month.

Too bad if you were backing up you Terabyte Hard drive to Carbonite...

The point is that more and more products seem to be introduced whose very design is to work with this subscription model.  Product features tend to be stripped down for the sake of it.  Even the latest version of Windows dumped their email client in favor of the useless free Windows Live suite or online applications such as Hotmail or Gmail.

 I wonder when they'll dump notepad...

Yes it's true that application suites were prohibitively expensive but if you didn't need to be on the cutting edge you could always find a deal on the previous version.  You didn't have to keep paying for it either.   It seems we've been led to believe that the a la' carte model lowers the barriers of entry to productivity and recreational apps but the truth is that we're just spreading out our buying patterns. 

With every app you buy you end up on another mailing list.  There's also this false ubiquity that anything in the cloud is secure and accessible.  Yes, it may be so long as you pay the subscription.  Let's also hope they don't go out of business taking your data with them.  Read the Terms of Service,  if they're gone, so's your data...

There's nothing wrong with making applications more accessible but to rely on the subscription model and the cloud exclusively  is dangerous.  I'd hate, for example, to lose the ability to update my resume if I had to cancel my office 365 subscription after losing my job. 

I sometimes chafe when I hear some pundit advocating how the cloud should be our primary data repository.  Really?  You have that much faith in a web page with an e-commerce portal to secure your data? 

I can't accept that a commercial entity has my best interests at heart thus I have no faith in the assumption that they do.  Yet when I look around I see a consumer mindset that accepts the premise as reasonable. 

Whatever happened to Caveat Emptor?  I guess they don't teach that in schools anymore...