IT support news from Conosco

New blog

Ben Gladstone — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 13:27:35 +0000

I've moved my thoughts on IT to a better blogging platform at http://bengladstone.com/.

Conosco news will continue here.

Microsoft's trailer park datacentres

Ben Gladstone — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 11:38:09 +0000

Microsoft will build trailer parks of containers for its datacentres rather than today's monolithic warehouses - just like Google, who it's trying to keep up with in the world of online services.

Ugly, but neither company is known for its aesthetics - and these modular pre-configured containers of modular servers will allow Microsoft to expand rapidly and react quickly to changes in demand.

Microsoft's head datacentre guy has a nice graphic of his trailer parks - and anyone who thinks the internet is eco-friendly should look at the red lines in the picture - the key design constraint is getting enough electricity to the machines. Hence why one of their current centres is by a hydro plant in Washington state.

Spammers get 1 response in 12 million emails

Ben Gladstone — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 18:08:25 +0000

If you'd ever wondered who actually responds to spam emails, researchers have hacked into a hackers' network and had a look at how they're doing - not very well by normal marketing standards, but clearly it pays.

A team in California analysed three spam campaigns - one to spread a virus and one for medical drugs. They hacked the outgoing emails to divert interested recipients to 'defanged' copies of the hackers' web sites and measured the results.

About 25% of the emails got through users' spam filters but, from 350 million pharmaceutical emails, only 10,000 people visited the web site and just 28 tried to buy a $100 male-enhancement product.

Although the researchers estimated that the network is generating $3.5m of revenue a year, their analysis of the economics suggests that the spammer and the online retailer must be the same people - there's not enough margin for the spammer to be only taking a cut of the profits.

Unpicking Google's strategy for world domination

Ben Gladstone — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:53:26 +0000

Here's a good summary of what Google's up to from French consultants faberNovel - showing how the myriad parts of its empire interact and complement each other.

It adds up to a valuable account of the dominant technological company of our time.

One new nugget: "In 2007, Google launched Google Voice Local Search in the United States, a free and automated phone directory service. What is the business model of this free and ad-free service? Google is creating a database of phonemes, recorded during calls in order to better its speech to text technologies"

Amazon web services gets a database

Ben Gladstone — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 11:57:57 +0000

Amazon has released its web services database - SimpleDB - as a public beta, adding a key part of its growing cloud computing platform.

You can now run virtual servers on Amazon, add virtual disks to them, back them up to cheap storage on it and more. We're watching computing move from each company running its own server farm to large centralised shared platforms - like electricity did around 1900.

Will Amazon Web Services eclipse its book business? It would be a textbook case of lateral thinking, exploiting its rare skill in running vast web-based services. Only Google, IBM and Microsoft are offering something similar and Amazon is far ahead in usable services for all sizes of business.

SimpleDB is also interesting because it isn't a traditional relational database (such as SQL, Oracle, etc) but more of a structured storage engine - simpler, much more flexible and highly scaleable.

Windows market share slides below 90%

Ben Gladstone — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:30:45 +0000

Based on web browsing data, Windows market share fell nearly 1% in November to 89.7%. The only real competition is Apple, up to 8.8%.

This supports the trend we've seen at Conosco - the increasing use of Macs in smaller businesses, with execs exerting their freedom of choice and buying Mac laptops.

This brings one main problem - using Microsoft Exchange on a Mac - but this should be solved with the next version of Mac OS X, due possibly as early as Q1 09.

Apple sees a virus threat to Macs

Ben Gladstone — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:48:42 +0000

Apple are quietly retreating from their boast that Macs are almost immune to viruses - they've posted a note on their support forums recommending three anti-virus products -

Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult. Here are some available antivirus utilities

Of course, Macs were never inherently more secure, there were just less people writing viruses for them. Now that the Mac market share has risen from the dead, Macs are targets again.

At the moment, the specific threat is from web pages that have been booby-trapped with malicious code.

Apple's MobileMe email down again

Ben Gladstone — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:05:52 +0000

As we've pointed out before, running an online service is very different to building great computers and software, as Apple continue to prove with their disastrous MobileMe launch: down again for a whole European working day, apparently because they don't have 24x7 support on it. US-centric or plain dumb?

Apple and Microsoft (with Live Office) are bidding to join Google in the online services arena but don't have Google's experience in running web-based tools that almost never go down.

This could be a critical factor in who wins the next phase of computing's evolution.

Google Apps claims 10 million users

Ben Gladstone — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:22:58 +0000

... and growing at 3,000 a day. Microsoft's year-away competition is looking very late.

iPod inventor steps down

Ben Gladstone — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 10:17:37 +0000

Apple's resurgence owes much to Tony Fadell's vision and determination and his departure is a pointer to the future.

In the late '90s he came up with the idea of combining a handheld music player with an online music store and started his own company to promote it. Failing to get funding, he took it to RealNetworks - but left after six weeks. So he took it to Apple and just ten months later the iPod was launched.

Fadell rose to lead the iPod division, but his departure is unlikely to hurt Apple - the company is famous for not relying on individuals talents and he will stay as an advisor to CEO Jobs.

As a sign of the future, he's being replaced by an chip expert not a design or consumer person: there's little more scope to improve the iPod / iPhone form factor so progress is likely to focus on the internals - hardware and software.

Handheld devices have reached the 'wristwatch' moment - as they in the 1880s reached their current size and shape, and then improved only in functionality.