Sabre 2/3rd Tiger v3

Fred Vogelstein wrote in 2 May 2005 issue of Fortune the article subtitled “Bill Gates is on a mission to build a Google killer. What got him so riled? The darling of search is moving into software—and that’s Microsoft’s turf.” He goes on to document the difficulty Microsoft is having trying to catchup with Google and why this is not Netscape all over again. Interesting read. Some excerpts …

Microsoft was already months into a massive project [Underdog] aimed at taking down Google when the truth began to dawn on Bill Gates. It was December 2003. He was poking around on the Google company website and came across a help-wanted page with descriptions of all the open jobs at Google … Gates wondered whether Microsoft might be facing much more than a war in search. An e-mail he sent to a handful of execs that day said, in effect, “We have to watch these guys. It looks like they are building something to compete with us.”

He sure got that right. Today Google isn’t just a hugely successful search engine; it has morphed into a software company and is emerging as a major threat to Microsoft’s dominance. You can use Google software with any Internet browser to search the web and your desktop for just about anything; send and store up to two gigabytes of e-mail via Gmail (Hotmail, Microsoft’s rival free e-mail service, offers 250 megabytes, a fraction of that); manage, edit, and send digital photographs using Google’s Picasa software, easily the best PC photo software out there; and, through Google’s Blogger, create, post online, and print formatted documents—all without applications from Microsoft …

Simply put, Google has become a new kind of foe, and that’s what has Gates so riled. It has combined software innovation with a brand-new Internet business model—and it wounds Gates’ pride that he didn’t get there first. Since Google doesn’t sell its search products (it makes its money from the ads that accompany its search results), Microsoft can’t muscle it out of the marketplace the way it did rivals like Netscape. But what really bothers Gates is that Google is gaining the ability to attack the very core of Microsoft’s franchise—control over what users do first when they turn on their computers … The most paranoid people at Microsoft even think “Google Office” is inevitable. Google is taking over operating system features too, like desktop search …
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I have a need for a software to help the guys/gals to inventorize all our PCs (now getting to 500+) including their specs and serial number. A quick google search found me an open source candidate, OCS Inventory 3.00 Final released on 29 March 2005. Its main site gives the following introduction …

Open Computers and Softwares Inventory is an application designed to help a network administrator keep track of the computers configuration and the number of copies of software that are installed on the network … The application comes with Microsoft Access database which stores the applications to search for and the results that the inventory agents return … The inventory agent is a small (about 300 K) executable that can be run from the login script for each user … Informations about Hardware and Operating System are collected …
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Scott’s nice write-up on 11 April 2005 about Linux SCM provides a nice perspective on tridge’s possible viewpoint …

… I suspect that someone who didn’t know the people involved would assume that the whole mess was Tridge’s fault—he’s the one that was working on cloning BitKeeper, even though any sane person would know that it would really piss Larry off … I’m aware of two other cases where he’s dug in and reverse-engineered similar sets of protocols and file formats. The first time, the result was Samba, which was (and still is) really one of Linux’s first killer apps. The second time, he decoded TiVo’s on-disk media format … Getting off of BitKeeper is probably best for Linux in the long run. It’s a pity we couldn’t have waited for another year or so for open-source SCM software to mature more, though …

… that I have some sympathy with.

• BitKeeper and Linux: The end of the road? – Newsforge article on 11 Apr 2005 with the interview of the three main actors: Linus, Larry and Tridge.
• Kernel SCM saga – Linus Torvalds post on 6 Apr 2005 regarding moving away from BitKeeper. Mentioned looking at “monotone” and not to bother with “subversion”.
• Larry McVoy site – on BitMover Inc, developer of BitKeeper SCM.
• Andrew Tridgell site – Tridge on Samba.org.

Seems the guys have decided that now is a good time to get a new enterprise wide anti virus system. I think they’re proposing Trend Micro Enterprise Solutions. Lets see …

Products:

• Corporate Antivirus Software – PCMag, 22 Apr 2003. McAfee Active Virus Defense, Sophos Anti-Virus, Symantec AntiVirus Enterprise Edition 8.0, Trend Micro Enterprise Protection Strategy.
• AVG Network Edition – AVG NE 100 = USD1,290/RM4,902. 1 year.
• Client/Server Suite for SMB – CSS SMB 100 = USD2,400/RM9,120. 1 year.
• McAfee Active Virus Defense SMB Edition – AVD 100 = USD5,600/RM21,280. 1 year.
• Sophos Anti-Virus Small Business Edition – SAV SBE 100 => salesasia@sophos.com .

Local vendors:

• ITWin Technology Sdn Bhd – Trend Micro Enterprise Solutions, Symantec Corporate/Enterprise Antivirus Solutions, CA eTrust Security Suite, and Norman Antivirus Solutions.
• Hileytech Sdn Bhd – AVG Network Edition (Multi Licenses). AVG NE 100 = RM5,000.

Should we change from typical write-off period of 5 years to replacement cycles of 4 years?

• PC Lifespan and Replacement – Mike Barger’s guidelines under Creative Commons copyright recommending, “Increase the replacement life cycle for newly purchased … PCs to 4 years … offers the best mix of lower initial purchase cost with extended time between PC purchases … represents the lowest overall cost of ownership.” He included computer replacement cost over 15 years comparison for different replacement cycles, and computer technology changes over 10 years.
• Upgrade or Replace? What to do With an Older Computer System – distinguishes between functional lifespan of computers, “as long as the parts that comprise the system work … anywhere from 10 years or more”, and useful lifespan of computers, “anywhere from 3 to 6 years depending upon the configuration of the computer at the time of purchase”. The articles suggests when “the cost of upgrading is 75% or higher than the cost of replacement for a better system, consider replacement.”

… or when to completely write 0ff the net book values of those darn computers.

• InvestorWords: net book value – “The net value of an asset. Equal to its original cost (its book value) minus depreciation and amortization. also called net book value and depreciated cost.”
• Investopedia: Book Value – “1. The value at which an asset is carried on a balance sheet. In other words, the cost of an asset minus accumulated depreciation. 2. The net asset value of a company, calculated by total assets minus intangible assets (patents, goodwill) and liabilities.”
• Nebraska Personal Property Return – “Net Book Value is the taxable value for property tax purposes. It is the Nebraska adjusted basis of the tangible personal property multiplied by the appropriate depreciation factor for the recovery period and year. The property tax is imposed on the net book value of tangible personal property. Example: A computer has a Nebraska adjusted basis of $12,000. The computer was purchased three years ago. The computer has a recovery period of five years. The depreciation factor (see Table 1) is 41.65%. The net book value (taxable value) of the computer is $4,998.”
• Writing Off Those Computers More Quickly – Small Business Canada, March 27, 2004 – “… a new Capital Cost Allowance class for computers. Now computers purchased March 23 or later will be eligible for a Capital Cost Allowance of 45 percent [in first year] rather than 30 percent, meaning that businesses will be able to write them off more quickly.”
• Tax Change 2005: Writing Off Small Business Equipment Fast – regarding US taxes – “Tax planners call it “first-year expensingâ€? and the IRS calls it the “Section 179 deduction.â€? Whatever you call it, you get to write off not 50% but 100%, of the cost of the equipment in the first year of use … First-year expensing only works for small business.”

Amongst other things our Raid 5 fileserver failed to reboot today, 2 of our 5 disks in the array failed. And our tape backup over last weekend didn’t complete, so had to fall back on 1 week old backup. And big boss wanted a report that was stored on that fileserver. And the particular user choose to store her only copy of the report on that fileserver, and no copy on her notebook. Looks like I’ll be needing to do some nifty explanation soon. :-/

The top google search for “raid 5 server” and “raid data recovery malaysia” currently gives …

• Raid 5 server died… – telling of this story “We actually had 3 with 1 hot spare….so, when the first drive was removed, he was like, “cool, it works” then grabbed another and, here we are….” and “Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. You are now experienced in RAID5 in that it can sustain a single drive failure, not two. With your defined hot spare, you could have survived two drive failures, although not at the same time.”
• ADRC – Data Recovery Specialist in Malaysia.

Langalist is one of my oldest PC related mailing list subscription. I haven’t been reading every issue that comes out every 3 or 4 days. However, lately while doing so, found that the issues are as relevant as I used to remembered it.

More info on Langalist Home Page.

The following are the top ten things for a prospective successful IT manager to remember, according to Bill Vass, the CIO of Sun Microsystems.

More in CIO Update article on 4 Nov 2004 .