Oh yes, and buys Autonomy, a fast-growing specialist in enterprise knowledge management.

Here’s the news from HP’s announcement:

As part of the transformation, HP announced that its board of directors has authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for the company’s Personal Systems Group. HP will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction. (See accompanying press release.)

HP will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. The devices have...

Oh yes, and buys Autonomy, a fast-growing specialist in enterprise knowledge management.

Here’s the news from HP’s announcement:

As part of the transformation, HP announced that its board of directors has authorized the exploration of strategic alternatives for the company’s Personal Systems Group. HP will consider a broad range of options that may include, among others, a full or partial separation of PSG from HP through a spin-off or other transaction. (See accompanying press release.)

HP will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. The devices have...

The internet and search: the greatest resource ever for troubleshooting computer systems.

Except when you follow a promising link to find this:



On June 26th, the HP IT Resource Center forums were migrated to the HP Enterprise Business Community. This migration coincided with the release of the new HP Support Center,...

Amazon is into day three of a major failure of its Elastic Compute Cloud at its North Virginia datacenter, and at the time of writing it is still not fully recovered.



I am reminded of a prescient remark by Tony Lucas at Flexiant, a UK cloud provider, who told me a couple of years ago (with commendable honesty) that cloud failures will be rare, but when they occur will be on a grand scale.

It seems that it is hard to engineer around the possibility of cascading failure. I am not...

Oracle Database 10g Express is a free edition that can be used for development and deployment.  After a long wait, the Beta release of 11g R2 is now available for download.

I’m at Intel’s software tools conference in Dubrovnik, which I have attended for the last three years, and as usual the big topic is concurrent programming and how to write code that takes advantage of the multiple cores in today’s computers.

Clearly this remains a critical subject, but in some ways the progress over these last three years has been disappointing when it comes to the PCs that most of us use. Many machines are only dual-core, which is sub-optimal for concurrent programming since there is an overhead to multi-threading programming that eats into the benefit of having two cores. Quad core is now common too, and more useful, but what about having 50 or 80 or more cores? This enables massively parallel processing of the kind that you can easily do today with general-purpose GPU programming using OpenCL or NVidia’s CUDA, but not yet on the CPU unless...

IBM’s Bob Sutor, VP of Open Systems and Linux, says in a blog post that the company will now shift its open source Java effort from the unofficial Apache Harmony, to the official Open JDK. The announcement is also covered in an Oracle press release.

All Windows OS starting from Windows Vista are distributed as .WIM files, the new image-file format.  Andriy Klyuchevskyy gives an introduction to Imaging and WIMGAPI.

Following the replacement of many keyboards, mainly due to USB and PS2 incompatibility, there has been a realisation that some of the older Keyboards are just a bit, well, mucky.

I have had several discussions around putting them in the dishwasher, which has been known but perhaps not recommended.  It seems that a good jet of air is the safest and easiest method of giving the old keyboard a good clean. That and a bit of an upside-down shake.

Then it occurred to me that we have a new device in the office that would do the job nicely ! In the newly refurbished amenities here at the office, we have a Dyson Airblade  (other air based hand dryers are available), perfect for a good strong jet of air to blow all the dust out of your keyboard ! 

-  oh yes! and drying your hands.    

...

Today’s big open source announcement is OpenStack, an open source cloud platform that aims to be an non-proprietary alternative to Amazon’s Elastic Computer Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3).

I spent some time setting up RemoteApp and secure FTP for a small business which wanted better remote access without VPN. VPN is problematic for various reasons: it is sometimes blocked by public or hotel wifi providers, it is not suitable for poor connections, performance can be poor, and it means constantly having to think about whether your VPN tunnel is open or not. When I switched from connecting Outlook over VPN to connecting over HTTP, I found the experience better in every way; it is seamless. At least, it would be if it weren’t for the connection settings bug that changes the authentication type by itself on occasion; but I digress.

Enough to say that VPN is not always the best approach to remote access. There’s also SharePoint of course; but there are snags with that as well – it is powerful, but complex to manage, and has annoyances like poor performance when there are a large number of documents in a single folder. In addition, Explorer integration in Windows XP does not always work properly;...

Here’s a conundrum – you are building a virtual infrastructure to host your businesses mission critical applications. Where do you put your vCenter Server? The documentation says it can be physical or virtual – but, be honest, do you really get a warm fuzzy feeling with the thought of managing your virtual infrastructure from a virtual machine hosted within that infrastructure?

Despite the apparent high cost of the VMware offering it remains the market leader.  Why?

Most businesses these days realise that in the current climate you cannot afford to let any opportunity slip... Here I am going to show how a techie tool for monitoring systems and alerting the Systems Administrator to potential issues may be used to improve performance in other areas of the business!

 If you are a Systems Administrator or responsible for systems in your organisation you are probably familiar with that gut-wrenching feeling that you get when a bunch of people arrive at your desk asking “Are you aware of any problems?” Of course it ain’t ever easy to answer such open ended questions - and the sad thing is that often the answer is “No!” in spite of the sudden arrival of evidence to the contrary...