In the last year the level of smartphone and tablet ownership has sky-rocketed, and with it the trend towards the consumerisation of IT. In other words, business IT organisations have come under ever-increasing pressure to let their employees choose what they use to do their work on. While many firms follow the traditional route of offering a stipend or some sort of financial incentive, others expect their employees to pick up the tab
BBC News: BYOD: Bring your own device could spell end for work PC
Although this has been making the rounds here and there it’s taken me a few weeks to actually sit down and appreciate this cover of The Animals House of the Rising Sun covered entirely using audio samples recorded from legacy computer equipment and diagnostic machines. The piece uses four primary “instruments” including an HP Scanjet 3P, an Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope as the organ, a Texas instrument Ti-99/4A with a Tektronix Oscilloscope as the guitar and a hard-drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller as the bass drum and cymbal.
Collosal: House of the Rising Sun Covered by Legacy Computer Equipment
It wasn’t so long ago that speed junkies were foaming at the mouth at the read/write performance offered by Intel’s 510 series of SSD storage solutions. Now Smart has announced that it’s managed to squeeze up to 1.6TB of solid state memory into the 2.5-inch form factor Optimus drive and leave the competition standing with a sequential read of up to 1GB/s, and write of 500MB/s.
Gizmag: Smart introduces the blisteringly fast Optimus 1.6TB SSD
A post on the BCS Project Eye blog back in November 2009, which picked up on the failure of the government’s C-Nomis project, sparked a lively debate among blog readers as to why so many big IT projects fail. Suggestions ranged from failure to monitor progress, to lack of accountability and ownership to arbitrary political pressure. However, one recurring message seemed to be that IT projects fail because of inexperience or simple incompetence.
British Computer Society: Equipping IT project managers
I have lived in Japan for several years, programming in a professional capacity, and I have broken many systems by the simple expedient of being introduced into them. (Most people call me Patrick McKenzie, but I’ll acknowledge as correct any of six different “full” names, any many systems I deal with will accept precisely none of them.) Similarly, I’ve worked with Big Freaking Enterprises which, by dint of doing business globally, have theoretically designed their systems to allow all names to work in them. I have never seen a computer system which handles names properly and doubt one exists, anywhere.
So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.
Kalzumeus Software: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Given the specification (Intel atom N270 chip, 8.9 inch screen, webcam, 1024 x 600 resolution, 8GB SSD, three USB ports, VGA, and two SD card slots, two mini PCI slots (one for the WiFi and one for upcoming Wimax or HSDPA), Ethernet port, touchpad, 802.11b/g WiFi and a default 512MB of memory with a spare slot to add more) the Aspire One represents stonking good value for money. This is a seriously useful piece of kit and Acer are not hiding their light under a bushel either.
Free Software Magazine: Acer’s Linpus Linux Lite ultra-portable laptop piles the pressure on Microsoft
By some estimates, there are more than 600 million computers in the world, many of which are rarely turned off. If all of them were running screensavers, they would be drawing 60,000 megawatts per hour – for no valid reason.
REAP Calgary: As Useful as a Flying Toaster
I’m an IT Manager. I usually work with start-up companies, usually from their first year onwards. It’s not uncommon for people in my circumstances to find themselves starting out as head of a team of one or two, and then concentrating their efforts on successful expansion through investment in systems and people.
The IT Manager in a firm usually reports to and advises the board on all things technical, but how are the board to know whether or not what they hear from their own technical team is in any way right for them?
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