Category Archives: microsoft and google

4 GB: The next RAM barrier

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Back in the early days of DOS, we had a memory barrier of 640 kB of memory. I know, it seems quaint now, something that you can find on the chipsets of audio greeting cards rather than real computers, but we spent a lot of time juggling applications to fit in that space. We had special hardware cards that could address more memory, and swapping programs (remember Quarterdeck?) that could allow us to run bigger apps. (And for those of us that are really old, we even remember the 64 kB barrier of the earliest Apple // computers!)

Now we are approaching another memory barrier, only this time it is 4 GB. That is the biggest amount of memory that 32-bit processors can access. It is a problem particularly for servers and has this eerie sense of déjà vu all over again for me.

Four gigs seemed like a lot of memory just a few years ago. We didn’t really need to worry, and our desktop operating systems seemed comfortable inside it. Then Microsoft got greedy with Vista, RAM got much cheaper and apps got bigger. Before you knew it, we are once again running out of headroom.

What is driving these bigger applications is the popularity of both virtualization and database servers. Virtualization is especially memory-intensive. If you want to take advantage of this technology, you have to bulk up your machine with lots of memory and disk. And the more RAM you throw at database servers, the happier they are.

Another big consumer of RAM is the video card and how it interacts with system memory. Some of them share their memory space with the PC, which means when you are running graphics-intense operations, you take away some of that RAM from all your applications. Again, we’ve heard this tune before. And most of us haven’t really paid much attention to the video card in our servers, because we didn’t think they needed much horsepower there. After all, we weren’t planning on running GTA4 on our servers, right?

There are solutions: run the 64-bit versions of Windows, or Linux, or even the Mac OS, which can address memory beyond 4 gigs quite nicely. This is nothing new on the Mac or Linux side, which has had 64-bit OSs for many years. Indeed, if you go back into the early 1990s, we had DEC Alphas and Silicon Graphics’ Irix and all sorts of workstations that were 64-bit processors and 64-bit OSs. Some apps are now only available in 64-bit versions, such as Microsoft Exchange 2007. Others, like Oracle 11g, are still available for both 32- and 64-bit versions.

The problem is with Windows, and particularly finding the right 64-bit drivers for these machines. Rewriting drivers isn’t sexy stuff, and generally the province of some very talented coders that are dedicated enough to stick to the project. One engineering manager I spoke to told me it took his team six months to rewrite his driver set, and it wasn’t a fun six months at that. “Microsoft’s driver signing requirements are intense, he told me. “And at the time we were engaged with them, they were adding and changing tests during the process without informing us, which increased the dev cycles and cost.”

This driver issue is tricky, because you don’t usually think about all of them that you need to upgrade when you are looking at your server portfolio, and generally you don’t know what you need until you install a test machine and see what isn’t supported. Then the fun begins.

So take some time to plan out your strategy if you are running out of RAM. Take a closer look at the new Windows Server 2008 64-bit version, and whether it will run on your existing hardware. And while you are at it, look at Apple’s X Serve too: it might be a lower-cost alternative to running all those virtual machines on a true 64-bit platform.

(this appeared in Baseline Magazine this week)

Baseline Strominator column: A more open Microsoft

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A new year, a new assignment — I start a regular series of Web columns and print features for Baseline Magazine.You might have missed the news just before the holidays that Microsoft has become slightly more open with respect to its networking protocols. Late last year, they announced a way for third parties to license their core file sharing protocols through an independent organization called the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation.This is good news on several fronts. You can read more of this posting called a more open Microsoft. 

Gmail’s contact management is the pits

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I have been a big fan of Gmail for the past two years until lately when they made “improvements” to their interface — and have gone a step backwards.

For those of you still living in the stone ages, Google’s Gmail is a free Webmail service, and available for free as well for domains that you own too. Their philosophy is to have world-class search, to be able to classify messages so that you can easily find them. Oh yeah, and do no evil. They lose on all three counts by me.

What did they break? The whole contact management section, that’s all. There is no easy way to delete a contact from a group once you have more than a few groups. The interface takes longer to load and requires a more recent Web browser to work. Safari 2 and IE 6 aren’t recent enough, it seems. And, the whole search engine thing is broken: if I want to search on a term that is part of my notes on a contact, I can’t do it with the Search interface of the contacts page. For example, I am heading out to Boulder to visit my daughter next month: a search on “Boulder” comes up empty, even though I know I have entered information on several people in the area. The old interface worked just fine, and displayed things correctly, and could search across any data that you entered in your contacts.

Gmail’s contact groups have been the weakest part of the service for a while. In late June, all of my group members went missing for about 24 hours, and I — and many others — had a fit.

At the heart of any email solution for me are two things: being able to run it from any Web browser and being closely tied to my contacts. Gmail does neither: to delete that errant contact mentioned earlier, I had to bring up a version of Windows with IE6. That seems backwards.

What I liked about Gmail was being able to create ad hoc groups and mini-mailing lists of my contacts, arranged by subject, geography, or some other common thread. I must have 40 or 50 different groups of my more than 8500 contacts. I am not trying to brag, but I took the whole notion of “never throw anything away” to heart and now am stuck with this huge list.

Gmail offers ways that you can export your contacts into a CSV or a file that contains V-cards, but neither of these exports contains the group identities of the contacts. The only way that I have figured out to make backups of this information is to take screen shots one by one of the groups that are displayed. Talk about the stone ages. This is so cumbersome that I have only done it once, since shortly after the group memberships were restored from the June outage.

So what can I do? I could get off of Gmail, but that means finding something else to use for my contacts and cleaning them up. Plaxo Pulse and LinkedIn both do a nice job of keeping everyone’s contact info current, but neither have a nice Webmail solution. Apple’s Address Book can take the Gmail V-card export just fine and also do the searching across all contact information, but that ties me to a Mac when I travel. I could go with a Web-based ACT solution, but I have stayed away from ACT for this long I am not sure I want to start now. And I don’t want to run an Exchange server and use Outlook Web access either.

Of course, Google could fix their contact management module, but I am not holding my breath. I hate it when software companies succumb to adding features at the expense of usability, and turn a great product into an also-ran. I guess they are taking some lessons in becoming evil from their pals in Redmond.

Who really wants Vista anyway?

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Maybe no one, at least right now, according to this blog post from PC World’s Tom Spring. My favorite line from the comments section (which are well worth reading too):

There are plenty of users out there who don’t want Vista. And why should they? It’s bloated, buggy, unstable, requires twice the hardware specs of XP, isn’t compatible with most of their existing apps (including ones from Microsoft), and runs slower than XP (especially if you enable all the eye candy).

Live Writer, a kinder, gentler blogging editor from Microsoft

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This week Microsoft announced its Windows Live Writer. Here to tell you about is Newt Barrett, who is CEO of Succeeding Today (Newt@SucceedingToday.com). Newt and I worked together at CMP during another era in tech publishing. Take it away, Newt.

Something is afoot at Microsoft.

t has to do with a product that was quietly released in beta in mid-July and announced this past week. It’s called. It’s slick. It’s solid. And it’s free.

Live Writer is an intuitive, WYSIWYG blogging editor that enables bloggers to manage multiple blogs on multiple platforms–either online or offline. In fact, I’m writing this article with Live Writer.
But this week’s release of Live Writer isn’t just about a product. It’s about Microsoft reasserting application dominance in a world of consumer-created content.

Free is a Strategy that Works for Microsoft

Although Bill Gates prefers to get paid for software, he knows how and when to give it away free. Just think back to 1995 when Microsoft first started to take the Web seriously. In May 1995, a few months before the launch of the much hyped Windows 95, Bill Gates wrote a legendary memo, entitled, “The Internet Tidal Wave.”
“It’s the most important single development” since the IBM PC.”I have gone through several stages of increasing my views of its importance. Now, I assign the Internet the highest level.”(as quoted in Business Week, July 15, 1996) What followed within 12 months was a seismic shift in strategy that put the Internet at center stage for the software company and for many of us too.

Microsoft was late to the party, but not too late to crush a once arrogant Netscape. While Netscape was charging $50/copy for its browser, Microsoft readied the launch of Internet Explorer in 1996 at a much lower price: FREE. As Bill Gates cheerfully noted in a press conference at the launch of IE, “It’s priced to sell.”

It looks as though Microsoft is making another strategic move that’s all about the Internet–and about blogging.

What Makes Live Writer So Important?

Microsoft, like the Japanese, tends to take the long view. They may be late to the party. They may appear to have missed an opportunity. But, once they decide they must dominate a market they will do whatever it takes.
“I think blogging is super-important and we’ve got to do a lot more software.” That’s what Bill Gates said in a January 7, 2005 interview on the blog, Gizmondo. Clearly, he was telegraphing what they’re now doing.
Microsoft’s approach with Live Writer is intriguing–not just because it’s a beta product that works with very few glitches, but because it plays nice with others.

Here’s how it works:

You download and install it. (http://get.live.com/betas/writer_betas) LW will work even when you are not connected to the Internet. Next, you tell LW about your blogs. It works with WordPress, Typepad, Blogger, and Microsoft’s own Live Spaces. You show it how you log on and then let it match your style by posting a test blog that it immediately removes. You can submit either a post or a page, and then it pulls down your categories and lets you set a publish date.

You can edit and resubmit your posts, and you can pull down posts that you had made before using LW in order to edit them. Its WYSIWYG tools enable you to format a page easily, insert tables, photos, website images, and videos, and create hyperlinks and tags. It works effectively even on a small laptop screen and works with voice dictation on the Vista platform .It has some nice plug ins both from Microsoft and from third party developers – one notable and symbolic example is “Blog this from Firefox” tool. Imagine developing something that works seamlessly with Firefox!

The Bottom-line

Live Writer is capable and easy to use. It matches the very attractive price of Internet Explorer–free. It works just as easily with WordPress as with Live Spaces. It’s just as useful offline as on. Within a day of using it, Live Writer has become my blog editor of choice.

Microsoft was heavy-handed in destroying Netscape. Live Writer demonstrates that Microsoft is just as determined to win in the blogosphere as it was to win on the Web browser. In 2007 it looks as though Microsoft will do it with a great product that actually plays nice with others. What a nice surprise. Of course, you still need XP SP2 or Vista, maybe someday it will run on a Mac!

Top Microsoft Technologies for the channel

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If you are a Microsoft ISV, VAR or systems integrator partner, you should be thinking about gaining expertise in five critical technologies. These are the ones that Microsoft is banking on for many future offerings, and these five will play an increasingly bigger role in your own products and services. The five include .Net, Live services, endpoint security, SharePoint, and Exchange.

The story ran this week in eWeek print here.

Microsoft extends its lending reach

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Microsoft Financing, the software giant’s lending arm, announced at the company’s Worldwide Partner Program July 12 that it has extended its lending reach with greater coverage across the Microsoft portfolio and more flexible payment options.

The expansion includes more choices and extended payment options, greater coverage of the Microsoft product line, introduction in other countries outside the U.S., and tighter integration into the overall partner marketing programs, said Brian Madison general manager of Microsoft Financing. You can read the entire news story in eWeek here.

Microsoft Partner Dashboard

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Microsoft unveiled at its Worldwide Partner Conference here July 10 a partner dashboard that promises to consolidate information from across hundreds of pages on various Microsoft corporate and partner Web sites and provide partners a single source to measure stats against the partner pack.The tool gathers information on partners’ certifications, customer engagements and other up-to-the-moment statistics currently spread across the portal, providing a single glance at overall metrics and monthly progress of partner activity.

Read the full article that was published in eWeek here.

SharePoint as your enterprise search application?

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Microsoft Corporate Vice President Chris Capossela announced a new search product developed in partnership with consulting giant BearingPoint at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver on July 10. The product, called SingleView, is built on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint 2007 collaboration portal and is already being used by dozens of large enterprise customers.

You can read the entire article here in eWeek.

Microsoft Home Server review

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Here is a question for you:  when was the last time you backed up your home’s digital files? Maybe never? Bad answer.

Microsoft has been working on a solution, and it went into its final production throes this past week. The product is called Windows Home Server, and it is a stripped-down version of its Windows Server 2003 that normally costs a thousand bucks or so. For the time being, you can download a timed-version (it will work until December) freely from this link. You do need to sign up and answer a few questions to join the Connect service, which also has other pre-release software from Microsoft.

You need to install the software on a new machine: it will wipe your disk clean and boot up automatically with the Home Server running. The software is designed to run “headless” which means that you don’t need to attach a monitor or a keyboard, once you get beyond certain basics that I will talk about in a moment. It will install the operating system, split your hard disk into two partitions (one for system files, one for data), and set up a bunch of shared drives for pictures, videos, files, and so forth. Think of this as layering a simple set of controls on top of the standard Windows server platform.

To access these shares, you will need to run another piece of software called Home Server Connector Software from each computer to set up the network connection. There are basically two different levels of access – “remote control” for the administrators that gives them access to the server control console, and ordinary file and printer shares for everyone else.

I tried it out on my home office network to mixed results. I liked a few things:

First, getting to the reason for this column, it is very easy to backup your PCs with this product, provided you have a big enough disk on the server’s PC. You can choose what you want to backup, and it automagically does it in the middle of the night, when traffic is lightest (and presumably your PC that is to be backed up is still powered on). You can set up a different schedule if you are pickier.

Second, Home Server can also automatically synchronize its shared folders with ones on your local PC – that is a neat trick and something you might consider for say sharing your pictures or videos across the network, and something that has been standard with the Windows server line for some time.

Finally, you can control the server from outside your home, if it can figure out how to open up your home gateway ports.  It uses UPnP to do this. Sadly, my 2Wire DSL gateway doesn’t support this (it doesn’t support a lot of other things, but that discussion will have to wait for another day). It would be nice if there were another alternative to UPnP, but there isn’t.

Here are some things that I didn’t like about the software.

First, you initially need complex passwords to set the darn thing up, meaning something with seven characters, upper and lower case and numbers too. That seems a bit onerous for the average home network. This can be loosened up once you get the first user going.

Second, when the install was done, it didn’t recognize the Intel network adapter that was in a fairly recent Dell. Once I installed the right driver, I was good to go. Third, despite its headless installation, you will still need to be sitting in front of the server to set up a shared printer. Next, the only clients for this server are Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Vista – if you have got anything older on your home network, and chances are good you do – then don’t even bother with the product.

Is this a good deal? It is hard to tell until Microsoft sets pricing. There is still talk that it will be available both as a bundled piece of hardware from the usual suspects and as a software download, but we’ll see.

If it does come as low-cost software and you have an older PC and can upgrade the storage, it might be worth it. But if you have older Windows and Macs, then no: you are better off buying either a Mac mini or a network-attached storage box and saving yourself the trouble.