Technology In Check

We’ve all heard of the KISS principle, right? Keep It Simple, Stupid. It can apply to many areas of life, as I’m sure we’ve all seen. When you make things overly complicated, it just introduces more places for things to go wrong.

I was reminded of this while working at a client’s site last week. The technical support provider prior to my company had done some… shall we say, interesting… things to a laptop, which rendered a critical business application nearly useless. And the fact of the matter is that the changes that had been made had no real benefit.

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Web 2.0 brought us social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook, as well as popularizing blogs like this one. It was a dramatic shift in thinking about the interweb, changing it from being a tool to being a place to play.

Web 2.1 expanded on that functionality by adding mashups, web-based applications like Google Docs, and expanding the collaborative sphere with tools like Microsoft’s Sharepoint. People started to look at how they could expand the boundaries of what they were working on, and how they could do things on the Internet instead of the local machine.

And today I read about some new items coming out now that I think of as Web 2.2 because it again changes how the world will see computing.

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As promised, I want to talk about commodity computing this week. What it is, how it affects you, and how it relates to utility computing.

So let’s get straight to it, shall we? Continue Reading »

This week I want to take a look at one of the buzz-phrases that’s sometimes bandied about by computer types - utility computing. It’s an idea that’s generated a lot of interest in the past year or so, and I can understand why. The Wikipedia has an item on utility computing, but it’s a bit heavy on tech-speak.

So what is utility computing, and can your company use it? Or do you even need it? Continue Reading »

A while back I commented on how Microsoft had an article dedicated to teaching IT bosses how to convince business managers that Vista is practically a required upgrade. Well it gets better. Witness the true power of the Internet.

The Microsoft Australia site is running a contest called Fact or Fiction. And you, the intrepid in-house tech types, get to show off how much you know about the different versions of Vista. The whole thing takes about 20 to 30 minutes or so, and as one punter wrote:

“The whole thing is a massive exercise in how well you can regurgitate Microsoft marketing hype. If there’s a question which might put Vista in a bad light, it’s clearly Fiction, but if the question is happy and fluffy and might make people rush out into the streets in droves, driven by the whole heady thrill that is Windows Vista, it must be Fact.”

As a professional geek, I found this one to be too funny. The fact that it’s true (the site can be found here) makes me laugh that much harder. Granted that the prizes are very good - first prize is a $15,000 AUD entertainment bundle - but what was MS thinking when they came up with this? Is the public perception of Vista so bad that they feel they need to resort to this?