Yuval Ararat

I have taken the evenings off from creating content to try and get my laptop work on the latest OS available from Microsoft! Windows 7.
Why you might ask… i was thinking it will be an interesting experiment and might return my confidence with the windows OS. so how was it?
I will start with the process.

In the first part i realized that the upgrade option is only available from Vista Ultimate SP1, So i had my Vista Enterprise in the drive and got my XP upgraded to the Vista Ultimate.
Right after that i updated the Vista to the latest patches and service packs and put the Windows 7.
Surprise. i get an error stating that you cannot upgrade the Vista Enterprise to the Windows 7 but only the Vista Ultimate is able to upgrade.
I decided to leave it and just make my Vista working with all the office software including the VPN client and the VMWare workstation.
And after a few hours i have left it as it.
I could not accept this situation and yesterday just decided to Google my situation. feeling like an idiot not doing this earlier the feeling was worsen after realizing my solution was to change a key in the registry from Enterprise to Ultimate, yes that makes you feel great doesn’t it.
Ok so i have made the change and all was working very very well. until i decided to do the windows update dance. and now my system is not willing to start at all.
For this reason i have not yet posted any real impressions from the Windows 7 and it seems that the VM with the Windows 7 i had was much more stable then my current configuration.
At this time i am making the final tries to make my PC boot correctly, these seem to go avail and my machine likes the BSOD more then working like it did earlier.
So i decided in the spirit of windows 2000 to do a repair of the install, reading some info on the net made me go to the system restore menu and try my luck. to say the truth i could not find the system restore link the way they described it on the forum so i decided to open the control panel and use the search capability, to my surprise it works really well and the 5th link was actually the one i needed.
After a few days i have been deleting drivers and trying to fight a BSOD of the 0×000008E kind i have decided to try and just install the windows on top of the existing one and see how that goes.
All the help i got from this post about restoring was not impacting the machine at all.
I have to say that recovery is not the walk in the park you would expect from the established windows after the time machine of the mac.
But that is probably the reason i am writing this post over my G5 and not my laptop, more probably so due to the 23″ screen.
So now i have a machine with nothing installed on it.
Its running nice but a bit useless.
As for the upgraded windows i have no idea what happened to the files but looking at program files most of it got deleted by the install apparently, It was a wise move to backup all prior to the install.
I have discovered after a short fright that the Cisco VPN was my problem.
As for the usability after a couple of days with the Windows 7 i have to say that windows team have done a nice job, they have also made the windows more like OSX. but with the change comes problems, to avid windows users the access to your information on the disks is a bit hidden and makes you click just more. for the home users the way information is ordered is very easy and intuitive.
For the look and feel of the system i can say it seems quicker then the Vista and less cluttered, not too many side bars or other items lurking on the .
The taskbar is better and reminds me of the OSX again joining the applications windows under one icon and popping a preview on top of it, i like it alot wspecially when using multiple windows of Acrobat.
Over all the system is better then the vista and seems to be intuitive, the similarities to OSX will probably keep users from upgrading if the software price will be right.
Update:
I have found a feature showdown of the OSX VS Windows 7 on lifehacker.com, it does make you think of how well constructed the task bar in 7 is.

One of our local partner just partnered up with OpenText. this is quite good to know we are to keep our partners are not leaving us with this new constellation.
Most of the guys that are in StoneBridge Systems are like family to us in VPS so it is a great news.

and regarding the news here is the item i got the news from.

Information architecture and the way radio websites are built.
Taking a look at the Radio of Collage of digital arts in Holon called halas.

My first impressions were that the site is not just minimalist in form but very functional. first when you go to a radio station you want to hear that station right. so the radio starts streaming straight away. that is a goof Information Architecture choice you get what you want.

The screen is split not evenly attracting you but at the same time annoyed me until i picked up why it was split, a click on the Info button opens the player up displaying a very informative text on the show.
Apparently the right side is station information and the left side is current broadcast, a thing that you don’t get quick enough but a minimalist design requires intrigue.
The symbols are almost coherent and release you from thinking to some extent. They are obviously using common icons to make it identifiable.
Button labels are popping on the top bar buttons but not on the lower part so there is some missing coherency? or may be a design bug?
I dont think it was not planned. this site was very very planned and thought of, the minimize X button implies that there was a real thought of thoroughly and was designed thoroughly.
The Splitting line apparently is the show timer stating the position i am in and the total time of the show.
The creators of the site boast with not so great site signature of annoying wastage of real estate.
But back to the radio, as oppose to the creators site, is spreading on your site correctly and gives you the information you want when you want it. the information appears in the center of the player and spreads the radio player on your screen to put the information in a table or iconized layout that is true to the information it represent.
In the overall i really think that the site is much more condensed accurate available and the Information Architecture is well thought of.
Its unfortunate that the creators site is not as good.

 

 halas-radio-information-architecture [2:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I have been addressing the issue in previous post oblivious to the fact that it is a growing phenomena.
Now it became even a user driven one when MG Siegler from techcrunch decided to tell the services like face book how much would he pay for a yearly subscription.
I am not a fan of the Pay for a subscription or parish without knowing my services for longer then trial usage, but for the freemium deal i am all about.

As the comment i have made to the post i believe that the usage of paid services with a base price rather then giving you some services and then charging you for the premium package is a wrong business model for most of the services in the web. people got used to the free and like it and are willing to pay for the pro if they require the additional services.
I use flickr and i am a pro member since i saw the value in the service, as a counter point i use the AgileTracker and i am not going to use the pro service Agile Agenda supply since i am not in need of that and i need only the client locally.
Will i be more lenient to buy the service when i require? yes i will do so since their tool is great and when in sync probably greater.
So what is freemium at all?
Freemium is offering a basic or a service with ads free and giving you the option either to upgrade to remove the ads or add the premium functionality.
And no trial of a very expensive software is not a freemium business model nor is a free service going into a pay business model. Oracle XE and SQL Server Express (growing recently to the Visual Studio Express family) are a wonderful example of a freemium business model In response to the MySql assault.

But for services to start charging money at the front door after years of free services? that is just wrong, foolish and wrong.
If you want to expose users to your alternatives you just need to push them and let nature do its course. i am looking for the next free P2P radio client.
Actually i am very happy i left Last.fm since then they managed to expose all their clients listening information to the RIAA and made a nice bar fight with techcrunch denying it.
But that was just because they needed the money… i can lash at last.fm now for ages but lets go the the original argument i am making. if Last.fm would not go and make you pay for a service you have gotten for a small fee of exposing your data to them and letting them rip the songs of your machine. and they used commercials more offering an ad free pro version with ability to do more in the widget world and in the community will you not take that opportunity?
And last.fm are an annoying example since they were using your services as much as you used theirs to get your songs available to other users.
I assume that this was a more appropriate contract then the one they lazily devised in their couches.
Assume that face book will now charge you for image sizes and video uploads making you a pro user for 15$ a year. that will be a reasonable price especially if it came with some more features.
The only problem there is that they might lose some users that were dangling away or the ones with moral standards.
And some of their rivals like my space would get more traffic (although they are number one any way).
But i am sure that steps like that from a competitor will make others follow.
Google will be the last one to move since they are running the biggest advertising agency in the world and will not want any one not to be exposed to the content due to some little fee.
Having said that they are a very good candidate to put their freemium services.
So what is the future? i say freemium is going to be the best breed approach to get users hooked and if you have a good service you will get your crowds hoarding in.
What sort of incentive will be given for the clients to upgrade can very and will be probably dominated by ad free, more space and more features. though i hope to see some more incentives in the features and space then in the ad free.
But it all could be because i admire Fred Wilson and he favors the model as well.
So Freemium it is for me. with a side dish of features if i may.

 

 freemium-fad.mp3 [3:39m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Phoenix the BIOS manufacturers have devised a new replacement to the Operating System, their main claim is that the OS is becoming sluggish and slow with time and when i just want to surf the net and check emails i dont need the whole windows to load. sounds reasonable and quite appealing.
The name of the technology is HyperSpeace, and they claim its very promising and interesting.
I can see the potential of opening the computer that quick and doing whatever i need but i can also see the pitfalls of such a technology.
We might believe that the ability to start the computer like that is better but the problem we face is that the OS we are working on is not our normal one but a BIOS installed one, this creates 2 OS on the system with 2 different profiles requiring now some synchronization. since many put important folders on the desktop of windows, or links to folder structures on other locations, to shorten the time to get to important information when we have 2 OS its almost like having 2 computers. we need to sync the links/bookmarks/accounts to the one that is not synchronized.
So unless phoenix will tackle this problem i see it in limited use, mainly in the relm of open go to gmail check messages and close.
Experts will claim that they have everything as SaaS and need nothing more then what is been given to them by the Phoenix OS, but how many people like that do you know that are not IT professionals.
So the appeal is mainly in the IT industry.
I am predicting this technology will not last long and will be adopted in the IT community for a short while until we all move to MAC/Linux and use sleep instead of shutdown.

 

 phoenix-bios-the-new-operating [1:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I bumped into this YouTube movie by accident.
That is backed up by this website.

It seems very high level but depicts the economic situation we are in in a very fun and easy to comprehend.
If i was the creator i would have taken a few more minutes to explain the Green/Cyclic methods that are available and not just toss the names in the air as they do.
But what really got me in this movie was that all the American way is the outcome of a design made by Victor LeBow and not “Natural Market” conditions as i always thought. it makes me ponder if the American way is not the wrong way to manage an economy.
So i set to find the document and read it to see what are the … hiding.
i found the Article from 1955 lying around the web.
As i thought the article has a lot more then the quote used in the movie:

Victor seems to put a lot of emphases in the article about the power of the new medium called television and the consumer behavior.

This factor of symbol and significance has become partly obscured with the advent of television. Here we have a new and most powerful medium of communication. It creates a new set of conditions, impelling toward a monopoly of the consumer’s attention. For the first time, almost the entire American consuming public has become a captive audience.

What Television Sells?
Television actually sells the generalized idea of consumption. It promotes the goal of higher living standards. But the commercials are an intrusion. This captive audience, spending several hours a day viewing television, is faced at best with the necessity of rejecting all but one of the automobiles that come into its living room, all but one or two of the breakfast cereals, all but one of the coffees, the wrist watches, the cigarettes.

And it seems to me that the way the movie depicts the world is, again, an American way and angel, making it look like a big conspiracy theory to simplify the problem.
No one read Victor’s article, in the government in the 1950’s, and pondered how to implement this as a global scheme.
It sounds more like “our addiction to the television has taken its toll” story, that is part of the American history.
I am not undermining the movie and its message in any way and want to emphasize it, but the cause to this should be the right one and not a fake Americanized truth.

More intriguing is the fact that Brand loyalty is also a big part of the article pointing to the future of brand positioning techniques,

the consumer’s highest loyalty is actually towards his standard of living, toward the goals, aspirations, and wants which comprise the reason for his existence.

making us today associate the brand with our goals and aspirations rather then the functionality.

Reading the article makes you feel that we are not that different from the people in the 1950’s and have not changed much.

The real goals are to look better, live better, dress better, travel better.

In my opinion Victor LeBow only predicted the future in some aspect seen the way people react to the new media of television and the consumers actions of the 1950’s. this led him to a very accurate prediction of the future but not more then that.

Coming across this Review by victor lebow of Robert Heilbroner book, Business Civilization in
Decline it seems that the prediction of the Sky is falling was made more then once and that the end of the capitalist era was just around the corner in 1976 too.
I wonder why are we still using the same obsolete methods as a society and not act to change it?
I hope that this movie although been Americanized and a bit distorted will make its impact and push us as a society to better manage our global resources.

 

 over-commercialism-the-reason [3:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

VMWare Private Cloud computing, now that sounds quirky, using VMWare for a cloud is bizarre and seems to me like the upside down solution. Why should a company invest in a virtualization solution and then go and turn it into a cloud computer?

What are the advantages especially in ROI and utilization?
I can understand the need in spannable resources in the IT and the ability to provide space as service and so on but, wasn’t private cloud computing suppose to be getting us as close as you can to the bare bone? Supplying us with on demand processing/storage? so how will be a VM able to supply me with exactly that when we know that a VM adds a layer to the hardware.
May be the target is different, some old esx servers are available in many places and make decent sense to become a part of a cloud computing. If that is the case why not have a Ubuntu eucalyptus implementation instead of the VMWare proprietary solution enabling you running on VMWare and normal machines.
Why turn to this very proprietary solution?
That beats me.
I hold the thought that if you are an organization you should deploy something useful that is spanable across the whole infrastructure and operates indifferently of the hardware.
I guess that the guys in VMWare were just trying to hook the people already involved with them to make the move to a familiar environment and justify the cost to the board.
Some claim that the Amazon is hosting in a Virtualized environment for their EC2 and that might be the case, and amazon do place you in a position to buy your computational supply in chunks called Virtualized servers.
AS got discovered by Peter Wayner on InfoWorld

After a few hours, the fog of hype starts to lift and it becomes apparent that the clouds are pretty much shared servers just as the Greek gods are filled with the same flaws as earthbound humans. Yes, these services let you pull more CPU cycles from thin air whenever demand appears, but they can’t solve the deepest problems that make it hard for applications to scale gracefully.

So may be the VMWare solution is better/similer to other solution?
I return to the previous problem I have with running a VM to support a real time need of CPU cycles and the investment in Virtualized environments to create these computers.
When google lashed at VMWare they had the same argument

In the virtualization approach of private data centers, a company takes a server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. We do the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer.

This in turn ties both of my problems with the VMWare implementation together to a one coherent issue with virtualised clouds. The increase in efficiency is coming with a cost of having to buy dedicated hardware and jeopardise the performance with the added VMWare layer.
I can understand the need for a Private Cloud and the ability to stretch resources to the organization on demand making the production environment stable and flexible but I think that the solution is not a VMWare one.
The VMWare solution will appeal to the avid VMWare professional who wants to keep his job easy and not learn new tricks.
If I was an organization COO/CTO that needed to recommend on a solution to our private network I would have chased the Eucalyptus Ubuntu solution or the Reuven Cohen, thus utilising those old Pentium 4 that are been decommissioned to supply my organisation with more breathability, especially with the shrinking IT budgets that are now so common.
What do you think! Do you see a cloud without virtualization?

 

 vmware-private-cloud-sounds-quirky [3:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download