Top 10 Most Over-hyped Tech Products

January 6, 2009 Leave a Comment

Yet another top 10 list, so I’m already thinking top 10 lists themselves are overhyped.  I already posted a couple top 10 lists on IT trend predictions for 2009 in a previous post. This one is from Yahoo! on the top 10 most over-hyped tech products.

Segway Personal Transporter – there was a deal in Winnipeg that went bust, because it simply failed to recognize that it was Winnipeg.

I have a Wii – got it from Costco online about a month ago.  Two controllers and two nunchuk controllers, three games. Reasonable price and best of all they actually had stock (unlike many other places).  I’m liking the boxing with the Wii sports right now.  It’s very therapeutic (tho if you play a luddite and they win, will you be able to bear the shame?).

My son enjoys playing with his OLPC on a daily basis (we got one with a G1G1 program last year).  It’s too bad many of the deals fell through as there is some impressive technology and educational theory behind it.  At least its introduction has produced a line of inexpensive laptops and netbooks. Perhaps the hi-res and energy efficient screen will one day produce a number of tablet computers and other e-readers (hopefully less retro looking than the Kindle).

I think the iPhone is abysmal in terms of battery life (I don’t have one, just an iPod Touch), but I think the big thing about the Wii and the Touch/iPhone is the gestural interface component (I think Jeff Han’s presentation at TED in 2006 really grabbed peoples attention - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLhMVNdplJc – though I saw a presentation by Joe Paradiso from MIT when I was at NASA-GSFC about 10 years ago (see http://web.media.mit.edu/~joep/TTT.BO/wall.html for early work in this area).

If the Kindle didn’t look like 80′s ColecoVision, I think it might appeal to me.  I borrowed a few BlackBerries (as I don’t currently have one) and loaded some SciFi ebooks and found that they were pretty good for reading (http://knowledgenavigator.wordpress.com/2008/06/23/adding-freely-available-ebooks-to-your-blackberry/ )

Ahh, Vista – all the advertising and marketing in the world won’t help.  Micro$oft should actually invest money in making the next OS innovative (and abandon the silly widgets – I already have a big clock and calendar on my wall! …find something more interesting to amuse me.)

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Intel’s Experiment on Free Cooling to 90 degrees

December 23, 2008 Leave a Comment

Intel has announced the results of experiment that challenged myths about server room cooling:

  • The chipmaker’s air-economizer experiment reveals that servers can weather relatively harsh conditions while delivering huge savings on cooling
  • For 10 months, the chipmaker had 500 production servers, working at 90 percent utilization, cooled almost exclusively by outside air at a facility in New Mexic
  • Only when the temperature exceeded 90 degrees Fahrenheit did they crank on some artificial air conditioning. Intel did very little to address air-born contaminants and dust, and nothing at all to deal with fluctuating humidity
  • The result: a slightly higher failure rate – around 0.6 percent more – among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company’s main datacenter – and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year in a 10MW datacenter using free cooling over traditional cooling.

The computer industry has a practice of keeping data centres under 70F/21C. The University of Winnipeg Library server room runs around 90F/30C on an average day. Our mean time to failure (MTTF) on drives and blistering capacitors on motherboards has been no where near industry standard reports.  Perhaps it is a myth and the hotter, the better…or perhaps we’re just too lucky. We’ve been running about 10 servers in the server room for about four years now, so we’ll have to see if they start to get a bit more cranky as they get a bit older.

Filed under Green, Library Systems, News

Who’s Laughing Now: Libraries Offer Free Relief from Tough Times

December 12, 2008 Leave a Comment

The recession is not supposed to hit Manitoba as hard as rest of Canada, and, in comparison to the United States, the recession in Canada (for those who may have actually heard journalists or politicians use the ‘R’ word or even the word ‘downturn’ or perhaps the phrase ‘lower growth’) is supposed to be nowhere near as dramatic.   But speaking of something that is dramatic, I enjoyed this NBC news clip of Libraries Offer Free Relief from Tough Times that my American colleague, Michael Sauers, posted to his blog.  As as Librarian I spend a good deal of time promoting my Library and the need for Libraries in general, but I’m glad big news media is finally helping to promote the virtues of Libraries.  Looking back on my previous post Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past, it does seem like there’s less opportunity to aim such satire at Libraries.  However, as big news media gets a hold of this and mixes the merits of Libraries in to a two and a half minute soundbite, there’s something that makes a much bigger and better blockbuster.

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IT Trend Predictions for 2009

December 8, 2008 Leave a Comment

CIO Insight has announced their top 10 disruptive IT trends for the coming year.

New Media
Augmented Reality
Social Networks
Information Transparency
Web Waves
3D Printing
Molecular Computing
Cloud Computing
Semantics
Web as Reasoning Engine

Gartner has also announced their top 10 strategic technologies for 2009:

Virtualization
Cloud Computing
Servers — Beyond Blades
Web-Oriented Architectures
Enterprise Mashups
Specialized Systems
Social Software and Social Networking
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Green IT

There’s some overlap between the Gartner and CIO Insight lists (when you figure “Web Waves” on the CIO Insight list equates with “Business Intelligence” on the Gartner list).  We can bet that no list of predictions will be dead on.  The Gartner technologies have better explanations and straightforward categories …let’s hope clarity provides more direction (better understanding and informed leadership) and becomes a better predictor than something that’s much more ambiguous and uses some odd rather odd labels for these trends.

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Partnership – New Issue

June 23, 2008 Leave a Comment

A new issue of the Partnership (the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research; 1191-9593) has just been published.  As the Section Editor for the Media / Publications Reviews section for the journal, I have a particular affinity with this journal.

The Media / Publications Reviews section completed 17 reviews of 18 books in this latest issue (Vol 3. Iss. 1).  Of course, there’s much more — so take a look today!

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