A Nondenominational Holiday Greeting . . . Bah! Humbug!

The ultimate Politically Correct Greeting!  Please appreciate it for the humor it is . . .

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all.

I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2012, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere.

This wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference of the wishee.

My best to you and yours,

This is why I wish everyone a Merry Christmas!!

Empowered IT executive leading social media change - Page 3 - IT Workplace

Empowered IT executive leading social media change - Page 3 - IT Workplace

A Week with IBM Power Systems and Linux

Insights from the road…

The temperature wasn’t the only thing that was hot when I visited Austin, Texas, and LinuxCon 2011 North America in Vancouver, Canada, this past week. I took to the road to share insights from GHY International, which uses the powerful combination of Linux, the open-source operating system, on IBM Power Systems  in a production environment. I also wanted to get a sense of the current state of Linux on Power hardware.

From a corporate perspective, GHY has invested in state-of-the-art technology that allows it to seamlessly communicate with its customers and customs offices in the United States and Canada. It also prides itself on providing its customers with the human touch.

“We offer the best of both worlds: As companies look at their options for trade services, they’re looking for partners that can deliver all the important technology-based solutions but also maintain close personal relationships and accountability for performance,” says Reynold Martens, executive vice-president.

GHY International is in its second decade of using Linux in the enterprise, the last nine years on IBM Power hardware. Approximately two-thirds of our server environment consists of virtualized machines running on our IBM Power 750 server. We use SUSE Enterprise 11 Linux on our server instances.

We run very diverse workloads from core network services including a firewall on an IBM Power LPAR, to email and Web services, and finally to an application-development platform based upon the industry-standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack.

Using this powerful combination we have created solutions that save the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. These savings are calculated in real hard dollar savings from licensing, maintenance costs, training, etc., to FTE savings. As an example managing email, spam, anti-virus, context filters, etc., saves us an estimated 9.5 FTE annually.

It’s because of our use of Linux that I attended LinuxCon an event of The Linux Foundation, which is a non-profit consortium dedicated to the growth of Linux. This year’s North American event was held in Vancouver, BC, Canada, from Aug. 17 through Aug. 19.

Of special note during the LinuxCon North America 2011 event was a keynote with Dan Frye, vice president, Open Systems Development, IBM Systems and Technology Group; Jon “Maddog” Hall, executive director, Linux International; and Eben Moglen, director-counsel, Software Freedom Law Center. The keynote was moderated by Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. From a commercial position it was the feeling of the group that Linux is where it is today because IBM stepped up and made its original $1 billion commitment back in 2001.

News of the Week was poorly timed when Phil Robb, director of the Open Source Program Office at Hewlett-Packard presented his keynote the morning of Aug. 18, just as the news broke from HP corporate about the company’s withdrawal of WebOS based products, The audience, which was plugged in, was aware of this news before the keynote even wrapped up. Unfortunately for HP the keynote was all about how the Linux technology-based WebOS was so great. Needless to say, HP’s booth at the event was bare after that.

I did some recon at the event to understand how the market sees the IBM Power platform’s position. In light that the “Jeopardy!” playing computer, Watson, is an IBM POWER7 processor-based system running Linux that speaks volumes to the masses, IBM has a home run with Watson.

Currently, Red Hat and SUSE are the IBM enterprise partners that provide distributions for Power Systems. Red Hat is the North American market leader in x86 Linux workloads, while SUSE, the new/old standalone business unit from the recent acquisition of Novell by Attachmate leads in non-North American markets as the choice for enterprise Linux, but during a conversation with one executive from SUSE he indicated that their figures indicate that the company also accounts for at least 50 percent of the IBM Power market and more than 80 percent of the IBM System z marketplace. Of special note for me is the fact that historically SUSE has been in step with IBM Power hardware releases and not a fast follower like Red Hat.

For those wondering, yes I did have very detailed discussions with SUSE executives about the whole Attachmate deal. While a number of issues that reassure me of SUSE’s future in this market were discussed, such as Attachmate is investing, not divesting of this product portfolio, some nagging questions still need to be answered as to the long-term future impact to the open-source marketplace and potential indemnification that vendors will still need to put in place for enterprise users. If anything I think it plays very well for SUSE, which holds perpetual rights to use all products and their intellectual property without license.

Surprises and Delight

It was with great surprise and delight that I found some interesting tidbits that the IBM Power community should be aware of.

Gentoo, which is generally regarded as the Linux distribution that is like getting a box of Legos without the instructions for those who like to build things, has a community build of its distribution for IBM Power Systems.

Canonical, the distributors of Ubuntu, also have a community build for IBM Power Systems available. Since Canonical is already in the business of selling enterprise distributions, maybe the company will consider a future opportunity to make its community build an enterprise offering.

The last tidbit is more a future opportunity than a solution for today, maybe. IBM’s love/hate relationship with Oracle is no secret. It’s also widely known that IBM Power Systems with enterprise Linux can be a good solution for Oracle application users. Oracle, of course, bought MySQL, the “M” in the LAMP stack abbreviation. IBM has offerings to migrate to DB2 (a great database) but that breaks the industry standard of the LAMP stack, and at this time I am not aware if the DB2 team has done anything to make DB2 more of a drop in replacement to MySQL. The original developers of MySQL now have an offering called Maria DB, only available in an x86 distribution directly, but it is a direct binary replacement to MySQL, thereby preserving the LAMP stack and requiring no re-development while migrating to a different database, away from future concerns of what Oracle may do with MySQL. I found it interesting that this may not be as hard as it sounds as Gentoo’s public distribution already contains the IBM Power version of Maria DB. This is definitely one case that requires some R & D to understand what it can do and again increase choice in the IBM Power market.

About GHY International

GHY International has pioneered customs broker and international trade solutions through Canada and USA borders while providing trade compliance solutions to meeting the trade needs of our clients. Since 1901, the depth and breadth of our services at GHY have expanded to create one of the most successful, knowledgeable, and experienced customs brokers and trade compliance specialists in Canada and USA.

Video Games Future in Doubt

Online Game Play Future Cash Cow

I am sure that those that read this may think I am crazy, but from my own personal experience as a player and parent of an AVID player, the future of video games is in doubt because of the many enterprise players who are trying to figure out how to monetize the future of video game play. IE: we pay way more for broadband connections than we pay for a game itself, who wouldn't want a residual model for game sales?

Combine that with my belief based upon interviews with gamers that today most game sales are made to players wanting access to the online play world, that's where the real game play happens.

In my home that is Xbox Live and to a much smaller degree the Nintendo WII world.

The Current Money Pit

Xbox live has a tidy additional sum of $60/yr for access to play and interact with friends, regardless of interface used including the newest Kinect type interactions, why else would skype be so appealing to an organization where they sell a simple audio/video interface into the home for game play that could be leveraged with a Kinect device to be the core VOIP/Video station to the home. That means new services on the backbone of that and perhaps future acquisitions of broadband service providers so they own the future of the last mile to the home?

The Real Money

Regardless the real money they seem to be focusing on based upon all the chatter is subscription based online play. The chatter is in some cases just noise, in others a real concern as leading titles may become free or less expensive in order to draw a larger audience who start by paying for premium access to dedicated game servers, additional game content not already in the online store’s, or even access to play online. This last point is the real crutch of the matter.

As identified earlier, I believe that the bulk of game sales today are to players who go online, so removing online access, as a standard part of the game you buy will detract from future game sales. The strategy may be to reduce the cost of a product for replaced revenue for online play, BUT I would argue that no one talk about online play as a 1 time cost, the SaaS software market has already proven that. It is a subscription service model that really works for software developers, and games are after all just another type of software.

Future Implications

Sure there may be subscribe and get games for free models, Gamefly already has a simple model that can be used to understand how that could work, but the real question is what does that new model mean to game companies? Do we see title being retired and even though you love playing it, if not supported you can’t play it anymore? Then you need to get more content?

Summary

This is an area to watch, my predication is watch what the game console companies do an the top 5 game developers in each platform market, folks like EA are in everyone’s top 5 virtually as a simple example. The companies actions in the next 1-3 yrs will dictate the next 5-10 yrs of what will happen with game sales and if they can master that content, watch out Video producers as that is next target, but due to bandwidth concerns in just North America alone, it is doubtful if even 10% of the population could get enough bandwidth to service all the video, audio, game, voip needs. That is another story.

20 Things I heard at TEDx Manitoba

I was privileged to be selected as one of 100 attendee's at today's TEDx Manitoba, held at the Park Theatre.  Now the last time I was at the Park Theatre, I was about 30 yrs younger, lived in the area, and it was a still an active local movie theatre. Now it is a chic renovated destination for entertainment and cultural events. I never visualized the potential of the location, it was great!

Back to TEDx Manitoba

Our MC, Kevin Hnatiuk did a great job keeping things going today.

 

The day began with some African drumming from Chango. A great way to get the day going, although I felt rhythmically challenged first thing today :-)

Next up was Robert Sawyer, SCI Fi Writer. He talked about consciousness and how the internet if the first technology approaching the number of synapses, in discussing his concepts with other attendee's it would appear that there is a shared belief that the internet could be considered a growing shared global consciousness.

 

Not as impactful I  believe was our second speaker Nicole Buckley, from the Canadian Space Agency.  What she did share was that the amount of research that must go into addressing the challenges still ahead of us if we wish to consider travel to distant planets. Most uniquely was the research to solve those issues appears to have a correlation to solving diseases associated with ageing.

 

Kerry Stevenson raised some very interesting questions to which there are no immediate answers related to the impact of 3D Printing.  Yes 3D printing.  If someone can print a knife that is banned in a country, how to we control that if the 3D model is a file shared online?

 

For me one of the most emotional stories shared was that from Karen Latourneau, Ultrasound technician. She initiated a review of procedures (protocols) in order to improve the discovery of prenatal heart disease. Her initiative and review with her peers resulted in a drop of infant deaths from approx. 27 deaths a year in Manitoba to ZERO, her dream is to share the simplified protocols they created with other jurisdictions.

 

Len Brownlie, shared his insight in Olympic sport. It was interesting to note that the time differential between gold medalists and silver medalists was .measured in hundredths or thousands of a second.  Using sport technology can contribute to that success.

 

Dr. Frank Plummer shared an interesting story about sex trade workers in Aftrica that appear to have natural immunity to the HIV virus.  The story isn't complete regarding his research and we were left hanging.  The implications to the developers of vaccines is huge as this heads in a completely different direction than they have ben going.

 

A very encouraging story was shared by Shaun Loney, BUILD project. It makes me wonder why I never heard of this yet and why we aren't endorsing projects like this?  Maybe electoral votes has something to do with it?

 

Phil Doucette, shared a strong and impassioned story about Forgiveness and Monopoly.

 

Lin-Lin Wang, Chinese Musician impressed all with her performances on the 2 stringed Chinese instrument called Erhu.

 

Rick Van Eck, educational reform enabled through the use of concepts from Video Games.

 

John Weigelt, a National Technology Officer from Microsoft Canada came to share the understanding he has over the development of the economy that is recovering and rather than talking about a "Digital Economy", he talked about an economy enabled through technology.

 

Leslie Silverman & Columpa Bobb, I am sorry I didn't understand this session and what message they were trying to share. As an artistic dialogue it was very engaging and enjoyable.

 

Scott Striton, As CEO of local Smith Carter Architects he talked about Intelligent Buildings. It made a lot of sense and was an impressive approach that he shared.

 

I had a chance to talk to the father of HannahTaylor. Her presentation about caring and how such a small act of recognizing a homeless person can make a difference was inspiring. As her father shared, Hannah shares an insight and maturity not found elsewhere, she may just be an "old soul"

 

While I will admit I am a listener of Terry MacLeod's morning radio show on CBC, the story he lead with his 3 Guests left me awestruck at the back ground and  brutal honesty of his 3 guests, all former gang members. They also deserved the standing ovation they received as I believe there is hope and they are striving to be better citizens as they re create their lives for the betterment of them and their families. POWERFUL

 

Les Foltos, Peer Coaching for teachers. Interesting concept that delivered a part of the solution on how to transform education to utilize 21st century techniques to educate our youth.

 

Bernard McCoy - He is a monk and CEO of lasermonks.com, His presentation about Social Entrepreneurism was very intriguing. Basically a concept of creating for profit business that fund non profit organizations.  This idea of doing things for the GOOD of the masses was a new approach to the perpetual question of funding for non profit organizations that do social good in our communities.

 

The final high energy presenter was Terry Godwalt - Teacher and contributing founder of DeforestAction.  He presented so much high impact material, I am still absorbing it. But  basically the message was about developing meaningful ways to have children invloved in global issues. The key here is that they get to see meaningful results as part of their contribution thereby reinforcing the message that they can bring change.

 

The final item that I heard was not from any speaker but from discussing these ideas with others in attendance. We have so much to contribute and now the goal is to decide how each of us will play a part.  It was inspiring to see that we do have a hidden resource in Manitoba with so many great thinkers, now it's time to share these idea's, and I am beginning with this post.

 

Thanks for listening . . .