Wainhouse Research – Surveys

Survey results on use of videoconferencing.

Priceless – Frank Ackerman & Lisa Heinzerling interview – cost-benefit analysis

about their book  Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing

Seen on Stay Free!

Dan’s Data – PC hardware and gadget reviews!

A fun down-under take on the build-it-yourself hardware scene.  Kind of like Don Lancaster with more humor, (and frankly a little less mumbo-jumbo) or Jerry Pournelle but not as serious. His note from April 28th, is about home-built or off-brand rack mount servers.  And indeed, as soon as you start thinking about these, the hardware people get $$$ -signs in their eyes. Not entirely without reason, as the cooling in  rack mount is a huge problem, when compared to the same motherboard and components in a generously-sized tower case.  A little excerpt:

There’s nothing magic about this kind of server hardware; if you’re talking four or more CPUs and/or non-x86 architecture then there’s a considerable real baseline price increase, but any old PC can do many server tasks. And a PC built with better-than-average components – good PSU, motherboard that you didn’t buy at an open air market, maybe a 10,000RPM drive – should be just as durable as a purpose-built x86 server.

Once you start talking rackmount, though, you also start talking excitingly pumped-up prices. Maybe you’re paying for a serious support contract, but disturbingly often, you’re not (or the contract you do pay for turns out not to be worth what you pay…).

Server makers also have an annoying tendency to assume you want a “server class” CPU. Now, if you want multiple processors in an x86 server, then you definitely do want a Xeon or Opteron box. But a lot of people buying up-to-two-processor Xeon and Opteron machines with only one chip in them will never add another processor – or will, by the time they do need more speed, be able to buy another single-chip box that’s faster than upgrading their current machine.

My own home server, for the past six months, has been a repurposed Dell Dimension 100TX (if memory serves) workstation, that had one or two motherboard upgrades. It currently has a 450Mhz Pentium III or IV processor, and 256Kb of RAM.  Its running Windows 2003 Enterprise (!)  Since the on-off switch broke, I removed the cover, and it is sitting there, in all its utilitarian glory in my wire shelf…which almost looks like a rack mount. As Don Lancaster says in his classic book The Incredible Secret Money Machine II “Think cheap. Think skungy”.

And while we’re on the subject, don’t forget the O’Reilly publication Make which according to its home page, says, “we’ll also show you how to make a video camera stabilizer, a do-it-yourself alternative to an expensive Steadicam.” Don’t miss their round-up of sonic clothing…wearable clothing which generates sounds.

TechFoundation – TechFoundation Homepage

http://www.techfoundation.org/

As described in a VON magazine interview of Brian Allain:

TechFoundation is a non-profit organization headquartered in Cambridge that is focused on providing technology support to other non-profit organizations. That market segment has been technologically underserved and often lacks the internal skills to optimally utilize technology. TechFoundation supports non-profits thorough technology education, subsidized technology staff, discounted products, and assistance with obtaining technology grants.

HBS Working Knowledge: Social Enterprise: Nonprofit Networking: The New Way to Grow 

book review from Harvard Business School.

Microsoft has released a new junk eMail filter for OutLook.  This one is dated May 10th.  I’m finding that the combination of OutLook (not Express), with its Microsoft-supplied junk mail filter, and basic filtering of my eMail at my ISP, seems to be effective.

What’s odd, is that just this weekend, I got four spams in German…and they weren’t even obscene.  

Over at Everything Sysadmin, there is an interesting discussion of laptop economics. 

However laptops are different. Laptops seem to be treated like crap by even the daintiest of users. People drop them, slam them, toss them into the trunk of the car before speeding off bouncing it around. That’s a lot of wear-and-tear. Even if you have a fancy carrying case, there can never be enough padding in my opinion.

True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today’s dollars – and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart’s chief executive, was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee will earn in a lifetime.

Italics mine. 

From Paul Krugman’s column in The New York Times

“It may seem impossible to imagine that the technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”  The Climate of Man by Elizabeth Holbert, is a three part New Yorker article about climate change.  The first two parts on are online.   

I’ve been experimenting with SipPhone for some weeks. They offer a service that connects your internet phone to a standard telephone number  for approximately two cents per minute.  Like a pre-paid phone card or pre-paid cell service, you can purchase a block of time for $10.00 minimum. When you make a call a voice comes on the line telling you how much time you have available for the call.  I’ve been using the service when traveling to client sites. Once I connect my laptop to the client’s network, I can fire up EyeBeam (the XTen software phone)  on the laptop.  EyeBeam is configured to use SipPhone as the telephone provider. 

The EyeBeam is pretty spectacular; it includes the ability to do videoconferencing (which I haven’t even gotten around to trying yet…) However, there are numerous free softphones that you can download, including one from SipPhone itself which is a go-branded version of the X-Ten softphone.

Once the software is runing on the laptop the phone will automatically attempt to register with the SipPhone directory service, and you’ll see a message “logged in — enter phone number” and a display of your own SipPhone phone number, which is usually (?) in the 747 area code. (You can buy a customized “viritual” phone number too, in a number of different area codes.)

Other SipPhone users can dial your SipPhone number, and the call is completed over the Internet. This costs nothing. Only if you connect to a regular phone, do the SipPhone charges apply.  

Several issues as far as the calls are concerned:

1. A broadband connection is required. Both Verizon DSL and Adelphia cable seem to work fine.
2. The service appears to be much more reliable, with better voice quality, and fewer delays, in the mornings.
3. Depending on internet traffic, and presumably local LAN traffic on your office network, the software phone may not even register with SipPhone Central, and you will be unable to make calls.
4. At its best, voice quality is identical to that on a standard telephone.
5. If both parties talk at once there is a “collision”. As such, the service appears to be less than “full duplex”. 
6. There is sometimes delay between the time you speak, and the time that the other party hears your voice. 
7. The time to connect the call, that is, between the time you dial a number and the time it starts ringing can sometimes be a minute or more.
8. International rates are great. 4 cents/minute to Germany, for instance.

Note that items 1–6 are not necessarily related to SipPhone per se. I’ve had similar experience with Free World Dialup.

Alternatives: 

Maybe Skype+SkypeOut.   Phonecard minutes from Costco phonecards. (2 cents/minute)  Cellphone minutes.