dell on SWiK

Dell's Eee-killer to ship with Ubuntu preinstalled

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 08:57:33 -0700

That Dell-Facebook News…More Like Non-News

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:11:50 -0700

Last week, Dell’s PR team was busy emailing us about a joint announcement they were going to make in tandem with Facebook. They were going to announce a partnership, they said,

…around the next generation of Cloud Computing. In addition to the joint announcement, the companies will also be discussing their perspectives, insights and future plans surrounding the Cloud Computing space.

Since it conflicted with some of my other commitments, I couldn’t go. I am actually glad I didn’t go, for it turned to be much ado about nothing. According to a post on the WSJ’s blog, the only piece of news that came out of the event held at the top of a posh office tower in San Francisco was that Facebook has 10,000 servers — and not all are made by Dell. Dan Farber has a more elaborate report but essentially it says the same, except it also has Dell re-hashing the news that Dell is now working with Salesforce.com, replacing Sun. Facebook’s Jonathan Heiliger, according to the WSJ, said the company was:

… tired of all the high-cost features companies pack into servers – on a slide, he pointed to extra USB ports and unnecessary graphics capabilities as examples. Most server makers are selling what, in automobile terms, would be the equivalent of a Lexus “at a Toyota price,” he said. What Facebook wants “is the Scion product at the Scion price.” He said Dell seems to be ahead of other server makers in selling inexpensive servers that reduce power and cooling requirement.

So essentially Dell is offering stripped-down, cheaper computers that may be consuming less power! Dan Apparently the company has been doing that for a long time, as per their founder. So how this redefines cloud computing, I don’t understand. What it seems like is an attempt by Dell to add some Facebook pixie dust and finish it all up with the latest, hottest lipstick shade, called “cloud computing.” I gotta be honest, a certain impromptu toga party definetely had more news value.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

... GF v3 Memory Consumption, Rails App in 15 minutes, Managing JRuby Instances, OpenMQ 4.3, and Solaris on Dell

Thu, 28 Aug 2008 18:08:12 -0700

A compilation of today's news of interest:

Jason provides early indications of Improved Memory Consumption in GlassFish v3. Since GFv3 Prelude is early in the cycle of GFv3, expect further improvements over the life of the release family.

Charles has a detailed description of how to write a Rails App on GlassFish using the latest run-time/packagings. And Jacob describes improvements he is working on for dynamically managing the pool of JRuby instances in GlassFish.

From the OpenMQ Team, more Details on OpenMQ 4.3, which will be part of GlassFish v2.1. Proposed new functionality includes a REST Messaging API, AIX support, more platforms, STOMP Support, and more. As always, provide feedback to the team at Users at OpenMQ.dev.java.net.

And from OnTheRecord... the Original Announcement was last year and now we have the product: Solaris on Dell is finally here: Solaris@Dell.COM, Online Configurator.

New Video Card For Optiplex gx260 Desktop? - OptiPlex - Video (R) - Dell Community Forum

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:04:22 -0700

Dell only certified the ATI Radeon VE and 7500 for this system/chassis size. Check some other posts, but high end videocards won't be available. You can look into the ATI 9250 or so. Don't expect too much tho. The tower option for this system would have been a better choice (if you had a choice when you got this system) as it can take full size AGP cards.

Laptop Battery Outlet is the best source for Dell Laptop and Hewlett Packard Laptop replacement batteries and extended computer batteries

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:06:55 -0700

Dell Laptop Batteries

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:06:45 -0700

omconfig: Managing Components Using the Instrumentation Service

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:10:33 -0700

Dell™ OpenManage™ Server Administrator Version 5.4 Command Line Interface User's Guide

Broadcom bcm4310/bcm43xx (Dell Linux HOWTO)

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:10:56 -0700

Truemobile ndiswrapper [DellLinuxWiki].

Dell Offers HPC Systems in Europe

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:15:20 -0700

Dell has launched a pilot program to provide high-performance computing systems to European universities and other organizations. The market for high-performance computing servers grew 15.5 percent in 2007 to reach a record $11.6 billion, according to IDC. It’s not a completely random venture for Dell, which has 25 computers on the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, but it is an example of the computer giant chasing growing markets. We’ll see if this pilot makes its way stateside.

HP Keeps Pushing Touch

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:19:07 -0700

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that within 18 months HP plans to have multiple touchscreen products, including a laptop, “that use the same type of finger-tapping interface popularized by Apple Inc.’s iPhone.” If HP does use the same type of touch screen as that of the iPhone, it will represent a significant breakthrough for larger touch screens as it will help drive down costs and create a market for more applications.

The iPhone has brought touch to the masses, but HP and Microsoft have been pushing the technology for years. Microsoft’s Bill Gates showed off his first tablet in 2000, and in the last two years offered the world the futuristic Surface Table and the Touch Wall. And HP launched its second generation of touch-based personal computers earlier this summer. But the underlying touch technology for smaller devices is very different from that of big ones.

Behind the iPhone, Samsung Instinct, LG Secret and several other mobile phones with touch screens lie capacitive sensors. These are semiconductors that require the human body to make them work. For users, it means that fingernails aren’t enough to dial a number and that the resulting screens are clearer instead of filmy. But the capacitive screens used in phones would be prohibitively expensive if they were put in larger devices. They could also could cause usability problem, especially when used for tabletops, where an errant palm could easily flick photos out of sight or drag windows to the wrong locale.

That’s why HP’s personal computer and Microsoft Surface Table and Touch Wall rely on cameras built into the four corners of the monitors to make their touch screens react. These screens generally use LEDs to shine light across the surface areas. When a finger interrupts that light pattern, the cameras sense where the finger (or fingers) are based upon how the light scatters and react accordingly, all without the need for either a network of chips underneath the screen or pressure-sensitive films.

But between the large-screen touch offerings and the existing capacitive screens on cell phones, notebooks and tablets have languished, with most using resistive screens, which measure touch via pressure applied using a stylus or fingertip. Many tablet and laptop makers have capacitive screens in their product road maps, but in order to really drive adoption, they’ll need to incorporate applications that take advantage of touch.

Last month, Dell showed off the first multi-touch, capacitive touch screen for its 12.1-inch Latitude XT tablet. The Dell machine’s touch screen is provided by N-Trig, a startup with offices in Israel and Austin, Texas. On Monday, N-Trig released a software development kit that will allow programmers to build multi-touch software that can “read” gestures and touch to control applications. HP has its own internal software group that builds touch applications as well. It may only take a couple of years before our fingers will be flying — not over keys, but over screens.

image of first HP touch screen computer circa 1983 courtesy of HP

Google Eyeing a VC Arm?

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:12:22 -0700

According to the Wall Street Journal, Google may be trying to build out a corporate venture capital arm similar to other strategic venture groups at companies ranging from Intel to Motorola. The Journal reports that Google SVP David Drummond will be in charge, and that the search giant has hired 33-year-old former entrepreneur and investor William Maris to help.

Since Google already invests in plenty of companies, from Current Communications to 23&Me, the genetic information company run by Sergey Brin’s wife, I don’t think this news it terribly new or exciting. It also has a program in place for clean and renewable investments as part of its philanthropic arm. And so far, its track record as an investor has been unproven or weak given issues faced by portfolio companies. Current faces lackluster BPL use, Meraki is trying to stay relevant and electric vehicles are still far out there.

When a company sets up a venture arm it needs to decide if the investments it makes are part of a money-making effort similar to the way Intel now invests its capital, or to push product lines or ideas. Google already invests in companies to further its technology goals, so it may be looking for a strategic arm to create financial returns.

The downside of setting up a formal investment arm is that investing in startups is a long-term effort and many public companies are driven by short-term results. In tough times, it can be hard to write down the value in the portfolio, as Dell and Boeing discovered after the crash. They have both discontinued their strategic investment groups.

Update: To create a successful strategic investment group a company really needs to focus, something Google has not historically done well. If the goal is to complement and push Google’s technology efforts, the comapny needs to figure out what those efforts should be, and ferret out the best startups in that sector. If the fund is motivated by returns, then Google will need to temper its desire to only get involved with the best, the brightest and the hottest items right now (You know like accepting a $17,000 a year daycare instead of $30,000), because valuations on those deals can be sky high. I’m not terribly optimistic that Google has the discipline to handle strategic investing, or even if it really should.

photo of David Drummond courtesy of Google

Motorola Creates New Divisions in Advance of Split

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 07:59:19 -0700

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Motorola has divided itself its home and networking business into three units, rather than two. In March Motorola said it would spin off its handset business in the wake of poor performance. Now, according to WSJ, it has further split its home and networking unit into: a set-top-box and home-networking business, a networking gear business, and the handset broadband business. Analysts view the move as a precursor to selling those divisions, although the company denied this in the article.

The set-top-box and home networking business appears to hold a lot of promise for a rich valuation as information technology companies seek to get a toehold in the home market; Cisco’s $6.9 billion buy of Scientific Atlanta is the most obvious example. Companies such as Dell and HP are eying the convergence of consumer technology with information technology, and they aren’t blind to the fact that a set-top box is a perfect way to marry the two. As much as I want to hope that my PC will send content directly to my TV, that’s not happening anytime soon — despite cool services such as Apple TV or Amazon’s streaming service.

On the cellular networking and broadband access side, the existing market for telecommunications equipment isn’t robust, prompting mergers as well as expansion into other areas by industry players. But Motorola is still a big fish in that small pond of major telco gear makers. If WiMAX takes off, Motorola could find itself holding a desirable asset, especially for a company such as Ericsson, which has so far stayed out of providing any WiMAX equipment.

As a side note, I checked with Motorola to see where its growing RFID and corporate radio assets might fall within this new organizational structure, and I will update the story when I hear back.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
Mobilize — Mobile Web Today and Tomorrow

GigaOM Interview: Michael Dell, CEO & Founder of Dell Inc.

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 02:59:57 -0700

Last week, at the Fortune Brainstorm: Tech Conference in Half Moon Bay, Calif., I caught up with Michael Dell, founder and chief executive officer of Dell Inc., the Round Rock, Texas-based computer hardware maker. He’s been trying to get Dell’s mojo back for over a year now, and in the past three months, things have started to come together, with sales, profits and the company’s stock price beginning to move in the right direction.

We had a wide-ranging conversation, one that covered everything from cloud computing to the likelihood of Dell entering the smartphone business to the advantages of being a founder. Below are edited excerpts from my chat with the eighth richest man in the U.S., who is as humble today as the day he started selling computers from his college dorm room.

On cloud computing

Om Malik: Will Dell ever start offering its own cloud services?

Michael Dell: Today, we sell to the guys who make clouds. We actually already have some services that we provide; you can think of them as software-as-a-service. For example, for managing your infrastructure, we purchased a number of companies recently like Everdream that are all services provided online. We’ve got a huge business in managing the computing infrastructure for large companies.

Om: What do you do as a company to become a leader in (cloud) client computers?

Dell: For the last eight years, here in the U.S., we’ve sold more computers than any company in the world. In fact, last quarter our lead kind of widened relative to the No. 2 company. Mobile Internet devices and smartphones are all part of our mobile computer business. Our focus is on the bull’s-eye of the volume, which today is notebooks, computers and laptops.

The interesting question is these “Internet-in-the-pocket” kind of things. Do those replace the notebook, or are they a compliment to the notebook? That is the kind of threshold question one would think about as you explore this.

Om: It is actually a complimentary device. But I think the bigger opportunity is in buying those devices because they can be replaced every six months.

Dell: No question, this is a large and significant opportunity and it’s one — I think you will see Dell move in that direction. But I think it will be sequenced in the right order relative to all the opportunities we have.

Om: What do you think is the biggest opportunity for Dell?

Dell: We have identified five big opportunities. When I say big, I’m talking about $5-$10 billion dollars each in terms of scale opportunities. They are the consumer business, mobile computers, emerging countries, enterprise, and small/medium business. We [have] reorganized the company around these key priorities.

On smartphones

Om: Any plans for mobile phones or smartphones?

Dell: We are certainly looking at the whole smartphone category, but I wouldn’t expect anything anytime soon.

Om: With the emergence of Google’s Android, and with Symbian OS and Microsoft Mobile already on the market, do you think that makes it easier for Dell to get into the phone business?

Dell: What you’ve got [are] industry-standard platforms upon which applications are being built and ecosystems are being created, and that kind of building-block architecture gives us all sorts of opportunities.

Om: You can be a big game-changer in this market, right? You can decide to work with Android or Symbian. Is there a desire on your part to work with one over the other?

Dell: We’re not ready to publicly disclose our plans there…we’re kind of working on that.

On being a founder

Om: From your perspective as a founder, what makes a founder/CEO different than a professional CEO?

Dell: The founder has special permission to make changes at a company. There have been two or three times within the history of the company where we’ve made some pretty dramatic changes; the last year and a half has been a good example of that. When I told our company that the direct model has been a great revolution for the industry but it’s not a religion, that was actually a pretty big shock to a lot of our people. Some of them thought it was a religion.

I think as a founder you get special permission to call into question things from the past, and it is up to you to figure out how to do that.

Om: So it’s almost like a political job in that sense.

Dell: I think there’s a lot of equity and trust that gets built up in the company over time. And when we’ve laid out the priorities in the organization — if we’ve done a good job and people see the results and they can see how their efforts apply to their success, and how they can realize their own dreams at the company — then they kind of say, “These guys know what they’re doing.”

On the future

Om: My impression has always been that your biggest competitive advantage was your supply chain; you fine-tuned it to such a level that others couldn’t compete. That has actually evolved over a period of time because others have started to think like the “Dell” way. What is the next competitive advantage going forward?

Dell: I think it’s true that we have had and have a supply-chain advantage. If you look at, for example, return on equity, you’ll see that our return on equity or vested capital [has been] massively higher than our competitors and still is today.

That advantage is very much intact in terms of the capital efficiency of the business. But I think that is really only part of the story. What informs that advantage is the connection we have with customers and the information that customers convey to us in the process. By knowing exactly what customers want and being able to build that and provide products and services tailored to customers’ needs and being able to personalize products — that creates significant advantage and significant growth possibilities for us.

Photo Courtesy of Dell Inc.

Upgraded Barebones Desktops Are the Way to Go

Sat, 26 Jul 2008 00:49:50 -0700

<sep/>willing to put in a little bit of time, you can save some money by purchasing and upgrading a Samba (thorough review) for $135 or a cool-looking, energy efficient Shuttle box for $240, both of<sep/>

How to Build a redundant iSCSI based Xen solution.

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 13:58:12 -0700

Ubuntu on Dell Inspiron 1501: NDISwrapper In Hardy Heron

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 10:46:42 -0700

Dell PE1950 NIC Firmware Workaround - MyWiki

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:13:28 -0700

Re: AW: [SPAM] Re: [Xen-users] network bridge problem - xen 3.1 - Xen Source

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 04:13:25 -0700

[from bushwald] Apple now third largest PC vendor in the U.S.

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 13:00:59 -0700

"The company shipped 1.4 million units compared to Acer's 1.33 million, according to Gartner's survey. Dell held the top spot, shipping 5.25 million units and growing 11.9 percent year-over-year, followed by HP." Whao. Dogs and cats living together!

Dell Inspiron 1720

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:50:43 -0700

Dell Inspiron 1720 (210-18177-Blue) Представляем новый портативный компьютер Inspiron с дисплеем диагональю 17 дюймов, доступный в восьми<sep/>

жилье

Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:50:40 -0700

Ubuntu 7.10

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 13:48:43 -0700

Re: [Xen-devel] Xen linux error message: PCI-DMA: Out of SW-IOMM - Xen Source

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:46:04 -0700

Bug 333658 – lots of "Out of SW-IOMMU space" log messages from SATA disks with XEN

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 11:46:04 -0700

Dell - Dell Linux - IPMI

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:54:49 -0700

Dell RPM Repository - DellLinuxWiki

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:54:47 -0700

Contains dell-supported drivers, applications, BIOS and firmware images

[from bushwald] Dell's Services Strategy

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 16:53:14 -0700

[laptop-discuss] Dell D600 laptop wireless Broadcom 4309 bcmndis

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 12:47:45 -0700

RE: [Xen-users] PROBLEM WITH DELL POWEREDGE 2950 & BroadcomNetXt - Xen Source

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 01:58:12 -0700

bnx2 ethernet plus debian linux 2.6.18 plus xen fix

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:56:43 -0700