Big SAP Databases

In this context he may well be talking about big SAP databases.

There aren't that may SAP DBs over 12TB.

The beauty of having your DB in memory is fast reporting without having to set up a dedicated data warehouse reducing server count and storage requirements.

SAP/oracle Don't blame the software

Blame the implementation partner/project management team

For every failed project there are 100s where putting in SAP/Oracle has been a success and has resulted in inefficiencies.

If they were truly crap enterprises would not by them.

Far too often certain individuals (mainly finance and bean counters), control the implementations with only their requirements being important without looking at the true business needs.

Depends on the user

However Linux in my experience had never been a hit with anybody but the geek.

I support a number of user types and have tried various OS's on all,

1. The wife. Form over function,

Likes win7. Dislikes win 8. Hates XP hated Linux even more. Loves her Mac.

2. 9 year old son. (Potential geek in the making).

Within hours was teaching me how to use win8. Likes win 7. XP is just boring. Linux (why does it look shit)

3. 14 year old step daughter. Brain washed by nerd dad that Linux was the way to go, but could not exchange files with friends. XP looked shit, win 7 great. Win 8 what's the point.

Mac. Looks good but can't exchange files with friends.

4. End users at work. Good generally care, but hate win 8 and must have office. Open office on Linux trial did not go we'll.

5. Me. Office a must for work. So win 7. Fire up and rdp session for redhat and suse for system admin.

Home. Win 7 for photoshop. And XP for a very propriety 8 in: 8 out recording interface. Which has never seen a Linux driver.

Conclusion. Give win 8, which I like from a stability and performance point of view a win 7 front end (by all means if a touch screen is available start with metro)

Consitency

It all comes down to needs.

I for one am glad that Linux has not won out on the desktop.

I move from customer to customer. The one thing that is consistent is the desktop operating system I have to use. Either XP or Windows 7. If I had to deal with a different Linux distro every time, I'd waste alot of time getting to grips with the environment.

Thankfully SuSE or Redhat have become the defacto Linux at the server end.

I tried Linux at home using my family as my test subject. They didn't like the look and feel and my son couldn't play the games he likes to play. My daughter uses office at school and regularly has to do her homework in office. He hated Libre/openoffice. Also reliability was an issue, which was not the case with XP on the same machine.

Now we also have a Mac. Yes we have the same problem with the games, but we have MS office on the Mac so daughter is happy. My wife likes the Mac (because it's shiny) and intuative and is more stable than either windows or the Linux distribution.

I know people will say. You should have used, gnome or KDE or ........ Or you should have spent longer getting linux to work, tweaking the desktop. That is exactly what I don't want to do with a home machine.

I want a consistent look and feel whereever I go. I deal with the differences between Unixes/Linux on the server end everyday.

And why not?

What do you think is behind the iTunes Store?

SAP gets a lot of bad press due to shit implementations that have nothing to do with the software just shit consultants and SIs.

You never hear about the implementations that work. And there are many

Send it somewhere sunny

Why not send the resulting fluids somewhere where the sun always shines, such as Austrailia (lots of useless desert there) or the Sahara.

A few thounds square miles of Solar panels and you could probably generate enough energy to seperate the C from the O2.

Actually why not ship loads of water out there and generate hydrogen for fuel?

To bust a few myths

Hana is not built on ABAP technology.

Hana is fully scalable (IBM have a 100 node test rig with 1TB of memory per node)

Given that it uses relativley inexpensive x86 nodes, prices for hardware will come down

year apon year, unlike Oracle hash job of exadata that still relies on aggregation and extraction

of data and uses propriorty hardware.

SAP Payroll

There is no real technical excuse for screwing this one up. I know some people hate SAP, but payroll is SAP bread and butter and has been a stable product for 15 years and SAP payroll consultants are two a dozen.

This sounds like a complete cock up at the requirements gathering stage and potentially a data migration cock up, project management and scope management the likely overall cause.

No problems with win 8

Well I installed win8 on an old Athlon64 x2 running at 2ghz. With 4gb ram. It runs perfectly. Think of thee new UI as a big start button and no problems with usability. The kids like the MS store.

If anything it has fewer problems in terms of stability than Win7.

Ok I do hate IE10 lots of compatibility problems with lots of sites, but a quick chrome install fixed the issue.

Not need to buy a new PC at all though. Run faster than XP or Win7.

Not an MS fanboy also run an iMac and a Solaris workstation at home.

SEP field

No no no. Douglas Adams had it right.

Just generate an SEP field.

It's Somebody Elses Problem

AMD buy?

How about this for an idea.

AMD and ARM get a 64bit ARM processor out the door with the new seamicro architecture.

i.e. x86 and ARM on the same board.

AMD is on its death bed, and get snapped up by apple (gets them into the enterprise market at the same time)

New iMac comes out with x86 APU which is nice and slim with decent graphics performance, and an ARM co-processor they can then slowly migrate apps over to ARM. All of a sudden 5 years down the line x86 get dropped but they now have an nice ARM+Radeon 64bit APU.

OEMs are the problem

In that the Llano chips are seen purely as a way of reducing cost (i.e. cheaper motherboards without dedicated graphics) and thus they go into low end laptops without much thought to design.

Take the new Piledriver based Trinity chips. Which do outperform the intel 4000 Graphics chips, now add a dedicated AMD GPU and you can crossfire the APU with the GPU which will outperform most mobile GPUs.

Diesel range extender

Now the best possible hybrid would either be a diesel+Battery hybrid (diesels tend to give the best economy at cruise speeds to charge the battery). However you do need a heavier engine and a turbo for when the diesel needs to drive the wheels directly and provide the power required.

However even better would be a full electric car with the diesel generator just charging the batterys rather than driving the drive train directly.

A managed economy aka USSR!

The biggest difference between a federal Europe and the US is that the US was a reletivley new Country able to come together under one flag with roughly similar values and the same language.

Now a federal Euroupe would be much closer to what the former USSR was, older countries with a long history, different values, different languages. The USSR was controlled by fear from Russia, who didn't have a clue how to manage their own economies, with some countries being forced down a single economic route with no diversity, so when it split up most countries where in the shit.

It would become a two tier federation with the rich north, exporting the cheap low value jobs to the southern countries (A bit like Germany post reunification).

The Italians/Greeks/Spaniards will never have the same work ethic/values as the Germans, so they will never be able to compete internally.

ERP/Webserver

About the only place where I can see this could be of benefit over a GPU style co-processor is in ERP/Web type loads, where you have highly threaded/highly parallel small integer type work loads.

i.e. Large parallel payroll jobs, or very dense web servers, where each thread does very little workload wise but you have alot of users.

But for HPC not a chance.

All in the memory!

For general office use an old Athlon x2 64 is totally adequate for your day to day needs.

It's memory which is the bottleneck on most office machines. Most companies still roll out laptops and desktops with 1GB of memory 2GB if you are lucky this is what really slows down productivity.

Add in a modern GFX (even a cheap one for £30) and you get good performance with modern browsers (thinking IE9).

Now build the GFX into the processor which AMD are doing, even with a lowly dual core or quad core and plenty of memory (64bit OS helps) and an office machine should last for years.

Workstations are a different matter, but they really only make up a very small proportion for standard business use.

Thermodynamics

mmmmm sounds wrong to me.

Kinetic energy is converted to electrical energy hence energy is taken out of the wind.

This has the concequence that

a) The pressure behind the blade will be lower

b) The temperature behind the blade will be lower.

Think of a turbine in a Gas turbine engine. Hot fast air flows in and turns the turbine (windmill blade) the air exits at a lower pressure and lower temperature.

The mixing of air is going to be insignificant except maybe for the local environment.

Tablet to become the desk top

How about the tablet will become (a few more performance iterations will be required) the desktop.

All you need is a docking station with a decent monitor/mouse/keyboard.

You plug in your tablet (or compute unit) the OS then switches to desktop mode (aka Windows 8) and you use it in the traditional way.

Undock it and it switches to tablet mode. Most of the recently used info will be cached locally on the tablet with a sync to "the cloud" via wi-gi/3G.

Obviously the one thing that will be required will be a docking station standard.

Just a screen is all I need

AV amp has all the HDMI inputs and proper surround sound outputs I require.

Just need a set top box with all those bits (maybe with integrated bluRay).

Current bugger for me is. Apple TV and sky box don't have iplayer, but blueray player does.

Bluray player does have media capabilities to stream from a PC but interface is crap.

Not a problem for me but family gets confused which source they should use.

Specify your own Device?

In some way I welcome BYOD. I don't have to lug two phones around, I can have a laptop that suites what I want to do.

Certainly when it comes to laptops most companies tend to have a one size fits all policy, suited firmly to the lowest common denominator.

Yes your senior exec only needs to run excel, powerpoint, outlook and watch some porn, but us power users do the above, but in addition may be running an X-windows client, visio, a browser with about 10 tabs open, a couple of PDFs and a load of putty windows. So our requirements are 17" screens, a minimum of 4GB memory, 4 core processor and large fast disk.

The lowest common denominator does not work, hence why more and more people are creating Vmware images of their work laptop and running the image on a personal laptop.

Wank & Wanking

Having grown up in Munich I saw these towns regularly.

There used to be a big Advert in one of the underground stations.

"Wilkommen zum Wankbahn"

With a picture of a cable car and smiling people looking out.

It was there for years and was defaces regularly.

macros VB for apps?

Is programming macros not programming?

You might learn Excell at school, but what about learning VB for applications at the same time?

Our best PAs have learned some VB and produce some really powerfull spreadsheets (OK not going to get into the argument of having a proper app vs Excell being the corporate database).

Kids need to at least learn to appriciate how a computer program works not just how to use it.

Maybe we should go back to good old BBC basic a nice old 3GL or pascal?

Easy to learn and quick to get results even if you do produce horrid code.

I learnt BBC basic when I was 15 and even got into a bit of assembler to speed things up. It is not hard for kids who have a knack for logic.

Do some fundamentals, i.e. core office skills for everybody with an introduction to programming and then have a seperate subject kids can pick who want to go down the programming route (they will probably not even need to learn office skills as they'll pick it up quickly anyway)

MAXDB=Adabas

MaxDb comes from Adabas, which SAP bought the rights to the code years ago (was known as SAPDB for a while). This was then handed over to MySQL and was going to be the MySQL enterprise addition. However oracle came on board at Sun so SAP grabbed the IP back again (Mysql was going to be certified for SAP at time).

MaxDB has been used for a while as an in Memory database with the SAP supply chain management suite it was known as live cache.

Book for adults

We have to remember this is book/series for adults, depicting a more realistic depiction of the times.

where sex/violence was common place.

I for one applad the grittyness.

Think of the scene in Two Towers where the orc wants to gut the hobbits.

"I'll take out your innards" is not what violent grotesk orc would say.

BBC Basic on the Pi

My youngest has stated he'd like to have a go at programming. And thinking back 30 years, I still think that BBC basic was probably the best beginners language there was.

"Hello world" being one line of code.

Drawing a box on screen 5 lines of code

So please somebody, port BBC basic to the Pi.

iplayer

Would love to see iplayer/4OD, etc supported as well

Too many people are Semi IT literate

Half the problems stems from too many people think they know alot about computers, cos they built their own PC.

However they do not have a clue what the techies really do. Oh is just A:\install is the most common joke I hear from the guys in the business.

Then you tell them you have to set up 127 virtual servers. DR/HA half of them, do pen testing for the internet facing part,run stress/performance tests to proove the system meets the SLAs that have been plucked out of the air.

And all you get back is . "I only want SAP installed."

Business needs to get back to the point where they realise that quality IT costs money. It can't be done on the cheap.

I often see project plans (far too late in the process) that are so far fetched, and they don't even have dependencies on IT, it beggers belief.

Then you get the big strop when you add in the dependencies and the project goes RED.

I also find there are just not enough really experienced people around to hire. Most CVs I get are from the Gui generation, ask them what happens under the hood and they don't have a clue.

Don't even need a screen

With projectors the next big think on mobiles, you won't even need a monitor, just a blank screen to project your screen onto

Imagine the kids

Beam picture of boobs onto random person on tube/bus.

Beam picture of their bits onto tube/bus and accuse everybody of looking at child porn.

Beam "Kick me" onto the back of your boss.....

Early days yet

Now I do need a desktop for what I do at home.

Recording with Pro-Tools, image editing with Photoshop. Fondleslabs do not have the power yet.

Now the rest of the Home PC is pretty redundent, i.e. Optical drives/Hard disks (thats what a NAS is for).

Now consider the processing power and memory availability likely to be available on a tablet is 10 years time?

Why not have a portable processing unit with a screen for when I'm up and about, which I can then plug into a large screen and keyboard.

All files are "in the cloud" somewhere.

Now the OS on the mobile device doesn't really matter that much as long as the apps are available and if not, well there will be some cloud alternative where the processing power is not local or I use some sort of VDI solution on the fondleslab.

The race is going to be for the standard in portable space that is able to adapt to a bigger non touch screen environment when sitting in the office, using a mouse and a keyboard.

Now lets think who's going to release such a beast,. Ah yes Microsoft and Apple are slowly combining iOS and OS X for just such a device.

AV amp the best solution

As to the switching issues. Get and AV amp.

a) Much better sound (if you are allowed the extra speakers)

b) Is a much better switching system (with rename options for the inputs)

c) Only one cable going to the TV (well it's actually just a monitor now), which is a must if wall mounted.

As to the Apple TV. I have a Gen2. It is lacking massivly in content (certainly here in the UK), but the integration with other i devices is great, i.e. the ability to use an iphone/ipad whilst sitting on my sofa to choose music or a movie is great and so simple to setup.

I hated my old Netgear device the iTV replaced

Dangerous for Oracle

Well SAP happens to be Oracles biggest VAR when it comes to database licenses, Piss then off too much and SAP with do an oracle and decide that it will no longer support oracle databases and priovide Sybase (or MaxDB) free of charge with some free consultancy thrown in to help migrate.

Alot of the SAP customer base on oracle (especially the old HP-UX customers) are already considering moving to DB2 or SQLserver as there is a distinct nervosness regarding oracle. Again oracles statement regarding VMware support is also steering customer away from Oracle.

Profits for the post office

Here's a novel Idea.

Rather than the likes of UPS, etc going back to their own depot, why not deliver (and pay a small fee) to the local post office. Just like we do if Parcel Force are delivering an item.

That way we always have a local pickup point and the post office gets a bit of extra money.

God I hate passwords

As a consultant working at multiple sites, they really have become a pain in the backside.

Each site has different timeouts, different rules (and they sometimes change).

The amount of time lost, due to having to reset passwords mounts up fairly quickly.

Even a well maintained encrypted password solution has it's limitations (i.e. I forgot the password that was reset just before I went on holiday). Hard disk crashed and the last good backup was two weeks old. (how many of us have nightly backups of our laptops)

Oracle arrogance

I think alot of this is down to people not liking oracle rather than prefering SAP.

I have a number of (SAP) customers, who are now considering migrating to DB2 or SQL server rather than stick with oracle. Far to much uncertanty as to where they are going support wise, (i.e. VMware, still not 100% supported and questions over the linux direction).

I'd imagine the same is happening when it comes to software choice, go to an expensive but reliable SAP or oracle...

Why are developers copying MS/Apple

Because the Linux community does not use the ergonomics experts that Apple/MS spend alot of money on.

It is these guyes that create the requirements for the programers to code for. In the linux community it's mainly the programmers that decide what the requirements are or end users who ask.

"Make it look like Windows/OSX"

But why is it that all linux desktops I've seen just look blurred, fonts are crap and to me still look like the X-windows of old.

Keep the bottleneck where it has least impact

In my experience if you find a bottleneck and fix the bottleneck the next bottleneck in line often makes the performance even worse. It's all about balance and not overloading any one component.

A CPU bottleneck can hide all manner of other sins

Crap Graphcis

Well I lived in Germany where the C64 was king (nobody had a BBC), so my parents got me an Electron. Booooooo.

OK this led me down the IT route. Was given a second electron and connected the two via the RS423 port and had one running as a dedicated graphics card (crap for real time work), so programs had the full 28K available with the other computer as the output.

However what really let it down for me (including teh BBC B) was the graphcs output.

The C64 had more colours much better sound and sprites.

But for programming the BBC/Electron was king (imbedding assmebler within your basic code was cool)

22.2 Surround sound?

How the hell I am going to persuade "She who must be Obeyed" that I need an additional 17.1 speakers in the living room ????

SAP benchmark

Well I've done an extensive comparison of the HP DL580s and DL585s comparing the Intel 10core/20 thread chips and the interlagos. (see benchmarks at www.sap.com/benchmark).

With SAP the conclusion is that an AMD core has the same performance as an Intel thread but at half the cost.

Now if you to go for a DL580 fully loaded you get 16 more threads than you do AMD cores, so if you are looking at minimum rack space usage and high server utilization and cost is not a factor then intel all the way.

Arch not suited to current Desktop

From what I can make out, Bulldozer is a server chip and was just not really suited to the desktop unless you are a real power users using all of the chips resources with lots of threads and apps running at the same time.

Now in the server this could be a real throughput monster although at the expense of single threaded performance, but not quite so bad as the Sun T2 processor.

But it will only really come into its own on a highly utilized server where hyperthreading on an intel chips stops showing its advantage.

Financial advice

Buy shares in canned food companies.

Their turn over will go through the roof with people stocking up.

Then sell the day before "dooms ay" (the shares will crach afterwards)

Polical fall out

Should fusion become a reality at the vast scales we'd love to achieve it will create and absolute nightmare polically around the world.

The middle east will loose its income becoming even more unstable than it already is.

Those countries without the technology will not be able to compete thus becoming unstable.

I hope to god that if we can get it to work the patents will not be inforced allowing everybody to use the technology and not create an even worse two tier world.

Still looks pig ugly

I know Linux is all about function over form. But no matter the GUI it still looks pig ugly to me.

If Apple can design a decent looking UI ontop of unix why can't the linux community.

I like to get back to a nice looking desktop after being burried knee deep in unix terminal sessions

SAP merger on the card????

This is quite interesting.

HP need software (which is what Leo was trying to achieve), but without a big Enterprise app all HP have is just tools.

Now with the release of SAPs HANA in memory database they are tied to hardware more than ever.

Given the Oracle competition with Exadata, with Peoplesoft, Siebel, etc, an HP/SAP merger would be a very good fit to put a blocker on oracles world take over plans, but there was one person standing in the way for this to happen. Yes Leo.

Use of a tablet

There are lots of uses!!!!

Work:

Yes it not designed for media/document creation, but I can go to a meeting without having to lug a laptop around so I can get/search emails at a drop of hat.

Quick googles for info, etc without being hidden behind a screen.

I can plug it into a projector if needed.

Use it on the train/bus to compose email replies or to create rudementry diagrams/flowcharts.

Whilst listening to music

Home.

Lounge around on the sofa whilst watching TV and surf/play Angry birds ;o) catch up on email (always makes a good impression replying to work emails out of hours).

Keeping kids quiet on long trips (have one of those cases that hangs on the back of the seat)

Yes you can do all of that with a netbook but the tablet is alot more user friendly.

What has apple done Right!

OK, I am a unix geek so am not scared of text based interfaces, etc,

but for me apple have got it exactly right. (although I do still use windows on the desktop)

What they have invested in is the user interface. And it looks great and feel great.

Why has Linux not penetraced the end user market. It does not have the UI that OSX and Win 7 has. It does not look as pretty. It might not matter to the small majority of geeks who value function over form but I like my desktop to look and feel nice. If apple can create a decent looking gui on top of unix, why can't the OS comminity do it.

Now lets look at the mobile market.

Again Apple have done a great job at making even the casing look nice. Just compare an average iPod to other MP3 players out there. Why have the likes of Sony not stepped up to the mark.

Then there is the iPad. Nice aluminium back, great screen and a nice looking UI.

All of the alternatives just look cheap and nasty. And Android is still very much a iOS look a like.

Expensive ones are crap

Well I had to buy a £30 cable at John Lewis. Was in a hurry and needed a 5m cable.

Now the difference between an expensive cable and a cheap one?

The moulding around the connector.

The cheap one is fully moulded so if you knock it it just falls out.

Now the Gold plated connector is clipped on. You knock it and the cable falls out and bends the pins on the inside and it becomes worthless.

(Why do flat screens have connectors on the back which stick out so you can stick it on the wall, hence the reason of knocking the connector when trying to wall mount the bloody thing)

Still just plain ugly

When is the linux Gui community actually going to work on looks?

Apple have done a great job in creating a nice polished looking gui ontop of Open BSD.

I look at the linux Gui's and they look just plain dull (Just like the firefox Icon).

I'm normally a function over form person, but if you want mass adoption you need the bling (just look at any other apple product).