Mike C Sees

Gregg Wolper at Morningstar comments that “index funds are in effect momentum players,” since they must buy into rallying stocks or countries, to continue to mirror an index.

IDC has published their annual Server Tracker report, and CNET pulls out some highlights:

• “The overall server market grew 4.4 percent to $51.3 billion from 2004 to 2005″ and “much of the growth took place in lower-end servers costing $25,000 or less”
• “Blade server revenue grew 84 percent from $1.15 billion in 2004 to $2.11 billion in 2005. Meanwhile, blades themselves got more powerful and their average price rose from $3,750 to $4,200″
• IBM had more than 40% of the blade market, and HP almost 35%.
• “Computer makers sold $17.7 billion worth of Windows servers worldwide in 2005 compared with $17.5 billion in Unix servers” — the first time Windows tops the Unix category.
• “Linux took third place, bumping machines with IBM’s mainframe operating system, z/OS” — note IDC separates Linux and Unix numbers.
• in the Unix segment, “IBM secured the top spot in 2005, with 31.8 percent of the market to Hewlett-Packard’s 29.8 percent and Sun’s 26.2 percent.”
• “IBM led the overall market in 2005 in terms of revenue, with $16.9 billion in sales and 32.9 percent share, IDC said. But IBM’s growth was slower than the overall market, and the company lost 0.3 percentage points of share.”
• “Two major server companies that grew faster than the overall market:
• HP (#2), with 8.9 percent growth to $14.2 billion
• Dell (#3), with 13.3 percent growth to $5.3 billion.”
• Sun (#4) revenue shrank 4.9 percent to $4.9 billion — hopes to rebound in 2006 with “new “Galaxy” line of x86 servers and UltraSparc T1 “Niagara”-based servers“
• “Sun is trying to restore Unix fortunes as well by making Solaris an open-source project and bringing it to x86 servers.”  That faces an uphill battle for open-source mindshare with Fedora Core - version 4 was released in June 2005.

If you have data in lots of places, it’s a challenge to synchronize files and directories bidirectionally, right?  Check out these links:

• Unison
• Data Transport Between Different Machines
• Synching Files Between Remote PCs
• SourceForge.net: Tsync: (Transparent) Synchronization

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

The eMarketer reports on research into why 37% of US households still choose dial-up over broadband.  Whatever the reason, if you’re designing a site for universal (US) access, be thoughtful of your page rendering times.  This portion of the market is apparently satisified with email, IM and simple Web browsing.  So think about offering a simple or low-graphics page format, at least as an option.  [eMarketer, Yankee Group, Ipsos Public Affairs]

“Remember to be gentle with yourself and others. We are all children of chance, and none can say why some fields will blossom and others lay brown beneath the August sun. Care for those around you. Look past your differences. Their dreams are no less than yours, their choices in life no more easily made. And give. Give in any way you can, of whatever you possess. To give is to love. To withhold is to wither. Care less for your harvest than how it is shared, and your life will have meaning and your heart will have peace.”  Kent Nerburn - Letters to My Son

“IBM/Lotus plans to infuse its entire collaborative software lineup with social networking technology such as blogs, wikis and syndication feeds.

“These things are not replacements for what we already have,” says Duncan Mewherter, development manager for blogs, wikis and feeds at IBM Research. Instead, he describes them as a light layer of collaboration.

  More…

Looking at InfoCentral as a possible solution for my church’s database, I notice that their initial implementation used PHP and mySQL but that development of that version has ceased: “the existing PHP code is not worth overhauling.” They “feel that the modern, lightweight use of Java is the best tool for the task at hand,” so they are “switching to Java, employing the lightweight J2EE framework, Spring, and the persistence layer, Hibernate.” Sounds like they decided a major re-write was in order, and that PHP as a language was not up to their needs. I wonder if they considered the object-oriented extensions of PHP v5?

This Spring framework is interesting… “A central focus of Spring is to allow for reusable business and data access objects that are not tied to specific J2EE services. Such objects can be reused across J2EE environments (web or EJB), standalone applications, test environments, etc….” So they have a lightweight container for assembling POJOs, with transaction management and JDBC abstractions, and an MVC web application framework.

Related Reading

• Introduction to the Spring Framework

“If you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative.” –Woody Allen