Moving and Storage Business News

The News Review:

- Sunday begins new era for cable subscribers
- White House Press: Moving Day Is July 3
- HP steals agenda setting crown from IBM
- Dell Launches New Mobile Workstation
- Also: Some gripes about what’s not included on eagerly awaited…

Sunday begins new era for cable subscribers
USA Today – Jun 28, 2007
PC as hub of digital content Microsoft is working toward making PCs the center of the home theater action. PCs run by its new Windows Vista Media Center and built with CableCard slots can function as the DVR. Such PCs also would offer inexpensive capacity for storage of videos, music and photos and could share them via home networks to TVs and other PCs. “People want to not only watch their shows on their own time, they want to have access around the home to the thousands and thousands of pictures they’re putting on their PCs and the thousands and thousands of albums and music tracks,” says Microsoft’s Craig Cincotta. “The PC is becoming the hub of digital content, and your TV is part of that, as well. ” Some industry issues remain Some cable operators preparing to comply with the Sunday changes have grumbled about higher prices they are having to pay for the new CableCard-ready boxes that must go to new subscribers and to subscribers changing service. Telephone giant Verizon…
Profitable and old Critics say that operators also made it needlessly hard to get one. “The drivers who come to your home have one CableCard in their pocket, and 20 boxes on the truck ready to install,” says Richard Doherty, senior analyst at The Envisioneering Group technology consultants. Cable operators are “salespersons for leased boxes. I’ve paid for the average cable box in this house seven times over their cost. They’re profitable, and they’re old. The boxes’ lack of advanced technology has hurt companies such as TiVo.

White House Press: Moving Day Is July 3
CBS News – Jun 28, 2007
The shift begins July 3 and the newly renovated press area officially opens on July 11 with a ribbon-cutting, with the first briefing planned for the following day. But it almost didn’t happen, thanks to a little issue called fire. Steve Scully, the C-SPAN bigwig who heads the White House Correspondents’ Association, said that the company that did the work built the newswire booths 6 inches too wide, limiting the pathway space for emergency evacuations. Worse, on the other side of the aisle were to be desks with chairs on rollers, and the fire marshal was concerned that they might be in the way of those trying to escape during a fire alarm. Facing an opening delay, Scully had two choices: Make room by eliminating some of the desks used by newspaper and magazine reporters, or install long cafeteria-style tables with stools bolted into the floor. “It would have been like being on an Acela train,” he groaned. So the association recommended losing four desks, and the opening is on again…
“It would have been like being on an Acela train,” he groaned. So the association recommended losing four desks, and the opening is on again. When reporters finally see the renovation, they will find a better-organized home with lots of new storage and production space for photographers. Most of the regular press — TV, the wires, the major newspapers, and magazines — will keep desks in the upstairs area, with radio and cable TV downstairs. By Paul BedardCopyright © 2006 U. News & World Report, L.

HP steals agenda setting crown from IBM
Register – Jun 28, 2007
CEO Mark Hurd’s favorite speech documents HP’s goal to shift from spending about 75 per cent of its IT budget on data center maintenance and 25 per cent on new technology projects to the exact opposite formula. HP will accomplish this, in part, by moving from 85 data centers scattered around the globe to two centers each in Houston, Austin and Atlanta. The same program has HP cutting back from around 20,000 servers to 5,600 â half of them blades â and retiring thousands of software applications. (At the same time, HP will go from 4,000TB of non-shared storage to 10,000TB of shared storage and from 435 “next-generation” switches to 6,500. )HP wants to finish off this Herculean task by Oct. 31, 2008 â call it All Hallows Judgment Day…
HP will accomplish this, in part, by moving from 85 data centers scattered around the globe to two centers each in Houston, Austin and Atlanta. The same program has HP cutting back from around 20,000 servers to 5,600 â half of them blades â and retiring thousands of software applications. (At the same time, HP will go from 4,000TB of non-shared storage to 10,000TB of shared storage and from 435 “next-generation” switches to 6,500. )HP wants to finish off this Herculean task by Oct. 31, 2008 â call it All Hallows Judgment Day. (The company, however, has a long way to go, having cut its data centers down from 85 to just 79 over the past year. )More often than not, HP refers to its IT shrinking as a “transformation.

Dell Launches New Mobile Workstation
eWeek – Jun 28, 2007
With no moving parts, these NAND flash memory drives offer greater stability and generate less heat and noise compared with traditional hard disk drives. However, these SSDs, which are made by SanDisk, will add about $500 to the Precision workstation price. While Dell has been working to reshape its consumer line of desktops and notebooks as a way to gain back some of the market share its has lost to…
While Dell has been working to reshape its consumer line of desktops and notebooks as a way to gain back some of the market share its has lost to. “I think well be seeing a lot from Dell in terms of pushing the technology envelope,” Bhavnani said. “In addition to the solid-state drives, the company has been offering free online storage in the last year. I think with a lot of its new models, Dell is looking to differentiate itself from other companies. They dont want to be known in the industry as just the low-cost PC provider.

Also: Some gripes about what’s not included on eagerly awaited…
San Francisco Chronicle – Jun 28, 2007
You can’t, and that’s not going to make it popular with the business crowd. In fact, this could be a headache for IT managers. The iPhone can deliver e-mails from a Microsoft Exchange server, but it requires IT people to change some settings that many companies won’t be comfortable with. And I’m not even sure how safe this thing will be working in a company’s network. — No removable battery. It would be nice to have a battery we could swap out easily without having to send the iPhone back to Apple. It means that we can’t just buy a spare battery to ensure that we’re never out of juice…
It means that we can’t just buy a spare battery to ensure that we’re never out of juice. — No memory expansion slot. The iPhone’s 4 GB and 8 GB of storage is better than almost anything on the market. But wouldn’t it have been sweet to supplement that with a MicroSD slot to add another 4 GB without a big fuss? Samsung is working on an 8-GB MicroSD card now. It would have been nice to have that option because some iPod users are used to 30 GB and 60 GB of storage. — The other things we’d like to see: voice dialing, games, picture messaging, removable SIM chip, instant messaging, porting over contacts from your old cell phone and other outside applications. These are a few things we’ve noticed.