Menu Content/Inhalt
Home

Digital Culture in 2013 + Feedbacks Print
October 2012

Feedback added after the seminar on 6 November 2012

@Haggis (Whangarei Girls High School): I really enjoy the presentation as it gave a bird's eye view of the IT landscape

@Karen (Blomfield Special School): Always enjoy your knowledge and insight into the future

@Wayne (Excellere College): Made me think outside the old square

@Nancy (retired, Kamo High School): Very satisfied with today's briefing.  I will be putting lots of thought into the idea of Reverse Advertising.  Will be very useful

@Bryan (Blomfield Special School): Opened my eyes to innovations
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Compucon Technology Seminar
1 November 2012
Kamo High School

Continuing Professional Development plays an important role in assisting peers to remain current and develop new competencies in information technology practices. We would like to invite school and business people involved in IT or business planning to attend. Philip Mahoney, Assistant Principal of Kamo High School at 1 Wilkinson Ave Kamo Whangarei is the host of this event.  Please register ASAP by emailing This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it of your name and organisation name.  Attendance is free of charge but registration is strictly necessary due to limited seating and catering.

2:00 – 2:15pm Reception
2:15 – 3:15pm Digital Technology Lecture (TN Chan from Compucon New Zealand)
3:15 – 4:15pm Windows 8 (Warwick Grey from Microsoft New Zealand)
4:15 – 5:00pm Muffin Break

Digital Technology

o This lecture will attempt to address 2 high level questions arising from digital technology developments: (a) How do we gain and mitigate the threats from digitisation for organisational productivity and competitiveness, and (b) Do we know enough of the digital future for educating our next generation?   In order to address the first question, we will review existing digital technologies such as online Search, Maps, and Video Intelligence to gain an understanding of the scope of impacts they can have on our organisational performance.  To address the second question, we will look at the technologies that are being developed in the works such as smart dust, smart meters and smart vehicles.  We will be amazed to learn that smart does not mean smarter, but so smart that we thought we live on a different planet.   The lecture will come back to the reality and address current hot and controversial topics such as cloud computing, local computing, and bringing your own device (BYOD).  We will make a lot of analogies for reflections of where technology is pushing us to.  This lecture will certainly provide big pictures of digitization, some ideas for organisational productivity and for proofing our future, and a perspective for dealing with our next generation.  This lecture is a tutorial, not a commercial, and is suitable for an intellectual audience.

o TN Chan is the general manager and system architect of Compucon New Zealand.  He has provided industry level guidance to the University of Auckland since year 2002, and lectures and seminars to teachers and students of Kamo High School for about the same period.  He is a chartered engineer with major industrial project management track records in Hong Kong and Wellington.  His current interest is in technology transfer, quality assurance, and business productivity. 


Windows 8 and the Connections for 2013

o Windows 8 is Microsoft’s most game changing operating system launch since Windows 95. It is Windows re-imagined for the new mobile, social, connected world we are now living in.  Windows 95 is a desktop operating system but Windows 8 is a lot more than that.  It will be more correct to see Win 8 as a client operating system (as in server client computing).  Win 8 has incorporated many improvements for business productivity as well as consumer friendliness.  So many that we may even consider Windows 8 to be consisting of 2 systems with 2 user interfaces in one package- one for desktop systems and one for mobile platforms (Metro).  This is definitely a unique feature and this seminar will address this feature in reasonably depth within the confine of 60 minutes.  An example is the Internet Browser bundled with Windows 8.  It is Internet Explorer 10 or IE10 in short.  Whilst IE10 desktop has incorporated more web standard supports, IE10 Metro for the mobile platform is a totally new experience.   For daily business productivity, we may like to learn that our familiar Windows Explorer is renamed File Explorer with a ribbon style of menu presentation.  File searching is made faster and more enjoyable as a process.  Join IT veteran Warwick Grey for an informative and entertaining look at what IT trends are shaping the future of business, education and our lives over the next few years.

o Warwick Grey was a founding director of Renaissance Corporation and has 20 years’ experience of information technology developments after roles with Adobe Systems, Corel Corporation, Hewlett Packard, and Microsoft. He is widely known as subject matter expert on the Small to Medium Business sector and for explaining challenging technology concepts in easy to understand presentations.  He is currently the Distribution partner manager for Microsoft New Zealand.

 
Video Management System v3.0 for 2013 Print
October 2012

We have spent 3 months testing a new version of Video Management System from our video surveillance technology supplier ACTI in Taipei and we believe to have mastered all its new features over the previous version.  The previous version is 2.3 and the new version is 3.0.0.1.24 as tested.  The new server application has 30MB of footprint and we tested it under Windows 7 Professional 64bit. The Workstation Client requires 89MB minimum storage area.  Web Client for live views does not require anything other than IE9 browser. 

We have installed v2.3 for all projects up to Q4 2012 and we will continue to maintain v2.3 for them.  We will start installing v3.0 for projects acquired from now on.   The new version supports all models of ACTI cameras whereas v2.3 may not support camera models released later than v3.0. 

(Hove Mouse over to enlarge)


 

Apart from a new graphical user interface which is more efficient and nice to look at (see Slide 1) and being faster in responding to user requests, the new version introduces these new capabilities:

o Display the live views of 64 cameras on one screen obviously with smaller window size for each (see Slide 2 for 16 cameras)

o Play back any one of the cameras that is on live view when prompted by the user (see Slide 3)

o Play back up to 64 cameras simultaneously

o Record with low frame rate for no events and higher frame rate when event is detected as an option to motion detection recording

o Support Microsoft Active Directory® service to provide a more convenient choice for user management

Limitations

o Does not support multicast
o Web client live view is not always stable- version 3.1 will fix this issue

END

 
Video Management System v3.0 for 2013 Print
October 2012

We have spent 3 months testing a new version of Video Management System from our video surveillance technology supplier ACTI in Taipei and we believe to have mastered all its new features over the previous version.  The previous version is 2.3 and the new version is 3.0.0.1.24 as tested.  The new server application has 30MB of footprint and we tested it under Windows 7 Professional 64bit. The Workstation Client requires 89MB minimum storage area.  Web Client for live views does not require anything other than IE9 browser. 

We have installed v2.3 for all projects up to Q4 2012 and we will continue to maintain v2.3 for them.  We will start installing v3.0 for projects acquired from now on.   The new version supports all models of ACTI cameras whereas v2.3 may not support camera models released later than v3.0. 

(Hove Mouse over to enlarge)


 

Apart from a new graphical user interface which is more efficient and nice to look at (see Slide 1) and being faster in responding to user requests, the new version introduces these new capabilities:

o Display the live views of 64 cameras on one screen obviously with smaller window size for each (see Slide 2 for 16 cameras)

o Play back any one of the cameras that is on live view when prompted by the user (see Slide 3)

o Play back up to 64 cameras simultaneously

o Record with low frame rate for no events and higher frame rate when event is detected as an option to motion detection recording

o Support Microsoft Active Directory® service to provide a more convenient choice for user management

Limitations

o Does not support multicast
o Web client live view is not always stable- version 3.1 will fix this issue

END

 
SSD vs HDD in 2012 Print
October 2012

SSD (Solid State Drive) as a technology for mass storage use has been under development for 40 years.   It has been discussed widely in the industry for mainstream use within the last 4 years and taken up by Compucon New Zealand for less than 14 months.  This timeline indicates SSD has made a lot of progresses and this article attempts to explain its status as in year 2012 and beyond.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) has stayed on Winchester technology invented by IBM for about 40 years as well. Its main developments are in storage size and production cost but not in performance.  We are seeing 4TB from a SATA HDD for a retail price of a few hundred NZD only. 

These 2 strengths of HDD (large storage size and low price) happen to be the 2 weaknesses of SSD and the major weakness of HDD (low performance) happens to be the strength of SSD.  SSD has 2 more weaknesses (in reliability and lifespan) than HDD. 

In brief, HDD is based on rotating disk with magnetism for storage and SSD is based on a type of memory called NAND flash that is stationary and uses voltage for storage.   There are 2 ways of storage in NAND flash cells- SLC for single level cell and MLC for multi level cell. SLC refers to one bit per cell and MLC refers to 2 bits per cell.  SLC is more expensive, more reliable, and has a longer lifespan than MLC.  Since MLC SSD is already much more (over 10 times) expensive than HDD, SLC SSD is only used in top end applications and is not for the mainstream. 

(Hover Mouse Over to Enlarge)



 

A new technology company turned up on the horizon and invented a few technologies on SSD called RAISE (see slide 1), Compression, and Zero Over-Provisioning which were detected on Compucon radars within the last 14 months.  These proprietary technologies have made SSD less expensive, more reliable, lasts longer (see slide 3), and further faster.  The advent of SAS600 or SATA 6Gb/s interface has helped release the full performance potential of SSD (see slide 2).  We are seeing SSD with a continuous Read speed of 550MB/s and continuous Write speed of 530MB/s.  Both speeds are above the last generation interface technology of SATA 3Gbps.  HDD is staying below 3Gbps at present unless RAID is applied. 

Whilst HDD vendors have consolidated into 2 major brands virtually forming a duopoly, many SSD vendors have appeared on the horizon and trying to turn the wave of fortune towards them.  Seagate is a major HDD vendor and they have attempted to join SSD by producing HDD models incorporating several GB of NAND cache additional to the original MB of memory cache inside the HDD enclosure.   According to performance benchmark test results, these hybrid HDD models are no where near SSD. 

It appears that we have to deploy SSD in reasonable storage size such as 128GB and more since size likes 8GB has not shown to be meaningful.   As of 2012, Compucon is promoting SSD for 3 uses.  The first is as the Boot Drive containing all applications leaving HDD for data storage.  The second is as the Cache for HDD RAID sets (this is the topic of a separate article).  The third is tiered storage for large businesses (again a separate article). 

Beyond 2012 are PCI SSD Drive and Enterprise MLC.  Wait for these new articles. 

 
SSD vs HDD in 2012 Print
October 2012

SSD (Solid State Drive) as a technology for mass storage use has been under development for 40 years.   It has been discussed widely in the industry for mainstream use within the last 4 years and taken up by Compucon New Zealand for less than 14 months.  This timeline indicates SSD has made a lot of progresses and this article attempts to explain its status as in year 2012 and beyond.

HDD (Hard Disk Drive) has stayed on Winchester technology invented by IBM for about 40 years as well. Its main developments are in storage size and production cost but not in performance.  We are seeing 4TB from a SATA HDD for a retail price of a few hundred NZD only. 

These 2 strengths of HDD (large storage size and low price) happen to be the 2 weaknesses of SSD and the major weakness of HDD (low performance) happens to be the strength of SSD.  SSD has 2 more weaknesses (in reliability and lifespan) than HDD. 

In brief, HDD is based on rotating disk with magnetism for storage and SSD is based on a type of memory called NAND flash that is stationary and uses voltage for storage.   There are 2 ways of storage in NAND flash cells- SLC for single level cell and MLC for multi level cell. SLC refers to one bit per cell and MLC refers to 2 bits per cell.  SLC is more expensive, more reliable, and has a longer lifespan than MLC.  Since MLC SSD is already much more (over 10 times) expensive than HDD, SLC SSD is only used in top end applications and is not for the mainstream. 

(Hover Mouse Over to Enlarge)



 

A new technology company turned up on the horizon and invented a few technologies on SSD called RAISE (see slide 1), Compression, and Zero Over-Provisioning which were detected on Compucon radars within the last 14 months.  These proprietary technologies have made SSD less expensive, more reliable, lasts longer (see slide 3), and further faster.  The advent of SAS600 or SATA 6Gb/s interface has helped release the full performance potential of SSD (see slide 2).  We are seeing SSD with a continuous Read speed of 550MB/s and continuous Write speed of 530MB/s.  Both speeds are above the last generation interface technology of SATA 3Gbps.  HDD is staying below 3Gbps at present unless RAID is applied. 

Whilst HDD vendors have consolidated into 2 major brands virtually forming a duopoly, many SSD vendors have appeared on the horizon and trying to turn the wave of fortune towards them.  Seagate is a major HDD vendor and they have attempted to join SSD by producing HDD models incorporating several GB of NAND cache additional to the original MB of memory cache inside the HDD enclosure.   According to performance benchmark test results, these hybrid HDD models are no where near SSD. 

It appears that we have to deploy SSD in reasonable storage size such as 128GB and more since size likes 8GB has not shown to be meaningful.   As of 2012, Compucon is promoting SSD for 3 uses.  The first is as the Boot Drive containing all applications leaving HDD for data storage.  The second is as the Cache for HDD RAID sets (this is the topic of a separate article).  The third is tiered storage for large businesses (again a separate article). 

Beyond 2012 are PCI SSD Drive and Enterprise MLC.  Wait for these new articles. 

 
<< Start < Prev 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 Next > End >>

Results 1045 - 1053 of 2512