Where have all the Hard Disc Drive manufacturers gone?

Posted on 20/12/2011 by Mike McNamara

As the major Hard Disc Drive (HDD) manufacturers move towards even further consolidation, two – Seagate and Western Digital  – have announced with very short notice that they will be reducing the warranties on a number of their HDD’s; in some cases from five years to one year!

The new warranty periods offered will come into force at the turn of the year and whilst ‘Enterprise’ designated HDD’s will keep most of their exiting warranty levels, it is likely that many of the new computing devices that the average buyer (you and me) purchase in 2012 will contain the reduced warranty HDD’s.

Some reports suspect that the recent flooding has caused this move, but Seagate – one of the big players – has said that they want to reduce the cash tied up in their 5 year warranty plans for new internal development funding.

Should we as consumers be worried about this move? On the price front, perhaps. Prices had already marginally increased due to the flooding in Thailand and one would think that reducing the warranty on HDD’s by 80% in some cases that this might have been reflected in a drop in the price of the affected HDD’s. However, there is unlikely to be any reduction in prices any time soon.

From a technical point of view, should we be worried that HDD’s will be of lesser quality? One hopes not and in fact all of the HDD’s will continue to be manufactured in the same controlled environment that they have always been made in. In my many years of using, installing, and sometimes recovering data from them, I have only ever experienced one complete mechanical failure of an HDD. They seem to be one of the most reliable moving pieces of computing technology in use today.

Another aspect these announcements have thrown up, is just how few HDD manufacturers there now are. This diagram shows how much consolidation has happened over the past 20 years with just three major players (Seagate, Western Digital & Toshiba) now left in the market. Perhaps Toshiba will be making similar announcements soon?

Slowly consumer choice is without doubt being eroded in this area and regulators need to keep a watchful eye on this market otherwise we could all soon be paying much more for our HDD’s with perhaps even less warranty.

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It’s all about the vocabulary.

Posted on 06/12/2011 by Mike McNamara

I came across an interesting #ePrdctn Twitter conversation the other day about the need to use a common language or vocabulary when discussing various publishing technical production issues.

In these #ePrdctn (there’s also a Wiki page) discussions the topics can cover a wide number of subjects including XML markup (just what do you call a person that does that task), JavaScript programming (is that about writing scripts or code),  data conversion for ePub and InDesign operations; in fact any topic that is involved in today’s publishing production environment.

Clearly a common word list or vocabulary is a benefit to any organisation when trying to define and describe its own workings.

Most common definitions of ‘Vocabulary’ today describe it as being about:

  1. The body of words used in a particular language
  2. A part of such a body of words used on a particular occasion or in a particular sphere: i.e. “the vocabulary of law” or “the vocabulary of nursing”.

It’s very clear that one person’s definition of a word may not always meet with wide scale acceptance by everyone else. For example, when writing some JavaScript, is the creator writing a Script or creating programming code that performs an action? Are they a ‘scripter’ or a ‘coder’? When marking up XML content, is the person that does that job called a ‘mark-upperer’ or a ‘mark-upper’?

Looking back over some recent projects, the discussions around well thought out vocabularies along with the building of Taxonomies to form the basis for Metadata, can dramatically enhance the value of most Publishers content. Particularly when offering up that content to end users for searching, resulting in an increased Findability factor for specifically targeted content.

It is all about the vocabulary, but clearly there has to be a common agreement on the definitions so as to have the same meaning to everyone. So as I wrote this, does that make me a writer, an author or a creator, or perhaps all three? Some may say, none of them!

#eprdctn – Vocabulary definitions, some suggestions

  • Scripter – Someone who creates a JavaScript
  • Programmer – Someone who writes computer programme code
  • XML Element – Everything from (including) the element’s start tag to (including) the element’s end tag. More examples here
  • XML Attribute – An XML attribute provides additional information about an XML element. Another source of XML examples.

All comments welcome.

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XML Editors – Another poll result

Posted on 29/11/2011 by Mike McNamara

Back in the middle of 2011 and as part of an ongoing survey of XML Editing tools, we thought it would be interesting to run a poll to find out if people would tell us which XML editing tool they were using.

The results of this first poll showed us that out of 231 page views only 14 votes were cast with Oxygen coming out top with 7 votes followed by Altova XMLSpy & XML Mind’s XML-Editor getting 2 votes each and Arbortext Editor, FrameMaker & XMetaL receiving 1 vote each.

As we thought this was a pretty low response we decided to run a second poll which ends tomorrow (30th November). So far from another 228 views we have seen 3 more votes for Oxygen, 1 vote for the Pollo’s XML Editor, 1 vote for Notepad++ and 1 vote for Vim.

Bringing those two results together we see totals of…

  • Oxygen – 10
  • Altova XMLSpy – 2
  • XML Mind’s XML-Editor – 2
  • Arbortext Editor – 1
  • FrameMaker – 1
  • Notepad++ – 1
  • Pollo’s XML Editor – 1
  • Vim – 1
  • XMetaL – 1

Clearly Oxygen is the winner in this poll out of 20 votes cast from over 400 page views. But what else does this poll tell us about the use of XML tools in Publishing?

Initial tweeting & posting about the poll seems not to have brought out the sorts of voting results that we thought there would be. So who is using the estimated 500,000 plus installed XML editing tools? This number is from an aggregation of figures from direct conversations we’ve had with some of the 70 plus XML editing tool vendors & developers that we discovered during our current survey.

We also know from our own direct conversations with various publishers about XML workflows & production environments that many more than 20 XML editing tools are in use today. Of course many publishers are somewhat reticent to discuss their own production environments openly, therefore we thought a ‘blind’ poll would have drawn out many more examples of the use and variety of XML editing Tools. That said, these are the results so far.

With regards to the XML Editing Tools survey, we have unearthed a wide variety of tools available (70 plus as mentioned above), ranging from the very well-known commercial products through various ‘Freeware’ offerings that are available to a number of very interesting Open-Source products. We expect to be able to begin publishing some of the findings of our survey soon and will post another update in due course.

In the meantime, if you have any comments about the XML Editing tool that you are using, then feel free to add your comments to this post to join the conversation.

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Findability – The search for that elusive content.

Posted on 21/11/2011 by Mike McNamara

How do we find that piece of information that we really need, which lays somewhere between the actual responses to a search query and the results we really want but can’t seem to formulate a search request for. To paraphrase a past quote of Donald Rumsfeld, ‘How do we find the information we want, but don’t know that’s what we want?’

The term “findability” has been variously used to describe how users find websites and how they then find relevant content once inside of a particular website. It’s not a new term as it was also used in a KM World article in April 2005 by Alkis Papadopoullos entitled “Findability”: The Key to Enterprise Search, with references dating back to a 1943 article about “The Findability of The Law”.

With so much more data available today, the issue of ‘Findability’ has become an even more important factor as companies strive to get relevant information in front of ‘fee-paying’ users using the simplest of User Interfaces (UI), yet without presenting them with a difficult and unpleasant User Experience (UX).

Over recent years, search engines have become more sophisticated, much more data is now held in XML and massive advances have been made in the searching of unstructured data. The use of Metadata associated with the core content and based on well developed Controlled Vocabularies and Taxonomies will also improve the findability of content for users.

However, there may still be some way to go before users are able to fully exploit ‘content’ searches that really can deliver ‘all’ the relevant results that users are ‘not’ consciously thinking about at the time of the search initiation.

I’d be interested to hear how others think ‘Findability’ can be improved for users without complicating the UI or destroying the UX.

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Website update for Araman Consulting

Posted on 17/11/2011 by Mike McNamara

Welcome to the Araman Consulting updated website.

I have now moved the Araman Consulting website over to a WordPress based environment, which has been interesting. I’ve used Blogger.com in the past for personal usage, but felt that a WordPress based platform offered a few more advantages that suited what I wanted to do for the Araman Consulting website.

Learning a new application is always challenging and there have been a few new areas to dig into. I am sure that there is much more to learn about using WordPress, but there does seem to be a vast amount of good documentation around that covers almost every question that I needed answering, so far! I have also had some good assistance from my website hosting company, UK2.Net.

So there we have it. The updated site is now up and running, more tweaking will be needed, I am sure. Now it’s time to move on to other items including a review of XML Editing Software that I seem to have been working for some time. I hope to release some preliminary information at the end of November. As they say, ‘watch this space’.

Please send any feedback/comments that you have about the updated site. I am happy to hear all.

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