Neville’s posterous

via brandrepublic.com

Top video is the Asda employees' response. I've added the one below, what the chicken-licking employee did, for context. Not pretty. Compelling response, Asda, nice work.

The videos tell the story but you can also read Brand Republic's report.

[...] The move would reach far beyond Walmart's stores. Its 100,000-plus suppliers would have to reveal their ecological impact or have their products taken off the shelves. They are also likely to become greener to attain a higher rating, as shoppers use them to guide purchasing. The impact would be global; one in every five of China's factories is thought to be in the supply chain of goods the retailer sells.

It's an example of the green entrepreneurship that one Wamart top executive calls "the biggest business opportunity of the next 50 years".

That's one heck of a supply chain. Imagine if other influential companies did the same thing.

The concept of parity-based RAID (levels 3, 5 and 6) is now pretty old in technological terms, and the technology's limitations will become pretty clear in the not-too-distant future — and are probably obvious to some users already. In my opinion, RAID-6 is a reliability Band Aid for RAID-5, and going from one parity drive to two is simply delaying the inevitable.

The bottom line is this: Disk density has increased far more than performance and hard error rates haven't changed much, creating much greater RAID rebuild times and a much higher risk of data loss. In short, it's a scenario that will eventually require a solution, if not a whole new way of storing and protecting data.

[...] We all know that density is growing faster than bandwidth. A good rule of thumb is that each generation of drives will improve bandwidth by 20 percent. The problem is that density is growing far faster and has been for years. While density percentages might be slowing now from 100 percent to 50 percent or less, drive performance is pretty fixed at about 20 percent improvement per generation.

[...] The disk reliability density problem is getting worse, and fast. Some vendors are using techniques such as write logging — keeping track of write on another disk during rebuild to allow the rebuild to occur faster — to get around the growing problem. Will this solve the problem for the long term, or is this the equivalent of the RAID-5 to RAID-6 fix that just delayed the inevitable problem? Personally, I think it will turn out to be just another short-term fix. The real fix must be based on new technology such as OSD, where the disk knows what is stored on it and only has to read and write the objects being managed, not the whole device, or something like declustered RAID. In essence, the disk drive layer needs to have more knowledge of what is storage, or fixed RAID devices must be rethought. Or both.

The solution that immediately comes to my (non technical) mind is the cloud.

But is it reliable enough yet? Would you really give all your trust to the remote equivalent of a RAID set-up? I wouldn't.

[...] This new intellectual property lawsuit against former Joost CEO Mike Volpi and venture capital firm Index Ventures really has nothing to do with Joost at all. It’s all about control and ownership of Skype, and it’s a signal that the dispute is nowhere near over.

What’s most interesting about the lawsuit is a single disclosure early in the lawsuit complaint. Not only does Skype not own the core P2P technology underlying the service, but they don’t even have access to the source code.

[...] This new litigation could tank the acquisition. Or it could change it materially. Or it could result in a big compromise where Niklas and Janus take a big role in the new Skype. But whatever happens, it has very little to do with Mike Volpi and Index Ventures. The real story here is that Skype is restrained from innovating because they don’t own their own IP. In fact, they can’t even see the core IP.

I've been a Skype user since early 2004. As a service, it's essential to one of my activities: recording the twice-weekly 'Hobson and Holtz Report' podcast with my co-host Shel Holtz in California.

Prudent thinking now might be to prep an alternative VoIP service in case the worst happens re Skype, eg, it suffers any kind of service interrupt due to litigation or something connected to it.

Just checking out insurance.

[...] from a business point of view, music isn't nearly as important to Apple as it once was. While Apple built its comeback over the past decade on its music-playing iPods, sales of those devices are expected to be flat in the years ahead.

So Apple is shifting its focus to new kinds of content. The Sept. 9 event was billed as a music-oriented affair, but Jobs spent much of the time showing off the game-playing abilities of the iPod Touch and new camcorder features in the iPod nano. Analysts say the most critical driver of Apple sales in the future will be the thousands of software programs, or "apps," that owners of iPhones and iPod Touches can download from the company's online App Store. "It's no contest," says Needham analyst Charles Wolf. "Apple's strategic future is tied to the App Store. There is no strategic importance to music anymore."

My very simple user perspective - iPhone is all about the apps.

On my BA flight from Barcelona to London on Sept 17, I had a superb downwards view of the clouds from 36,000 feet.

See also Sunset on the Wing.

(I created the video at Animoto.com using photos I took out the window with my Nokia N95 8GB - in airplane mode, of course - then added a soundtrack from Animoto's audio library. The resulting video is made by Animoto.)

During my British Airways flight on Sept 17 from Barcelona to London: the setting sun as we travelled north along the Atlantic coast of France.

See also In the Clouds.

(I created the video at Animoto.com using photos I took out the window with my Nokia N95 8GB - in airplane mode, of course - then added a soundtrack from Animoto's audio library. The resulting video is made by Animoto.)