Unlike the rest of the Internet it seems, I don’t mind Windows 8, although I agree that 8.1 has added much to make the jarring difference between the old desktop and new formerly-known-as-Metro environments less jarring. So which of the new crop of Windows machines would ‘light up’ Microsoft’s new OS best?

In the end I decided upon a Surface Pro 2; 8Gb RAM and 256Gb SSD to be precise. I’ve been using it for a work and a little at home for about a week so far, here are my impressions…

Buying experience: Absolutely abysmal actually… Microsoft’s inability to keep these new products supplied is well known at this stage. Possibly it was a case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’. Given the less than stellar sales of the first generation Surface and Surface Pro, and their continued discounting to shift stock at the same time as the new units are being sold, MS have probably scheduled less production initially. Heading to local bricks-n-mortar resellers like JB Hi-Fi was a dead-end; they had no stock and weren’t getting any until the end of March (so they probably still don’t have any as I write this). No worries, let’s try the online Microsoft Store. ‘Out of stock’. WAT? ‘Out of stock’ is a phrase I would use to describe an SKU that is no longer in production, not one that is supposedly the vanguard of your attempt to become a leading hardware player. Hey Microsoft, Apple’s shiny new Mac Pro is hardly in stock either, but online they will happily take my money, give me a rough idea of when it will arrive, and here’s the good bit, as a result they actually have an idea of REAL DEMAND. I know that MS is new to this particular supply chain and are catching up, but they really need to start matching their competitors rather than leading up the rear (unless you subscribe to the theory that Surface isn’t really targeted to be a major success but is a loss leader aimed at threatening their OEM’s into action vs Apple; as a now Surface user I would be distressed if MS is less than 100% committed to the Surface product line however).

It turned out that there was some availability of the Surface Pro 2, however it was sporadic at best. The recent discussion on the Surface Pro 2 thread over at Whingepool, sorry, Whirlpool has been quite hilarious were it not quite sad for MS, as myself and other SP2 wannabes have been fighting over the limited stock that was available online.

Then one lucky afternoon, the particular SKU I wanted was in stock online, hooray! I eagerly started the purchasing process, however was stuck on the Billing or Shipping Address page. It Turns Out that the Microsoft Store doesn’t like Safari; I was using my personal MacBook Air to work using a Windows VM (quite a painful experience since it has only 4Gb of RAM and little disk space was remaining for the VM) so happened to be trying to purchase the product using Apple’s browser. WAT? It seems like Microsoft’s online store is being actively hostile toward users on an alternative platform who are seeking to adopt their platform. Great way to win customers guys… Anyway, this turns out to mostly be the end of my ranting.

Unboxing experience: No photos sorry, but nothing negative to report here… it is obviously informed by the best of product packaging in the Apple world, although that does mean most things are covered in little plastic wraps that need to be peeled off.

The physical feel of the device: It looks and feels well made, no complaints here! It is dense but a reasonable weight compared to other desktops.

The screen: Absolutely gorgeous in and of itself, and when running the Start screen, IE desktop or ‘Metro’ apps. However High-DPI on the desktop, especially when dealing with legacy applications that are unlikely to be updated, is quite bad. This has been well-documented elsewhere. So yeah, small screen and high-resolution isn’t the best combination in all circumstances. I think I can live with it, and anyway I am using the SP2 with a Dell 27″ monitor at work so maybe it matters little. I am tending to run touch-focused Metro apps or IE on the SP2’s display and my desktop (editors, IDE, Office, etc) on the 27″. In this configuration some apps on the desktop appear a little blurry I think; I’m not sure if the monitor needs calibration or if its Windows unable to tailor ClearType settings (or something) at a display level. More investigation to be done here but it’s not been a problem really. One thing I am a little concerned about is some occasional flickering of brightness, I think, when running on battery power. Not sure if it is dodgy firmware, overzealous battery life management, or a physical fault but I will be keeping an eye on it.

Performance and battery: No complaints so far, it is equipped with an i5, 8Gb of RAM and 256Gb SSD so for the sort of development I am doing it is sufficiently beefy. I initially thought that I would have been happy with an 8Gb/128Gb unit if Microsoft made one; in hindsight I’m glad for the extra space and where my messing about with Hyper-V is concerned I am considering using a 64Gb MicroSD for template VHDX storage, with differencing disks on the main SSD. As far as battery life is concerned, Haswell appears to have

Type Pad 2 and the ergonomics of the kickstand: Here is something I was concerned about and unable to satisfactorily try beforehand; can I use it on my lap? In my case, yes I can (I’m maybe just a touch above average male height?) although its not a configuration I would want to do serious work on. And that’s the thing, if I am doing serious work I am at a DESK. On a train, plane, couch using the touch-focused side via IE Metro, etc is just fine and I use it as a tablet. That said, on a couch or in bed (yes, yes, yes, I know, keep the bedroom a technology-free area, blah, blah, blah…) I can use the Type Cover 2 (backlit) and SP2 with kickstand out in combination. I’m not a fan of the teeny-tiny touchpad and I have no idea how to perform a drag, so there’s some improvements to be made in that area. When mated with the 27″ at my desk, I’m using a full-size keyboard. But the Type Cover 2 will be fine when I’m out and about… once I figure out dragging.

‘Metro’ apps: Microsoft’s app store seems quite janky compared to Apple’s; both in presentation and the quality of the apps inside. Many of the apps appear quite poorly designed. That said, I’m a .Net developer so if I want the situation to improve I could give it a go myself. Whether there is sufficient money to be made to justify the outlay of time is an open question.

Thoughts on other accessories: I’m definitely considering getting the Docking Station… again, when Microsoft sees fit to actually make some available. It would be great to see a clamshell-style keyboard, i.e. Asus Transformer style, although I suspect that such a thing would need to be quite bulky and weighty itself, with a massive hinge, to counterweight the SP2 when sitting on a desk or lap.

That’s it so far. My blogging around here is even more sporadic than Microsoft’s Surface Pro 2 availability, hur-hur-hur, but hopefully I will come back in a few months with another update!

Anyway.

Sometime ago (2009), with the introduction of Amazon EC2’s Spot Pricing, at that time I speculated:

It would be great for competition and innovation if cloud computing was more transparently portable between providers, and the resulting fungibility would benefit consumers of cloud resources in being able to manage their operational expenditures.

Well, it appears the concept of a broader market for computation may be coming into existence. According to Reuters:

German financial markets operator Deutsche Boerse is planning to commoditize computing power with the launch early next year of the world’s first independent exchange for trading cloud computing capacity.

There has been a huge amount of evolution in the cloud market since 2009;

• More competitors to Amazon’s EC2 have arrived or become stronger: Microsoft Azure, Google Compute Engine, Rackspace Cloud, smaller players such as Linode and Digital Ocean have become greater forces.
• The idea of the ‘private cloud’: some enterprises with sufficiently large internal compute requirements adopt principles similar to cloud computing with regards to provisioning and management of servers (thanks to virtualisation)
• Emergence of cloud computing platform standards such as OpenStack, CloudStack and Docker

So it seems like the opportunity is there for an independent exchange for idle compute capacity. The challenge will be in establishing an agreed standard unit for delivery, just as in physical energy/mineral/agricultural commodity markets. Take for example the contract specification for greasy wool futures, traded on the Australian Stock Exchange, here’s an extract:

Standard Delivery: Good topmaking merino fleece with;

• average fibre diametre of 21.0 microns,
• with measured mean staple strength of 35 n/ktx,
• mean staple length of 90mm,
• of good colour,
• with less than 1.0% vegetable matter.

The contract specification then goes on to identify a range of acceptable tolerances on the deliverable product. This is quite common across all commodity contracts, obviously there is going to be some variation in the product that is dug/drilled out of the ground, grown on a tree, shaved off the back of a sheep!

So to, will a market in compute hours need to specify a basic unit of computing that can be delivered with some specifications that can be easily measured and verified; RAM, Hard Disk space, baseline operating system; and some that cannot; CPU, I/O performance, network bandwidth and latency. For the latter, the exchange may need to take quite an active role in market surveillance in ensuring that the resources being delivered are of sufficient quality for the contract they are being delivered against.

At any rate, I personally find this idea quite interesting, especially when held up alongside Bitcoin which effectively converts energy commodities, via compute power, into a ’store of value’; albeit one that has far from universal acceptance! For more on that relationship, see Bitcoin, Energy and the Future of Money.

From the FEATURES section of the project README:

• An implementation of the non-generic System.Collections.IDictionary interface in AgileWallaby.Ehcache.EhcacheServerDictionary.
• An extension of the new System.Runtime.Caching.ObjectCache class, AgileWallaby.Ehcache.EhcacheServerCache that has been introduced in the .Net 4.0 platform. However I was hoping that this API would be the same as that implemented by the new AppFabric caching service (formerly known as ‘Velocity’) a la the Java platform’s JCache API however it appears they are different.

Code (no binaries at present) is currently available in this GitHub repository although it is a work-in-progress, hoping to sort out serialization of generic type parameters to/from XML & JSON and Silverlight support soon.

This all first kicked off in 2007… then the GFC/credit crunch came along and adding a competition angle to markets that were in freefall was clearly off the agenda!

Now that it is ‘game on’ again, it will largely be how quickly ASIC can take on the market supervision role formerly played by the ASX that determines how soon Chi-X goes live. At least their technology is getting in place; they are adopting SMARTS‘ platform for market surveillance, a number of former colleagues of mine work there so that bit at least is in good hands!

There is also the issue of Chi-X and ASX coming to an agreement on the fee to be paid for access to ASX’s clearing & settlement network… possibly a separation of ASX Austraclear from the market side of ASX might be on the agenda in the future. Or possibly not; successive Australian governments (of both flavours) have failed to address the issue of Telstra’s conflicting roles as both wholesaler and retailer with serious break-up talk so addressing these sort of monopolistic issues is not a hot issue.

Scott Riley of the Clearing and Settlement blog also has some links on the matter.

Interestingly AXE ECN, the first proposed alternative to ASX, appears to have gone quiet.

I blogged a little about e-readers in the past but I have yet to jump into the market myself.

With the Kindle DX shortly being shipped to Australia however, I may put my money where my mouth is.

Whilst I like the smaller e-readers that now appear to be abundantly available the sort of e-reading I want to do lends itself to a larger screen. I have a number of books downloaded via O’Reilly Safari monthly download tokens; these are generally technical/programming books and are available in PDF format (although I have recently noticed Safari now lets you download certain whole books in PDF, epub or Kindle’s Mobipocket format; but O’Reilly published titles only at the moment). Kaplan Professional, with whom I am studying a Masters of Applied Finance, has also started making their study notes available in PDF (which saves me from scanning and OCR’ing them myself via my ScanSnap).

PDF documents don’t reflow so attempting to view any of this content on a smaller screen (including the regular Kindle which recently gained PDF format support) would be an exercise in futility. Hence my desire for a larger screen e-reader.

The number of large format e-readers available is still very small. This list on Wikipedia shows only the Amazon Kindle DX and a couple of models from iRex. I’ve followed the evolution of the iRex products and they have had some quality-control issues from my time lurking on the iRex forum.

The elephant in the room is the mythical Apple tablet. Rumour is hot that by the end of this month Apple will have revealed its 10″ tablet, the ‘iSlate’, which will revolutionize the consumption of media. Or something like that. Despite being an Apple fan I will remain skeptical that this device will be suitable as an e-reader unless it incorporates some sort of dual e-ink/LCD display technology… my eyes don’t want to read lengthy text on a bright backlit LCD screen.

Various other consortiums of publishers have been proposing to build their own e-readers which may or may not be open, large format or otherwise functional. So the Amazon Kindle DX just might be where I jump into the e-reader world.

However, I have my reservations, some of which are echoed in Sean Carmody’s excellent post about the Kindle in Australia on his Stubborn Mule blog:

• I believe that Amazon has not yet established in Australia a servicing capability for Kindles that breakdown. Any required repairs either in or out of warranty will require it to be shipped back to the US.
  Australia’s antiquated publishing laws surrounding parallel imports mean that the content available in to the Australian region is significantly smaller than that available overseas. However I still have a bank card with a UK billing address and it appears that this is sufficient to purchase books available in the UK region… although this maybe more faffing about than I can put up with.
• What is AT&T Global Wireless coverage like in Australia? Which local mobile network operator do they piggyback on? (hang on, it looks like there is a coverage map)
• The e-book format war: Although the Kindle DX has excellent PDF rendering, it does not support the epub standard, preferring its own Mobipocket format. It would seem unlikely that Amazon would ever add epub support to the Kindle range.
• Are local news outlets going to be publishing via the Kindle store, or in Kindle format? (eg. Crikey, the AFR, etc). According Stubborn Mule, they may have been turned off by the high percentage of sales revenue that Amazon demands from publisher’s pushing content to the Kindle platform. At the very least I can use a desktop application to scrape these sites for content, convert and sync; perhaps Calibre?
• Kindle purchases are made in USD. Although the AUD is quite strong at the moment, most Australian credit card companies tend to charge fees plus an FX spread you could drive a truck through on foreign currency transactions. It would be great if Amazon opens online Kindle stores ‘around the world’ that bill in local currency especially since they are restricting the available titles to what they have rights to sell in digital format in any region.

Given CES is about to kick-off and Apple’s rumoured event to launch the tablet is at the end of the month I think I will cool my heels for the moment, and hopefully I will have a bit more clarity at the beginning of February about my e-reader purchase decision!

In Hedging Your Options for the Cloud Joe Weinman discusses how as cloud computing turns computing power into utility, its pricing and risk management strategies around volatility of prices will begin to reflect those of other commodity markets (electricity in particular).

As if in response to the previous article, Werner Vogels of Amazon announces ‘Spot Pricing’ for EC2; customers requiring EC2 compute time at some point in the future without hard deadlines can nominate a maximum price they are prepared to pay. When the spot price (defined in financial markets, particularly commodities and FX, as the price for immediate delivery of an asset or commodity) drops below this level the customer’s EC2 instances will spin up and start computing. When the spot price climbs above the customer’s specified level the EC2 instances will automatically shutdown. The latter will require the workloads to be resilient to abrupt termination but this should be fine for robust batch jobs.

So I wonder if futures/forwards/options markets may grow around this new commodity one day. Probably not at the moment as there is no mechanism for selling short. Also unlike deregulated and competitive electricity markets there is only one ‘generator’, Amazon. However the EC2 APIs are published and in fact the Eucalyptus project is building an open-source implementation of the EC2 APIs. Eucalyptus has already been integrated into Ubuntu and RightScale’s toolsest for virtualization. So it might seem that the barriers to entry for a potential Amazon competitor are quite low, however Amazon have already achieved significant economies of scale (which will increase further with their planned entry into the Asian market).

It would seem natural for Microsoft or Google to challenge Amazon directly by providing their own implementation of Amazon’s EC2 APIs, however their own cloud computing offerings require developers to code to more proprietary frameworks (although there are open-source efforts to implement the Google App Engine on EC2; AppScale being seemingly the most advanced) rather than EC2’s approach of just providing access to a virtual machine. Maybe they have already run the math and decided that competing directly with a low-cost provider like Amazon is like wrestling with a pig… you both get dirty and the pig likes it

It would be great for competition and innovation if cloud computing was more transparently portable between providers, and the resulting fungibility would benefit consumers of cloud resources in being able to manage their operational expenditures.

Xignite have some great looking APIs and I understand that their business model is all about providing the data ‘on demand’, but it would be great if they could combine their use of open APIs with a basic market data streaming offering as well. They could take the ‘comet‘ approach, use a 3rd-party technology like Caplin Liberator or Lightstreamer, or perhaps the best forward thinking option, adopt HTML 5 Websockets. Since they would be delivering their stream via the Internet rather than leased line or private packet switched network there would be more latency compared to a professional solution such as Bloomberg or Reuters, so is there a market for streaming financial data at a lower SLA?

I would like to do some experimentation with these APIs, maybe amCharts’ WPF Stock Chart control will be an excellent way to visualise the data. Hopefully amCharts are working on a Silverlight version as well.

• Twitter integration naturally, although it appears StockTwits is also building out their own microblogging backend (presumably API compatible with Twitter)
• Chart sharing with Chart.ly, which StockTwits acquired)
• StockTwits TV; their burgeoning competitor to CNBC/Bloomberg TV/Fox Business News. The accuracy of StockTwits TV reporting can’t be much more fantastical than that of the big boys’ sometimes is, they are often rabidly bullish.
• SkyGrid business news integration

Presumably porfolio management features might be integrated as well. I also wonder if they could take a big step further and build in some rudimentary FIX API integration… especially if they want to attempt to sell into the ‘pro-am’ daytrading market, although brokers that make FIX access available for daytraders at a price they can afford tend to be hard (impossible?) to find. Maybe StockTwits next step will be to set up a brokerage themselves?

Amazon VPC lets you create your own logically isolated set of Amazon EC2 instances and connect it to your existing network using an IPsec VPN connection.

I am sure that cohesiveFT’s salespeople would say otherwise, but this looks awfully like their VPN-Cubed solution which itself runs on EC2. A small ecosystem of start-ups has sprouted up around Amazon’s web services; RightScale, cohesiveFT, Eucalyptus, Enomaly, Scalr; many of them providing enhancements to EC2’s initially sparse feature set with regard to management and scaling. However Amazon have demonstrated that they are increasingly interested in providing this value-add themselves and charging for it rather than just providing the base platform; look at the introduction of CloudWatch, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancing and now the Virtual Private Cloud.

The life of an EC2-based startup is clearly becoming riskier but do Amazon themselves risk alienation from the software development community through this policy of subsuming their ecosystem’s functionality?

Open-source is no stranger to the consolidation trend either;

Terracotta acquires Ehcache: from a capital markets perspective, Oracle’s Coherence (which itself arised from acquiring Tangosol) seems to be the 500lb gorilla in the ‘in memory data grid’ space. The combination of Terracotta and a deeply integrated Ehcache might be an appropriate alternative solution for the primary use case of Coherence in bank deployments; a market data/trade/position/risk cache & time series database.

VMware acquires SpringSource which itself acquired Hyperic: VMware is gearing itself up to be a major cloud player by offering a complete virtualised Java development stack, after all isn’t the recently announced CloudFoundry Java’s answer to Microsoft and .Net’s Windows Azure? Is a database acquisition or purchase of Splunk that far away?

Co-operation rather than consolidation; the open source trading platform Marketcetera has established close relationships with Sky Road and NYSE Technologies’ to provide a hosted solution for Marketcetera. Given Marketcetera uses Spring extensively some involvement with CloudFoundry is a possibility as well.