b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Diffly - A New MacOSX Software Tool
A Clarification on Zounds Sales Strategy and Some Industry Statistics
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Zen and the Art of the Backup
Brent Ashley reminds us all that backups are essential to peace of mind. Which reminds me... I've been living off my laptop for more than a year since my last workstation went up in flames (gawd, I hate computers) and I really need to back it up to an external drive like, right now.
The path to serenity is via regular backups
Michael O’Connor Clarke’s recent brush with near-data-death had a happy ending, and he credits my backup advice with helping to save the day. I figure now is as good a time as any to make that advice more widely known.
The ONLY successful backup strategy is one that actually gets your system backed up regularly. This means taking it out of the hands of the procrastinator and into the hands of the automator.
In my opinion the only truly workable restore strategy is to have a disk image to restore. If you have to spend untold hours loading your OS and programs, searching for license keys and farting around with settings, passwords, adding users etc etc, just to get to the point where you can restore your backed-up data, you are wasting time and money.
A regularly scheduled disk-image backup will save your otherwise very sorry ass many many times.
I use Acronis True Image to back up my laptop. The Home version suits my needs, but the Workstation and Server products are stellar as well for a business environment.
Acronis makes a compressed image of selected partitions on your hard drive. It does this in the background while you are still using your computer. You can schedule it to happen regularly so you don’t even have to think about it.
With Acronis you can:
- Make a full image of your drive
- Make multiple incremental images against a full image
- Save the image locally or over the network, split to multiple files or CDs/DVDs
- Access the images for read or restore
- Mount any full or incremental image to access a snapshot of your drive via a drive letter
- Restore your machine from any full or incremental state via disk, cd, network
- Restore your machine from bare metal with a rescue boot CD
- Schedule backups
- Automate backups so you don’t have to think about them
- Define pre and post commands to run
Those are the basics you need. Beyond that you can use the rescue CD to back up and restore non-windows partitions, too - Linux and BSD for instance. There are many other features too.
I have a scheduled task set up to back up my laptop every Monday and Thursday at 2am to my home server. If my laptop is plugged into my network at home at those times, it will save a full disk image to the server. If the target directory already contains a full image, it will build an incremental image.
At the start of each month, I delete the contents of my LastMonth directory and move the current image and incrementals there. I should really write a batch to invoke pre-task to do this automatically, since this is the only thing I still have to remember to do.
I’m pretty serious about my backups. On my server, I have two 250Gb hard drives that I synchronize daily using rsync. I also copy certain critical files off to a NAS device that’s at the other end of the house and take sporadic file backups to a USB drive to take offsite. You don’t have to get that crazy about it, but for the sake of your long-term sanity, by all means set up a regular image backup of your main machines.
Terry Frazier at 10:23 PM
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Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Diffly - A New MacOSX Software Tool
Matt Mower has just announced the release of his first publicly available software tool for MacOSX. It’s called Diffly and is a productivity app for software programmers. Matt has a long history of developing productivity tools for niche environments. I’ve used several over the years and always found the functionality and UI to be well thought out. Diffly is the first product Matt’s released for general consumption. But since I’m not a programmer, I’m already looking forward to the next one! Congratulations, Matt.Pain can be a great motivator (to finish your first Mac application!)
Not the best weekend on record as I seem to have developed an ear infection which is both very painful and very uncomfortable (my jaw isn't working properly). I decided that, rather than spending the day waiting in casualty to be seen by a doctor, I would take my mind off it by debugging the problem with my first MacOSX app that has been preventing me from releasing it these last few (okay 8) weeks.
So I'm quite pleased to be able to announce Diffly my first real MacOSX application written in Objective-C using the beautiful Cocoa framework.
If you're a developer, use MacOSX, and use Subversion you might want to take a look.
Terry Frazier at 10:28 AM
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Monday, April 9, 2007
A Clarification on Zounds Sales Strategy and Some Industry Statistics
A few weeks back I was in the office on Saturday when my phone rang. On the other end was a fellow named Jay Turner, VP of Marketing for Zounds. Like any good marketing VP, Jay had been following web traffic on Zounds and came across my blog entries. As I said previously, I have no direct relationship with the company and no one there knew who I was. Even though I have a small investment, it is as part of a limited partnership and my name appears nowhere in the Zounds' records. So Jay had been looking around my blog trying to figure out who I was and why I was interested.We had a nice conversation and Jay offered some statistics to clarify points raised in the earlier discussion. What follows are quotes from a follow-up e-mail Jay sent me. I have not independently verified these numbers but I have no reason to doubt them. Zounds did extensive market research before launch and has an advisory board that consists of medical professionals from both the ENT and audiologist fields. Further, 2006 sales statistics published in The Hearing Review show 2.37 million hearing aids sold in the US, so Jay's number of 7%=150,000 is conservative.
Per our conversation, industry research indicates 7% of hearing aids in the US (150,000 units annually) are sold through Ear, Nose, and Throat (ENT) Physicians that employ Audiologists. They buy high-end hearing aids for $1250 wholesale from the Big 6 manufacturers and mark them up to $2500 to $4000 per aid, or 2X to 3X. This same wholesale/retail pricing is used in the independent Audiologist/Hearing Instrument Specialist (HIS) channel.So, my hypothetical assertion of paying a referral fee is misleading. Zounds sells to physicians just as all other major hearing aid suppliers.
Zounds provides excellent patient care through licensed Audiologist/Hearing Instrument Specialists, the best technology, and affordable prices to fixed income seniors through Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) and ENTs. Zounds sells the product and diagnostic/fitting service at wholesale (no referral fee, no Medicare/Medicaid reiumbursement, no Stark law conflicts, etc) and the PCP/ENT marks them up to MSRP $999 per aid, making far less, but for many still appealing, mark-up than the Big 6/ENT/Audiologist/HIS business model. There is nothing illegal or unethical about Zounds distribution strategy. Yes, Zounds technology, distribution, price point, and consumer marketing will be disruptive. Unfortunately, there is a lot of misinformation and emotional reaction to Zounds' business model. Overall, Zounds is trying to provide a better product, service, and price to the millions of people who suffer from hearing loss.
Another point Jay made in our conversation is that 10%-15% of high-end hearing aids are returned. This is not far off the number quoted by Tom Shearman (5%-10%) for all hearing aids. I would expect return rates for $2,000-$4,000 items to be somewhat higher.
And so the experiment continues. I remain a believer in the Zounds technology and approach, but the market will decide if it's ultimately the right approach. The fact that there is a great deal of emotion and misinformation regarding both the company and the product supports my belief that this is a fundamental disruption for an industry that is ripe for change.
Terry Frazier at 4:44 PM
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