Posts by Mikel

When the last appeal is heard

Some ten years hence when the last appeal is heard, nobody will even remember what this was about.

Nobody knows

There is no point in trying to pretend that anybody knows how people in general are going to react to Windows 8 or Surface until they are on sale. And for a good bit after that, too, as the marketing effort of course includes trying to make it look like a screaming success even if it isn't.

Meanwhile, Dell's profits are off 18%. That would have been a useful nugget to include in the article.

Gigabit is not all that fast

HP blades have come standard with dual 10Gb ports for several years now. Google, when it serves a neighborhood full of 1Gbps connections needs must have some means to aggregate it. Fortunately these higher speeds don't require a rip and replace. The upgrade to the electronics uses the exact same fiber for 100Gbps that it uses for 1Gbps. Transcontinental fibers work the same way. 1.6Tbps isn't a standard, but it is commercially available now and proprietary solutions work if you own both ends of the cable.

Enhanced Geothermal is cheaper than coal

It's CO2 free, local, safe baseload power with no fuel wastes, toxic wastes or proliferation issues. Some places can't benefit from it, but there is no reason not to start building it out everywhere that has the geothermal resources.

Remember the KIN?

300,000 Facebook fans, 300 units sold.

Coconspirators

Apparently they've been lovers since 1994. They hid it well.

Windows Phone news has dried up

I note that on every blog, analyst report and trade publication for the last 18 months there have been an continuous drumbeat of hopeful, over-optimistic articles about Windows Phone - several each week and syndicated all over the place. And now they have all but stopped. If anything, the trend is now the opposite.

I've seen nuclear fans hate on geothermal too

I guess if you've got the one you like, all the others must be bad.

Total domination: LOOK at THAT CHART

Holy cow that is brutal ownership of the mobile universe. Android is just crushing it. Was anybody ever to 68% before, after the second smartphone vendor entered the market? There is such a story in these graphs.

Obviously the iPhone drop in share is pent up demand for iPhone 5, and seasonal deviation, and a little bit loss of share in BRIC as uptake there for lower priced smartphones outpaced the market overall. But the iPhone 5 will have to be quite astounding to quadruple the iPhone sales going into Q4. It needs a miracle. It's always been a great phone, though it offers limited choices.

Apple and Android together? 85%. A tiny 15% left for EVERYBODY else when a year ago that was less than Symbian alone. It's a two dog race now for sure.

The Nokia story here is quite striking too. Apparently Nokia's brand value wasn't in "Nokia" it was in "Symbian". Obviously the Symbian buyer was an "Anything But Microsoft" buyer, so those customers didn't transfer over to their Lumia line _at all_. They killed Symbian and got nothing for its meat.

Of course the Blackberry story is sad, but we knew that. RIM's customers are either abandoning ship or hoping for a Hail Mary pass in BB10. The schedule push was triply bad because some customers were holding off purchasing to get the BB10, and some of those abandoned ship immediately on the schedule push, and the remainder are still holding out.

Kudos to Samsung and all the other Android OEMs for not just hitting their marks but service over and above.

And then there's Android's amazing 104 million units. More units than Windows PCs for the quarter just in Android phones. In case you didn't know, Android is a Linux. It seems the world is changing quite fast. Let me be the first one to enunciate that idea all the way out: "In 2012Q2 Linux phones surpassed Windows PCs in unit sales, dollar sales and manufacturer profits. Linux took the lead as the most popular kernel in the world for client devices."

Far and away the most profitable OS kernel is still the iOS kernel, but since it's exclusive to Apple other vendors can't participate in those profits.

Let's hope there's more good news to come. Apple's iOS is still the profit leader by 3x, but they may find themselves suffocated again by sheer volume, as they were in the distant past.

Only $8B? Maybe 6 more for Autonomy by the by

They don't look likely to make a good return on that one either.

Dealing with HP has been pretty messed up lately, and I don't see a change in course here.

/And by the way... that's enough money flushed down the toilet to put a man on Mars.

OK

If Gaben supports Linux I see no reason not to give him my money.

This is a great idea.

Dell competes with Acer. Does Acer ship their competitor Dell prerelease hardware to develop the drivers for them? Why not? Do they think Dell might do less than their best work, or steal their ideas?

Get off the train to crazytown

The lock-in with XP was horrid, but what makes anyone think that migrating to another version from the same vendor is going to put them in a position to have continuous business operations? It's the software vendor's strategy to keep you on their platform with these incompatibilities, and it's working. They're not going to suddenly change that very effective strategy.

New OS, new bugs

To get it out this fast, no doubt they've had to remove some features that were present before - again. And since it's a whole new OS there will obviously be annoying bug regressions. We shall have to see what it's really like.

32 fiberhoods have qualified now

It's only day 4 and 32 fiberhoods have qualified, many others are quite close. In one fiberhood 20% of homes - one in five - has signed up already. That is amazing. 42 days, 8 hours left to go!

The bigger the success this is the faster Google will roll it out to the rest of us, so let's cheer them on. Go KC!

My lecture on options and the results

Some time ago here on El Reg I gave a minor lecture on the "long put option" using Nokia as an example case. The post is here: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/1376189

Using that example case if you bought the Put option given there three months ago for $0.62 and sold it today for $1.62 you would be 2.6x ahead for that period and well advised to get out no matter what you thought the future might bring. Or at least you might take your original investment out plus whatever you think is a reasonable premium and let the rest ride Nokia to $0.01. There is some big risk there though because eventually Nokia might fall to a point where they needs must be bought out, and at least the price will bounce. If they're bought out and close before your option date your options are worth nothing because the option to sell shares that don't exist is worth nothing.

Claim a win. Take your base and the profits you want out now. Leave a little of your paper profits in just in case it goes to zero and you jackpot.

If you're well ahead take some winnings off the table - or take them all off the table and find a new company that's being phenomenally stupid. There always is one. Under $3 per share units are risky business, and this one gave all it's worth already, I think.

Again:This is all gambling - don't bet more than you can afford to lose. I'm not an investment advisor and I'm definitely not yours. The above information is for entertainment value only, and should not be taken as a recommendation for any course of action. It may be inaccurate, and your mileage may vary.

All hat

No cattle

"We tried"

Now AT&T can finally point to this result and say "See? We tried." Redmond had been accusing them of being uncommitted to this whole "Windows Phone" thing. A shame that it's driving up the cost of Androids and iPhones though, to sell this brick nobody wants.