Posts by Mikel

Microsoft is still evil

Steve's just not as good at being evil as Bill was. Bill did evil _well_. Steve's more of a Batman villain kind of evil: dire in intent and completely incompetent at execution.

Anyway, Steve's doing the job Bill wants him to do - holding the company still while he sucks the rest of his money out to fund his new philanthropy game. At the end the company will be a dry hulk of course.

And I'm OK with that.

Throwing Jobs in here is a bit of a red herring. Some people keep their charity private, and I can respect that.

Biting the hand and all that

Microsoft is giving stuff away to a good cause too. Just whine about android on twitter and you might win a free WP7 phone.

Recalculate for Ceres

I hope they redo the math for Ceres. Men are actually likely to live there one day.

Excellent article

Had to know there would be rage.

Faust

Have you read about Faust? He made this deal too, and it didn't end well for him. I remember a story about some other company, what was it... Sendo! That's it. Yeah, they cried too. And then there's Nokia, to fill out the lifecycle of pain.

If you dance with the devil you will pay his fee.

Power?

The easy way to get the heat out: don't put it in.

Another mobile MS adventure

They're hopeful to turn around a series of disasters in mobile persistent since 2003. It will be interesting to see if they can pull it off.

Is a $99 ICS tablet cheap enough?

If so, it seem's it's already shipping: http://androidos.in/2011/12/forget-aakash-mips-launches-99-ics-tablet-nova-7/

Well, now that's settled. Back to global warming, eh?

Pitched at Itanium and nonstop

But works fine with plain-vanilla rack servers on Linux too. It'll be a year before HP admits that, but it's true. HP does this sometimes. They tried to pretend their MDS600 didn't work with rack server also for a while. I don't know why. Maybe the R&D teams haven't friended each other on Facebook yet or something.

Sometimes you crest the hill

Sometimes you crest the hill and a new vista opens up, verdant fields stretching to far horizons. That's what I felt like when I read this fine article.

Florian's not going to quit spamming your inbox

Until you stop printing his name. Maybe not even then.

What else will H2 have?

FOUR different quad-core ARM SOC platforms from a herd of OEMs under every brand imaginable, running Android and iOS. Sammy would be well advised to let us have our Android. If they want to try and launch the Windows tablet one more time also, just to see it still won't fly then I'm OK with that. But they better not try to hold back the good stuff for that.

Another foolish rumor

Microsoft is not going to support the iOS and Android platforms with Office - not even the years-old Office that you can get for OS-X. That would be suicidal.

Dodged a bullet

Looks like we just missed the onset of an ice age in 1750 or so.

@EWI - He's not saying it was aliens... but it was aliens.

Classic Menu

Get ClassicMenu Indicator and tint2. That fixed all my issues with the new UI. Or choose "Ubuntu classic" in the dropdown when you log in.

Silicon is essential to star development too

Well, starlet development anyway.

Big business

At $500m revenues per quarter the installed base of customers has to be less than about 1000 in the world because an Itanium cluster is going to cost at least a few million bucks on the average. So we're not talking about folks we know or care about, likely.

If you have a problem the Itanium is a solution for, you already have a vendor to sell you it, so I'm not going to waste my day looking for you.

HP Unix it will be a loss, but that war's been fought and Linux won - oddly enough through SCO. The provenance of Unix is now so tangled that the knot cannot be undone. But that's OK. We still have a way forward without reinventing everything.

Tablets are computers

And they should be counted.

Wowser

It seems all that's required to get folks in a lather is utter the words "Kindle Fire".

Welcome to 1998

This has been going on forever. We've been doing VDI in reverse and using desktop compute resources for legitimate purposes nearly as long. It's not mainstream, but it's been around a long time. In fact some of the technologies might trace back to Unix in the 1970's.

You don't even need Windows to carry out this sort of thing maliciously. If you have or corrupt a popular website you can implement it in Javascript, Java, or Flash for fine-grained problems and distributed network attacks in the background in addition to serving up user content in a platform-neutral, no-admin-rights required way. This is what LOIC is made of.

I wish this were put to more legitimate use. And I doubt the malicious uses can be stopped.

Balmy is awesome

Hope they keep him forever.

The iPad is a PC

Add those numbers back in and you'll see nothing ever changed.

Sigh

The level of discourse of both the talking heads and the press seems to indicate that in the past fifteen years no significant resources have been deployed anywhere on Earth to respond to the threat, to understand or report it. That's appalling. The entire world is asleep at the switch.

This is grade school hacker stuff, not high-end nation-state stuff. You folk have no idea how bad the situation really is. I'll give you a hint though: it's worse. Much worse. So much worse that you wouldn't believe it.

Logitech is still in

They're just not going to go bat-crazy with the launch quantities like they did last time. Got stuck with a lot of rev-0 inventory and took a $100M hit to profits. Google TV will do well eventually if they keep at it. Certainly I would buy one if it came with full Android and the kind of experience I get from my Asus Transformer - maybe even an app I could use an Android phone or tablet to be the remote and user interface and save the cost of manufacturing those bits.

Now that Intel's out of the TV box hunt maybe they can get some Kal-El goodness up in this business and rock our world not only as a set-top box but also a game engine. That would be very nice. Bluetooth or some other wireless game controllers, keyboards, headphones? All fun in the family room. But it's too late for this Christmas. CES introduction maybe for Sony and Samsung maybe? Sammy's certainly got reason to give Android and Google a little slack, considering how that saved their bacon the last couple quarters.

I like Samsung gear. Not going to buy the Sony one, ever. Too long a history of stuff that's deliberately incompatible with other stuff.

I'm a netflix streamer

But only on Android and my Blu-Ray player and TVs. I seriously doubt there is any Silverlight in any of those things.

Biting the hand that feeds IT

"Windows Phone is not only one of the most original pieces of design Microsoft has done – perhaps the best – it has executed it really well. This is a strong candidate for the best piece of technology Microsoft has ever produced."

Talk about damning with faint praise... You couldn't say it causes rapture on contact? And what about how much more attractive it makes the holder to members of their preferred gender - couldn't squeeze that in?

Maybe I'm missing it. Was the entire article written in a sarcastic tone as a spoof to other reviews?

Transformer Prime announced today

It makes all these look like yesterday's breakfast.

Oh, no. Next year is the Windows 8 launch

Windows 8 tablets are expected to just slaughter the iPad and all those Android Tabs in 2012. Because they have Windows, which everybody knows is the best software for everything. Maybe 150 million the first year - just wait for the IDC reports for the real forecast. iPad will drop to like a few thousand. Gartner will have the real report go like this too. These new people don't know nuthing. They sound Canadian.

Fifth core

The presence of a fifth extremely low power core for network monitoring and other low-power-required stuff should do the trick for longer life in this phone, if you're not watching HD movies on it. NVidia says the power use overall is no worse than Tegra 2 also. Should be a neat piece of gear.

Rise of the tablet

We all wanted Android tablets or iPads anyway. That Transformer Prime is looking pretty awesome. Kindle Fire too. No tears from here. This could not happen at a better time.

As soon as you say "Mueller"

As soon as we see that we know you just pasted his email from your inbox to the article submission form. Please stop.

It's for the best

I think it's best of all of us if Microsoft continues to hide their head in the sand for a few more years. As long as they're off in the corner playing with their Windows and Office they're not getting in the way. Cool stuff like Transformer Prime and iPad and Google TV and Apple TV will keep coming out, getting better, and getting all the developers, developers, developers, developers!

Windows 8 should be out in 2012, or 2013, or 2015 at the latest unless they have to refactor more than twice like they did with Vista and Windows Phone. On launch day it will have hundreds of apps, be buggy as hell, lack critical features and only work on platforms that were cool 2 years prior. By then we may not even remember why we used to care.