Posts by Mikel

Good

When the last good free software project escapes from Uncle Larry, the world will be a better place.

Microsoft is a tool, well used and done.

A business starts as a tool of its founders - usually serving the goal of money and / or fame. That is its purpose. Paul Allen left Redmond in 1983 after a bout with cancer, having acquired more wealth than any one person could reasonably spend the interest on. He is still one of the world's wealthiest men. Bill Gates, the other founder, was also set for life at that time. Mr. Gates got the idea to repurpose this tool, Microsoft, to endow a philanthropic organization.

For over a quarter century after that he amassed unimaginable wealth, and used it to seed the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. The foundation invests the wealth, spurning Microsoft stock, with the plan to fund charity from the interest forever. It currently has an endowment of $36 billion and has given away nearly another $24 billion since 1994. With this stake Bill Gates approached many of the world's billionaires, inviting them to also leave half of their wealth to charity - and over 40 have obliged so far to the sum of over $600 billion pledged. Warren Buffett was one of the first and wealthiest, and helped encourage the others. They are between them in danger of running out of good deeds that money can do. To give an idea of the scale of this achievement, the US national debt in 1975 when Microsoft was founded was only $533 billion.

Microsoft as a tool has done admirably well, but it hasn't done well admirably. Oft cited, sued and fined, articles about its business practices abound. Its purpose may be to fund philanthropy, but its practice runs quite the other way. The company, which Bill Gates still has $15 billion of his estimated $54 billions of wealth in, hasn't really that much left to offer to the job of endowing a charitable foundation.

When you're done with a tool you put it away. In this case that means winding down the operations of the company in as orderly a manner as possible. Otherwise there remains some risk the company will once again run amok and detract from the philanthropy. The shareholders have had an entire decade of no equity growth to warn them away, which should be enough for all but the foolish - and Bill Gates has little patience for fools. Some rare companies transition after the departure of their founders to entities that are persistent, like HP and IBM, but not this one.

For these reasons it is my opinion that Bill Gates will step down as chairman of the board soon, with Steve Ballmer taking up his role, and that he'll divest himself of his holdings shortly thereafter. The new CEO, and the next few successors will be selected for their general ability to make a mess of things, fail to deliver, and - for a change - disappoint their business partners instead of consuming them.

If it's a phone, it's a phone

Yes, a smartphone is a PC. Can a computer get any more personal? But it's not counted in the PC numbers because phones are a different category. iPad is more like a notebook, netbook or "smartbook" - something that clearly should be included in the PC category.

Of course the phones are not included in the PC numbers, because they're phones - not because they're not PCs. The iPod Touch is a PC too, and it's not a phone. It's not included in these numbers I guess because it's supposedly primarily a music player. But eventually it will probably be included too.

@ALL

I wish them well. I'm sure there are a lot of interesting folks in India that it would be cool to chat with online.

Of course the price is optimistic. It's a challenge to get the cost down as low as possible. There's almost certainly some subsidy built in, to get it to that price point. Local assembly would probably help get the cost down, and provide some folks with the income to buy the thing. But India has a huge population so the opportunities for ridiculous economies of scale are also there.

As for prioritizing on this rather than something else, well, I think this is a good priority to have. A web tablet comes with a variety of useful things, like Google. Using the Google you can find information about all sorts of things, like how people manage conception in the rest of the world, various forms of well designs, and medical information of all sorts - some of it even true. And it comes with income opportunities too.

The Tau of Programming

First book, third chapter:

The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.

The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.

Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.

But do not program in COBOL if you can avoid it.

- http://www.canonical.org/~kragen/tao-of-programming.html

ARM at 28NM?

The current ARM chip in my Samsung Epic is a Hummingbird at 45nm. It has the Imagination Technologies SGX540 GPU (with GPGPU capabilities) with four graphical pipelines. It runs Unreal Engine 3, a full-scale immersive 3D engine and the video in games like Dungeon Defenders is not to be believed on a phone. It's only a few months old.

28NM brings the same experience at less than half the watts, or photorealistic gaming on a tablet with six times the cores. Think Crysis - on a tablet or phone, all day on a long flight without recharging. Three days of HD video on a slate before the battery runs out, or Citrix if you prefer that.

If they can do this in mobile, they can do photorealistic ray-tracing rather than compositing in high-power desktops.

The third world? They've been wanting to join us online and add their value to the Net, but they don't have Watts. This would do it for them.

And they're embedding this in TV's? Vizio sounds like they're playing that game. A whole bunch of stuff is about to change. This is big. Huge. Holy Cow, the mobile revolution is upon us. The times, they are a-changing.

Netflix on H.264

H.264 and the MPEG-LA patent pool are tools that Microsoft uses to prevent open platforms like Linux from legally having video players shipped with them. You have to add them, or you have to download them from outside the US and so in some instances break the law. This is just a replay of the .GIF submarine patent fiasco, and we all know how that worked out. Obviously it's in Microsoft's best interest if competing platforms can't do something critical like video as an integrated core feature.

Reed Hastings is the founder, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Netflix. He also sits on Microsoft's board of directors: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/bod/hastings/default.aspx Of course he's going to take Microsoft's side on this. Netflix is also going to disrespect Android from time to time, like they do here: http://blog.netflix.com/2010/11/netflix-on-android.html

About all browsers letting the OS handle video codecs like IE does: yeah, that's not going to work. Windows has a long tradition of not working at all for applications that Microsoft has decided to compete with - going all the way back to Windows 3.0 and Lotus 1-2-3. And of course who can forget the glorious decade-long antitrust suit for killing Netscape that got Microsoft to invest in a George Bush presidency to finally get some relief? Do I need to summon the ghost of WordPerfect here to be a witness? You don't let Microsoft's OS have any more of your application's functionality than you absolutely must if you want the app to live for very long.

So yeah, Google owns the WebM tech. They paid $106M for it. If they want to make it free and open that's their right. If they want to make browser plugins for all the other browsers, more power to 'em. And if they want to omit the H.264 support in their own browser and OS and so both make them more shareable and also save on some H.264 licensing costs, well, that's their right. They're not obliged to keep paying MPEG-LA licensing fees if they have their own video codec. They don't need H.264 - they already bought a codec, and it's quite good, and they've let us all use it any way we like. What evil controlling jerks they are to give us hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property for free! The hardware builders will come along with hardware acceleration in good time, if they haven't already. If somebody wants to pay the license and make an H.264 codec plugin for Chrome, it's not like the API for that isn't published with everything else in Chrome - with source code and examples even. You want it? Build it. Knock yourself out. Nothing is stopping you. No doubt somebody will before long.

I'm going to close this with one of my favorite quotes from RAH:

"There has grown in the minds of certain groups in this country the idea that just because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with guaranteeing such a profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is supported by neither statute or common law. Neither corporations or individuals have the right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back." - Robert A Heinlein, Life-Line, 1939.

Embrace, extend, extinguish

I'm going to go ahead and censor myself. The comment I would have writ here could not possibly have gotten past El Reg's censor. Read it somewhere else. I doubt this will post anyway, so it becomes in a sense an expression of my discontent with the local moderation to the moderator who's rejecting this post you're unlikely to see.

And yet somehow in the above I've managed to insert some carefully coded and insightful commentary about the article discussed if you're willing to make the skull sweat required to figure out what I'm saying, just in case it makes it through.

So they've got a lock on the vision

They've got a lock on the vision now. Can they execute?

By the time real Windows runs on ARM (2013) Intel's Atom processor will be on the 16nm node. Interesting. And Intel's under no further obligation to facilitate Windows on this chip so they can instead deliver the best engineering they're capable of. They can let go of legacy technologies and let whoever builds the best OS for it win. That sounds like progress to me. I wonder how nimble Microsoft's OS porting team is. I'm quite confident in the competence of the Linux crew that's going to be building the kernel for Android - they've even ported their ware to run on a dead badger.

I guess we can dismiss Windows 7 tablets now since even Microsoft won't stand up for them. That has to have all the hardware partners who went to such great engineering feats to have the thing ready for CES feeling a bit jilted. And the ones that have been keeping the faith and not building ARM because they were promised that would go are going to be looking sideways at future promises. They've lost last Christmas and now won't have product under the trees next Christmas either. Asus, who had a Snapdragon mini-notebook ready in the summer of 2009 but was talked out of it in mid-tradeshow must feel especially harmed. When they do finally get to market now they're going to be trying to crack an installed base of over 100 million units with a new and different technology that's untried and not appreciably better. Not a good place to be.

So at least we don't have to hold off anymore, waiting, before we buy our tablets. Who's in motion on the ARM tablets, to bring us the revolution until Microsoft, Intel and their herd get their act rolling? Apple of course. Samsung and HTC. Visio and, oddly, Dell. All of the cellular providers naturally, and Amazon, and Google. HP may come out of nowhere with WebOS, but somehow I doubt it. No ASUS, Acer, Lenovo, IBM or Toshiba.

Well...

They can't very well levy a Windows tax on all those Android ARM tablets their hardware partners are shipping if Windows doesn't even run on them... can they?

And to the people who were all saying "no, no! The iPad is not a computer!": neener neener.

They don't pay list prices

Microsoft subsidizes a significant portion of the hardware cost of HPC installations that claim to use Windows, so it's a net negative cost to the installation. That means that a US corporation is paying to build supercomputers in China. Yay. For the most part these sites run Windows for the benchmark only, and run Linux the rest of the time.

Microsoft Excel integration with HPC... Oh, God I wish there were words for how ridiculous that is.

@AC First - what they're trying to do is to appear to still be in this game. Fake it 'till you make it. That sort of thing. For HPC the OS doesn't really matter much. All of the operating systems run apps and give them direct access to the hardware, and that's what's required for HPC. Theyd've have done better this pass, but their management app had a signed short int overflow. Who could have predicted that? Nice post though.

Too many topics, too many options

I'm seeing the "If it won't run in a VM, you can't have it" policy being implemented in more places these days in larger organizations. Running one service per VM simplifies software lifecycle management, reduces potential conflicts. Still getting the question "Why shouldn't I run services also on my VMHost native OS?" - that particularly from folks new to this new model.

Oracle... what are we going to do about Oracle... Well, eventually they'll price themselves out of the market. They'll milk their existing accounts to death forever of course, like Novell did, but nobody in his right mind is going to sign up for that abuse as a new account.

Back-end storage is critical, and the migration from Fiber Channel to iSCSI is more of a stampede at this point. Actual performance metrics are critical. A lot of folks are going to take offense at this, but it is what it is. The beautiful architecture and reliability of FC doesn't override the fact that you can get much more reliability for less by having massive redundancy and geographic separation in your stores using iSCSI for far less - and it doesn't take a fiber guru to set it up. The FC era is coming to a close for the same reason that Oracle's is - they're excessively fond of it and people are becoming less willing to sit still for the value-building story. They have lives they want to get back to.

And then there's backup. Tape is truly dead. Synology is offerring today a 15TB NAS that scales to 45TB raw, or about 38TB usable starts at $900: http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/214523/synology_announces_new_15tb_nas_device.html Various technologies can turn this into iSCSI with unlimited thin snapshots, waypoints, or whatever you want to call them. Any systems analyst can figure a way to build a reliable backup system with that, and it's only one example of hundreds. Another interesting option is the BackBlaze box with 135TB of raw storage in 4U (1.3PB/rack), and if you build it right it can host VMs too.

Yes, people are still confusing High Availability, Disaster Recovery, and backup. They always will.

In the Enterprise and SMB space I'm seeing more people willing to try new things than ever before. The pace of change is stepping up. I think that's a good thing.

Work with their beta standards

Help them to patent the next generation of web standards in its infancy. That sounds like a marvellous idea.

It's cool they've taken up citing el Reg, though.

That explains why

If Ballmer's giving the Keynote for MWC on 2/14/2011 he can't have actual dismal sales numbers for WP7 distracting people from the message of how wonderful the software is now that it's patched to include one of the many critical features that should have been included over a year prior in the first alpha, and the second patch in the indeterminate future may include another.

He gets to stand up and say "we're happy about the slope of our uptake" and it's not a lie too much because since it started at zero, trickled into thousands in Europe and by then may reach hundreds of thousands of units total shipped if you count the phones MS and Dell bought their own employees, and that should be a good growth trend.

He'll want to talk about the Millions and Millions that WP7 developers are earning - but if someone should ask what share of that is money Microsoft is paying itself for integrated apps and apps sponsored by their marketing efforts... expect him to demur.

The only way that growth trend looks bad is if you cast it in the unfair light of iOS devices and Android devices, which between them should be moving 750,000 units a DAY by then. Or if you consider the half-billion dollar advertising commitment. Or if you consider the millions of manufactured units gathering dust in the unlit corners of the retail outlets or sharing warehouse space with the Kin.

Apple plus Android should be trending to a million units a day by summer 2011 - on par with PC units shipped, and above PCs in gross margin dollars. And that would be why WP7 developers can't access analytics, or get paid for their apps until after the show. Simple, really. He can't stand up and admit that the war is over, and he lost.

Convergence is code for "buy our whole stack"

HP is eager to sell convergence too, as are Oracle and Dell. To each their own convergence of course. Good luck with that. Every vendor has weaker spots in their portfolio. Going sole-source for all your IT has tech management advantages, as integrated management offers an opportunity to manage all of your tech through that awful "single pane of glass" that salesmen won't shut up about. It also makes you entirely subject to that one vendor's every whim. Not a good idea.

To quote the wise Admiral Ackbar, "It's a trap."

Pure awesomeness

Oh, gosh. This is just too wonderful. Tight integration of HTML5 with the OS, through Silverlight. You have to bet whoever came up with that one got a bonus this year. The outcome of this one will be epic. Just watching the bloggerati try and sell this as the Next Great Thing is going to be fabulous. The show as they suffer their summers of pratfalls and prop jokes are going to be delightful.

Concur with everyone above. They Just Don't Get It. Still. Woohoo! The further from reality they are, the closer we are to seeing the end of them and their prevention of progress. To those compelled in the work space to try and do useful lasting work with their products, regrets. Everybody else: grab some popcorn, the comedy's about to begin.

Fragmentation is choice

Fragmentation = choice. Choice for carriers, choice for users, the proliferation and winnowing of platforms that makes for rapid evolution and optimum fit for the end customer. Yes, Rovio having seen 7M Android downloads sees enough of a market for older Android handsets to custom build their app for that platform - but not for Windows Phone 7 yet. What that says is that supporting fragmentation on a popular and rapidly evolving platform is profitable at least some of the time. They have hinted at a for-pay Android version rather than ad-supported soon - and there seems to be demand for it. BTW, Angry Birds is at 35M units downloaded or sold so far across all platforms, not 7M. It's a runaway hit.

Nothing has changed with Samsung and WP7. Oh, I'm sure there's been some back-channel executive talk about licensing, partnering, and how to talk up products you're trying to sell. No doubt someone reminded them that they've got a lot of exposure in dead inventory if the market for it doesn't build to some nominal sustainable level. They're still not going to build more WP7 units than they expect people to buy. There's been some chatter about sales numbers and WP7, but nothing the last few weeks that rises to more than idle speculation and vague rumor. Anecdotes at best. Maybe it means nothing. To me it suggests disappointment. After all: if the thing were moving millions of units I'm confident SteveB would be crowing in front of every camera that would hold still. We'll know soon enough when the quarterly reports come out or with the monthly mobile web share numbers.

Nothing to do with the CEO

HP makes servers. Oracle bought Sun. Sun makes servers. That shifts Oracle from the "partner" column to the "competitor" column. Supporting competitors with revenue is self destructive. It's not an emotional thing - it's just business.

Not going through?

I think somebody's going to see that Novell is undervalued here and start a bidding war.

Leave them how they are

With Steve Ballmer in charge. The Beast needs his firm leadership to fall the rest of the way into the trap. Somebody useful might start changing things and save the company.

Squinting at Google

If you've got to look this hard at Google to try and see evilness that isn't there, that's saying something.

Half a million Kins?

Hmm... $60M from Sharp to Elcoteq for Kins: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE6601O020100701

Just guessing here, but at $120 each that would be a half-million units. If they've sold 10,000 units they would only have 490,000 left. Get yours before they're gone!

Going Z

I lost count of how many people called me crazy when I suggested such a thing many years ago.

Oh, well. We're going Z. The amazing progress of the last 30 years is not even close to ending. Frankly, it's a relief.

Big mistake

Suing Motorola over Android was a big mistake. HUGE. Microsoft is just now figuring out how huge.

FRAND doesn't preclude a company from conducting reasonable negotiations for things of value other than money - technology cross-licensing for example. And if the negotiations take so long that products are delayed, that can't be helped. Microsoft would never play this game to its own competitive advantage with ActiveSync and the other patents they're suing people over. Oh, no.

Alternative to Java

The main alternative is C++. It's standard and open, and porting from Java isn't a big deal. It's also likely to be around for a very long time.

It's not as portable as Java, but can be very workable. One of the core concepts of '70s and '80s thought on platform design is that if the compiler is written in a language it can compile, runs on an OS that it can compile, and hardware differences are isolated so that the compiler can cross-compile its OS for a new platform with little difficulty, then the whole system becomes immortal no matter what hardware the future may bring. That's the whole reason why C is still with us.

Java geeks make a big deal of the "write once, run anywhere" thing. Well, they're coming to the end of their road for lack of foresight. C and C++ aren't. Some of the core code in your Android phone was written 30 years ago for BSD for equipment so alien you would not recognize it. That's "write once, run anywhere."

Partially agree with him

The iPad is a computer.

I wrote about this here

Nearly two months ago: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/855954

My post wasn't well received then. Maybe now?

Developers can invest in the Microsoft HTML tools now if they want, and learn how to do HTML5 the Microsoft way. There's sure to be some certifications on that available any day now. I also hear Microsoft has found some love for Java on Azure just about the time we're all figuring out that Java under Ellison just doesn't have the way forward we need. They seem to have an innate ability to back the losing horse.

Or, you know, you could invest your time and money training your neurons to operate in a way that will be a bit more persistent.

The retention problem explained

Microsoft is having a brain drain problem at the top. They've lost many top executives over the past few years. Why? Options. This article about Apple executive options has some stunning numbers: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/business/piked_apple_juice_359K6fdyx1FNIPxn4axfwI

$125M will buy a lot of beers at the corner pub. Microsoft executives used to pull down that kind of confetti with their stock options, in the '90s. But with the stock mired at more than 1/2 off its peak over a decade ago the options extravaganza just isn't there. The really good executives know they can launch a startup and get bought out a heck of a lot faster than they can turn Microsoft into the Street's favored child again. So they go - because farming dinosaurs is fun and all, but they have personal goals too.