* Posts by Mikel

2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008

Google Android chief smacks Steve Jobs with Linux speak

Mikel

Andy Rubin is a god

If he had to tweet, that was just right.

Oh, and Closed = integrated = Cathedral; Open = fragmented = Bazaar. ESR wins again. If you control the meaning of the words you control the discussion, so notch one for George Orwell also.

Steve J needs to step back from the competitive landscape and get back to cooking us up goodies in his labs. Mangling the memescape is for empty hats like Ballmer who can't do useful work, and that can be hired on.

Foxconn faces leaked report of worker abuse, violence

Mikel
Big Brother

Take a million people

I don't want to give Foxconn a total pass here because they could do better.

But take a random sample of one million of the world's population and follow them for a year. Somewhere between ten and twenty thousand of them will die in that time. Some of them will be killed by somebody else, some will take their own lives, most will die of natural causes or accident. Some of the million will do evil things. Some will be foolish and thoughtless. Some will find love, start a family, have children.

Foxconn has over a million employees. It's practically a nation unto itself. It has one factory complex with nearly a half a million people. In addition to the ordinary needs of an employer it's providing many of the infrastructure needs typically provided by governments: utilities, transportation, keeping the public order and so on.

They can do better. They must do better. But they're not scouring the countryside with press gangs rounding up villagers to work in their technology mines. The people flock to them because it's the best opportunity they have to earn some money to send home to their families, who really have it rough.

Google TV transplants Android on Intel

Mikel

Atom is a good chip

This looks like good tech. It'll make your big TV a window into cloud services, maybe a video phone. The Atom is as good a chip for it as any.

Hopefully Google will also use their technical wizardry on the network and storage end for reliable streaming. I'd like to see them sell movies (not rent them) for persistent local storage, but it will be a nuisance to get Hollywood to go along with that.

We're almost there though.

Android rebellion: How to tame your stupid smartphone

Mikel
Pint

The article is not a disaster

El Reg has to poke fun at everybody, and it's Android's turn. That's what they do here, and it's what keeps us coming back. The hung download issue is a huge issue for a few people so there's some substance to it. But then there's this:

"Not that everyone has these problems - some lucky Android users just buy phones that work. But an awful lot of people are suffering from some, or all, of the above problems, and Google isn't going out of its way to help."

That's overstretching it, and it goes rapidly downhill from there. It's not irreverent and funny, it's bitter and overblown. If the article had gone to just the line before and closed with some of TheRegister's customary wry wit, it might have been passable. Better still would be to also trim the exposition up top by half as many words. Perhaps the authors cared too much. When you're writing angry or frustrated it's best to let the draft sit a few days before going over it to make it fun to read.

Certainly we'll see in the near future an article here that does roast Android well, with good humor. This just isn't it. You know what? Nobody's perfect. We've just come to expect such awesome performance from TheRegister's authors and editors that when one falls flat like this we're disproportionately disappointed. We'll get over it.

Legendary steampunk computer 'should be built' - programmer

Mikel
Pint

Build it.

It's the right thing to do.

HABITABLE ALIEN WORLD discovered 20 light-years away!

Mikel

Roughly 3x Earth

If the planet is roughly 3x Earth size well within the Goldilocks zone and liquid water, it likely has a moon with all the right properties. Gravity that's high and low enough, liquid water, atmosphere, some sort of "day".

I wouldn't look to the planet itself. Too much gravity. But a moon might serve for Earth II.

Microsoft: IE9 will never run on Windows XP

Mikel
Pint

XP users don't want it anyway

XP's mostly still entrenched in business. They've just started their migration to IE7. Forget about 8 or 9. You see, they bought into this whole stack of platform development tools that standardized them on Windows from the server to the desktop. They built their line of business in-house applications by embedding their business logic in custom applications on the server side that would only talk to IE6, or symmetric applications on the client side, required Microsoft languages and tools, clients and frameworks and media formats. This would have been a grand idea if that platform was designed with some thought to future migration. But it wasn't.

It was designed to get them stuck in a place where they couldn't migrate away from XP to something else and it worked too well. Now they can't migrate away from XP to future versions of Windows either. There will be a lot of cursing and pain as they cut themselves out of this trap, and the last thing that they want to hear about is how well [browser next] is integrated into [os next].

VMware boss: we rise as Windows falls

Mikel
Happy

RE: All the food on the table is Microsoft's

@David Bond: Well that was clear as mud.

Mikel

All the food on the table is Microsoft's

At least, if you ask them it is. When a software product becomes popular enough, it's time for them to harvest your market and eat your lunch.

Adobe, are you paying attention at all?

Yes, Hyper-V is a hypervisor and once you pay for the Windows Datacenter, it's free. If you cared about that you'ld be running Linux KVM on Debian since it's free from the very beginning before you enter into the prerequisite and definitely Non-Free Software Assurance agreement. Or you'ld be running ESXi or XenServer, both of which are free (but not Free). Saying that Hyper-V is cheaper isn't really so. The license terms include things like failover, but if you read carefully the terms you can't fail back in under 30 days. That's to give them an "in" for your BSA audit where you pay far more than VMWare could ever cost. The whole thing with Hyper-V is a mess and while a highly paid team of IP lawyers can sort out whether or not they believe a given configuration is legal, they can't guarantee it.

If you want free, use application servers that run on a Free OS and cluster them for HA under a Free hypervisor, and pay for support from one of the many vendors who offer that, or hire somebody for goshsakes.

If price is no object, and frankly per VM on the right hardware VMWare doesn't cost much, go with VMWare. Or XenServer.

If you want to be sure you're violating the terms of some license somewhere, Hyper-V is a good choice.

Microsoft buffs Silverlight for HTML5 video contest

Mikel
Pint

We're going mobile

We're going mobile, and silverlight isn't. Developers are better off putting their training time into learning something that's going to be around for a while.

Microsoft douses VMware with cold cloud shower

Mikel
WTF?

Power? Really?

@Allison: Industry Standard Architectures are less of a trap than sole-vendor platforms. This has always been the case. There is no more valid argument for IBM Power except for the use case that it deliveres a required performance or feature that can't otherwise be had - itself a concession to the monopoly trap that surrenders your free will to get your solution. That's almost always a bad plan.

@article: Microsoft can say whatever it wants in the press, couched in the fungible terms they always use. For Microsoft the "cloud" is the ambiguity of their marketing. Read the license terms carefully and try to get that past legal before you buy the product. You'll find there is no way to legally deploy Hyper-V in an HA environment where you need to fail over and fail back on demand. It's a non-starter.

What counts in the cloud is that your cloud virtual servers are always arranged in redundant clusters for failover and scalability. It helps if they can be migrated from one virtual platform to another. The hypervisor is only relevant in that it needs to permit the required operations with its licensing, it must report performance metrics and provide management. That's all.

Ethernet storage protocol choices

Mikel
Boffin

Sometimes the best choice is to not choose

I promised more if that Wall 'o Text passed moderation. Not only that but somebody liked it so here goes with the promised follow-up. I'm painfully aware I'm dangerously close to the moderation guidelines for post length, but this particular article was "asking for it."

The article is about storage, and so we're talking iSCSI. iSCSI travels over Ethernet. An iSCSI connection is an Ethernet connection so for the rest of this post I'm going to say Ethernet for iSCSI. Ethernet also gives you other things, which of course you know because somehow this post came to you over Ethernet.

10G Ethernet and 8Gbit Fiber Channel are here now. You can buy that if you want to. Each adapter is going to run more than a thousand dollars, and you're going to pay again on the switch side. You'll pay twice if you're buying SFP+ modules as well. It will be a few years before we pass beyond 10Gig Ethernet and 8 Gig FC, so you've some confidence in your investment. Those standards are fairly new in fields that make large infrequent steps and happened relatively at the same time this past two years only by coincidence. With these connections you can pay more for the connectivity than for the box with processors, but probably not including the RAM and storage.

Fiber Channel over Ethernet is a fairly new link that, despite the name, isn't just Fiber Channel over Ethernet. It's Fiber Channel and/or Ethernet over a new connection type that's not quite Ethernet. Calling it Fiber Channel and/or Ethernet over a new connection type that's not quite Ethernet yields an unwieldy acronym: FCaoEoancttnqE, and that's hard to sell so we call it FCoE. The switches can be pretty expensive - the ports are all 10Gbps. The Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) are expensive too. But you can put those in your server. The links aren't just fast in bits per second - they're also very low latency, which is even more important.

You can skip all the per-server NICs and HBAs, SFP+'s and cables. Some blade servers, like HP BL465c G7, come with integrated dual 10Gbps FCoE now. Others from several vendors come with onboard dual 10Gbps Ethernet. No adapters, SFPs or cables to buy, only one (or two) blade interconnects in the back of the chassis, and many servers (16 or so) can talk to each other with amazingly low latency high-bandwidth connections. This is pretty cool because when something goes wrong, 90% of the time it's the cables. You don't even have to build out 10Gig and 8Gig infrastructure yet, because uplinks can be slower. Choose the right interconnect modules and you can choose how much of that you want to be Ethernet, and how much Fiber Channel, and change your mind at any time. Another advantage is that the blade interconnect can be "not a switch" so if the server teams need an interconnect between their servers that they can manage without permission or interference from the network team, this is it.

The microseconds latency is the most important thing. Most of the traffic is multiplied many times in your cluster. One client form update request from the uplink turns into dozens of file requests, database reads and writes, logfile updates, SAN block writes and reads amongst your servers before a single, simple next page is returned through the uplink. If you can change dozens of 1 millisecond hops into 20 microsecond hops between request and response they add up to a perceptible improvement in responsiveness to the customer even if his bandwidth to the cluster is limited.

Other brand servers you can get the same FCoE in a Mezzanine card today, and that's almost as good - the servers might be cheaper to offset. You still get the same leverage of no SFPs, no cables, and so on, but you use up a precious Mezzanine slot. The FCoE adapters don't cost much more than either the 10G Ethernet or the 8G fiber, and definitely less than both. Dell sells these, and I'm sure IBM does too. Cisco has one for their UCS. Not sure about the others, but it seems likely.

The way these FCoE interfaces work you can use them as any of 1Gbit Ethernet, 10Gbit Ethernet, 10Gbit FCoE, 8/4/2 Gbit fiber or 4/2/1 Fiber depending on the SFP module. So if you're using Fiber Channel now but migrating away from it, or are pure iSCSI now but might want Fiber Channel also in the future, you're covered. Some of them even have some internal "virtual connections" that allow the bandwidth to be divided up into multiple Ethernet and/or FC ports.

10Gig is the way to go in blades, and FCoE if you can swing it. Choosing has the downside risk that you might choose wrong. The nice thing about choosing FCoE adapters in your blades is that you can change your mind later.

So we're left with "What about rack servers?" Not everybody needs enough servers to justify a pair of blade chassis. Rack servers now typically come with four 1Gbps Ethernet NICs. If you need more than that -and you almost certainly do - or you need FC, you're going to need a NIC or HBA. If money's so tight that you can't think about strategy you're going to buy the quadport 1Gbit NIC or the bare minimum FC card you can get today and this post wasn't for you in the first place. Here the decision point comes down to how many servers and if you already have the switch. If you don't have the switch and you need to provision links for enough servers, then a FCoE switch like the Cisco Nexus 5010 at 20 ports and $11K is more likely to give good return on investment even in the short term. For both 10GbE and 10Gbit FCoE you can use relatively inexpensive copper-based cables with integrated SFPs to the top of rack and keep costs down. Those Fiber SFP+ modules are pretty spendy in the pairs you need. Regardless, keeping your options open in the future should add some weight to the FCoE side even if it's not the most economical solution today - though that's probably harder to sell to the executive team. The break-even is at about four servers today. If you can't put that over with the E-team you're back up there with the quadport NICs and the cheapie FC HBAs and reading this must be sheer pain. I'm sorry. Rack servers benefit as much from low latency connections to each other as blade servers do - it results in a more responsive experience to the end users, who are the point of the exercise.

FCoE is new, and for now it's a one-hop deal. Your FCoE adapter can go to a FCoE switch, but that switch has to break out the connections and diverge the paths into Ethernet and Fiber Channel. It can't yet send it on to another switch still in FCoE form. The standard that allows for the second hop, routing and such things won't be ready for a year or two.

Fair notice: I don't own stock in any company mentioned. I do work for a company that sells solutions in this space including some but not all of the products mentioned, but my opinion is my own and my employer is neither responsible for it nor influenced it. I didn't get paid, nor do I stand to profit, from saying these things.

Mikel

Now that we know AoE is ATA Over Ethernet, a primer

Now that we know AoE is ATA over Ethernet, isn't broadly supported, lacks enterprise features, isn't generally supported and generally isn't Enterprise Ready, let's talk about the other two. Let's have a primer for the gallery.

Fiber channel (FC) is the grandaddy of shared storage tech. It once was the fastest available transport method (back at 1Gbps or 2Gbps). Its reliable packet delivery offers a firm foundation on which to build your enterprise tech. People who build out FC care more about reliability than anything else, so they usually populate two HBAs, each of which provides a link to at least two FC switches - themselves connected in a mesh network, with each storage appliance (SAN) likewise at least dually connected, through dual SAN controllers to drawers all the way down to redundant connections to individual drives. The idea is that you can wipe out one entire path of controller, fiber, switch, fiber, controller, fiber - and still not lose your connection to an individual drive. The drives are then striped and/or mirrored for additional redundancy at the media level, and in some cases can even be striped or mirrored across SANs that are geographically separated for the ultimate in storage reliability. All of the connections (or nearly all - some vendors cheat) involve interconnections using Fiber Channel protocols that guarantee reliable end-to-end and in-order delivery of packets. Typically the connections between boxes are fiber-optic.

Because it's rarer than common server hard drives and networking, FC is expensive. It involves a large number of patented and licensed technologies. It has garnered a certain high-end storage following, and it's well deserved. Many of the storage technologies that will follow in this discussion arrive from the need to maximize the benefit of very expensive FC disk, or to work around the idea that bringing your storage offline "just isn't done". Price really isn't much of a consideration with FC folks. You might pay $3,000 for a 600GB 15K rpm 4Gbit FC Hard drive, for example if you were looking for the IBM 59Y5460. FC now can use interconnects in the market that are 8Gbit/second between servers and switches or switches and storage, and these links can be aggregated for arbitrary amounts of bandwidth.

FC is a stable market. It's got reliable some % growth year over year in business, but it's not sexy, it's not new. Most people who aren't FC shops aren't looking to sign up for that drill.

iSCSI is a different technology invented by Microsoft - one of the few things they've made standard that I'm in favor of. It's possible to borrow some of the same ideas from FC and build in the same path redundancy as Fiber Channel, all the way to the drive - but this is a fairly recent development. iSCSI goes over Ethernet, which succeeded in the networking market despite the fact - perhaps because of the fact - that it DOES NOT guarantee either reliable end-to-end delivery nor in-order packets. Ethernet now gives commonly available links that run 10Gbits/second but with packet overhead it's a wash because it amounts to 8Gbit/sec actual bandwidth. The technology in iSCSI that allows for divergent paths to the disk is called Multipath I/O (MPIO). It requires special drivers in the OS, special configurations and recent versions. It requires validation testing, and frankly the technology is still a little bit fresh for environments where human life and safety are at stake. Like FC, connections between boxes can be aggregated for arbitrary bandwidth.

iSCSI works off of the principle that the aged SCSI bus protocol required that information be organized into packets so they could pass over the parallel SCSI bus. On this bus there were multiple drives and they needed to cooperate with the controller to avoid crosstalk. iSCSI essentially encapsulates the packets for transport over Ethernet, and adds a few features. We don't use the parallel SCSI any more, but its organization can still be useful. The client side driver and the storage device software negotiate reliable end-to-end delivery and in-order execution of writes and reads across the unreliable Ethernet connection using their own intelligence. Using modern iSCSI capable Host Bus Adapters rather than standard Ethernet adapters on the server side allows for boot-from iSCSI SAN as well as offloading of the processing overhead from the CPU. Enterprise iSCSI devices can still be expensive. A Dual-Port Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 6Gbps (6G) drives at 600GB lists today for $809. That's not cheap, but it's better. You can also buy a cheaper and slower dual-port 6G SAS drive with a short warranty from that vendor that has 2TB for $949, which is coming somewhat closer to consumer SATA technologies and prices. They're cheaper because these drives are sold in vastly larger quantities as directly attached storage in millions of servers. The Dual-Port thing is an important part: it allows for backplanes that provide independent links to independent SAN controllers to complete the last leg of a redundant connection all the way from the server bus to the drive. Because it's more common and so leverages economies of scale, Ethernet switching generally costs less - but we're talking about 10Gbit Ethernet here and it's not as widely deployed as it might be so this is still not a small business use case yet. 10Gbit Ethernet can go over copper to the top-of-rack, or a few racks over - and save a lot of money doing it - but it's not an end-of-row solution. If you need 10Gbps Ethernet for more than a few meters, you're going to buy the expensive fiber GBICs. Most folks are still exploring 10Gbps Ethernet, and frankly if you can isolate this cost center as closely as possible to the servers, that's a good thing. We're not ready to go 10Gbit to the desktop yet. Because the abstractions used to maximize the return on investment for FC SANs are just software, the software has been ported to iSCSI SANs to provide the same amplifications. This includes things like synchronous replication, asynchronous replication, clustering, virtual volumes, thing provisioning, snapshots, clones and so on (the SAN Features).

There are even companies sell devices to insert into your FC + iSCSI network that serve to take the block storage that you have whether it's iSCSI or FC, ignore its special features, and provide all of the SAN Features so that you can continue to use the underlying storage using your preference of iSCSI or FC while you migrate from one vendor or technology to another without doing the (gasp! Forbidden thought!) unforgivable of bringing your storage offline. This is called Storage Virtualization.

iSCSI is a growth market. It's growing multiple x per year. Some say 10x.

Convergence: And then we have Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE), DataCenter Ethernet (DCE) or FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet). These are all names for the same thing - at least they became the same thing when the standard was announced a few months ago. The multiplicity of names was from vendors attempting to take ownership of the symbol space leading up to the standard. At the moment this is a technology that exists between the server and the first switch that it encounters. Using this technology, which I'm going to call FCoE to be simple, the server has a FCoE Host Bus Adapter that provides a reliable and in-order packet to the switch. All of the HBAs I've seen operate at 10Gbps and have two ports for a net 20GBps. Typically each port can be configured to be presented to the server's I/O bus as MULTIPLE separate hardware devices which are either Ethernet or Fiber Channel. With FCoE you can do it either way, or do it one way now and migrate to another way later. You get to choose. You can adjust the fraction of bandwidth allocated to storage vs networking based on your need. This is a powerful choice.

The trick with convergence is that it ends at the first switch. There's no switching or meshing standard for FCoE yet. The first switch MUST break out the virtual connections into Ethernet or Fiber Channel, and pass them to their respective networks from there. Instead of simplifying things at this point it just adds a third network. But this can be useful for some things, depending on your needs. The Cisco Nexus 5000 is typical of the device you would use as a top-of-rack switch for this sort of application, but it's one of several.

There are FCoE HBAs you can use that connect with this first switch using a copper connection. This can save a lot of money, as Fiber GBICs (the module that converts the electrical signal to light and back again) cost a good deal of money and you need a pair of them to terminate both ends of a fiber connection. The Copper cable includes integrated GBics on each end and can be had for a couple hundred dollars. Fiber GBics generally start at about $800 each, or $1600 for each path. Remember, you need pairs of paths.

And then there are blade servers, some of which now include a pair of 10Gbit FCoE HBAs on the motherboard by default and avoid all the expense and connections, at least for sets of up to 32 servers at a time. The blade server chassis can provide the first-hop FCoE switch, and a lot of the complexity of the problem goes away, as does the need for HBAs, the vast majority of the GBICs, almost all of the cables. This is VERY important. I was taught nearly three decades ago in IT that if there's a problem, 90% of the time it's the cables, and my experience has held true to that lesson.

OK, that's enough of a primer. If this post passes El Reg moderation I'll discuss current solutions in this space.

Porn and pirates hide Android's money maker

Mikel

You know what they say about consultants?

Consultants don't know how to run a business. They know how to get other people to pay them to tell them how to run their business.

They're like marketing companies. Marketing companies sell their ability to do marketing. It's what they do. That in return they have to produce ads that may be seen by customers is an advantage they have over consultants, but it's the only one.

Paul Allen launches patent broadside on world+dog

Mikel

The IPocalypse

It does appear the day of Mutually Assured Destruction foretold in days of yore is upon us.

Fear as motivator: why Intel acquired McAfee

Mikel
Linux

I am concerned

Obviously Intel has decided to double down on their commitment to their oldest and best friend in the industry. This does not bode well for Linux, which neither has nor needs any McAfee products.

Maybe it's time to shift to ARM on the client anyway and this will be a temporary nuisance.

ARM server chip startup gets big backers

Mikel
Go

Android VDI?

That would solve a lot of issues. Lots of other interesting lines to pursue here.

Intel's been working on getting the watts down though with Atom. Maybe they've got a few interesting options along this line. Competition is a good thing.

US fanbois await freedom from Big Phone

Mikel

There's no benefit to apple in a VZW iPhone

It's a month after release and people are still waiting in lines for the new iPhone. Unless they can ramp the manufacturing they don't need a bigger pool of customers. It would just cause riots.

OpenSolaris axed by Ellison

Mikel

Said it before, say it again

Larry Ellison is not in the giving stuff away business. I said it in April and I'll say it again. The guy isn't even trying to hide it. He's telling you in plain language. Free stuff is not how Oracle became such a wealthy company, nor how Larry Ellison became such a wealthy man. To Larry Ellison technology is just the context of the game. The goal is to win the game, and score is kept in dollars of profit per quarter, or market capitalization, or personal wealth - for him scoreboards that are functionally equivalent.

Link where I said it: http://forums.theregister.co.uk/post/742120

And the text (because you all are lazy) reads:

Giving stuff away does not add immediately to the bottom line. It's not how Oracle operates. Larry Ellison is not in the "giving stuff away" business and he doesn't intend to be.

So get over it. It's time to get forking all the Sun things that can be forked, and replacing all the things that can't.

Ellison wrestles Google to strangle 'unofficial' Java

Mikel

This is not about Java

And it's only marginally about Android. It's not about any intellectual property Oracle acquired from Sun.

It's about the launch of Windows Phone 7 coming up in a few weeks. Bill and Larry are co-billionaires for charity now. They're playing on the same team - for the children, for their legacy. That doesn't mean they've given up playing dirty. Far from it: it gives them a moral certitude that they're working toward a worthy end that justifies almost any means. Bill may not be CEO of Microsoft any more, but that's where the bulk of the billions he's giving to charity come from.

Microsoft needs to sow some Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt in the mobile and tablet markets so that they can market their products as being free of that taint and so gain an opening that frankly isn't there otherwise. If they can't get a leg up here they're facing barriers to entry that are insurmountable. People Luurve their iPhones and iPads - 95% of owners would recommend the product. Android is swinging up with a market share growth that defies gravity and owner satisfaction ratings that are nearly as high. Without a rash of IP suits against iOS and Android, some legitimate security disasters there, and so on, they've just got nothing but a product that on its face is, er, inadequate.

The Virtnet lawsuits are about the same thing, by a different route. Given a near certain loss in the lawsuit but the potential for a long delay, it's easy to see the negotiating team work out a settlement that goes something like "Look, we could tie this up in the courts with appeals and whatnot for another decade or so... or we could settle for a decent figure as long as you agree to go after our preferred target next." The settlement was probably cheaper than their ad budget for Windows Phone 7, and Microsoft is not one to shy away from pouring money on the bonfire in the name of strategy.

There will be more of these suits filed from every angle. And the puppet press will cover each one from the same "Evil Google, Evil Apple" point of view. They're all bunk.

Elon Musk plans new Mars rockets bigger than Saturn Vs

Mikel

Land on Mars?

That's crazy talk. You land on Phobos or Deimos. No gravity well, more interesting survey spot for a permanent settlement and spaceport.

And when you get to the Asteroids with your tunnelling equipment, 1 Ceres is a likely spot with plenty of water.

Ballmer and Softies sacrifice sleep to catch iPad

Mikel
Pint

Windows Slate Forever

The release date is "when it's done".

Windows Phone 7 misses big-business support tools

Mikel

Bing Is Not Google

Also, integrated search on the phone that can only use Bing.

An app store that rejects applications that compete with Microsoft's apps.

Microsoft Office, but without that nuisance Copy & Paste feature.

Microsoft 'record' results beat Jedi mind trickery

Mikel
Go

Cloud

@Matt Bryant

Cloud is taking the distributed management and services philosophy of the botnet and implementing it to provide useful services in legal ways. It allows for dynamic scaling of resources to meet demand. It's been around for a long time - obviously the botnets have been using it forever, as have Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others. These days it's being pitched as a suite of products so you can have the cloud without rolling your own solution at great expense like they did. Of course everybody with a product to sell wants to redefine the "cloud" term so that it describes their product and noone else's - but that doesn't take away the utility of the idea itself, it's just business.

What services? Almost all of them of course. The applications that aren't well served by a self-scaling distributed architecture are pretty rare. Of course some few are tied to legacy hardware and software architectures and have to be rebuilt with the cloud in mind. Basically you take a thin operating system image virtual machine and build each service on that with the presumption that the service will be managed by the cloud so have cloud management hooks, it will only perform a scalable subset of the whole service, will operate only with resources that are dynamically assigned and be redundant. The management of the cloud is just a management VM built on these principles. They don't even have to be virtual machines, but that's pretty much how this is being implemented and sold right now because it simplifies a lot of things.

Using a cloud internal services architecture allows you to offload your internal workloads to compatible hosted services - when appropriate - to handle demand spikes or outages. If you're interested in this facility you have to consider the need from the beginning because cloud is new and some service providers may go away over time, leaving you with a cloud infrastructure that has no external service providers to provide this service.

One problem with cloud implementation is that it requires robust fast network connections between sites to provide professional levels of service. The downside is that if the network is down, you're sunk. But isn't that the case anyway? Another problem with it is that it's scary: the database guy is really comforted by the idea that there's an identifiable physical server out there that his code is running on and with cloud technologies that's just not the case. A third problem is that it's so different from the way things have been traditionally done that it can be hard to get people to go along with it and reorganize their activity. In the current model there are storage people and server people and network people and each of them has their turf and may feel threatened by the change.

So... did you win the buzzword bingo game you were looking for?

Mikel

If Redmond understood cloud

If they understood what cloud computing is, they would know why they don't need to squeeze Windows 7 into a tablet.

Congrats on squeeking out one last quarter of revenues higher than Apple's. That was a surprise.

Major Microsoft re-org to avert Windows' cloud cannibalization

Mikel
Jobs Horns

Beautiful strategy

For a young group with bold new ideas that threaten the status quo the best place for it is in the division most threatened by it, the most likely to cut off its air supply.

Brilliant! I wonder if this evolution is the one that finally convinces Dave Cutler to stop casting his pearls before swine.

Microsoft's KIN is dead, long live Windows Phone 7

Mikel
Pint

Nice Windows Phone 7 tag

Verizon is off the short list for the WP7 one would think, but it's up in the air whose idea that was. Who's the largest US cellular provider again? Oh, my.

The announcement takes care to state critical features of the immensely popular Kin will be carried forward to WP7. That's a bold stroke. Not what I'd have done.

I wonder how many Kin phones were baked into that Microsoft funded IDC study that claimed a market for 31 million Windows Mobile handsets by the end of next year. Lots?

The phone is cloud-backed. No announcement yet on how long the servers will remain up, and precious customer memories retained. I'd caution people to back their stuff up - the thing is heir to the SideKick, and if you don't know how that worked out, google "Microsoft Danger".

The ads are still running on TV, print and on the web, but the radio station I listen to has stopped pumping the thing. Prepaid ads probably. People are still astroturfing on facebook, myspace and twitter as well. 200,000 facebook fans? I wonder how much that cost all together. It must have been a good chunk of cash - I've seen dozens of TV ads alone, on multiple stations.

Oh, how I envy the popular mobile app developer today. I can only imagine the rare privilege of being the one to handle the Windows Phone 7 evangelists' phone calls. You don't get a shot like that every year.

Cisco uncloaks Android video tablet for suits

Mikel

The video calling feature will be enabled

...through the purchase of an optional license. As will the app store, the browser, and wireless capability. Inserting MicroSD storage will have its own tiered array of optional licenses based on the number of cards you desire to insert over time and their capacity. Some of these options will be bundled in utterly meaningless functionality clusters. Warranty support will be one year, with another tiered set of "service and support" options to "optimize your ROI".

And because it's a "Business" Cisco Android tablet it will have a management app for your company that inexplicably runs only on Windows.

Net TCO over the two year life of the fully enabled object will thus be $37,000 US.

Microsoft PR boss sweats in face of Apollo Creed Apple, Google... world

Mikel
Thumb Up

Dance, monkeyboy, dance!

Many of us are enjoying the show they make as they flail about. They've earned every bit of it.

The long and the short-term of it: Apple's future

Mikel
Pint

OK, this is a little tough to follow.

There's a lot of press right now about Apple particularly with respect to Microsoft.

Apple (AAPL) is testing all-time highs again this week on news they may have to charge more for their stuff to prevent fans from rioting in their stores. They keep breaking into new markets with products that capture the high-end, high-margin products, or dominate totally. The only uncertainty in their gross sales and net profits is how fast they can manufacture products. That all the products they manufacture will sell at whatever price they offer them is a given. They can continue to innovate as they haven't entered into restrictive agreements with their software vendor because (gasp!) they are their own software vendor.

Apple's core products are gaining market share every quarter - and the high margin high end of the market. Even in the recession people seem willing to pay full price for quality. Where they really stand out is mobile where their smartphone offerrings are growing both in units and share at a rate that have caused both higher-share vendors RIM and Nokia to miss their targets. Anecdotal evidence has the true value of their iPhone 4 product somewhere between $1600 (eBay price) and $2000 (widely reported convenience price). In its first day of release the iPhone 4 is believed to have sold 1.5 million units despite numerous difficulties caused by overwhelming demand. Preorders were 600,000 in one day sight unseen. They've created a new ARM tablet category that's sold 3 million units in 80 days and looks to be accelerating - an unprecedented victory for a first gen unit and amazing against a 15 year history of tablet failure. Though Android tablets have announced over and over no similars are launching before the holiday gift buying season. Apple caught their competition flat-footed here and look to have a full year of first-mover advantage. Traditional OEMs started their replies with Windows 7 tablets on Intel Atom CPUs but had to respin because this mix gave a poor experience and was not competitive. Since then Dell has adopted Android and HP has puchased Palm for their WebOS - both major defections from the Windows camp, and products are expected next year but there are questions about component availability because Apple is believed to have optioned the entire world's supply of displays.

In media products Apple continues to excel, selling more iPod devices than all other media players put together, tightly integrated with their iTunes store which offers a more diverse and complete media selection than all of their competitors combined. They make good margin on every unit shipped as well as profits on all media purchased.

By consistently delivering outstanding products in fields outside their core business Apple has built up a reasonable expectation in the consumer that no matter what new field they choose to enter, the result will be outstanding and durable. This enables Apple to enter new markets with an ease that competitors desire.

Apple has been a growth company since mid-April 2003, the stock having gained 40 times its price in that time.

Friday in after-hours trading Microsoft (MSFT) hit $24.41 per share - bottom of 10 months and only $.41 over the most pessimistic analyst's downside target. So Microsoft's stock (MSFT) is trading outside and below the range projected by 30 of 31 professional analysts. The mean projection of the analysts is $36, or 1.5 times the current price, and the most optimistic has an upper projection of $40. The big news this week is that Microsoft's Windows 7 is moving well but this is figured into the stock price and will be adjusted when real quarterly financials are announced soon. W7 is known to be a passable product that will gain adoption. Whether it's adopted or not it will sell well because consumers of volume OEM PCs have no choice but take the license with their PC and most enterprise customers are on Software Assurance and so were licensed on release day. Because of the way the market for Windows is structured to determine how "popular" this product is we'll need to rely on web access numbers because licensing numbers are meaningless: If a PC is purchased from a major OEM other than Apple, it comes with a Windows 7 license even if it doesn't come with Windows 7 - even if it can't run Windows 7 at all.

Microsoft releases new versions of their profitable products (Windows, Office and Exchange) on a regular cycle and get the usual annoucements about licensing. Vista, their recently rejected OS revision was also said to be widely licensed despite its rejection by the market. There's a new version of Office as well, and it's expected to be widely adopted as is the usual course. The expectectation is that this will continue to occur on a regular schedule for the rest of time and the company's pronouncements on volume licensed bear no weight because these numbers have nothing to do with actual usage of the products and cannot bear on their popularity.

Outside of their bread-and-butter businesses Microsoft has found a remarkably diverse assemblage of failures to dissipate their immense profits. Their search effort Bing is falling in share this week on news they have discontinued the cashback mechanism where purchasers of web advertising encourage their customers to pretend to use Bing to find their products in return for a cash refund from Bing. Gaming with XBox is finally profitable these past two quarters, but not at a level that has any prospect of winning back the billions sunk into buying market share with products that need to be returned at such an alarming rate. Natal, a motion sensing input using cameras is getting a lot of press but will not bring profits as the company is discounting it as a loss leader to gain acceptance.

Microsoft's biggest failure at the current time is also what's seen as the revolution that drives technology forward. The Windows Phone 7 mobile OS promised in January 2009 is still not shipped and doesn't look likely to ship in a form that will find traction with customers this year. Notable missing features include multitasking, copy and paste, compass. Although Microsoft funded an IDC study predicting 30 million units shipped by the end of 2011, this number is looking incredibly optimistic and has been roundly dismissed by the technology community. Developers are seen reluctant to waste time on this distraction so Microsoft is subsidizing some developers to produce games.

The most recent product launch - the Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two - are a pair of phones with limited features. These phones are an evolution of the SideKick purchased last year when Microsoft acquired Danger. Despite a months-long data loss debacle at the end of last year Microsoft continues to evolve this line because it leverages their "cloud" efforts which are seen as a way forward. The phones, formerly known under the codename "pink" lacked a number of critical features on launch including the ability to "retweet" and without an Instant Messaging client which is contrary to the positioning as a "social" phone for teens. Despite the shortcomings Microsoft's marketing department chose to advertise these phones as a forerunner to their new mobile effort, Windows Phone 7: "Microsoft said that the underlying fundamentals of Kin and Windows Phone 7 will be held together by similar core technologies. Both Kin and Windows Phone 7 run the same Silverlight platform. Microsoft has stated that over the long-term, Windows Phone 7 would be merged with Kin." Also critical was Microsoft's partner Verizon's insistence on a full smartphone data plan for the phone in addition to regular cellular charges which drove monthly service charges to $70 - quite high for the target teen market. Despite heavy advertising on the web, magazines, billboards and television spots sales are not going well. Two months after release there are rumors the two phones have sold 500 units total - amazing in that that's less than one per Verizon outlet carrying the things. Countering the rumor is that the Kin has 200,000 easily-bought friends on Facebook. Supporting it is that on Amazon.com the Kin One has one rather poorly rated review after two months on release, and the Kin Two has none. If the Kins are a forerunner for Windows Phone 7 the outlook is not good.

In media products Microsoft has tried time and again with Plays For Sure and Zune as notable cash sinks with no appreciable user base and no hope of turning a profit. Zune and the Zune Pass media outlet are losing money in the faint hope of achieving interesting market share.

By failing in the market over and over Microsoft has built the expectation that the new things they try will be poor and forgotten quickly. This causes reluctance with new adopters of their products and friction against success in new markets, despite their considerable desktop software advantage.

Microsoft has generally been in decline since January of 2000 when Steve Ballmer was made CEO, and has lost 35% of its market cap since then despite immense monthly profits. The company has declared some dividends but not enough to make ownership of the stock cash-positive since then.

Considering only the two companies' market cap with respect to each other Apple is clearly in ascent, Microsoft is clearly in decline and no change is expected.

Considering Microsoft and hardware partners as a group it appears that Microsoft is losing the control of partners they had enjoyed. Hardware partners want to survive and Apple is looking like a serious competitor in hardware that will drive them out of business if they do not create and deliver satisfaction from their customers. Placed on the horns of this dilemma Dell and HP seem to be choosing to compete, ASUS and Acer not so much.

MS will see a brief bump next week as they're oversold short-term, but the long term fundamentals are clear and they don't win.

Disclaimer: I don't own, sell, or work for any of these.

Intel preps x86 Android for summer release

Mikel
Pint

Intel opts not to go down with the WinTel ship

A wise choice, as it looks like that ship's going down with or without Intel inside. MSFT is down a hair less than 20% in the past two months, while AAPL keeps hitting all-time highs. Six more months of that takes Microsoft completely out of the driver's seat - a position they'll find tough to get back into.

Android/X86 on the client is cool and all - or at least it will be when the next generation of Moorestown SOCs get here. It puts an Intel chip in almost everything.

Where this plays really well is in virtual desktops. Android is Linux based and lightweight so as a VDI desktop VM it should be completely awesome - maybe 3-500 VMs on one dual Westmere server. With no/low licensing cost that puts the whole VDI proposition over very easily and it's a good leveraging of the superlative high-end processing of the Xeon processors at an end where the ARMs can't keep up. I'm actually going to be demoing this usage as soon as possible after FroYo/X86 comes out. This amount of leverage makes cloud desktop hosting reasonable for consumers and private clouds economically feasible for the enterprise. With the right remote desktop software the multitouch thing can pass through gracefully and they can start with iPads until the Android 2.2 slates are shipping and awesome.

Then there's the cool things you can do with software. With the right software any number of Android + Intel powered HDTVs, slates, projectors, wireless keyboards, wireless drafting tablets, thin clients with multiple high-resolution displays and more can all be integrated into one person's workflow. People can do things like pass live application windows from one wireless device to another, or even one user to another with a gesture, or share one application window with multiple people who can all interact with it at the same time. How many? All of them. You can make a video wall of anything at all.

Android is Linux of course, so your high-end engineering applications still work if you're the type who needs the horsepower on your desk - and all the engineer types can join a compute resource pool and share their spare compute cycles with whoever needs it at the moment. Finally. Of course fast networking will help make this facility useful.

With the vast influx of users, we draw the developers of course. And all the apps we need get ported over. It shouldn't take more than a year or two for a .NET -> python converter of some sort, and won't that draw some huge sales?

Suddenly we get dynamic growth in innovation again, instead of buying the same old stuff over and over. This is almost certainly something all the non-Apple hardware vendors can get behind. They have to compete with Apple, right now, or go away forever. There is no third choice. X86 is something they understand well, and the Android thing they can clue up on fast enough - they've been supporting Linux and playing with Android for quite a long time - they've just been muted about it for the obvious reasons.

Have we seen the end of "Intel Giveth, and Microsoft taketh away"? It wouldn't hurt my feelings at all.

Apple flogs 3m iPads in 3 months

Mikel
Pint

Few enterprise sales yet, few schools

There's a whole bunch of large-lot business that Apple hasn't even started to get yet. This may turn into the OLPC for the first world, an essential business tool. I think it's probably going to be the must-have back-to-school item for middle school and up.

I've tried it. It's pretty slick. Also, it draws an envious crowd everywhere you go - which is nice.

Microsoft claims 'biggest' show-biz investment with Bing refresh

Mikel

Microsoft Claims

That they're flushing money down a toilet faster and more efficiently than ever before!

Congratulations guys. You've got to aim high.

Microsoft offers iPhone devs Windows Phone 7 cash

Mikel
Pint

500 kin phones

Google "500 kin phones". It's hilarious. The vanguard of Windows Phone 7, the Kin, is going down as one of the most epic failures in the history of technology. It's the CueCat all over again.

It's been available for over a month and not only has it been marked down from $349.99 to $.01 on Amazon.com, you can still be the first to review it:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003H4R6SA/

Microsoft justifies lost Office 2010 upgrades

Mikel

I've gone over the changelog

There's not one feature that would make me want to upgrade. Not in this version, not in the prior one, or any of the others since Office 95. Even then I was beginning to suspect stagnation because the feature wars were over. If in 15 years they can't come up with a compelling reason to upgrade from that, it might be time to look at Open Office and the others.

I've had a look. It turns out that the science of putting glyphs on a page is well settled, and while WYSIWYG is way cool and all, for professional printing nothing beats the LaTEX., and for cross platform document production XML is where it's at. All the various document preparation suites do, well, prepare documents in the same ways we did thirty years ago. The spreadsheets do in fact calculate fields based on the contents of other fields in an array and offer methods of computation that normal people don't need to four sigmas - as they have since I was in high school two and a half decades ago.

The slideshow apps do, well, present slides and make the audience dumber thereby, using the exact same methods I used 25 years ago. It's a tool and we've reached the evolution of this tool to the point where the limit of what the tool can achieve is limited by the quality of movement of the handle end. Now they support video. That's cool. Let me know when you decide to use that. They support every other content mechanism and attachment method in existence too - and that's why Office gets more patches than Windows, and why it's the best vehicle for targeted exploitation. At this point there's no legitimate use for most of these, yet they persist in Office. Let me pick on one: VRML. This war is over. VRML is dead. Nobody is going to send you a VRML document. And yet the VRML interface affords at least 32 methods of exploitation that could completely compromise your computer - in Office 2010. VRML is only one of many hundreds of abandoned formats that evil people could use through office to own your computer.

At this point Microsoft Office is a swarm of productivity components flying in close formation. Although each of them has vulnerabilities, you don't get the full remote-manageability from any anonymous user on the Internet capability until you have the full suite.

What I'm wondering is: why is that feature worth paying money for? Somebody here educate me please.

Did the iPad just save Wired, and Conde-Nast?

Mikel

There's a way for traditional media to win here

It'll be like threading a needle, but they can get it done. If they can rework their paper content with ads into digital content with ads, they can live, but they have to do it right.

Be easy. In a magazine the ads don't obscure the content. That popover crap has got to go. If you have to fight the thing to find the darned story, you'll Google it instead and you won't be back. Yeah, there's lots of market research to prove that blocking the content with ads are how you maximize the value of ads. This is like grocery stores that make you navigate a Skinner box that forces you through every aisle and product to get your milk to make more money. Y'know what? The grocery stores that bought that story are now out of business, and you can navigate to the milk without impediment (though they all still put it at the back of the store).

Be relevant to our interests. In a magazine the advertisers choose the magazine, and the magazine chooses the advertiser based on some convergence of style or purpose. Magazines don't take advertisers who are off-brand, even if they are willing to pay a lot. Even online this rule should stay.

Be true to yourselves. We can smell a sellout a mile away.

The value of the content has to stay high and exclusive. Duh.

Y'know what? Cool ads are content. Raise the bar on what's accepted as an ad and you'll move more units. This is probably the commonest mistake. Get it through your heads: if the ad is in your product it needs to meet the same rules of "interesting" that the rest of your content does, or even more. Win that one and it's a slam dunk.

Google's $124.6m open codec hits Chrome dev build

Mikel
Grenade

VP8 is now BSD licensed

That should put any concerns about open sourciness to rest.

Goodbye MPEG-LA.

Microsoft's Ballmer and Ozzie tag-team on mediocrity

Mikel
Thumb Up

Microsoft has strong assets?

>Microsoft does have problems but it also has strong assets. However, it is doing an exceptionally poor job of communicating its strengths.

You can't begin to solve the problem until you first admit to yourself there is a problem. Look at the latest mini-msft post. This guy nails it every time. Steve Ballmer has at least today finally admitted that they have a problem: "we missed an entire cycle in mobile." Without focusing on the fact that it took 2 years to come to this stunning revelation - this is only the first step of many to find the solution.

Program managers and above at Microsoft have goals. Their goal is almost required by company tradition to be "make my product the industry standard". It's not about making a great product that pulls the world to them. It's about putting a spike in all opposition. This had worked for a long time, but it's completely broken and the innate failure of it is now revealed. People are starting to realise it now. These goals don't deliver innovation - they drive stagnation.

In this context the mission seems to be: Mind bend the hardware people to believe all the value is in your software, and they will kill each other (rather than you) to deliver the lowest margin hardware possible. Because in this world your software is an essential component, it's assumed that they must give you utter control of the user experience no matter how badly you screw it up.

Apple has figured most (but not all) of this out. It's not about these widgets. It's not about control of the market (though Jobs does seem to be a bit of a control freak). To apple it's about providing an experience that users find attractive enough to draw a huge mass of developers. This is the keystone that drives the rest of it, and so the point of this needle is enabling people to do stuff they couldn't do before, and enabling to do these things in a way that's easy for them, and gets out of their way the rest of the time. Jobs thinks holistically though - it's about money and once the tip of the needle is in you have to drive it home to get all of the money.

So Jobs' vision includes letting third parties develop an ecosystem where third parties compete to enable customers in new ways - knowing that this gives him millions of new features he couldn't afford to develop even with his teeming billions and at the same time absolves him of guilt for somewhat poor features bought from third parties - but he still gets a cut. Apple isn't at all interested in gaining control of the PC market - they're only interested in gaining control of the profitabe 10% of it. For all of them HP and Dell can kill each other over the 0% margin desktops, laptops and servers hoping to get their money on services.

Media, social networking and ads are important features Steve Jobs is pulling together well. Believe it or not, people do want advertisements. People just want advertisements which are laser-focused on the specific thing they want - even if it's "Happy hours at taverns within one mile of my current location" (a topic of recent conversation and iPhone app demonstration). They just want advertisements interspersed with unbiased and credible information like reviews. This empowers people in that it allows them to find the vendors who care to advertise easily, in a way that doesn't threaten their freedom of choice, in a contextually relevant way. If you 're in Boston, Happy Hours that end 20 minutes from now in Tampa Bay are not relevant, but ads mixed with reviews of establishments within 1/4 mile of you that have a happy hour that extends into the next hour are relevant.

The Apple iLife is not for everybody. Steve Jobs is opposed to porn apps for example, so you can't get them on your iPad or iPhone unless its jailbroken. Anybody who thinks this is a moral issue for Steve Jobs is just a fool. As far as I know Steve Jobs is a grownup, and most adults know that "The Internet is for porn". It's about money, about being presentable. These Apple products still feature a browser and codec, and that's all an adult needs to find any type of content they desire. But you can't be seen to deliberately facilitate porn to be a credible vendor for the larger market that includes corporates and government agencies that can't be seen to support porn. It's somewhat like the celebrities who make sex videos to rescue their careers and place them with distributors so they can sue & settle for a cut. It's a sham. Porn's not the only example here though.

In the end your iProduct is about getting to pay more for it that it costs to make by a certain percentage (some say 40%). Jobs extends this a little bit, adding that it must also enable you to buy things after the fact that provide contiuing profits at near zero cost by being a broker rather than a seller. Your iProduct becomes a store where you can purchase the objects of your desire (advertised or searched) when YOU want to, any hour of the day or night. This is a great deal for Apple, for the advertiser, and for you. It's still not quite the ideal answer.

And then there's Android. The thing Android is about is that the Googlers want to play in this game. They don't have to make money on it right away because they're doing fine in search and advertising for that so they give it away - unless you want the Google apps too, and then there's a fee. But giving people choice enamors them to you. Apple made exclusive deals with AT&T for wireless and data plans, and that created a vacuum because other vendor OS products suck. But other cellular providers and handset makers that service them need a credible platform to sell if they can't get the iPhone. Windows Mobile 7 ain't it - it was promised 18 months ago and isn't delivering. In Cellular, that's forever. The other providers MUST have product that's shippable and showable, or they're toast - and that creates a vacuum when they can't get the hot new iPhone. It's not Google's fault they were sucked into this hole: nature abhors a vacuum.

But the Android developer market is open to everybody, even if they sell porn. It's a wide open field that attempts no control over the developer. People write apps and sell them, and if they sell them so be it. If they can't get clearance for the app store, they can offer their app from any website because Google allows that in their Android OS.

I hope eventually that Android wins. To me it's not about the widget, but about what I can do with it. If I plunk down my hard-earned cash for a hardware platform I want to OWN it. I want it to obey me and nobody else. I want it to let me do whatever I want regardless of the motivations of its vendor. If I can get that platform then what it can do for me is ultimately ANYTHING I want because if I have a desire then it's probably common enough to drive a market to serve it

But if it happens that Apple redefines the world so much that they kill or at least dimininsh the power of Microsoft, well that's one impediment to progress I won't miss. I want progress to resume and grow, as it did in the '80's. If that's what it takes to buy freedom from the prevention of progress that Microsoft means to me, I'll pay it and hope we can kill the new devil one day.

This post doesn't have a lot of Microsoft in it. I want to have something to say about their current mobile, tablet and CE products. But it's been two years since they promised them and they're not here. The remarkably innovative products announced this week do not promise to ship this year. Given that things change real fast in IT, it's best to assume they got nothin'. Their old strategy has been worked around. Maybe now they should try innovation: giving us what we want, rather than controlling what we can get. If they can't focus on empowering and enabling us to do the new and interesting things we want, of what use are they?

Ballmer, black turtlenecks, and Microsoft's next big idea

Mikel
Thumb Up

Ballmer will right this ship

Yes, Microsoft's flight path is flat or descending. Apple soared past them last Thursday, and today has $12B more air under them - more than 5%. MSFT is on a collision course with Google, AAPL in danger of colliding with XOM.

But with Captain Steve Ballmer's steady hand at the controls...

Oh, darn. I can't even write that. I keep cracking up.

Windows Mobile is toast. They're not an also-ran, they're seriously in "who?" territory. The mini-msft blog today was totally hilarious, as was "Ballmer three envelopes" (Google it). The Kin is a non-starter, WinPho7 looks to be delayed to next year. Nobody wants WinMo6.5, and they don't have any leverage with carriers, and HP was in such dire straits they bought Palm for $1.2B. Android phones are selling 100,000 units a day. Even Dell is making an Android phone. WinPho7 starts with no apps - no cut & paste - no developers - no multitasking. We all had a good laugh at the Microsoft funded IDC whitepaper forecasting 30 bazillion Windows Mobile sales in 2011. That was rich. That'll really get them some play with carriers - a self-funded IDC whitepaper about a fictional product on the Microsoft side, real products and buckets and buckets of soft folding cash on the iPhone / Android side. That scale's going to tip in their favor for sure.

Their tablet plans are even better. They can't stop the iPad. Apple owes them nothing. Nobody has credibly announced a Windows 7 tablet launching this year and if they had one, they would have. Not for grads, nor dads, nor back to school season. Not for Christmas either. Apple will have a full year to put 12 million iPads in the hands of consumers with pent - up demand, and one might imagine those people show off their latest envy inducing gadget, buy some content and accessories. Microsoft's tactical response? They go after Android tablets. Brilliant! The strategy involves driving even more consumers and developers and content vendors (apps and books and magazines and movies, oh my!) into the camp of Steve Jobs so he can have even more money to suffocate Microsoft with. This is truly amazing leadership.

Microsoft still has Windows desktop, Office and Exchange. When we all have nice tablets and phones that don't have the problems that trinity does, I imagine we'll all feel somewhat different about a platform shift away from that mess. Or just walk away from it.

These huge profits you speak of for Microsoft... where are they? If they've been turning billions of dollars in profits per month for the last decade, where is that money? Seriously. Where did it go? You noted they don't have it. The dividends only add up to $25B so they didn't give it all back to shareholders. By your own count that's about 18 months worth. Where are the rest of these legendary, or perhaps mythical "profits"? Lost in the accounting somewhere?

Novell seeks rich suitors

Mikel
WTF?

If patent trolls carve up Novell

Then progress in networking will come to a complete halt, as flocks of IP Buzzards with no useful purpose sue everyone in the industry out of the depth of their ancient patent portfolio.

Surely preventing that is worth a billion bucks to somebody? Please?

Microsoft fluffs boffins with supercomputer promise

Mikel
FAIL

Windows HPC has only five machines in the Top500

And of those five, two run Linux (#73 at NCSA also runs RHEL4, #106 at UMEA University runs CentOS). Those are more properly "Mixed" or "WINO" (Windows In Name Only).

So really, only 3 Windows machines in all of the top 500 supercomputers on the planet - less than one percent. I wonder if any of the others have upgraded to Linux yet? Must write some emails and ask. The other three are #94 HWW/Universitaet Stuttgart, #19 Shanghai Supercomputer Center and #74 University of Southampton.

They had better order up more boffin fluffers. At this rate Windows is going to be lumped in with the other niche HPC solutions. Perhaps it should have been already.

Intel: best days are ahead for servers

Mikel
Go

The money from virt is in RAM, network and storage - not cpu

My goodness, but those 8GB RDIMMS are expensive and you need a lot of 'em. And have you seen how fond EMC is of those 200GB SSDs? Wow, have you priced 10Gbps ethernet ports lately? Each of these things makes the priciest W5680 Xeon look like bargain bin parts.

The LeftHand (HP P4000 series) also uses the Nehalem chips in the current generation, and has always been Xeon based.

VMWare is spendy too - the license per CPU costs much more than the CPU.

What can Google's tablet deliver?

Mikel
Pint

If you're Verizon or Sprint, no iFruit for you!

So get something else to offer the smartphone hungry consumer post haste, or lose customers. Waiting for Windows Phone 7 in the hope it's going to save your bacon had better not be plan A.

HP's webOS tablet 'due in Q3'

Mikel
Thumb Up

I'll believe it when I see it?

I'm not holding a grudge about the HP Slate thing, which they held onto for five years and just dragged out to try to head off the iPad announcement. It might have been a hit a year ago. Market timing is a tricky thing.

But even if they get this thing perfect in time for a third quarter release there's the issue of parts. One of the first clues that Apple was up to something was last November when they started taking options on the world's entire supply of thin displays of this size. Then there's the timing issue - it just won't have enough time with a release in September to get a big enough market going to justify a big manufacturing ramp leading into the Christmas season. There won't be enough samples about to get people going oooh, shiny. The iPad, at the same time will have a considerable advantage with several million samples showing up on coffee tables and meeting tables, at airports and coffee bars.

So Jobs, with notably impeccable timing and ultra secrecy has pulled off another coup. No doubt plans for the iPad II began on the same day the iPad plans did and it'll be released about the time this "Hurricane" is still a tropical depression.

Don't get me wrong - I want the thing. I would prefer it to an iPad. But I'm going to have to see a sample before I hang my hopes on it. I doubt HP would buy Palm to build credibility in vaporware. But the thing would need cameras front&back, three major wireless carriers with killer plans, and an early 3Q release date to blunt the iPad's first mover advantage. It would take flawless execution and awesome marketing with a big budget.

Intel wades into smartphone wars

Mikel
Alien

I want to believe

It's not about the widget - it's about what you can do with it - the opportunity it enables, the potentials it creates. It's about devices that empower the user to do new things, to do the things they do better, that stay out of the way. I really hope this platform has got the power to compete because I don't want to live in a Jobsian world.

If this has got the grunt and battery life for serious competition and it's as close as you say, one of these may wind up on my desk before Christmas - especially if there's a Linux or Android version. If it's just another ploy like the HP Slate to try and prevent the adoption of the iPad and Tegra2 Android slates, the iPhone and the Android phones, then we're not going to forgive you and you've just done a great deal of damage to the Intel brand.

Show me, Andy. Show me.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 shuns open video

Mikel
Go

VP8?

I imagine once Google open-sources VP8 this issue will go away forever. It's about time too - you'd think we'd have learned after that .gif nonsense that open standards everyone can use are the way to go.

'Gossips' say Apple will acquire ARM

Mikel

Buying your suppliers

Sometimes buying your suppliers makes sense. I note ARM is up over 40% this year. Somebody's liking ARM.

Obama 'deep space' Mars plans in Boeing booster bitchslap

Mikel
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The asteroids are a tricky target

Nothing in space is stationary. For Mars you can use the planet's gravity and atmosphere (yes, it has a little) to pull you into an orbit so you don't have to use engines to stop, and you have more choices for angles so you can go on walkabout and return to Earth without waiting for the Earth to come back into the right orbital position. The asteroids? No. Once you get to the asteroids you have to stop relative to the asteroids using engines because there's no gravity, no atmosphere - and using inertial damping by colliding with asteroids would be traumatic and potentially cause undesired secondary effects. The asteroids are dancing a peculiar dance we still don't understand and it's dangerous territory. As you match orbit to your desired asteroid the Earth spins merrily away, and you'll have to catch it the next time around. It's a minimum 16 month trip barring some innovation in drive technology I haven't heard about.

Not that it matters. For amount of money we're talking about here nobody in the US is going to build anything that leaves the atmosphere. I we're talking about the same level of investment for design costs as the Boeing 787, and that doesn't even reach low Earth orbit. The timescale is too long also. By the time this comes to a workable plan we'll need the permission of Russia, China and India to leave Earth orbit anyway and the Mars landing team will need local work permits and valid passports.

I am not an Obama basher by any means - I really do like the guy and I'm glad he's president. But on this issue he's spinning a story. Today he's taking the trouble to tell it well because when he drew a big red X on NASA's budget he discovered that manned space exploration has a constituency too. Somewhere in there I'm sure the NSA briefed him on the value of the USA space engineering team, and how if they can't pursue manned US spaceflight like they want to, they might be persuaded to help Pakistan with their cruise missile problem.

Go or don't go. Don't waste billions of taxpayer dollars pretending to try. If we're just going to pretend, give the budget to James Cameron and ask him to generate some good simulated visuals. If we're going to pretend, then let's pretend WELL. Don't pretend the next time the parties switch power - and they always do - that this long term plan won't again be devalued and scrapped in favor of "a new vision that will work this time - we promise!"

Oracle charges $90 for Sun's free ODF plug-in

Mikel

If I add more RAM is that an extra license?

And what if I need to run OpenOffice on my quad-core box - is Larry going to charge extra for the extra cores?

Oracle is not in the giving stuff away business. As soon as we get over that and get to porting everything we can that Sun touched, the better off we'll be.

Microsoft stealth launches 'historic' programming language

Mikel
Pint

Did we need another programming language?

Succinct? APL. Durable? C. Fast? Assembler. Efficient? Get a better programmer.

Once upon a time I collected programming language proficiencies like my children now collect Pokemon. I was proficient in over forty before I lost interest. Snobol app with functions in C, Pascal and Assembly? Sure, been there, done that. The lessons I learned? Over 90% of the operations occur in the libraries. The programming language is just a convenient grammar for accessing the libraries. 90% of the performance lies in selecting the correct algorithm and applying it correctly. Poor programmers find the correct algorithm sometimes accidently, but the incidence is rare. 90% of the longevity involves "absurd limit theory". 90% of security involves checking your inputs. I learned some stuff about hardware problems too: 90% of the time it's the cables.

I taught programming for a while. It turns out you can't teach creativity and curiosity. Either you have them or you don't.

A bad programmer is as likely to produce good code as a poor photographer is to produce a good photo. These things happen by accident, but new powerful tools allow an amature photographer to take many hundreds of of photos, some few of which may be worth looking at. If you need good efficient code the first time and every time, you need good people to write it. The thing is, you're not going to spend a lot of time debugging a photo.

A good programmer starts with a basic understanding of Turing, of Wirth, and the other giants found in the pre-1978 communications of the ACM. He's one with the hardware - exploring the intricacies of its nature and exploring its limits through Assembly and machine code - but he's not mature until he accepts that it's a machine and the underlying machine will change with time. He doesn't do it because he sees some profit in it, but because he's CURIOUS. He sees the development of programming languages in a grand arc, from the partly mechanical machines of yesteryear to subjective interpreters of tomorrow. He knows that every extra step - every data structure that doesn't scale - every unchecked input is his ticket to a forgotten history. He's as passionate about perfection in his mythical creations as any great author.

All great young programmers can be difficult to deal with because they have control issues. Their creations must obey them. This is perhaps the source of their social problems: the machines become interesting because they can be made to do what you want if you command them properly. As a young programmer gains proficiency, he loses humanity until social skills become a debugging task that's NP hard. This can be worked around by associating him with the right geek girl. At least that's what worked for me.

Oh, and you user interface geeks that eat up 70% of the development budget? You're creatives. You don't count. Your work will be forgotten in the next version.

One last other thing I figured out: there are some primitive basics. The first thing I always look at when considering a new language: what are the libraries written in? What of the OS? The compiler, does it compile itself from code written in that language, and will it compile itself to a new hardware platform with appropriate assistance? Can it be cross-compiled to create an operating system for a new and different machine? Answer these questions and you'll know whether the language designers were serious about creating something real, or if their goal is a script accellerator. You'll be about where Kernighan an Ritchie were in 1978.

So... this new F# language? Not interested. When it's compiled with a compiler written in it that runs on an OS written in it and can cross-compile that to a new platform that will boot that OS, load that compiler and compile the necessary apps, maybe then.