I'll settle for 2D memristors

Isn't the interesting question when *2D* resistive RAM will be in production?

Not helping

IDC wouldn't get away with this shallow analysis in their other sectors. The number of boxes shipping really doesn't matter. Is revenue declining even faster than unit sales? I'm none the wiser reading the canned summary. Worse, market share in unit terms masks relative success at selling fewer, more expensive boxes.

Plus, this is capital equipment, not consumables. Some markets are saturated, some not. Capital equipment has a limited life, implying a replacement rate (hinted at above). In saturated markets, overall sales numbers are not meaningful except in relation to this rate. (You can still argue about market share).

Maybe IDC have all this in their report, but all I see on IDC's site is metadata.

Blaming Win 8 is speculation. My experience is that Win 8 is on the good side of okay. There are problems: dropping volume shadowing causes backup locking problems, and tifkam apps have v1 issues, but everything else works. Power users hate tifkam, but they can just disable it, as corporates probably will.

HP RIP

Anyone can make these. What makes it viable, both for HP and the customer, is the management layer, just like OpenView and Insight Manager made ProLiant and HPUX viable at scale in the days of steam power. (To be fair I would add that those boxes were reliable, which was also nice.) I'm not getting any software love from the Moonshot site, or from the article. What's the HP sauce in the firmware or the rest of the stack? Do I have to pay for that? Or is it just OpenStack? Which would mean: anyone can make these.

Btw including local storage lends a certain retro chic, but it's an odd way to save power. Tell me it's optional.

Karaoke

Colluding on prices is a kind of did-he-didn't-he, slippery-slope, don't-get-caught kind of thing. The real value of a judgement like this is that it sends a clear signal that karaoke is always wrong.

WTFn

Fn key combinations for Home, End, PgUp, PgDn? Game over.

poseurs beware

US patent 987897586: a method is described of displaying a shiny accessory purely and expressly for the purpose of appearing more sophisticated, cooler, or more privileged, particularly when said accessory is needlessly expensive and affords no measurable functional advantage over a cheaper alternative.

Perhaps

he is off to run Classic Shell. I hear it has a great future.

http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/

Is this what they mean by 'non-obvious'?

I'd like to be able to say this is the kind of corporatist legalo-nonsense that comes with the special Fear you get when you get as big as Exxon Mobil, but in fact this display is straight from the Steve Jobs Big Book of Adventures for Boys.

Non-obvious, indeed.

Lawyers doing PR

Letting your lawyer run your PR is like letting your terrier wash your hamster.

USB

Can you charge it over USB?

Demand yours

I love my Scorpio Blacks, and price won't be a consideration when I have to get a new one pretty soon. Drive manufacurers need to differentiate the products that deserve a price premium, and actually market them. This morning I saw a giant Samsung SSD marketing truck parked prominently in the middle of Frankfurt. I've not noticed any above the line marketing from WD or Seagate. Their consumer stuff is good but unimaginative. I don't see any accompanying service offerings for example. Maybe I'm not paying attention.

Man, are we spoilt, just like Paris.

The business market is another kettle of worms: the drives are a trivial part of the cost of enterprise storage. Drive manufacturers are definitely the tail, not the dog.

Wholesale & OEM? One can only guess at the level of carnage.

Fanboi labour

Sorry if this is obvious, or has already been covered in the Onion, but the answer, in the long term, is to enlist the underemployed fanbois and -grrls who queued at the Apple store as a flexible volunteer labour force. You could work them round the clock and pay them in shiny baubles. The economics of their pavement vigils suggests they would expect the same number of baubles for longer shifts, which may prove useful. They are self-feeding, and bring their own chairs. Their superior Western education should make them flexible enough to cope with any assembly line snafu. Their uncritical eagerness, known in business as 'passion', would go a long way to reducing their new employer's dependence on ungrateful foreigners.

It's win-win.

All is forgiven

Having switched to Android from S60, I am unpleasantly amazed to find how immature Google's mobile mapping solution is. So it's nice that they keep updating the %$^%$ thing every week.

Actually, in hindsight S60 in general is looking more and more stable, usable and appealing. I think it's Nokstalgia.

Don't use Apple - don't have the dress sense.

Playbook

There's one born every minute. The funniest/saddest part of this story (so far anyway) is that Goldman was dealing this slurry over the counter before the IPO to all the other dads who were late to the disco.

When the parents turn up, as has been pointed out somewhere here, the party is over, and the guy with the dope is long gone.

Some interesting tech was done. But FB racked up some heavyweight recurring costs in the process, hiring darlings from Google, building a very nice data centre on the arctic circle, buying Instagram and Opera, and other daily essentials. In the long run (...) it has to cover those recurring costs from revenue, like a grown-up. Not from capital, like a trustafarian.

Can it? I confess I have not checked. But who cares? The fees have been paid, the outs have been cashed, and everyone who's anyone is a winner.

A much more interesting question is what all those zuckers will have learnt when the sell side suits next come calling.

Revlon

That'll be the old glam slap flash cache hash, stash & dash.

Well, you can forget your troubles with those Imperial slugs. I told you I'd outrun 'em.

That is a weak ASA decision. Carbonite works, though not perfectly, and whatever limits it has are immaterial in practice. I use it because it is cheap. I have around 150MB sitting in Boston, which is probably typical. I throttle my own Carbonite uploads - it is more than fast enough for the retail and small business applications it is designed for.

Why not perfectly? The Windows client is a bit clunky and annoying for power users. You can't throttle its CPU use during scans. It's file based, not block based (a bit of a non-problem in this market). Migrations can be patchy.

Claire Galbois-Alcaix underestimates her customers, to put it politely. This is normally fatal in the long term.

Paris - you know why.

Conflation

Let's not confuse the retail and wholesale issues here. By analogy the FSA makes a useful distinction between private investors, who need some things spelled out and who get some guarantees, and institutionals, whose day job it is to know this stuff.

The wholesale cloud thing will not go away. There are still a lot of idle assets in IT, and the consolidation of storage and computing power that has happened in the enterprise will continue beyond it, for exactly the same reasons. The buyers may not be informed, but then the Masters of the Universe get it wrong sometimes too. [The hole in this model is that network throughput can't be consolidated in the same way, but that is another debate.]

Retail cloud users have no understanding of the consequences of what they are doing, and no 'Information Services Authority' to spell it out for them. Maybe they actually want Facebook to point out what their alleged friends supposedly bought, as they drive past the mall. It's their decison. It should be an informed descision. It isn't.

Finally, anyone who has lived in a police state can see that this retail cloudwalking has the potential to get much uglier.

Accessorize

The problem facing Ultrabooks is that unlike Macbook Air owners, PC owners are more likely to have real jobs that don't involve, or that even actively discourage, sitting around in Starbucks looking coolly wired. The rest follows naturally.

Fwiw, the drive that OCZ replaced (instantly) when my controller died, hasn't died yet.

Who cares if it dies, if during its tragically short life, it goes like the clap? Real storage is magnetic. My data live on. QED.

You can use internet searches to investigate press releases

This appears to be a UK developed column database or something inspired by it.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/12/clearpace_shrinks_primary_databases/

GM tp buy HP

http://www.scribd.com/doc/52801884/GM-EDS

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/computer-colossus-looks-to-life-after-spinoff-from-gm-1335327.html

Funny old world.

Can we have...

...more weatherproof phone reviews please.

Beerproofness is an acceptable proxy test, but only if the reviewer is also beerproof.

Non-event

This is no more feasible than it was three years ago. Who's been pocketing the consulting fees all this time?

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/27/imp_consultation/

Cloud

Maybe RBS should move their back office to the Cloud..?

Shetland mammoths

Did they pay any tax?

Lock-in

It's like lock-in, but you feel cleverer.

What's wrong with this picture

Predicting an x86 revolution in embedded systems may be funny, but that don't make it right.

Gnome Unity

Actually, now that I've tried Metro, Unity doesn't look so bad.

OEM?

IDC says it does not include OEM sales, by which it presumably means it does not try to unravel them.

Warning: competitors with significant OEM businesses will appear smaller in your rear view mirror than they really are.

Question

Why would anyone spy on *Canadians*?

Numiricy & punditry

The minimum *uncompounded* margin of error of this prediction exceeds the projected difference by an order of magnitude. However even I can see that 'Windows phone may or may not overtake iOS in a few years' doesn't make such a good headline.

Now if someone were ever to put these pundits and their pundit-wallahs to the test, that would make for interesting numbers. We need the IT equivalent of politifact.com. Come on, let's burn some bridges.