Dell has partnered with Microsoft from the very beginning, co-investing in products, research, marketing and more. Move along, this isn't the news you were looking for.

For what its worth, bundling software on servers, Linux or otherwise is pretty much a waste of time, most customers wipe it when they get it. As a percentage of servers sold I'd guess we(Yes thats right I work for Dell the man) ship way more servers without software than with. ELA's are where it's at.

Whats more interesting is the macro level actions, as TPM says, what will be different from what the company will do differently than it would have as a public company. I know internally that the talk of the PC collapse true or not, was a distraction to what we've been doing to re-invent Dell in the last 3-years.

Coincidentally, I registered to attend the upcoming Linux Collaboration summit yesterday. ++Mark.

Win8 for business

OK, yes I work for Dell.

That said, personally I think people that don't understand the application of touch and tablets in a business environment are missing a big part of the picture on future work habits and processes. Yes, I'm bashing away on a keyboard, attached to a Latitude laptop that doesn't have a touch screen and is running Windows 7 to write this.

When I got to meetings if I want to take notes I have to open my laptop and put it between me and either the other person or the whole room. If I'm walking from one meeting to another, using my laptop is virtually impossible.

Add to that, using Windows 3.1 style UI, which after all is what Windows 7 is, doesn't really fit the size, capacity and speed that my computer can run at today. My personal interaction with the UI is about the same speed as it was in 1984 when I was writing UI Windows-2 apps, it's just the controls respond a bit quicker these days.

I'd really like to use something that doesn't require a mouse, can be used more discretely, that responds to a flick of my hand, a gesture, that works intuitively etc. that isn't so invasive when I use it in meetings. I know lots of folks don't like Windows, thats fine. The answer can't just be an iPad though and the iPad interface isn't so far removed from Windows 3.1, which you may or may not think is a good thing.

Personally, I think in a few years, touch, tablet style apps with always-on capability, 5-10 hour battery life, will indeed have changed how we think and deliver business apps. But hey, go ahead just be negative, misery loves company.

Guys, I know I'm trying to make the blind see, but really there are some cool things going on over here at Dell now, yes we really are innovating. Not everyone is motivated purely by money, for some of us its really about the opportunity to build technology that solves real problems.

For the record, in addition to Jai in the Server Group, Don Ferguson former IBM Fellow is CTO in Software Group, myself and Graeme Dixon are working with Don, we are both former IBM Distinguished Engineers and Academy of Technology members. Add to that some outstanding technical talent from recent acquisitions such as Kitenga, Force10, SonicWall and we think we can do great things.

Actually it does mean MIPS

It's just it's unreliable to actually compare to anything else. First because ALL mainframes run a form of hypervisor, some OS's actually run under two hypervisors. Second, almost all I/O is not done by the main processors; in fact there are a great number of processors in the system that handle I/O once it's made its way through the GPU. Third, IBM System Z uses a form of macrocode or VLIW in its firmware which allows direct calls from an app or OS to bypass what would normally be result in a series of instructions that might cause interrupts in the GPU(s) and calls back to the OS in other environments. So apples and oranges.

So, MIPS are indeed measure of millions of instructions per second, they are just not comparable, hence they are meaningless. However, if you want to compare a specific app running a real world workload using say 4x cores, 128Gb of memory, in a VM doing say 250 IOPS per second, with a failover server and networking, you can come up with some pretty compelling price alternatives to mainframes. Are they valid, are they comparable? It depends on the business need?

Beauty as they say, is in the eye of the beholder, price and value are the same. I work at Dell (now)

Well all know the problem is the hardware for old media

Yes, theres a problem and el reg was right its the hardware... while well know file formats and open source software make it much easier to recreate programs that read old media, old software not required, the real problem is that as hardware gets smaller, it becomes much harder to recreate or fix it when it breaks. I still have a working IBM PC Junior, which only has diskette drives, I kept it from the days when I wrote a callable UI library for a home banking system to use. It still makes me laugh to see how small the library is, even though it gets packaged with the Turbo Pascal app runtime executable. The OS and the app run from a single diskette...

Here is a picture of my cube in I think 1983, with the same PC and expansion chasis...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cathcam/5616375294/sizes/l/in/photostream/

Emotional rant passes as what, news?

Clever use of emotion over logic, while your point might be somewhat valid its backed by almost no fact(oid)s. Remember, even Star Wars was fiction... Do you know or even have a clue if the virus in this case was easily detected ? I think not... Can you describe how it was in the "Supply chain"?

We can all imagine doomsday scenarios, but implementing is much harder. I'd be MUCH, MUCH more worried about loading new ROMS downloaded from the internets on your phone... seriously...

Palmisano

Next time you see Karl, or for that matter Sam, say hi from me.

I think if you check Tim, Sam was in fact head of IBM Systems Group when Linux was first proposed for System Z and Karl was System P marketing.

I still have somewhere in my collection the spoof analyst and press reports I made up to illustrate how this might get perceived and how to position the speciality engines.

However, be clear, the whole IBM Linux strategy was really about positioning the company to be ready for the tidal wave of people, technology and skills that would grow out of the emerging economies adoption of Linux, which was inevitable as it was, err, free.

The fact it might sustain the mainframe, or provide a wedge to drive between Microsoft and developers etc. Were all side effects of the former, not the drivers.

Still I failed in one respect. At a keynote at the, I think, 2002 System Z expo, or whatever it was called in those days, I claimed that as an industry we would have failed business if we were still talking about Linux as an OS in 5-years.

I had meant, instead of focussing on business apps and their runtimes like Java, Grid(ah hem) etc. IBM wasn't so pleased with the remark and I was called to explain myself.

Good fun, enjoying myself over in x86 land at Dell these days working on, err, embedded Linux "solutions".

"Software Group, which sells operating systems"

Oh yeah, which ones would those be ? Microsoft WIndows or Linux ? The IBM OS's are from IBM Systems Group... just sayin

Oh yeah... and the VC's are where?

So lets assume that he's right and capping is a good idea... does he have any idea how and where the VC funding is going to come from in the UK to "ensure that the next generation of "Googles, Microsofts and Facebooks" were British companies."

I'm guessing thats a brain half full type of wish...

Not likely

I spent 2-years on assignment to IBM SWG in the late 1990's evangelizing open source and Linux, and 2-years, 5-years ago as a spokesperson and lead technical consultant for IBM with the IBM Europe, EU PR Team.

This is a noble request, and possibly a good reason to do it. Let me tell you why it won't happen though. Notes/Domino is a huge piece of code contributed to by 1000's over a period of 20-years, as such IBM cannot attest to their ability to grant free and open access to all the source code. Some of the code will no doubt come from business partners and others who granted IBM a license to use the code, but will not have given IBM the rights to freely distribute their code.

IBM is very unlikely to spend the money going back over all the code and licenses to make this happen. Better would be to ask for a new Notes codebase, such as the Notes 8 eclipse code to be released, or for IBM to work with the community to open up the process to create new Notes/Domino APIs etc.

Good luck though. I assume we can rely on el-reg to do follow-up work on this and let us know what IBM's response is.

Penguin: because it will freeze in hell before this happens...

TT7 on HTC Touch Pro

I have an HTC Touch Pro with Tom Tom 7, in a powered cradle in my car, I have the phone connected to the car stereo to use as an MP3 player, oh and also to listen to BBC Radio London streamed over the net to my normal 12-mile commute in Austin TX, the TT7 Voice is just slightly louder than either MP3 or the Beeb and is great.

Yeah the screen is small, and yeah the whole thing isn't stuck to my windscreen/shield via an ugly sticker thing, but hey it works great and I can follow twitter via PockeTwit, get emails, I have my calendar, address book synced via CommonTime mNotes... uh, oooh, d'oh, I think I just arrived...

It does phone calls too some I'm told ;-) and yeah its Windows Mobile, but actually I think thats pretty good, the only downside is the horrible PC side Windows ActiveSync that keeps thinking its a different phone.

Hello world

What no hello world example, what kind of review was this... now I'll never be able to program in M.

@asdf - You are kidding right

Who is your US contract with ? I think its much more to do with the fact that the US users just are not aware they are paying more. My prior O2(UK) contract with unlimited data was much cheaper than my current US AT&T stitch-up, admittedly the data part is about $40 as you state, but I can't have it without all the other over expensive services.

When I travel to the UK, I have a Three pre-pay SIM that I use that provides a months 3G fair-use data for £5 so say about $9...

Bill because he knows a good deal when he sees one!

Rewriting history

my favorite is the one on page-4 where it says "We're applying the same kind of process isolation you find in modern operating systems" - Like err, address spaces in the 1970's mainframe systems. Just because Windows was borked doesn't mean everything else is... but then if Google says its true, it must be. So how radical is the concept of running tabs as processes and freeing up all the memory when you close a tab... not very, just another old concept applied obviously, patents anyone?

Oh yeah, and I remember around 1985 when the VM/SP pubs team first used cartoons to explain topics in some of the VM/SP manuals, so even thats not new google. Still nice to see the youngsters re-invent the old, maybe next up will be google coke, if you put a dirty penny in it, it cleans it... Wow.

Having said that, I'll be trying out Google Chrome, muppet I know. Mines half way up the stairs

But did they wire tap the calls ?

and are they going to keep them for 75-years... You bet if I called them they would.

Paris, because she's had her phone stolen too!

2.5mm headphone jack and no MP3 player

The spec says it has a 2.5mm headphone jack, groan, Nokia headsets then, at least its not the dumb HTC mini-USB, I don't see an MP3 or even an OGG player as standard...

I'd like to buy one just to encourage them to keep going... I assume they'll make some profit from the sale of the handset.

Cassette love

I just bought a cassette adapter with composite lead and 3.5mm plug for my 2005 Merc c230 Kompressor... works a treat. If I'd know about this before I'd have bought one, saves the MP3 player... come to think of it, I might get one anyway...

I'll get my Crombie-coat, my best cassette years were in the late 1960's and early 1970's delivering newspapers with my cassette on the rack on the bike of my bike.

I blame Berners Lee

Yeah, HTML was such a bloat after TTY and ANSI graphics, can't we go back to 3270 datastreams, they were such more more network efficient.

Smilie because I can still remember how to program an erase write alternate...

@Stuza

How long for ??

The US Embassy recently took all ten prints for a visa, how long before BAA send them my T5 prints to compare??

The only problem is we'll all need kid gloves, the slightest cut etc. and your finger prints don't compare. The US Embassy won't even take your finger prints and you can't get a visa if your prints are not perfect... all ten!