Except that XP lives until 2016

Windows XP Embedded Edition gets at least another two years of support, so somebody will do unofficial backporting, just like Windows 98 has an unofficial service pack that is currently maintained.

You can't go home again

Debian never recovered from Canonical poaching its best developers, and most of its core packages are now cross contaminated by Ubuntu gunk because nobody else is doing the heavy lifting. If you are unhappy with Ubuntu, then you will be disappointed by Debian too.

Apple did exactly the same thing to FreeBSD, and today any feature on that platform lacking direct corporate sponsorship is withered or dead. Debian is doomed to be the next Darwin underneath whatever Ubuntu Unity mutates into.

Debian might have a chance if they can attract some new talent, but they are recruiting too much from the IRC channels and web forums. The organization has lost its cultural spark for hardcore engineering excellence and is now staffed by college students that want an @debian.org email address on their resume for their first real job application.

Here comes the Walmart of IT

I'm old enough to remember when the butcher was skilled labor, and working up front in grocery was just enough to raise a family. You're screwed when businesses start talking about your job in terms of "consolidation" and "margin" like this.

Your employer will get hooked on Amazon's prices just like you got hooked on Walmart's prices. The last person to earn a middle-class wage doing IT work is already walking the earth. These jobs are already fading away like textile, steel, and automotive did.

Name them!

These stories never give a list of the bad apps. Name the bastards.

What is this? SEO keyword farming?

Shuttleworth is inventing new words because Ubuntu isn't relevant to discussions (or web searches) about IaaS, PaaS, or SaaS.

Canonical should just call it "Laandscaape", like how a zombie product manager would say it.

The end of more IT jobs is coming

Look at the demo and marketing reels that Amazon recently posted to YouTube. They are saying that utility computing makes IT personnel redundant, and they're right, but before now they were subtle about describing this part of the value prop.

Smart IT managers should be resisting the cloud in the same way that they resisted virtualization ten years ago.

Smart development managers should now architect things like AWS into all new products.

Cramp that executive bonus

Any product that doesn't make a profit next quarter is a failure. Imagine the disruption of executive bonuses that would happen if a new product took a whole year to get traction.

Maybe B&N is having a Blockbuster moment: Technology is hard and competing against Amazon is scary.

Andrew, you missed the point

If the music industry had any kind of foresight, then they would have been the first t create the first MP3 player, or something like iTunes, or offer a subscription model.

Instead, they fought every technological development and were dragged into the modern world by large companies that couldn't resist such big and obvious potential.

As a consequence, the music industry owns none of the platform, which is what Bob Lefsetz means.

Own The Whole Set

In a few years, a complete set of Ubuntu media will be a collector's item.

Nerd combat and the Ubuntu default packages

The Ubuntu default packages must be less than 700 MB so that they all fit into a regular CD-R or CD-ROM disc. This announcement means that something needs to be cut.

One of my favorite spectator sports near Ubuntu release season is watching Nerd Combat, Celebrity Edition, as the maintainers joust to get their pet packages into the default installation.

In previous years, the battle has been fought over music players, photo editors, and Mono dependencies. What will it be this year? Who will win a place in the Gold Master arena?

oneieric... oneric... ugh

"Oneiric Ocelot" is too hard to type.

Skype has the temptation of monetization

Skype has enough users to induce a stupidity that is particular to software investments: The idea that you can monetize something that people use mostly because it is zero cost.

Watch for forced upgrades to the Skype clients that do advertising. This is the first milestone towards failure. When advertising revenues are inevitably too low to hit the IPO targets, they will do something obnoxious that will cause user defection.

They should also remember that the primary technical merit of the Skype Client was NAT traversal. Way-back, home users coudn't get competing products like NetMeeting or anything that was based on SIP to connect reliably. Today they have several competitors.

Samsung removed the Yahoo Widgets

Since the previous model year, the screen shot shows that Samsung has removed the obnoxious "Yahoo!" button from the remote control. I guess that means Samsung has discontinued the Yahoo Widgets program.

I wonder whether my old Samsung TV will still get app updates. The apps are weak and entirely worthless if you have a computer nearby, but I paid a premium for it, so I want the updates anyways.

Can anybody suggest a good 3rd party firmware for the 2010 Samsung TVs?

Java threatened Apple too

Java had the potential to displace traditional platforms, so Apple was threatened by Java in the same way that Microsoft was threatened.

The difference is that Apple took a measured approach. They licensed Java from Sun and they waited, but Apple was positioned to block it on Mac OS X if it became successful.

Apple made the correct strategic choice and didn't waste resources by fighting the fashion trend. Java eventually died for lack of merit.

Attention Round Rock Employees

The public use of your Windows 7 phone is a necessary precondition for ongoing employment at Dell. The development reimbursement that we received from Microsoft is worth more than either your salaried time or your personal satisfaction.

Be advised that all other mobile devices are not fun and therefore require a business case that is subject to review by HR and the nearest VP responsible for keeping Microsoft happy.

this will diminish Microsoft and kill most low-end IT jobs

Microsoft became powerful because their ecosystem allows mediocre people to keep well paid jobs, and these people are positioned resist change at the tactical level.

Cloud computing is disrupting this ecosystem by making competent IT personnel indirectly available to everybody, and the nature of utility billing makes the realized capital costs zero, which is like a narcotic for accounting departments everywhere. I have yet to see a VP of IT that can give a blow job to a CEO that gets a result like an Amazon EC2 invoice.

The droid that double-clicks to keep the virus scanner updated at your branch office doesn't have any way to prevent the whole replacement of his job with a disposable desktop computer and a faster Internet connection. I wonder how Microsoft will accommodate their hordes of MCPs and MCSEs.

the separation of work and home life is ending

I try to keep my home contacts and personal contacts separate, but it is difficult when you network with youngsters that publish everything that they do.

Nobody under the age of 25 that I've met can tell me why privacy is important. It just isn't something that is valued by people that had cellphones as children.

I felt old when a teenager asked me why I still use email instead. Hotmail users are very much middle-aged now.

HP is irrelevant, Palm is irrelevant

HP is a mausoleum for innovation. Palm will be embalmed, put on display, and forgotten by the regular consumer. WebOS products will smell vaguely of yeast and dirty underwear.

Anything that people carry with them, like a purse or cellphone, will always be subject to fashion. HP is the anti-sexy.

I think that most of HP's business is grandma giving the wrong gift to the kids because her classic LaserJet still works and she doesn't know any better. Same goes for geriatric IT managers.

Blockbuster is a good example of the business lifecycle

Corporations live a long time, but they all eventually die because they age like any other organism and get cancer: Professional Management.

If Blockbuster had even one executive with foresight, then they could have seen the opportunity, crushed Netflix and Redbox, and been healthy competition for things like Apple iTunes.

Imagine some of the conversations that happened in the Blockbuster boardroom: "The Internet will never catch on." "We're not a technology company." "Our customers want to browse physical product." "I never understand what those dweebs in IT are saying to me."

What is VMware?

I think that El Reg meant EMC. The VMware brand is just a bag of skin on top of EMC.

Tiger is now really unsupported

These vulnerabilities would apply to Mac OS X 10.4, so it means that the Tiger server has actually fallen out of support.

Apple had been providing Tiger updates for things like Safari and iTunes beyond the end-of-life date.

I wish that Apple had included the Classic environment in Leopard. That would have made the retirement of their PPC computers perfect and graceful.

the original Coraid product was compelling

Coraid initially sold a demo kit that directly bridged an IDE disk onto an ethernet switch. This idea was compelling because they were betting that 10 gigabit ethernet would be better developed and commoditized earlier than Fiber Channel or any other physical transports, and they were right.

However, Coraid didn't productize the AoE bridge, which was perfect for things like ZFS and CLVM, maybe because they couldn't afford to create a bridge chip for SATA.

All of the current Coraid products use a regular computer as a front end. Putting a modern CPU in front of the physical storage makes AoE mostly pointless because TCP/IP and other networking overheads become trivially cheap.

Solaris refugees should escape to FreeBSD

Let's carve a tombstone for Solaris. When it stops twitching, we will bury it beside Irix, Tru64, and all of the other gloriously dead unix platforms.

FreeBSD is adopting worthwhile technology from Solaris, and it already has critical mass independent of any single corporation.

The parenting habits of Apple and Oracle are remarkably similar. Illuminos can meet Darwin on the short bus to the slow school.

HP will tarpit Palm and WebOS

HP/Compaq/Digital is a company that stifles and sedates products. I'm not saying that WebOS is good, but its irrelevance is confirmed. The smartphone market has condensed to three platforms: Android, iPhone, and Wince.

I'm still bitter that Carly killed some of my favorite divisions. They bet on Itanium instead of Alpha (which became the AMD64 chip), the whored their printer division, and they portal-ized AltaVista.

Put android on the Treo and Centro

The Treo and Centro can run the Android operating system, but it is difficult to install and unstable because the drivers are reverse engineered.

If anybody remains in the Palm engineering department, then please release the hardware specification or Garnet driver source code.

None of you have any chance for long term employment, so you don't need to pretend that WebOS matters.

Unisys Icon

I want a Unisys Icon for my trophy case. Nothing better embodies the principle of doing less for more.

On2 contributed most of the code for Ogg Theora

I wonder why Google wants the team that did most of Ogg Theora, which is the video codec for freetards that nearly got written into the latest HTML standard.

all the PBX and back-end vendors are screwed

The problem with big companies like Nortel is that they die, but the corpse disintegrates over several years, like a beached whale.

So, I'm working as an IT mercenary for two companies of 100 seats in the same building with the same ILEC.

The first company buys a Meridian system: $1,000,000

The second buys an Asterisk system with a paint job called Switchvox. $100,000

The difference? The VP of IT at the first company got a cruise for his family. The second company got a system that can actually run 100 seats.

Nostalgia for Windows 98 and Macromedia Flash

I'm nostalgic for Windows 98, but each hole found in a legacy application makes it a worse idea to connect such a computer to the Internet.

So far, there are critical vulnerabilities in the Windows 98 SMB implementation, Internet Explorer 6, *Macromedia* Flash, Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Office, etc.

University Of Waterloo's new slogan for the new logo

UW

"We're Serious About Success"

Sun tried to screen their cloud customers

I recall that it was difficult to become a Sun cloud customer. They wanted paperwork and large commitments, but Amazon just wanted an email address and a credit card number.

I think that this happened because Sun was building a new system, whereas Amazon was selling slack capacity on an infrastructure that already existed.

Amazon got critical mass because they were willing to sell to anybody -- just like any other public utility -- but Sun management wanted customers that were "worthwhile".

strip AT&T of common carrier status

If anybody in the regulatory body had any gumption, they would begin the motions of stripping AT&T of their common carrier protection for discriminating network traffic.

They forgot to inclue the boot loader menu

The grub menu.lst file is missing from the osol-0906-x86.iso file. Again!

Good jorb guys, we're sure that Sunacle will keep you.

My anecdote!

Lenovo reneged on my Windows Vista refund, and my T60 already has two screen defects.

Their Indian-rific technical support got a bit uppity after they dropped Ubuntu from their product lineup. This probably coincided with a restructuring.

Oh well, Lenovo is just another wintel vendor that will go bust.

Silverlight buggered Netflix on my Mac and Linux home theatre

Netflix worked fine on my Power Mac and on my Linux home theater kit until they broke the streaming service with Silverlight.

If Netflix streaming is embedded in the Windows Media Player, then maybe I can get it through WINE.

I wonder what it is like to work for a company where you can just bribe your shitty products into the market.

AMD did the transformation, and it was to 64-bit

AMD was responsible for the x86 platform going from 10% to 50% in the last decade because their 64-bit implementation got traction for being affordable, sensible, and backwards compatible.

Everything in Nehalem is an incremental upgrade, or a gimmick on an incremental upgrade, except the MMU virtualization. (This piece finally obsolesces the fancy software technology in VMware, and makes VMware just another front-end on the hardware.)

If Intel had their way, then Sparc would still be leading because the alternative would be Itanic.

I hope that trackerd is disabled or gone in Jaunty

I'm still sore from the bent-over experiment that was trackerd. It was a huge embarrassment for Canonical. (Tracker is a clone of Apple's Spotlight, just done poorly like in Vista.)

Oracle buying MySQL?

*shudder*

Would they call it Oracle 11 Lite?

The freetards would restandardize on Postgres in an instant.

the low hardware spec will be emulated

Console game piracy usually matures like this:

1. Code injection, like through a logic analyzer or an exploit. (eg: On the Xbox, Huang did it in hardware, and the the dashboard font overflow discovered soon after.)

2. Toolchain availability. (eg: The legitimate ps2dev for Playstation, and the leaked XDK for Xbox.)

3. Emulator availability, which can be difficult for weird things like the Emotion engine.

The kit is commodity, so the second and third part are already available. Most PC computers and existing consoles will be able to run the games.

My bet is that the initial exploit will be through a GSM crack. (Or HSPDA. Whatever.)

Silverlight is being built for the iPhone

Do you really think that Apple got that Exchange sync license and trademark suite for just cash? Microsoft doesn't operate like that.

You're going to see a Touch-style Windows Media device soon, but a patent battle won't happen. If the new WM hardware family is stillborn (which is unlikely), then you'll see Silverlight available for the first iPhone that has video acceleration.

AT&T and T-Mobile plans don't perfectly overlap

I've got telephones on both AT&T and T-Mobile. At first glance, AT&T and T-Mobile offer similar plans for the iPhone, but they don't perfectly overlap.

For people that use few minutes and much data, AT&T is probably better, especially with rollover. The in-network discounts and freebies make a bigger difference than you might think. The AT&T data network is noticeably faster and larger than T-Mobile. Both companies have soft caps at 5GB. Tunneled voip over 3G works fine in metropolitan areas

For people that do the opposite, the MyFavs plan is worthwhile. You can game the MyFavs contract by doing everything though a VOIP repeater. (eg: Buy a local VOIP DID. Forward DID to cellphone. Add DID to MyFavs. Add DID as outbound calling card. Put the DID on your business card and keep the actual cellphone number a secret. T-Mobile base plan + $5 VOIP buys unlimited minutes in most markets.)

Saurik is an idiot for attracting this kind of attention

Saurik should have put the store application and/or commercial framework in a new repository, named it something different, and had commercial developers depend on it.

The name "Cydia" is now contaminated. Apple's battalion of undead lawyers is now mercilessly tracking anybody that smells of the project.

The iPhone will kill Sirius XM

Well, not the iPhone particularly, but services running on the cellphone network like Pandora, Slacker, LastFM, et al will kill Sirius XM.

Sirius XM has forgotten their value proposition and is becoming indistinguishable from regular terrestrial radio. Why did people buy satellite radio service?

1. To avoid commercials.

Sirius XM has been running commercials on their music channels for more than a year. The DJs read advertisements between songs and call it "banter".

2. Adult content.

A condition of the Sirius XM merger was a minimum of 100 "family friendly" channels. All of the hard rock and hip-hop channels are now playing radio edits and bleeping profanity.

Uncensored content is a big draw for the Sirius XM audience. Sirius XM is now censored at the same level as regular cable television, which means that you can get titties and dirty words while the children are asleep, but daytime content is bleached clean.

3. Deep playlists, better targeting, and rare stuff.

Most of the specialty channels have been cut. The remainder are as bland and repetitive as any Clear Channel or Jack FM station.

4. Audio Quality.

Most Sirius XM music channels are down to a bitrate of 32kbps or less, which makes the music sound worse than AM radio. Talk channels are running at 8kbps, which causes the "tin roof".

People that pay for radio generally expect higher quality. Trying to cram backseat TV service into their bandwidth license was idiotic.

5. Price

Most people would rather put the money for a $250 radio and $15 subscription into a fancy fancy cellphone with a data service, and stream exactly what they want from the Internet.

More simply, everything that Mel Karmazin turns to shit and shareholders that had enough votes to fire him fully deserve to see their investment evaporate.

2TB would be a nice place to go bankrupt

I hope that these storage media companies begin manufacturing 2TB disks before they fail financially and fire the R&D department.

The obsessive-retentive part of me thinks that 2TB is "perfect" because that is the addressing limit for computers with parallel ATA/IDE interfaces.

The 2TB hard disk could be the next 1.44MB floppy disk or the next 2GB SD card, especially for embedded systems. It would be a mature part for a stable old platform that just can't go any bigger, but doesn't really need to go bigger.

RIM is moving to Dallas, not Chicago

RIM is shrinking their Waterloo operations because graduates from the University Of Waterloo and University Of Toronto are under-performing, and because the business isn't sexy enough to get tax subsidies and federal grants anymore.

Between the dot-com enrollment bust, and the province saying "pass 80% of your undergraduates or lose funding", the availability of quality human resources that are willing to work burn-out hours has decreased to the point that Ontario is too expensive for this kind of business.

It is much more likely that people being hired in Chicago are being given job offers for the new RIM campus in Dallas. Many of RIM's top-performers have already moved there, or are getting ready for the transfer.

here comes the AppleTV

Comedy Central, which is being cut, carries Stewart and Colbert. These two shows are consistently top-ten in regular ratings and in iTunes sales, so they have enough pull to get people to try things like the AppleTV (or Xbox 360) if they fall off cable broadcast.

Dumb move for both Viacom and Time Warner. Apple and Microsoft are both worse partners.

layoffs should kill the Microsoft dream

We're starting to see the labor dearth caused by the dot-com bust, and it would be nice if students are further discouraged by some newsworthy cuts at Microsoft.

I get annoyed by the large number of junior programmers that think they have a potential career track into Microsoft (or the video games industry), and I would enjoy posting the eventual El Reg story on the cafeteria corkboard to crush their dreams and make them less likely to leave.

tape is more expensive than the cloud

The price of a fast Internet connection and a cloud storage service like Amazon S3 is often less than a tape silo, and altogether more convenient and scalable.

One thing that always annoyed me about DLT tape is that the drives were not backwards write-compatible. I always felt that my legacy tape inventory was wasted after a drive upgrade.