* Posts by Mikel

2643 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2008

Windows 8 launch outdoes Windows 7's, says Microsoft bigwig

Mikel
Windows

We have this to go by

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/03/28/ms_vista_shipments_claims/

Apparently declaring victory early is a Windows tradition.

Moody's slashes HP's credit rating

Mikel
Windows

Gee whillikers

You write down a measly 16 billion dollars in a span of 90 days, and suddenly everybody gets all nervous Nelly on ya. Bunch a pansies.

What can save the Xmas PC market? Not Windows 8, say analysts

Mikel

No Metro for Chrimbo?

Say it isn't so!

Microsoft Surface with Windows 8 Pro gets laptop-level price

Mikel

Re: Tears

Oh, it's getting a little dusty in here for me too. Probably a different reason tho.

Microsoft halves Surface RT production orders - report

Mikel
Paris Hilton

RT PrO though that will sell Meelions

It must. Who hasn't looked at a laptop and said: "This is really neat, but I wish it didn't have this keyboard. I would totally pay twice as much if they would take that off."

Why, the CES Windows Tablet storms of the past few years have yielded an amazing outpouring of innovative designs that have conquered the tablet market. A shame Microsoft isn't even going this year, to finally show off their own-brand hardware. That would be awesome.

Microsoft Office 2013 heads for the cloud but fails to soar

Mikel
Happy

Install footprint

Have they hit a terabyte yet?

Android seven-inchers swipe rug from under Apple

Mikel
Go

Let's be happy

These new things are crazy good. We didn't have them before, and we do now. I think that's a bigger deal than Brand X or Brand Y.

Power station, airport SCADA defences 'dead as a dodo'

Mikel

The state of SCADA security is dire

I suppose that means there's an opportunity here.

Google parks panzers on Germany's lawn over 'link tax' plan

Mikel
FAIL

So drop the newspapers

Agree with the others here. If the law passes, de-index the newspapers. If you have to pay to link to it, it ain't on the Internet.

Intel edu-tablet sales forecast slashed - supply chain whispers

Mikel

$300 price point

I'm sure that back in April that seemed like a good idea for third world education tablets. Now, not so much.

Datawind insists $42 tab isn't Chinese

Mikel
Meh

This is an important product

The Indian market is fiercely competitive and notoriously corrupt. If the students are going to actually get the benefit of these tablets somebody responsible is going to have to cut through the nonsense.

Asteroid miners hunt for platinum, leave all common sense in glovebox

Mikel
Pint

It's their money

Whenever these objections about Planetary Resources come up I feel it's important to remind the author: it's their money. They don't tell you how to spend your money. Some of the richest guys on the planet are behind this thing, and they're not in it for giggles. As long as they don't ask you for your money, let them do what they will.

It's not like they just spent 11 billion retirement fund investor dollars on Autonomy, 8 billion on Skype, or two billion dollars a year maintaining their web presence like some fools have been up to.

Mikel
Go

Orbital fuel dump

This is actually what they're about as they themselves have said. The metals thing is just a byproduct. LH2/LO2 FOB LEO is quite the valuable product and the addressable market may one day be in the kilotons. Other materials on orbit may also have good value. Bringing an object down from orbit considerably depreciates it.

When NASA's Dawn mission gets to Ceres it will definitely discover an essentially unlimited water resource. There's good potential for Xenon ice as well at the poles, which would be outstanding. The capture and processing of near-earth asteroids for fuel to accelerate the robotic recovery and exploitation of this resource is essential.

Who would have thunk it? Our 21st century spacecraft will be primarily steam powered. Sorta.

Dell looks around for an all-Flashy gobblement opportunity

Mikel
Happy

Dell should roll their own

Supermicro makes a 4U 72HDD server chassis for $2500. Dell could probably slim that down to 3U and 96HDDs by rotating the backplanes 45 degrees. Stuff in some 500GB SSD drives for the price/performance/density sweet spot, lay in a server MB and some I/O. Now it's off to their own software guys to turn this into a 10M IOPs 40TB RAID6 storage screamer with quad 10Gbps iSCSI or some infiniband and network redundancy. Mark it up 3x and make some nice margins. Done and sorted for 0.04 billion dollars.

Don't touch Sony, Panasonic's junk, says credit agency

Mikel
Devil

Strategy

I hear when they get desperate enough, Sony might start considering making stuff that works with your other stuff. I don't believe it tho.

Lenovo set for Chinese smartphone crown in 2013

Mikel
Thumb Up

Lenovo is making the hard turn

They bought IBM's PC business right before the Vista launch and turned that lemon into lemonade - taking themselves to top dog in the PC client biz. There's scant profit in it, but they're driving units and spoiling the fun for all the other Windows-only PC vendors - and that's a win for China and Lenovo to break the monopoly by driving the profit out of it. HP should have parted with their Windows PC business too before Windows 8 launch as Apothaker said, if there were a buyer; now it is too late.

But the growth is in smart mobile devices - especially in China where most people don't even have PCs and never did. Android has 90% of the China mobile phone market now, and nearly as much in tablets. Most of those people who never had traditional PCs now never will. Lenovo is ready to make a profit now, and they've found a way. When they leverage their homegrown MIPS technology chips and software development prowess they should surpass the West in the general availability of technology in about five years. But five years from now in the West an entire K-16 education will be something we just assume everybody over the age of 8 has on their person so, meh.

Lenovo and China will continue to export this of course using the "thousand paths" model, and make good money that Western methods of Intellectual Property war cannot stop. Battalions of lawyers cannot stop 100,000 vendors and eBay.

It helps the Chinese citizen that this stuff is battery powered and can be charged with a solar cell. Their power infrastructure isn't the best. India is in the same boat there. India is going whole hog on the Android tablets also, subsidizing the Aakash II tablet to $20 for students, and their target is a half billion students in the next few years.

There is a cost in the availability of technology. An uncensored copy of Wikipedia in English is about 10GB. It fits on an SDHC card that can be hidden under a postage stamp, in a bar of chocolate, in a battery, and so on. That can be uncompressed, viewed, copied on any one of these devices. The proliferation of these devices means that the Chinese government is about to lose their control of the flow of information. They will find themselves forced to move into our dynamic world of communications whether they want to or not. There will be change and they need to find the smoothest possible way to embrace it - a challenge I don't envy.

Oprah Winfrey too late to save Microsoft's Windows 8

Mikel
FAIL

"It's early days for..."

We've been hearing that about Windows Phone for two years. Guess what. After two years it's "late days". Two years is about three generations of mobile.

Last quarter non-Windows mobile smart clients moved 2x as many devices as Windows clients both classic and mobile. This quarter it will be 3x, as nobody wants to find a Windows device under their tree - mobile or classic. The last Microsoft Windows-phone exclusive OEM - Nokia - is losing over a billion dollars a quarter selling 88% of all the Windows Phones sold. Everybody else is standing up a false WP front to get Microsoft off their backs about patents, but not moving any significant units.

For a while there the question was, "well why aren't Android OEMs earning profits?" The answer is "because they were sinking their Android profits into the Windows Phone money pit." Now that they have stopped doing that, all but one has turned around. Even Sony has seen reason, and that's saying something.

These mobile devices drive many times more margin and profit dollars EACH than Windows laptops and desktops do on average - which amplifies the difference into many multiples of profits for the OEM. Lenovo just won the top spot in Windows PCs units shipped at an operating margin of 2%, meaning that on that $400 Lenovo laptop they made eight bucks. Apple laughs at this earning $160 profit on an iPad Mini, and Samsung finds it equally hilarious earning $200 or more on each SGS III. Lenovo would have to ship 20 laptops to match the profits on one iPad Mini, or 25 laptops to match the profits on one SGS III. The FedEx guy who delivers it probably earns more profit than that. And Lenovo is not shipping even as many laptop units as Apple is moving iPad Minis or Samsung is moving SGS III devices, let alone 20 or 25 times as many.

The world changed. The money is in mobile. Everybody needs to get with the program, or go away.

How Intel's faith in x86 cost it the mobile market

Mikel
Boffin

In tech we eat our own

Intel has a singular linguistic problem. The word "cannibalize" is seen as an argument against any new technology, as in "we could do that, but it would cannibalize our (desktop/laptop/server) sales." Guess what: if you don't do it, somebody else will. Intel needs to embrace the Fine Young Cannibals that bring progress by eating the slow-moving ill members of their pack. They need to take up cannibalism as a core corporate ethic.

Intel needs to find some Young Turks and tell them: Kill a business group if you can. Count coup and you will be the boss of that realm until another younger, faster, hungrier Turk comes to supplant you.

Mikel
Pint

Linux runs on...

Whatever you've got, presuming it's a Von Neumann architecture - and we haven't seen any others gain traction in the last 40 years. You can install Linux on a dead badger. Google it.

PCs punch HP in the gut, servers knee it in the jewels

Mikel
Happy

I like the C-series blades.

Especially Gen 8. Dual LOM 10Gbps FCoE, and all the 1U server goodies, 16 core/32 thread servers with up to 512GB RAM, Terabytes of Fusion IO storage if you need it. FDR Infiniband and 16Gbps FC if you want it. Good, stable management that's now got Android and iOS apps. Huge RAM full-height quad socket blades for when the software licensing costs more than the server.

There are some new architectures that challenge it in the non-x86 realm but for the general use case this is still good stuff with a long leg on the road ahead. In the blade space I can engineer you a solution from any major blades vendor but if you ask me - HP is the way to go in blades. I don't just engineer the solutions - I fix 'em too - and HP is a rock-solid member of the blade uptime club.

I'm not a fan of their Windows obsession in the client space but that's a different thing. If anybody deserves props in the blade space, HP does. HP still have AMD blades too and I like those for certain use cases. Most others have let AMD go because they don't move enough units to sustain that much choice, or never took it up.

Long story short if you want x86 blades, HP is still my first recommend.

Design guru: Windows 8 is 'a monster' and 'a tortured soul'

Mikel
Pint

I love the new look

I'm thrilled. I think it will do wonders for bringing the company's influence in the market more in line with what they deserve.

Intel roadmap leak shows quad-core Atoms for 2014

Mikel
Windows

Windows only?

Are they sticking with that?

The Sinofsky Letters: Defenestrated Windows overlord corresponds

Mikel
Holmes

** Applause **

Nicely done! Icon is for you.

Should Microsoft merge Office into Windows - or snap it off?

Mikel

Office for Linux?

Putting your data in Office is like gifting it to Microsoft and renting it back.

Another Microsoft Trojan? Sinofsky might just want a RIM job

Mikel
Black Helicopters

HP doesn't need a softie

They've already got one in the Chief Operations Officer, emplaced just in time for the runup to Windows 8. His name is Bill Veghte. He is responsible for daily operations of the company.

Windows boss Steve Sinofsky exits Microsoft

Mikel
Devil

Somebody's looking around for a new mission

I wonder which company is going to get their Sinofsky-style Elop maneuver.

Acer lowballs on price with Celeron-powered C7 Chromebook

Mikel

Dual core, 64 bit and VT-x.

Interesting. Maybe I''ll run the Chrome OS in a VM.

Mikel
Thumb Up

This will work

I can see myself putting Linux on it if I don't take to Chrome. At $200, not a tragedy if it isn't perfect.

Nvidia launches not one but two Kepler2 GPU coprocessors

Mikel

That's a lot of perf

They're getting some pretty premium prices for these things though.

Will Santa be working overtime to shift Win 8 kit? No. Yes! Maybe

Mikel

Re: Obviously

Asked the secret of his success Wayne Gretsky replied (paraphrased): "The other guys skate toward the puck. I skate toward where I think the puck is going to be."

Mikel
FAIL

Microsoft will declare victory

They have sold a great deal of Software Assurance and Enterprise Agreements and will present those as W8 sales even though A scant 5% of those licensees intend to install the software ever - And they buy 2x seats to keep the BSA away.

Microsoft Surface Touch keyboards self-destruct – and more

Mikel

On fire?

I would buy a Nexus 7 that was currently on fire before any sort of Surface.

Mikel
Windows

Re: It was to be expected...

The exception is probably the KIN. They only sold a few hundred of those, and bought most of them back so it could become quite the collector's item.

Office for Android, Apple iOS: 'REALLY REAL this time' - report

Mikel

Linux is a kernel

The home for Linux is Kernel.org. It is not intended to be much more than a kernel, drivers and filesystems. The kernel is the thing that allocates resources and provides an api for apps. All the rest you see on a modern Linux system is GNU. Even the terminal window that gives you your preferred command shell.

There is nothing UN-Linux about Android. They are using it in a way it was intended to be used, though in a use case that was less popular five years ago. Today however, this has become the default use case by sheer weight of numbers. And that is a good thing for everybody except gnu.

Mikel
Windows

not gonna happen.

Office 365 maybe. Nothing else.

Mikel
Pint

Re: "If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won" : Linus Torvalds

The kernel mods are being folded in. This is a designed Linux use case. Android is a linux.

Windows RT still haunted by the ghost of Microsoft's 2001 tablet fiasco

Mikel
Go

Bluetooth keyboards

The ideal would be for pckeyboards.com to come out with a Bluetooth version of the Model M. I have asked and they have no such plan. Maybe an email campaign or petition is in order.

Mikel

Re: Tablets

I see a lot of comments like this. Try it. You'll like it.

Mikel

Patience.

You will get your wish.

Microsoft mulls 'Xbox Surface' slate for games

Mikel

outlook for hardware partners

Grim

HP upgrades Linux Foundation membership to Platinum

Mikel
Alien

Re: The way the wind is blowing

HP has been a friend of Linux just about forever. A bipolar friend with multiple personality disorder ("HP recommends Microsoft Windows" on their Linux landing page for example), but a friend. As I've put on here before, HP has always donated servers to Kernel.org for example. They support multiple distros. They contribute to the kernel. Except for a short period with laptop wireless chipsets they pay attention to component driver availability in their build designs. Printer driver support is huge and they've got that covered with over 1,000 models of printer.

Fondle fever: Growing tablet market no longer just an iPad market

Mikel

A very tablet Christmas

Hurry, Santa!

Acer Iconia A110 8GB Android tablet review

Mikel

A good review

HDMI and SD are important features for some, and if you want them on a 7" tablet then this is a slamming deal.

Asteroid belts could be key to finding intelligent life

Mikel

Re: Timing is everything

ELEs provide evolutionary reboots in the case of a Darwin system hang. There is no reason to believe Earth is special in this way.

Mikel

Re: Timing is everything

- "Building blocks of life" raining down from the heavens is, at best, lunch.

After the first one, yes. For the first one though the entire planet is breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Mikel
FAIL

Timing is everything

Life first appeared on Earth about 15 minutes after the environment was stable enough to support it. The combined notions that it originated here so soon, and yet requires some miraculously special environment to do so requires a leap of faith. I ain't jumping. It's easier to believe space is littered with life and it sprouts in every fertile ground.

Tape is sexy again - so why can't Quantum stop drowning?

Mikel

Tape?

It is difficult for me to appreciate the reasons why we are still talking about tape. Or even imagine it.