"Makes the information [that] applications present their user interface"

You mean, like, er, the words tell you stuff?

Gutenberg would be so proud of us. We've re-invented the book.

Haters gonna hate

Kudos to MSFT for this release - their server OSes were always so much nicer than their client ones. To all those who say, "yah boo sucks UNIX had this 30 years ago" I say: you are absolutely right. And you know what? No one gives a damn.

I prefer administering UNIX boxes myself too, but Microsoft deserve credit for offering GUI less, scriptable access, so please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Now all they have to do is implement bash and a decent SSH server and I will be one happy bunny. Yeah, it'll never be UNIX, it'll never give me the feeling I get when I log into a strange UNIX box and know that I'm home amongst friends ("Bourne shell? Check. GNU C compiler? Check. Perl? Check. <Happy sigh> Houston, the Eagle has landed"), but it's soooo much better than it was.

Love the sinner, hate the sin

Languages have baggage. Sometimes the baggage is overwhelming and the language dies, and sometimes it limps on. But this article does nothing to convince me that Java is inherently bad, only that bad developers are, well, bad.

At the risk of sounding like a pseud, languages also have baggage that comes from the time of their birth. C focused on lean resource usage because of the environment it was built in, and to hell with the consequences of a stray free(). Java was created in an environment where Microsoft's dominance of computing and history of locking out competition was a real threat, so they sacrificed everything to run anywhere.

The question of baggage is precisely why I believe that Computer Science courses should not try too hard to teach the language-du-jour to undergrads. Far better to teach them about good programming practice, user experience, algorithmic design and hardware than spend weeks on the wonders (or baggage) of Java, c++ etc. This was why Knuth invented MIX, though I freely admit that's a bit over the top for most. But modula-2 or C seem perfectly reasonable to me as teaching languages.

Can we have more of this please

Can we please have a review of phones for people who don't/can't carry theirs in a handbag/manpurse. I'm not about to take off my work-essential leather gloves just to fondle a slab, especially when I'm on a building site/on a rig/a boat/down at the meatpacking plant. And some people (my dad being one just have blacksmiths' hands. what phones are there for us types?

Everything old is new again

I suspect that the Woz feels that after 40 years of development, we are coming full circle. Hackers like him and the 70s valley scene wanted to build _personal_ computers in opposition to the computing services of IBM and Amdahl. They wanted to get compute power and data storage on their own terms, not the terms of the glasshouse priesthood.

The (main) problem with the cloud is ownership. If you can get access to compute power, or to charged-per-byte-storage models, that's all fine and dandy. What's not fine and dandy is when your compute provider or your data provider starts to claim ownership of the data that you put there. That is a serious, market-warping, privacy destroying issue that no-one has yet got to grips with.

Oh please oh please oh please sue IBM

I would love to see Microsoft lawyers take on IBM's in the patent space. It would be the mother of all patent battles:

MSFT: "Hey, you stole that header file! That's part of our Hyper-V IP!"

IBM: "We invented virtualization, ninny. In 1962. Do you want to pay now, or shall we drag this out?"

Can't wait.

juvenile

There's no doubt that the loan company were lax, but attempting to get money out of them in exchange is juvenile, ludicrous and makes Rex Mundi look like idiots. It would have been far more effective to get the data and publicise that they had it, and let Americash's executives squirm.

Elegant, but quite possibly irrelevant

Either the article is overly simplistic, or these guys are missing something fundamental. I hope it's the former. Let's take the Excel example cited in the piece and suppose that i have some piece of Excel in my hand. So, the microVM let's Excel open that file, and then my file says, "hey, User! Is it ok if I update the data linked in this spreadsheet?". What happens then? If the user grants permission, some ODBC magic happens and somebody's SQL Server just got trashed. If the user denies permission, their boss will come round asking by the Q4 numbers haven't been pulled from the database and emailed to him. In short, ringfencing apps is great, but lives or dies by the actions of users.

Here's what I never understood

It's one thing to have malware infecting a 'domestic' PC - home users, non-security-critical businesses etc. And I can see how the malware would be introduced, by some doofus with a USB drive. But surely machines in sensitive environments have a limited number of ways to report back to their controller...and all those routes are through closely-monitored choke points? For example, getting outbound http or dns requires you to go through particular servers, and the bofhs watch those like hawks looking for deviations from the norm. "Hmm, 200 queries for 432rewfds.weirdo.com today. Sounds fishy."

What am I missing?

I'm having a flashback

vi vs. emacs.

KDE vs. GNOME

Does anyone give a stuff? Use Libre or Open. If you've already decided not to use Office, you have already crossed the chasm.

The real issue is switching cost. For a home user, the switching cost is a certain visual dissonance when they trade the pretty ribbons of Office for the party-like-it's-1999 UI of LO/OO. That's offset to some extent by the cost savings, which is, I suspect, why Microsoft are bending over backwards to get low-cost versions of Office out to this market.

For enterprise users, the switching cost is less about license costs and more about the enormous collective wisdom built up over years of Office. I'm talking about macros, templates reflecting a corporate style, scarily-complex spreadsheets that no-one dares touch, line-of-business VB apps that need Access, and all that jazz. This is an incredibly hard nut to crack...and, I suspect, one that it would take the resources of an IBM to address. I'd suggest that they stick Global Services on the case, but paying $$$ to IBM's consultants to save on Office costs seems like a poor use of a customer's money...

Isn't the problem their endless confusion over who their customer really is?

The problem is that Microsoft have failed to identify who their customers truly are. Is it the cool kids with their smartphones, busy tweeting their masturbatory self-aggrandisements? Is it the Reg reader, who needs to install 300 copies of Windows by Thursday but who would much rather be trading witty banter with Verity Stob? Is it the great unwashed masses stuck in their cubes churning out emails and powerpoint decks?

What we've seen in the last few releases is the infantilization of their product set. I crank out hundreds of emails and documents a week at work and I don't give a stuff about Windows Live .NET MSN Zune Picture Player or whatever it's called this week. I want something that is fast, stable and professional looking.

I respectfully suggest that the Microsoft team do the following.

1. Give up trying to chase the cool kids. You can't do it, and it demeans you. Get over it.

2. Forget about branding the add on products as any other than "Microsoft". Not "Windows Live", "MSN", "Windows SkyDrive" or whatever. You are playing on a field where the Windows name confers no advantage and your apps must compete with everyone else. It should just be Microsoft SkyDrive. Microsoft Instant Messenger. And so on.

3. For the love of god, produce some themes and customization bundles that mean something more than fluffy clouds on my desktop. When I'm at work, I want to be in power user mode: all the fluffy sh** turned off and everything sacrificed to speed, stability and efficiency. When I'm at home, I don;t mind a little fluff. Go ahead and show me your metro doodah.

Nice rack

World+dog in telecoms uses 23" racks, not 19". 19" is for those pussycats in IT with their laughable Dells. Wonder why Facebook didn't choose 23" racks?

More seriously, can anyone explain to me why data center designers try to cram everything in on a horizontal server orientation? Seems to me that you could use the case-less cookie-sheet server designs for density and turn them vertically so that you could pack more in, and have a more natural bottom to top airflow.

I see we still haven't learnt

The point that UI designers miss is that there is no single UI that will keep all users happy, or even the same user happy (doing different tasks). There cannot be - so stop trying.

What we really need are per-user UI choices to be selectable at login time. Imagine that on the login screen was a chooser that let you pick your UI style between, say, "tiles", "windows", "lite" and "shell". I might pick/default to tiles for the friendly Win8-style/metro l&f, but if I wanted to spend an hour doing image work in gimp I would pick windows for a traditional windows/fvwm sort of interface.

I understand it's sort of heretical these days to suggest machines having multiple window managers, because we've taken the direction of gnome, kde etc taking over your life, but it has a lot of merit.

Finally, in case anyone says "can't be done", this used to be available on UNIX machines running (shudder) the Common Desktop Environment. CDE was such an ugly beast that pretty much my first click when arriving at a login screen was to make sure that my session was set to OpenWindows. Ahh, that's better.

Let's hope this isn't the beginning of the end

IBM's retail stuff is what makes IBM, IBM - that sh** just works, all day, every day, 'cos people get mighty upset when they can't get money out of your wallet and into their POS system. It's not sexy, it's not fast, it costs too much and --ye gods-- it still comes in the funky beige case and electric blue buttons color scheme that gives Jonathan Ives seizures.

I hope IBM are not about to go all Twitter on us and will continue to sell boring but decent and profitable stuff like this to the planet.

Not yet worth it

I'm a Luddite: aren't SSDs advantages overstated for general purpose workloads? Their price/performance and lifetime per dollar ratios are far worse than magnetic. No one is going to buy a server with a single SSD that costs $10K and dies in five years** when they could buy one with four HDDs configured for RAID for half the price. So SSDs only make sense as accelerators, caching frequently used but non-critical (rebuildable) data, like database indexes, or in vast arrays of servers where the loss of one individual machine doesn't impact service (e.g. as used in the googleplex). The former makes sense but the latter doesn't offer compelling cost/benefit advantages over spinning rust. Why pay the overhead?

**Or maybe two: a typical spec at http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/quickspecs/13415_div/13415_div.pdf isn't very encouraging.

Ironic

...that text messaging, the cash cow savior of the mobile operators, will be their undoing. Delivering short text messages over the interweb (it's really just a series of pipes, y'know) will collapse their revenue overnight. It's already here in iMessage on iOS for example.

The phone call is dead. The only thing of value that carriers have left is the phone number and a nice trove of usage data. Time to move on.

Overclocking for the senile

Being an old fart, my memory is unreliable, but I vaguely remember overclocking 80286-vintage cpus by pulling some sort of crystal/tranny thingummy off the motherboard and soldering in a new one. But there's no one around here ancient enough to tell me if I am remembering this correctly. Anyone remember doing this?

(If the tranny had been called Crystal, I might have remembered.)

1990 called, they want their name server back

As the BOFHs who keep the net running, it's about time we had a collective sendmail moment and decided that (just as in the case of the veritable MTA) DNS is too important to trust to one big and ancient hunk of code no matter how shiny the wrapper. Small components = better security, period.

Personally, I look forward to the day when djbdns runs on all the root servers. And this from someone who detests qmail.

Lazy thinking

"Given the complexity of the system (solid driver code plus impressive system architecture) it is not possible for this to have been written by a single person, nor by a team of part-time amateurs".

Riiggght. Because part-time amateurs can't produce complex code. Sorry Linus. Sorry Bill Joy. Sorry Professor Knuth.

It doesn't matter whether Duqu was produced by a 13-year old teenage girl in her bedroom or the Chinese secret service, this type of thinking is lazy.

Brave of the spokesman to acknowledge likelihood though

Not much news in this story, but significant to me that he acked that given the size of the universe it was likely there was life out there. I look forward to "US GOVT SAYS ALIENS LIKELY" being broadcast tonight on Fox News and the various religious talking heads being called on to explain how they are going to cope with the fact that being made in God's image might actually mean God is small and green.

I know, not gonna happen.

Does Facebook really care?

If Facebook were to blow up tomorrow, would anyone really care? It's not the Gutenberg Bible we're talking about here. Oh I know there would be a wailing and gnashing of teeth, but dropping a few million bucks on a mega tape system so FB can store the masturbatory aggrandisements of a bunch of 13 year-olds seems like a poor return on investment.

Paris, because her slot has been well-taped.

This is news....how?

It's no news that the CEOs of large companies can be major league assholes, is it? I'm sure that Meg Whitman isn't much fun when she gets annoyed (which must be quite a lot, I imagine).

I do think it's in pretty bad taste to crack jokes about a dying man's last days. Imagine that your doc tells you that you have only six months to live. Don't rag on the man for getting his comforts where he could. http://xkcd.com/836/ sums it up pretty well.

OK so what do I run?

Deep, meaningful sigh. I feel like the Linux universe and I are drifting apart. It's not you, it's me.

I want a personal *NIX laptop system so I can

- run lots of terminal sessions

- have a pleasant, if old-school, development environment for casual programming (a little C, Java Perl etc)

- run Wireshark like the good lord intended

- use an X GUI that is somewhere between the balls-out lunacy of twm and motif and the childlike idiocy of Gnome and KDE. If you started twenty processes or ate a gig just to boot my GUI home screen, sorry, you just failed.

- use a reasonable package manager for those times when I just want something to work

I don't particularly want to ditch Linux, but the best contenders seem to be the BSDs. OpenBSD is super-lightweight for example. Is there a distro out there that meets all the above criteria?