* Posts by Zed Zee

49 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Jun 2012

The big AWS event: 120 announcements but nothing has changed

Zed Zee

Re: SPoF

That's just due to badly designed architecture.

HPE's Azure Stack Hub future 'in doubt' as US staff canned, SimpliVity team cut, India picks up the pieces

Zed Zee

Re: Simplivity was declared mature and transitioned to non US engineering

Let's not get our technologies mixed up here. SimpliVity, Nutanix, VMware SDDC, Pivot3, OpenStack, Azure Stack HCI and so on, are indeed, all HCI platforms. Not all the same. Not all equal. But they are all HCI platforms.

Microsoft Azure Stack, AWS Outposts, Google Anthos are Hybrid Clouds, designed to integrate with existing public cloud services, from the same vendors.

Azure, AWS and GCP are the public cloud platforms, pure and simple.

So now that we have these clearly defined, we may proceed with the debate.

Containers to capture 15% of all enterprise apps across 75% of business by 2024

Zed Zee

Having said that...

...despite what Gartner or any other market analysis stats thrower might say, IT is moving towards containers, rather than staying with virtual machines. Anyone trying to fight this is burying their head in the sand and will ultimately become a hindrance in their IT team, if they continue to resist change and refuse to engage on this new technology, while clinging onto their beloved Windows Server, Cisco Networking and VMware vSphere certifications.

Having more than 30+ years of IT industry experience (and having done it all from mainframes, to server consolidation, to now cloud), I can guarantee you that workloads are mostly going to the public cloud. Believe me, I, too, fought against Open Source Software and Public Cloud - I lost.

Never mind all the BS about hybrid and private - multicloud is where they will be - not 100% (some will still run on mainframes in some co-lo somewhere) but enterprises are looking to get rid of their DCs, as the leases come up for renewal. This is what drives most Digital Transformation and DC Migration projects.

The revolution (and it is this time a revolution, rather than an evolution as was with VMs) is not only happening at the Compute Primitive level (Containers) but also at the application level (Microservices), which in turn is driving new ways of hosting (Public Cloud), hosting (Containers and Orchestration), provisioning (Automation and Configuration Management), managing (Observability and AIOps) and development (DevOps and DevSecOps), etc.

This revolution is happening right now and will continue to grow in the future, whether you like it or not. Will it be as fast as Gartner predicts? Maybe. But they don't call it Agile for no good reason.

Beware the trainee with time on his hands and an Acorn manual on his desk

Zed Zee

Ah, yes. The days of Econet.

I was on one of those YTS iTeC courses as well. Drew wasn't in the Southall branch, was he?!

Anyway, the coolest thing I managed to do (this was back in 1987/88) - having already proficient skills on the BBC Micro since I had purchased one when it came out - was to write a FOR...NEXT loop that would scan memory pages (of a certain range) and print out any ASCII characters found there that were in the alphabet character set range, filtering everything else out.

This was not a program. This was a loop written on the command line, raw, there and then, each command delimited by " : " or " ; ", I can't remember now - preceded only by a *FX200,3 command at the prompt, which wiped all memory at the press of the BREAK button, so no one could see the code I had written, if they tried stopping the loop.

ESCAPE then OLD then LIST? Nope! Remember - it's not a program - it was just written on the command line. BBC BASIC was that frikkin good! I did sometimes hide it in a Red Function key, though, cos I could not be bothered to type the whole loop, whenever I wanted to hack a student or lecturer. And it meant, I could go back to it again, after lunchtime and keep trying. ;-)

Now, why would I be printing pages and pages of memory? Well, because the Econet module stored your log-in password for your account in plain text, somewhere in those particular regions (according to some Econet User Guide I had picked up at one of those computer shows, down at Ally-Pally!)

And if there were no lecturers around, I could quickly write that loop and *NOTIFY it (I think that was the command to send messages) to the machines in the Econet network and have other students run it and watch the screens, looking for any silly/unusual words that might come up that don't belong in those regions of memory. Once found - such as a lecturer's password who had just logged off of that machine - I could log back in again as them and give my account Master privileges (I think it was called), create new Master accounts for myself and tuck them for a rainy day, delete students accounts that had fallen out of favour with my mates, love poems to any girls we fancied, as a log-in greeting etc. Result = king of the jungle!

When the lecturers found out that I was too clever for their establishment, they shipped me off to IBM, for the practical experience part of my YTS course!

Kubernetes goes in for nip and tuck, comes out with 25 'enhancements': We take a look at v1.15

Zed Zee

The problem with K8s...

"The downside is that it is easy to get it wrong."

Sounds a bit like the 'platform for platforms' before it...OpenStack.

Nobody in China wants Apple's eye-wateringly priced iPhones, sighs CEO Tim Cook

Zed Zee

Re: Overpriced kit

Could not agree more. Bought one for my wife around that price - it's a fantastic phone. 4000 mAh, dual SIM + separate SD card slot, massive screen, big memory and storage options and very good performance all around. After many years on Motorola (which have been great phones), I really like the Xiaomi efforts.

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

Zed Zee

Police Spinner?

"Harrison Ford with a spinner in a still from the 1982 Ridley Scott film"

Err...that's NOT a Police Spinner in the photo!

That's Deckard's own Toyota Prius or whatever it is. But it's definitely not a Police Spinner.

El Reg - I will classify this under 'New Year Party Hangover', but please, do check your facts next time. It's somewhat embarrassing.

Why does the world need the new 'Arkraino' network edge stack'?

Zed Zee

Which one is it?

"Arkraino", "Akraino" or Arkanoid...which one is it?

Your spelling, El Reg, reminds me of the amount of times my school English essays used to have "sp" marked all over them, in red ink!

;-)

Migrating to Microsoft's cloud: What they won't tell you, what you need to know

Zed Zee

Not necessarily.

Not so, if you use tools such as VeloStrata. They can 'stream' your workload into AWS/Azure, while the app storage back-end stays put (on prem) and back again, if you don't like the look of AWS/Azure.

Zed Zee

Did someone say "app migration"?

"with a limited time window to have your systems down"

Why bring it down at all - VeloStrata and UShare Soft do it on the fly, I believe!

Please don't tell me that the author of this article doesn't know that such technologies exist?!

Nutanix consciously uncouples with move into software-only sales

Zed Zee

HCI - the great distraction of our time.

Nutanix first started with their own hardware appliances and Acropolis (proprietary version of KVM, to everyone else, so customers are swapping one closed Hypervisor for another). But when they took this into VMware shops, they found much resistance, so they dropped to being just an SDS provider, serving storage pools to the incumbents.

When this meant they could not fund their entire HCI stack (afterall, there's a plethora of SDS providers out there; Open Source, Pretentious Open Source and Closed Source), they opened up their entire software stack to be installed on anyone and everyone who sells an x86 server.

They're now realising that these hardware partners either don't care who the software stack is from or they lack knowledge, to extol the virtues (if any) of HCI.

So now, they have re-invented themselves with their software stack running on 'anything, so long as we've stuck the disc in their 5 minutes prior to the customer, to make sure it runs' compatibility and calling it an "Enterprise Cloud" instead.

From HCI to SDS, back to HCI (with someone else's hardware) and now Enterprise Cloud, all in the space of a few years. HCI is nothing more than a bandage for the data centre.

HPE crams unloved software down Brits' throats – then charges them $9bn to swallow it

Zed Zee

Re: HP's """machinations"""

But you should've bought yourself some MF stock.

Zed Zee

"(profitably) die"

There's more to software than just selling new licenses; many organisations rely on software that 'just works'. Although MF develops this software as well, it also makes revenue from renewing its license, while companies take the 'if it's not broken, don't fix it' attitude.

Zed Zee

Re: HP's """machinations"""

Let's hope his pension fund manager invested in MF stock instead - it's up 21% today! My wife invested in them about 6 months ago - it's made over £1000 overnight!!

Zed Zee

Re: HP's """machinations"""

Yeah, but I bet you regret not buying MF shares; they're up 21% this morning, according to the FT!

Raspberry Pi Foundation releases operating system for PCs, Macs

Zed Zee

What's the point?

Surely if a school has old computers, it's best to replace them with Raspberry Pi devices anyway, since they consume less power, offer the operating environment that the students use to learn and (as the article says) they can take their work home with them.

What school has the time/inclination/experience of trying to rip out Windows/MacOS from a bunch of old machines and trying to install a technology release of Linux, with no support from the vendor and certainly no support from the small IT company that usually supplies a school with the computer equipment it needs?!

The Foundation should stick to enhancing the RasPi, making RPi4 even better and perhaps even considering a RPi "Pro" model, with much faster CPU, more RAM etc. That would be fab!

HPE UK preps the redundancy ride as Chrimbo looms

Zed Zee

Re: News?

You forgot software defined everything, running in a hyper-converged infrastructure, hosting containers and microservices, running in hybrid clouds that bring accelerated time-to-value! ;-)

Hyperconvergence 101: More than a neatly packaged box of tricks

Zed Zee

HCI.

Hyper-convergence is a breakaway term, being coined by Software Defined Storage (SDS) outfits who do not have enough muscle to develop fully-fledged Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) platforms or have simply missed the boat. So they settle for SDS but confuse the market by calling it HC, so they can get on the whole 'hyper' bandwagon.

HCI is the software virtualisation/abstraction of all three main system pillars; compute, network and storage. Unfortunately, up until recently, most HCI vendors (you know who you are), have been only doing compute (hypervisor) and storage (SDS) offerings, while leaving the networking aspect to either a virtual switch (VMware vSwitch or Open vSwitch come to mind) or to good ol' hardware switches. It's only recently that they've started to use Software Defined Networking (SDN), to really push a fully-fledged HCI solution.

What HCI vendors are finding though is that most customers who have invested in VMware or Hyper-V don't really want to move off these platforms, onto a relatively unknown hypervisor (Nutanix offer Acropolis, which is based on Linux KVM), so they also (like 'true' SDS vendors) drop down to the storage layer and flog their wares as merely SDS solutions. This has become so bad, in fact, that Nutanix/Nexenta and others have started to jettison their own hardware and just put their software pack on top of someone else's machines (look at Lenovo).

Of course, the best solution to pursue in all this mess is a private cloud, underpinned by an open source SDS solution, which is not based on any proprietary HC/HCI/SDS platform. Otherwise, you're swapping one set of proprietary products for another.

WileyFox Swift 2: A new champ of the 'for around £150' market

Zed Zee

Second SIM slot only available only if you don't use SD Card.

Your review is very poor. You do not mention a very important (flawed) factor in Wiley Fox phones, in that they provide a second SIM slot only if you do not use an SD Card.

Star Trek film theory: 50 years, 13 films, odds good, evens bad? Horta puckey!

Zed Zee

"odds good..."

So "The Wrath Of Khan" is a bad film and "The Final Frontier" is good???

Surely you mean odds are bad...?!

Google and Microsoft are playing catchup with AWS's cloudy power

Zed Zee

Re: How did NTT/Dimension Data rate?

NTT, like PCCW Global, and a host of other TeleComs providers, have suddenly woken up and realised that the world has moved on and they're hemorrhaging customers to public cloud providers.

Since they own the pipes under the sea, which the likes of AWS and Google, rely upon, the TeleComs have decided that they should jump in on the act and create their own clouds, which they are selling to their customers, as a MSP/CSP entity.

Ditch your Macs, Dell tells EMC staff

Zed Zee

What's the fuss?!

I really don't see a problem here. All vendors have a preference, their own deals for notebooks or happen to be manufacturers themselves; if Apple acquired EMC, I doubt they'd leave them using Dell/Lenovo notebooks, if the shoe was on the other foot.

Besides, for an industry that's supposed to be technical, I really don't see what the fuss is about using a PC from the fruity company that has the same guts as your average PC notebook, yet costs four times as much and runs a derivative environment that's based on a 50+ year old OS, with a silly and superfluous amount of GUI animations that makes me dizzy, everytime I see it.

Every Apple owner I know complains, after a year or so, that their Mac is "running slow" and it's off to the Apple Store, who will more than happily extort £100+ from them, to "fix the problem". The hang-up with anyone who moans about Windows/Linux is that they're a fashion victim - everyone's got an expensive PC (Apple Mac) so I should not feel left out.

Review: Star Wars: The Force Awakens offers a new hope for the franchise

Zed Zee

Typical JJ Abrams rehash.

I thought it was a typical JJ Abrams reboot - the similarities with A New Hope are so abundant, that it makes this almost a reboot. *** SPOILER ALERT *** A droid carrying important plans about a new monster weapon. A young person dreaming of a better life. A cantina teaming with all sorts of lifeforms. "The Death Star has cleared the planet" kind of countdown to doom for the Rebel (sorry, Resistance) base. A groove to fly through to knock out the monster weapon's Achilles heal. Leia's buns now at the back of her head. A new emperor, effectively. "Holding her is dangerous" type new henchmen. Political correctness dripping from every scene! The band New (First) Order being mentioned all the time...sorry, couldn't help that. You should be catching my drift by now...And why, oh why, is a London born-and-bred lad saying his lines in a US accent?!

Dell buys out EMC in mega-super-duper $67 billion deal

Zed Zee

Re: RIP Compellent/EqualLogic

It's simple: Dell will stop making its own sh*te brands and no one buys and adopt EMC across the board instead.

What it's not accounted for in the acquisition is that not only is traditional storage (SANs and LUNs) being eroded by Cloud Computing but it's also being eroded by different and new local storage solutions.

For example, having local drives is cool again, thanks largely to Open Source projects, such as Hadoop, GlusterFS and Ceph, and closed source ones, such as SAP HANA. These are all clusters of local, cheap SATA/SAS drives, so who needs a SAN?

Wileyfox smartphones: SD card, no bloatware, Cyanogen, big battery – yes to all!

Zed Zee

Motorola on steroids.

This and OnePlus products is like Motorola's Moto G on steroids!

Motorola Mobility started this whole new segment of affordable phones (which still none of the big players seem to get), with impressive enough specifications to make some buyers forego their dreams and aspirations of owning a £600 phone (with a stupid contract to boot, no doubt) and opt for a more affordable product, with a decent specification (minus all the bloatware) and a great price tag to boot.

Wiley Fox are following suit, like OnePlus before them, which is fantastic to see and being British too, they get my seal of approval...where do I sign?!

What's dying on the vine and rhymes with IBM?

Zed Zee

Re: Big Blue -- Lost Identity

At a time when x86 architecture is taking over the world (hyper-converged infrastructure, hyper-scale datacentres, Open Source Software, HPC, Cloud Computing and on and on), IBM decides to withdraw into its own shell and get out of that market.

Instead it focusses on bringing it's mainframe (LinuxONE) and Power Systems (OpenPOWER) into the 21st century, kicking and screaming and try to wrap the usual software/services around them in a vein effort to distinguish itself and stay relevant in an industry that has long left it behind and taken its best customers with it.

At least HP tries to keep up with the market - and has so far, despite the upcoming company split, which I believe will actually do it a great deal of good - it's done quite well; Moonshot micro-servers for the data centre, Helios for OpenStack, coining Converged Infrastructure and an ever-present, ever-reliable and established x86 server brand, in the ProLiant systems. IBM has changed it's x86 server brand name 4 times since HP took over Compaq!

Meanwhile, Dell also maintains a competitive edge. What's that, Mr Customer? You want Hyper-Converged Infrastructure from us? No problem - let's get into bed with Nutanix and offer a solution.

Every time IBM is faced with such challenges, it sells a portion of itself and makes people redundant!

Smartphones merge into homogeneous mass as 'flagship fatigue' bites

Zed Zee

It's not flagship fatigue - it's mid-market distraction.

While I think releasing a new flagship phone every 12 months or less is bound to saturate an already highly competitive market, I believe the reason for the recently-observed FF effect is also due to the fact that the likes of Motorola, ThL, DooGee and Xiaomi are deliberately not aiming for these high-end segments.

There's a new segment that's opened up, which all of the top manufacturers have zero products in. It's not the cheap end of the market and it's certainly not the "mini" versions of the flagship models market, either.

This new segment is led by the likes of the Moto G - one could argue that Motorola really started it - whereby the product is not an all-singing, all-dancing device, it's not a mini-me version and it's certainly not at the other, cheap and nasty, sluggish with a crappy locked-in interface (unless you root it, of course) end either.

This new segment brings clarity to what the smartphone ought to be; yes, it's got features but not any unnecessary features (like a grafted UI on top of the OS), or smack-you-in-the-face speed processors or indeed gigantic screens (although the One+ models go against this mantra) and certainly no gimmicky features, like heart monitors and so on, that barely anyone uses.

This new segment focusses on clarity, speed through simplicity and a peeling back of the OS, to reveal the original beating heart of Android (I'm talking a stock version), like the Moto G and E and to a degree, the X. One+ is doing the same with their Cyanogen image. This new freedom to offer a very good performing phone, at an unbeatable price (between £100 and £200) was unprecedented, until Motorola released the Moto G, in 2013.

Google's current slogan is "Be together but not the same" or something like that. I think Android vendors have had too much freedom or not enough policing from Google and the result has been Apple's runaway success, because they have always presented a consistent look'n'feel to their products. Sure, freedom is good and messing about with the UI is nice but really, do you need all the grafted interfaces, from Samsung, hTC, Huawei, Sony, LG etc? I would argue no, because plenty people bought the Moto G and never did I read anyone moaning that it was 'too stripped down'; if anything, industry pundits LOVED that about it!

My wife was delighted with it, because it had a competitive screen size, it was very cheap at Tesco, on a PAYG deal, it had fantastic performance and there was absolutely zero bloatware on it and Android was sparsely populated (as it should be), so users can make their own choices about apps. Couple that with a simple app that xfered all your stuff from the old phone to the new one and hey presto! A new market segment was invented.

This, in my humble opinion, is where Samsung and Apple are haemorrhaging customers to. The abandonment of the flagship segment is not a net migration to Huawei, Doro or Alcatel and the like, but an embracing of Motorola, One+ and other manufacturers, with a 'natural' product, performance that delights and at a very attractive price-point

One API to rule them all: The great network switch silicon heist

Zed Zee

Seen this before.

This is the same as when IPMI came out, as a standard base of code, for management processors, whereby PC vendors could build on it, with their own extra functions (read: proprietary).

Or when BIOS became UEFI (you-eff-ee) - again, it was standard BIOS with any crap you'd like to bloat your PC with, thrown on top.

I see similarities here - so it will end up the same. For better or for worse.

While I appreciate the values of SDN (although many a LAN and security bod would raise an eyebrow at it), this is levelling a field that should not be, because manufacturer's choice of silicon, ports, bandwidth, packaging, whether they do east-west or north-south traffic and reducing latency is what it's all about. For example, Cisco likes ot protect its 'core' switches, so they continue to insist on north-west traffic, whereas integrated (converged) systems now all do east-west traffic, such as Lenovo's PureFlex, and they're all better for it!

This would surely make the network vendors indistinguishable from each other, until they reach a high enough point in the hardware's spec, when you start noticing 'innovation' and 'uniqueness'. I'm not sure they'd willingly agree to wiping half of their margins, just so vendors from another market can benefit.

Microsoft refuses to nip 'Windows 9' unzip lip slip

Zed Zee

Re: Apple's Yawn and Windows Apology

Apple are becoming like Nintendo every day.

Slightly different hardware platform, same software franchise.

Smartphone chip champ Qualcomm says it's ARMed for server wars

Zed Zee

Re: It would be good to see their weight thrown in

Or better still, Facebook can go to one of the Far East ODMs and get ARM boards made for them at a fraction of the cost that Qualcomm would charge and stuff them into their hyperscale DCs.

Facebook doesn't need Qualcomm - just like they don't need IBM, HP, Dell or Windows for their Intel servers.

OpenStack's success depends on IBM and HP's tech queens

Zed Zee

NASA is right.

NASA hit the nail on the head.

Private Cloud is dead, long live Public Cloud!

What's the point of me hosting 'on-prem' in my own dc, when I can throw it all into the lap of an MSP to do it for me?

Microsoft and Dell’s cloud in a box: Instant Azure for the data centre

Zed Zee

Prediction for cloud computing.

I believe private cloud is dead - you don't need it. If you have a virtualised infrastructure already, that's good enough, you just need decent deployment tools and even the standard tools supplied by VMWare, Microsoft and others tend to be good enough. However, one might want to consider using containers (LXC or Docker) but beyond that, private clouds don't give you anything above what virtualisation technologies do.

Public clouds have been only good for a handful of 'consumer' applications. You're only now seeing the likes of IBM, SAP and Oracle slowly moving their apps into a cloud model - so when they mature in a few years, that would be the time to start considering them. Having said that, as others claim on here, public cloud is not for everyone due to security concerns/laws.

Hybrid clouds might work better, but not in their current guise. I think once what they offer can be componentised (not an entire application, but a subset) into offering things like Docker in a seamless and dynamically interchangeable model - whereby application subsets are loaded and offloaded, into/out of the private side of a hybrid cloud, as the business needs change - then you'll be in a real position to consider a move to cloud computing. I'm predicting a capability in a hybrid cloud environment, whereby application subsets (based on something like LXC or Docker), come in and out of one's private cloud (from a public cloud - probably supplied by an apps vendor) to deliver a particular function or application service. This movement of apps/subsets creates a hybrid cloud (because you have a mixture of app types - in-house developed/running and those coming in from a public cloud) and breaks things down to beyond an application; actually using subsets delivered by something like LXC or Docker.

Until then, it's all marketing and a repeat of what one already has at the moment = virtualisation.

Lenovo to finish $2.1bn IBM x86 server gobble in October

Zed Zee

ODMs.

I think the biggest threat for all server vendors comes from the Original Device Manufacturers, who are producing throw-away servers for the likes of Facebook, Google, Amazon and Rackspace, under the banner of the Open Compute Project.

If the Hyperscale data centres do not contain kit from IBM, Lenovo, HP or Dell, then how long is it before others catch on to doing the same thing or merely relying on the cloud services of some of these internet/cloud giants (Google, Amazon, Rackspace), to do their IT?

Don't think it will happen? Just look at Linux merely 10 years ago - no one even thought of using it in their data centres and now, it's so popular and in production that any major bugs (such as the recent Heartbleed and Shellshock) are headline news!

Read IBM's note to staff announcing mandatory training and 10% pay cut

Zed Zee

Re: Is this actually warranted?

You sound like you've been watching Michael Moore's "Capitalism: A Love Story" film.

I do agree with you but I really don't understand why all this 'behaviour' and 'patterns' of capitalism need to be pointed out...not only is it academic but it's inherent.

Microsoft's axeman Nadella fills baskets with 2,100 fresh heads

Zed Zee

Re: Nadella fills baskets with 2,100 fresh heads ?

Nobody's that stupid. The point being made was that it was just poor headline taste, considering some journalists really ARE being decapitated.

Terminator-maker 'Cyberdyne Inc' lists on Tokyo stock exchange

Zed Zee

Re: HAL ... evil AI creation.

Unfortunately, he forgot to mention two very important points:

1. US/UK went over the head of the UN, stating that they did not need any further resolutions and now the UN has a broken credibility in the world, and that's why you see the US now leading such crisis, rather than the UN.

2. He forgot to mention the half a million civilians that have been killed since the US/UK invasion.

Zed Zee

It's only a matter of time.

The reason they're currently only doing exoskeletons is because the Terminator has not come back in time yet and they haven't gotten hold of its 'revolutionary' microprocessor, in order to build the Skynet in the first place...as Sarah Connor says: "God. A person could go crazy thinking about this stuff."

Moto G: Google's KitKat bruiser could knock out, bury Landfill Android

Zed Zee

How much of that 8GB is actually available?

There's no doubt that the Moto G is a good phone at a very good price and for the novice/average Android user, it's a bargain.

However, this does come indeed at a price - something this article has mentioned only in passing

- No SD Card slot - I really don't know why Google is doing an Apple 'me too' with their products, when really, one of their differentiators IS having extra expansion on Android phones. This to me, seems like an evident shooting of their own foot.

- The phone only has about 4.5GB of the internal storage free for the user, which essentially cripples the phone from doing anything useful, aside from holding a few vids and photos and the odd MP3 tune. After about a year, you're looking for an upgrade out of sheer desperation and the 16GB model is probably no relief to anyone either.

- 5MP camera - is that it...? For that lovely screen?

When you consider that the hTC Desire 500 can be picked up around the same price, but includes an SD Card slot and an 8MP camera - the Moto G soon looks a bit inferior.

Congrats on MP3ing your music... but WHY bother? Time for my ripping yarn

Zed Zee

What if...

"What if Richard Dawkins had been bumped off the zoology course at Balliol College and sent to a seminary instead?"

Well, it would've at least stopped him from releasing all those baseless books of fiction that he seems to enjoy writing and that, sadly, Joe Bloggs takes as being (if you will pardon the pun) gospel and never go and check for themselves the actual facts.

Microsoft: Surface is DEAD. Long live the Surface 2!

Zed Zee

Microsoft don't seem to get it.

Pardon me, but didn't MS just write off $1B worth of the first gen Surface?

What are they doing pumping out 'more of the same' then?!

This strategy of releasing a faster, better product does not make sense. There are far more fundamental strategy points to deal with than adding "2" at the end of the product's name.

Things like deciding on one architecture and not two; either go with Intel (not recommended, since they don't have even 1% market share in the mobile/tab market) or ARM (defo!) architecture, so that developers don't have to write (or at least, compile) their apps twice, for two different architectures.

Second, more focus on an entry-level, cheap tablet is more of a priority, since MS is so late to the party - they simply cannot afford to slap an arrogant price on it (as Apple continue to do on their's), because they're not setting the trend here. So, a cheap entry-level 7"/8" tab would be a really good idea right now, to get their foot in the door; here's hoping Nokia will show them how to do it with the Lumia 2520 ("Sirius") tablet.

Third, invest in bringing Windows Phone 8 to work on tablets, not slap on there the desktop Windows 8 version. This will mean one code base, one API for devs and hopefully lower licensing costs - a bit like what Canonical is trying to do.

Can someone who knows someone in MS, please pass on these suggestions...?

Huawei Ascend Mate: The phondleslab for the skint

Zed Zee
Stop

Chinese clone anyone...?

Why not just buy a Chinese clone Andy (Android - you heard it here first) phone from the likes of ThL instead?

They are as fast as anything like this one from Who Are We (sorry, couldn't help that) but cost as less as 2/3 the price of such over-priced-cos-we-make-you-pay-their-import-duty models!

A quick search for on the web will find you all the models you can handle, at throw-away prices, from importers who now have UK warehouses and offer full refund (unlike CarPhoneWarehouse and Phones4U) and fix etc.

Microsoft Surface sales numbers revealed as SHOCKINGLY HIDEOUS

Zed Zee

Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows RT?

Microsoft's problem with Surface is not related to the hardware, marketing or even the price; well, at least, not after the RT discount.

It's problem stems from the fact that it went with 3 architectures, around the time when Surface was being developed.

Rather than extending Windows Phone 8 to cover tablets as well as mobile phones, or redeveloping it to 'cope' with the requirements of a tablet product, and thus maintaining binary compatibility and sharing the ARM architecture between the two, Microsoft decided to go for a THIRD architecture - that's Windows RT.

So devs have 3 architectures to contend with, when they develop their apps; write for normal Windows 8, write for Windows Phone 8 and port/rewrite for Windows RT.

Why did Microsoft do that?! That's the question they should be asking themselves, because if they had combined WP8 and WinRT into the same architecture and binary, then they'd have had a much larger apps base.

The fact that Windows RT (and thus, Surface tablets) is not compatible with either Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8, puts it in no-man's land, rather than taking advantage of the complete portfolio of already-developed apps for the other two platforms.

Dell bucks PC market tumble with Haswell business systems

Zed Zee
FAIL

How many articles is that on Dell now?

Crikey! If I didn't know any better, I'd say that either Dell paid El Reg loadsa money to plaster Dell news articles all over their main page or it's been a slow news week (the industry's on holiday, is it?) so they've just copied and pasted all the press releases from the beleaguered PC maker.

I count no less than six (6!) news articles that are directly about some 'me too' product or another that they're releasing.

HP cranks up bandwidth on BladeSystem sheaths, adds pretty platinum stripe

Zed Zee

Still one power connector?

Did HP manage to update the blade's power connections while they were at it - from one to two - or is it still a single point of failure?

"seven years ago...no one but Google was doing custom, high-density machines". Except of course, IBM, which launched its BladeCenter product way back in 2002.

Brits swallow Google Nexus 4 supply 'in 30 minutes'

Zed Zee
FAIL

The conspiracy to dictate device storage continues.

It's amazing how the processor is dropped into this article with a complete vacuum, when it comes to it's specification; that being quad core at 1.5GHz.

What's of more concern and smacks of a conspiracy by all the Android phone vendors, is that they've now started dropping the feature of an SD Card slot from their phones!

Sony is at it with the NXT models, Google is now doing it on Nexus 7 and this unimpressive phone and I think hTC has started down this disappointing behaviour as well, with the Desire X.

I don't want my storage capacity dictated to me (as Apple fanboys have to endure) - I want to decide how much capacity I want and I certainly don't want to blow my monthly data allowance, on streaming all my content, just because my phone hasn't got a SD Card slot.

VMware profits pinched in Q3, but not as pinchy as expected

Zed Zee

Typo ahoy!

Crikey. After all this time and jurnos still can't spell. "But not AN pinchy as expected"? Don't think sooo.

VMWare's decline is in sight, thanks to a fast-growing KVM for Linux, PowerVM holding its own for IBM Power Systems and a shockingly good catch-up by Microsoft (yes, those guys!) with Hyper-V in Server 2012.

The iPHONE 5 UNDERMINES western DEMOCRACY: 5 reasons why

Zed Zee

" In a proper smartphone, if you need more storage you can buy it and slot it in yourself. "

Incorrect! Even Google and Sony are at it now; both the Nexus 7 tablet and Sony's latest Xperia NXT Series DO NOT have SD card slots either, so it's worse than people think.

There's an underlying 'conspiracy' here, started by Apple, but now seems to be perpetuated by the Android brands as well, which is undermining the whole freedom idea that goes hand-in-hand with open source.

Microsoft's Surface proves software is dead

Zed Zee

Comparing apples with oranges.

"companies like Facebook, Google, Red Hat, and more have learned to sell services based upon or built around software" - that's because their products are not good enough for enterprise-class solutions. So they have targeted social, search and companies that cannot afford business software. Microsoft has been a corporate stalwart since the dawn of the PC- where was open source during that time? This really is apples and oranges you are comparing here.

"free as in freedom" - if by this statement you mean software fragmentation, then you're right.

Regardless of the software that Apple uses, how it presents this software to customers is COMPLETELY and UTTERLY closed.

"Apple sells iPhones, not iOS." But it has and still does charge for OS X, even though that might be perceived as being 'cheaper' than Microsoft. Do you really think every Microsoft corporate customer pays the off-the-shelf price for Windows? That's a naive.

"Google has open sourced Android" - not quite. It's not a view shared by everyone, especially phone manufacturers. And besides, Android is so mobile-phone oriented, there's really no point in developing it for any other type of device. Some have tried to offer a desktop/notebook version, but come on, that is nowhere really, isn't it? All one has to do is type in "is android truly open" in (ironically) Google search and you'll soon find differing and contradicting opinions.

"a holistic product that embeds software but doesn't attempt to sell that software." - well, the mobile phone/tablet market is different from desktop/notebook/server. Surely you didn't think that Microsoft would insist that customers pay for the hardware AND the WinPhone 7 as well, did you? I mean, who is doing that in this market? No one! So why would Microsoft shoot itself, so stupidly, in the foot? this is really common sense, it's not a revelation or something to write about; it goes without saying!

Other vendors are just not as successful as Microsoft in the other industries, so people - like the author of this article - continue to attempt to compare apples with oranges. What's Google Docs' market share in contract with MS Office, in office productivity tools? How many corporates use Apple servers versus Wintel? How many people do you know that own a ChromeBook?