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Here's a static image of the graph from last year, with AAPL added for contrast: 2010.

Here's the graph from 2002 to the end of last year: Dead money.

People don't buy stocks so they'll be as reliable as stuffing the money in a mattress. The point of investing capital is to participate in the growth that can be achieved with pooled capital. This ain't getting that done. A dollar invested in Microsoft these past eight years isn't working for you, it's vacationing in the Bahamas. That's not what you want to be happening with your earned money. With your earned money you want to put it to work, so it can pay for you to be vacationing in the Bahamas.

(Image credit: Google Finance screen scrape)

Here's a static image of the graph from last year, with AAPL added for contrast: 2010.

Here's the graph from 2002 to the end of last year: Dead money.

People don't buy stocks so they'll be as reliable as stuffing the money in a mattress. The point of investing capital is to participate in the growth that can be achieved with pooled capital. This ain't getting that done. A dollar invested in Microsoft these past eight years isn't working for you, it's vacationing in the Bahamas. That's not what you want to be happening with your earned money. With your earned money you want to put it to work, so it can pay for you to be vacationing in the Bahamas.

(Image credit: Google Finance screen scrape)

Lots of cores are good. A good amount of RAM helps too. And when you put a bunch of servers that do real services in one box, storage and network bandwidth and latency are also important. At the moment memory seems to be the sticking point rather than cores.

For many virtualization scenarios right now with VMWare there is the VMWare licensing to consider. The 8GB DIMMS are still spendy but so is the VMWare licensing so there's tension between server density with expensive DIMMs to minimize rackspace and licensing cost, or twice as many servers with the cheaper DIMMS and paying the increased licensing.

HP and Cisco both have interesting propositions in this area, with blades that do 10GbE and FC for good bandwidth, have dual 6-core processors and support 192GB of RAM or more. When better processors and cheaper memory come out the Cisco UCS solution may have challenges because the architecture may become I/O bound with only 2 10Gbps links for both network and storage per half-width blade, and sharing at least half of that in the chassis uplink. The HP blade solution supports full line rate between servers and an insane amount of uplink - and it's denser than the UCS so it takes up less rack space. The UCS solution uses an ASIC to more than double the number of memory sockets, so for example a full-width server supports up to 192GB using the cheaper 4GB DIMMS and they claim they all work at 1333MHz. I don't know what IBM and Dell are doing here but I know they have products too.

All of the basic virtual environments are basically free (except Microsoft's Hyper-V, of course). Microsoft software is practically free in education environments so they're making inroads there. But in the enterprise the high availability and reliability features of the advanced commercial packages are compelling. There's something awesome about asking an admin management type to evacuate a server so you can work on it (because the local IT support is out today), and watching her migrate the VMs off in a few seconds so you can take it down.

One of the really neat things about VM consolidation is that 20 physical servers with 4x 1Gbps Ethernet don't actually use it so by consolidating them you eliminate waste. Not only that, but by moving to the VM host with 10GbE you get virtual servers that have multiple 1Gbps connections but each has a 0.2ms ping to the external gateway and each other. This makes many things work faster like databases, websites and such. The downside is the downside of sharing: if you don't plan carefully and get a storm load, the servers will contend for bandwidth and knock each other offline.

Now that DDR3 is becoming cheaper than DDR2, I'm glad to see AMD adopt it. I like their 8-core server chips for workstation stuff - a coworker and I are building out dual-8 core boxes for virtual machines and such.

Incidentally I'm not a greedy jerk. By C3000 max config I only mean four of these (geek porn) and some PCIe sidecars with GPUs. I don't need the double-density blades that put 16 blades with 32 Westmere CPUs in one 5U blade chassis. That would be asking a lot. A nice casual infrastructure with 80Gbps of uplinks would be nice this decade, at least for me. I have modest needs.

I saw one of their products today. I took a picture.

Yeah, like NASA. Those guys put up data from thermometers that clearly shows the hockey stick.

Oh, wait. No, it doesn't. That's odd. Maybe you can find the hockey stick in this data. I can't. What I find in the data is that scientists like to live in cities that get warmer as they get larger.

A picture is really worth a thousand words. In case you haven't heard there has been some dissent about the value of speculative future business, some doubt about the viability of current businesses, the current reliability of certain previously reliable credit rating agencies, the real value of certain assets and the value of the buck.

On a positive note, soft gold still warms in your hand, continues to have value and cannot declare bankruptcy. If gold fails you, it wouldn't hurt to have a gun.

Now explain to me what the DRM in Vista is stopping me from doing.

Booting? That's what Vista is stopping that laptop from doing.

More to the point Vista is preventing you from taking a screen shot of a video, even one you've recorded from the evening news. A still image of a news broadcast in the context of a discussion regarding the broadcast or its subject is fair use, and Vista is preventing you from that fair use and so depriving you of your civil right of freedom of expression. That's not a minor thing. Maybe you don't care because you don't care to discuss current events or world history in the lens of public media - but some do and they're rightly offended.

I agree, many people have a vague dislike for Vista. I think it has to do in part with allowing Apple to be the one to tell consumers about Vista.

Yeah, it has nothing to do with the common experience that the product sucks, or the fact that ordinary folks who feel that way have no problem with sharing their not-so-vague opinion. It's not even hard to show you that it isn't even stable on an OEM laptop sitting on the counter at BestBuy.

Listen, when Apple tells you in some ads the Vista sucks so much it's funny, that's advertising. When everybody you know tells you they've tried it and it sucks so much it's sad, that's word-of-mouth. Advertising doesn't get any stronger than word-of-mouth.

MS also needs to convince people to buy new PCs with vista.

When this is the Vista that greets customers at BestBuy, they're going to have problems with that.