In an ancient thread we might have a meaningful chat outside the issues of a potential audience that is long gone. Surely that's your intent. I do that often here. What's on your mind?
Thyroid cysts or nodules are being found in 36% of 38,000 Fukushima children. A 2001 study in Nagasaki found an incidence of 0%. Thyroid is associated with iodine, as the substance is essential to its function. Iodine-131 was a considerable component of the contaminants released in the incident.
It takes a metric fuckton more than that to offend me. I've worked your post for what its worth and got my bit out of it. Please do give me another one to sharpen my wit against.
I was only counting smartphones, tablets, PCs and such things in the half billion per year. ARM processor sales have outnumbered the Earth's human population for several years if you include semi-smart embedded devices.
When you buy an SSD - now about $75, it comes with a utility to migrate your boot drive to it. If you do that you will see at least a 30x improvement in drive I/O - which will make an old laptop PC seem like it's from 10 years in the future. It turns out that the slowness of spinning rust drives have held back latencies for far too long. Solid state is where it's at these days, and giving a 5 year old PC a solid state drive catapults it a decade into the future. It's far better than buying a new PC. It was fast enough already for everything the customer wanted to do except booting, so this is almost too much progress.
The Linux kids have known this for quite some time, as we installed knoppix on pens long ago and were like "Holy Cow! How did that boot so fast?"
Linux systems are moving a half-billion units a year. That's quite a lot on a planet with only 7 billion humans, half of whom have no technology above the Iron Age.
Microsoft isn't about money and they never have been. They're about control. If they have control they can demand money and their "customers" have little choice but to pay. Oracle works the same way though frankly Oracle's mind bending powers are even more inexplicable. Oracle must have hired the same guys who designed the sales pitch for Encyclopedia Brittanica - that was an amazing pitch.
Microsoft going from 90% control of everything in IT including mobile to 33% of everything including mobile is a significant loss of control. Losing also every whit of influence in mobile - the only growth sector - at the same time is an even bigger deal. Microsoft can't go to carrier CEOs today and say "we might let you carry our Windows Phone devices if you suck up to us enough" like they could do when Windows Mobile was nearly 40% of smart devices and mobile smart devices were a tiny fraction of PCs. Verizon - the largest US provider - pushed the KIN and they are since reluctant. Now they have to petition the secretary of the secretary of the guy who adds phones for a carrier to set a meeting to discuss potential partnerships, and they have to bring the green suitcase or they won't even make it past security even with an appointment.
Google knew this when they bought Android for $50 million. They've gotten good value from this weapon in their war for survival, gaining so much control of mobile as it has grown larger than PCs that they provide the software for all of half of all the devices sold. For comparison Microsoft has spent about $16 billion on their Online Services Division (320x as much) since Steve Ballmer swore he was going to "fucking kill Google" (sorry for the language, but it's in the court document) in the legendary chair-throwing incident to no effect whatsoever. Actually to negative effect since Windows Mobile was doing far better without help. That's a lot to spend on a grudge and get less than nothing back. The Google guys aren't just out-thinking them, they're proving to have far more foresight also - probably a result in them being fully engaged in innovating rather than surviving their Survivor: Redmond working conditions. Or maybe because by being a challenger, Google must strive.
It's been never since Microsoft had to earn their market share. They lucked into it with a shaky deal with IBM on day 1, and leveraged that control since. Not only do they not know how to earn it - they never have known. Microsoft has always worked from a position of power and used that dominant position to take whatever they wanted from technology businesses. They will continue to work as if they're working from a position of power even when they're not in one because they don't know any other way. They don't know how to earn it because they've never had to. Obviously believing you have immense power and acting on that when you don't is an illness called "megalomania" - a psychosis they are unlikely to be cured of without long confinement in a straightjacket. By the time they're healed and sane again it will likely be too late for the shareholders.
Such is always the way with dominant companies: pride goeth before a fall. There's a long list of companies who fell this way in mobile: Palm, RIM, Nokia are but a few. Empires end eventually and it's starting to look like Microsoft's day in the sun is over. The decline will be long and slow as they have many fully committed acolytes - some in the highest levels of governments the world over - but eventually change must come. As humans we crave progress, and progress is antithesis to monopoly.
Raspberry Pi presold sight unseen over 350,000 units while restricted to one-per-customer. They ramped up the factory to 4,000 units a day - a run rate of 1.5 million units a year. They're little bare project boards. We're not even sure what we can do with them yet. Now that the schools they were intended for can order them in the bulk appropriate to the use of entire school districts full of students they may ramp quite a bit. School districts order in the dozens of units for test/dev and for deployment up to tens or hundreds of thousands so in the launch enthusiasm for RPi they were pretty much shut out so far. It doesn't hurt at all that their HDMI video output is standard input for flat panel monitors and TV's these past few years, so displays for them are everywhere and likely to last far longer than the PCs they came with.
If a bunch of hardware OEMs aren't snapping to attention over this they should be. The march of tiny low power ARM platforms seems to not want to stop. Now we have the Android TV dongle, five of these SBCs including the one in the fine article, a Kickstarter for OUYA that raised $5.3 million so far in 11 days from 41,000 backers who have no guarantee the product will ever even be made, on the strength of the reputation of the participants and the description of a product that isn't anticipated even being made until 9 months out - if they succeed in making it at all. That so many would put so much of their own personal money on only the promise of a thing is evidence of immense underlying demand for something.
Of course over in China and India they're making about a thousand different kinds of low-cost Android devices including a 7" tablet that costs $40 and runs Android ICS. Then there's the Nexus 7 tablet which sold out in retail stores around the planet on launch day and the 16GB version is even sold out on the Google Play store until further notice and the 8GB version probably soon will be - most of them were presold before they even hit the shelves. This one alone may move 10 million units the first year or more. Maybe much more. It's a product that may have buyers camped out at retailers awaiting fresh shipments like they were iThings.
The iThings are going great by the way, moving about a 500,000 units a day between iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch - every one a neat little ARM PC. And they just opened up the China market, which is like a whole third of everybody.
At last report little Android ARM PCs that also happen to have cellular phone capability are also doing well, activating 1,000,000 units a day - a run rate of 365,000,000 per year and still growing at a 2.5x pace year over year. And early next year come little ARM SOCs with 75% more processing power and 2x the graphics power for about the same price - and the SBCs that are made from them. Wow, the pace of progress here is stunning. It's like the early '90s again in PC land.
The traditional PC is stagnant. If you have one that's not too old you probably can suffer through another couple years with it, or until it fails completely, and save the money you would have put to a new one on one of these amazing new things. It's not like your laptop isn't already overpowered for what you're using it for. People have a certain budget for neat new gear anyway, and with adequate laptops costing $300 it's not like there's not money left over in the US market even if it is time to update your PC. The traditional PC market isn't going to collapse right away but I think it has peaked, plateaued, and begun its long gradual decline. In time, all things end.
All of these new things work wonderfully together, a
The stepwise nature of the move-along is the issue here. Once you subscribe to the Office leash you are doomed to be led by it. Here boy. Heel. Sit. That's a good boy.
I gave all of the Windows' a skip in my personal life. Never once bought one of them for my own use, nor stole it either. Frankly, if you were a Unix admin in 1982 with a graphical Xterm, Windows is still a toy for children. Even back then we were working on cloud, only we called it "grid". On my xterm I could build a dashboard to monitor an arbitrary number of hosts. The aggregate compute of those many hosts now fits in my pocket. Wasn't a big OS/2 fan either.
But these kids at Microsoft, they've at least come closer to honest work than any before them. That's something, right?
I admire you for having document processing needs far above those of common folk like me. Hopefully someday I might be so powerful and influential that I must succumb to the needs of Microsoft to get my work done.
It's exceedingly rare for me to lay any sort of praise on a Microsoft product at all here on slashdot but it does happen once in a great while; maybe three or six times in the past decade out of over 6,000 posts. It's going to happen here for a moment so if you W/E folks want to save a screenshot of a post to throw back at me later, now is the time. If you're hovering over that overrated mod you might just want to hang back for a wee bit and maybe read all the way through and review my comment history before you decide I'm a Redmond astroturfer. If you're one of my/. fans, you may want to turn your head as it's going to get ugly. Let's pause for a deep breath before we dig in.
In my experience in my labs on diverse hardware the most recent W8 demo publicly released is considerably more performant than W7 in every case - and maybe even better than XP, and credible reports anticipate an even more performant and responsive retail product. Specifically the removal of Aero and related chrome speeds up user interaction. The removal of several background tasks and the streamlining of others add other enhancements. Memory footprint is smaller. I/O operations to boot and log on to the domain are consolidated and reduced. Boot time is thereby reduced to something approaching reasonable even on older hardware. There may be some improved things happening in the scheduler too. It should allow the Enterprise System Architect to, for example, budget about 2x as many VDI clients per CPU core, and 1/3 less RAM per VDI desktop, and reduce the storage IOPs budged by 1/3 as well - though storage IOPs are notoriously oversubscribed for VDI because storage IOPs are expensive as hell. For some installations that's millions of dollars in hardware savings.
But wait! There's more! For normal hardware based desktop and laptop users these improvements also apply, but there's more. There are also broad driver enhancements that impact a vast spectrum of historical hardware - offerring improved I/O, better graphics performance, more reliable and performant interaction even with hardware up to five years old. Driver support goes deeper into history I believe than any Windows version has ever gone before, and broader across more brands. Yes, there will still be legacy devices, including some ancient printers and webcams that came in a white box, that don't have drivers - and if you have legacy devices that aren't supported you're out of luck. But generally not only are modern devices supported - they're supported better than any new version of Windows has ever supported them. If all your hardware is supported the $39 upgrade to W8 from even XP or Vista is a performance improvement that might get you out of buying new gear, giving you the performance boost of a 2-year upgrade - and get you the "Pro" version when you've been plodding along with a "home version" or worse and Media Center as a download too! If that's spare money an SSD and a couple Nexus 7 tablets or a Transformer Infinity or SGS III are all great places to put that money you would otherwise give to HP, Dell, Acer or Lenovo, and then you can have both a performant PC and the Pretty Amazing New Stuff!
For once Microsoft remembered to put some bait on their hook. In short, some Microsoft code geeks got retro and started doing stuff everybody else was doing 5-15 years ago. There's some other stuff in the box too and I'll talk about it in other posts. But for once I'm going to give the Microsoft software engineers some praise and not take it immediately away. They found out how to operate a performance analyzer, how to trim some fat, how many legacy devices to support in an OS revision. They figured out what a waste that UI chrome was. They read up on what a framebuffer is. They figured out that 5,000,000 128-byte I/Os at boot time could and probably should be consolidated somehow. They figured out how to get the fixes for that past their management.
The Wintel Surface is an inch thick, weighs a bunch more and has a fan and a stylus. The battery life sucks. It's a whole other critter. Everybody knows the fans almost always go out first - especially cat fanciers and dog owners. The stylus thing is self explanatory. No excuse for the battery life. It's just another Wintel tablet and those sell in such great quantity they may as well be handcrafted by guild tablet artisans to customer specification - and priced accordingly.
Except for the keyboard and the TPM chip the Surface is a clone of the Transformer Prime - and the OS was developed for actual Transformer Primes. You can already buy the Transformer Prime and run Linux on it, and you don't want the TPM chip. TPrime has a keyboard option too that has a battery extender and extra ports. Or get the Tranformer Infinity for all that and higher def 1920x1200 as well.
You didn't think they were coding for some new thing of their own design, did you? They don't have the hardware chops for that. They do have the in with Asus to get pre-release Transformer Primes though. Asus should be pretty upset unless they get included in the value chain somewhere.
Why would you wait and pay the extra just to increment Surface sales when you could have the real thing already? You really like that keyboard/cover? It doesn't look all that hot to me.
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The 8GB version is too barely profitable to allow for retailer margin. Retailers won't want to lose money on it.
You can sideload flash.
Not sure if you're counting this, but seaweed is grown in the sea, and bioconcentrates iodine. And it is popular in Japanese food.
No, they're recently shipping seafood again.
In an ancient thread we might have a meaningful chat outside the issues of a potential audience that is long gone. Surely that's your intent. I do that often here. What's on your mind?
Thyroid cysts or nodules are being found in 36% of 38,000 Fukushima children. A 2001 study in Nagasaki found an incidence of 0%. Thyroid is associated with iodine, as the substance is essential to its function. Iodine-131 was a considerable component of the contaminants released in the incident.
Hurry up with that gigabit fiber, please.
It takes a metric fuckton more than that to offend me. I've worked your post for what its worth and got my bit out of it. Please do give me another one to sharpen my wit against.
I was only counting smartphones, tablets, PCs and such things in the half billion per year. ARM processor sales have outnumbered the Earth's human population for several years if you include semi-smart embedded devices.
When you buy an SSD - now about $75, it comes with a utility to migrate your boot drive to it. If you do that you will see at least a 30x improvement in drive I/O - which will make an old laptop PC seem like it's from 10 years in the future. It turns out that the slowness of spinning rust drives have held back latencies for far too long. Solid state is where it's at these days, and giving a 5 year old PC a solid state drive catapults it a decade into the future. It's far better than buying a new PC. It was fast enough already for everything the customer wanted to do except booting, so this is almost too much progress.
The Linux kids have known this for quite some time, as we installed knoppix on pens long ago and were like "Holy Cow! How did that boot so fast?"
Linux systems are moving a half-billion units a year. That's quite a lot on a planet with only 7 billion humans, half of whom have no technology above the Iron Age.
Microsoft isn't about money and they never have been. They're about control. If they have control they can demand money and their "customers" have little choice but to pay. Oracle works the same way though frankly Oracle's mind bending powers are even more inexplicable. Oracle must have hired the same guys who designed the sales pitch for Encyclopedia Brittanica - that was an amazing pitch.
Microsoft going from 90% control of everything in IT including mobile to 33% of everything including mobile is a significant loss of control. Losing also every whit of influence in mobile - the only growth sector - at the same time is an even bigger deal. Microsoft can't go to carrier CEOs today and say "we might let you carry our Windows Phone devices if you suck up to us enough" like they could do when Windows Mobile was nearly 40% of smart devices and mobile smart devices were a tiny fraction of PCs. Verizon - the largest US provider - pushed the KIN and they are since reluctant. Now they have to petition the secretary of the secretary of the guy who adds phones for a carrier to set a meeting to discuss potential partnerships, and they have to bring the green suitcase or they won't even make it past security even with an appointment.
Google knew this when they bought Android for $50 million. They've gotten good value from this weapon in their war for survival, gaining so much control of mobile as it has grown larger than PCs that they provide the software for all of half of all the devices sold. For comparison Microsoft has spent about $16 billion on their Online Services Division (320x as much) since Steve Ballmer swore he was going to "fucking kill Google" (sorry for the language, but it's in the court document) in the legendary chair-throwing incident to no effect whatsoever. Actually to negative effect since Windows Mobile was doing far better without help. That's a lot to spend on a grudge and get less than nothing back. The Google guys aren't just out-thinking them, they're proving to have far more foresight also - probably a result in them being fully engaged in innovating rather than surviving their Survivor: Redmond working conditions. Or maybe because by being a challenger, Google must strive.
It's been never since Microsoft had to earn their market share. They lucked into it with a shaky deal with IBM on day 1, and leveraged that control since. Not only do they not know how to earn it - they never have known. Microsoft has always worked from a position of power and used that dominant position to take whatever they wanted from technology businesses. They will continue to work as if they're working from a position of power even when they're not in one because they don't know any other way. They don't know how to earn it because they've never had to. Obviously believing you have immense power and acting on that when you don't is an illness called "megalomania" - a psychosis they are unlikely to be cured of without long confinement in a straightjacket. By the time they're healed and sane again it will likely be too late for the shareholders.
Such is always the way with dominant companies: pride goeth before a fall. There's a long list of companies who fell this way in mobile: Palm, RIM, Nokia are but a few. Empires end eventually and it's starting to look like Microsoft's day in the sun is over. The decline will be long and slow as they have many fully committed acolytes - some in the highest levels of governments the world over - but eventually change must come. As humans we crave progress, and progress is antithesis to monopoly.
Raspberry Pi presold sight unseen over 350,000 units while restricted to one-per-customer. They ramped up the factory to 4,000 units a day - a run rate of 1.5 million units a year. They're little bare project boards. We're not even sure what we can do with them yet. Now that the schools they were intended for can order them in the bulk appropriate to the use of entire school districts full of students they may ramp quite a bit. School districts order in the dozens of units for test/dev and for deployment up to tens or hundreds of thousands so in the launch enthusiasm for RPi they were pretty much shut out so far. It doesn't hurt at all that their HDMI video output is standard input for flat panel monitors and TV's these past few years, so displays for them are everywhere and likely to last far longer than the PCs they came with.
If a bunch of hardware OEMs aren't snapping to attention over this they should be. The march of tiny low power ARM platforms seems to not want to stop. Now we have the Android TV dongle, five of these SBCs including the one in the fine article, a Kickstarter for OUYA that raised $5.3 million so far in 11 days from 41,000 backers who have no guarantee the product will ever even be made, on the strength of the reputation of the participants and the description of a product that isn't anticipated even being made until 9 months out - if they succeed in making it at all. That so many would put so much of their own personal money on only the promise of a thing is evidence of immense underlying demand for something.
Of course over in China and India they're making about a thousand different kinds of low-cost Android devices including a 7" tablet that costs $40 and runs Android ICS. Then there's the Nexus 7 tablet which sold out in retail stores around the planet on launch day and the 16GB version is even sold out on the Google Play store until further notice and the 8GB version probably soon will be - most of them were presold before they even hit the shelves. This one alone may move 10 million units the first year or more. Maybe much more. It's a product that may have buyers camped out at retailers awaiting fresh shipments like they were iThings.
The iThings are going great by the way, moving about a 500,000 units a day between iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch - every one a neat little ARM PC. And they just opened up the China market, which is like a whole third of everybody.
At last report little Android ARM PCs that also happen to have cellular phone capability are also doing well, activating 1,000,000 units a day - a run rate of 365,000,000 per year and still growing at a 2.5x pace year over year. And early next year come little ARM SOCs with 75% more processing power and 2x the graphics power for about the same price - and the SBCs that are made from them. Wow, the pace of progress here is stunning. It's like the early '90s again in PC land.
The traditional PC is stagnant. If you have one that's not too old you probably can suffer through another couple years with it, or until it fails completely, and save the money you would have put to a new one on one of these amazing new things. It's not like your laptop isn't already overpowered for what you're using it for. People have a certain budget for neat new gear anyway, and with adequate laptops costing $300 it's not like there's not money left over in the US market even if it is time to update your PC. The traditional PC market isn't going to collapse right away but I think it has peaked, plateaued, and begun its long gradual decline. In time, all things end.
All of these new things work wonderfully together, a
The accumulated deficit of OSD is now about $16 billion. Any way you slice it that's a lot to spend on a grudge.
They should learn to hunt the wild evergreen and pulp it like their forebears did. With an onion on their belt, as was the fashion in the day.
Are there still software houses that wrote apps for XP on launch? I thought Microsoft ate them all.
The stepwise nature of the move-along is the issue here. Once you subscribe to the Office leash you are doomed to be led by it. Here boy. Heel. Sit. That's a good boy.
I gave all of the Windows' a skip in my personal life. Never once bought one of them for my own use, nor stole it either. Frankly, if you were a Unix admin in 1982 with a graphical Xterm, Windows is still a toy for children. Even back then we were working on cloud, only we called it "grid". On my xterm I could build a dashboard to monitor an arbitrary number of hosts. The aggregate compute of those many hosts now fits in my pocket. Wasn't a big OS/2 fan either.
But these kids at Microsoft, they've at least come closer to honest work than any before them. That's something, right?
I admire you for having document processing needs far above those of common folk like me. Hopefully someday I might be so powerful and influential that I must succumb to the needs of Microsoft to get my work done.
They need the extra thickness for the patent licenses.
Old software has bits that rust. They oxidize into AOL subscriptions. You don't want that.
Wrong. It has a fan.
It's exceedingly rare for me to lay any sort of praise on a Microsoft product at all here on slashdot but it does happen once in a great while; maybe three or six times in the past decade out of over 6,000 posts. It's going to happen here for a moment so if you W/E folks want to save a screenshot of a post to throw back at me later, now is the time. If you're hovering over that overrated mod you might just want to hang back for a wee bit and maybe read all the way through and review my comment history before you decide I'm a Redmond astroturfer. If you're one of my /. fans, you may want to turn your head as it's going to get ugly. Let's pause for a deep breath before we dig in.
In my experience in my labs on diverse hardware the most recent W8 demo publicly released is considerably more performant than W7 in every case - and maybe even better than XP, and credible reports anticipate an even more performant and responsive retail product. Specifically the removal of Aero and related chrome speeds up user interaction. The removal of several background tasks and the streamlining of others add other enhancements. Memory footprint is smaller. I/O operations to boot and log on to the domain are consolidated and reduced. Boot time is thereby reduced to something approaching reasonable even on older hardware. There may be some improved things happening in the scheduler too. It should allow the Enterprise System Architect to, for example, budget about 2x as many VDI clients per CPU core, and 1/3 less RAM per VDI desktop, and reduce the storage IOPs budged by 1/3 as well - though storage IOPs are notoriously oversubscribed for VDI because storage IOPs are expensive as hell. For some installations that's millions of dollars in hardware savings.
But wait! There's more! For normal hardware based desktop and laptop users these improvements also apply, but there's more. There are also broad driver enhancements that impact a vast spectrum of historical hardware - offerring improved I/O, better graphics performance, more reliable and performant interaction even with hardware up to five years old. Driver support goes deeper into history I believe than any Windows version has ever gone before, and broader across more brands. Yes, there will still be legacy devices, including some ancient printers and webcams that came in a white box, that don't have drivers - and if you have legacy devices that aren't supported you're out of luck. But generally not only are modern devices supported - they're supported better than any new version of Windows has ever supported them. If all your hardware is supported the $39 upgrade to W8 from even XP or Vista is a performance improvement that might get you out of buying new gear, giving you the performance boost of a 2-year upgrade - and get you the "Pro" version when you've been plodding along with a "home version" or worse and Media Center as a download too! If that's spare money an SSD and a couple Nexus 7 tablets or a Transformer Infinity or SGS III are all great places to put that money you would otherwise give to HP, Dell, Acer or Lenovo, and then you can have both a performant PC and the Pretty Amazing New Stuff!
For once Microsoft remembered to put some bait on their hook. In short, some Microsoft code geeks got retro and started doing stuff everybody else was doing 5-15 years ago. There's some other stuff in the box too and I'll talk about it in other posts. But for once I'm going to give the Microsoft software engineers some praise and not take it immediately away. They found out how to operate a performance analyzer, how to trim some fat, how many legacy devices to support in an OS revision. They figured out what a waste that UI chrome was. They read up on what a framebuffer is. They figured out that 5,000,000 128-byte I/Os at boot time could and probably should be consolidated somehow. They figured out how to get the fixes for that past their management.
I'm not a fan of the
The Wintel Surface is an inch thick, weighs a bunch more and has a fan and a stylus. The battery life sucks. It's a whole other critter. Everybody knows the fans almost always go out first - especially cat fanciers and dog owners. The stylus thing is self explanatory. No excuse for the battery life. It's just another Wintel tablet and those sell in such great quantity they may as well be handcrafted by guild tablet artisans to customer specification - and priced accordingly.
Except for the keyboard and the TPM chip the Surface is a clone of the Transformer Prime - and the OS was developed for actual Transformer Primes. You can already buy the Transformer Prime and run Linux on it, and you don't want the TPM chip. TPrime has a keyboard option too that has a battery extender and extra ports. Or get the Tranformer Infinity for all that and higher def 1920x1200 as well.
You didn't think they were coding for some new thing of their own design, did you? They don't have the hardware chops for that. They do have the in with Asus to get pre-release Transformer Primes though. Asus should be pretty upset unless they get included in the value chain somewhere.
Why would you wait and pay the extra just to increment Surface sales when you could have the real thing already? You really like that keyboard/cover? It doesn't look all that hot to me.