Posts by beemergeek

PC market facing worst-ever slump in 2013

Windows 8 not helping

You're right, it's not *all* windows 8's fault for declining sales.

However, it sure isn't helping. Nobody (and I mean *nobody*) I've talked to has liked Win8 on the desktop.

I think the article draws an incorrect conclusion from BYOD. I don't believe that cost is the primary factor for a BYOD purchase. BYOD allows people to select the laptop (machine, whatever) that makes sense for *them*, not the cheapest one that a company can purchase in bulk.

It's an important distinction. While some will buy the cheapest laptop, most will buy the best they can afford. I know I did -- I went for a top of the line Macbook Pro. It's going to last me 5 years (as my last one did), and I want a system that will still be relevant after 5 years.

HP fuels second-gen Moonshot servers for April 8 launch

All things to nobody

Sadly, HP doesn't know what is has, what it wants, nor where it is going.

They designed a high density ARM solution for very large horizontal scale out. A very cool idea that could jump start a Linux/ARM Cloud infrastructure solution.

However, ARM doesn't run Windows, and Windows is key to everything HP (at least from an HP strategy standpoint).

So now they'll offer lots of different types of CPUs in their high-density solution. This decreases the profit margin, as different types of chips are expensive to integrate and support.

In the end, I believe this project will die because it tries to straddle server technologies rather than continuing the charge into new server infrastructure.

Apple share-price-off-a-cliff: Told you that would happen

Brit Corporate Innovation

Sorry, I couldn't make it through the article. The premise just too far off for me:

The Brits are famous for having the most backwards IT environments on the planet, and this fellow is using his experience in those environments to say that Apple (one of the most innovative companies on the planet) will fail?

I don't believe this fellow has a relevant reference point to Apple's culture, nor it's capacity to innovate.

Canonical to Windows XP cliff-clingers: Ubuntu safety net's ready... now jump

WINE

You've obviously never heard of WINE. WINE translates Windows API calls into Linux API calls.

Many applications (games included) run unmodified under WINE better than they do under native Windows.

Oracle Linux honcho 'personally hurt' by Red Hat clone claims

Car analogy

Obligatory car analogy:

Red Hat is to Oracle as Ford is to Mercury.

Oracle doesn't control the destiny of the product. They fit slightly different fenders, change the engine tuning slightly, then feel miffed when someone says it's just a slightly different Ford.

Oracle, want to impress? Take the product in new directions! Bolt on ZFS and a 'yum install oracledb' option.

Until you do, you're just another rebuild of Red Hat.

Cisco: We are NOT lagging behind Brocade

Love the marketing speak

I believe this is marketing speak. Most of the new cisco switches offer selectable FCoE, FC or Ethernet capability. This makes saying that you've shipped 60M FCoE ports hollow, as the vast majority of the ports will not be used for FCoE, but rather for plain-old-ethernet.

I could be wrong, however. Mr. Metz, could you clarify how many of the 60M ports were actually used for FCoE?

Oracle's Sparc T4 prices mask improved value

Performance skewed

I think a simplistic view has been taken on the performance comparison in the article. One thing that isn't obvious about the T4 is that for smaller workloads, the CPU will turn off the extra threads, dedicating the resources of the core to a single thread.

In real terms, this means that you can run the system all out (max threads) at one performance level, and, at 1-thread-per-core at a much higher performance figure.

I believe in a comparison of T3 and T4, the all-threads performance figure and the 1-thread-per core should be used. I believe you'll find the performance for the 1-thread-per-core to be far superior to the T3.

Hardware-happy HP has swallowed a Sun death pill

The easy way out

The grass is always greener on the software side of the fence. Just ask Unisys, when it went from industry hardware powerhouse to software/services.

It had over 100K employees. What does it have now? 8k?

I see this as HP giving up. They *need* their computer biz (not Itanic) to remain relevant in the IT industry.

I expect the ex-CEO of SAP to run HP into the ground. I expect the company to be 100K employees (from 300K) in the next few years.

Let's hope that the HP board is ousted before the company goes too far down the rathole.

If not, bye-bye HP. I wonder if Larry and Mark will buy you as well?

Probably not.

Acer founder: 'Tablets, ultrabooks just a fad'

iPad2?

That's funny, as the iPad2 can do everything you're talking about:

1. Get a tablet

- Done

2. Do something with it:

A Sell a Car

- Done. I can take a picture with the built-in camera on the iPad2, and post the resulting picture to Craigslist, adding the description via the on-screen keyboard.

B. Book a Holiday

- Done. I booked my holiday to Indianapolis to the MotoGP races on my IPad 1 some months ago.

C. Pay a bill.

- Done. I shop on Amazon and other sites regularly with my iPad. I can type just fine on the on-screen keyboard, but if I *needed* a keyboard, I can attach a bluetooth keyboard for heavy typing.

I think you've never used an iPad, or if you did, you called it a 'fondleslab' in an Apple store and quit using it 30 seconds later. You should work with the product a bit more before you complaint about it.

Directing Fibre Channel storage traffic over Ethernet

Interop?

The article doesn't mention the elephant in the corner: Interop.

The different FCoE solutions are all vendor-specific. If you install a Brocade FCoE SAN, good luck with plugging it into your Cisco infrastructure.

Borrowing words from Steve Jobs:

FCoE is a big bag of hurt.

Until everything works seamlessly all of the time, I don't see any broad based installations.

Oracle preps Google and Microsoft Office challenger

Meh

Another way to do spreadsheets! Yay!

If you want to impress me, create a program that eliminates Visio from the office landscape.

That's what keeps people coming back to Windows.

Ethernet borgs RDMA from InfiniBand

Cisco?

Unless Cisco signs up for this, the solution is dead. Without the 800lb gorilla of networking, this is a 'what we might do' pipe dream.

Additionally, I believe the converged 10ge one-connection-to-rule-them-all to be all pipe dream. Once it's all connected, simple, and it just works, great.

Now I just need to figure out how to afford ports and cards that cost more than the server I'm connecting them to.

YMMV.