IDC, the same company that predicted an overwhelming start for Windows Vista [pdf], is predicting that Microsoft will Sell 30 million units of their phone OS next year. Originally taken to mean Windows Phone 7, Microsoft later issued a correction to state that the number reflected all of Windows Mobile OS including version 6.5 which is currently in the market. Actually, being laughed out of the market would be a better description.

Microsoft Windows mobile operating systems for smartphones market share is in free-fall having dropped from nearly 20% in the quarter ending October 2009 to 6.9% for the quarter ending March 2010. It's losing 50% of its share every six months and the rate is accelerating. At a flat rate that's 1.5% share in 1Q2011. Including the accelerating rate of decline gives somewhere south of 0.7%. Negligible. Fringe. 0.7% is in a projected 500M unit market is 3.5 million units which at $15 a pop doesn't even start to pay for the cost of development, let alone any marketing money. And that's if they launch an awesome product in 1Q2011, which seems unlikely. 3Q brings 1/3 of that and past then it's zeros all the way down.

Microsoft is having IDC float these ridiculous numbers so it can push phone vendors and carriers into line - into giving up control of their user experience, into giving Windows Phone 7 preference over competing solutions, into giving up margin to get share. The message is simple: "You dare not ignore the overwhelming market power of Microsoft. You dare not argue. It is useless to resist us." The truth could not be more clear, nor more different. Microsoft is not in charge here - they're not even relevant with a <7% share. By giving up control of the user experience the phone vendors give up the differentiation that is the value they can add - their work that makes their platforms special to them is the thing that turns their product from a generic commodity to an object of desire. By giving up their margins they gain nothing but the opportunity to lose even more money - which is not their goal. By playing along with this the network providers likewise give up everything that makes them special. The smart executive will tell his Microsoft weasel: "You told me that story a year ago. Come back when you have product." The dumb executive will swallow this hook, line and sinker and fire up the co-marketing scheme without proof of product so keep an eye out for stocks to short because dumb executives run their companies into the ground.

Meanwhile, as you're all well aware Microsoft Friday reorganized its entertainment division. It's not an accident this happened on the Friday leading into a US holiday weekend any more than the announcement that the BP "Top Kill" failure was. What you may not know is that this is part of an escalating sequence of reorganizations that started in Windows Mobile nearly two years ago - and it's the third or fourth of such. Each time the reorganization goes higher up the tree and now this iteration has CEO Steve Ballmer directly in charge. Obviously there would be no need for a top-level reorganization if the product were on track, so expect the schedule to slip past Christmas and into next year or alternatively for the product to suck so hard that the level of vacuum is scientifically interesting.

Next year is too late. Nothing less than a perfect product will do, and even that is probably not enough. Nobody's going to believe a Microsoft funded IDC report in the face of actual shipping products with huge margins - not anybody who wants to survive anyway. Mobile is different. Two years is forever in mobile. A year from now to start to try to gain traction on a new OS and find developers willing to take a risk on the the continuous delays is just impossible.

In short it's game over for Windows Mobile and not too long thereafter for Windows as well. You see, there are these tablets...

This is a work of fiction - as all my slashdot coments are. It infers facts not in evidence. It describes inferred historical events. Dates are not precise. The bulk of it is however my firmly held opinion given considerable experience and study in the field. It is sourced from a /. comment previously written and I'm replicating and revising it in my journal both so I can find it more easily and so my slashdot friends can see it even though the article must fade from the main page:

Normally I'm not one to praise Microsoft's end results, but I'm not stupid. They hire the brightest minds from the best schools with strong foundations in classical IT art as well as contemporary vision and they work them to death because that hazy zone between exhaustion and physical failure is a special point where human brains integrate at miraculous levels. Microsoft has known this for twenty years and organizes its workers accordingly. These folks driven in this way can make an awesome mobile OS, they did, and I'd love to have a copy of the source for that bad boy. These Microsoft developers made a rock solid performant and genuinely innovative phone OS which is the core of Windows Phone 7. It's tiny, boots fast, suspends and resumes instantly, and pinches ergs like they're made of platinum. It has an intuitive touch-centric interface. It works flawlessly with all the latest technologies - hell, it'd make a great HPC OS if these jerks would think out of the box now and then. This was about two years and three reorgs ago. This is the mockup they'll trot out to the major phone vendors hoping to get them to push the platform - short a few apps but you can see the potential because it's beautiful, intuitive, responsive. They built an app store for it, and shopped the mockup around to app developers under NDA. Some of the AC posters here even have it and they're in awe of its incredible flexibility, its power, its potential - and they should be because this bare OS rocks. They built apps for that were complete a year ago, and they're continuously refining them in the hopes that the platform will launch someday. Microsoft floats an early 2009 release date to some of their preferred pundits even though it's not finished yet because that's how you feed a flackalyst.

It's a killer mobile OS but it's not a Windows yet. For six months they put some finishing touches on the version they intend to ship - integrating Bing search and Windows Live services into everything, building the Mobile Office apps for it, porting Silverlight, .NET for mobile and a bunch of other stuff. This is leveraging the platform so that it pushes all of the other Microsoft platforms because making products that can be extracted from their internicine application and server dependencies is not the One Microsoft Way. The shipping version then ran like a dog, leaked memory like a seive and crashed every few minutes. So eighteen months ago they rebooted the team and tried again. They got the same result, so nine months ago they reorg the group from higher up and try again. The new group can't get the thing to work right in nine months, so yesterday they reorg the entire entertainment and mobile division to be directly under Steve Ballmer and reboot their efforts yet again. This product was supposed to ship in early 2009. It is not even close to ready. It probably never will be because all of these internicine ties never did work well, are a moving target, and have reached an insurmountable level of complexity for a mobile device which must by definition be the ultimate in computer reliability and stability while remaining cutting edge in a dynamic market. It literally can't be done.

Even today Microsoft executives are shopping around that slick bare mockup that no end user is ever going to see to their phone partners at the manufacturers and carriers, playing the push/pull game. "You want this. You need this. You're going to want to start planning the marketing around this product right away. This is going to be a slam dunk! And look - it says Microsoft on it everywhere so you know businesses are going to eat it up. [Hushed]It has IE and Outlook." / "Of course, this iPhone killer isn't for everybody - it's exclusive to our special friends. Committed friends like you who know the value in long term relationships with a powerful member of the digital ecology. Partners who are willing to sacrifice any control whatever of the end-user experience. Existing paid-in Windows Mobile deals don't count because this isn't Windows Mobile - it's Windows Phone. For something this great we need a new level of commitment and we're not offering it to folks who care so little about their customers that they'll push that Android thing on them."

The whole time these Microsoft account execs know the real thing with a real app load bears as much relation to the thing they're showing as you do to a squid. They know the intended shippable version can't run at all on equipment with a BOM less than $1000 and even at that crashes several times an hour. They probably took meetings today pushing this thing, knowing that the latest reorg means there's no hope of a shipping product that works well in the next year. They don't know that in that year the target will shift again, pushing their target date out another year as the team refactors yet again. Even if they knew, they don't care. They're willing to believe the code monkeys can make it work because they make $400K + options, live in nice homes, and are going to milk this cow for all it's worth. If they had scruples they'd never have passed the first interview.

Meanwhile the phone partners, the carriers and the PC partners have wised up. They have to sell product today. They can't wait forever for Microsoft to pull their collective heads out the the dark place they're at and deliver a product to compete with the iPhone and the iPad and the iPod if they want to stay in business and WiMo 6.5 just won't do. Those that bought the "Real Soon Now" story for over a year lost serious opportunity to those more skeptical. In this business the two+ years from intended WP7 release in early 2009 to a current hope of mid 2011 really is forever. In one year Android has gone from "Android what?" to 28% share of sales and the growth arc if continued has total mobile domination by mid 2011. This is actually good news for all of us because once vendors let go of the "wait for WP7" idea they don't have to be Microsoft's special friend any more and can instead focus on giving us what we want right now: Progress. So HP buys Palm, Dell offers Android Phones and slates, all carriers that can't get iPhone like AT&T (who have an iPhone exclusive in the US) push Android like it's the Holy Grail and even AT&T carries Android because they must offer choice and there's only one iPhone.

We have one more Windows Mobile reorganization left to go. This is the one that knocks monkeyboy off his perch at the top of the tree. The guy who replaces him will know better than to let this cursed project live a single day. This train came off the rails years ago, and we're now only still watching the crash in slow motion because these things take time - but the outcome will be as certain that day as it is today and as it was two years ago. It's got fail written all over it.

Hidden in this post is a secret message to Microsoft on how to fix their stuff - as my posts often do. I've been doing that for years. I do that because it amuses me to taunt their employees who post here about their obviously predictable failures by linking to my old posts. I don't want Microsoft to win because they have a long history of being evil, but it amuses me to tell them how to win knowing that they'll ignore me so that I can later point out how they could have won if they weren't such fools. So far this is working and the outcome is to me hilarious. Everybody needs a hobby and this is mine.

J.A. Watson of ZDNet belatedly joins the Vista Sucks Chorus. He makes up for his tardiness with zeal and by moving to GNU/Linux.

I simply can't believe how awful Windows is, and (unfortunately) how gullible I am. [my laptop] came loaded with Vista Business, and a "fallback" DVD for XP Professional. I tried running Vista on it. I really tried, I really wanted it to work, and I said exactly that in my blog here. But it didn't. Every time I tried it, things started out looking promising, and after a month or two it would go belly-up. Three or four times I reloaded Vista from scratch and tried again, hoping that the latest Microsoft Updates would fix it. Eventually I gave up, reloaded one last time with XP Professional, and ran that with no problem for two years.

A month or so ago, through my own carelessness, I wiped the disk on this laptop. I had to reload everything from scratch, so (like a fool) I thought well, Vista SP2 is out, everyone says that it is "all fixed up now and works great, and reliably", so I'll try that again. I loaded Vista from scratch, added all the updates to SP2 and beyond, and I've been running it that way since. Until today. ... Windows is unreliable garbage, it always has been, it always will be, and if you use it you should be willing to accept that risk. I am no longer willing to accept that risk, even part-time as a secondary operating system on this laptop. Windows is gone, it has puked all over its disk for the last time here, and I will not reload it. I am in the process of transferring the data to one of the Linux partitions - yes, Linux is quite happy to read the partition that Windows says is hopelessly corrupted.

Please, PLEASE, unless you want to hear a very long string of words that I learned during my military service, do NOT tell me that the "solution" to this problem is to give Microsoft even more money and "upgrade" to Windows 7. ... if Vista is not stable, or reliable, then Microsoft should withdraw it and either offer a free "upgrade" to Windows 7 or offer a refund of the purchase cost. ... I absolutely don't believe the Windows 7 is any better, any more stable or any more reliable than Vista. They come from Microsoft, they are utter garbage...

This is a sign of things to come for Windows. Windows 7 was predictably just as bad as Vista was. People no longer are falling for Microsoft's promises of "this version fixes everything."

For a long time now, Apple's total value in the market, or market capitalization, has grown relative to Microsoft. In April it was reported that Apple has passed Microsoft on the S&P 500, but many people pointed out that this was an adjusted figure, not raw market cap.

The difference between them has shrunk from over $100 Billion to only $3.1 Billion today. Given the rate of change it's reasonable to expect that Apple will pass Microsoft in this key metric before the end of June, perhaps as soon as next week. Possibly even tomorrow.

This is important because Microsoft's influence in the maketplace is disproportionate to the value of their products. It's driven largely by a long history of fear, a perception of invincibility. That another company can rise up and topple them from the height of America's largest tech company should have remarkable impacts on all the other tech companies. We may see more innovation because of this.

eWeek is reporting that HP's Windows 7 based tablet PC, demonstrated by Steve Ballmer at CES is, contrary to previous reports, alive but delayed to October. Other reports say that it will have WebOS from HP's recent Palm acquisition. Over on CNET, Erica Ogg isn't calling it either way.

HP's own site still has promo up. Certainly they are pushing Philip McKinney as a personality with vision.

So... An HP tablet is coming in October. Will it have W7? Maybe. Will it have WebOS? Maybe. Will you be able to choose from these? It seems unlikely given the history. Compaq showed a Windows tablet at Comdex in 2001. Nothing came of it, nor did anything come of the Compaq/HP tablets that followed. All of those came with Windows.

If it arrives, it's late. By then there will be 9 million iPads in the market, and dozens of Android on ARM alternatives to compare it to. Will it be a compelling product? We'll see. HP definitely has the manufacturing chops to pump out a bunch of these. They have first rate engineers. But will their partnership commitments result in a compromise product that's lackluster in performance, has an interface that's not suitable for the form factor, requires the requisite and power-sucking Windows antimalware suite? It's possible, especially if HP gets a really sweet W7/Server 2008 licensing deal in return. Microsoft can be really persuasive, and they have a large number of "special relationships" available to sweeten a deal. Whether they can sweeten a deal to be worth more than the $1B HP paid for Palm remains to be seen. To me it would be a shame if the net result of HP buying Palm was to kill WebOS in order to get a better deal on Windows. Palm was better than that even though they made some business missteps recently and found themselves cash poor at an unfortunate moment.

Clearly there are some CEO level executive negotiations going on between Microsoft and HP. Hopefully these will become open on Groklaw one day. For now we have to wait and see if HP is ready to compete in the new world. My guess: if they come out with a W7 only tablet it will suffer the same fate as all their other Windows tablets - unit sales that peak in the tens of thousands. If they give us a choice between Android, WebOS and W7, they've got a chance of making something that catches the wave - a chance to be a part of the new people-centric consumer electronics world. If they fail it, well, there's always all those other vendors who are willing to give us what we want.

We shall see.

Digitimes has another reason for Windows 7 sales to be low.

PC replacement demand is not driven significantly by the consumer market, but rather enterprise and government purchases ... most enterprises in Europe and North America are expected to start planning annual purchasing budgets for the year in March and April of 2010, actual replacement demand is not expected to spur until the second half of the year.

Companies and government might buy computers next year, but they should already be buying orders placed in March and April of this year. There are already accounts of corporate rejection of Windows 7, so that OS is not likely to have anything to do with corporate buying and government won't be a big market because UAC still does not meet government security standards . Back in January, retailers at CES remembered being "burnt by Vista" and saw nothing to change their minds about the contracting PC market. Perhaps OEMs and retailers could deliver the gnu/linux netbooks and desktops that people actually want to buy.

Who decided that all story submissions would be tagged with user email addresses? You might as well demand and publish people's real names.

This is a breach of trust that will drive away long standing users such as myself. Email addresses were collected under the promise of never being published. Now I have the choice of submitting things as AC, publishing my email address or just giving up. I'm leaning towards giving up. Boycott Novell has been more fun anyway.

A couple months ago my Achievements page clicked over from 32 to 64 +5 moderated comments. I decided to try to increment the +5 moderated comments counter on my Achievements page again with 64 more +5 comments. For NYCL or Bruce Perens this is a day's work but it took me a good while. Today I managed to achieve this goal and arrived at 2^7 comments moderated +5.

To commemorate the occasion, here it is. Lovely. I would have preferred this one. To my credit, most of the posts were going for insightful or informative and were modded correctly. In the whole time unfair moderation was very rare, and easily countered with a followup post at +2 bonus.

It's not very hard to do. Post at 1. If you post at 3 with karma and subscriber points and your first moderation is funny or insightful which most people default to +1, then the post looks like it's +5 moderated to the moderators, but (I think) those bonus points don't count - it has to have four legitimate up-moderations. Say the usual stuff. It helps to post early in a thread, and best to get the first one if you can do it and not get modded to oblivion.

Along the way I had one post that was so controversial it was modded over 30 times before sticking short of +5 but well in the visible range. I wish I could remember which one that was.

At one point I was getting so many mod points it was scary. I think I only used them up once.

Karma is neither cumulative nor persistent, or now I could be a real jerk and get away with it. That's probably for the best.

I guess my rambling point is that moderation does seem to work. I guess since it gave me the incentive to do this, maybe the achievements thing works too.

The new page design is still broken, and the home page now reports that it is too large to load into my BlackBerry so I'm down to slashdotting about 1/2 as much.

Despite all the hype, it is easy to predict that Windows 7 will go the same way Vista did. Vista was a failure in every way, so a pretty new face was made to sell the same buggy and customer hostile core and the Microsoft hype machine was turned on full blast. Now that Vista 7 is RTM, we no longer have to make predictions, we can simply watch the results. Here is a collection of Vista 7 failures found on YouTube. Enjoy what I found in a few minutes:

• Counter Strike Fail
• Power Management Fail Hibernate seems to be broken. Any power management working would be an improvement over XP or Vista but we should not expect such miracles from non free software.
• Cracking Video shows how to p0wn "activation." Soothing music welcomes you to the botnet.
• Good rundown of Windows 7 problems by seasoned IT professional who has yet to give up on Windows. He's not correct about being able to upgrade from Vista to Windows 7.

Update 1/2/2011 Real users have been forced to buy Vista 7 with their new computers for more than a year and it's Vista all over again. They tell the story better than I can.

Here are videos that have collected at YouTube over the last year. Windows 7 is no less a pig and no more secure than Vista was, everything the Microsoft boosters say is a lie. All of these videos were made after the RTM date and most after the October 22nd, 2009 shelf date. The best have bold dates.

2009

• 07/28 - an amazing Windows 7 failure video. Ten minutes long but fun the whole time.
• 09/11 - buggy dual monitor action. It's funny how my PIII can correctly do this kind of thing with composting using E16 and Debian. Multitouch on Windows 7 has had a lot of high profile failure too.
• 10/22 - Fails the day it was released to the public. Man forced to wipe Vista to install Windows 7 and ends up with two dead computers.
• 12/29 - Windows 7 speech recognition, impressive and completely worthless.
• 12/31 - What Windows 7 OEM "support" is really like, explained by a former Gateway support tech. The techical issue was product activation but the video is a profoundly sad portrait of betrayed US tech workers.

2010

• 01/03 - A gamer hates Windows 7 performance and broken Steam
• 01/05 - Another user abandons the Windows world over Vista/Windows 7.
• 01/15 - Another tech and XP fans tell his users to go from XP to Mac OSX because Windows 7 is so poor
• 01/18 - This poor user thinks Vista was better, how pathetic.
• 04/19 - Hardware does not work with Windows 7, user hates it.
• 07/10/2010 - Excellent critique by long term Windows user fed up with Vista/Window7. After fighting "updates" for two years, user runs to Mac and vows to never purchase Windows again.
• 07/29 - Windows 7 ruins a netbook and lots of other hardware, user can't use CDs and is very frustrated.
• 8/21 - Infuriating general flakeyness, poor user wants his XP back.
• 09/04 - Poor battery life of Windows 7 graphically illustrated.
• 09/30 - Windows 7 broken so that user can't log in.
• 10/04 - User complains about poor performance and incomplete Vista facelift for Window 7. Thinks it works a little faster with "classic" 1995 like menu bar.
• 10/10 - Fake AV demonstrated, shows that Windows 7 is still insecure and preyed on by all sorts. The demonstrator should have actually used virtual machine if he really needed Windows.
• 10/31 - Slow shutdown ruins someone's day.
• 12/10 - Great demonstration of CPU usage in Windows 7 vrs GNU/Linux.

2011

• 02/01 - Bugs and clown music
• 02/11 - Microsoft Anna voice tells you how annoying Windows 7 is
• 02/13 - Windows 7 ruins $1,000 computer so user is unable to play games, make videos and whatnot.
• 03/16 - Five crashes a month belies hype for this man. He wanted an improvement over Vista and 64 bit OS, but thinks Windows 7 is worse than Vista, which he also thought suckes. Wants to go Linux but has a few programs holding him back.

The Madison WI alder for district 20 Thuy Pham-Remmele is an idiot.

From the dept of brain dead or bribed journalists.

This ZDNet opinion piece has got to be the worst defense of unethical business practices I've see to date. Basically, the author admits M$ bribes and punishes OEMs and that's AOK with him. Let's preserve this gem:

a company gets twice as much from a PC with their brand on it as one they make for someone else. MSI needs this money to survive in a world where its Chinese partners can undercut them. The margin justifies MSIs existence.

It is also true that Linux cannot afford a presence in the channel. Its not how we roll. You cant invest in retailing if your product costs nothing. There is nothing to invest. Thats why Linux and open source depend on the Internet.

A monopolistic practice occurs when two sides are offering the same deal and one side gets all the business. But in this case both sides were not offering the same deal. Microsoft offered channel support, Linux a hearty handshake and rhetoric about freedom.

... What Linux needs to succeed is a way to offer more than was offered MSI. The question is, how would you structure a deal?

Well, that's a good question. What besides an OS that works and costs zero dollars does free software offer? OK, it can cost up to half what Windows costs if you get it customized and maintained by a company like Xandros. "Channel Support" is just a code word for exclusion of competition by bribes and threats, the very definition of anti-trust conspiracy. Lately, "Channel Support" has come at a terrible cost to companies like Asus. Retail partners like CompUSA, Circuit City and others who got themselves channel stuffed with Vista. This is what Li Chang, vice president of the Taipei Computer Association, was complaining about and it's worth a DOJ investigation. People don't want Windows, they want computers that work. Retailers and OEMs that don't deliver are going the way of other M$ partners and M$ themselves.

Ordinarily, I don't pick on language and style but the phrase, "how we roll," references to his parents' national origin bring special disgrace on ZDNet and the Wintel press. It's hard to tell if he's being cynical or if M$'s culture has really degenerated so far. This single article earns Dana a place in my Poison Pen Collection.

WikiLeaks http://88.80.13.160 Source

The influence is not stone-toss obvious, but the referenced PDFs do provide some interesting reading. WikiLeaks Title: Documents expose the influence of US lobbies on the EU WorkGroup on Open Source, 2009 http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Documents_expose_the_influence_of_US_lobbies_on_the_EU_WorkGroup_on_Open_Source%2C_2009

I was interested in the V3-pdf https://www.cepis.org/files/cepis/docs/20090506040545_European Software Strategy v3..pdf ideas and what I thought was an obvious (USA NOW typica!) lack of vision/prescience. Yes, it was not a favorable OSS review. A bit simple/single minded for academic EU quality, which does indicates some corporatism-bias (anti-Capitalism) and profit motive surreptitiously insulting OSS.

Anyway, I was surprised that the obvious to me was totally overlooked. Software/product is not the means to innovation, synergy, economic growth....

The ROI/value is enabling folks to have greater means. Technology, software/hardware/services... when enabling people to do far more with far less provides innovation, synergy, economic growth.... Learning is the key enabler for all people/things/time/value.... The ability to share, collaborate and innovate with other folks always has a synergistic effect, and adds the apt/agile evolving economic value.

Anyway, am I right to think that the wealth of a nation/union are the people/citizens learning and sharing?

Can a nation and an economy be secure, stable and strong when we focus on enabling technologies for people and local communities?

What do /. folks think...?

The alphabet, the wheel, agriculture, horse domestication, bio/nanotech, robots, cars, hardware/software are all enablers of human production, performance, cultural evolution... the real economic stuff that create greater wealth for more or less (government/corporatist dependent).

 

Was it really only nine months ago that Fusion-IO launched their IODrive(pdf)? Since then they've gotten VC funding and made strides in new product (pdf).

For those who aren't following along, they make an Flash memory data storage product that looks like a 320 GB drive, but rather than connecting through legacy SATA interface it connects through the much faster PCI Express (PCIe) interface. By using RAID techniques to "stripe" the data across multiple flash chips, an abstraction layer to hide failed memory cells and intelligent logic to provide wear levelling they take fallible flash chips and turn them into reliable static storage that has performance characteristics more familiar in RAM. Their first version pulled in over $10K for a 320GB card.

They weren't the first out the door with this technology, and they weren't the last. Now OCZ has stepped up with a PCIe flash storage device that offers up to 1TB of storage in one PCIe slot and delivers it at a claimed 500GB/s. Now PhotoFast has one that does the same at 1GB/s for under $5k. That's not 1Gb/s. It's really one billion bytes per second.

Combine this with the new Nehalem technology available in platforms like the HP DL370 G6 with NINE PCIe G2 slots. Add free SAN software with HA clustering, unlimited snapshots, unlimited storage and other popular features like openfiler. Mix in a little Infiniband QDR.

Now you can have for under $60k a box that delivers 6TB of storage that does >1 million IOPS and can deliver that at about 96Gbit/s, in 4U. For another $5k you can get a MDS 600 5U to attach to that box that holds 75 of these 1.5TB 3.5" drives. Add 75 of this Drive sled and you've got over 100TB of slower storage at 3Gbps for an upgrade cost of under $20K. Even with 24/7 unlimited systems enterprise level support for five years you're looking at less than $100K. And it scales to infinity.

So here we are, with 6TB of insanely fast storage and 100TB of nearline storage, HA, thin provisioning, iSCSI and remote admin delivered at insane bandwidth. In 9U, for under $100k and burning less than 1000W, with unlimited LTU and unlimited support converged with current network architecture. And the speed and performance of the flash devices is more than doubling every nine months at the same time as the price goes down by more than half.

8Gbps FC San just got here. There isn't even a FCoE standard approved yet and when it is, it's not as fast as this by an order of magnitude.

Is the classic FC SAN dead?

Roger Grimes makes this startling admission of public perception:

Youll often read similar recommendations to dump Microsofts Internet Explorer (I work full-time for Microsoft) and use any other browser instead. To completely protect yourself, theyll advise moving off of Microsoft Windows all together.

He goes on to make some long winded excuses and insult users in a way that's completely torn apart in the comments. His readers sanely point out that Window's endless problems have been well demonstrated. What's interesting about this article is not the same old blame the user and "popularity" excuses, it's that M$ is no longer able to pretend to the general public that "computer experts" still trust Windows. They don't and neither does anyone else any more.

I mostly vote for democratic candidates and when I donate money to candidates I mostly donate to democratic party members. But I never donate to general campaign funds because those funds can be divvied up and used to help jackasses like Joe Lieberman and John Dingell get reelected. Today I would like to highlight a couple more reasons why I do not donate to general funds:

Blanche Lincoln, Senator Democrat from Arkansas:
In these tough economic times when rich people are scraping to get by and Blanche feels their pain. To help them she wants to cut estate taxes for super rich, the top 1%.

North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad is a fucking jackass: First, he opposed a provision to limit tax deductions for high-income earners. Second, he opposed a new cap on crop subsidies to farmers who take in more than $500,000 per year. And, third, he upbraided Obama for not doing more to reduce the budget deficit.

*I would be more likely to donate to green candidate general funds, but greens are not often competitive at the national level due to our undemocratic outdated election laws(electoral college, gerrymandered districts, Simple majority voting).