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.

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.

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.

It's been such a long time...

Now, I am finally divorced. What a relief!

I still have four kids, a house, a cat and three ducks to keep me busy but at last... at long last... I'm free. :-)

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?

Toshiba will show a 0.5T SSD in a 2.5" form factor at CES according to CNET. The drive is expected to cost $1,652 in "sample quantities". The drives are reported to perform 240MBps max sequential read and 200MBps max sequential write using MLC flash memory. IOPS information is not yet available.

It may be time to recant my bias toward SLC in relation to MLC, at least in terms of laptop drives. The preference IRT database cache and server drives will have to wait until full benchmarks are available. They seem to have sufficiently exploited the benefits of parallel ICs to defeat the performance advantage of the underlying technologies.

The interface is not specified in the article but it's probably SATA 2.0. The SAS version is probably 3-5 years out, as is usual.

SO just found this game. It's been what, three days, and already there's a shoe throwing Flash game. The responsiveness of modern culture continues to amaze.

As of now the top countries shoeing the US president are The United States, France, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, United Kingdom, Germany and Pakistan.

Re:Bullshit (Score:2)
by girlintraining (1395911) Foe of a Friend on Wednesday December 17, @05:23PM (#26153681)

>If you go see the shuttle up close and your first thought is that it has a bad paint job, maybe you should just stick to playing with dolls.

Or maybe you should be less of a douchebag. The fact that something is an engineering marvel doesn't mean much to some people, but that doesn't mean that lessens the impact it has for them. Who hasn't looked up at a bird in the sky and wanted to journey? Who hasn't seen the stars and wished upon them? When I look at the shuttle, I don't see an engineering marvel. I see the realization of over twenty thousand years of human beings dreaming of having their own wings and flying through the heavens. And you know what -- I think I'm allowed to say it does have a bad paint job, and I could care less about the mechanical guts of it. That's not why it's beautiful.

Tanks, bombers, subs, and all that jazz you like--You can love them if you want, call them awesome. They're not special to me, they're just made so some people can kill other people. I'll stick with my dolls, and if you don't mind terribly, I'll be doing it in that badly painted bird over there that was built with hopes and dreams, instead of fears and insecurities.
--
All difficult things have their origin in that which is easy, and great things in that which is small. ~ Lao Tzu

Reading the recent piece by Alex St. John about PC gaming vs. consoles I just had way more to say than I could fit in replies to the subject so I blogged about it instead.

Yeah, I understand some people like gaming with headphones, a mouse and keyboard in their basement, but I prefer the couch, a big set of home theatre speakers, a wide screen HD TV and a controller in my hand with a headset on and a bluetooth keyboard next to me when necessary. I've been building PCs since I was 15 and I wouldn't have imagined it then, but console gaming is now at the point where its really not worth the bother to me to constantly keep up with my PCs capacity to play the newest titles.

Anyway, read more about my thoughts on my blog entry if you like.

What, in all my years of hacking, is my favorite application of all? What is the one program I would like to have with me on a desert island? Brace yourself...

The catch is it has to be a single file and no dependencies other than what the OS of its day provided by default. I am sick of OSes today shipping with hundreds of thousands of files, on install DVDs. I am looking for the most useful yet tiniest ever. Small is indeed beautiful (and this program's chief architect should be President).

My choice: Microsoft Word for DOS. Specifically, version 5.0a, 622,428 bytes. [Version 5.5, patched for Y2K, is available from MS for free].

Some of the reasons I love Word.exe? Ran native on OS/2, had a shallow mouse-and-keyboard accessible menu tree (that negated the need for obscure WP-like macros or keyboard templates, although it had one of the best keytemps ever), integrated support for a powerful yet readable macro language, RTF support, embeddable images, CR or CR-LF text file support, changeable screen resolutions (including a half readable graphics mode), first DOS application with native mouse support. And practical things like a hefty 8MB file size limit, auto-created backup files, auto-generated "DOC" file extension, automatic on-screen pagination and absolute 100.0% stability. Pity that XP broke the clipboard access...

At one point I worked at a 500 person engineering firm that was still running Word.exe right into the Windows 98 era. I've written applications that depended on automated calls to Word.exe. Low tech, high age friends of mine use Word.exe to write, manage contact lists and convert documents -- for almost 20 years now [Word timeline]. They bought a new printer 6 or 7 years ago and the dealer installed Windows to install the printer drivers. On their next trip to British Columbia, on route to Hawaii, I was called upon to put it back to "just DOS + Word" for them. Word.exe keeps on ticking.

If we allow more than a single file but still limit things to what shipped with the core application, then Word.exe gets even better because of: postscript support (30KB), superb help file (105KB), the most complete spell check database at that time -- that allowed user and global add-on dictionaries (180KB), full thesaurus (320KB), excellent tutorial system for mouse and keyboard (900KB)]. Heck, if you excluded the thesaurus & tutorials you could be fit it all on a single bootable 3.5" floppy.

Word.exe. I don't leave home without it.

So Randy Moss is now a Patriot.

Corey Dillon managed to work within the program for a couple of years (and once he acted up, we cut him).

Rodney Harrison didn't have the best reputation for the Chargers (though that may have been more because of his prodigious fine total...).

Arguably, TO would be a better project for the Patriots; Moss has a history of, well, laziness, which doesn't necessarily fit in with the Patriots system. Still, I think that his willingness to renegotiate the contract underscores a desire to get a ring, and if he reverts to prior form, the core leadership in the locker room (Brady, the elite-level QB that Moss has never really had (save for maybe Cunningham in Minnesota way back when?), Bruschi, Vrabel, etc.) may need only to flash some Super Bowl rings and say "you can raise hell when you have even two rings."

If worse comes to worst, he can be cut rather easily, and the Patriots have really only burned a fourth round pick. On the other hand, the tandem of Stallworth and Moss has got to be giving secondaries throughout the AFC nightmares....

EDIT to add the fringe of soccer that was advertised: Villa win 2-0 away to Man City. Providing more evidence that Martin O'Neill's vision is being realized, James Maloney and John Carew (both January window acquisitions) were Villa's scorers, while Petrov and Ashley Young (the other main acquisitions this season) performed very well. Villa have won 3 straight road games in the league for the first time since 1998.

I expect Villa to be competing in the UEFA Cup for 2008-09, with a possible Champions League appearance in 2010-11.

Some people claim that religion is valuable, having been the constant companion of the human race since its beginning.

Should we likewise value lice?

Some religions require adherents to wear funny hats. Yamulka's, turbans, burkhas, scarf-thingies, or whatever.

I don't believe in any supernatural mumbo-jumbo nor follow any "faith" but they say that atheism is a "religion". Why don't atheists wear funny hats?

Oh, and while I'm at it... I want to get some medication for my condition. I don't have any illness or disease that I'm aware of, so they say I'm "healthy".

If atheism is a religion, then "healthy" must be a disease. What would be the proper medicine to cure my health?

I want to convey it with a single word that I'm a rational person who values the understanding of objective reality rather than superstitious nonsense. Ideally, it would fit in the slot normally reserved for "religion" on surveys, military dog-tags and such.

"Atheism" is too reactive. As Richard Dawkins points out, practically everyone is an "a-Thor-ist" or an "a-FlyingSpaghettiMonster-ist". One shouldn't have to specify every possible type of nonsense which one does not believe. Atheism has such a bad public image too. It's been associated with Communism, Stalin, Hitler, etc. I'd rather have a word which is so obviously sensible that vilifying it would be next to impossible.

"Skepticism" is closer, but similarly reactive and negative. The skeptics of ancient Greece were not socially acceptable.

"Naturalism" (as opposed to supernaturalism) might have worked if there weren't already so many different meanings for the word. In many languages other than English, a literal translation would mean the same as "nudism". Not very respectable.

"Realism", "rationalism", and "materialism" also suffer from semantic overload, mostly from the liberal arts camp.

I'm thinking that the Greek and the Latin may already have run out of good root words for us to re-use for this purpose. What do other languages have in their stock to describe someone who eschews nonsense and laughs at superstition?