My mug collection just grew with 2 mugs and a shot glass from Bora Bora.
Thanks Taiwo!
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OpenVMS II
Paul Anderson was kind enough to comment on my post on OpenVMS here.
He raised a couple of points I feel I need to respond to:
Do you not realize that OpenVMS is more reliable, more secure and has a lower cost of ownership than any other operating system?
In what way, Paul?
And compared to what?
When was that TCO study made? Is it still valid today?
Why should this "dolt", as you call him, want to retrain and move to a UNIX solution when customers such as himself are perfectly happy with OpenVMS?
Errrr, because the OS is dead? Shouldn't that be a valid reason for pulling the ripcord and punching out?
As he grays, and hits the retirement wall, who are you going to call?
Is OpenVMS still being taught in schools? Where will you find replacement droids to take his place?
I called him a dolt feeding at the iron rice bowl exactly because of that.
This is the ultimate in hardware/software lock-in! Apart from IBM, I don't see any other manufacturer designing for such a scenario.
Are you kidding me?
OK, lets see go down the list:
- Hardware obsolete? Check.
- Software obsolete? Check.
- Admins/sysops obsolete? Check.
- Data held hostage? Check.
Don’t bring the mainframe argument here. IBM still develops mainframe stuff today.
Meanwhile, remind me, where is Digital Equipment Corporation?
Oh, okay. So you have the brainchild of a now-defunct company purchased by another defunct company, with the resultant effect that the brainchild is now the bastard stepchild, twice-removed, of a current relevant company.
It has been sixteen years or thereabouts that VMS was ported to Alpha. And almost a decade since the death knell started for OpenVMS. The same VMS/OpenVMS which, if memory serves me correctly, has already been given two reprieves at the gallows.
Moreover, all this time, this moron didn't know that there was going to be a day when he couldn't feed at that trough anymore?
If he, and I'm assuming here that he has been at it for a while, so far hadn't drawn up migration plans for moving data from OpenVMS to a more modern OS, then he's an imbecile.
Actually, he isn't.
His superiors are.
For allowing their enterprise to be held prisoner by an outdated OS and the adherents who worship it.
My position here is simple: no matter how powerful and secure an OS is, if there isn't anyone to run it, or if the manufacturer no longer supports it, or if the OS is no longer being taught to n00bs, then it is useless.
Period.
$4.93 billion profit? I sneeze at you!
The gall of Microsoft!
Trying to schneider us by unveiling this sorta weak earnings report.
Revenues of $14.4 billion? Pfui!
Operating income of $6.59 billion? So?
Net income: $4.93 billion? Zzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Net cash flow of $7.29 billion? Booooring!
Returned $7.72 billion to shareholders? Why not?
Look at the FY numbers, real and projected - FY ends June 30, and see if it moves you:
Revenue $56.5-$57.5, operating income from $22.0-$22.5, all in the billions.
So what?
The revenue/income ratio is only 34.34%, OK? You guys were only able to get income of 34 cents on the dollar? That is just weak!
For reference, we will examine the results of that current media darling, AAPL.
For their 2QFY2007, the loops at 1, Infinite loop reported the following:
Sales of $5.26 billion, with net earnings of $770 million. Or a revenue to income ratio of 14.63%. Sweet, eh?
And Microsoft is giddy with their results?
For goodness sakes, Redmond! Shake yourselves!
All Apple has to do is drive quarterly revenue to $33.664 billion in order to get the same $4.93 billion profit you have.
Or have net income of $1.80 billion in order to match your revenue/income ratio of 34.24%.
For this Liddell, Turner, Ballmer, and Bill G. are happy?
Pfft, please!
I guess that analyst prognosticator was right: you guys are barely hanging on.
*All amounts in US dollars.
Amiga
When do we get to say, "Nyet"?
When is enough, you know, enough?
Minding my own business reading the news online, I come across the news that Amiga, Inc, is planning to deliver two systems this year.
Intrigued, I read further, and find out that the systems are will be powered by a PowerPC chip.
PowerPC chip?
Even AAPL jumped off that boat.
That's not all.
Trip this quote from the 'software partner' of Amiga Inc.:
"I have been working on these designs with Amiga for almost 12 months and have been able to create two new designs that will fully support the needs and desires of today's Amiga user, while opening the doors for new users, said Adam Kowalczyk, president of ACK Software Controls, Inc., in a statement.
I had to check the website again to see that someone wasn't yankin' me!
Today's Amiga user?
Are we living in a time warp or some other reality distortion field?
WTF?
Some droid is still tooling around in an Amiga rig in 2K7?
This is taking nostalgia waaaay too far!
Also, there are enough users out there that these guys can create an updated Amiga OS, and make coins selling it to them?
I don't know what is scarier: the fact that there are enough users out there for these yum-yums to create a new Amiga, or that the Amiga thinks there are 'new users' out there!
Technorati tags: John Obeto, AbsoluteVista.com
Longhorn Server Beta 3 released
While I'm pleased at this development, I can't help but think the release date might slip.
This is a a public beta so all can enjoy.
Downloading as we speak.
Original link from Windows-Now.com
Google brand surpasses Microsoft
Errr, so did AOL.
Before the merger with TW.
Cue song from DC La Rue, Cathedrals, "Where are they now"?
Inquiring minds might want to know!
Code Project Vista Gadgets Winners
Nick White has just posted about some of the winners of the Code Project Windows Vista gadgets competition.
I especially like the Soapbox Video gadget and the runner-up Virtual Earth slideshow gadget.
In praise of Intel's PR department
If there ever was an award to be given for the best PR in this (the IT) business, it has got to be given to TASS the crew at Intel's PR department.
For several days, even weeks, now, Intel has been on a PR offensive.
A very stealthy PR offensive!
The beauty of this offensive is that the cattle media being led around by their virtual nose-rings have no clue that they are being used in such a subdulous manner.
And a pretty effective PR offensive if you tabulate the inordinate amount of ink devoted not just to the anointing of Penryn, but also to the travails of AMD.
In fact, it is to the latter that this praise-post is directed.
What prompted it?
Reading somewhere in the blogosphere about the impending demise of AMD.
Totally reminiscent of absurd articles in that late, unlamented CCCP/CPSU party organ, Pravda, this kind of crazy-talk disguised as ‘research’ is just the sort of crap one used to hear about in that fishwrap.
This time though, the dumbkopf who wrote the ‘research paper’ has outed himself as an apparatchik of the Zampolit in that PR department.
Is it just me, or isn’t this a total rehash of the same rumors a few years ago, before the release of the Opteron? (And we know what happened subsequently!)
Which was also a total rehash of the same rumors a decade before that during the epic math coprocessor wars? (And we also know what happened subsequently!)
Methinks history is about to repeat itself here, and there is foreboding in Santa Clara.
However, in closing, I must press upon AMD the need to come out firing on all barrels not just at the intro of Barcelona, but to direct fusillade upon fusillade of cogent, coherent information on the public in order to correct this FUD blogorhea.
© 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com®
Am I the Luckiest man Alive?
In the past year or two, I have
- Been selected to share $millions looted by dead African dictators,
- Been selected to share $millions from corrupt Russian oil companies looted by imprisoned oligarchs,
- Been selected by a dying Sheikh to receive his $millions upon his death from a wasting disease,
- Been selected by Tatiana and several other East Bloc 'beauties' as the object of their desires,
- Won the National Lottery in Spain,
- Won the National Lottery in the UK, and
- Been selected as one of the winners of the Olympic Games $1 Ticket Promotion.
Yep, just li'l old me.
All without entering into any contest!
However, as lazy as I am, I have never gotten around to claiming my winnings/awards, or striking up online relationships with the East Block shiksas.
Today though, I received another award, one that I am seriously considering:
THE BMW AUTOMOBILE COMPANY.
22 Garden Close, Stamford,
Lincs, PE9 2YP, London
United Kingdom.The Board of Directors, members of staff and the International
Awareness Promotion Department of the BMW Automobile Company, wishes to congratulate you on your success as one of our TEN(10) STAR PRIZE WINNER in this year's BMW Automobile International Awareness Promotion (IAP) held on Saturday 21IST April, 2007,in London.This makes you the proud owner of a brand new BMW 5 Series, M Sport Saloon car and a cash prize of £850,000.00 GBP (Eight Hundred and Fifty Thousand Great British pounds).
The selection process was carried out through random selection in our Computerized Email Selection System (C.E.S.S.) from a database of over a million email addresses from the world wide web.To begin the processing of your prize you are to contact our BMW Claims Manager through the contact details as stated below:
Mr. Steve George,
BMW Claims Manager.
E-mail: bmwclaimsoffice@comcast.net
Phone: +44 701 112 8491
Contact him, with your ticket number: 5647600545188, Serial number: BMWP/556543450906 and Reference Number
BMW:2551256003/23. You are also advised to provide him with the under listed information along with your reply:Claims Requirements:
1. Names in full: -----------------------------------
2. Address: -----------------------------------------
3. Sex: ---------------------------------------------
4. Age: ---------------------------------------------
5. Occupation: --------------------------------------
6. Phone: -------------------------------------------
7. Country of Residence: ----------------------------Winners are advised to keep their winning details/information from the public to avoid fraudulent claim (IMPORTANT) pending the transfer/claim by Winner.
Yours faithfully,
MRS IDEANER BLATTS.
Online coordinator for Bmw Automobile Company.
Can you believe the balls of these fu*kers?
In particular, appreciate the nanotube-reinforced heavy-metal gonads on these fraudsters when they state that "Winners are advised to keep their winning details/information from the
public to avoid fraudulent claim (IMPORTANT) pending the
transfer/claim by Winner"!!!
Sadly, a sucker will fall for this!
Photo experience in Live Spaces improves
From the Microsoft Photography blog.
Apple plugs 25 (more) vulns in OS X
Isn't this like the 5th patchfest in the last 4 months?
Secure and reliable my a$$!
Technorati tags: SmallBizVista.com, Windows Vista
MIX07 buzzcasts already available
10 pre-event buzzcasts (love that word, no mention of the stuff from 1 Infinite Loop) for MIX07 are already available on Channel 9.
Going through them makes me want to go there even more!
Penn selects Windows Live @ Edu
What a great choice!
In my SmallBizVista.com Editorial here, I stated that Windows Live Hotmail was the best web mail service out there.
The powers that be at The University of Pennsylvania think so too.
The Ivy League school today selected Windows Live @ Edu as the messaging platform for students at the SAS and Wharton.
Nice move.
Original link from Omar Shahine.
Turn down the noise!
I hate to be a conspiracy theorist, but....
Is there a correlation between the forthcoming introduction of AMD's Barcelona and the current surfeit of information from Intel about the MCM dual-dual-core Pentium Core 2 Extreme and future CPUs and technologies?
Do they sense a coming correction in the quad-core space?
I do.
And I think they do as well.
As a result, they are - correctly, IMO - doing what any marketing company faced with an innovative competitor does: shift the marketing gears into damage-control overdrive.
(Their new favorite pal, AAPL does it all the time. So much so that the cattle there have branded Stevie as The Returned!)
I cannot read industry news or blog without hearing about a new ‘revelation’ from Santa Clara. I cannot open any industry fishwrap or glossy without tripping over a new 'scoop' on Penryn.
Homie, please!
OK?
The fear is palpable, and cracks are starting to show.
Tone down this unprecedented (dis)information campaign.
Turn off the noise!
School Lockdown in Small Town America
I live in rural, OK, semi-rural, America where you can leave the front door unlocked.
Supposedly!
I don't!
Ever!
Life is somewhat idyllic, I only have to commute to LA as needed, and the air is always fresh and nice.
Until today.
Getting out of a meeting, I see a missed call from my older son's school.
Thinking that he has schneidered them into keeping him awake so I will have to pick him up at noon - ending my business day, I call the school back.
I'm out of town, I start to say, but I am interrupted by the following words:
"We are on lockdown," I am told.
Are you fu*kin' kiddin' me?
In this 2-horse town?
After calming down, I ask if he can be picked up. I am told we can, but there are three police cruisers at the school, of which one is from the California Highway Patrol.
Furthermore, the threat is not against his school specifically, but a general one for the two adjourning counties.
To say I am stunned is like a freakin' understatement.
The news channels detail that a suicidal meth-head loser with an AK47 made threats to his padre in church, and on his MySpace page, and that is what has the community rattled.
Just WTF is going on in America today?
Trying out Community Server
I've been blogging using Blogger externally for the past few.
Which is a great departure from our internal use of MOSS 2007, and Microsoft technologies.
I wanted to use an ASP.NET program, and looking to evaluate Community Server and DotNetNuke.
Robert McLaws of Windows-Now.com - the same brain behind the old Longhorn Blogs - recommended Community Server.
I have been trying to vet CS with webserf over the past few weeks, and I tell you, the older one gets, the harder it takes to learn sh*t.
I'm still on it, but I need a script to transfer my blog posts from Blogger, using their service - not FTP - to CS
Harghhhhhhh!!!
Office 2007 Accounting import wizard
Microsoft has released an upgrade to Office Accounting 2007 that allows for import of Quickbooks transactions into Office Accounting.
Makes you wonder why it wasn't in the shipping package in the first place!
I mean, if you want to take market share from an entrenched leader, it makes sense to include migration tools, doesn't it?
Technorati tags: John Obeto, AbsoluteVista.com, SmallBizVista.com, The Interlocutor, Logikworx, Office 2007 Accounting
Has Microsoft conceded?
In the past year or so, every time Microsoft has gone against GOOG, it has lost.
- In public perception of nimbleness and innovation? Lost!
For example, though Windows Live Hotmail remains the most well thought out web mail client out there, as well as the most popular, Microsoft has virtually ceded the crown of innovation to Gmail due to a combination of the following:
- A staleness of the Hotmail UI. Until recently, there hadn't been any refresh of the basic UI in Hotmail.
- Restricting Hotmail usefulness. To promote MSN Premium, IMO, Microsoft started restricting the usefulness of Hotmail, denying users features such as POP access, aging the emails, limiting mailbox sizes, etc.
- Branding stupidity. HoTMaiL, the most important brand in email services, was changed to Live Mail. Begging the question, why? Even now, Microsoft should have done the synergistic thing by branding the new, actually in beta, Windows Live Mail Desktop as the Hotmail Desktop Client, building on the virtual ubiquity of the Hotmail brand. Are they?
- Marketing. When was the last time you saw an ads for any of the Windows Live properties? Yet the Windows Live team continues to turn out some of the most incredibly innovative stuff out there.
- Lack of evangelism. Adjunct to, and supplementing marketing should be broader evangelism of Microsoft's products. Am I advocating the creation of a fanboi cadre, yes, I am.
Even now, in product nomenclature and advertising, Microsoft seems to have fallen into the IBM-style rut of middle-aged companies, content to reel off specs and WIIFMs instead of aspirational marketing.
Apart from Vista marketing, including the amazing Vanishing Point game, and the initial Zune ads, the perception of Microsoft seems to be that of a follower, rather than innovator.
- In contractual agreements with top-tier media companies? Lost!!
All around us and in especially recently, it has been either Yahoo! or Google winning contractual agreements with companies while Microsoft loses out. Constantly!
- In purchases of companies with a business plan? Lost!!! And losing!!!
Looking at purchases of companies recently, I don't see a lot of movement when companies are purchased, especially in the not-so-nascent yet extremely important 'search' space.
Which leads me to ask:
Just WTF is going on with the M&A team at Microsoft?
Can't be lack of cash, can it?
I sincerely hope that this is not a case of the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome.
Now Google gets to purchase DoubleClick.
For goodness sakes, this would have been a very good time to buttonhole Google. and expose it as the one-trick pony it is.
Prior to now, Google was essentially limited to serving ads based on properties across Google's networks. Now it can broaden that base both with advertisers and eyeballs.
Where is Microsoft in all this?
MIA
While I can't profess to know what transpires in the M&A and strategy groups in Redmond, I believe a fire needs to be lit under them in order to re-energize MSFT, the company and the stock.
Sometimes, a potentially adverse decision/purchase has to be made in order to thwart the ambitions of your foe.
Come on, Microsoft! © 2007, John Obeto II for SmallBizVista.com®
Technorati tags:
John Obeto, AbsoluteVista.com, SmallBizVista.com, Logikworx, The Interlocutor, Microsoft Dynamics
Microsoft further enables Enterprise customers
In a very welcome move today, Microsoft is further easing the migration concerns of enterprise customers by throwing them a major league bone by giving them the right to install Vista on diskless PCs, and the availability of the Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktop.
Using Vista Enterprise edition in conjunction with the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack would allow customers to secure PCs, centralize applications, and increase productivity while decreasing deployment costs
While available only to Software Assurance customers using Windows Vista Enterprise, these two new ways broaden the customer's ability to license and deploy the operating system.
- The license right to use Windows Vista on diskless PCs, which is simply a PC that runs Windows but does not store Windows or data locally because it does not have a hard drive
- The availability of a subscription license called Windows Vista Enterprise Centralized Desktops (VECD) which allows customers to use Windows in virtual machines centralized on server hardware. VECD enables customers to deploy and run Windows Vista Enterprise in virtual machines on server hardware. It provides a Windows experience that is centrally executed in the datacenter and delivered out to either PCs or thin clients.
Using VECD with PCs provides a flexible combination of local and remote computing including mobility and off-line usage. Using VECD with thin clients lets customers who are always connected use minimum footprint devices.Both options provide a complete Windows experience for end users connected to the corporate network, typically delivered over Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) – a multi-channel protocol that allows a user to connect to a computer running Microsoft Terminal Services. It also allows IT administrators to centrally manage, provision and store Windows images. Of the two options, we think using VECD with PCs is often a better choice for most customers because it still allows local and offline use of productivity applications, such as Microsoft Office, while providing centralization for line of business applications.
The official release is here.
Apple TV?
Mike Torres just loves Apple TV.
From his blog:
The interface looks like a weak version of Media Center and the video quality was so poor I couldn't even make out Capt. Jack Sparrow's grin in Pirates from less than a few feet away from the TV.
[...]
If you want to know what the picture quality is like, do a couple Tequila shots, spin around a few times, bang your head against the floor, and then watch broadcast TV on an old 19" JVC. Don't skip a step.
More here.
Makes you wonder what Mossberg and the other media ho's were thinking about when they wrote their puff pieces.
Actually I know what they need done: emergency recto-cranial de-insertion surgery in order to facilitate blood flow to their addled brains!
Original link from Ed Bott's Windows Expertise.
Technorati tags: John Obeto, AbsoluteVista.com, SmallBizVista.com, The Interlocutor, Logikworx, Windows Vista, Windows Media Center