April 4th, 2008
Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP
Fall back! Fall back!
Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “Extended Availability of Windows XP Home for ULCPCs” is more evidence that the Windows Vista fiasco is still growing.
Microsoft is scrambling to stay relevant in a world where they are no longer the only game in town. Can’t let Linux become the default OS for low-cost systems, can we?
Why doesn’t software get cheaper?
My 1978 Apple II cost over $3,000 in today’s dollars - with no disk or display - and a primitive command line OS. Today a vastly more powerful machine like the Eee is less than $400 - with a display and an incredibly capacious 4 GB flash drive. Other machines coming soon will be much cheaper. $200 is the magic number for broad consumer acceptance.
Microsoft has lived in a monopoly pricing bubble, selling Windows to OEMs for $50 a copy, while hardware - driven by Moore’s Law - has plummeted in price. That couldn’t last forever. It’s crunch time for Redmond.
Redmond’s nightmare now in the light of day
Microsoft’s announcement created a new market segment - the Ultra Low Cost PC - that it hopes will protect its Vista margins from the low-end Linux attack. Like that could work.
Today’s mid-range Vista PC is tomorrow’s ULCPC. The reasons vendors and customers balk at Microsoft’s $50 Vista tax today won’t change. Consumers will pay $50 on a $600 machine. But $50 on a $200 machine? No way.
People are realizing that for much of what they do - web surfing, email, online video - can be handled by much smaller and cheaper systems. As Linux continue to refine the GUI and simplify its distros, the Windows advantage continues to fade.
The Storage Bits take
First time users who learn Linux will have no reason to ever pay for Windows. Just as I deciphered the Apple II’s CLI 30 years ago, today’s eager, but poor, first timers will figure Linux out.
Microsoft’s Vista is a slow-motion disaster. Bloated and inflexible, expensive and late, Vista is a continuing drag on Microsoft’s business flexibility.
But this isn’t all Jim Allchin’s fault. If Steve Ballmer were as smart as he thinks he is he’d have seen the ULCPC segment emerging and positioned to company to dominate it. Instead they’re playing catchup with a 7 year old product.
Steve, resign. If you can’t do that, at least stop obsessing over Google. Focus Microsoft on building great software. That is a game you can win.
Comments welcome, of course. BTW, there’s an opening at Microsoft for an ULCPC Business Development Manager. Just make sure you aren’t measured on margins. That could be brutal.
April 2nd, 2008
Who uses MS Live Search - on purpose?
No one.
Net Applications monthly newsletter posed an interesting question: who uses MS Live Search?
Nobody I know.
One of their engineers theorized
. . . it’s mostly people that are searching for files on their own hard drive who accidentally click the ’search the net’ button.
Hm-m, how could you tell?
If that theory is correct almost all Live Search sessions would come from Windows systems running IE.
Sure enough, they found that an overwhelming 99.82% of all Live Search sessions are Windows machines running IE.
A 90% market share is good for something
It kept the Live Search market at a pathetic 2.4% last month - instead of a humiliating 0%.
IE’s market share is 75%
If Firefox - 18% market share - users were just as likely to use Live Search as any other search engine, you’d expect to see 18% of Live Searches on that browser. Or 1/10th the chance is a 1.8% share.
But the distant #2 OS on Windows Live Search? Mac OS with a 0.17% share. All hail Microsoft’s loyal Mac business unit!
The Storage Bits take
Search is THE problem as storage capacities grow. Microsoft’s weak showing means they aren’t going to beat Google at the current game. MS needs to put it’s substantial muscle finding the Next Big Thing in search.
It also suggests that taking over Yahoo won’t help either - they haven’t had any better luck against Google. Put 2 losers together and you just have a bigger loser.
Comments welcome, of course.
March 31st, 2008
Microsoft’s storage geeks speak
What do Microsoft storage heavies say when the suits let them off leash? Microsoft engineers at the ubergeek Usenix FAST 08 conference last month talked about Microsoft’s storage intentions to a crowd of PhDs - and a stray storage blogger.
Soft sell
Understand that Microsoft was recruiting. So was Google, IBM, NetApp, Seagate, Sun, HP, Yahoo and niche companies like Cleversafe and Marvell. That is real competition.
Interesting work is the big motivator for these guys, not money or security. Selling them isn’t easy. Avoiding boredom is key. Touch lightly on many topics so listeners hear something that interests them.
The people
Speakers were from Microsoft Research and product development. In off-line conversations the ’softies impressed. Despite all the problems with Vista and a buggy NTFS, they have some very smart folks who are passionate about building great storage.
For example, one Microsoft researcher was co-author of the conference’s Best Paper: Portably Solving File TOCTTOU Races with Hardness Amplification. Sounds smart. Maybe even spammy.
The vision
The big picture is like everyone else’s: more scalable, more reliable and easier to manage storage. Yawn.
The difference is in the details.
Data storage
They like storage clusters - but only if customers don’t have to become cluster admins. Not huge clusters - 2 nodes would be a big win for the SMB space.
But later they mention building building large-scale distributed storage solutions. What?
The email model of storage
Why can’t storage access be like email? You access your email on a notebook and on the office desktop. Maybe even your iPhone Windows CE smartphone.
Why isn’t a file on your office desktop also available on your home notebook?
That raises some interesting technical problems - catnip for PhD’s - like synchronization strategies. Caching for offline access. Remote file system protocols.
If you think about it, it means building a large-scale distributed storage solution. Like EMC’s unannounced but hardly secret Hulk/Maui project.
In a distributed storage system, what does “centralized” mean?
Data management
Within 3-5 years companies will have to save every electronic file and communication. Judges are getting hip to the fact that storage is cheap - much cheaper than the paper records companies have kept for decades.
But with the growth of data volume, how will companies manage them? One idea they mentioned: content-aware storage.
For example, the storage sees a SSN or other marker of confidentiality. It then consults the confidential data policy, and takes the measures, such as encryption and access logging, that you’ve already determined.
The Storage Bits take
Meeting the storage ’softies gave me hope that perhaps, someday, Microsoft products will give as much attention to protecting user data as the company does to protecting market share. They have the people for the job.
Like IBM, which has perhaps the most brilliant storage researchers in the industry, Microsoft has a hard time translating research breakthroughs into industry-leading products. The suits vs. the geeks problem.
The suits look at market share and say “Life is good!” The geeks look at the technology and say “Life could be better!” I’m with the geeks.
Comments welcome, of course.
March 25th, 2008
Massive memory servers
How massive? How about 10x standard server memory capacity?
There is a boom in large memory server products - anywhere from a quarter terabyte to 2 terabytes. Is this the ultimate solution to server performance problems?
Some products
Violin Memory is offering a 500 GB DRAM eSATA “memory appliance”. Metaram’s 16 GB DIMMs build a 16 core server with 256 GB of RAM for under $50k.
The unrelenting hype over flash drives hasn’t overcome their huge cost disadvantage and mediocre performance on notebook systems. But Salt Lake City startup, Fusion-io, is delivering a 640 GB PCI-e flash card promising really hot performance for servers.
Then there are the network products. Gear6 has a new, low-end 125,000 IOPS NAS cache box. Texas Memory Systems has a 2 TB flash solid state disk for SAN attach.
What’s going on?
Several trends are powering the new products.
- Memory - both flash and DRAM - is really cheap. The price drop makes it economically feasible to increase memory capacity to 16 to 64 GB at the same ratios we had several years ago.
- Disk drives are getting bigger, not faster. Over-provisioning for performance is costing ever more in power, floor space and unused capacity.
- Most importantly, CPU performance - clock rates, instructions per clock cycle, multi-cores - are demanding much more I/O capacity to keep them fed.
There’s a rule of thumb that each CPU instruction per second requires one byte of memory. With 4 instructions issued per clock cycle and a quad-core 2 GHz CPU, a Xeon-based server could use 16 GB of RAM. But 256 GB?
Will they sell?
The server products are aimed at applications where performance, not price, is key. Databases, media webservers and realtime data ingest are all good targets.
For DRAM-based products the quality of the battery backup is critical. Flash has performance issues that are costly to fix, but you can trust that your data will be there when you need it.
The Storage Bits take
There is definitely a market for massive memory servers. The only question is how many vendors will that market support? At least one - but how many more?
Network-based caches, like the Gear6 NAS box and the TMS block-based SSD, have the advantage of spreading their cost across more servers. Ultimately, the people with big performance requirements will usually have large infrastructures, so the network-based products should have the market size edge.
Comments welcome, of course. How would you use a 256 GB server? Disclosure: I’ve done some work in the past for Gear6.
March 23rd, 2008
Hooray! Blu-ray BD+ hacked!
The good folks at SlySoft announced last week that they’d broken the BD+ copy protection scheme:
With today’s release of version 6.4.0.0 of AnyDVD HD it is now also possible to make backup security copies of Blu-ray discs protected with BD+.
Cool.
Is unbreakable consumer copy protection possible?
It sure doesn’t look like it. After all, consumers have access to:
- The protected data
- The device that can read the protected data
- The unprotected data - via HDMI
Serious data protection schemes seek to keep at least 1 and preferably 2 of these out of the hands of possible code breakers. German codes during WWII relied on a machine to encode and decode the data. It wasn’t until the British got their hands on one of them - thanks to the Polish underground - that they were able to start unraveling the codes.
Deliver all 3 and it is hard to see how a workable, mass-production system can possibly avoid penetration. But as long as Hollywood wants to control access, inventors will come forward claiming they’ve “solved” the problem.
The Storage Bits take
Strong copy protection will never stop determined criminals from large-scale counterfeiting. What it does do is discourage people who buy legitimate disks from using the content the way they want - whether watching it on their iPhone or ripping it to a flash drive to take on a trip.
Those of us with young children know how tough they can be on digital media - so it sure is nice to give the kid a backup copy rather than the original. All these cases fall under the doctrine of “fair use” - a doctrine Hollywood has sought to eliminate.
Onerous copy protection hurts Hollywood more than it helps, because it makes other, unprotected, digital media products more attractive: easier to watch; easier to share; and easier to create new content with. The democratization of digital media raises the bar for Hollywood productions.
Which benefits all of us who enjoy being entertained or enlightened. SlySoft’s product will make Blu-ray more attractive for consumers, not less. Ultimately, that is a good thing for Hollywood too.
Comments welcome, of course.
March 18th, 2008
Notebook SSDs disappoint
An unsourced Engadget report says
. . . flash-based laptops are being returned at a rate of 10 to 20 percent for technical failure, compared to the 1 to 2 percent of regular laptop returns due to HDD issues. . . . Other consumers are sending ‘em back just due to lackluster performance — particular applications like streaming video and, strangely, Microsoft Outlook . . . .
Low-end suckage?
The high rate of failure is surprising, since millions of flash chips get wave-soldered on PCBs every day. Likely problem: the flash translation layer chip isn’t fully compatible with notoriously finicky disk drivers.
The lackluster performance problem is well known to regular Storage Bits readers - search on Solid State Disk if you aren’t. I’m still working on unraveling the issues in detail, but the basic problem is that flash was never intended for frequent small random writes.
Can the low-end flash drive be saved?
High-end flash drives - the kind that cost $10,000 a copy - throw money at the problem. DRAM buffers, fancy pre-erase algorithms, multiple data paths and smaller block sizes all play a role.
But for your cheapie $1,000 64 GB flash drive, fuhgeddaboutit. Those drool-worthy performance specs are all large-block transfers on a virgin drive - not a crowded, fragmented drive. Vendors aren’t lying. You’ll just never see those numbers after a couple of weeks.
Your PC OS throws small random writes around like confetti. Open a file and get 2 writes: update the file metadata and the journal. Since the flash controller can only handle so much I/O even your nominally fast random reads get slow-w-w.
The Storage Bits take
High-end flash drives seem likely to improve mid-range and high-end storage arrays, where money is not much of an issue.
But consumers face a rocky road. Even at 10x-20x the GB cost, consumer flash drives just aren’t delivering the goods. Without high volumes they probably never will. Unless a deep-pocketed company steps up with aggressive forward pricing, those volumes won’t materialize.
Net-net: don’t hold your breathe waiting for high-performance, affordable notebook flash drives. They may never arrive.
Comments welcome, as always. Looks like the hard drive industry is gutting yet another potential competitor.
March 16th, 2008
P4P: faster, smarter P2P
The P4P working group demo’d higher P2P download speeds with 1/6th the inter-metro hops that soak up expensive, long-distance network bandwidth. P4P is designed to enable better ISP and P2P coexistence with a win/win solution: better performance for users and less network overhead for the ISP.
P4P speeds up P2P downloads by localizing network traffic. Standard P2P traffic gets spread all over the globe, so a single packet may go through a half-dozen costly high-end routers and thousands of miles of scarce ocean-floor fiber on its way to your PC. Metro-area routing is both cheaper for ISPs and faster for the users.
[graphic courtesy of the P4PWG]
Traditional P2P
Today’s P2P is network oblivious: peers are selected without regard to network topology. One stream may be coming from Flagstaff while the next is coming from Cape Town.
pTracker and iTracker
P4P is an open standard for delivering network awareness to P2P networks. One way it can work - and there is more than one, but the tech papers aren’t available yet on the web - is to add a peer-tracker (pTracker) and an Internet-tracker (iTracker).
The peer queries the pTracker for nearby peers. If the pTracker knows where the right bytes are in the local metro area, it returns that info to the peer. But if the inventory isn’t locally available, the pTracker could then go to the iTracker for peering suggestions that take into account network topology and costs.
The pTracker then selects a set of active peers and returns that list to the peer that initiated the request.
The pTracker is run by the P2P system - say BitTorrent or Pando - while the iTracker can be run by trusted 3rd parties, P2P networks or ISPs.
The Storage Bits take
As the volume of video content rises, the demand for P2P will only grow. With P4P it appears a substantial portion of the ISP community will make its peace with P2P content distribution. This is a Very Good Thing.
Which leaves Comcast - who isn’t a P4PWG member - facing their original problem: they under-provision their network in order to maximize profit. As long as customers are passive receptacles that works, but once they start distributing content through P2P Comcast has a problem.
Comcast wants to make their problem your problem. Rather than saying they can’t compete with DSL or fixing the problem through protocol or equipment upgrades, they’ve been fighting the common-carrier law.
That’s just wrong. Common carrier status for telecom is over 160 years old. It has stood the test of time for very good reasons. Comcast needs to get with the program: either get competitive with the telcos or get out.
Comments welcome, of course.
March 12th, 2008
Big storage is watching you
Kudos to Larry Dignan for an informative post on the system that caught NY governor Eliot Spitzer canoodling with a prostitute. Modern information technology enables 24 hour surveillance of every citizen. Should we care?
Of course not. Every citizen is a potential terrorist. You want to stop terrorists, don’t you?
If you have nothing to hide . . .
Cell phone Call Detail Records (CDR) track location through the cell location. GPS-enabled phones add even more detail.
GPS-enabled cars support remote speed monitoring. No need for photo radar - you’ll get a ticket by mail. The correlation of your phone GPS and car GPS will place you at the scene. The state will sell the information to insurance companies. Those revenues plus fines will pay for the surveillance.
All your phone calls can easily be - and quite possibly are - being monitored right now by NSA computers. And your emails. Bank accounts. Credit cards. ATM withdrawals. Online payments and purchases.
Just like Eliot Spitzer.
A database tracks the source and destination address of every packet you send or receive. VoIP calls can be monitored too.
EZpass electronic toll collection records? Of course - they’ve already been used in divorces to prove spousal culpability.
Personal responsibility is a good thing
So take some. Don’t do anything illegal, suspicious, embarrassing or that someone might not like and you’ll be fine.
Milwaukee mayoral candidate Marvin Pratt’s bill-paying habits were revealed by a utility company employee. He lost the race. The employee lost their job. But is that fair? After all, Mr. Pratt was the one who wasn’t paying his bills.
That isn’t the only creative use of utility company billing records:
A landlord snooped on tenants to find out information about their finances. A woman repeatedly accessed her ex-boyfriend’s account after a difficult breakup. Another obtained her child’s father’s address so she could serve him court papers.
Sounds reasonable to me.
Domestic surveillance is a time-hallowed practice in Washington DC. The longtime director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, curried
. . . favor with Presidents by using agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to gather political information. The committee staffs report shows that Hoover willingly complied with improper requests from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He gratuitously offered political intelligence to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, but both seemed unimpressed.
In all these services, offered or actually performed, there was also the implicit signal that Hoover could find out almost anything and even Presidents should handle him with care. He ran the agency for 48 years and was seven years beyond the mandatory federal retirement age when he died in office on May 2,1972.
That was then, this is now
Of course, no President today would use such information to dispose of political rivals. That would be wrong.
You can trust the United States Government, the several States, and county and municipal governments, as well as insurance, telco, healthcare and media companies to only do what is right. In a competitive business climate their first concern is you, the customer. If they don’t please you - or enough of you - they are out of business.
The Storage Bits take
Thomas Jefferson said “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty” but he was wrong.
Liberty means freedom. Freedom means choices. Some choices will be bad and must be exposed so all can learn not to repeat them.
Robin Harris says “Eternal surveillance is the price of safety.” You want your children safe, don’t you? Trust the government to protect you. After all, its their job.
Comments welcome, of course.
March 4th, 2008
Small business backup for Windows
Apple’s Time Machine one-click backup utility is the easiest and most intuitive in the industry. Does anything on Windows come close? Surprisingly there is.
The backup problem
Some 40% of enterprise backups fail - even with professional sys admins and costly software. It’s no wonder many small businesses don’t bother.
I work with a number of small businesses here in the mountains outside Flagstaff, Arizona. Most small business people here don’t know and don’t care about the details of their computers, like the difference between disk and RAM. They just want them to work.
Finally, there is a Windows backup system I can recommend for these small office and home office (SOHO) folks with up to 10 PCs. It is simple, fast, low-cost and complete - nothing else to buy.
If I sound impressed, I am. My accountant wishes they were paying me, but they’re not.
The product
The product: Backupkey - small business backup. It comes as a USB hard drive or a flash drive with the software already installed. You plug it in, wait for the Backupkey window to open, hit Enter twice and voilà your backup begins. I tested the disk drive version.
It’s that simple. Nothing to install, nothing to configure. It finds your Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail files and backs them up. Along with your My Documents folder. And it restores just as simply.
How easy is it? Even my 86 year-old neighbor figured it out. She’s a sharp cookie, but no nerd.
You have to see it to believe it
I’ve looked at other, more traditional Windows backup products like Acronis True Image - an excellent product for people who know their way around Windows - but not for the computer-phobic.
Update: A commenter disparaged my research, saying:
I’m shocked that you obviously did not research on this issue. Windows Vista and Server 2003 (yes, that means also “since 2003″) has VSS, where any data on Drive C: (that’s the default) is backed up automatically via shadow copies. . . .
So in fact Apple choosed to copy the long-known Windows feature . . . and found a more compelling name. . . . even well-known bloggers at ZDnet do fully believe the stories from Apple’s marketing group. That’s sad.
It’s also wrong. VSS is not a substitute for backup, as Microsoft’s excellent Introduction to Shadow Copies of Shared Folders states:
Shadow copies cannot replace the current backup, archive or business recovery system, but they can help to simplify restore procedures.
For example, shadow copies cannot protect against data loss due to media failures
A ideal backup solution for small business must be simple, fast, low-cost and use external media - not the C: drive. Time Machine and Backupkey meet these needs. End update.
Is it perfect?
No. Some nits.
- The interface could be even simpler. The non-standard progress bar takes a while to locate. And there is a progress bar for each section of the backup, rather than for the backup as a whole.
- The hard drive cable has 2 USB plugs on one end to ensure sufficient power for the disk. But on several PCs a single plug was sufficient, and the dual-plugs confused some folks. Backupkey should get a really low-power disk and lose the extra USB plug.
- After the backup is done - and it moves fast since it only backs up user data - the interface says the backup is done and then, after a few minutes, switches back to the pre-back up window. Odd.
Compared to the complexity of standard backup packages, these are tiny issues. You could talk your mother-in-law through the process over the phone. Try that with True Image!
The Storage Bits take
If you or a loved one uses a PC and is too clueless or busy to backup - Backupkey is the product for you. It was a Best of RetailVision “Best New Technology” nominee and I can see why.
In a world where only Apple seems to get ease-of-use, it is good to see a Windows product that comes close to Time Machine’s simplicity. Check it out and see if you don’t agree.
Comments welcome, as always. Why can’t Microsoft or Symantec do stuff like this?
March 2nd, 2008
Windows Vista (In)capable
What went wrong? I’ll tell you what went wrong: Microsoft execs - starting with Steve Ballmer - don’t care enough about their customers. Which is too bad for the thousands of smart, hard working ’softies who do.
I went through the Vista Capable lawsuit Exhibit A emails. Lots of warnings that Vista was a train wreck, that its requirements exceeded the market, that the continual changes and slips were killing OEMs and that many peripheral vendors had simply given up trying to stay in sync.
Where was Steve?
Even execs get shafted
If you were confused and/or burnt by the “Windows Vista Capable” logo, you have good company. Mike Nash, now Microsoft Corporate VP, Windows Product management, said in an email:
I personally got burned by the Intel 915 chipset issue on a laptop that PERSONALLY (eg with my own $$$). . . . I now have a $2100 email machine.”
Board member and former Microsoft President/COO Jon Shirley also had Vista woes:
I upgraded one of the two machines I use a lot to Vista. The most persistent and so far hardest to fix issues are both MSN products, Portfolio in MSN Money and Music (downloads I had bought in the past).. . . there are no drivers yet for my Epson printer (top of the line and in production today but no driver yet), Epson scanner (older but also top of the line and they say thwy not do a driver for) and a Nikon film scanner that will get a driver one day . . . . I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is a such a shortage of drivers. I suppose the vendors did not trust us . . . enough to use the beta for driver testing?
Good question, Jon. Ballmer replied: “You are right that people did not trust us . . . “.
Was it Intel’s fault?
Intel clearly put pressure on Microsoft to ease the graphics requirements for the “Vista Capable” designation. Intel VP, Software and Solutions Group Renee J. James got a lot of attention from William Poole, a Microsoft VP.
Mr. Poole seems to have been Microsoft’s primary contact to Intel’s James. Mr. Poole played an key role in strangling Netscape - based on his testimony in the antitrust trial. He knows how to play rough.
Thus John Kalkman’s email statement doesn’t quite add up:
In the end we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded.
If Intel couldn’t sell motherboards, could Microsoft sell Windows? Further, Intel’s 915 graphics performance wasn’t bad. In a November, 2004
ExtremeTech review, the 915 could do 73 fps on Halo and 60 on UT2004 - not bad for integrated graphics 3 years ago.
My reading: Vista’s hardware requirements exceeded what most consumers were buying. Microsoft bloatware overshot the market and they had a choice: lower requirements or hose the available market for Vista.
They lowered requirements. The “Intel made us do it” claim is an excuse, not a reason. The emails also show that HP had worked hard to meet the original requirements. If Microsoft cared about consumer requirements they would have supported HP over Intel - even at the cost of initial Vista sales.
Product intro tight rope
Product intros are a balancing act. The development team is racing to implement features and fix bugs while marketing is prepping customers and sales. Features are dropped weekly while “show stopper” bugs are keeping everyone in suspense.
Top management has to balance what was promised against what can be delivered. Vista’s last minute slips - especially the one that pushed delivery past the holidays - were painful attempts to correct major problems. Ultimately they were too little, too late.
The Storage Bits take
The Vista project was entirely on Ballmer’s watch and he bungled it. The CEO is where competing priorities get sorted out. It’s clear that Ballmer couldn’t get his team focused on a great customer experience.
Allchin’s development team overestimated consumer PC performance at Vista ship. Ballmer over-promised Wall Street on Vista sales. The continuing slips eroded vendor support.
Marketing split hairs - charging OEMs $8 more for Vista Home Premium! - and created a messaging mess that no one could understand. Let alone tell engineering they were dreaming.
Downgrades to XP are running wild. Microsoft’s prestige has taken a huge hit. Millions are looking at, and many are buying, Macs. Low-cost PCs are forcing Vista prices down. The news seems to keep getting worse, not better.
The fish rots from the head, Steve. And you’re the head. Time to go and give someone else a shot. The world’s largest and most profitable software company can and must do better.
Comments welcome, of course.
Update: There’s a bug in the new ZDnet stylesheet, so I’ve gone back and put the direct quotes in italics. Hope it makes the direct quotes clear.
Robin Harris has been selling and marketing data storage for over 20 years in companies large and small. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Recent Entries
- Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP
- Who uses MS Live Search - on purpose?
- Microsoft’s storage geeks speak
- Massive memory servers
- Hooray! Blu-ray BD+ hacked!
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- Hooray! Blu-ray BD+ hacked!
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