Monthly Archives: April 2007

Vista is selling

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Yep. Apparently there are more masochists in the world than I thought. Here’s what GMSV reports:

On Thursday, Microsoft announced record quarterly sales and profits, also beating the projections, but this time, the sound you heard was a collective sigh of relief.

Microsoft’s revenue for the quarter rose 32 percent to $14.4 billion, and net earnings rose to $4.93 billion, or 50 cents a share, from $2.98 billion, or 29 cents a share, in the same period last year. Both figures benefited from the deferral of $1.67 billion of revenue from the previous quarter to account for the Windows and Office upgrade coupons distributed late last year. Even better, from the analysts’ point of view, was that there were no unpleasant surprises in the company’s outlook, with earnings forecast between $1.68 and $1.72 a share for fiscal 2008, and revenue between $56.5 billion and $57.5 billion.

What it all boiled down to was that, fears and perceptions aside, Windows Vista and Office 2007 have gotten off to strong starts. Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said consumer sales of Vista surpassed the company’s own expectations by $300 million to $400 million. “There is very good acceptance from a launch perspective for the product. It’s early days, but we’re encouraged by it,” Liddell told Reuters.

Analysts were happy to exhale. “I think it’s a very good quarter, but more important, guidance is essentially in line with what the Street is expecting,” said Sarah Friar of Goldman Sachs. “Everyone was so terrified guidance would have some sort of issue.” And any speculation that CEO Steve Ballmer was on the hot seat seems to have cooled for now. “This is a solid, even strong report from Microsoft, and should do quite a bit to assuage the fears that CEO Steve Ballmer was on his way out the door,” writes CNBC’s Jim Goldman. “He had a rough year last year with high-profile product delays and production issues. I think just about everyone thought he was on the ropes. … This report goes to show that his plan is underway and working, at least for Vista, and should buy Microsoft some more time as it tries to come up with the next-generation moneymaker that will alleviate the company’s near total reliance on the sluggish, mature personal computer industry.”

On the other hand…

SALES OF PC CHIPS were weak in January and February this year, falling 12 per cent in the quarter, year on year.

According to Bruce Diesen, senior analyst at Terra Securities ASA, “inventories and expectations for Vista were too high at the end of Q4.”

[Source]

And, of course, there’s this…

We had MS reps in about a month ago touting how wonderful Vista is. We have about 10k client computers, about 40% Macs mind you. Still that leaves us with about 6000 systems that run some flavor of Windows. The vast majority of that is Windows XP Pro 32bit w/ SP2. We manage all of our Windows clients with Server 2003.

We just rolled out about 500 new IBM/Lenovo business class machines for a small project. All of those machines officially come with Vista Business.

However since we have no plans to roll out Vista on the desktop anytime soon since it is “cludgeware,” we are allowed to “downgrade” our license to XP and still be in MS compliance.

We are in K12 education in the NE USA. I would imagine this is happening all over the country with business sales. Perhaps globally. You would know that better than I given that your HQ is on the big island across the pond. :)

Officially the computer goes out the door with Vista, it arrives on site, Vista gets blown away and our image of XP Pro is put on. MS still counts the box as a Vista sale however.

A day in the life of Edward VII

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Sunday Times restaurant critic Giles Coren decided to go on the Edward VII diet for a week. Here’s Day 1 from his report

Breakfast: Porridge, sardines, curried eggs, grilled cutlets, coffee, hot chocolate, bread, butter, honey.

The meal is served at the Edwardian house in Barnes in which I am residing with my co-presenter Sue Perkins, and is cooked, as all our meals here will be, by the great Sophie Grigson from a weekly menu taken from an Edwardian housekeeping book.

I go at it full tilt, using the age-old technique of “surprising my stomach” by getting as much as possible down before it realises I am full. I do myself proud and end by wiping my fifth cutlet in the remaining curry sauce from my eggs. Sue, a demi-semi-vegetarian, has not fared so well, going green halfway through her first sardine. We discuss briefly how income tax at the preposterously low rate of 5 per cent freed up plenty of cash for eating, but are interrupted by Sophie ringing the bell to announce lunch.

Lunch: Sauté of kidneys on toast, mashed potatoes, macaroni au gratin, rolled ox tongue.

Good stuff, this. Toast all mulched with kidney fat and blood, macaroni good and rich, tongue gigantic and purple. It is exactly what Dr Petty wants me to avoid.

Afternoon tea: Fruit cake, Madeira cake, hot potato cakes, coconut rocks, bread, toast, butter.

High tea was invented by the Edwardians to stave off hunger during the endless minutes between lunch and dinner. Everything is very brown.

Dinner: Oyster patties, sirloin steak, braised celery, roast goose, potato scallops, vanilla soufflé.

Oysters, the gouty man’s nemesis. I swallow eight in my patties. I carve the goose, as the man of the house always did, and find that it is not easy in the stiff-fronted shirt I am wearing with my white tie, nor can I properly incline my neck to observe my work, what with the 3in-high stiff separate collar I am wearing, and thus very nearly lose a thumb. Sue says that I can shut up until I have worn a corset. Apparently her spleen and kidneys have already been forced up into her ribcage (a recognised problem of the Edwardian lady) and her stomach, contained in a waist now narrowed to the width of a toddler’s thigh, is no longer allowing ingress of food.

And so to bed. But up again an hour later for a midnight snack of roast chicken and Madeira. King Edward always took a roast chicken to bed with him, so it seems only right. Alas, after my chicken, I do not get back to sleep. I have consumed 5,000 calories in a single day, well over Dr Petty’s recommendation of 1,800, and toss and turn and rumble until dawn.

Er, from what I remember from the various biographies of Eddie, roast chickens weren’t the only things he took to bed with him.

Don’t drink the water — even if it has been blessed

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Galway’s newest resident.

The raging prosperity of my homeland has to be seen to be believed. Some of its manifestations are horrible — for example the despoilation of what were once lovely seaside towns by build-to-rent development. Some are comical — as in the practice of renting stretch limos to deliver 7-year-old girls to their First Communion. And some are beyond satire.

Take the current situation in Galway, the lovely town near where my father’s family live. A stop-frame video made from satellite images of Galway over the last 15 years would show a municipality growing like a tumour, as field after field and hill after hill is covered by speculatively-built housing estates created without the infrastructure to support such explosive growth.

Now we discover the consequences: the public water supply in Galway is no longer safe to drink. On March 28, RTE News reported that:

It has emerged that the city and county water supply in Galway has been contaminated by both human and animal waste.

Tests carried out in laboratories in Wales have also established that the strain of cryptosporidium parasite which has been found in water reservoirs and treatment plants can be transmitted from human to human.

The Health Service Executive says the situation remains a very serious one and it is of the utmost importance that all water is boiled before use.

Experts have told RTÉ News it could be up to six months before tap water is safe to drink in parts of Galway affected by pollution.

Up to 90,000 householders and businesses are affected, and today the number of cases of the cryptosporidium illness in the country rose to 125.

Since then, everyone in Galway has had to use bottled water. Newspapers are full of photographs of families trudging back from supermarkets laden down with huge plastic bottles. Nobody has any idea when — or how — the problem is going to be resolved. It’s got to the state where ‘GalwayWaterCrisis’ even has its own MySpace Profile — surely an innovative use of social networking.

It’s not entirely clear yet what the source of the pollution is, but the Guardian reports that:

Suspicions have focused on a sewage treatment plant at Oughterard, north of Galway, which pumps effluent into Lough Corrib. The Green party mayor of Galway, Niall Ó Brolcháin, claims the plant, built 60 years ago to cater for 250 houses, is unable to cope with the sewage from the now 800 homes in Oughterard that have spread out over the land. “Water services are at capacity and have been for some time,” Mr Ó Brolcháin said. “Yet we are still continuing to develop more houses. That’s wrong. That’s why we are in this mess.”

The Mayor and local politicians blame the government; Environment Minister Dick Roche, however, will have none of it: he retorts that the government had already made 21m euros available for water treatment projects in Galway, but the local council had failed to make use of the money. For once, I agree with the government: this looks like a product of local greed, corruption of the planning system and incompetence. Meanwhile the local business community — which is a major holiday and tourist destination — is beginning to sweat. Will the usual hordes of holidaymakers throng to a resort where you can’t drink the water? Stay tuned.

The delicious irony, of course, is that tainted water used to be a hazard of poor countries like India. In searching for a phrase to describe modern Ireland, a slogan first devised by John Kenneth Galbraith comes to mind. “Private affluence and public squalor”.

The crisis has also, I understand, affected supplies of ‘Holy Water’, which now has to be imported from heathen but uncontaminated localities.

Deconstructing reconstruction

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From this morning’s New York Times

The United States has previously admitted, sometimes under pressure from federal inspectors, that some of its reconstruction projects have been abandoned, delayed or poorly constructed. But this is the first time inspectors have found that projects officially declared a success — in some cases, as little as six months before the latest inspections — were no longer working properly.

The inspections ranged geographically from northern to southern Iraq and covered projects as varied as a maternity hospital, barracks for an Iraqi special forces unit and a power station for Baghdad International Airport.

At the airport, crucially important for the functioning of the country, inspectors found that while $11.8 million had been spent on new electrical generators, $8.6 million worth were no longer functioning.

At the maternity hospital, a rehabilitation project in the northern city of Erbil, an expensive incinerator for medical waste was padlocked — Iraqis at the hospital could not find the key when inspectors asked to see the equipment — and partly as a result, medical waste including syringes, used bandages and empty drug vials were clogging the sewage system and probably contaminating the water system.

The newly built water purification system was not functioning either.

Officials at the oversight agency, the Office of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, said they had made an effort to sample different regions and various types of projects, but that they were constrained from taking a true random sample in part because many projects were in areas too unsafe to visit. So, they said, the initial set of eight projects — which cost a total of about $150 million — cannot be seen as a true statistical measure of the thousands of projects in the roughly $30 billion American rebuilding program…

On this day..

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… in 1992, rioting that claimed 54 lives and caused $1 billion in damage erupted in Los Angeles after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of almost all state charges in the videotaped beating of Rodney King. You could say it was the beginning of user-generated content, though the video in question wasn’t circulated on the Net. (The Web was just over a year old at that point.)

What SONY doesn’t get

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If, like me, you’re struck by the fact that unsold SONY PS3s are stacked rafter-high in every computer-games shop while you can’t get a Nintendo Wii for love or money, look no further.

Thanks to Tom for finding it. He also tells me that “the tune is called ‘How To Save A Life’ by The Fray — this guy took the tune and changed the lyrics”.

Fun with the Dinosaurs

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James Cridland found this hilarious post by Rick Segal about an encounter he had with some network TV executives. Excerpt:

These guys were bragging about the ability to start showing TV shows online. If, for example, you go to ABC’s website, you can watch episodes of certain shows pretty much a day or so after they air on TV.

They were proud of these two key points.

They had ‘locked down’ the content. Their words, not mine.

They had ‘locked out’ the rest of the world outside the US. Their words, not mine.

Me: “Yer kidding, right?”

Them: “Not at all. We got this baby right. We’d show you but since we are in Canada, you can’t see the stuff.”

Me: Sigh

I crank up the laptop and fire up the abc.com website and we verify that I get the evil, only those in the US can see this, message.

Me: Pay attention, boyz.

Step one: Google: ip spoofer software

Step two: grab one, install it.

Step three: watch Ugly Betty.

Them: Nobody is going to know how to do that. Besides, if you were to tell people, we’d sue for damages.

Me: So, if I told the world that in order to get around websites that restrict access by IP, you could change the IP address via a zillion pieces of software freely available on the Internet, you’d sue me? Really? Like as in, say a blog entry? Can I get that in writing? As a promise?

Them: Blank stares

Lovely! This is the ‘push’ mentality personified.

Is the stampede to go online slowing up?

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Peter Preston thinks so, and quotes some findings from Ipsos Mori’s quarterly technology tracking poll.

This time last year, 60 per cent of British adults had online access. Now it’s 62 per cent, a relatively tiny shift. Three in four people over 65 have no access at all. Only one in 11 pensioners in the DE category – those most dependent on state support – can log on. Meanwhile, at the other end of the age and education range – ABs between 18 and 34 – internet penetration is actually falling back a little. Park Associates’ latest US survey may show two thirds of all adults online there, but, of those not hooked up, 44 per cent are just not interested in surfing their lives away.

We are not either on the internet or in print, but somewhere in between, and likely to stay there for years. We must commit millions to the digital future, but still cut down forests and drive distribution lorries along motorways at midnight. We must watch one pot of gold empty, but another fill up somewhat more slowly than we’d hoped…

Murphy’s Law

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This morning’s Observer column…

Collapse of stout conspiracy theory, then? Well, yes. But also a striking illustration of the collective intelligence embodied in the blogosphere. Memo to traditional journalists: there’s always someone out there who knows more than you…