Kawaii's Blog

Reading through various outlets I have to make a few points and then head off to bed because I’m one of those people who really can’t get to sleep (or have a decent night sleep) unless I vent and get the annoyance out of my system.

1) Free doesn’t mean that there is no cost – and I say this every time a company gives alway something for free that there is zero cost to the end user or organisation using the ‘thing’ they were given. Latest example was Microsoft giving away 10,000 free Surface RT devices to educators and thus the usual people came out of the wood work claiming that this proves Microsoft is ‘desperate’ whilst ignoring that all companies have give aways and discounts to gain marketshare in key demographics. It doesn’t say anything about a success or failure off a single give away but what will be the question is whether the ‘foot in the door’ that the give away provides translates into further adoption or whether it remains ‘something I received at the convention last year’. It all pretty much depends on whether they address the short comings in Windows 8.1 update, the Outlook client that comes with Windows RT 8.1 will be feature complete, that the licensing allows commercial use and most importantly that there are signs of an ecosystem being built up around Windows RT but that last part will require Microsoft to provide some way to allow application vendors to step out of Metro/ModernUI and create traditional applications as not all software is translatable into a purely touch environment.

2) Free software isn’t free of cost – the reason why in many cases Linux replaced commercial UNIX’s wasn’t because it was ‘free’ but because it was UNIX-like and ran on generic PC hardware and cheaper than what Santa Cruz Operations were selling their UnixWare for thus people went for Linux. Are there people who go for the community supported ones? sure but most enterprise customers go for commercial vendors as they’re the only ones certified to work with the large commercial software like Oracle which run on the operating system. If you want to have Oracle support then guess what – you’re going to have to run an operating system underneath which is certified or otherwise kiss goodbye receiving support from them. Solaris main issue was that it was late to the x86 and when it did arrive it lacked hardware support and the drive by Sun Microsystems to really push it forward – less to do with Linux being free and more to do with Sun doing too little too late by the time they got the memo that x86-64 servers were gobbling up Sun from entry all the way up to the high end segments.

3) People buy workstations  (such as the Mac Pro) to do real work (real work involves doing stuff that generates income for a business – not inviting friends around for a dick waving contest) so the idea of people whining that they can’t upgrade the video card in the new Mac Pro is pathetic at best. The vast majority of professionals buy a workstation, max it out and then run it into a ground – and if they’re lucky enough to upgrade their video card for some reason it is from a limited list of supported and tested video cards offered by their OEM vendor who supports the hardware which have been certified to work with major software titles – most of them being OpenGL based using workstation class graphics cards such as Quadro and FireGL. I mean honestly – you can upgrade your memory, you can expand storage using a Thunderbolt 2 connection to a 5 disk array with 20TB in it, provide expansion using external PCIe case and use a video card in a PCIe box for additional OpenCL computational power – what more do you want?

4) Saw OS X and quite frankly this is the first time I’ve been ‘pumped up’ about a release since the early 10.3/10.4 days back in the PowerPC days and each release was a massive leap over another. All I’ve seen so far are a bunch of negative folks whinging whilst ignoring the fact that this is a beta release – honestly I really have to wonder whether Apple should just flag even announcing new operating systems until it is finished and ready to be released as to avoid the chorus of whining from the cheap seats. Lets not get started on the usual wankers who whine that they can’t legally install OS X on generic hardware – Jesus toe tapping Christ it is the same shit but different day with the usual trolls on parade.

Le Sigh, off to bed for a decent night sleep.

Finally uploaded the video where I can give my five cents worth on the WWDC keynote and where I think Apple is heading in the future. I’ll do a couple of these but I’ve kept them ‘unlisted’ on YouTube because I don’t want it to be part of my usual video postings.