The floods in Thailand and the availability of small cheap PCs is holding back Wintel’s attempt at up-selling PCs generally.

• Floods in Thailand will keep supply of hard disc drives 25% below demand for the next quarter, prompting price increases.
• “Taiwan-based EMS provider Wistron expects to ship 36 million notebooks and four million tablet PCs in 2012, increasing by 20% and 300-400% from 2011“
• Acer/Wang: Google’s Android is mainly working to catch up with Apple in both the smartphone and tablet PC markets, and Microsoft’s Windows has not had any achievements within these two markets that can help it gain share, causing shipments of netbooks to drop and traditional notebooks to see only slight growth.
• ASUS/Acer: Initial Ultrabook shipments 1/3 of expected levels.
• Meanwhile Walmart is selling a bunch of tablets with Android/Linux:

This severely impacts M$’s plans for world domination. They cannot defend against the swarms of small cheap computers on retail shelves. They have no competitive product and their old locked-in market is getting tired…

UPDATE ASUS reports they only have one month’s supply of hard drives left.

UPDATE Western Digital and Samsung are cutting supplies of hard drives in November. Some OEMs have only a two week supply left. The shortage is expected to continue through Q1 of 2012. Without hard drives to copy that other OS onto, M$’s cash flow could be compromised. It couldn’t happen to a more deserving company… Meanwhile Android/Linux keeps flowing onto flash drives.

Until this year, the central government of Portugal has paid for M$’s software licensing for schools. This year that will end and schools will either have to pay out of their own meager budget or choose FLOSS. That’s good. Unlike consumers who only see that other OS on retail shelves, educators have a choice. This could affect tens of thousands of PCs.

see Google Translate

I love Debian GNU/Linux and thin clients. It’s the ideal solution for me and schools where I have worked. While reading an article about how thin clients are doing in the market, I came across some revelations:

• “according to a Gartner report published earlier this year, 2011 marked the crossover point for enterprise applications. According to the report, half of all installed enterprise applications were written for Windows and half were OS neutral. Importantly, the trend showed a steady downward slope for Windows-native applications. If applications become less dependent on a particular underlying operating system on user hardware, “thinner” thin clients and especially zero-client hardware devices would become much more attractive to IT.”
• “Today, the two biggest audiences for thin-client products are health care and education. Nearly every thin-client maker has a health-care-related use case that enables medical staff to access patient data on a desktop that follows them throughout the day.”

This supports my understanding and things are definitely improving for GNU/Linux and thin clients. Because everyone does not need to run all the applications dependent on that other OS, that other OS is becoming less relevant and more people will find the performance they need in GNU/Linux and thin clients.

I recommend Debian GNU/Linux.

The stated purpose of patents are to encourage/reward innovation but they are doing exactly the opposite. The more Amazon innovates, the more they are sued in court. Instead of police and the courts punishing the patent-trolls, the innovators are being punished.

see The Inquirer – Amazon discloses the extent of its patent battles

They have had far too many patent suits recently:

We wrote earlier about the shrinking share of PCs shipped with “7″. This could give a clue about what is happening:
“These systems are not recommended for the average PC user. Above average technical experience with PCs and software are typically required to install the software and drivers needed to make these systems fully functional.

ThinkPad models without an operating system preload are not eligible for special promotions such as, but not limited to: ecoupons, limited time offers, component discounts, etc.”

see Lenovo – ThinkPad laptops with no operating system

Apparently there is a significant demand for PCs without M$’s “tax” and these machines are not intended for businesses who are big customers of M$. They are likely getting GNU/Linux installed.

One wonders what “volume licensing” with M$ is about if a PC without an OS does not work? Is M$ asking businesses to pay twice for a licence, once when purchasing the PC and again when making the “volume licensing” agreement? Here’s what M$ says about that:

None of that makes any sense to me. The trolls call GNU/Linux complicated. All the complexity of GNU/Linux pales in comparison to the choices M$ offers. Of course complexity kills. I don’t see anywhere in that document where M$ requires a customer to purchase software with a PC, yet Lenovo discourages that. The mystery continues. Where have all the PCs gone that ship without “7″?

It’s about time. Not that there’s much to vote about but just getting the least bit of momentum forward in the role of women in that society is wonderful. Besides being able to vote in municipal elections, women will be able to advise the King in the shura.

This could be a good thing. I remember when I was living in Saudi Arabia, I responded to an advertisement for term deposits in a local bank. It took an hour long visit to “the men’s bank” to figure out if the deposit could be made and it took another day to actually perform the transaction. My wife did a similar deal in “the women’s bank” in ten minutes… Think how changes like this could affect the GDP.

see BBC – Women in Saudi Arabia to vote and run in elections

I read this recently, above a photograph, “Anti-Gaddafi fighters fire a rocket”.

Well, the gadget resembles a rocket in that there is an exhaust plume but it does not follow the projectile… It’s a recoilless rifle, folks. I saw video early on in the Libyan war that some novice fired one while standing behind it. The next image was him being loaded into the back of a truck with shredded trousers. I hate it when journalist are close enough to take a photograph but not clued-in enough to know about what they write. The recoilless rifle is an artillery-piece with a vented case so that exhaust gases match the momentum of the projectile and leave the light weapon stationary. It was a crazy idea conceived early in the twentieth century but developed around the time of WWII and Korea to allow light troops to carry serious artillery with a lot more accuracy than an unguided rocket.

That’s among my pet peeves. Others are “hard drive” instead of ATX “case” (because that other OS died so often that consumers complained of paying to get the “hard drive fixed” and they never knew what was involved was re-installing that other OS because it had messed up again), or “welding” instead of “cutting” when folks make lots of sparks in movies, cars “blowing” when they merely burn (Hollywood’s fault), “automatic” instead of “autoloading” referring to a firearm…

It’s hard when you soak up technology and live amongst mere users of technology.

There’s a rumour from the Wall Street Journal that HP, ARM and Calxeda will get together to ship ARMed servers. There’s an announcement by ARM that ARM v8 will be 64bit.

On top of that, Applied Micro plans to have the first 64bit ARMed server. It’s not a toy. The system can deliver 80gB/s throughput and chips can communicate among themselves at 100gB/s.

Taken together, I think there is no doubt ARM will have a presence in servers. What the share will be I have no clue but server rooms are often hot and crowded. Customers of Applied Micro are demanding more efficient servers. The technology is needed.

I have been using Chrome browser for a while and find it very fast and efficient. Last year, I ran it on thin clients with no problems. This year…

Number one issue is the “smooth scrolling” which smooths scrolling by refreshing the screen multiple times between shifts, basically making a movie… This is deadly on thin clients as the network lag between shifts is multiplied by the number of shifts. For thin clients it would be great to turn off smooth scrolling and just jump to the next view. It works pretty well in FireFox but there is no option in Chrome browser…

The result is that I am forced to use FireFox from my thin client to get acceptable performance. I can turn off non-smooth scrolling in FireFox (http://about:config).

The thing I really hate about FireFox is the two separate windows for URI and search. I am told that the latest version of FireFox is better. I can type two search terms into the address window and FireFox does a search but with one word, it tells me this is not a valid URI… I do a lot of searching and I don’t want to type in two words when one would do.

While Dell seems mean to GNU/Linux in USA and other developed markets, Dell has agreed with Ubuntu to supply units with Ubuntu GNU/Linux on board to Chinese stores. These stores will have

• branded marketing collateral in-store,
• trained staff positioning the benefits and advantages of Ubuntu to consumers, and
• a retail team of Ubuntu merchandisers, set up to support the stores

On a side note, Canonical claims, “With an actively growing base of over 20 million users this represents another significant endorsement from one of the world’s major PC vendors.” That’s more than 1% of the world’s PCs. Since there are several very popular distros in comparison to Ubuntu, that means far more than 1% of the world’s PCs now run GNU/Linux.

see Canonical’s Blog

There is an eloquent comment that appears on GROKLAW today. Here’s the bottom line:
“Hey Microsoft – here is a clue for you. I have an Adroid phone, and I love it, and I don’t appreciate you threatening the manufacturer of my phone. Get the point? If you can’t make a good phone, give it up, and go make something else. There are endless things you could invent with your billions without going around threatening to take away people’s phones. Just leave the rest of us alone.”

Is Big Brother being resented? Are the consumers in revolt? You betcha. M$ is in the low single digits percent of market share of smart phones.

see Get the facts…