A Random Walk has a really scary property prices graph fort the US market (from the NY Times).

I wonder does anybody have anything like this for Ireland?

Sarah gives some excellent advice on turning your children into Adults via the college route,

…pick a college far away from home. For students, the most important thing about college is moving out of home. For parents, this is the excuse you need to get your adult children out of the house. Yes its scary for both parties. The cowardly youth fond of well stocked fridges has reason to squirm at the prospect of sour milk and days of toasted ham.

From our accountants,

The European Commission has announced that it is not going to raise any objections to the Business Expansion Scheme (BES) and Seed Capital Scheme (SCS) measures announced in Budget 2007.  Confirmation of the decision appeared in the State Aid Weekly e-News (Nr 29/07), issued by the Directorate-General of the European Commission.

Go forth and raise capital….

What do Dell do? They provide low cost computing resources to home users. Why is Dell’s star fading? Because they have  hit rock bottom, there is no other place to save money, their existing model has run out of steam. Instead they have made desperate lunges at the Games market and the printer ink market, neither of which are dell Core Competencies and therefore they struggle in both these spaces.

So what should they do? Well what’s cheaper than having Dell computer in your home? Not having a Dell computer in your home. What Dell should do is offer home users access to grid computing on a pay-as-you-go basis with access to as little or as much computing power as you require (ala S3 from Amazon but with Windows as the base operating system). They can still sell you a monitor, keyboard, mouse and box, but that  box is just a network connection to a blade server hosted in a Dell data centre that does all your computing.

They own the Windows and Office licenses, that you lease as part of your subscription (which keeps Microsoft happy, as they continue to stuff huge volumes of Vista and Office into  the market place) but they manage the storage and compute power, keep your computer humming and totally insulate you from hardware and software failure. The low cost set-top size boxed they give you can even include a cheap as chips disk to do really efficient local caching of content.

They get to continue building systems, but the systems are now almost completely rack based which means they can make much more credible sales to business. They also smooth out their revenue model because it goes to monthly subscriptions rather than lumpy seasonal purchases.  Finally they sell much higher priced more keenly specified desktops to the remaining market segment that previously were their Alienware customers.

Of course plans like these require a pair a cojones, which are sadly lacking in Dell at the moment.

Joel says,

I’ve been using Vista on my home laptop since it shipped, and can say with some conviction that nobody should be using it as their primary operating system — it simply has no redeeming merits to overcome the compatibility headaches it causes. Whenever anyone asks, my advice is to stay with Windows XP (and to purchase new systems with XP preinstalled).

My own Dell PC crapped out a few hours before a critical presentation so I had to go retail for a replacement and retail means Vista these days. My own personal Vista stinkbombs are,

• I can’t connect to a XP hosted printer share, at all, ever. This seems to a common problem judging from my web searching, one that Microsoft hasn’t addressed.
• All the bells and whistles on the new windows explorer just make my head hurt but the one consistent feature I used on XP (the ability the view a folder of photos as a film strip) has been removed.
• It takes way more memory

Stay away as long as you can in the hope that the sound of all us early adopters wailing will make Microsoft see sense.

Vista reminds me of an old skit on X-Windows so with credits to Phrack:

Vista. A mistake carried out to perfection.
Vista. Dissatisfaction guaranteed.
Vista. Don’t get frustrated without it.
Vista. Even your dog won’t like it.
Vista. Flaky and built to stay that way.
Vista. Complex nonsolutions to simple nonproblems.
Vista. Flawed beyond belief.
Vista. Form follows malfunction.
Vista. Garbage at your fingertips.
Vista. ignorance is our most important resource.
Vista. It could be worse, but it’ll take time.
Vista. It could happen to you.
Vista. Japan’s secret weapon.
Vista. Let it get in *your* way.
Vista. Live the nightmare.
Vista. More than enough rope.
Vista. Never had it, never will.
Vista. No hardware is safe.
Vista. Power tools for power fools.
Vista. Power tools for power losers.
Vista. Putting new limits on productivity.
Vista. Simplicity made complex.
Vista. The cutting edge of obsolescence.
Vista. The art of incompetence.
Vista. The defacto substandard.
Vista. The first fully modular software disaster.
Vista. The joke that kills.
Vista. The problem for your problem.
Vista. There’s got to be a better way.
Vista. Warn your friends about it.
Vista. You’d better sit down.
Vista. You’ll envy the dead.

Damien rails about the same old cliquey gang going to Barcamp Galway. I’m not sure how to fix this one personally, apart from not attending 🙂

As an organiser of a previous Barcamp I can tell you one of the big worries is not having enough speakers to interest and entertain your audience, so I embrace all participants who are willing to post on the blog with an idea for a talk. You take your speakers where you can get ’em.

Each Barcamp I have been at has been completely different in character feel and style to the others (and thats a good thing) and I rarely felt like I was seeing the same speaker over and over. The most common complaint across all Barcamps is “gee I want to go to all three sessions” that are scheduled for the current slot, so there is a recurring demand for some of the talks. As it is about 20% of those who sign up for a talk fail to attend, and of the audience much less than 10% will be willing to do an impromptu session. I had to practically press gang poor Karlin Lillington on a panel at Barcamp Dublin.

This is Ireland, I think we might be the first country in the world with 0 degrees of separation, so everything will appear a bit cliquey from the outside. My advice to people who are bored with the regulars is, go hustle up to stranger, there were always plenty at the Barcamp’s I attended. For people who are attending Barcamp for the first time, my advice is, do a talk. There is no better way to get to know people.

So IEDR whacks you with their exhorbitant fees,  but when push comes to shove, they bail out and try and shove the responsibility for domain squatting back on the CRO.

The CRO is of course absolutely right,

“We spoke to the CRO and asked them what conditions they apply to awarding an RBN. They must have a business address in Ireland and this condition appears to have been met. The CRO’s official position is that it is a matter for the patent holder or trademark holder and the remedy is the civil courts. There is also the option of dispute resolution adjudicated by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO),� Curtin said.

So, if its the responsibility of the civil courts, why is the IEDR charging for service that it is not responsible for and cannot enforce?

Mike Arrington asks “What ever happened to GDrive?” especially now with SkyDrive and a host of others offering large online storage for peanuts. Well its no biggy if you stop for a second to think past the mountains of technology that pour out of Google and realise that their primary business is advertising.

No huge insight there. The difficulty arises when you try to apply Google’s standard monetization strategy to raw storage. Sure you can index it, but only for each individual user, so you soak up scads of compute power without any power law results in terms of aggregated value for all the google search users. You could try and aggregate the results but you can bet dollars to donuts that joe user (and the EFF, FSF etc. etc.) would scream blue bloody murder about infringement of privacy, and they’d be right.

The other way Google normally makes money out of content is to stick a stream of adverts alongside but that won’t fly with remote storage because 99% of the consuming applications don’t have a mechanism to consume or display that ad stream (‘cos guess who the vendor is?).

So now we have the rub, if your turn on GDrive you immediately have to allocate a gazillon gigabytes of storage for every tyre kicker in the northern hemisphere to try out the service, which ain’t small potatoes even for an outfit with a grid the size of Googles (can you say grid envy? :-)).  Plus all the bandwidth in both directions (virtual storage takes bites in both directions, especially that bad boy webdav) and not a dollar  of advertising revenue to be had. No wonder they  said “woah there cowboy”.

Instead there is a tentative dip in the water for Google Docs and Google Web Albums,  But you have to pay which kinda breaks the free for consumers model, That model has been at the heart of everything Google does (and that free model breaks poor Microsoft’s heart a little everyday so they must doing air punches all over Seattle).

Its seem clear that Google sees the way out of this conundrum by keeping you inside the Google World (Gmail, GDocs, GReader) where they can continue to face paint your browser with advertising.  Unfortunately doing anything other than the daily flyer in GDocs is like pulling your own teeth out with a pliers which means its back to Microsoft Office for that quarterly results report.

So expect the burgeoning pay-to-play storage community to make hay while the sun shines especially with Amazon stepping up to fill the infrastructure gap.

Beaten out of a market by a book vendor, maybe those Google techies ain’t so smart after all 🙂

And Microsoft,  500MB of storage? You must be havin’ a laff…

But its about the lyrics.

When a blah company files suit against other blah companies on InfoWorld.