Watson on Jeopardy!: The end of the Microsoft/Intel computer era

On this day five years ago, IBM's Watson competed against Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings on the game show Jeopardy!, winning the competition. (The actual competition happened January 14, 2011 with the first broadcast of the two episodes on February 14 and 15, 2011.)

To me, this event marked the Microsoft/Intel computer era that we have been living in for so long and the start of the Watson era, which continues today. To my knowledge, Watson's software and hardware does not contain much, if any, Microsoft code or Intel processors.

The Microsoft/Intel computer era was an age where cheap software running on cheap hardware was king. It was an era where Version 1.0 was garbage and everyone waited until at least Version 1.1 came out. It was an era where Intel microprocessors would take arbitrary text and execute it as a program (allowing over 30 million viruses and other malware to date).

Sadly, other companies fell into this trap of bad software with bad security. Adobe Systems is a leading example of this. In the Watson era, Adobe's Flash is near the end of its life.

I graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in Computer Science (College of Engineering) in 1976. Some of the best practices of that time were simply ignored by Microsoft and Intel and have only been rediscovered in this decade, some 40 years later. What if the cars of today were designed and built with the technology of the 1970s? Air bags and antilock brakes would not be included. People would be furious! But many business people didn't want to pay for good-quality hardware and software over the last 40 years, so they bought technology that was poorly designed even for the 1970s.

What is different about the Watson era of computing? IBM's Power Systems servers, like the ones running Watson, running the IBM i Operating System have multiple parity bits (including error-correcting memory) and other checks to prevent memory errors and even adder errors from corrupting the operating system, user programs or data. These processors and operating system require that programs be compiled by a compiler and will not run arbitrary text as a program. I know of no viruses or worms that run on IBM Power Systems (with the caveat that there may be malware that affects the two other operating systems that run on IBM Power, AIX and Linux). Ironically, many of IBM Power Systems do run antivirus software, but not as much for themselves: They do it to detect viruses affecting Microsoft/Intel systems which have been uploaded into their file systems by infected computers (how ironic)!

The IBM i Operating System, including its predecessors going back to 1979 (longer than any Windows Server has existed), have always more robust than Windows Server. Today they can manage multiple workloads in multiple virtual machines without conflict or crashing and dependable resource allocation. It's not unusual to have a 10-year-old Power Systems server that has never crashed. There have been cases where one IBM Power Systems server has replaced over 100 Windows and Linux servers. There are companies that have 15,000 active users working on one Power Systems server with sub-second response time.

What did the end of the Microsoft/Intel computer era and the start of the Watson era five years ago mean for the typical computer person? For many, nothing. Companies will still buy cheap: They can buy Windows 2012 R2 running on a server with an Intel processor for less than $1,000. They will still pay lots of money to load this system up with antivirus software, which is unlikely to block zero-day vulnerabilities, and pay technicians to keep this system running and to restart it when it crashes. They will continue taking the server down to install monthly patches from Microsoft. If they need another function, they will buy another server, and another, and another... I know a company that buys a skid of servers with Intel processors (at least 20 servers) whenever they have a planned power outage to replace the servers that will not boot up when the power comes back.

But there's another group of companies out there which understand the false economy of the Microsoft/Intel world. These companies will spend the money for better servers and operating systems, without the need for antivirus software for their operating system, and end up with better results with a lower cost of ownership. And many good computer people will work for these companies, because they don't want to deal with things keeping them from writing dependable programs which can run 24/7 without having to deal with crashes and glitches.


Notes: I have donated $10 in both 2015 and 2014 to Wikipedia for its operations. Have you donated?
This is cross-posted on my company blog at Netburg Services.

2013 Windows April Fools' joke becomes 2014 Windows reality

"Microsoft skips 'too good' Windows 9, jumps to Windows 10," blared the headline April 1, 2013 on Infoworld's web site.

Today, the real headline is "Microsoft Offers First Peek at Windows 10," confirming that the April Fools' joke is correct: There isn't going to be a Windows 9.

(A tip of the hat to John Gruber who writes Daring Fireball.)

Steve Ballmer: Dragging MSFT down by $20 billion

We knew that Steve Ballmer was dragging down Microsoft, but now we have a value on it. He announced his retirement today and MSFT went up $2.37 per share today. With 8.33 billion shares outstanding, he's been dragging the stock down by almost $20 billion.

Sorry, Steve, about the dissing by Wall Street but at least your stock and options will have appreciated too.

When someone posts a chart showing the performance of Microsoft's stock under Ballmer's tenure, I'll link to it. I'm not expecting much gain, if any. Bloomberg has given us some numbers: "An investment of $1,000 when Ballmer took over is now worth 13 percent less, including dividend returns, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Since Microsoft’s 1986 initial public offering through the end of the Gates era, $1,000 turned into $554,464."

Here's a Fortune article on this, written before the market closed: Steve Ballmer: The $16 billion drag on Microsoft.

Updated Aug. 24: Added quote from Bloomberg.

Seven months since leaving Slashdot

At the end of December 2012, I left Slashdot. Cold turkey, no more reading, no more story submittals, no more comment moderation. I had good karma and I have no idea what they did with it. Like others, I posted under a handle so you won't find my contributions without working at it.

In case you are not familiar with Slashdot, it "is a technology-related news website owned by the US-based company Dice Holdings, Inc. The site, which bills itself as 'News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters,' features user-submitted and evaluated news stories about science and technology related topics." (Source: Wikipedia)

I left for four reasons: I have better sources for "News for Nerds," they refused to track a story back to its original source, the editing of stories was atrocious and I got tired of the stupid comments. Let me expound on these.

Better sources: I have several blogs and other news sources for my tech news. As a whole, they are faster and have better reporting and editing than Slashdot. One of the last straws in December was when Slashdot posted a story that I had read elsewhere two days earlier.

Original source: Slashdot relied on reader-submitted stories. While there is some original reporting on the Internet, many news sites simply scrape and rewrite content from the originators. How many times have you read a story in a major media source and realize that it was written by the Associated Press? The readers who submitted content rarely took the effort to track the story back to its roots, something I always try to do on this blog. This resulted in incorrect information and incomplete stories.

Sometimes, they had ridiculous situations where an Australian news publication was used a source for a United States story. It also resulted in a couple of cases where someone was able to sneak through a story that was a couple of years old.

Atrocious editing: Readers are nerds and their submissions need editing. This didn't happen as much as it should have. Ranging from misspelled words and wrong word usage to summaries that totally misrepresented the stories, this got really obnoxious after a while. Also, the problems listed in "Original source" were passed right on through by the editors.

Stupid comments: Every blog or other site that allows comments has to have a way to deal with stupid ones. Slashdot had an excellent moderation system that used people like me with good karma to keep the stupid comments in line. It was just too much work and there was just too much stupidity to deal with.

I really have a problem with tech people who work exclusively in a Wintel world (Windows + Intel) world and have no clue that there's other worlds out there that have nothing to do with Microsoft or Intel. They would be amazed to know that there are servers out there that don't run any antivirus software and yet are not vulnerable to malware!

Last year, I was wasting too much time cussing at stories and comments on Slashdot. Now I have that time back to do other things, like write this blog.

Updated Aug. 9: Replaced "stupid commenters" with "stupid comments." I really shouldn't call people stupid. People aren't stupid, they just do stupid things, like post stupid comments. As Forrest Gump's mother used to say, "Stupid is as stupid does."

I want a touch screen on my laptop

I'm a big fan of John Gruber and Daring Fireball, but this time I think he's wrong. He's right in that I don't need the same user interface (UI) for both a phone/tablet and a personal computer but I do want a touch screen on my laptop. I played with Microsoft's Surface on Thursday and touching the screen seemed natural to me. Sure, I still want the trackpad for the fine work (I don't use a mouse with my laptop) but I'm used to a touch screen from using my iPhone. If I had a choice, I would rather have a touch screen than a Retina display.

And if I could have a numeric keypad it would be the icing on the cake (Hey, it's my blog, so I can ask for anything). By the way, I noticed the two-finger method worked on the Surface; did Apple license their patent to Microsoft?

My current laptop is a MacBook Pro (with the 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7 processor). I expect my next laptop to have a touch screen. If Apple isn't going to provide it, then I'll have to buy one from someone else. I may go the Hackintosh route but I may not; Windows 7 is working well for me.

I like the annual improvements in the Apple products, but I do worry that they're not improving enough. Why, on my iPhone, when I am reading an ABC News story on Chrome do I get a request to install the ABC News app, when I already have it installed? Why can't I make Chrome my default browser (I like it better than Safari and it syncs my bookmarks between my iPhone and my laptop)? How is it that Chrome can automatically update itself when other apps can't?