2016: “You’re watching the Linux Channel.”

July 24th, 2016.
Josef Konsumer, a home-based employee and portfolio manager for ICBC/CiticorpChase, a Chinese-owned multinational investment bank, wakes up to hear his alarm clock go off at 8am, and gets out of bed, his 47-year old body aching from an aggressive personal trainer session from the day before. His morning double espresso with frothed skim milk and mocha is already waiting for him, thanks to his new Korean-made LG RoboCafe, which brews and extracts a perfect crema every time using pre-portioned, mess-free nitrogen-sealed pods imported from Brazil. He considers nudging his wife, Mindy, to get up and make him breakfast, but decides to leave her alone. Best not to wake sleeping dragons.
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Josef walks downstairs to the kitchen to grab his coffee. “12 pods left in the magazine” he mutters, as he notices the “SUPPLIES ORDERED” indicator on the status display. “Thank God for Amazon and that thing’s wireless connection or I’d be done for. The new Indonesian flavor should be here by Friday.”
After finishing his coffee, Josef moves into his home office to start the day. He’s been a home-based employee for several years now, since Citigroup and JPMorganChase merged with the folks out in Shanghai and they had to downsize. To cut costs, Josef lost his nice office in midtown Manhattan on Park Avenue and has to use a group admin based out of Bangalore, but he doesn’t mind. When he’s at home, he gets to see his family all the time, and no more horrible and expensive commute from Edgewater to New York City, even with today’s super-efficient electric vehicles. Who wants to pay 20 bucks in tolls and 60 bucks in municipal parking each day anyway? “F@#$ing city occupancy tax.”
Josef waves his hand in front of his Linksys N2 wireless ThinTerm, and the first of his 3 energy-efficient HD 1080p OLED display units comes to life. “ACCESSING REMOTE DESKTOP: 300Mbps, 32-bit color, SolidICE 5.0. CONNECTED. DEFAULT SESSION: Ubuntu 16.04, 128-bit. VMID 0×01EF3FF0×001. BIOMETRIC LOGIN, AUTHENTICATED.” Gotta love that 5 second commute. “Need to buy more CSCO.”
Josef turned off his terminal last night before he went to bed, but it doesn’t matter because all his windows, browsers, and net-based applications are running, just the way he left them. He could have just turned on the HDTV in his bedroom, and issued the login voice command to the high-end Motorola-Sony PS5 DVR/entertainment set-top, but that probably would have pissed Mindy off with that thing’s loud Led Zeppelin splash screen music. Oh well. Time to look the portfolio. “MSFT at $12.25? Crap, Time to dump.”
Josef remembers what it was like before FIOS 2.0 and the subscriber Ubuntu NetDesktop service. He had to boot his machine up every morning, which always took forever, because Windows always kept getting more and more bloated. And all the viruses and spyware… and installing and upgrading applications… yuck. OpenOffice 6.2 does everything he wants, and what better browser is there than Firefox 8, anyway? People really had to buy a new PC every 3 years and go through porting all their data and email each time? Worrying about filling their hard drives up? Personal data backups? Hard drive crashes? What a huge hassle. “Oh that reminds me… How’s my EMC stock doing? $72.81, after a 3-way stock split. Excellent.”
Oh sure, Josef could subscribe to the “Premium” service for Windows 7 Subscriber Edition, or get a Apple TV with remote Mac OS XI Bobcat on Mobile Me Corporate Edition, but why pay the extra $400-$600 a year for the base OS image plus expensive metered software licenses for the productivity apps? He’d rather download the latest direct-to-video Batman movie using On-Demand Pay-Per-View, although admittedly Christian Bale is really starting to look like an old fart.
With his basic $120 monthly fee, Josef gets his super clear VOIP service, 200 channels of HDTV programming, and all his computing needs using Open Source software. Besides, all his important line of business SOA-based J2EE apps are provided over secure VPN connection from the Verizon virtual cluster using web services. Personal data? His 50GB Gmail account alone dates back to 2004.
“What are those guys in their green data centers in the flyover states using these days, anyway? IBM Z15s? Hyper-V? Parallels Server 4 or SLES 17.0 128-bit on IBM iDataPlex with POWER12? HP Integrity? Niagara 4? Who cares. It just works.”
Yes, it just works. Of course, years ago, people thought this was science fiction. But by 2012, a lot of stuff changed to make this a reality. Corporations wanted to dodge the “Vista and Windows 7 Bullet” by waiting as long as possible to do major desktop upgrades, and started to move more and more desktops into virtual infrastructure using software like Qumranet, Sun Secure Global Desktop, Microsoft Citrix XenDesktop and VMWare VDI. In 2014, Linux finally caught up on the desktop for corporate use and more apps went on web servers. Green datacenters with various hypervisor and containerization technologies on mainframes, mid-range Linux superservers and lower-power x86 processors on blade clusters made it all possible. Downsizing of corporate IT also meant less people to do PC support, and it was cheaper to outfit each desk with a $200 solid-state Cisco ThinTERM 5000 with an effective service lifetime of 10 years running on 10GigE over Cat-6 or 2gigabit multi-mode encrypted Wi-Fi, which could be swapped out by building services instead of a trained PC technician. And in 2016, once they perfected the technology for use in corporations, the next step was to shut down the office entirely and send just about everyone home, once FIOS and high-speed 50 megabit DSL was finally rolled out to everyone.
“Yeah, those lower level executives who travel like maniacs and earn frequent flyer miles with their solid state SUSE LINUX laptops, iPhones and WiMAX 6G can freakin’ keep them.
PCs! I can’t believe they didn’t toss those stupid things earlier.”
Will you still be using PCs in 2016? Talk Back and let me know.

Apple's future without Steve Jobs

The rather inelegant question of who will lead Apple when Steve Jobs "goes" is being bandied about virtually everywhere at the moment. Speculation about his health has prompted the rumour mill to go into overdrive with Apple seemingly doing a poor job to dampen down the feverish speculation.
It all started last month when a gaunt Mr Jobs appeared at the company's developer conference in San Francisco. There was an almost audible gasp in the auditorium when he took to the stage in jeans that were practically hanging off his thin frame. But for a short while the issue faded as the crowd went nuts over his announcement about the new 3G iPhone.
Afterwards, spokespeople at Apple said Mr Jobs was recovering from a common bug. It was no secret that he had pancreatic cancer and four years ago underwent surgery which was hailed a success.
But the topic took centre stage again this week when analysts were involved in a conference call following the company's quarterly results. Chief financial officer Peter Oppenheimer said that Mr Jobs served as CEO "at the pleasure of Apple's board and has no plans to leave Apple".
Not sure if that line was borrowed from the West Wing script where the characters were constantly intoning how they "served at the pleasure of the president".
Arguably the matter might just have withered on the vine if Mr Oppenheimer had left the issue there, but he added that Mr Jobs' health was "a private matter".
That got people Twittering like mad and now the big question being asked is just how much investors and analysts should know about a top exec's health. Especially, they are suggesting, one like Steve Jobs who is such a visionary for Apple and whose success seems to be closely bound together.
You might well think that this is a lot of brouhaha for nothing, but in the world of commerce this is a big deal. Reuters news agency reports that one investor was considering adding to his $2bn fund but was hestitant because of all the talk about the Apple guru's health.
There are now reports that the "common bug" that led to the weight loss was due to a "surgical procedure" Steve Jobs had earlier in the year. And also being highlighted and bandied about by unnamed sources and unnamed friends is the story that "in recent weeks, Mr Jobs has reassured several people that he is doing well and that four years after a successful operation to treat a rare form of pancreatic cancer, he is cancer-free".
You might wonder how Apple ended up handling this bit of public relations so badly? They are, after all, regarded as masters of the art when it comes to hyping their products and controlling the "message". But it does seem they have been wrong-footed.
The debate all just underlines the $64,000 question of who really will eventually follow in Steve Jobs' footsteps? And can or should any one person be allowed to be bigger than the company he or she runs?

25k To Shut Up About This: by Chad P. Flick

Having something go viral the way Myspace and Facebook have done, is a totally different ball game from the viralness you get when you tell your best friends.
Using ordinary tell a friend pages to make your site go viral and bring in traffic is like watching grass grow, or turtles race.
It isn't going to happen fast, and when it does happen, get this, it wont be any thing significant.
I don't know about you, but I don't have the time to waste filling in friends emails when I come to those types of pages.
I'm lazy!
So what did Myspace & Facebook do different??
They cheated!
They allowed people to import their entire contact list from their email provider.
Now, instead of the average 1 or 2 people being told, it jumped to 30+
So one person tells 30 of his friends, which in turn tells 30 of his friends, which in turn tells....
Well, you get the picture!
I'm not going to insult your intelligence explaining how viral this is.
In well under 2 years they had hit top 10 in the world.
Can this be replicated? Yes. Well now it can
A 23 year old Aussie from "down under" is spilling his guts on how to create massive lists of people begging you to sell them your products with an easy to use software that the gurus have pleaded with him not to sell to the public.
The exact same software that he's been offered $25,000 with a "shut up about this" disclaimer by a very big internet marketer.
Don't even think about this though if your website is permanently stuck on a tiny little server that can't handle lots of bandwidth.
If you are unable to upgrade, this is not for you. You'll have so much traffic you'll want to turn the flow of visitors off.
For more info visit: OptinAccelerator Test Drive