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Riighterr!!!! Knew so - how's Android (a Linux) doing, security-wise for years now? Torn up!

Actually, no. More of a beat up.

Despite Microsoft attempting to buy scare stories with free phones, malware on Android is rare and generally easily removed.

"Microsoft is offering five Android malware victims a free Windows Phone 7 phone. The catch? You need to share your rage against Android with the Twitterverse."

http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/none/291668-microsoft-offers-free-windows-phones-to-android-malware-victims

"Advanced users are already wary of alarmist declarations from security vendors, and though the malware threat for Android is growing, many consider it overblown, especially when compared to Windows and other desktop operating systems".

http://androidcommunity.com/symantec-backs-off-of-android-malware-claims-after-researchers-cry-foul-20120201/

security firms that warn of Android malware 'charlatans and scammers'

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/are-security-firms-that-warn-of-android-malware-charlatans-and-scammers/16412

Intelligent people will only buy cheap and nasty for so long.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/after-the-iphone-4s-android-just-feels-wrong/5068?tag=content;siu-container

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/im-sick-to-death-of-android/20242

Intelligent people will only buy cheap and nasty for so long.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/after-the-iphone-4s-android-just-feels-wrong/5068?tag=content;siu-container

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/perlow/im-sick-to-death-of-android/20242

Is the Linux Desktop actually growing? quotes a market share figure from Net Applications of 1.4%, up from 0.97% the previous July. Other estimates have put the figure at 1.67%. Some analysts are predicting the figure could hit 2% to 3% before the end of 2012.

The author states that 12% of visitors to his tech related web sites run Linux. If that is any indication, then the figure of technologically minded people using Linux desktops already exceeds 10%.

Keep in mind that Apple's global desktop market share is in single figures: Linux desktop market share doesn't have to exceed that of Windows to be considered important.

Pass that this way.... Bah nevermind..... In other news my Mac is bullet proof!! /sarcasm off .. Every OS is penetrable, hell even the flying drones are getting viruses. As an aside, every smartphone on the market is tracking what you do and who you talk to, and blah blah blah no matter what OS it runs. Google's is by far the worst, but your beloved iPhone is doing the same thing. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/us-government-pays-250000-for-ios-exploit/11044

So? Chris Dodd is a fraud, you don't see him being arrested. Nobody is even investigating him, even after he openly admitted to congressional bribery... because the people who would need to start the investigation are the same people who he bribed.

Let's face it, Kim Dotcom is a fraud, but so are the people he's fighting against. Kim is guilty of not bribing the right people. He should have used some of his massive profits to bribe politicians like Chris Dodd of MPAA did, then he wouldn't be in this situation. In a world of frauds, I root for the newcomer fraud.

itâ(TM)s easy to buy âoefriendsâ and âoefollowers,â by the thousands, and âoelikesâ by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.

The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.

The operators of the networks: Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, must know who is real and who isnâ(TM)t. They have usage data that shows telltale signs of a fake account. They also know how much information a user has disclosed, and how many user profiles are empty.

Whatâ(TM)s not known is how they count the many types of users, how rigorous is their analysis? There is no transparency on the single most important pool of information for their commercial customers.

So really, who cares? Facebook users are narcissists, insecure, asocial, or bogus "marketing accounts".

Saying things to make the subject go away avoids useful investigation. As usual, the money needs understanding.

For example, Mozilla Foundation is a rich, rich corporation. No one should make the mistake of thinking that work on Firefox is done mostly by volunteers.

But where does all the money go? Did you see $78.6 million worth of improvements in Firefox in 2008?

Did you see improvements suggesting that Mozilla Foundation had $168 million in assets in 2010? -- (Official PDF file, see page 2. Numbers are in thousands, as it says at the top of the page.)

Firefox is a world-class asset. No other browser has all the features. There is no substitute for the capabilities of Firefox together with Firefox add-ons. (Mozilla Foundation calls one thing by 3 names: Add-ons, extensions, and plug-ins.)

But Firefox is unstable. Firefox instabilities are experienced most frequently by those who open many Firefox windows and tabs, and leave them open while putting the computer into standby or hibernation several times. That is the pattern of use of those who do a lot of online research. The crashes and memory gobbling have been reported for more than 10 years, since version 0.9 of Mozilla Suite, before Mozilla began using the name Firefox. Firefox is still unstable even though the change reports for almost every version say there have been "stability improvements".

Firefox crash info:

about:crashes
Put about:crashes into your URL bar and press ENTER. Firefox will then show a list of crashes of the copy of Firefox on that computer.

Crash info for all users and all versions:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox

Crashes per 100 active daily users, version 10.0, the version before the most recent:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/10.0

Version 11 is less stable. Crashes per 100 active daily users, version 11.0, the most recent version:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/products/Firefox/versions/11.0

Top crashers, version 11.0:
https://crash-stats.mozilla.com/topcrasher/byversion/Firefox/11.0/14

Notes:

1) The lists of crashes are ONLY the ones that Firefox caught and that were submitted. The lists do NOT include crashes that did't start the crash reporter. The lists do NOT include crashes that weren't submitted to Mozilla Foundation.

2) The crashes are often preceded by rapidly increasing memory use. Firefox often corrupts Microsoft Windows, so that Windows needs to be re-started. When Firefox corrupts Microsoft Windows it often damages operations in Windows that are not connected with browsing.

The hollow emptiness in social media numbers - most accounts are fake or empty

He and his assistant discovered that only 30% published anything on G+ and only 6% were "outright spammers." But the largest group he classed as,

Ghosts. 36% had not even filled out a profile.

Mr Kelly pointed to a study by two journalists at Popular Mechanics that only 25% of their Twitter followers were real, and 49% were fake or spam.

And this is a widespread problem:

Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich claims to have 1.3 million followers. But last August a group at Indiana University did an analysis of some of the 2012 Presidential candidates and found that 76% of Gingrich's 1.3 million Twitter accounts lacked a profile biography.

The rise in fake users is directly related to corporate marketing campaigns that aim for large numbers of followers, 'likes,' and to show high levels of online engagement.

This has given rise to a growing services sector where it's easy to buy "friends" and "followers," by the thousands, and 'likes" by the tens of thousands, for a low fee. This can jumpstart a marketing campaign if it makes it onto a top trending list. Buying such services will also help contractors meet performance goals set by clients and trigger payments. It can be a lucrative arbitrage.

The result however, is considerable inflation in the numbers of users of all the major social networks and platforms.

Social media is a scam, same as SEO. Get over it. Facebook has less than 250 million active users, and they are a really low-quality demographic - people who have nothing better to do than bolster their low self-esteem by accumulating "friends" on facebook, and spammers.

http://www.quora.com/Do-most-Farmville-users-have-multiple-accounts-to-be-able-to-be-able-to-do-tasks-you-need-to-do-with-a-friend

The first is to create fake accounts. It's trivially easy since all you need is an email address. However, these are very easily spotted by Facebook since they generally all only have one or two friends. If Facebook thinks these accounts are fraudulent, you'll often need to provide a unique phone number to verify that it is real.

[user comment] yes, it's too easy to create multiple facebook accounts. my sis made like 10 of them.

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/facebook-statistics-stats-facts-2011/

Anthony Permal Says:
January 27th, 2011 at 2:42 pm

Nice stats, however I wonder alot about that figure claim of 500 million âactiveâ(TM) users. I know at least 5 or 6 people who have multiple facebook accounts for various purposes including personal accounts, professional accounts and the like. I feel the stat should be changed to say 500 million active âprofilesâ(TM) instead. Its very misleading.

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57399449-285/manage-multiple-facebook-and-twitter-accounts-in-one-place/

Manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts in one place

Whether you're a freelance social media manager or just someone with lots of online IDs, it can be a struggle to keep up with multiple Facebook and Twitter streams. Conversocial makes it much simpler.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-is-not-20-times-the-size-of-google-its-even-bigger/4654

kus2728 14th Oct

@aep528 the other thing to consider in all of this is are they both reporting actual users or just active accounts. I know multiple people that have multiple FB accounts that they log in to regularly. 1 person with 4 accounts does not equal 4 users in my opinion but I don't know if either network acknowledges the difference in their reporting.

and

Michael Alan Goff 14th Oct

I was wondering how it might have been me. XD

He is counting signups vs usage, but even signups vs signups doesn't tell the whole picture. There are people, and I this to be a fact, that make multiple Facebook accounts.

Some of them are for fictional characters they write.

and

inux for me 14th Oct

Everyone I know that is on Facebook and play the games on it, have 2 or more accounts. Many of these games allow player to transfer resources to other players, so they use multiple accounts to accumulate resources to transfer them to their main account. This makes the Facebook numbers extremely inflated compared to actual users.

If Google+ adds games, then the same thing will happen there too.

http://www.facedekk.com/

Facedekk

Manage Multiple Facebook Accounts

With Facedekkyou have all the following features available at your fingertips

Simultaneously update statuses for multiple Facebook accounts

There's plenty more like that. I know people who manage multiple fake accounts just so that they can either spam, or to make it look like their SEO activities are working "look you have these many new friends" - it's the same as buying facebook fans in bulk - they're mostly fake accounts.

To be perfectly fair, Mac users always talk about "Time Machine" which is enabled mainly by the file system... so, while they don't talk about the file system directly, they are using a feature set.

Quick Google search "RDP Vulnerability": http://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/rdp-exploit-watch-5-million-rdp-endpoints-found-on-internet/10937 (admittedly, I skimmed it.)

There is a ton of evidence. IN fact, they person who make those claims has said they where accurate... of course no he makes the excuse they where just theater stories and not meant to be taken as fact.

The 'Fanboy' group think is pretty alien to me in general.

http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-blog/2012-03-20-now-can-we-start-talking-about-the-real-foxconn/

http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/podcast/460.mp3

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122903-does-daiseys-lie-change-what-we-know-about-apples-manufacturing

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/apple/mike-daisey-caught-lying-about-foxconn-incinerates-credibility/12569

IS Foxconn a place of magic unicornd and pixie dust? no. But it isn't nearly as bad as people like you think.

So, thre are the facts. Lets see if you are truly capable of evaluating and reflecting on your opinion in light of new facts, otr if you are another non thinking excuse making reactionary. i.e. Shitweasel

I really hope they figure out how to make a faster read write speed. It is already almost a given that if you have a RAID 5 setup with 2TB drives there is bound to be an error during rebuild. There was a report on the chance of failure of an array using large drives failing during rebuild. So instead of RAID6 or are we going to have to go to a 3 parity RAID? They claimed RAID 5 should have failed in 09 and that is sata drives but if you put 60TB on a single drive you are asking for trouble IMO. Granted a nice RAID10 would be nice though. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

Here you go.

This may be about moving ads to Google properties. With AdSense ads, Google has to share revenue. With ads on Google's own pages, they don't. Google is putting more ads on their own search result pages now, and adding their "social" (i.e. brand related) results at the right. Look up "cars" and you now get "People and Pages on Google+ related to cars", which are Ford, Nissan (with logos) and "cars.com".

Google has been trying to drive traffic to their own properties for a while, and the pressure is increasing. Top results for popular searches are increasingly Google's own content, or something they scraped from somewhere else. (You can stop Google from scraping your site. The price is total disappearance from Google searches. News Corp. did that for some of their newspapers. Few others dare.) "Videos" as a search option has been replaced by "YouTube". And, of course, there's "Google+"

Anything Matt Cutts says about "cracking down on SEO" has to be viewed with skepticism. He's Google's promoter to the SEO community. He speaks at the big SEO conferences. His position is "SEO is not spam.

As far as we know, data encrypted with a random key and modern algorithms ought to be safe in the hands of the enemy. I say as far as we know, because the NSA does not reveal exactly what they can and can't crack. There is no practical way to brute force any of the modern algorithms: 256 bits is roughly equal to the number of atoms in the universe.

That does not follow. The original discoverer might have disclosed it to other resources who leaked it, or leaked it himself.

If that exact packet is an obvious way of doing it, it could also have been an independent discovery.

Why doesn't it follow? This has been a risk since day one of Microsoft's advance notification program.

In this article, Luigi Auriemma, the guy who discovered the flaw and reported it to Microsoft, explains the changes he made to the packet and the fact that the same packet was in the released exploit code.

Here's the original ZDNet blog post. It's a longer article with more detail; it's also linked at the bottom of TFA, which seems to have plagiarized it. Compare the first paragraphs:

[TFA] Cloud-based service, Incapsula, has revealed research indicating that 51 per cent of website traffic is through automated software programs; with many programmed for the intent of malicious activity.

[ZDNet] Incapsula, a provider of cloud-based security for web sites, released a study today showing that 51% of web site traffic is automated software programs, and the majority is potentially damaging, — automated exploits from hackers, spies, scrapers, and spammers.

The sentence structure and order of ideas is identical, and many phrases are the same or nearly the same. A high schooler should do better. Minor rephrasing is not sufficient.

That said, both articles are pretty much advertisements. The study doesn't appear to have attempted to actually be comprehensive (so it only used data from this one company). The point was apparently to give this cloud service provider some selling points for businesses to use their service to "secure" their sites. This story is yet another that shouldn't even have appeared on /.; shame on the editors who let it through.

'Yahoo! has invested substantial resources in research and development through the years', so "new CEO Scott Thompson is planning to lay off workers in public relations, marketing, research...." [stop reading here].

Way to over-simplify and misinterpret:

https://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/anonymous-hacks-vatican-website/10567

They don't seem to like Scientology either.

Maybe the battery life difference is actually related to the technology used (LTE as opposed to HSPA+) and not the data transfer speed, and the Apple fanboys were complaining that LTE kills battery life?

So all I'd have to do get a couple of free phones is to send an email claiming I'm an Android developer?

True. You have to claim you're a competent one, and be able to prove it.

Well, all you Apple cultists in this thread, it moves me indeed that you hold such great concern for the welfare of Android devs, whether they can get hold of the hardware they need, whether it is free or not, and so forth. But don't get too teared up, Android devs are doing just fine judging by the number of Android apps in the market, apparently already more than Apple apps and accelerating.

Of course, what I mainly care about is the number of free as in Freedom apps, vastly greater on Android than Apple. Because Android has free distribution whereas Apple is just one giant, shameless paywall.

Bing has gotten better. A year ago, it couldn't even search its own website (search for WP7 dev kit yielded nothing on the first two pages), yet Google did. Now their own website shows up!

Anyway, it's not surprising that Bing is getting more like Google, since they are actively copying Google.

The point of the competition is that you show up with your exploit, and run it.

This article linked in another post above disagrees:

Miller, a Pwn2Own regular who makes headlines every year for his work breaking into fully patched Mac OS X machines, says he is skipping the contest this year because of the new rules that require on-the-spot writing of exploits.

This latest crack just makes it a little more obvious that it's a question of motivation more than anything else - and money is a powerful motivator, probably more so than notoriety (in sufficient quantities, anyway).

No, it just proves that when you put enough money, professional crackers are attracted.

There is an article where Charlie Miller (winner of past contests) explains why he won't compete:
https://www.zdnet.com/blog/security/charlie-miller-skipping-pwn2own-as-new-rules-change-hacking-game/10554

On the contrary, I think that money attracts professionals, and discourages all other people, who may have interesting hacks but know that they cannot compete against professionals.
In short, it encourages people who came to win, and discourages people who came to participate.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/weblife/photosketch-better-than-sliced-bread-photoshop/965

GPL is a horrible piece of sh*t.

It's fine as long as you don't need to use that software commercially. But in the commercial world you need to be able to edit the source code of the software to make any use of it. GPL does the exact opposite of what it pretends to promise: it restricts you from editing the source code, because you become liable to all sorts of legal responsibilities if you do so. Not understanding these caveats in supposedly "free" software can be very costly, when you implement a large application that relies on a slightly modified version of a GPL source code, and after two months of development realise that you have painted yourself into a corner and made yourself into a copyright criminal – just because you naïvely thought "free software" was actually "free".

If you want to write free software for the benefit of the IT community and not a certain unemployed American self-righteous zealot, you should definitely release it into the public domain or – if you want attribution – use some easier and more relaxed license (both to understand and read) than any GNU license. GPL is anyway a dying ecosystem, because both Apple and Microsoft have banned it from their current and future distribution platforms. And no Slashdot, this is not because they are bad evil corporations that hate penguins and kittens, but because GPL is an ambiguous, incomprehensible myriad of rights and responsibilities that no sane company in the software distribution business would ever touch.

When you hit the Win key, you get to Metro start screen, same as in dev preview. It looks slightly different when you start searching, in that you get a pane on the right that houses the text field and also lists various categories (this screen shows it), but it's still Metro and therefore fullscreen, obscuring your desktop.

You no longer have to leave the desktop and go to Metro for everything like before. Consumer preview much improved for desktop users.

The integrated search and some of the METRO share, app, and sync functions are on the desktop. Also, you only need to move the mouse a little to the upper left hand corner to go to metro and click to app cycle and not go crazy dragging it all over to browse the tiles while staying in the desktop.

Here is the video by MS showing on a non touch screen lenovo. A full review is here. Yes it is now at least usable with an old fashioned mouse and keyboard where you can run 10 apps at once at least and can stay on the desktop.

I can now probably use it. I do not know if I would like it over the traditional Windows 7. I will download it and play with it tonight.

Nope MS fixed many of the desktop issues.

Still very METRo-ish but now you do not have to leave the desktop or move the mouse as much to cycle Metro apps. Jury still out but it looks much better than the developer preview that drove me mad.

Thank God!

They listened and you can read the review here and see the desktop in action staring in 3:45 here.

Still miss the start menu, but at least I can search for a file/program just like in Windows 7, can use aero preview and not have to leave the desktop for Metro each time I do a search. Also you do not have to drag the mouse all over and just need to move it to the upper left hand corner to preview metro apps and stay in the desktop.

I am not saying its better than Windows 7. But at least they are making it suck less and are working on it.

Yes and No.

I hated the developer preview but the consumer preview enchanced its desktop mode for keyboard and mouse users. There is a picture and small preview here. Basically you do not have to drag the mouse all over the place and just need to go to the upper left hand corner to preview other apps and the title bar still works like Windows 7 with Aero preview. The search button and other features are to the right of the screen so you can hit the Windows key and type your program or file which is nice.

Here is the new gui in action, where the desktop is mentioned after 4:00. Metro is still there but at least MS listened to use and made it more mouse and keyboard friendly with the corners and dragging so we do not have to keep using our fingers and only seeing one app at a time. Thank GoD!

I do not know if I like it as a desktop as it will take awhile to get used too. But it is much improved over the developer preview to it being tolerable hopefully. I do like the sync/send function if you watch that video. It integrates nice in desktop mode and the app/icon grouping from XP that is lacking in Windows 7. Other than that it is eh ok.

Keep making fun of Nokia ignorant yankees. One of the main reasons Nokia is non-existent in US is because it tried to stand up to the telcos and protect consumer's rights by not crippling the phones as per the request of your greedy-ass cellular carriers. I guess it won't be making that mistake anymore.

The 808 just goes to show that some companies still employ engineers instead of designers. I mean, Apple has to rip off that patented technology from somewhere. ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/apple-pays-up-licenses-patents-from-nokia/50558 )

I'm not new here, so I know it's a lot to ask, but in addition to reading the fucking article, I encourage everyone to read the white paper too: http://europe.nokia.com/PRODUCT_METADATA_0/Products/Phones/8000-series/808/Nokia808PureView_Whitepaper.pdf

Also check out the sound quality of the 808 recording (listen with good headphones or speakers to really appreciate the difference) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EbLFtF50y9A

But it incorrectly assumes that no one, including Apple, isn't working on exactly this.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/home-theater/apple-patents-new-touchscreen-remote-control-for-a-future-apple-tv/5610

AppleInsider has revealed that Apple has patented a new universal remote that presumably could accompany the Apple television set rumored to be in development.

The company’s remote concept is designed around the concept of a dynamic touchscreen that not only can automatically detect devices (without users needing to punch in special codes), but also present users specific controls for those devices automatically, reducing the number of buttons that typically litter universal remotes.

I'd give Pogson a break Barbara if he was just a zealot, but Voldemort syndrome? there is NO excuse for that. Voldemort syndrome actually makes FOSS users look like a bunch of tinfoil hatters and makes it the punchline of jokes. I mean would it REALLY cause the end of civilization if he wrote MSFT or even MS? but not once, not once has he been able to write anything but "M$" or "The OTHER OS" like they are listening to his thoughts through the walls. the LAST thing FOSS needs is another Twitter.

And while I would like to think there would be room for a proprietary Linux frankly the "free as in beer" tards would have such a damned screaming shitfit it would never happen. i mean what was Xandros' crimes? it signed a deal that would give it access to the Exchange and Sharepoint protocols along with access to MSFT tech like AD and GPO backend protocols, that's it. And anyone with a brain would know that for a business OS having the ability to use Exchange and AD is pretty much a must have. Instead the community destroyed what as your friend found out was the only really sanely designed linux I had ever seen, it all "just worked" without "pulling a Gnome" and restricting the user. you had full CLI,could run apt-get and use any app, it just had sane defaults so you didn't need to if you didn't want to. it even had on first startup a "behavior" choice which would make the OS respond to Windows,Mac, or Linux conventions when it came to things like right click so it was simple to convert users. I used to have a Xandros laptop I'd hand to a client to use while i worked on site, just so the person whose machine I was fixing wouldn't be completely down for the day ya know? i had not once needed to spend a single minute teaching them "The Linux way' because it all "just worked". it would detect the AD, ask for a login, plug it into an AD network and it would be up and running faster than XP.

And I agree that Grub and most of the underpinnings have frankly gotten just dumb, what these guys are cooking up is frankly more of a hindrance than a help. And again the fundamental problem is how to pay for the work? How do you pay for the focus groups and QA and regression testing required to bring everything up to a point that while the home user can run it the power user and admins don't feel hamstringed? I truly believe Canonical is gonna be the final straw, after they close their doors any thought of Linux having a prayer on the desktop will be finally dead, well except for pogson whom I'm sure will think "Its a vast conspiracy to keep GNU away from the masses!" while ignoring in the end its the busted shitter problem, in the end the shitty jobs just don't get done. Vista was a pig so the users didn't buy, MSFT got the feedback and built Win 7 which runs great even on netbooks. there just isn't that kind of positive feedback in F/LOSS. I mean how do you tell a dev working for free 'What you are doing isn't helping, it doesn't follow the GUI conventions, its got too many bugs, and it relies too much on CLI and its help files are poorly written"? Answer you don't, they say "take it or leave it" which is why you end up with a shit sandwich, because the devs say 'hey you want a free sandwich?" and when you say yes hand you a turd on bread and say 'No complaining now, because its free". Well a shit sandwich is still shit, like Joe Rogan said "If someone hand you a sandwich that is 95% shit and 5% ham, would you call it a ham sandwich?".

In the end users don't care WHY it don't work, all they care about is their wireless is broke, or their sound is now static, or their GUI doesn't have the options they require. Hell even Nichols admits the new GUIs are shit, and I NEVER thought he'd have a bad word to say about F/LOSS. But you have yourself a great weekend Barbara.

Actually one of the few smart things they are doing with Win 8 is they are FINALLY gonna have services that start when they are called and stop when they are no longer needed, most likely because the sweaty monkey still thinks he can sell a WinPhone and WinTab so if you don't set any family settings the service won't actually be running so no worries there.

What IS a huge worry is how a company with THAT many engineers can't see the giant screaming FAIL in 50 foot letters! I mean first they tried to jam the Windows desktop metaphor onto phones, complete with teeny tiny start button even though its a completely different form factor and when that fails miserably what do they do? they go "Herp derp i know, we'll stick the Windows tablet UI on the desktop!" which shows that anyone with common sense has done left that company for Google> I mean HOW many desktops and laptops were sold with touch enabled screens this year? MAYBE .03% of the entire market? hell take out Kiosks and POS machines and that number is probably something like 0.001% of the world PC market. So what fucking moron thinks jamming a touch focused UI on something WITHOUT A TOUCHSCREEN is a brilliant idea? Anyone? Beuller?

The ONLY thing I can think of that makes sense is the engineers have frankly gotten sick of Ballmer's Apple fetish and bullshit and are letting him have everything he wants in the hopes he'll flame so badly that even being Bill's little buddy won't save his sweaty ass. I can imagine them going "Sure Mr Ballmer (snicker) having a cell phone UI on the desktop IS a brilliant idea (chokes back a laugh) and yes sir i bet this will finally make us a "cool and hip" company like Apple (rushes to hang up phone before they bust out laughing)". But hey, don't take my word for what a big heaping of fail Win 8 is, try it yourself for free! The Consumer preview is being released to the world at the end of the month, this is the "90% complete" version so what you see is what is gonna be crapped all over desktops and laptops this Oct...well until the OEMs have a screaming shitfit as their sales plummet and they demand downgrade rights to Win 7 like they did with Vista and XP.

To me though the sad part isn't win 8 being a giant failwhale because Win 7 is supported until 2020 and hopefully Ballmer will be shitcanned by then, no what is sad to me is first with Vista and now 100 times more powerful with the combo of Win 8, the death of XP, and everyone practically living on the net Linux has been given all these great gifts. its like the competition is giving them a 250 meter head start on the 300 meter dash and what does the devs do? Do they announce a distro with ten years of support and a rock solid foundation, built upon a "It works and will consistently continue to work" philosopy? Nope first they gut the entire soundsystem for an unstable mess and then if that didn't set them back far enough they trash the two biggest DEs for a buggy blingfest that set everything back a good 5+ years with regards to stability! Its like someone went back in time with the design of the iPad and tried to hand it to the Linux devs only to have them go " Naaaaah, we're betting it all on the Foleo baby!". So instead of just taking that huge lead and waltzing across the finish line so they can finally give us a true "third way" over apple and MSFT they promptly shoot themselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of a field to write a script in long PHP codes that makes the CLI answer them with "You are so cool master"...sigh.

As much as I can't believe i'm agreeing with that linTroll Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols all these new UIs just suck, like REALLY hard. Its like all the devs of the world just lost their damned minds when iPhone came out and then lined up to horribly fuck up their offerings in the hopes they could somehow "capture the magic" of the iShiny. It reminds me of the old Python upper class twits bit, these devs probably couldn't even shoot themselves correctly.

SEC filings don't get into that much detail. Gartner estimates it's .5 percent: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-apps-for-business-05-percent-of-googles-revenue-says-gartner/60880?tag=content;siu-container

Honestly, $136.6 in revenue million is much smaller than I thought. While probably not in danger of closing down anytime soon, it's certainly not a multi-billion dollar product. Since we don't have cost or profitability numbers, it's hard to say.

Microsoft is an MPEG LA licensor. Motorola is not.

MPEG LA claims that Theora and VP8 infringe on its members' patents, and implies it will take legal action against users of those codecs.

Android is Linux the same way that OSX is FreeBSD. Even Linus treats it as an incompatible fork.

That's the problem with a fork - sometimes, even when you have the full source, it's so different that it's simply not worth the effort to merge back.

You joke Mr AC but this kind of crazy is a prime example of why itch scratching and ignoring the users makes Linux a giant fail on the desktop.

I'm sure i'll get hate for not drinking the koolaid and joining the perception bubble but fuck it, I'm a frustrated retailer and this needs to be said. For the first time in history you are being given not one, not two, but THREE incredible gifts, its like the field has been cleared and you are being given a 200 yard head start on a 300 yard race and what do you do? promptly shoot yourselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of the field to tweet about the latest idea you have for REALLY pissing the users off!

I mean you have your traditional nemesis run by the most incompetent CEO since Apple had the Pepsi and not only that but he's about to shoot his own company right in the face because he is so desperate to get into cell phones and tablets he's gonna force WinPhone on the desktop, which i predict will be the biggest failwhale since MSFT Bob, that's one, two you have the great XP dieoff giving you all these incredibly powerful machines that MSFT has priced themselves out of the running with, we are talking late P4s to early mid dual core desktops and laptops with 1gb+ of RAM and 40Gb+ of HDDs which is more than enough for Linux, and finally you have a population that NEVER BEFORE IN HISTORY does damned near everything online, the one place where Linux has always been strong!

So what do you do? do you give all those businesses and consumers a distro with 10 years of updates so they can be confident they can just slap that OS on and it'll just work? Do you tell Linus to STFU and develop an ABI so the drivers won't break if they DO upgrade? Do you focus on stability and bug fixes and QA to make Linux so damned rock solid frankly no body has to do forum hunts of CLI fixes? NOPE, you throw out BOTH major DEs when they are FINALLY becoming really stable for a blingapaloza that sends you back a good 7 years on the stability front and just to add to the fail replace the sound which again was finally starting to get stable with Pulseaudio which is barely at MSFT first release quality, which is to say it sucks! Oh and if all that weren't bad enough Canonical the ones that were SUPPOSED to be the ones making the noob friendly distro for the masses says "Hey slapping a cell phone UI on the desktop is a GREAT idea, lets do that!" and makes their distro even more of a failwhale than Win 8, which is quite an accomplishment!

I swear the current OS situation reminds me of that old Monty Python skit where the upper class twits couldn't even shoot themselves correctly because they were too fricking stupid and I'm not alone in feeling this way. hell even Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols who is the biggest linTroll and the flipside to the Thurott Wintroll hates the new UIs and for HIM to say anything nasty about Linux is unheard of!

C'mon Linux community, you are better than this I know you are. its obvious the Linux devs are gonna ignore you unless you have a royal screaming shitfit so speak up already! We ALL know what's happening here, its as plain as the nose on your face, Apple released the iPhone and iPad and all the devs done lost their damned minds and are tripping all over themselves trying to come up with the "next iPad" and destroying their core strengths in the process. As someone who has been selling to consumers since before there even was a Windows i can tell you a few things about consumers and the desktop/laptop, 1.-Most of them have NO clue about all the bling bling crap you guys slap in there, and the few bits they know about they don't like. hell they were willing to put up with the Fisher price UI of XP right? all you need is to not make it fugly, maybe a nice metalli

You joke Mr AC but this kind of crazy is a prime example of why itch scratching and ignoring the users makes Linux a giant fail on the desktop.

I'm sure i'll get hate for not drinking the koolaid and joining the perception bubble but fuck it, I'm a frustrated retailer and this needs to be said. For the first time in history you are being given not one, not two, but THREE incredible gifts, its like the field has been cleared and you are being given a 200 yard head start on a 300 yard race and what do you do? promptly shoot yourselves in the foot and then plop down in the middle of the field to tweet about the latest idea you have for REALLY pissing the users off!

I mean you have your traditional nemesis run by the most incompetent CEO since Apple had the Pepsi and not only that but he's about to shoot his own company right in the face because he is so desperate to get into cell phones and tablets he's gonna force WinPhone on the desktop, which i predict will be the biggest failwhale since MSFT Bob, that's one, two you have the great XP dieoff giving you all these incredibly powerful machines that MSFT has priced themselves out of the running with, we are talking late P4s to early mid dual core desktops and laptops with 1gb+ of RAM and 40Gb+ of HDDs which is more than enough for Linux, and finally you have a population that NEVER BEFORE IN HISTORY does damned near everything online, the one place where Linux has always been strong!

So what do you do? do you give all those businesses and consumers a distro with 10 years of updates so they can be confident they can just slap that OS on and it'll just work? Do you tell Linus to STFU and develop an ABI so the drivers won't break if they DO upgrade? Do you focus on stability and bug fixes and QA to make Linux so damned rock solid frankly no body has to do forum hunts of CLI fixes? NOPE, you throw out BOTH major DEs when they are FINALLY becoming really stable for a blingapaloza that sends you back a good 7 years on the stability front and just to add to the fail replace the sound which again was finally starting to get stable with Pulseaudio which is barely at MSFT first release quality, which is to say it sucks! Oh and if all that weren't bad enough Canonical the ones that were SUPPOSED to be the ones making the noob friendly distro for the masses says "Hey slapping a cell phone UI on the desktop is a GREAT idea, lets do that!" and makes their distro even more of a failwhale than Win 8, which is quite an accomplishment!

I swear the current OS situation reminds me of that old Monty Python skit where the upper class twits couldn't even shoot themselves correctly because they were too fricking stupid and I'm not alone in feeling this way. hell even Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols who is the biggest linTroll and the flipside to the Thurott Wintroll hates the new UIs and for HIM to say anything nasty about Linux is unheard of!

C'mon Linux community, you are better than this I know you are. its obvious the Linux devs are gonna ignore you unless you have a royal screaming shitfit so speak up already! We ALL know what's happening here, its as plain as the nose on your face, Apple released the iPhone and iPad and all the devs done lost their damned minds and are tripping all over themselves trying to come up with the "next iPad" and destroying their core strengths in the process. As someone who has been selling to consumers since before there even was a Windows i can tell you a few things about consumers and the desktop/laptop, 1.-Most of them have NO clue about all the bling bling crap you guys slap in there, and the few bits they know about they don't like. hell they were willing to put up with the Fisher price UI of XP right? all you need is to not make it fugly, maybe a nice metalli

If you actually go to a Chinese factory you'll find the layout is something like this

1) 1% of the space is automated. There are pick and place machines, wave soldering machines and so on.

2) The other 99% is production lines. There are migrant workers from rural areas doing unskilled labour assembling things. There are also lots of them doing sorting - i.e. testing things and sending the bad ones back for rework. The rework is all manual too. Now my guess is that sorting and rework is what most of them are working on.

Now at this point you'll wonder - why is there so much rework going on? Actually it is often because the Brand - i.e. the end customer - put the product into production too early. So the process only works say 90%. So to manufacture you need to build the machines and test them and send back the 10% for rework. In a high wage country this would be a catastrophe. In a low wage one it's not too bad. So if you're a large and incompetent first world company, low wage is the way to go.

Incidentally if you're wondering why loading another OS works so poorly on a netbook it is because this process very tightly ties hardware and software. Sometimes hardware bugs are fixed in software and vice versa. So long as you use the OS the machine was designed for - and I don't just mean "Windows or MacOS" here, I mean "Windows 7 SP1 or later with KB245386 and KB245387 installed but not Windows 8" or "OS X 10.7.3 or 10.7.4" - it will work. If you load Linux or OS-X onto a machine which was not intended to run it, you basically have to do this yourself. Actually if you downgrade Vista to XP or upgrade Vista to Windows 7 it would be just the same.

You can see this here

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/foxconn-snubs-linux-users/2292

The ACPI tables were for Vista, XP, older Windows and Linux. Only the Windows ones were correct. Probably the Linux one was inherited from another project but not updated. The board only supported Windows officially. Actually Linux claims to be Windows to ACPI anyway

It's even worse with netbooks and a lot of notebooks since they pre-load an OS and only support that particular pre loaded version.

If you want to use hardware with a particular OS and have it work out of the box, buy hardware that officially supports that OS.

http://www.zdnet.com/debate/do-happier-chinese-workers-spell-the-end-of-affordable-tech-gadgets/6343317

Wow! Would like to share what you are smoking with the rest of us?

Yes, they injected G+ results in their search results. They did NOT however block results from anyone else like Twitter or Facebook from appearing. They were still in the results. Were G+ results returned with higher rankings? I don't know, never turned that on, and never used G+. Because of that, I never got back search results relating to G+ at all, and as far as I know you can still turn that off, so you don't get them either. I can see why Twitter and the others were butt-hurt about this, it cuts directly into THEIR money, but why are you? Don't like it, SWITCH IT OFF. It hardly constitutes evil to allow you to opt out of something.

(Modded in this story; not the same AC)

I do not use Google+ and I never even created an account (though I have been invited, which may have stupidly built an account for me), but it still tries to stuff the results into my feed even after I have turned it off; that is definitely bundling. Furthermore, it has been proven that Google+ is being given an enormous advantage over far more relevant services in Google's search results.

I have also never used a website that required Facebook to login. Not one. (That is different from using sites that offer it as a secondary login)

Maybe this thought will help all of us - and drive Linux DEs away from trying to do things people don't want ;-) http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/five-reasons-why-windows-8-will-be-dead-on-arrival/10275?tag=nl.e539

lollll...yeah, the technology is evolved to keep up with the evolution of technology.

But in America, you don't need to take all of the risks and spend all of that money anymore; the Patriot Act lets you stick "block boxes" in right at the cable heads.

Adobe have discontinued Flash for mobile browsers. Those technologies you mention make up its replacement.

Agreed! Just look at iCloud! It uses...uh...Windows Azure. In fact, Apple's spiffy new datacenter seems to have a combination of Mac OS X, IBM/AIX, Sun/Solaris, and Linux..