In this case, they only hurt them by threatening to sue over bogus patents when they were already down. But similar idea, no?
The only reason B&N was even able to attempt to fight MS in court is that B&N didn't require any 'preferred OEM' arrangements with MS in order to stay in business. Rather than air the details of the patents in question (there were leaks that hinted they were pretty lame), MS sensed an opportunity and bought their silence. Yeah, they didn't cause B&N's business to falter, but they did want them to base their next-gen tablets on an MS OS, which B&N had no interest in. And in any case, the MS vulture strategy worked for MS as intended. And BN bought some time.
So my ultimate point is that very few have the financial wherewithal to wait out Microsoft when they want to force your hand. They either force you by threatening to damage your MS-dependent business, by threatening to sue unless you pay them for stuff they don't really have valid rights to, or by standing by and watching you shoot yourself in the foot. In all those cases, the public loses.
And, oh, by the way. Barnes and Noble basically only 'shot themselves in the foot' by being an actual bookstore. Amazon competed unfairly for years by not charging sales tax that their customers actually owed - something B&N could not get away with due to the horrible mistake of operating actual stores. And then there was the silliness of the 'one click' patent. Amazon too has managed to succeed by being a bad actor on the assumption that the law wouldn't catch up with them until their competition was badly degraded - perhaps irrevocably...
And too many anti-tax ideologues think that's a good thing, simply because it involves a way around the 'evil' of paying taxes. But if you're going to be a Libertarian, at least insist on a level playing field. Fight taxes if you want, but not by cheering some who can cheat while others carry the freight.
Do you need root to add yourself to the 'wheel' group? if so, not a security hole. And the 'wheel' trick only works from the physical console - presumably intended for server machines kept under lock and key with other access security in place. Now if it's enabled by default on desktop systems, that'd be pretty nasty.
I can't see anybody using this feature except possible admins of access-restricted servers. But even for them, how hard is it to use sudo? It sounds like a pretty dumb, unnecessary feature.
Barnes and Noble were shaping up to test a few of em in court - then Microsoft sidled up and 'partnered' with them. That's another part of the MS modus operandi. Wait for a company who you've hurt to be on the ropes financially, and then offer to help if they'll kiss and make up. Happened with Apple and MS too.
They're not really open sourcing them. The Linux version's going to be some kind of collaboration with Ximian to extend their Mono implementation. Eventually they'll be marketing along the lines of "Now that you've chosen Azure, don't you want the real thing for your.NET platform - you can't trust those hippies to have implemented it right".
A developer in my group was asked to provide code from our system to another group for inclusion in their system. The code implements a complex algorithm that nobody quite understands (a PHD student at the time was trying to be impressive, and wrote up a 20+ page tech document to describe it). In any case, the code works, and they want to copy it.
So my boss comes back and says "the developer wants to know why this was written in C and not C#". Okay, I guess they're going for an all Microsoft solution, and I won't comment on whether or not that's a good, bad or indifferent choice (though you folks can...). My point is that the code in question was written before C# even existed, and while the offshore kid in the other group might not have known that, my boss certainly should have. So maybe what's left of.NET is a viable toolset to use to build "apps in the cloud" (did I mention that the other project is a complete rewrite of an existing system to be in the cloud - which i don't think is a particularly bad idea, btw). But maybe it's not. And obviously, the people deciding to use it probably have no idea even what.NET is (partially due to the Microsoft PR machine's history of not knowing what.NET was...).
But that's exactly his point. All organizations have sensitive data infrastructure these days - most do not have IT staff competent to actually manage it once everyone's connected to the internet. And the staff they have was getting cut to the bone before IT got outsourced to the cloud. So, unless you're as tech savvy as the cloud majors, your data's likely to be less secure in house. Of course, that assumes you're a big enough target for hackers to take an interest in you. If Sony can be cracked, you can bet you can be too. So if you're as conspicuous a target as a Sony, you're probably better off in the cloud than relying on your IT staff to protect you. Odds are they're not as good as Sony's staff...
Or, more likely, the company's merged a few times, so most of the IT folks got fired. And now the 2-3 people remaining are in a different location administering systems they're not familiar with.
When my company switched Manhattan offices last year (after a string of takeovers and mergers), they mandated that all servers be located in a cheaper New Jersey location - including file servers for the local network. Even with a pretty good amount of bandwidth between the two sites, the file servers are now essentially useless. I've resorted to doing all work on local copies on my desktop machine and then copying them to the servers for backup whenever I think I've changed enough stuff for it to be worth waiting 15 minutes for the copy operation. It was either that or wait 10 minutes every time I wanted to recompile a Windows app I work on. I suppose they could've hosted my dev environment on a Citrix box in New Jersey - except that all the Citrix stuff they have is in Kansas City.
These are New York only servers, and the New York office has a mostly-empty equipment room that houses the routers, phone system, etc. The only reason these servers are in New Jersey is that there's nobody left in the New York office to swap backup tapes every morning (and I guess there'd be some cost to arrange for offsite storage of those tapes). But they're probably paying me more to do my own backups than any real solution would cost.
No, but they're paying a monthly charge for the phone. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. The model is roping in the customer with low upfront costs that are more than made up for in a monthly charge. It doesn't matter whether the user is told that charge is for hardware, software or service. The point is that the user pays it and is still fooled into thinking the hardware is 'free'.
But they're not really subsidized. Unless you're on T-Mobile, you just pay for the phone on the installment plan. But see, you believed it - so people might believe that they're getting a free computer and only have to pay the cheap, $10/month Microsoft fee...
Microsoft will subsidize the laptops, so the OEM's can sell em dirt cheap (and stop the Chromebook 'menace'). They get their money back over the first year and then it's all profit from then on - if users can be made to overlook the monthly fee and bite on the low introductory price.
That's been working pretty well for the cellphone industry - not so well for cellphone consumers. I'm on a Nexus 4 through T-Mobile, so I've mostly avoided that hamster wheel, but there hasn't exactly been a stampede away from the 'get a new phone free every two years!!!' model.
I didn't say that Obama or Hillary wasn't in the pocket of business - though he's less so than mainstream Republicans (let alone the far right wing) are.
And, if by 'that UVA rape thing', you mean political correctness run amok, that's dumb, but it's not crazy. Making policy based on a literal belief in Noah's arc is crazy. Believing that 90+ percent of scientists are perpetrating a hoax on climate change is crazy. And, by the way, some more mainstream beliefs - like that lowering taxes always raises revenue, or that cutting corporate taxes will produce a lot of new jobs - are pretty crazy too. Evidence matters - or at least it should...
That's the point. Right wing - other than the anti-regulation buisness lapdog wing - is severe crazy. That's why they vote for the anti-regulation business lapdog wing's agenda...
I assume you're joking, but I'll bite. Chrome doesn't 'spy on you' and Mint doesn't either. They just pass your searches on to a search engine which does what search engines do (and only the paranoid would call that 'spying on you' - though information is retained). Ubuntu, in passing your stuff on to Amazon, is scarier.
The only 'nefarious' thing Mint is doing is attempting to find a way to fund their development by getting a commission on the ad revenues generated by the search engine they contract with to process searches. It's exactly what Mozilla used to do with Google and now is doing with Yahoo - and it's a pretty neat buisness model. Mozilla rakes in hundreds of millions a year from Google. Mint probably has a much smaller user base than Firefox, so their haul is likely pretty modest.
You can disable it. Not as obviously easy as it could be (but then again, that's how Mint pays to keep the lights on). But if you don't agree with the way their 'enhancing' search for you, you can switch to standard Google search - or anything else firefox supports. Or install Chromium or Chrome from the Mint repository.
Absolutely. When my company outsourced, they (a big public Co.) were preparing to dump our devision. Presumably the bottom line looked better that way for the sale. Anyway, the private equity firm that bought us had a 2 year IPO horizon right from the start - and an IPO 'story' that assumes huge systems will be rewritten 'in the cloud' over that 2 year period - of which 1 year has already passed. Breathtaking doesn't even begin to describe it.
I'm doubtful that our finance system does 'work well'. There was a lot of value in it to destroy, and that's making a few people very rich while it lasts. That's about the best you can say for it at this point.
There's one silver lining in all this bitching about needing more H-1 visas. The tech companies that can't find enough cheap labor in the US are still looking for labor in the US. They could find all the cheap labor they want as long as they're willing to outsource the jobs to India - but they've already tried that, and it doesn't work.
As one of the few remaining onshore resources in an outsourced company, I can attest to the horrible inefficiencies that outsourcing brings to a tech project. Sure, it's cheaper. Perhaps even by enough to account for all the extra process to manage the outsourced workers. But what isn't said in there is that nothing actually gets done. Our outsourced systems are gradually falling into unsupportability by a thousand bits of bad code put in by cheap offshore resources that don't have adequate guidance to get up to speed without doing damage - and aren't kept on the project long enough to ever finally do some productive work once they get up to speed.
The big guys either know this intuitively, or have tried outsourcing and know it from painful experience. Either way, asking for H-1 visas amounts to an admission that outsourcing tech jobs doesn't work. Now we just need the political will to tell them that paying crap wages isn't an option either.
It sounds like high-ups at the Mozilla Foundation are a bunch of usurpers that managed to take 'ownership' of an open source project and turn it into a cash cow for themselves. Not saying they didn't do a good job of popularizing Firefox back in the days when getting the general public to download a replacement browser for IE was a hard job. But it seems like that mission's been accomplished, and they're all too happy to simply coast as long as they can collect their outsize salaries.
Why don't you serious developers fork it then? And then go for your own Google - or Yahoo - or whatever deal.
Of course, while you were at work - in your brightly lit office full of computers, elevators, and other power guzzlers, the sun was shining as brightly as ever. You could've even charged your electric car in the parking lot...
And this whole "I got two boys to code it for me" thing reminds me of the Winklevoss brothers in "The Social Network". You don't have to be a girl to be a tech-illiterate tech entreprenuer...
You're missing my point. It's not "to share" at all. Yes, they have your data. And if you hate that they use that to send you targeted ads, well, then don't use gmail - or google search - or the rest. But don't go claiming that they're sharing the info they have - they're not. Microsoft wants you to think they are - so they can get you to switch to MS services - where they will collect exactly the same data and do the same things with it.
For the bazillionth time, Google is not "sharing all your data in the world". They are using your data in some very specific ways - and giving you free services in exchange. Those uses are relatively benign, as free internet services go, and they do not include sharing with any third parties.
For all the paranoia about cloud services eating your privacy, the one place where they're a no-brainer is as paid services targeting corporations. The cloud itself, in this case, could be hosted by the corporation - but in any case, it wouldn't be ad-funded, and there's no reason to think that a hosting organization would snoop on content they're paid not to snoop on.
But in this case step 3 ("is not perceived as useful...") has some entrenched interests helping to muddy the waters. Turns out there's a lot of software that's been written for the traditional desktop. Much of that is tied to a back-end database, and would be much easier to deploy and support if it were rewritten to live in the cloud. But many of these systems are extremely complex, and those rewrites are expensive. Until a viable competitor comes out with a cloud-based alternative, vendors try to justify their client-server wares based on their robust features - playing down their mediocre performance and abysmal supportability. In the face of the new-found popularity of cloud app architecture, some have tried to pass off Citrix server farms as 'the cloud'. Good luck with that...
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In this case, they only hurt them by threatening to sue over bogus patents when they were already down. But similar idea, no?
The only reason B&N was even able to attempt to fight MS in court is that B&N didn't require any 'preferred OEM' arrangements with MS in order to stay in business. Rather than air the details of the patents in question (there were leaks that hinted they were pretty lame), MS sensed an opportunity and bought their silence. Yeah, they didn't cause B&N's business to falter, but they did want them to base their next-gen tablets on an MS OS, which B&N had no interest in. And in any case, the MS vulture strategy worked for MS as intended. And BN bought some time.
So my ultimate point is that very few have the financial wherewithal to wait out Microsoft when they want to force your hand. They either force you by threatening to damage your MS-dependent business, by threatening to sue unless you pay them for stuff they don't really have valid rights to, or by standing by and watching you shoot yourself in the foot. In all those cases, the public loses.
And, oh, by the way. Barnes and Noble basically only 'shot themselves in the foot' by being an actual bookstore. Amazon competed unfairly for years by not charging sales tax that their customers actually owed - something B&N could not get away with due to the horrible mistake of operating actual stores. And then there was the silliness of the 'one click' patent. Amazon too has managed to succeed by being a bad actor on the assumption that the law wouldn't catch up with them until their competition was badly degraded - perhaps irrevocably...
And too many anti-tax ideologues think that's a good thing, simply because it involves a way around the 'evil' of paying taxes. But if you're going to be a Libertarian, at least insist on a level playing field. Fight taxes if you want, but not by cheering some who can cheat while others carry the freight.
Do you need root to add yourself to the 'wheel' group? if so, not a security hole. And the 'wheel' trick only works from the physical console - presumably intended for server machines kept under lock and key with other access security in place. Now if it's enabled by default on desktop systems, that'd be pretty nasty.
I can't see anybody using this feature except possible admins of access-restricted servers. But even for them, how hard is it to use sudo? It sounds like a pretty dumb, unnecessary feature.
Barnes and Noble were shaping up to test a few of em in court - then Microsoft sidled up and 'partnered' with them. That's another part of the MS modus operandi. Wait for a company who you've hurt to be on the ropes financially, and then offer to help if they'll kiss and make up. Happened with Apple and MS too.
They're not really open sourcing them. The Linux version's going to be some kind of collaboration with Ximian to extend their Mono implementation. Eventually they'll be marketing along the lines of "Now that you've chosen Azure, don't you want the real thing for your .NET platform - you can't trust those hippies to have implemented it right".
A developer in my group was asked to provide code from our system to another group for inclusion in their system. The code implements a complex algorithm that nobody quite understands (a PHD student at the time was trying to be impressive, and wrote up a 20+ page tech document to describe it). In any case, the code works, and they want to copy it.
So my boss comes back and says "the developer wants to know why this was written in C and not C#". Okay, I guess they're going for an all Microsoft solution, and I won't comment on whether or not that's a good, bad or indifferent choice (though you folks can...). My point is that the code in question was written before C# even existed, and while the offshore kid in the other group might not have known that, my boss certainly should have. So maybe what's left of .NET is a viable toolset to use to build "apps in the cloud" (did I mention that the other project is a complete rewrite of an existing system to be in the cloud - which i don't think is a particularly bad idea, btw). But maybe it's not. And obviously, the people deciding to use it probably have no idea even what .NET is (partially due to the Microsoft PR machine's history of not knowing what .NET was...).
But that's exactly his point. All organizations have sensitive data infrastructure these days - most do not have IT staff competent to actually manage it once everyone's connected to the internet. And the staff they have was getting cut to the bone before IT got outsourced to the cloud. So, unless you're as tech savvy as the cloud majors, your data's likely to be less secure in house. Of course, that assumes you're a big enough target for hackers to take an interest in you. If Sony can be cracked, you can bet you can be too. So if you're as conspicuous a target as a Sony, you're probably better off in the cloud than relying on your IT staff to protect you. Odds are they're not as good as Sony's staff...
Or, more likely, the company's merged a few times, so most of the IT folks got fired. And now the 2-3 people remaining are in a different location administering systems they're not familiar with.
When my company switched Manhattan offices last year (after a string of takeovers and mergers), they mandated that all servers be located in a cheaper New Jersey location - including file servers for the local network. Even with a pretty good amount of bandwidth between the two sites, the file servers are now essentially useless. I've resorted to doing all work on local copies on my desktop machine and then copying them to the servers for backup whenever I think I've changed enough stuff for it to be worth waiting 15 minutes for the copy operation. It was either that or wait 10 minutes every time I wanted to recompile a Windows app I work on. I suppose they could've hosted my dev environment on a Citrix box in New Jersey - except that all the Citrix stuff they have is in Kansas City.
These are New York only servers, and the New York office has a mostly-empty equipment room that houses the routers, phone system, etc. The only reason these servers are in New Jersey is that there's nobody left in the New York office to swap backup tapes every morning (and I guess there'd be some cost to arrange for offsite storage of those tapes). But they're probably paying me more to do my own backups than any real solution would cost.
No, but they're paying a monthly charge for the phone. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. The model is roping in the customer with low upfront costs that are more than made up for in a monthly charge. It doesn't matter whether the user is told that charge is for hardware, software or service. The point is that the user pays it and is still fooled into thinking the hardware is 'free'.
But they're not really subsidized. Unless you're on T-Mobile, you just pay for the phone on the installment plan. But see, you believed it - so people might believe that they're getting a free computer and only have to pay the cheap, $10/month Microsoft fee...
Or Microsoft goes into the hardware business and uses the Apple free OS model... Make way for the Linux OEM's if that ever happens.
Microsoft will subsidize the laptops, so the OEM's can sell em dirt cheap (and stop the Chromebook 'menace'). They get their money back over the first year and then it's all profit from then on - if users can be made to overlook the monthly fee and bite on the low introductory price.
That's been working pretty well for the cellphone industry - not so well for cellphone consumers. I'm on a Nexus 4 through T-Mobile, so I've mostly avoided that hamster wheel, but there hasn't exactly been a stampede away from the 'get a new phone free every two years!!!' model.
Windows version upgrades will need to be made a lot smoother if they're gonna expect hundreds of millions of users to apply them every year.
I didn't say that Obama or Hillary wasn't in the pocket of business - though he's less so than mainstream Republicans (let alone the far right wing) are.
And, if by 'that UVA rape thing', you mean political correctness run amok, that's dumb, but it's not crazy. Making policy based on a literal belief in Noah's arc is crazy. Believing that 90+ percent of scientists are perpetrating a hoax on climate change is crazy. And, by the way, some more mainstream beliefs - like that lowering taxes always raises revenue, or that cutting corporate taxes will produce a lot of new jobs - are pretty crazy too. Evidence matters - or at least it should...
That's the point. Right wing - other than the anti-regulation buisness lapdog wing - is severe crazy. That's why they vote for the anti-regulation business lapdog wing's agenda...
I assume you're joking, but I'll bite. Chrome doesn't 'spy on you' and Mint doesn't either. They just pass your searches on to a search engine which does what search engines do (and only the paranoid would call that 'spying on you' - though information is retained). Ubuntu, in passing your stuff on to Amazon, is scarier.
The only 'nefarious' thing Mint is doing is attempting to find a way to fund their development by getting a commission on the ad revenues generated by the search engine they contract with to process searches. It's exactly what Mozilla used to do with Google and now is doing with Yahoo - and it's a pretty neat buisness model. Mozilla rakes in hundreds of millions a year from Google. Mint probably has a much smaller user base than Firefox, so their haul is likely pretty modest.
You can disable it. Not as obviously easy as it could be (but then again, that's how Mint pays to keep the lights on). But if you don't agree with the way their 'enhancing' search for you, you can switch to standard Google search - or anything else firefox supports. Or install Chromium or Chrome from the Mint repository.
Absolutely. When my company outsourced, they (a big public Co.) were preparing to dump our devision. Presumably the bottom line looked better that way for the sale. Anyway, the private equity firm that bought us had a 2 year IPO horizon right from the start - and an IPO 'story' that assumes huge systems will be rewritten 'in the cloud' over that 2 year period - of which 1 year has already passed. Breathtaking doesn't even begin to describe it.
I'm doubtful that our finance system does 'work well'. There was a lot of value in it to destroy, and that's making a few people very rich while it lasts. That's about the best you can say for it at this point.
There's one silver lining in all this bitching about needing more H-1 visas. The tech companies that can't find enough cheap labor in the US are still looking for labor in the US. They could find all the cheap labor they want as long as they're willing to outsource the jobs to India - but they've already tried that, and it doesn't work.
As one of the few remaining onshore resources in an outsourced company, I can attest to the horrible inefficiencies that outsourcing brings to a tech project. Sure, it's cheaper. Perhaps even by enough to account for all the extra process to manage the outsourced workers. But what isn't said in there is that nothing actually gets done. Our outsourced systems are gradually falling into unsupportability by a thousand bits of bad code put in by cheap offshore resources that don't have adequate guidance to get up to speed without doing damage - and aren't kept on the project long enough to ever finally do some productive work once they get up to speed.
The big guys either know this intuitively, or have tried outsourcing and know it from painful experience. Either way, asking for H-1 visas amounts to an admission that outsourcing tech jobs doesn't work. Now we just need the political will to tell them that paying crap wages isn't an option either.
It sounds like high-ups at the Mozilla Foundation are a bunch of usurpers that managed to take 'ownership' of an open source project and turn it into a cash cow for themselves. Not saying they didn't do a good job of popularizing Firefox back in the days when getting the general public to download a replacement browser for IE was a hard job. But it seems like that mission's been accomplished, and they're all too happy to simply coast as long as they can collect their outsize salaries.
Why don't you serious developers fork it then? And then go for your own Google - or Yahoo - or whatever deal.
Is this payment only for search from the default Firefox 'home page'? Or do they get payed for searches from the location bar?
Of course, while you were at work - in your brightly lit office full of computers, elevators, and other power guzzlers, the sun was shining as brightly as ever. You could've even charged your electric car in the parking lot...
And this whole "I got two boys to code it for me" thing reminds me of the Winklevoss brothers in "The Social Network". You don't have to be a girl to be a tech-illiterate tech entreprenuer...
You're missing my point. It's not "to share" at all. Yes, they have your data. And if you hate that they use that to send you targeted ads, well, then don't use gmail - or google search - or the rest. But don't go claiming that they're sharing the info they have - they're not. Microsoft wants you to think they are - so they can get you to switch to MS services - where they will collect exactly the same data and do the same things with it.
For the bazillionth time, Google is not "sharing all your data in the world". They are using your data in some very specific ways - and giving you free services in exchange. Those uses are relatively benign, as free internet services go, and they do not include sharing with any third parties.
g. cloud services
For all the paranoia about cloud services eating your privacy, the one place where they're a no-brainer is as paid services targeting corporations. The cloud itself, in this case, could be hosted by the corporation - but in any case, it wouldn't be ad-funded, and there's no reason to think that a hosting organization would snoop on content they're paid not to snoop on.
But in this case step 3 ("is not perceived as useful...") has some entrenched interests helping to muddy the waters. Turns out there's a lot of software that's been written for the traditional desktop. Much of that is tied to a back-end database, and would be much easier to deploy and support if it were rewritten to live in the cloud. But many of these systems are extremely complex, and those rewrites are expensive. Until a viable competitor comes out with a cloud-based alternative, vendors try to justify their client-server wares based on their robust features - playing down their mediocre performance and abysmal supportability. In the face of the new-found popularity of cloud app architecture, some have tried to pass off Citrix server farms as 'the cloud'. Good luck with that...