I will never, ever, forgive them for their short-sightedness in shutting down Reader. We told them at the time that they were shutting down a massive community of geeks & influencers, but they went ahead and did it anyway. A massive strategic mistake.
Maybe I was naive, but I never really thought about the prospect of Google shutting down a service I relied on - sure they shut down some services that had almost zero usage, but a server *I* relied on? No, Google would never do that. It's used by geeks and technologists for goodness sake, Google was *our* company.
Then the hammer fell - Reader was a service I accessed every half hour of every day. I know we some good alternatives have belatedly emerged (well, one), but the problem remained - how could I ever recommend a Google service to anyone in the future? How could I recommend gmail to my family when I wasn't sure it would vanish overnight because Google believes we were doing email wrong? How could I recommend to my boss that we move some critical infrastructure to App Engine, when Google had shown it was willing to shut down heavily used services because they just weren't quite big enough? Maybe all the snarly comments about fancy food and foosball tables were right all along - Google was staffed with kids and academics who had no idea how the real world worked.
Absolutely true. Companies these days are like 9th century coastal villages in Europe. Snakeoil vendors are selling magic potions and amulets to the village inhabitants promising to ward off evil. These villages may have some security people. These security people might be diligent and hard working, but when a horde of vikings appear on the horizon there is little or nothing they can do.
We need to withdraw to fortified castles and towns. Centralise our security resources and, instead of making holes all over the corporate networks, ensure that there is only one way in and out. Monitor everything going in and out of the corporate network through a single chokepoint. If you want to set up your business outside the fortified walls, you take your chances. It won't stop all attackers, but it will stop most.
There simply isn't enough good security people, and those that are out there are scattered working with multiple companies - the attackers have all the advantages at the moment and it is only getting worse.
They should have waited till they had more of their customer base tied into Office 365, and then raised prices. As it is, many companies I know are wavering between going with an all Microsoft future (along with 365), or going with a mixed Linux/MS environment. This will make that decision easier.
You'd be some idiot to build a business on the back of a service that might disappear. At least with the IaaS providers you have some hope of being able to recover should the service provider decide they no longer want to support their service, because you can shift your application to new infrastructure. If you're tied into the Google world-view, you're only a short blogpost away from seeing your business threatened.
This. This is the biggest thing for me. It's not like this was a niche product, Google had built _the_ best RSS reader and it in turn had become the core infrastructure for many products and services. I use Reader on the web, I use it on my Mac, I use it on my phone. I'm not naive, but I guess I expected that only super-niche products would ever be shut down by Google. I'm disgusted, this will make me much more wary of using any Internet service in the future, particularly one from Google.
Ubuntu might write off people who oppose this change as a small minority of geeks, and the vast majority of people won't care.
Which is true in the short term. Unfortunately as history has proved repeatedly, the "vast majority of people" go to a geek for advice. That might be a family member, a trusted friend or some geek writing something online. They might not understand what the issue is, but over time they will hear the geek background noise about what Ubuntu is doing. In the Medium to Long term, Ubuntu is in trouble if they continue down this track.
MS have just completely screwed over Nokia. Very few people are going to buy a new Nokia now until WP8 appears, so Nokia have no business for the next 6 months. I'm not sure they can survive that long with no income.
I agree. They appear to be betting the company on Windows 8 in an attempt to capture the market for touch enabled devices, and are willing to risk alienating millions of their customers as a consequence. Why they wouldn't follow through on that strategy by all but giving away the RT licenses is beyond me. Windows 8 makes it clear that they are not willing to settle on becoming merely niche players in this market, whereas high pricing on licenses seems to indicate the reverse.
Perhaps we have two parts of the company engaging in competing strategies, in which case responsibility for the mess would fall very squarely on Ballmer and senior management who should be setting the overall company strategy.
You can’t completely break something for a long time and expect people to jump right back when you fix it. I, like many others, had to go elsewhere when kde3 became impractical to keep running and kde4 was completely broken.
+1 this. I'm sick of distributions which I've gotten used to and liked who suddenly throw themselves (and my productivity) off a GUI cliff. I don't care if you're putting in place the building blocks for some super duper new GUI, I use my computers to get things done and don't like having a "WTF?" moment when I upgrade.
I used and really liked KDE for a long time, and along came 4.x . Suddenly I was left with a half working GUI, and was told that "well you shouldn't have upgraded should you?" and "it'll get better when we fix all the bugs". This is my problem now is it?
MS are about to run into the same issue with Windows 8. Taking a well known and, maybe not loved but tolerated, GUI paradigm of a desktop and discarding it. It's going to cause chaos and resentment amongst their user community, many of whom will look at alternatives.
I greatly respect everyone who contributes to open source, and I know you put your heart and soul into it, but for most of us our computers are not toys that we sit and tinker with endlessly to display snazzy new GUI effects, they are the tools we use to get things done. Once you lose the trust of the user that they can rely on you to provide a stable and easy to use OS you will have an incredibly hard job getting them back.
In fairness I think even a few bishops administered a sharp belt of the crozier to the dopy religious eejits who were proclaiming it was a miracle.
This happened the last time we had a recession, I'm surprised it hasn't started happening again. We love a good recession us Catholics we do, it's a truly miserable time and all the better for it.
Why would I go to another site, when the greatest source I've ever found for an exchange of real world technical opinions on enterprise IT is found right here? I might as well be reading one of the industry magazines if I wanted PR blurb.
I'm intrigued to see Diamandis involved, a guy who has dedicated a lot of effort to driving technological progress. It got me thinking that perhaps the objective here is less to actually create this technology themselves but perhaps to force the hand of governments and even some companies with large pockets.
The potential ROI for the first group (or country) who successfully builds a fleet of robotic miners could be..err.. astronomical. I imagine there's a number of smart people in government ministries around the world (China and Japan in particular, perhaps the US) who would not like to see this group get a head start on their nation. It could force these government's hand and force them to invest them in this technology, perhaps it might even spark a new space race.
If you were a billionaire interested in space, and unhappy with the cutbacks in funding of exploration, what better way to force governments to reverse course than by threatening to deprive these governments of the massive profits that may be available?
If Google implements a verified identity solution, this would potentially allow them to leverage G+ as an authentication option for online business. Your G+ account could become your SSO access to your financial accounts.
I loved Nokia, they worked hard to make good quality phones with advanced features. I'd reluctantly switched to iPhone about 3 years ago as Nokia fell behind on the Smartphone race, but I never loved Apple and was ready to make the move when a good competitor arrived. Microsoft are not ready for the new era, they are the Mubaraks of the IT world. Nokia is finished, it might sell a few million phones but will never again excite consumers or enthuse developers - I feel really really sad & sorry for enthusiastic Nokia employees.
Just because a length of rope can be used for strangling someone, that doesn't mean that the rope manufacturer should be held liable. Just because you can break someone's skull with a hammer, that doesn't mean the manufacturer can be held responsible.
However if the RFQ comes in from the "Ministry for hanging and bashing skulls with rocks" you would be well aware of what the potential use will be. But I take your point, and agree with it only as long as the company supplying the equipment has a reasonable expectation that the equipment will be used in a non harmful manner and haven't turned a blind eye to other uses.
If it is proven that certain companies, who only exist because of our Western culture and governance systems, supplied equipment which they knew would be used for the purposes of torturing or killing people by a despotic regime, I hope there can be some sanction.
Businesses in Europe haven't cottoned on to creating a Fox News equivalent, which would accuse politicians of being "liberal muslims!!!" every time they bring in new regulation for business.
At least it would give you some time to prepare, both yourself and your loved ones. If I found I had Alzheimers, I would want to make sure that I enjoyed the next few years and ensured that my family were taken care of. I'm sure depression would accompany a diagnosis, but for many people the certainty of knowing is ultimately a relief.
From my perspective, English is not a static language and is all the better for it. There is no equivalent of an "Acadamie Francaise" imposing rigid rules and instead these rules develop through use and mis-use. "Old English" from a 1000 years ago is mostly unintelligible to modern day English speakers.
Slashdot Mirror
I will never, ever, forgive them for their short-sightedness in shutting down Reader. We told them at the time that they were shutting down a massive community of geeks & influencers, but they went ahead and did it anyway. A massive strategic mistake.
Maybe I was naive, but I never really thought about the prospect of Google shutting down a service I relied on - sure they shut down some services that had almost zero usage, but a server *I* relied on? No, Google would never do that. It's used by geeks and technologists for goodness sake, Google was *our* company.
Then the hammer fell - Reader was a service I accessed every half hour of every day. I know we some good alternatives have belatedly emerged (well, one), but the problem remained - how could I ever recommend a Google service to anyone in the future? How could I recommend gmail to my family when I wasn't sure it would vanish overnight because Google believes we were doing email wrong? How could I recommend to my boss that we move some critical infrastructure to App Engine, when Google had shown it was willing to shut down heavily used services because they just weren't quite big enough? Maybe all the snarly comments about fancy food and foosball tables were right all along - Google was staffed with kids and academics who had no idea how the real world worked.
Absolutely true. Companies these days are like 9th century coastal villages in Europe. Snakeoil vendors are selling magic potions and amulets to the village inhabitants promising to ward off evil. These villages may have some security people. These security people might be diligent and hard working, but when a horde of vikings appear on the horizon there is little or nothing they can do.
We need to withdraw to fortified castles and towns. Centralise our security resources and, instead of making holes all over the corporate networks, ensure that there is only one way in and out. Monitor everything going in and out of the corporate network through a single chokepoint. If you want to set up your business outside the fortified walls, you take your chances. It won't stop all attackers, but it will stop most.
There simply isn't enough good security people, and those that are out there are scattered working with multiple companies - the attackers have all the advantages at the moment and it is only getting worse.
They should have waited till they had more of their customer base tied into Office 365, and then raised prices. As it is, many companies I know are wavering between going with an all Microsoft future (along with 365), or going with a mixed Linux/MS environment. This will make that decision easier.
You can walk around today with a video camera in your hand pointing at people. There's nothing stopping you. Try it and let us know how you get on.
You'd be some idiot to build a business on the back of a service that might disappear. At least with the IaaS providers you have some hope of being able to recover should the service provider decide they no longer want to support their service, because you can shift your application to new infrastructure. If you're tied into the Google world-view, you're only a short blogpost away from seeing your business threatened.
This. This is the biggest thing for me. It's not like this was a niche product, Google had built _the_ best RSS reader and it in turn had become the core infrastructure for many products and services. I use Reader on the web, I use it on my Mac, I use it on my phone. I'm not naive, but I guess I expected that only super-niche products would ever be shut down by Google. I'm disgusted, this will make me much more wary of using any Internet service in the future, particularly one from Google.
Ubuntu might write off people who oppose this change as a small minority of geeks, and the vast majority of people won't care.
Which is true in the short term. Unfortunately as history has proved repeatedly, the "vast majority of people" go to a geek for advice. That might be a family member, a trusted friend or some geek writing something online. They might not understand what the issue is, but over time they will hear the geek background noise about what Ubuntu is doing. In the Medium to Long term, Ubuntu is in trouble if they continue down this track.
MS have just completely screwed over Nokia. Very few people are going to buy a new Nokia now until WP8 appears, so Nokia have no business for the next 6 months. I'm not sure they can survive that long with no income.
I agree. They appear to be betting the company on Windows 8 in an attempt to capture the market for touch enabled devices, and are willing to risk alienating millions of their customers as a consequence. Why they wouldn't follow through on that strategy by all but giving away the RT licenses is beyond me. Windows 8 makes it clear that they are not willing to settle on becoming merely niche players in this market, whereas high pricing on licenses seems to indicate the reverse.
Perhaps we have two parts of the company engaging in competing strategies, in which case responsibility for the mess would fall very squarely on Ballmer and senior management who should be setting the overall company strategy.
You can’t completely break something for a long time and expect people to jump right back when you fix it. I, like many others, had to go elsewhere when kde3 became impractical to keep running and kde4 was completely broken.
+1 this. I'm sick of distributions which I've gotten used to and liked who suddenly throw themselves (and my productivity) off a GUI cliff. I don't care if you're putting in place the building blocks for some super duper new GUI, I use my computers to get things done and don't like having a "WTF?" moment when I upgrade.
I used and really liked KDE for a long time, and along came 4.x . Suddenly I was left with a half working GUI, and was told that "well you shouldn't have upgraded should you?" and "it'll get better when we fix all the bugs". This is my problem now is it?
MS are about to run into the same issue with Windows 8. Taking a well known and, maybe not loved but tolerated, GUI paradigm of a desktop and discarding it. It's going to cause chaos and resentment amongst their user community, many of whom will look at alternatives.
I greatly respect everyone who contributes to open source, and I know you put your heart and soul into it, but for most of us our computers are not toys that we sit and tinker with endlessly to display snazzy new GUI effects, they are the tools we use to get things done. Once you lose the trust of the user that they can rely on you to provide a stable and easy to use OS you will have an incredibly hard job getting them back.
You've never heard of Myles na gCopaleen/Flann O'Brien? Seriously? Ask some of your friends have they heard of him, I guarantee most will.
In fairness I think even a few bishops administered a sharp belt of the crozier to the dopy religious eejits who were proclaiming it was a miracle.
This happened the last time we had a recession, I'm surprised it hasn't started happening again. We love a good recession us Catholics we do, it's a truly miserable time and all the better for it.
Next thing "science" will probably try and explain moving statues.
Why would I go to another site, when the greatest source I've ever found for an exchange of real world technical opinions on enterprise IT is found right here? I might as well be reading one of the industry magazines if I wanted PR blurb.
I officially declare Internet Bubble 2 as confirmed!
I'm intrigued to see Diamandis involved, a guy who has dedicated a lot of effort to driving technological progress. It got me thinking that perhaps the objective here is less to actually create this technology themselves but perhaps to force the hand of governments and even some companies with large pockets.
The potential ROI for the first group (or country) who successfully builds a fleet of robotic miners could be..err.. astronomical. I imagine there's a number of smart people in government ministries around the world (China and Japan in particular, perhaps the US) who would not like to see this group get a head start on their nation. It could force these government's hand and force them to invest them in this technology, perhaps it might even spark a new space race.
If you were a billionaire interested in space, and unhappy with the cutbacks in funding of exploration, what better way to force governments to reverse course than by threatening to deprive these governments of the massive profits that may be available?
If Google implements a verified identity solution, this would potentially allow them to leverage G+ as an authentication option for online business. Your G+ account could become your SSO access to your financial accounts.
I loved Nokia, they worked hard to make good quality phones with advanced features. I'd reluctantly switched to iPhone about 3 years ago as Nokia fell behind on the Smartphone race, but I never loved Apple and was ready to make the move when a good competitor arrived. Microsoft are not ready for the new era, they are the Mubaraks of the IT world. Nokia is finished, it might sell a few million phones but will never again excite consumers or enthuse developers - I feel really really sad & sorry for enthusiastic Nokia employees.
Just because a length of rope can be used for strangling someone, that doesn't mean that the rope manufacturer should be held liable. Just because you can break someone's skull with a hammer, that doesn't mean the manufacturer can be held responsible.
However if the RFQ comes in from the "Ministry for hanging and bashing skulls with rocks" you would be well aware of what the potential use will be. But I take your point, and agree with it only as long as the company supplying the equipment has a reasonable expectation that the equipment will be used in a non harmful manner and haven't turned a blind eye to other uses.
If it is proven that certain companies, who only exist because of our Western culture and governance systems, supplied equipment which they knew would be used for the purposes of torturing or killing people by a despotic regime, I hope there can be some sanction.
Businesses in Europe haven't cottoned on to creating a Fox News equivalent, which would accuse politicians of being "liberal muslims!!!" every time they bring in new regulation for business.
At least it would give you some time to prepare, both yourself and your loved ones. If I found I had Alzheimers, I would want to make sure that I enjoyed the next few years and ensured that my family were taken care of. I'm sure depression would accompany a diagnosis, but for many people the certainty of knowing is ultimately a relief.
That all depends on how the information was leaked/stolen. The "how" could be more important to Cisco's reputation than the "what".
Very true. Business users need an A4 page size device or there is little point.
From my perspective, English is not a static language and is all the better for it. There is no equivalent of an "Acadamie Francaise" imposing rigid rules and instead these rules develop through use and mis-use. "Old English" from a 1000 years ago is mostly unintelligible to modern day English speakers.
Have we become part of a Turing test?