But I'm surprised that we don't see more maneuvers like this. If Microsoft's reaction is so reliable, I'd expect a string of news like "General Motors eyeing Linux", "Walmart checking out RedHat" and so on. Usually, big companies are not shy about squeezing a supplier.
I'm sure Microsoft will offer something like Windows 7 Starter again if it looks like Android is getting too much market share. How successful that will be remains to be seen.
Don't get me wrong, there is a sort of shadow brain drain war going on here that for a long time the West had easily been winning. UK, Germany, USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it. And it was really really easy. And now Western leaders are kind of getting uncomfortable because, well, it's not really working in our favor anymore.
That sounds overly dramatic to me. I think it is merely the market at work, with countries like India and China becoming a bit more wealthy and paying higher wages. That makes it less attractive for the people there to leave their country to work in the USA.
The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries. A fake "massive shortage of STEM workers" is pretty much their only card so far.
I observe the same in Germany. Trade associations keep moaning about a lack of STEM workers, which seems to be as real as in the USA. That is, not at all. But the politicians swallow it and have repeatedly lowered the wage threshold over which a non-EU foreigner can be hired as "highly qualified specialist" under easier immigration rules.
The success of this strategy is mixed. Several years ago, the administration of Cancellor Schroeder started a campaign to hire cheap STEM workers from India. The results were pretty meager, as the Indians usually preferred the USA for its higher wages and lower language barrier (an educated Indian usually speaks English, German not so much). What we get though are STEM workers from the former Eastern bloc. The company I work for has almost 50% Russians in R&D.
Vanilla Ubuntu was on the way to being "the" distribution to use. Then they introduced Unity, and it seems to be about as popular as the Win 8 UI, at least among the Linux users I know. That certainly hurt Linux adoption:-(
Microsoft could have kept the desktop UI the same, and *added* additional support for tablet and mobile devices instead of insisting that all use cases are the same. Instead they deliberately chose to dumb down the UI for the desktop user.
Hence the speculation that Microsoft it trying to push the average user into getting accustomed to the Win8 UI, relying on their desktop dominance to force the new UI on users.
While that sounds like a cheap conspiracy theory, it is the only not-completely-braindead reason for pushing a tablet interface on the desktop I can imagine.
I don't mind some adaption, if it comes with a corresponding improvement in usability. In that, I already found the ribbon in MS Officed somewhat underwhelming:
Sure you can get used to it, and by now it actually feels marginally more user-friendly than the old UI. But it took me a year until I got to the break-even point. I call that a substantial relearning effort for very little gain.
So excuse me if I'm not all that eager to jump on the latest UI fad from Microsoft. What I have seen of the Windows 8 UI so far is not particular encouraging either. I doubt I would ever reach the point where I like it better than the Windows7 UI.
Speaking of graphics cards. The current console generation has kept us at a DirectX9 level for ages. Since most games tend to be either cross plattform or not very resource hungry to begin with, that is the level you actually needed. If you've got a Geforce 580 you will be good to go for some time even though upgrades have been available for some time now.
I guess that will change towards the end of the year, or in 2014 at the latest. Both Sony and Microsoft are getting close to release new consoles. Which will raise the resources avaliable to console games a lot. Based on what we know about the PS4, the new "normal" GPU demand for a cross platform release might be a Radeon HD 78xx or GeForce GTX 660. On the CPU side, multithreading seems to become a lot more important. The PS4 will launch with eight, individually relatively weak CPU cores. That thing really needs multithreaded game engines.
Time to add my two cents. In my last three PC purchases/builds, I've cared about two things: 1) A new machine has to be able to play current games. Not necessarily at the highest settings, but things should run with acceptable frame rates, if I reduce the graphics levels. 2) The TDP of CPU and GPU should not exceed 70W each, as that can IMHO be handled with not too loud and expensive air cooling.
Over the years, that led to the following setups: 2004: A P4 2.4GHz with 1GByte RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600 pro. Idle desktop power usage was around 80W, so the P4 was not that bad. I guess the very modest power consumption of the Radeon helped there;-) Games wise, X2:The Threat pushed this machine to its limits.
2007: The P4 was showing its age, so I got an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ EE (the "energy efficient" model because of the 70W rule) with 2 GByte RAM and a NVidia 8600GT. Again, idle desktop power usage was around 80W. A nice little system I still use as secondary PC.
2011: The Athlon 64 X2 was showing its age, so I got an Phenom II X4 910e (again, the "energy efficient" model because of the 70W rule) with 4 GByte RAM and a Radeon HD6670. Again, idle desktop power usage is around 80W. Maybe a teensy bit lower than in the old Athlon. Gaming performance is adequate, but it won't run Crysis at high detail levels. BTW I was sorely tempted to get an Intel "Sandy Bridge", only the fact that Intel supports ECC RAM only in expensive server hardware secured that sale for AMD. Call me paranoid, but I like the extra assurance against flipped bits:)
Overall, I found that if your computing requirements include occasional gaming with current titles, the power draw of your system will stay pretty constant over the years.
Even to some more technically educated end users it is not worthwhile. AFAIK Windows 8 has some genuine advantages, such as an improved scheduler that makes better use of AMD Bulldozer modules.
But that is not enough incentive for me to put up with the stupid new GUI...
If that's all, it should be possible to boot Win7 in some VESA mode and load the proper driver afterwards. Unless someone has decided to drop such unimportant ways of ensuring backwards compatibility;-)
I find the ribbon that Microsoft uses in many newer UIs does take some getting used to. My observations for the ribbon in Word 2010, which I got about 15 months ago at work:
The basic principle is not that strange - it is essentially a series of tabs (as known from Windows 3.1) that switch between different sets of UI widgets. But it does take some re-training because many functions are no longer found where a user of older versions expects them. On top of that, some icons have changed in ways I find rather un-intuitive. It usually took me a Google search to find out what to click in those cases.
This said, I agree the UI changes from Windows 7 to windows 8 seem even larger.
In this case, the original patent could not be granted because India's laws did not recognize patents on drugs at the time. Now India has passed laws recognizing patentable drugs, the company wanted a patent, and claimed one for the existing drug, unpatented because of previous laws, slightly changed.
In this case, a patent would have been reasonable.
Actually it would not have been reasonable, as the existing drug was public knowledge at the time drugs became patentable. As such, it counted as "prior art".
Your drug and process example also hints at a failure in the patent process:
35 U.S.C. 112 says
Specification. The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
The generic drug maker should be able to counter this by saying the generic drug is a copy of the old one, for which the patent has expired. If that doesn't work, the law is even more fucked up than I believed.
I cannot offer a study about multiple CEOs, but just consider Ron Sommer: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Sommer. Sorry, no English Wikipedia page about that critter. Summary by me: -1995 to 2002: CEO of Deutsche Telekom, abysmal financial performance. Resigned because of "lack of mutual trust" between him and the supervisory board, received "only" 11.6 million Euros as severance package. -Today: Member of the Board of directors at Sistema, Motorola and Tata Consultancy Services.
The short notice on which he "pursued other interests" strongly suggests that it was due to the SimCity debacle. Also:
The Board has appointed Larry Probst as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition and to lead EA's executive team while the Board conducts a search for a permanent CEO.
Usually it is known several months in advance if a CEO will have his contract renewed, and if not, a new "permanent CEO" can be found without interim solutions.
Since we're talking a midrange (relatively cheap) product here, a huge socket like the 2011 might be prohibitive in terms of cost.
So what about a PC mainboard in PS4 style, with 8GByte GDDR5 RAM? CPU and RAM might have to be soldered in, but it would solve the bandwidth problem and 8GByte RAM seem adequate for most things you would do on a midrange PC...
Other games are already moving towards being designed for more parallel processing. For instance X:Rebirth by Egosoft, currently in development. The CEO said in an interview that a quad core is recommended, they will have at least three main threads and several smaller ones. So the days of well scaling games may be closer than you think.
A consumer protection law for software is what you want. Too bad we all agree to waive any expectations of warranty once we've agreed to the license agreement which few people actually read.
Legal limitations on "terms and conditions" is what you need.
German law has those, and most lawyers seem to agree that the typical shrink-wrap license agreement is covered by them. A shrink-wrap license agreement that says you waive any expectations of warranty would likely be unenforcable here.
Maybe in the console world. In PC gaming, LAN multiplayer used to be common, today it is rare in new games. Maybe the indie scene will bring it back at some point, but right now in most games multiplayer means internet.
It only takes a bit of patience: Don't rush out and buy the game on release day. Give it a few weeks, then read some user reviews on independent forums (not the official ones, as some publishers censor bad feedback). If those reviews look like the Amazon feedback for Sim City, stay away;-)
If so, he should not have too much problems with me (ignoring for a moment that I'm not a regular on his site). I'm currently doing two things to curb excessively annoying ads and tracking: 1) I have installed the NoScript add-on in SeaMonkey, which makes running JavaScript opt-in on a per website basis. That tends to kill JavaScript driven ads, as I will allow JavaScript only to the extent needed to see the content I'm interested in. 2) I tell my browser not to accept third-party cookies.
So if a web site serves ads as HTML content in some kind of side bar, it will most likely not be blocked by my setup. Annoying scripts that plaster popups all over the content, however, will be stopped. If a web site operator has a problem with that, so be it.
Several years ago, Outlook did something similar with Visual Basic scripts attached to a mail. Loading the email into the preview window was sufficient to trigger the script. IMHO the greatest security fuckup in the history of Microsoft (and Autorun on CDs was the second biggest).
Slashdot Mirror
You're probably right.
But I'm surprised that we don't see more maneuvers like this. If Microsoft's reaction is so reliable, I'd expect a string of news like "General Motors eyeing Linux", "Walmart checking out RedHat" and so on. Usually, big companies are not shy about squeezing a supplier.
I'm sure Microsoft will offer something like Windows 7 Starter again if it looks like Android is getting too much market share. How successful that will be remains to be seen.
Don't get me wrong, there is a sort of shadow brain drain war going on here that for a long time the West had easily been winning. UK, Germany, USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it. And it was really really easy. And now Western leaders are kind of getting uncomfortable because, well, it's not really working in our favor anymore.
That sounds overly dramatic to me. I think it is merely the market at work, with countries like India and China becoming a bit more wealthy and paying higher wages. That makes it less attractive for the people there to leave their country to work in the USA.
The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries. A fake "massive shortage of STEM workers" is pretty much their only card so far.
I observe the same in Germany. Trade associations keep moaning about a lack of STEM workers, which seems to be as real as in the USA. That is, not at all. But the politicians swallow it and have repeatedly lowered the wage threshold over which a non-EU foreigner can be hired as "highly qualified specialist" under easier immigration rules.
The success of this strategy is mixed. Several years ago, the administration of Cancellor Schroeder started a campaign to hire cheap STEM workers from India. The results were pretty meager, as the Indians usually preferred the USA for its higher wages and lower language barrier (an educated Indian usually speaks English, German not so much). What we get though are STEM workers from the former Eastern bloc. The company I work for has almost 50% Russians in R&D.
Vanilla Ubuntu was on the way to being "the" distribution to use. Then they introduced Unity, and it seems to be about as popular as the Win 8 UI, at least among the Linux users I know. That certainly hurt Linux adoption :-(
Microsoft could have kept the desktop UI the same, and *added* additional support for tablet and mobile devices instead of insisting that all use cases are the same. Instead they deliberately chose to dumb down the UI for the desktop user.
Hence the speculation that Microsoft it trying to push the average user into getting accustomed to the Win8 UI, relying on their desktop dominance to force the new UI on users.
While that sounds like a cheap conspiracy theory, it is the only not-completely-braindead reason for pushing a tablet interface on the desktop I can imagine.
I don't mind some adaption, if it comes with a corresponding improvement in usability. In that, I already found the ribbon in MS Officed somewhat underwhelming:
Sure you can get used to it, and by now it actually feels marginally more user-friendly than the old UI. But it took me a year until I got to the break-even point. I call that a substantial relearning effort for very little gain.
So excuse me if I'm not all that eager to jump on the latest UI fad from Microsoft. What I have seen of the Windows 8 UI so far is not particular encouraging either. I doubt I would ever reach the point where I like it better than the Windows7 UI.
There are still many games around that use only one or two cores. But the trend goes towards supporting more cores (Battlefield 3, Crysis3).
Speaking of graphics cards. The current console generation has kept us at a DirectX9 level for ages. Since most games tend to be either cross plattform or not very resource hungry to begin with, that is the level you actually needed. If you've got a Geforce 580 you will be good to go for some time even though upgrades have been available for some time now.
I guess that will change towards the end of the year, or in 2014 at the latest. Both Sony and Microsoft are getting close to release new consoles. Which will raise the resources avaliable to console games a lot.
Based on what we know about the PS4, the new "normal" GPU demand for a cross platform release might be a Radeon HD 78xx or GeForce GTX 660.
On the CPU side, multithreading seems to become a lot more important. The PS4 will launch with eight, individually relatively weak CPU cores. That thing really needs multithreaded game engines.
Time to add my two cents. In my last three PC purchases/builds, I've cared about two things:
1) A new machine has to be able to play current games. Not necessarily at the highest settings, but things should run with acceptable frame rates, if I reduce the graphics levels.
2) The TDP of CPU and GPU should not exceed 70W each, as that can IMHO be handled with not too loud and expensive air cooling.
Over the years, that led to the following setups: ;-)
2004: A P4 2.4GHz with 1GByte RAM and an ATI Radeon 9600 pro. Idle desktop power usage was around 80W, so the P4 was not that bad. I guess the very modest power consumption of the Radeon helped there
Games wise, X2:The Threat pushed this machine to its limits.
2007: The P4 was showing its age, so I got an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ EE (the "energy efficient" model because of the 70W rule) with 2 GByte RAM and a NVidia 8600GT. Again, idle desktop power usage was around 80W. A nice little system I still use as secondary PC.
2011: The Athlon 64 X2 was showing its age, so I got an Phenom II X4 910e (again, the "energy efficient" model because of the 70W rule) with 4 GByte RAM and a Radeon HD6670. Again, idle desktop power usage is around 80W. Maybe a teensy bit lower than in the old Athlon. Gaming performance is adequate, but it won't run Crysis at high detail levels. :)
BTW I was sorely tempted to get an Intel "Sandy Bridge", only the fact that Intel supports ECC RAM only in expensive server hardware secured that sale for AMD. Call me paranoid, but I like the extra assurance against flipped bits
Overall, I found that if your computing requirements include occasional gaming with current titles, the power draw of your system will stay pretty constant over the years.
Even to some more technically educated end users it is not worthwhile. AFAIK Windows 8 has some genuine advantages, such as an improved scheduler that makes better use of AMD Bulldozer modules.
But that is not enough incentive for me to put up with the stupid new GUI...
If that's all, it should be possible to boot Win7 in some VESA mode and load the proper driver afterwards. ;-)
Unless someone has decided to drop such unimportant ways of ensuring backwards compatibility
I find the ribbon that Microsoft uses in many newer UIs does take some getting used to. My observations for the ribbon in Word 2010, which I got about 15 months ago at work:
The basic principle is not that strange - it is essentially a series of tabs (as known from Windows 3.1) that switch between different sets of UI widgets.
But it does take some re-training because many functions are no longer found where a user of older versions expects them. On top of that, some icons have changed in ways I find rather un-intuitive. It usually took me a Google search to find out what to click in those cases.
This said, I agree the UI changes from Windows 7 to windows 8 seem even larger.
In this case, the original patent could not be granted because India's laws did not recognize patents on drugs at the time. Now India has passed laws recognizing patentable drugs, the company wanted a patent, and claimed one for the existing drug, unpatented because of previous laws, slightly changed.
In this case, a patent would have been reasonable.
Actually it would not have been reasonable, as the existing drug was public knowledge at the time drugs became patentable. As such, it counted as "prior art".
Your drug and process example also hints at a failure in the patent process:
35 U.S.C. 112 says
Specification.
The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.
Link: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/mpep-9015-appx-l.html#d0e302450
So if an essential process or precursor for making the drug was held back in the original patent application, the original patent should not have been granted.
The generic drug maker should be able to counter this by saying the generic drug is a copy of the old one, for which the patent has expired. If that doesn't work, the law is even more fucked up than I believed.
I cannot offer a study about multiple CEOs, but just consider Ron Sommer:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Sommer. Sorry, no English Wikipedia page about that critter. Summary by me:
-1995 to 2002: CEO of Deutsche Telekom, abysmal financial performance. Resigned because of "lack of mutual trust" between him and the supervisory board, received "only" 11.6 million Euros as severance package.
-Today: Member of the Board of directors at Sistema, Motorola and Tata Consultancy Services.
The short notice on which he "pursued other interests" strongly suggests that it was due to the SimCity debacle.
Also:
The Board has appointed Larry Probst as Executive Chairman to ensure a smooth transition and to lead EA's executive team while the Board conducts a search for a permanent CEO.
Usually it is known several months in advance if a CEO will have his contract renewed, and if not, a new "permanent CEO" can be found without interim solutions.
Since we're talking a midrange (relatively cheap) product here, a huge socket like the 2011 might be prohibitive in terms of cost.
So what about a PC mainboard in PS4 style, with 8GByte GDDR5 RAM?
CPU and RAM might have to be soldered in, but it would solve the bandwidth problem and 8GByte RAM seem adequate for most things you would do on a midrange PC...
In Crysis 3, the AMDs look good:
http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Crysis-3-PC-235317/Tests/Crysis-3-Test-CPU-Benchmark-1056578/
Only the really expensive Core i7-3960x (800 Euros or more on my side of the Atlantic) beats the FX-8350. And with a TDP of 130W, it is similar to the FX in heating your PC.
Other games are already moving towards being designed for more parallel processing. For instance X:Rebirth by Egosoft, currently in development. The CEO said in an interview that a quad core is recommended, they will have at least three main threads and several smaller ones.
So the days of well scaling games may be closer than you think.
Add a diagnostic program to show the temperature/throttling state of the CPU and you have the best of both worlds ;-)
A consumer protection law for software is what you want. Too bad we all agree to waive any expectations of warranty once we've agreed to the license agreement which few people actually read.
Legal limitations on "terms and conditions" is what you need.
German law has those, and most lawyers seem to agree that the typical shrink-wrap license agreement is covered by them. A shrink-wrap license agreement that says you waive any expectations of warranty would likely be unenforcable here.
Maybe in the console world.
In PC gaming, LAN multiplayer used to be common, today it is rare in new games. Maybe the indie scene will bring it back at some point, but right now in most games multiplayer means internet.
It only takes a bit of patience: ;-)
Don't rush out and buy the game on release day. Give it a few weeks, then read some user reviews on independent forums (not the official ones, as some publishers censor bad feedback). If those reviews look like the Amazon feedback for Sim City, stay away
Any suggestions on who should be first?
I still think Sony. Rootkit and Linux on the PS3...
If so, he should not have too much problems with me (ignoring for a moment that I'm not a regular on his site).
I'm currently doing two things to curb excessively annoying ads and tracking:
1) I have installed the NoScript add-on in SeaMonkey, which makes running JavaScript opt-in on a per website basis. That tends to kill JavaScript driven ads, as I will allow JavaScript only to the extent needed to see the content I'm interested in.
2) I tell my browser not to accept third-party cookies.
So if a web site serves ads as HTML content in some kind of side bar, it will most likely not be blocked by my setup. Annoying scripts that plaster popups all over the content, however, will be stopped. If a web site operator has a problem with that, so be it.
Several years ago, Outlook did something similar with Visual Basic scripts attached to a mail. Loading the email into the preview window was sufficient to trigger the script.
IMHO the greatest security fuckup in the history of Microsoft (and Autorun on CDs was the second biggest).