Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about... but that's nothing new.
Because if someone is using something like a Nokia 7020 it might be nice to get a smartphone. I didn't have a smartphone under my employer "gave" me one. (No, I don't work for MS)
Fact: 20% of Microsoft employees have an iPhone. They could have bought a Win-based phone, but chose not to. Why would they switch? Because it's free? Here - I've got an old Stinkpad that I'll give you for free if you switch from whatever you're using now.
"There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance," said Ballmer. "It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get."
Guess who is quickly rushing to the bottom to be the new 2-percenter. Hint - it's not Apple or Android or RIM or Palm. Of those, Microsoft is only ahead of Palm in new sales, and that will change once HP does their thing. HP has great corporate presence, as well as heavy lines into consumer sales (that comes from selling a lot of laptops and printers through retailers). Microsoft will be out of the mobile market in 2012, when their new market sales, already under 8% , drop below 1%.
How many lemmings queued up overnight to buy the first iPhone? People were willing to go first-gen (with their own nickel) go get a nifty smartphone. I'm sure many would be more than willing with someone else's nickel.
And we called them lemmings - it's not the same as being not so subtly forced to use a crappy, already-outdated-before-its-even-released POS like WP7 when you have something better.
Microsoft (and Ford for that matter) both can do those things.
Literally not a single company has ever gotten in legal trouble for firing someone and NOT stating the reason why.
It is only the ones that give a reason for being fired to the ex-employee, and a court decides that reason is a bad one.
The courts say otherwise. Plenty of people have gone to court over, for example, constructive dismissal, where the company not only doesn't give a reason, but doesn't even fire the person.
a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers in the blue-violet region' and a power out put 'more than a hundred times the world's highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers
Use it too many times, the media is burned to a crisp.
"Why isn't this thing working - let me look in and see if there's anything clogging the....AGGH MY EYEBALLS!"
Now if they can make a switchable converter that will let it emit in visible light, little Johnny the future serial killer can also tease cats from a block away - then nuke them!
PHP is an interpreted language - "dropping a text file in the same folder" is actually adding code - creating a derivative work.
Absolutely not - otherwise, dropping a css file into a folder would also be creating a derivative work.
One of the problems is that the developers are taking the position that "because they don't work in separate processes, they're one program." This is absolutely false. Back in the single-process DOS (and pre-DOS) days, all programs "worked in the same process space", yet they were still copyrighted. Clearest case in point is a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident - for you young'uns).
The argument that calling the APIs is not sufficient isolation is totally bogus. Calling an API does not make your code part of that code, any more than calling, say, the Windows API means that your program suddenly is merged with Windows and licensed by Microsoft.
So the Plugins API is actually not an API?
Why is it called Plugins API then?
Strictly speaking, no, it isn't an API. It's how WordPress itself is written! "X API" in this sense loosely means "WordPress core functions for purpose X."
It is not "an interface implemented by a software program which enables it to interact with other software." It's just functions. The use of API in this case is technically incorrect, but it's become common parlance, at least in the WordPress community. The incorrect label doesn't change my view of how plugins, themes and WordPress core form a single application, as explained above.
I'll give those links a read.
That's just idiotic. Even a c API is "just functions".
This whole thing is dumb.
Is the php code linked in, in any way, even at runtime? No. They both get run by a separate process, the php interpreter.
I'm in favour of the GPL, but this is beyond stupid.
Take them to small claims court - your phone is defective because of the unwanted bloatware on it. Either they acknowledge that YOU are the owner of the phone, and provide a way to remove the crap, or they refund the portion of your money covering the "purchase" of your phone.
I don't see a reason for all the vitriol directed at them for this.
You must be new here...:-)
Seriously, the reason is simple - we're all happy to see the bully get his ass kicked.
And then there are those creepy ads - not just the Gate+Seinfeld ones - the KIN stalker loser taking pics of his ex-girlfriend - which would get him arrested, charged, convicted, a criminal record, and a fine + community service if he were to pull that sort of stunt here.
And the products that are always late, buggy, clunky, and always a few steps behind the competition. Windows 7 is only now adding some of the features that KDE users have enjoyed for years - and it still has a long way to go. Must be nice living in that walled garden.
And the overblown hyping of non-features. Like the current page at Microsoft talking about how now, with Windows 7, you can use a touch device if you have one, in addition to a mouse and keyboard. What utter BS. Touch support is a hardware, not OS, feature - I was doing that back in 1993 witn WFW 3.1. "Oh, but we've added a new API and new hooks." Big deal - it's still dependent on the hardware manufacturers and their drivers - and they don't need Microsoft to add features like multi-touch.
I could go on, but what's the point? Microsoft has lost more than half it's value under Ballmer. There's no reason to expect that trend not to continue.
Q: "How do you create a $200 billion dollar company?"
A: "Take a $600 billion dollar company and put Steve Ballmer in charge."
Azure is Hazure compared to the competition. AdCenter is BadCenter - a money pit. Bing got no bling. PC gaming was thrown under the bus to support/divert customers to a money-losing XBox. WinMobile is more like WinCementShoes - to be phased out over the next 2 years as Microsoft retires from the mobile game completely. High Performance Computing is another perennial money-loser.
If it weren't for the vendor lock-in with Office, business wouldn't be buying either Office or Windows - and that's changing.
Microsoft will lose another 50% in market cap as people realize that they have 10 more years, and then it's game over, so the stock can only be based on revenue, not growth prospects, and that revenue not only will not keep pace with the competition, but will start declining on an absolute basis.
After all, business isn't going to upgrade Office if they can continue running XP - and now they can until 2020 by which time other alternatives will be firmly entrenched.
The whole "eating your own dog food" thing is a bogus excuse for making desperate noises about WP7 after the 2 billion dollar KIN failure (right now, it's "more than a billion, less than 2 - but there are still some serious bills to be negotiated).
The problem isn't the giveaway - the problem is that the WP7 is a piece of crap software compared to what's out there right now - even Microsoft's own employees admit it - and will be even more of a piece of crap by the holiday season.
Doesn't matter - Ballmer is on his way out. The replacement will make Neutron Jack look like the fairy godmother. 50%.
Hey everybody - Steve Ballmer is trolling slashdot!
The free phone thing is a bad idea for several reasons:
Why would someone want to replace something that they know works with a first-out-the-gate phone from Microsoft? Even Microsoft admits it takes AT LEAST 3 tries to get it right.
Why would someone want to pay the costs of canceling their contract, as well as losing the functionality of any apps they bought? It's called "vedor lock-in" - and it hurts now that the shoe is on the other foot, doesn't it?
Why would anyone want a Windows phone when Microsoft is exiting the mobile market in 2012, a year after Ballmer is kicked out?
Why host your pictures with ads? Because it's free. So, spend $10 a year on a domain, and a couple of bucks a month for some cheap shared hosting, and be ad-free. You'll find all other sorts of wonderful uses - like running your own webmail that doesn't have ads in it. Putting up your own site, hosting your own files - all ad-free.
Or if you're really cheap, check with your ISP - you probably have some disk space and a home page or two included with your plan.
Well, sure, it's more than 10x the number of KINs that were sold - but at least those were actual sales, even if they lost $100,000 per sale. Not some "here, use this phone - your job review is coming up."
You're an employee and you want to sue Microsoft? Refuse to give up your iPhone. Microsoft can no more tie your job review to you giving up an iPhone than GM can fire you for driving a Ford.
Get fired for refusing to give up iPhone
Litigate
PROFIT!
Of course, it's all moot - Ballmer won't be at Microsoft much longer.
You can't get pregnant alone - nude or otherwise (unless you go shopping on the net for a sperm donor and a turkey-baster).
Either that, or you accidentally trip and fall into into the average slashdotter's sock hamper...
... Eww !- a whole hamper - sounds like a sticky situation.
But if slashdotters are like other guys, there's no risk - they never put their dirty clothes in the hamper, they just call malloc(sizeof(socks)) and store them on the heap. And then they'll just sit there until either:
someone else (usually a woman) free()s them properly;
another process (family_dog.bin) corrupts the free store;
a call to new(TCleanSocks) returns null, so they walk the heap of cashed dirty socks looking for the least objectionable object to reuse.
"Religious people have a higher birthrate than anyone so I'd rethink the idea they have a problem with nudity alone."
You can't get pregnant alone - nude or otherwise (unless you go shopping on the net for a sperm donor and a turkey-baster).
Must be that faith-based schooling - the same stuff that taught people that they could catch STDs off a toilet seat back when it was called VD. Or that douching with coke would prevent pregnancy. And so would coitus interruptus.
Re:Microsoft a Top Secret Contractor?!?
on
Top Secret America
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· Score: 1
If you follow the link, they're not just supplying Windows.
One Microsoft program is called Windows for Warships - they even trademarked the term.
he U.S. Navy's Yorktown "Smart Ship," an Aegis missile cruiser that's being used as a pilot program for computer controlled naval vessels, was left adrift at sea for over two hours earlier this month because of problems with its Windows NT-based software. The ship had to be towed back to harbor for the third time because of database errors.
Officials confirmed that the Yorktown experienced an "engineering local area network casualty," though they stopped short of blaming Windows NT on the problem. Anthony DiGiorgio, a civilian engineer with the Atlantic Fleet Technical Support Center in Norfolk says that "using Windows NT, which is known to have some failure modes, on a warship is similar to hoping that luck will be in our favor.
>a href=http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987>Sunk by Windows NT
"The simple root of the problem on Yorktown was that politics were played in the assigning of the contract -- there was not a discussion of engineers, it was just a very small group of people pitching for it," said an engineer close to the project, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
In a statement issued this week on why NT was chosen over Unix, the Navy said that while Windows NT was specified in the Statement of Work as the operating system for the workstations in question, other components of a coming upgrade will primarily utilize Unix-based systems.
The source of the problem on the Yorktown was that bad data was fed into an application running on one of the 16 computers on the LAN. The data contained a zero where it shouldn't have, and when the software attempted to divide by zero, a buffer overrun occurred -- crashing the entire network and causing the ship to lose control of its propulsion system.
Singley said that human factors were considered in the decision to use NT, partly because it was thought to have a more friendly graphical user interface (GUI) than Unix systems. Critics of the move pointed out that modern Unix-like operating systems have multiple GUIs to choose from.
Some additional factors may have influenced the decision to go with NT as well. In the Navy's "Information Technology for the 21st Century" (IT-21) report, NT 4.0 is named the operating system standard. In addition, some commercial, off-the-shelf products were used, which tend to come pre-installed with Microsoft products. Furthermore, Microsoft's Bill Gates nominated the Smart Ship program for the ComputerWorld/Smithsonian Awards Program.
The "Where-do-your-files-want-to-go-today" company is listed as one of the government top-secret contractors.
You can all now sleep better, knowing how safe your secrets are.
Re:I Disagree with Some Parts of This Article
on
The End of Free
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· Score: 1
TruCinema is just frame doubling - so what it means is that the total amount of video info is 24 frames x the current resolution. 1080i @ 60fps gives 30 full frames of info in the same time period - and refreshed at 600hz, it looks gorgeous - far better than 720p, for example.
if you're not going to block me after 100 failed logins, it's unlikely that you're going to stop me after 4000, either.
Todays attacks use many computers, making many attempts with a longish interval between attempts. They don't care if they make 2 attempt every 15 minutes per host - this lets them attack hundreds of thousands of accounts simultaneously, and over the course of a year, they'll get into many boxes, without ever being locked out for too many attempts, since the REAL owner will successfully log in, and reset any "bad login attempts" count.
... except that the time to sprintf the string into the buffer is a function of the original string's length... ditto for the password you want to compare it to. So they can very quickly determine the length of the stored password - not a good thing.
Of course, how long does it take to do a snprintf of '12345'?
The AC is wrong alright. He's wrong for even brining it up.
Maybe he thinks he can salt the plain-text password and it will be "as good as" ciphered - like people who renamed their.bat files to.com so they would run faster...
I don't agree with the yelling, but day-to-day running of a LAMP stack should be required knowledge. After all, you're going to want to have one or more test environments, and it's nice to know that if you TOTALLY hose the system, you can restore it without having to go crying to someone else.
You should be able to alter the config so that you can have it listen on alternate ports, change what file extensions get run through an interpreter (you might want.html files to be interpreted as.php files, for example - this way, if at some future date an html file is replaced with a php file, you don't have to look in every piece of code and every link that references it by name, and change the file extension), which interpreters are loaded, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
My dog is color-blind, you insensitive clod! :-)
Seriously, longer-wavelength light exhibits less scattering. You wouldn't be able to tease a cat or dog a block away with a near-uv light.
Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about ... but that's nothing new.
Fact: 20% of Microsoft employees have an iPhone. They could have bought a Win-based phone, but chose not to. Why would they switch? Because it's free? Here - I've got an old Stinkpad that I'll give you for free if you switch from whatever you're using now.
Then again, like always, Ballmer doesn't know what he's talking about
Guess who is quickly rushing to the bottom to be the new 2-percenter. Hint - it's not Apple or Android or RIM or Palm. Of those, Microsoft is only ahead of Palm in new sales, and that will change once HP does their thing. HP has great corporate presence, as well as heavy lines into consumer sales (that comes from selling a lot of laptops and printers through retailers). Microsoft will be out of the mobile market in 2012, when their new market sales, already under 8% , drop below 1%.
And we called them lemmings - it's not the same as being not so subtly forced to use a crappy, already-outdated-before-its-even-released POS like WP7 when you have something better.
The courts say otherwise. Plenty of people have gone to court over, for example, constructive dismissal, where the company not only doesn't give a reason, but doesn't even fire the person.
Use it too many times, the media is burned to a crisp.
"Why isn't this thing working - let me look in and see if there's anything clogging the ....AGGH MY EYEBALLS!"
Now if they can make a switchable converter that will let it emit in visible light, little Johnny the future serial killer can also tease cats from a block away - then nuke them!
Absolutely not - otherwise, dropping a css file into a folder would also be creating a derivative work.
One of the problems is that the developers are taking the position that "because they don't work in separate processes, they're one program." This is absolutely false. Back in the single-process DOS (and pre-DOS) days, all programs "worked in the same process space", yet they were still copyrighted. Clearest case in point is a TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident - for you young'uns).
The argument that calling the APIs is not sufficient isolation is totally bogus. Calling an API does not make your code part of that code, any more than calling, say, the Windows API means that your program suddenly is merged with Windows and licensed by Microsoft.
When the guy argues in response to this question
That's just idiotic. Even a c API is "just functions".
This whole thing is dumb.
Is the php code linked in, in any way, even at runtime? No. They both get run by a separate process, the php interpreter.
I'm in favour of the GPL, but this is beyond stupid.
Take them to small claims court - your phone is defective because of the unwanted bloatware on it. Either they acknowledge that YOU are the owner of the phone, and provide a way to remove the crap, or they refund the portion of your money covering the "purchase" of your phone.
You must be new here ... :-)
Seriously, the reason is simple - we're all happy to see the bully get his ass kicked.
And then there are those creepy ads - not just the Gate+Seinfeld ones - the KIN stalker loser taking pics of his ex-girlfriend - which would get him arrested, charged, convicted, a criminal record, and a fine + community service if he were to pull that sort of stunt here.
And the products that are always late, buggy, clunky, and always a few steps behind the competition. Windows 7 is only now adding some of the features that KDE users have enjoyed for years - and it still has a long way to go. Must be nice living in that walled garden.
And the overblown hyping of non-features. Like the current page at Microsoft talking about how now, with Windows 7, you can use a touch device if you have one, in addition to a mouse and keyboard. What utter BS. Touch support is a hardware, not OS, feature - I was doing that back in 1993 witn WFW 3.1. "Oh, but we've added a new API and new hooks." Big deal - it's still dependent on the hardware manufacturers and their drivers - and they don't need Microsoft to add features like multi-touch.
I could go on, but what's the point? Microsoft has lost more than half it's value under Ballmer. There's no reason to expect that trend not to continue.
Q: "How do you create a $200 billion dollar company?"
A: "Take a $600 billion dollar company and put Steve Ballmer in charge."
Azure is Hazure compared to the competition. AdCenter is BadCenter - a money pit. Bing got no bling. PC gaming was thrown under the bus to support/divert customers to a money-losing XBox. WinMobile is more like WinCementShoes - to be phased out over the next 2 years as Microsoft retires from the mobile game completely. High Performance Computing is another perennial money-loser.
If it weren't for the vendor lock-in with Office, business wouldn't be buying either Office or Windows - and that's changing.
Microsoft will lose another 50% in market cap as people realize that they have 10 more years, and then it's game over, so the stock can only be based on revenue, not growth prospects, and that revenue not only will not keep pace with the competition, but will start declining on an absolute basis.
After all, business isn't going to upgrade Office if they can continue running XP - and now they can until 2020 by which time other alternatives will be firmly entrenched.
The whole "eating your own dog food" thing is a bogus excuse for making desperate noises about WP7 after the 2 billion dollar KIN failure (right now, it's "more than a billion, less than 2 - but there are still some serious bills to be negotiated).
The problem isn't the giveaway - the problem is that the WP7 is a piece of crap software compared to what's out there right now - even Microsoft's own employees admit it - and will be even more of a piece of crap by the holiday season.
Doesn't matter - Ballmer is on his way out. The replacement will make Neutron Jack look like the fairy godmother. 50%.
Hey everybody - Steve Ballmer is trolling slashdot!
The free phone thing is a bad idea for several reasons:
"Common"? Never gonna happen. They were practically giving KINs away at the end, and still nobody wanted them.
WP7 is Ballmer's last swing at bat. Within the year, he;s thrown his last chair.
Why host your pictures with ads? Because it's free. So, spend $10 a year on a domain, and a couple of bucks a month for some cheap shared hosting, and be ad-free. You'll find all other sorts of wonderful uses - like running your own webmail that doesn't have ads in it. Putting up your own site, hosting your own files - all ad-free.
Or if you're really cheap, check with your ISP - you probably have some disk space and a home page or two included with your plan.
So, 90,000 phones will be a "success"?
Well, sure, it's more than 10x the number of KINs that were sold - but at least those were actual sales, even if they lost $100,000 per sale. Not some "here, use this phone - your job review is coming up."
You're an employee and you want to sue Microsoft? Refuse to give up your iPhone. Microsoft can no more tie your job review to you giving up an iPhone than GM can fire you for driving a Ford.
Of course, it's all moot - Ballmer won't be at Microsoft much longer.
I could be worse - it could be made out of KINs instead of next of kins.
Hot new item @ microsoft - cases that make your iPhone look like a WP7 phone - complete with BSOD screen-saver.
The Balminator: "Hey - is that an iPhone?
Employee: "I wish - blue-screened again!"
The Balminator: "Okay, I guess I can find someone else to throw this chair at."
Actually, true employees get a WP7 phone.
Temps and interns get 2 WP7 phones, and a dozen KINs
But if slashdotters are like other guys, there's no risk - they never put their dirty clothes in the hamper, they just call malloc(sizeof(socks)) and store them on the heap. And then they'll just sit there until either:
You can't get pregnant alone - nude or otherwise (unless you go shopping on the net for a sperm donor and a turkey-baster).
Must be that faith-based schooling - the same stuff that taught people that they could catch STDs off a toilet seat back when it was called VD. Or that douching with coke would prevent pregnancy. And so would coitus interruptus.
If you follow the link, they're not just supplying Windows.
One Microsoft program is called Windows for Warships - they even trademarked the term.
And not just the US
Silly Brits - you should never open up Windows on a submarine!
Windows NT Sinks Navy Ship
>a href=http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13987>Sunk by Windows NT
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/companies/microsoft-enterprise-services/
The "Where-do-your-files-want-to-go-today" company is listed as one of the government top-secret contractors.
You can all now sleep better, knowing how safe your secrets are.
TruCinema is just frame doubling - so what it means is that the total amount of video info is 24 frames x the current resolution. 1080i @ 60fps gives 30 full frames of info in the same time period - and refreshed at 600hz, it looks gorgeous - far better than 720p, for example.
My user name is " or uid=1; -- you ignorant clod!
Todays attacks use many computers, making many attempts with a longish interval between attempts. They don't care if they make 2 attempt every 15 minutes per host - this lets them attack hundreds of thousands of accounts simultaneously, and over the course of a year, they'll get into many boxes, without ever being locked out for too many attempts, since the REAL owner will successfully log in, and reset any "bad login attempts" count.
... except that the time to sprintf the string into the buffer is a function of the original string's length ... ditto for the password you want to compare it to. So they can very quickly determine the length of the stored password - not a good thing.
Of course, how long does it take to do a snprintf of '12345'?
Maybe he thinks he can salt the plain-text password and it will be "as good as" ciphered - like people who renamed their .bat files to .com so they would run faster ...
Social engineering attack on the uni's records FTW.
Fact: One guy I know got his Masters in one day that way. (okay, it was more like an afternoon).
I don't agree with the yelling, but day-to-day running of a LAMP stack should be required knowledge. After all, you're going to want to have one or more test environments, and it's nice to know that if you TOTALLY hose the system, you can restore it without having to go crying to someone else.
You should be able to alter the config so that you can have it listen on alternate ports, change what file extensions get run through an interpreter (you might want .html files to be interpreted as .php files, for example - this way, if at some future date an html file is replaced with a php file, you don't have to look in every piece of code and every link that references it by name, and change the file extension), which interpreters are loaded, etc.