M$'s failing is not a lack of coders or Ph.Ds it is management incompetence. Very poor business decisions and, a total disconnect from their customers. Hiring more people just means blowing more money on failed products, or just being able to produce even more bad code.
M$ failings have nothing to do with a lack of technical staff but everything to do with the Vista (P)OS, the user interface failing on Office 2007, the Zune edsel music device, pathetic xbox360 failure rates and, the failed re-branding of MSN to Live.
Basically at this stage they should not be hiring more but less. Not focusing on new OS's but on killing the failed Vista (P)OS and refining stale piss, all with more cost efficient staffing levels, that and diversifying into other technology areas. To achieve this, the first required step is to dump a tired and failed executive team who are looked into the same marketing B$ they were using a decade ago and which now is an embarrassing failure. Vista, a failure, but that OK it's only 'a work in progress', or going cap in hand to News Corp to beg for assistance in the Yahoo takeover, what a buffoon.
These people really are crazy, especially when you consider the warranty/EULA that accompanies the windows OS. A warranty that basically stipulates that it is wildly unsafe for that kind of use.
Hence if there is a software failure that results in a death the full liability falls back on the hospital and the staff responsible for that software purchase and their criminally negligent willingness to use software the is clearly unfit for the purpose based upon the warranty/EULA supplied with the software.
It is only a matter of time before some hospital CIO finds themselves facing a possible prison sentence fro criminally negligent manslaughter.
It is all about numbers, You can't pay for a million different blogs, you can't control thousands of different forums with hundreds of millions of different members. Sure mass media is talking about politicians using the internet but how successful is the message, how quickly does a popular blogger disappear into oblivion once they are discovered to be a paid flunky or just one of thousands of different fronts for PR agencies.
Surely you must have noticed by now how much more information about corrupt dealings, about buried stories and, about published lies, are all appearing on the internet. Mass media was consolidated in the 80s and 90s into a worthless PR B$ machine, a propaganda device for those who could afford, into a marketing and lies as news engine of greed.
To achieve the same on the internet means they are forced to silence the general public first and restrict access to the internet to a dozen or so mass media corporation that currently rule the air waves. The public has already demonstrated how resistant they are to be silenced on the net.
It really depends upon what you consider a 'new' user to be. Someone who already users a computer and you a trying them out on a different interface or someone who has never used a computer.
I a fairly experienced computer user, perhaps way to much experience but when it comes to using a new interface it is always a frustrating and annoying exercise, as I can make use of the majority of functions of my existing gui's without having to think how I am doing something so that I can focus on what I am doing.
In all the swaps and changes I have made over the years, they are no easy changes. After a while you become accustomed to the different interface and adapt and the old interface becomes the frustrating and annoying exercise.
The reality is, a simple clear open standard interface, containing menus, icons and structure, needs to be created and used by most software. That way it can be taught once and the users can perfect their skills over time with out the hassle of changing interfaces as a result of for profit upgrades, or attempting to escape them and the resulting interface changes by doing a cross grade.
Now add to that the real danger of DNA being a silver bullet. How many hairs have you lost, do you know where they have all ended up? Have you used tissues in a public space and carelessly failed to keep track of the discard. Next time you spit consider where it might end up.
Now as it turns out suspicion does not fall on family members with near matches but on untested family members. So if you are the one family member with a near match, they do not pursue you but they pursue all your untested relatives who now must prove their innocence.
Well wouldn't it be best to shift completely away from fuel burning vehicles to electric vehicles. Really the main focus should be on improving battery technology, a global open effort to radically alter the way energy is used and pollutants created.
That way you can shift to methane power station ie. making use biofuels have they have fuelled people.
With better battery technology all the alternate, renewable energy sources become much more viable.
It is all the result of an overly competitive dog eat dog culture with a break down in the social welfare net. Those who are incapable of effectively competing simply resort to violent crime and that combined with a gun culture results in a huge number of violent deaths and a world record prison population.
They have locked themselves into the idea that the cost of all that violence and the massive prison population is cheaper than an effective social welfare net and the marginal risks of decriminalising but regulating currently illegal drugs.
Whilst those individuals might have been corrupt, mass media proved the be the major facilitator in getting the most corrupt politicians re-elected by burying the truth and launching slander campaigns against honest politicians. With the internet starting to dominate 21st century mind space, the mass media lies, oh, sorry marketing are getting buried.
So now we are seeing a radical change, where the lies are being exposed, where corrupt politicians are being publicly shamed, where stacked policy forums are being exposed for what they are, corrupt marketing opportunities to sell laws to target and victimise the majority for the benefit of a greedy self serving minority.
How many mass media adds for the most disingenuous politicians have been latter dismembered across the web, and the lies shown in the adds compared to the truth of the actions.
That is either a serious error in judgement, or sheer political bullshit. This partisan b$ has to stop, regardless of which party, which gender or whihc race, corrupt politician should be pursued, prosecuted and incarcerated.
The sickening party lie, that somehow it is acceptable today because someone from another political party did it a decade ago but not quite so bad is just a disingenuous lie.
All those absolutely corrupt idiots who fail to demonise any corrupt official often have their snout right in the trough with them.
Quailty government is all about the continual audit and review of every action of government and where applicable, the public disclosure of those actions so that htye can be publicly debated and based upon those debates, far more sensible choice about who you should elect.
It is the standard lie of the politically corrupt to claim all politicians are corrupt whilst they and the slimy cronies cook elections to ensure the worst and most criminally politicians of the lot get elected. So why mod idiots who say do nothing, idiots who look at failures a decade ago while ignoring what is going on today, or disingenuous idiots who would allow their own country to fail as long as they profit.
Well in M$ donation terms it is 825,000 x $999.00 (M$ window server edition is the nearest equivalent) $824,175,000, the open source community giving without charging a wacking great percentage. It always helps to put in perspective exactly what proprietary lock in really costs and what the open source community and the companies that support open source do to help community, hmm, quite a generous donation isn't it.
Whilst his goal can be appreciated, in context it makes no sense. M$ will feel totally threatened by any GUI that threatens its monopoly windows GUI. M$ will not only not support it they will seek attack and undermine it. Imagine an alternate open GUI that can run on any OS being taught to children as the default, now honestly, how will ballmer react to that idea.
Look, fine, run windows on the XO but, were does that leave the $100 price target, burdened with a >$100 OS and then a >>$100 dollar office suite.
No clear thinking person in the open source community supports because it just doesn't make any sense. Sure, we can all pointlessly rabbit on about M$ working with the XO but economically it is just silly waste of time. If M$ wants to supply free software that is unencumbered with future surprise costs amd changes of licence some years down track, then that is great and something they should be doing but, realistically based upon past their past history and specific direct attacks on the whole idea of the OLPC, attacks that extended over a number of years, attacks that were championed by the most senior M$ management, attacks that were designed to destroy OLPC and the XO, just who is kidding who.
Based upon M$'s attacks on the whole idea of open cheap laptops for children and anybody who supported that idea, who in reality are the fundamentalists, the zealots, the evangelists of greed is god. The reality is most open source advocates run M$ windows OS, after all it gives you a choice of a wide range of computer games, fair enough that (P)OS ain't fit for work or school but as a toy OS it is just, almost, somewhat, nearly, fine;D (hence by definition they are not making a fundamentalist choice of OSs, see, fit for purpose choices, Linux for serious stuff and windows as a toy).
Well consider this, you have a copyright licence to that content that is protected by copyright law for, basically, 70 years. M$ is attempt to steal back those licences without offering a refund by denying you the ability to legitimately retain them, with operating system upgrades, especially as M$ forces those upgrades by stopping all support for previous OS prior to their 70 copyright expiry. So yeah, it is really a target for a class action lawsuit and via that civil action forcing M$ to provide a full refund.
A major error in the drake equation is the length of time that civilisations would transmit those signals. Consider that an advanced civilisation one of it's major achievements would be the elimination of old age. As such an expected life expectancy could extend beyond a thousand years and even into the ten thousand year range. The most significant aspect of that extended age is that the older more mature members of an advanced society would dominate and younger members would be a minuscule minority.
Consider the stability that would be established upon a society when great, great,etc, grandparents were still active and in fact dominant in that society and the excessive demands of youth were effectively restrained.
So you get rapid development as a society evolves and technological advancements occur until there is a significant change in life expectancy and then development is slowed, and high risk advancements are constrained. Risking a ten thousand year life span on typical youthful (extended out to the first hundred years or so) misadventures would be considered extremely foolhardy and as would threatening an environment required for survival, it is no longer the next generations problem, as those from many, many generations previous, would still have to deal with it.
Considering you can do far more damage with mirrors and sunlight they you can with any publicly available laser pointers. This just looks likes public showboating, politicians trying to show they are doing something for their salaries and perks. By the way, exactly how many accidents have been caused by errant laser pointers, thousands, hundreds, 'er' one ?
Actually I read it as "Open source software is saving industry and the economy in the neighbourhood of $60 billion dollars per year in costs."
Now that is a pretty amazing achievement, and open source coders and the companies that support them should be congratulated.
That is a massive achievement, open source software it is already saving $60 billion dollars per year, imagine what will be achieved in five years time, savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It would be virtually suicide for companies to stick with the millstone of closed source proprietary software and be stuck with the costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sometimes those knuckle heads just forget there are other companies besides M$ and M$'s profits are in reality other companies losses, let alone the 10 to 100 times hundreds factor of using their software even after you have paid for it (well it actually never stop paying for it until you finally crossgrade/upgrade to open source software and start making those billions of dollars of savings;D).
Actually the only toxin is the article itself. It is just a boring B$ advertising as news fluff piece, something to make the investors feel better about M$ after the very public vista disaster.
For example "Statistics from industry-tracker IDC show that money spent on the type of paid Linux support being targeted in China increased 38.6 percent in the year after the Novell-Microsoft alliance". See it wasn't the hard work and good coding of all the Linux companies including 'Red Flag' Linux, only M$ can make Linux acceptable.
A clear example of the B$ use of statistics in marketing. Now, of the 38.5 % exactly how much if any of that did Novell/M$ get rather than %100 of it as ever so surreptitiously implied by the article.
So just another article trying to maintain the idea of M$ as being the 'dominant' computer technologist, of being the industry leader, rather than a company that is becoming redundant outside of it's now shaky monopoly and like it's leader being more like the industry 'goat'.
Good standards generally have a lot of money spent on 'preventing' them from being approved as they tend to clean up industries and enable the tackling and removal of the fly by night element.
Corrupt standards are of course about nothing but entrenching monopolies or blatant patent traps.
Not to forget the thousands of troll postings that are also released at the same time, this M$ release was great, I didn't have any problems, it installed properly and worked perfectly and improved security, stability and performance. All those people who are complaining have configured their computers incorrectly (it is always the customers fault) or/and the hardware manufacturers have failed to properly update their drivers as directed (why is it driver problems on Linux are Linux's fault and driver problems on windows are the hardware manufacturers fault, just ask any micro-softie) or/and it is the fault of some other software installed on the system (strangely enough often a competitor in some particular product area that M$ currently wants to expand into).
The biggest worry of course is the perceived reputation of M$ in that the last support pack often introduces more problems than it solves in order to force people to upgrade to their latest (P)OS, and with the problems M$ have been having with acceptance of astalavista, a lot of people are going to be real cautious and wait six months or so.
To be accurate storage capacity killed floppies, hence hard disks became the only way to store large files and CD RW took to long and remained to expensive for to long to become exchangeable. Mesh/bluetooth on the fly networking might change it but security hassles could mean people might prefer a manual physical interaction.
I have dealt with a lot of companies and, over time I have seen lot's of managers taking all sorts of advice from the secretaries, regardless of the secretaries level of business expertise, the level of the secretaries control over the business often related to their skills in other more private areas of human social interaction.
I have to say I am really looking forward to seeing someone running ad supported M$ (doesn't)Work, instead of free openofficer.org, and yes, quite cruelly, I will laugh at them and mock them and refuse to provide free support;D.
You are so backward thinking. High tech CGI 3D movie via virtual reality head ware, bugger all data over the net, you send the script, CGI character definitions and director instructions, the content is created locally via dirt cheap supercomputer hard ware and free software, why send the content, with the content algorithm would be so much more compact.
The biggest catch with any kind of unique identifier for a laptop to aid in theft recovery would also be seen as a massive invasion of privacy, I believe Intel learned that lesson early on be creating unique identifiers in the the CPU, it proved to be very unpopular. Which is why a lot of posts in this thread focus upon protection of data. With falling storage costs for flash storage you might see an odd shift back to early computing technology, prior to hard disks, where all the data was on portable storage media, floppy disks.
So have your OS and applications on the fixed storage and keep your personal data on portable storage devices with numerous copies, I have to say with my decades of experience a whole lot less data was lost from portable digital storage versus the swags of data routinely lost via fixed storage.
Large capacity fixed storage whilst very convenient, without backup regimes, is inevitably data destructive.
The report also does one other vary useful thing, it highlights an underlying change in human society. A return to the concept of "contribute and share, share and contribute", as one of the most important and socially constructive principles of human society. As it turns out, "Free Open Source Software" could be thought of as 'digital enlightenment';).
Of course genetic profiling does remain a real threat. So would corporations abuse genetic profiling, would governments abuse genetic profiling, the answer is currently, yes. Knowing which individuals are likely to remain free thinkers and oppose bad government decisions and should be targeted from a early age, is a threat. For corporations being able to target people who are more susceptible to marketing, those who would willingly bury themselves in debt to buy the latest B$ marketed piece of shiny junk, is really offensive.
Google seems stuck in the whole privacy invasive marketdroid trap. It's managements has now becomes lopsided and seems incapable of diversifying into other technology areas and sees the market from only one viewpoint. When management becomes like that, the company has real difficultly escaping the trap, as the management teams seeks to preserve and strengthen it's position as individuals defined by their expertise and will eliminate threats from other areas of business who threaten their ascendency.
Cheap hardware makes mass data storage. Cheap hardware also makes data mining very easy, and at the end of the day, the easiest method of industrial espionage would be by mining other companies data. As for google misusing data, they are a public corporation, their behaviour is defined by the majority shareholders and has already shown major changes in behaviour for the worse over the last five years.
Slashdot Mirror
M$ failings have nothing to do with a lack of technical staff but everything to do with the Vista (P)OS, the user interface failing on Office 2007, the Zune edsel music device, pathetic xbox360 failure rates and, the failed re-branding of MSN to Live.
Basically at this stage they should not be hiring more but less. Not focusing on new OS's but on killing the failed Vista (P)OS and refining stale piss, all with more cost efficient staffing levels, that and diversifying into other technology areas. To achieve this, the first required step is to dump a tired and failed executive team who are looked into the same marketing B$ they were using a decade ago and which now is an embarrassing failure. Vista, a failure, but that OK it's only 'a work in progress', or going cap in hand to News Corp to beg for assistance in the Yahoo takeover, what a buffoon.
Hence if there is a software failure that results in a death the full liability falls back on the hospital and the staff responsible for that software purchase and their criminally negligent willingness to use software the is clearly unfit for the purpose based upon the warranty/EULA supplied with the software.
It is only a matter of time before some hospital CIO finds themselves facing a possible prison sentence fro criminally negligent manslaughter.
Surely you must have noticed by now how much more information about corrupt dealings, about buried stories and, about published lies, are all appearing on the internet. Mass media was consolidated in the 80s and 90s into a worthless PR B$ machine, a propaganda device for those who could afford, into a marketing and lies as news engine of greed.
To achieve the same on the internet means they are forced to silence the general public first and restrict access to the internet to a dozen or so mass media corporation that currently rule the air waves. The public has already demonstrated how resistant they are to be silenced on the net.
I a fairly experienced computer user, perhaps way to much experience but when it comes to using a new interface it is always a frustrating and annoying exercise, as I can make use of the majority of functions of my existing gui's without having to think how I am doing something so that I can focus on what I am doing.
In all the swaps and changes I have made over the years, they are no easy changes. After a while you become accustomed to the different interface and adapt and the old interface becomes the frustrating and annoying exercise.
The reality is, a simple clear open standard interface, containing menus, icons and structure, needs to be created and used by most software. That way it can be taught once and the users can perfect their skills over time with out the hassle of changing interfaces as a result of for profit upgrades, or attempting to escape them and the resulting interface changes by doing a cross grade.
Now as it turns out suspicion does not fall on family members with near matches but on untested family members. So if you are the one family member with a near match, they do not pursue you but they pursue all your untested relatives who now must prove their innocence.
That way you can shift to methane power station ie. making use biofuels have they have fuelled people.
With better battery technology all the alternate, renewable energy sources become much more viable.
They have locked themselves into the idea that the cost of all that violence and the massive prison population is cheaper than an effective social welfare net and the marginal risks of decriminalising but regulating currently illegal drugs.
So now we are seeing a radical change, where the lies are being exposed, where corrupt politicians are being publicly shamed, where stacked policy forums are being exposed for what they are, corrupt marketing opportunities to sell laws to target and victimise the majority for the benefit of a greedy self serving minority.
How many mass media adds for the most disingenuous politicians have been latter dismembered across the web, and the lies shown in the adds compared to the truth of the actions.
Your statement is completely illogical, survival instinct itself defines that you wish to extend your life beyond the moment.
The sickening party lie, that somehow it is acceptable today because someone from another political party did it a decade ago but not quite so bad is just a disingenuous lie.
All those absolutely corrupt idiots who fail to demonise any corrupt official often have their snout right in the trough with them.
Quailty government is all about the continual audit and review of every action of government and where applicable, the public disclosure of those actions so that htye can be publicly debated and based upon those debates, far more sensible choice about who you should elect.
It is the standard lie of the politically corrupt to claim all politicians are corrupt whilst they and the slimy cronies cook elections to ensure the worst and most criminally politicians of the lot get elected. So why mod idiots who say do nothing, idiots who look at failures a decade ago while ignoring what is going on today, or disingenuous idiots who would allow their own country to fail as long as they profit.
Well in M$ donation terms it is 825,000 x $999.00 (M$ window server edition is the nearest equivalent) $824,175,000, the open source community giving without charging a wacking great percentage. It always helps to put in perspective exactly what proprietary lock in really costs and what the open source community and the companies that support open source do to help community, hmm, quite a generous donation isn't it.
Look, fine, run windows on the XO but, were does that leave the $100 price target, burdened with a >$100 OS and then a >>$100 dollar office suite.
No clear thinking person in the open source community supports because it just doesn't make any sense. Sure, we can all pointlessly rabbit on about M$ working with the XO but economically it is just silly waste of time. If M$ wants to supply free software that is unencumbered with future surprise costs amd changes of licence some years down track, then that is great and something they should be doing but, realistically based upon past their past history and specific direct attacks on the whole idea of the OLPC, attacks that extended over a number of years, attacks that were championed by the most senior M$ management, attacks that were designed to destroy OLPC and the XO, just who is kidding who.
Based upon M$'s attacks on the whole idea of open cheap laptops for children and anybody who supported that idea, who in reality are the fundamentalists, the zealots, the evangelists of greed is god. The reality is most open source advocates run M$ windows OS, after all it gives you a choice of a wide range of computer games, fair enough that (P)OS ain't fit for work or school but as a toy OS it is just, almost, somewhat, nearly, fine ;D (hence by definition they are not making a fundamentalist choice of OSs, see, fit for purpose choices, Linux for serious stuff and windows as a toy).
Well consider this, you have a copyright licence to that content that is protected by copyright law for, basically, 70 years. M$ is attempt to steal back those licences without offering a refund by denying you the ability to legitimately retain them, with operating system upgrades, especially as M$ forces those upgrades by stopping all support for previous OS prior to their 70 copyright expiry. So yeah, it is really a target for a class action lawsuit and via that civil action forcing M$ to provide a full refund.
Consider the stability that would be established upon a society when great, great,etc, grandparents were still active and in fact dominant in that society and the excessive demands of youth were effectively restrained.
So you get rapid development as a society evolves and technological advancements occur until there is a significant change in life expectancy and then development is slowed, and high risk advancements are constrained. Risking a ten thousand year life span on typical youthful (extended out to the first hundred years or so) misadventures would be considered extremely foolhardy and as would threatening an environment required for survival, it is no longer the next generations problem, as those from many, many generations previous, would still have to deal with it.
Considering you can do far more damage with mirrors and sunlight they you can with any publicly available laser pointers. This just looks likes public showboating, politicians trying to show they are doing something for their salaries and perks. By the way, exactly how many accidents have been caused by errant laser pointers, thousands, hundreds, 'er' one ?
Now that is a pretty amazing achievement, and open source coders and the companies that support them should be congratulated.
That is a massive achievement, open source software it is already saving $60 billion dollars per year, imagine what will be achieved in five years time, savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It would be virtually suicide for companies to stick with the millstone of closed source proprietary software and be stuck with the costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sometimes those knuckle heads just forget there are other companies besides M$ and M$'s profits are in reality other companies losses, let alone the 10 to 100 times hundreds factor of using their software even after you have paid for it (well it actually never stop paying for it until you finally crossgrade/upgrade to open source software and start making those billions of dollars of savings ;D).
For example "Statistics from industry-tracker IDC show that money spent on the type of paid Linux support being targeted in China increased 38.6 percent in the year after the Novell-Microsoft alliance". See it wasn't the hard work and good coding of all the Linux companies including 'Red Flag' Linux, only M$ can make Linux acceptable.
A clear example of the B$ use of statistics in marketing. Now, of the 38.5 % exactly how much if any of that did Novell/M$ get rather than %100 of it as ever so surreptitiously implied by the article.
So just another article trying to maintain the idea of M$ as being the 'dominant' computer technologist, of being the industry leader, rather than a company that is becoming redundant outside of it's now shaky monopoly and like it's leader being more like the industry 'goat'.
OOXML: "The 'WORST' Standard money can buy."
Good standards generally have a lot of money spent on 'preventing' them from being approved as they tend to clean up industries and enable the tackling and removal of the fly by night element.
Corrupt standards are of course about nothing but entrenching monopolies or blatant patent traps.
The biggest worry of course is the perceived reputation of M$ in that the last support pack often introduces more problems than it solves in order to force people to upgrade to their latest (P)OS, and with the problems M$ have been having with acceptance of astalavista, a lot of people are going to be real cautious and wait six months or so.
To be accurate storage capacity killed floppies, hence hard disks became the only way to store large files and CD RW took to long and remained to expensive for to long to become exchangeable. Mesh/bluetooth on the fly networking might change it but security hassles could mean people might prefer a manual physical interaction.
I have to say I am really looking forward to seeing someone running ad supported M$ (doesn't)Work, instead of free openofficer.org, and yes, quite cruelly, I will laugh at them and mock them and refuse to provide free support ;D.
You are so backward thinking. High tech CGI 3D movie via virtual reality head ware, bugger all data over the net, you send the script, CGI character definitions and director instructions, the content is created locally via dirt cheap supercomputer hard ware and free software, why send the content, with the content algorithm would be so much more compact.
So have your OS and applications on the fixed storage and keep your personal data on portable storage devices with numerous copies, I have to say with my decades of experience a whole lot less data was lost from portable digital storage versus the swags of data routinely lost via fixed storage.
Large capacity fixed storage whilst very convenient, without backup regimes, is inevitably data destructive.
The report also does one other vary useful thing, it highlights an underlying change in human society. A return to the concept of "contribute and share, share and contribute", as one of the most important and socially constructive principles of human society. As it turns out, "Free Open Source Software" could be thought of as 'digital enlightenment' ;).
Google seems stuck in the whole privacy invasive marketdroid trap. It's managements has now becomes lopsided and seems incapable of diversifying into other technology areas and sees the market from only one viewpoint. When management becomes like that, the company has real difficultly escaping the trap, as the management teams seeks to preserve and strengthen it's position as individuals defined by their expertise and will eliminate threats from other areas of business who threaten their ascendency.
Cheap hardware makes mass data storage. Cheap hardware also makes data mining very easy, and at the end of the day, the easiest method of industrial espionage would be by mining other companies data. As for google misusing data, they are a public corporation, their behaviour is defined by the majority shareholders and has already shown major changes in behaviour for the worse over the last five years.