We have four major carriers. Two carriers are on CDMA and two are on GSM. The two GSM carriers use different frequency bands for 3G, which means you need a phone with a pentaband 3G radio to be able to freely switch between those two. LTE is even more complicated.
Basically, this would have been a great suggestion ten years ago, but now the carriers have used technical measures to make the whole "carrier locking" thing moot.
T-Mobile got a good chunk of bandwidth from AT&T due to the failed merger. So they're not quite so disparate any more.
Most AT&T phones and most T-Mobile phones will work on the other's network, just at a different speed/capability set.
Food trucks take up public parking spaces, and they are free to leave the area when an inspector shows up, avoiding any regulations that they don't feel like complying with. They pay no property taxes to support the infrastructure (like the parking space they use). They can show up for an hour a day, just to service the lunch hour crowd and then vanish when the customers do, having poached from fixed businesses enough to make a profit.
That may be the case in some places, but many places it is not.
For instance, in NYC and WDC they are regulated on where they can park, and must take out permits to be there. Of course, they often stay there all day to get all the tourists too. I'd be its the same for most other places they go - like Fairs, Air Shows, Ball Games, etc; often places where it makes no sense to have a restaurant as people will only be there for a couple hours once ever week or so, may be less often.
Further, many times a food truck won't be able to move away so quickly. They can't just close shop and move - they have to "batten down the hatches" so to speak, and then move the beast of a vehicle out of the area.
Of course, all this is backed up by a nice little reality show too - where they went over a lot of that kind of stuff - The Great Food Truck Race where they went all over the country with the trucks. (And no, I'm saying this solely based on that show.)
Nope, it's clearly people who think different thoughts than we think that cause all these problems. After all, they kill other people who think different thoughts than they think to force them to stop thinking them, so we should force them to stop thinking their own thoughts so they can get busy thinking ours. It's just LOGIC, people, and I know it's right because I thought of it.
As does the atheist.
Both of which are welcome to hold that opinion; it's when they try to force their variant on everyone else that they become the dickheads of selfishness who fuck things up for the rest of the world.
True. It's just that all too often, especially here on/., people take the view that Atheists don't push their views on anyone - that it's all the religious people's fault, which (as we just agreed) is not the case.
Of course, taking offense at something just for the sake of taking offense in order to get ones own way also does not serve the societal interest either.
but for fucks sake the other kid IS FUCKING TWO YEARS OLD and the other one is FIVE - . and they go on an ultra ban on everything because they can't put the ipad on the top shelf - hell, I'd be proud if they could operate them, even iOS involves quite a bit of reading and even with familiar icons I bet the dad had to start the angry birds for the two year old one. they could have just bought them a ball.
You are severely underestimating 2 year olds. My daughter figured out how to unlock the iPad, page around until she found netflicks, open it, find Curios George in the recently watched list, and start it playing. And this was when she was 18 months old. And yes we had to sharply curtail her iPad time. She's supposed to be learning to explore her world physically at this age, not zone out in front of a screen.
We do still let her play for a few minutes a day because it is good for her to learn the tech, but too much screen time is IMHO counterproductive at her age. Besides after an iPad session she's always a huge grump.
Agreed. My 2 year old has figured that out on the iPodTouch, iPad Mini, an Android 4 tablet, and his Nubi Jr. He also figured out the OK/CANCEL thing before he was 2 when the iPod would pop up a message (typically about some sale or the battery or something) so that he could get rid of it and go back to the video.
I for one have never heard of an atheist food pantry or soup kitchen.
Don't be insulting. There are many atheist organisations working extremely hard to help the needy and unlike some religious groups there are no strings attached.
Nope, it's clearly people who think different thoughts than we think that cause all these problems. After all, they kill other people who think different thoughts than they think to force them to stop thinking them, so we should force them to stop thinking their own thoughts so they can get busy thinking ours. It's just LOGIC, people, and I know it's right because I thought of it.
"Or they could have tried to get Visual Studio to leverage LLVM and ship bitcode so things could be ever further future-proofed and extend to more than just 2 architectures."
That's the humorous part of all this: Microsoft started work (more than a decade ago, if I recall) on the 'Common Language Runtime' and the 'Common Language Infrastructure', with the 'Common Intermediate Language' playing the part of architecture-independent bytecode representation. It's ostensibly a standard and whatnot; but basically Microsoft's ".NET" is the serious implementation.
The already have, in house, widely used, supported by their dev tools, an architecture independent mechanism. Loads of ISVs even use it fairly extensively.
Architecturally, they might actually have the best position among any major vendor to make cross-platform binaries happen; but they threw it all away to try to have a mandatory app store. Elegant, really.
Yes..NET does that. But it never really got used for shipping stuff using the Byte Encoding, just the final x86/x86-64 binary encodings. Yeah, some people did the byte encoding stuff early on, but that quickly fell by the wayside as people realized it was only ever going to be on Windows, and normally 32-bit/64-bit x86 Windows at that.
Yeah, if they got serious they could push for the byte encoding again, or even make it the default output. But then, you wouldn't get much benefit if you had to mix non-.NET code with it.
Hell I live in one of the poorest rural states in the nation
I am not referring to the US. I am referring to places like the Pacific Rim, China, India, SWA - Nokia was extremely popular there even just a few years back, and their Symbian phones did very well. People used the Ovi store there. The rise of the Android phones there was occurring but its exponential rise in those locations was primarily due to the drop of Symbian by Nokia ala Elop.
Now, in the US - yeah, Nokia was almost non-existent.
Feature phones make alot of money and are stepping stone to smartphones.
Wrong. Feature phones make no money.
Please tell that to the many millions of people that bought apps for the Nokia Feature Phones, who used the Ovi store, etc.
Nokia did very well in making money using Feature Phones for quite a while.
Why would Meego have turned around Nokia's fortunes where Symbian would not? There have been plenty of "alternative" mobile OSes launched already (Bada, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS, Windows Phone... hell - even BlackBerry is an "alternative" OS these days) but none have been much more than a blip on the big Android/iOS radar screen. Why would Meego have been different?
MeeGo was about transferring what Nokia had on Symbian to a new platform. They supported developing both with Qt in a compatible way such that a simple recompile could move the application from Symbian over to MeeGo. Of course, they could have chosen to do the same thing with Android or Tizen (Bada/Ubuntu Phone/FireFox OS/etc didn't come until later), but they would have still had to integrated Qt into it, where Qt was a central component MeeGo from the get to.
Instead, they dropped everything they did in favor of a platform that none of their existing Symbian developers had any kind of migration path to. So everyone had to go out and start from scratch, in which case, why not chose the dominant platforms (iOS and Android)?
The question isn't exactly when he took over (9/21/2010), but when he started making big company destruction announcements (2/2011) - and that you can spot in the 6 year graph.
They specifically say the person sending the text should have a reason to know the person was driving.
Yeah, it's stupid but don't bring up reason that don't apply.
So the court can bring up any dumbass scenario they want, but I can't?
No. The court is limited by law and legal precedence; they honor common law but are not strictly bound by it like they are written law. Lawyers can try to be innovative in their arguments to try to build new case-law (and thereby establish precedence) but they run a big risk if they do so.
In this case, it's a judge responding to one of the arguments made saying that he can see under certain circumstances where the liability would occur, but does not agree those circumstances match in this particular case. In other words, it's a valid argument but not valid in the current case. Another lawyer within the same jurisdiction in another case with slightly different facts can point to this as saying "it's a valid argument" now, but they would still have to establish the facts required to show that liability extends to the person sending the text as well - which will still not be an easy thing to do. A lawyer in another jurisdiction might have a little bit easier time, but they would also have to pursuade the judge that what this judge said is supported by the law (precedence, etc) in that jurisdiction too.
Make it illegal to send a text if you know the recipient is driving. Now you gotta prove to a court of law that the sender knew. But it's easy to prove the driver was texting by checking phone records. But no, we don't want to do that, because it would imply making it illegal to text while driving.
Many places have already made it illegal to text while driving. They are just existing the liability to the other party of the conversation when that party has knowingly participated in the illegal texting, at the very least as an accessory to the crime itself.
Just because I send someone a text message doesn't mean that I'm forcing them to read it while driving. I'll often text my wife when I know she's driving home because I want to send it to her before *I* start driving. Something like "Hey sweetie, after your aerobics class can you pick up milk at the store?" or "I'm going to the gym after work so I'll be home late, go ahead and eat dinner without me".
I don't need or expect her to read the SMS's while she's driving, so why should I be responsible if she does? I paid for the car that she's driving that's capable of traveling at well over 100mph - if she goes over the speed limit and gets into an accident am I responsible for not speed-limiting the car?
If she reads it, then yes you do have a culpability to a degree. However, my guess (IANAL) is that a single text would not qualify you; sending numerous ones and trying to carry on a conversation would. Now, IANAL but there is already established case law in other areas that would seem to equally apply here in determining liability/culpability.
Despite the fact that the sender has no real way of knowing if the recipient is operating a vehicle unless they are in the vehicle with them, and on top of that, the text is a non-time sensitive communication like a physical letter. The only reason to read it the moment you get it is because you want to, otherwise you just wait until it's convenient, nobody is in any way forcing you to read it now.
As to the morons in NJ, they said "...know, the recipient will view the text while driving". I guess the statement of "I didn't know he/she was stupid enough to text while driving." suddenly becomes a valid defense.
True. No one is forcing the driver to read it. But that's not the question. The question is at what point does the sender become liable? The judge is saying that if they send texts to someone that they know is driving and that driver reads them (for whatever reason) and an accident happens then they are liable. Sending one text would not likely qualify - it would probably have to be something like a conversation going on over texts where the driver is responding, something sending a lot of texts quickly, or someone having been told "I'm driving" and continuing to text. There's already a large amount of case law that can probably be used to help make the determination that the sender knew about the driving (IANAL, that's just my educated guess).
You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.
It's probably more for when the driver responds and the sender responds back in those situations. Thereby they know the driver is actually driving and continued the texting.
Make it illegal to send a text if you know the recipient is driving. Now you gotta prove to a court of law that the sender knew. But it's easy to prove the driver was texting by checking phone records. But no, we don't want to do that, because it would imply making it illegal to text while driving.
Many places have already made it illegal to text while driving. They are just existing the liability to the other party of the conversation when that party has knowingly participated in the illegal texting, at the very least as an accessory to the crime itself.
Not necessarily. Sales can be flat or even rising and if margins shrink, then profits still decline.
Even so, a flat year-on-year is effectively a decline for Microsoft.
No I was not confusing Microsoft (MSFT) for Apple (AAPL).
Sorry 'bout that. I thought when you said "a couple of years ago" you meant two or maybe three years ago rather than a decade ago (MSFT's first dividend was in 2003 after the first dotcom crash, not 2000).
I never said it was in 2000 that they started paying out dividends, only that their stock has been flat since about then.
What you were saying seemed to fit AAPL's financials history better.
Only with respect to the time period for the dividend payout. I honestly forgot the exact year that MS started doing it, but it is still relatively recent given how old Microsoft is.
MSFT started paying dividends in 2003, about ten years ago. You might be mistaking them for Apple who only started paying dividends in 2012. The AAPL price is down $200 bucks since last year, not "largely flat". As for the future, who knows?
No I was not confusing Microsoft (MSFT) for Apple (AAPL). Microsoft stock has been largely flat since 2000 - which is why they started paying out dividends.
Apple started paying out dividends in 2012 because their cash-on-hand was too large, not because the of lack of investor satisfaction in the stock price direction.
Revenues for FY 2013 for MSFT were $77.8B, up 5.6% over FY2012. If that's evidence of "fucking it up" then I know of a lot of businesses who'd really like to be fucked up like MSFT
Yes, MS has done somewhat okay. However, their stock has been largely flat since 1999 for which they started paying out dividends just a couple years ago to please stockholders, and their current product generations are not doing too well in the market. We'll see how the bells ring for FY 2014.
they are actually quite successful in areas where they never had a monopoly.
All those areas you mentioned are areas where they built up business because of their monopoly.
It's quite well documented that MS changed protocols between their applications so that their applications best integrated with each other and not with third party products - often doing things at the expense of competitor products, for example enabling Office to perform better on Windows Desktop than WordPerfect could, changing the CIFS/SMB protocol when competitors figured out their changes to achieve interoperability thereby breaking the interoperability again (even having to add updates to older versions of Windows to maintain legacy compatibility), and the list goes on.
SQL Server - most prominately due to ties with Exchange.
Exchange - most prominately due to ties with Outlook.
Outlook - most prominately due to ties with MS Office (Word, Excel) and Windows Desktop.
Windows Server - most prominately due to ties with SQL Server, Exchange, and Windows Desktop.
And the list goes on. You can tie all their businesses back to the Windows Desktop or Office suite in some form, and often illegal things they did to push them.
I have to call BS. Microsoft has a stranglehold in the enterprise from stem to stern. Need E-mail, Exchange or nothing (good luck getting internal legal to sign off on a cloud provider due to Sarbox, FERPA, HIPAA, FISMA, and other regs, even though some providers claim to be "certified".)
There are plenty of other E-mail solutions out there - including a number that do the same thing as Exchange, like Zimbra.
AD is the only game in town because so many applications authenticate from that. Not LDAP, AD.
You do realize that AD uses LDAP as the back-end for authentication, do you not? Any application that can do LDAP authentication can authenticate against AD. Now, if they wanted to use Kerberos with AD then they have to use Microsoft's EEE variant of Kerberos. But AD itself is basically LDAP+Kerberos+DNS+CIFS/SMB.
SQL Server is usually the only choice for a lot of applications.
Again, no. SQL Server has many uses, but it has great competion from Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and quite a few others - many of which do better than Oracle and SQL Server, for which the primary reason to use them is the service contracts with Oracle and MS respectively.
For the desktop, lets be real. Windows is it, unless you move to VDI or a thin client infrastructure, or just want users to use a few applications internal to the company.
There are many organizations that utilize Linux and even Mac for the desktop. In some cases entire industries (Audio-Visual - CGI, Graphics Editing, Video Editing, etc.) for example. Even entire governments are moving away from Windows.
MS just had a big price hike in the enterprise to make up for lost revenue. Because they can, and businesses will continue to pay their SA fees.
And many businesses will not go along with it.
Seriously, in 2001 MS changed their Volume Licensing program and lost 1/3rd of their customers. 2/3rds of the remaining didn't renew their volume licenses when the time came 3 years later. Yes, it's a big program and Microsoft has adjusted it since then; but it doesn't mean businesses just rollover and give them what they want.
Businesses are not buying Win8 in any form. MS as a company has to change dramatically to remain relevant.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming in the Post-Microsoft Era....
But will it run Windows?
All joking aside...pretty much everything can run Linux now except WinRT devices
We have four major carriers. Two carriers are on CDMA and two are on GSM. The two GSM carriers use different frequency bands for 3G, which means you need a phone with a pentaband 3G radio to be able to freely switch between those two. LTE is even more complicated.
Basically, this would have been a great suggestion ten years ago, but now the carriers have used technical measures to make the whole "carrier locking" thing moot.
T-Mobile got a good chunk of bandwidth from AT&T due to the failed merger. So they're not quite so disparate any more. Most AT&T phones and most T-Mobile phones will work on the other's network, just at a different speed/capability set.
That may be the case in some places, but many places it is not.
For instance, in NYC and WDC they are regulated on where they can park, and must take out permits to be there. Of course, they often stay there all day to get all the tourists too. I'd be its the same for most other places they go - like Fairs, Air Shows, Ball Games, etc; often places where it makes no sense to have a restaurant as people will only be there for a couple hours once ever week or so, may be less often.
Further, many times a food truck won't be able to move away so quickly. They can't just close shop and move - they have to "batten down the hatches" so to speak, and then move the beast of a vehicle out of the area.
Of course, all this is backed up by a nice little reality show too - where they went over a lot of that kind of stuff - The Great Food Truck Race where they went all over the country with the trucks. (And no, I'm saying this solely based on that show.)
Nope, it's clearly people who think different thoughts than we think that cause all these problems. After all, they kill other people who think different thoughts than they think to force them to stop thinking them, so we should force them to stop thinking their own thoughts so they can get busy thinking ours. It's just LOGIC, people, and I know it's right because I thought of it.
As does the atheist.
Both of which are welcome to hold that opinion; it's when they try to force their variant on everyone else that they become the dickheads of selfishness who fuck things up for the rest of the world.
True. It's just that all too often, especially here on /., people take the view that Atheists don't push their views on anyone - that it's all the religious people's fault, which (as we just agreed) is not the case.
Of course, taking offense at something just for the sake of taking offense in order to get ones own way also does not serve the societal interest either.
but for fucks sake the other kid IS FUCKING TWO YEARS OLD and the other one is FIVE - . and they go on an ultra ban on everything because they can't put the ipad on the top shelf - hell, I'd be proud if they could operate them, even iOS involves quite a bit of reading and even with familiar icons I bet the dad had to start the angry birds for the two year old one. they could have just bought them a ball.
You are severely underestimating 2 year olds. My daughter figured out how to unlock the iPad, page around until she found netflicks, open it, find Curios George in the recently watched list, and start it playing. And this was when she was 18 months old. And yes we had to sharply curtail her iPad time. She's supposed to be learning to explore her world physically at this age, not zone out in front of a screen.
We do still let her play for a few minutes a day because it is good for her to learn the tech, but too much screen time is IMHO counterproductive at her age. Besides after an iPad session she's always a huge grump.
Agreed. My 2 year old has figured that out on the iPodTouch, iPad Mini, an Android 4 tablet, and his Nubi Jr. He also figured out the OK/CANCEL thing before he was 2 when the iPod would pop up a message (typically about some sale or the battery or something) so that he could get rid of it and go back to the video.
And no, he doesn't get free reign of the devices.
I was with you until this point
I for one have never heard of an atheist food pantry or soup kitchen.
Don't be insulting. There are many atheist organisations working extremely hard to help the needy and unlike some religious groups there are no strings attached.
Please name a few.
Nope, it's clearly people who think different thoughts than we think that cause all these problems. After all, they kill other people who think different thoughts than they think to force them to stop thinking them, so we should force them to stop thinking their own thoughts so they can get busy thinking ours. It's just LOGIC, people, and I know it's right because I thought of it.
As does the atheist.
"Or they could have tried to get Visual Studio to leverage LLVM and ship bitcode so things could be ever further future-proofed and extend to more than just 2 architectures." That's the humorous part of all this: Microsoft started work (more than a decade ago, if I recall) on the 'Common Language Runtime' and the 'Common Language Infrastructure', with the 'Common Intermediate Language' playing the part of architecture-independent bytecode representation. It's ostensibly a standard and whatnot; but basically Microsoft's ".NET" is the serious implementation. The already have, in house, widely used, supported by their dev tools, an architecture independent mechanism. Loads of ISVs even use it fairly extensively. Architecturally, they might actually have the best position among any major vendor to make cross-platform binaries happen; but they threw it all away to try to have a mandatory app store. Elegant, really.
Yes. .NET does that. But it never really got used for shipping stuff using the Byte Encoding, just the final x86/x86-64 binary encodings. Yeah, some people did the byte encoding stuff early on, but that quickly fell by the wayside as people realized it was only ever going to be on Windows, and normally 32-bit/64-bit x86 Windows at that.
Yeah, if they got serious they could push for the byte encoding again, or even make it the default output. But then, you wouldn't get much benefit if you had to mix non-.NET code with it.
Hell I live in one of the poorest rural states in the nation
I am not referring to the US. I am referring to places like the Pacific Rim, China, India, SWA - Nokia was extremely popular there even just a few years back, and their Symbian phones did very well. People used the Ovi store there. The rise of the Android phones there was occurring but its exponential rise in those locations was primarily due to the drop of Symbian by Nokia ala Elop.
Now, in the US - yeah, Nokia was almost non-existent.
Feature phones make alot of money and are stepping stone to smartphones.
Wrong. Feature phones make no money.
Please tell that to the many millions of people that bought apps for the Nokia Feature Phones, who used the Ovi store, etc. Nokia did very well in making money using Feature Phones for quite a while.
Why would Meego have turned around Nokia's fortunes where Symbian would not? There have been plenty of "alternative" mobile OSes launched already (Bada, Ubuntu Phone, Firefox OS, Windows Phone... hell - even BlackBerry is an "alternative" OS these days) but none have been much more than a blip on the big Android/iOS radar screen. Why would Meego have been different?
MeeGo was about transferring what Nokia had on Symbian to a new platform. They supported developing both with Qt in a compatible way such that a simple recompile could move the application from Symbian over to MeeGo. Of course, they could have chosen to do the same thing with Android or Tizen (Bada/Ubuntu Phone/FireFox OS/etc didn't come until later), but they would have still had to integrated Qt into it, where Qt was a central component MeeGo from the get to.
Instead, they dropped everything they did in favor of a platform that none of their existing Symbian developers had any kind of migration path to. So everyone had to go out and start from scratch, in which case, why not chose the dominant platforms (iOS and Android)?
Considering Elop successfully tanked Nokia's stock, I would say mission accomplished.
Can you spot where in this Nokia 6-year stock graph that Elop took over?
The question isn't exactly when he took over (9/21/2010), but when he started making big company destruction announcements (2/2011) - and that you can spot in the 6 year graph.
No one should have had root access.
Someone has to have root access. Otherwise you cannot maintain a server.
And using 'su' or 'sudo' in *nix, and "Run As Administrator" in Windows is all root access.
So the court can bring up any dumbass scenario they want, but I can't?
No. The court is limited by law and legal precedence; they honor common law but are not strictly bound by it like they are written law. Lawyers can try to be innovative in their arguments to try to build new case-law (and thereby establish precedence) but they run a big risk if they do so.
In this case, it's a judge responding to one of the arguments made saying that he can see under certain circumstances where the liability would occur, but does not agree those circumstances match in this particular case. In other words, it's a valid argument but not valid in the current case. Another lawyer within the same jurisdiction in another case with slightly different facts can point to this as saying "it's a valid argument" now, but they would still have to establish the facts required to show that liability extends to the person sending the text as well - which will still not be an easy thing to do. A lawyer in another jurisdiction might have a little bit easier time, but they would also have to pursuade the judge that what this judge said is supported by the law (precedence, etc) in that jurisdiction too.
See my replies to others on this thread.
Make it illegal to send a text if you know the recipient is driving. Now you gotta prove to a court of law that the sender knew. But it's easy to prove the driver was texting by checking phone records. But no, we don't want to do that, because it would imply making it illegal to text while driving.
Many places have already made it illegal to text while driving. They are just existing the liability to the other party of the conversation when that party has knowingly participated in the illegal texting, at the very least as an accessory to the crime itself.
Just because I send someone a text message doesn't mean that I'm forcing them to read it while driving. I'll often text my wife when I know she's driving home because I want to send it to her before *I* start driving. Something like "Hey sweetie, after your aerobics class can you pick up milk at the store?" or "I'm going to the gym after work so I'll be home late, go ahead and eat dinner without me".
I don't need or expect her to read the SMS's while she's driving, so why should I be responsible if she does? I paid for the car that she's driving that's capable of traveling at well over 100mph - if she goes over the speed limit and gets into an accident am I responsible for not speed-limiting the car?
If she reads it, then yes you do have a culpability to a degree. However, my guess (IANAL) is that a single text would not qualify you; sending numerous ones and trying to carry on a conversation would. Now, IANAL but there is already established case law in other areas that would seem to equally apply here in determining liability/culpability.
Despite the fact that the sender has no real way of knowing if the recipient is operating a vehicle unless they are in the vehicle with them, and on top of that, the text is a non-time sensitive communication like a physical letter. The only reason to read it the moment you get it is because you want to, otherwise you just wait until it's convenient, nobody is in any way forcing you to read it now. As to the morons in NJ, they said "...know, the recipient will view the text while driving". I guess the statement of "I didn't know he/she was stupid enough to text while driving." suddenly becomes a valid defense.
True. No one is forcing the driver to read it. But that's not the question. The question is at what point does the sender become liable? The judge is saying that if they send texts to someone that they know is driving and that driver reads them (for whatever reason) and an accident happens then they are liable. Sending one text would not likely qualify - it would probably have to be something like a conversation going on over texts where the driver is responding, something sending a lot of texts quickly, or someone having been told "I'm driving" and continuing to text. There's already a large amount of case law that can probably be used to help make the determination that the sender knew about the driving (IANAL, that's just my educated guess).
You send a text because you know someone is driving, so they can pick it up later rather than answering a voice call.
It's probably more for when the driver responds and the sender responds back in those situations. Thereby they know the driver is actually driving and continued the texting.
Make it illegal to send a text if you know the recipient is driving. Now you gotta prove to a court of law that the sender knew. But it's easy to prove the driver was texting by checking phone records. But no, we don't want to do that, because it would imply making it illegal to text while driving.
Many places have already made it illegal to text while driving. They are just existing the liability to the other party of the conversation when that party has knowingly participated in the illegal texting, at the very least as an accessory to the crime itself.
Splitting Microsoft along business/consumer lines:
MicrosoftBusiness: *WindowsDesktop (Profitable)
Profits for Windows Desktop are declining.
Declining would imply that sales were less than before. Last quarter sales were actually flat year on year.
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/153837-microsoft-reports-weak-windows-8-sales-in-q1-2013-says-it-will-respond-to-customer-feedback
Not necessarily. Sales can be flat or even rising and if margins shrink, then profits still decline.
Even so, a flat year-on-year is effectively a decline for Microsoft.
No I was not confusing Microsoft (MSFT) for Apple (AAPL).
Sorry 'bout that. I thought when you said "a couple of years ago" you meant two or maybe three years ago rather than a decade ago (MSFT's first dividend was in 2003 after the first dotcom crash, not 2000).
I never said it was in 2000 that they started paying out dividends, only that their stock has been flat since about then.
What you were saying seemed to fit AAPL's financials history better.
Only with respect to the time period for the dividend payout. I honestly forgot the exact year that MS started doing it, but it is still relatively recent given how old Microsoft is.
MSFT started paying dividends in 2003, about ten years ago. You might be mistaking them for Apple who only started paying dividends in 2012. The AAPL price is down $200 bucks since last year, not "largely flat". As for the future, who knows?
No I was not confusing Microsoft (MSFT) for Apple (AAPL). Microsoft stock has been largely flat since 2000 - which is why they started paying out dividends.
Apple started paying out dividends in 2012 because their cash-on-hand was too large, not because the of lack of investor satisfaction in the stock price direction.
Revenues for FY 2013 for MSFT were $77.8B, up 5.6% over FY2012. If that's evidence of "fucking it up" then I know of a lot of businesses who'd really like to be fucked up like MSFT
Yes, MS has done somewhat okay. However, their stock has been largely flat since 1999 for which they started paying out dividends just a couple years ago to please stockholders, and their current product generations are not doing too well in the market. We'll see how the bells ring for FY 2014.
they are actually quite successful in areas where they never had a monopoly.
All those areas you mentioned are areas where they built up business because of their monopoly. It's quite well documented that MS changed protocols between their applications so that their applications best integrated with each other and not with third party products - often doing things at the expense of competitor products, for example enabling Office to perform better on Windows Desktop than WordPerfect could, changing the CIFS/SMB protocol when competitors figured out their changes to achieve interoperability thereby breaking the interoperability again (even having to add updates to older versions of Windows to maintain legacy compatibility), and the list goes on.
SQL Server - most prominately due to ties with Exchange.
Exchange - most prominately due to ties with Outlook.
Outlook - most prominately due to ties with MS Office (Word, Excel) and Windows Desktop.
Windows Server - most prominately due to ties with SQL Server, Exchange, and Windows Desktop.
And the list goes on. You can tie all their businesses back to the Windows Desktop or Office suite in some form, and often illegal things they did to push them.
I have to call BS. Microsoft has a stranglehold in the enterprise from stem to stern. Need E-mail, Exchange or nothing (good luck getting internal legal to sign off on a cloud provider due to Sarbox, FERPA, HIPAA, FISMA, and other regs, even though some providers claim to be "certified".)
There are plenty of other E-mail solutions out there - including a number that do the same thing as Exchange, like Zimbra.
AD is the only game in town because so many applications authenticate from that. Not LDAP, AD.
You do realize that AD uses LDAP as the back-end for authentication, do you not? Any application that can do LDAP authentication can authenticate against AD. Now, if they wanted to use Kerberos with AD then they have to use Microsoft's EEE variant of Kerberos. But AD itself is basically LDAP+Kerberos+DNS+CIFS/SMB.
SQL Server is usually the only choice for a lot of applications.
Again, no. SQL Server has many uses, but it has great competion from Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and quite a few others - many of which do better than Oracle and SQL Server, for which the primary reason to use them is the service contracts with Oracle and MS respectively.
For the desktop, lets be real. Windows is it, unless you move to VDI or a thin client infrastructure, or just want users to use a few applications internal to the company.
There are many organizations that utilize Linux and even Mac for the desktop. In some cases entire industries (Audio-Visual - CGI, Graphics Editing, Video Editing, etc.) for example. Even entire governments are moving away from Windows.
MS just had a big price hike in the enterprise to make up for lost revenue. Because they can, and businesses will continue to pay their SA fees.
And many businesses will not go along with it.
Seriously, in 2001 MS changed their Volume Licensing program and lost 1/3rd of their customers. 2/3rds of the remaining didn't renew their volume licenses when the time came 3 years later. Yes, it's a big program and Microsoft has adjusted it since then; but it doesn't mean businesses just rollover and give them what they want.
Businesses are not buying Win8 in any form. MS as a company has to change dramatically to remain relevant.