The Japanese stock market, once upon a time (I suspect no longer) seemed to be focused more on long-term health than quarterly profits, and so the companies that crashed were the ones who didn't invest in the future--this was in direct contrast to western stock markets, where investors only care if the next quarter is going to meet the projections.
I work for a company that is expanding, partly through buyouts of smaller players that have complimentary technologies, and partly through hiring after those new technologies have been incorporated into the existing product lines and now need more support and R&D to further them. Given that this process began when there was no certainty of recovery from the recession, I actually feel pretty confident in the long-term health of this company.
Much like when Bill Ford recognized that Ford Motor Company had to shoot for the moon a few years ago, mortgaging everything to invest in new technologies, new vehicles, and new factory equipment, any company that is willing to bet on growth is generally going to do better than those who bet on contraction.
With the Motorola Mobility acquisition yesterday, it was looking like my next phone would almost certainly be a Motorola, despite my preference for Samsung hardware. This could potentially keep me a Samsung customer. We'll see.
You're kidding yourself if you don't believe Google will make that back from continued sales of Motorola phones, continued Android growth, and not having to pay out for various lawsuits.
No, I suspect what we're going to see is that Google is going to ask Apple and Microsoft if they still wish to play the game of global thermonuclear war. When the dust settles, everyone will be cross-licensed with everyone else, and we can go back to letting consumers pick the superior product without fear of it suddenly being blocked by trade commissions.
The reasoning wasn't based on those numbers as much as the fact that this debate showed the world that the US government does not have the balls to actually fix it's debt problem. The ebb and flow of the world economy is largely based on perception, rather than hard value. While in the midst of a shaky recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the US government put a gun in the mouth of the US economy, cocked the hammer, and had the trigger pulled to within a fraction of an inch of firing. The perception, quite rightly, is that this country is run (or at least held hostage) by lunatics who don't have the slightest grasp on the potential repercussions of the world's largest economy defaulting on its debt.
Wasn't a big part of the problem with mortgage backed securities the simple fact that there were a whole lot of folks who did not earn enough money to afford the lifestyle they were buying? You know, kind of like how the US government is spending more than it earns? The current argument for allowing our budget to be horrifically unbalanced is that with enough growth, we'll eventually be generating enough revenue to pay down our debt. That sounds to me like the same line of reasoning that created the sub-prime mortgage meltdown that came damned close to creating a second great depression. Only this time, that reasoning is being applied to a scale so massive that there is no nation or group on Earth with the liquidity (real or imagined) to bail us out.
I really don't think a company with as many bright people as Google would be stumbling about like this when the issue could cause Android to either be shut down or force Google into very expensive licensing. More likely, they are making this look as ridiculous as possible in order to try to garner enough support for eliminating software patents, or at least substantial patent reform.
Then again, maybe they really did just have a case of the stupids.
Ah, yes, because using an insecure, malware-prone OS for gaming makes sense. Nothing like being part of a botnet, having your credit card and personal information stolen, and getting your gaming accounts hacked in order to shave 5ms off your ping and gain 10fps. Your hardware is going to have a vastly bigger impact on gaming performance than your OS, and frankly I'm not clear what gaming "circles" are, in 2011, wanting to use XP SP2 anymore unless they are using outdated hardware.
I think the bulk of these SP2 installations are going to be corporate users who are wiping brand new systems with Windows 7 and installing an ancient corporate image. You would think that security concerns would make it worthwhile to update badly written software that is broken by OS vulnerability patches, but that's just "not in the budget" for a lot of companies.
The Tea Party are not the simple folk who don't want to be bothered. The simple folk who don't want to be bothered are the "silent majority" who are not that interested in getting involved, but when pushed hard enough, or bothered enough will finally join the fight. The Tea Party is "supposed" to represent those people, but so are the Republican and Democratic parties. Realistically, the parties represent only themselves. If we're going to qualify the Tea Party as a distinct and separate party from the Republican party, then I would say that all three parties are fueled primarily by a relative handful of individuals with large monetary influence. The founding fathers were by-and-large simple folk who became sufficiently fed up that they chose to get involved. The Tea Party might have some roots in that idea, but the current stance of the party is not in line with that reality (see the overwhelming poll numbers in favor of compromise on the debt ceiling vs. the "default-or-our-way" Tea Party line).
I remember a few years back, before the software patent lawsuit wars really kicked off, reading that these type of patents were akin to nukes. Everyone is infringing on everyone else at this point, and if everyone sued everyone else, it'd result in injunctions or pay-offs for just about every piece of software ever. At the time, I think it was something about IBM vs. Microsoft, but frankly I wonder why Google is taking the approach that they are. The hands-off approach to the lawsuits from Apple against HTC and Samsung, Microsoft vs. every android device maker, and the half-serious bidding war for the Nortel patents all make me wonder if perhaps their intent is to allow this "nuclear war" to occur between enough parties that the entire consumer electronics/software industry collectively realizes that they need to eliminate software patents?
The "Me too, I have input!" syndrome, as you put it, is still about getting re-elected, if you ask me. Why else would these people chime in on a subject they can't control and have little knowledge of? To stay in the public eye, and be able to say "I opposed this" or "I supported this" when their next opponent in the campaign cycle decides to challenge them.
End re-election concerns by going to single terms, and I bet most political posturing and useless activities like this would end (or at least become significantly less).
The mere fact that we're having to pin our hopes of patent reform on corporate interests is disgusting, and proof of the inherent failure of the US government to act on behalf of the interests of the greater good of its citizens in practical matters.
There are plenty of Americans who can't believe so many others allow themselves to be abused like this. The problem is that there are a lot of folks in powerful positions who have used fear-mongering as a tactic to achieve their goals for so long that they have started to believe their own drivel.
I keep hoping for a 21st century version of Thomas Paine's Common Sense to be written, but there just doesn't seem to be much hope that it would be read by enough people to matter anyway.
Chrome may be controlled by Google, but it is built on Chromium, which is at least open source: http://www.chromium.org/ FireFox stopped being the best browser for a whole lot of folks before this whole version number nonsense started. I had switched to Chrome before then, but when I checked out 4.0, I was shocked at how much slower it was than Chrome.
I am no fan of giving corporations singular control over things, but I'm not going to let that prevent me from using a product that is superior for my needs compared to the competition. I do hope FireFox returns to being a lean, fast browser that can retain a lot of market share. I prefer to see a variety of "platforms" pushing forward, as that will ensure standards take hold of the web, and that we never end up with another situation with IE6.
Your last statement, that "Google's offering is preventing it [Firefox] from becoming dominant." is absurd. I could say the same about FireFox having prevented IE from remaining dominant five years ago. Or about any other industry in which there is no pure monopoly. I do not want FireFox to be dominant. I do not want Chrome to be dominant. I want standards to be dominant. I want the web to be browser-agnostic.
Yeah, damn Google for being so evil to create a browser that can be installed by non-admins! Damn them for making a browser sufficiently secure that it doesn't need elevated privileges! I expect my web browser to require lower-level access to my system. How else can I get infected by the latest malware? By clicking links in email? My company's servers scrub that too well now!
Nonsense. You're sacrificing the pleasure that children would derive from you smacking him upside the head. Won't someone please think of the children?
This is exactly why Star Trek computers still had touch-based controls. All of those commands being voiced aloud would not only be loud and annoying, it would be inefficient. But there are certainly times when a voice command is going to be more efficient than any existing graphical/touch interface, especially with complex queries (presuming the voice system works as well as it does in Star trek, of course).
I don't blame developers for not reading their own forums. Most forums truly are the Mos Eisley Cantenas of the internet. That said, Blizzard developers do a phenomenal job of using their forums to interact with their customers. Ghostcrawler (Greg Street) must have the thickest skin of just about anyone on the planet to deal with the amount of flames and idiocy that exist there, but he not only reads many of the forum posts, he also replies and carries on discussions in many threads when a good point or argument is presented.
At the least, if a company is going to have forums for their products, they need to have representatives of the company there to read them (even if those representatives aren't the developers) in order to get what useful information there is out of them.
I disagree with your assessment that no greater threat exists now than in the past. The threat that presently exists is a public willingness to roll over and do nothing. How do you combat that threat? Education? Sounding the alarm doesn't really work, because the public has become jaded and is used to being told their children and/or themselves will be dead before the next morning if they don't tune in at 11/stay through the commercial break.
The terrorists have been winning this war, hands down. The casualties? Freedom and real, meaningful security.
Perhaps. The operating theory here, I think, is that at some point, a government will stop doing such idiotic things as cyber warfare because the costs are too high. Just like the threat of economic sanctions.
Part of the problem, however, is that for all the "control" we might have over the internet, it's a global network that by design can't just be turned off like that. Personally, I think that good old fashioned, "Oh, you shutdown our air traffic control system? Here, we'll shut down your airspace by destroying anything that gets more than five feet off the ground." is more effective. Excessive? You bet. That's the whole bloody point of MAD. Cyberwarfare cannot be part of a MAD policy unless you are prepared to destroy the physical connections.
Frankly, this proposal sounds like someone doesn't understand how this works. Countries like China really don't give a hoot if you block them from the internet - they'll find a way around whatever blocks you put in place, and crush (literally) anyone who internally dissents against their policies. Most of the general public has no idea this is happening. Perhaps a better solution would be raising a stink in a very public fashion at the UN, getting an international treaty in place, and *then* make it your official policy to react to cyber attacks with real, physical attacks. Otherwise, this is going to just keep happening with no real danger of reprisal that means anything to most of the countries engaged in this. Meanwhile, those nations that aren't actively trying to break things (merely spy, which is quite different) are going to get hit worse and worse with public sector damage.
Absolutely correct. However, 16,000 offenders being tracked.. 2 billion records.. Approximately 125,000 records per offender? I suppose it depends on the sort of data they are recording, and over what duration it needs to remain in an active (and not archived) state, but that just seems like an awful lot.
I guess the upside to this is that we know the US government (and it's contractors) can't actually track all ~300 million citizens with any sort of accuracy or utility then. There simply isn't enough brainpower working in government IT to build a usable system that could track us like that. Google or Facebook, though..
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The Japanese stock market, once upon a time (I suspect no longer) seemed to be focused more on long-term health than quarterly profits, and so the companies that crashed were the ones who didn't invest in the future--this was in direct contrast to western stock markets, where investors only care if the next quarter is going to meet the projections.
I work for a company that is expanding, partly through buyouts of smaller players that have complimentary technologies, and partly through hiring after those new technologies have been incorporated into the existing product lines and now need more support and R&D to further them. Given that this process began when there was no certainty of recovery from the recession, I actually feel pretty confident in the long-term health of this company.
Much like when Bill Ford recognized that Ford Motor Company had to shoot for the moon a few years ago, mortgaging everything to invest in new technologies, new vehicles, and new factory equipment, any company that is willing to bet on growth is generally going to do better than those who bet on contraction.
With the Motorola Mobility acquisition yesterday, it was looking like my next phone would almost certainly be a Motorola, despite my preference for Samsung hardware. This could potentially keep me a Samsung customer. We'll see.
You're kidding yourself if you don't believe Google will make that back from continued sales of Motorola phones, continued Android growth, and not having to pay out for various lawsuits.
No, I suspect what we're going to see is that Google is going to ask Apple and Microsoft if they still wish to play the game of global thermonuclear war. When the dust settles, everyone will be cross-licensed with everyone else, and we can go back to letting consumers pick the superior product without fear of it suddenly being blocked by trade commissions.
The reasoning wasn't based on those numbers as much as the fact that this debate showed the world that the US government does not have the balls to actually fix it's debt problem. The ebb and flow of the world economy is largely based on perception, rather than hard value. While in the midst of a shaky recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, the US government put a gun in the mouth of the US economy, cocked the hammer, and had the trigger pulled to within a fraction of an inch of firing. The perception, quite rightly, is that this country is run (or at least held hostage) by lunatics who don't have the slightest grasp on the potential repercussions of the world's largest economy defaulting on its debt.
Wasn't a big part of the problem with mortgage backed securities the simple fact that there were a whole lot of folks who did not earn enough money to afford the lifestyle they were buying? You know, kind of like how the US government is spending more than it earns? The current argument for allowing our budget to be horrifically unbalanced is that with enough growth, we'll eventually be generating enough revenue to pay down our debt. That sounds to me like the same line of reasoning that created the sub-prime mortgage meltdown that came damned close to creating a second great depression. Only this time, that reasoning is being applied to a scale so massive that there is no nation or group on Earth with the liquidity (real or imagined) to bail us out.
I really don't think a company with as many bright people as Google would be stumbling about like this when the issue could cause Android to either be shut down or force Google into very expensive licensing. More likely, they are making this look as ridiculous as possible in order to try to garner enough support for eliminating software patents, or at least substantial patent reform.
Then again, maybe they really did just have a case of the stupids.
Ah, yes, because using an insecure, malware-prone OS for gaming makes sense. Nothing like being part of a botnet, having your credit card and personal information stolen, and getting your gaming accounts hacked in order to shave 5ms off your ping and gain 10fps. Your hardware is going to have a vastly bigger impact on gaming performance than your OS, and frankly I'm not clear what gaming "circles" are, in 2011, wanting to use XP SP2 anymore unless they are using outdated hardware.
I think the bulk of these SP2 installations are going to be corporate users who are wiping brand new systems with Windows 7 and installing an ancient corporate image. You would think that security concerns would make it worthwhile to update badly written software that is broken by OS vulnerability patches, but that's just "not in the budget" for a lot of companies.
The Tea Party are not the simple folk who don't want to be bothered. The simple folk who don't want to be bothered are the "silent majority" who are not that interested in getting involved, but when pushed hard enough, or bothered enough will finally join the fight. The Tea Party is "supposed" to represent those people, but so are the Republican and Democratic parties. Realistically, the parties represent only themselves. If we're going to qualify the Tea Party as a distinct and separate party from the Republican party, then I would say that all three parties are fueled primarily by a relative handful of individuals with large monetary influence. The founding fathers were by-and-large simple folk who became sufficiently fed up that they chose to get involved. The Tea Party might have some roots in that idea, but the current stance of the party is not in line with that reality (see the overwhelming poll numbers in favor of compromise on the debt ceiling vs. the "default-or-our-way" Tea Party line).
I remember a few years back, before the software patent lawsuit wars really kicked off, reading that these type of patents were akin to nukes. Everyone is infringing on everyone else at this point, and if everyone sued everyone else, it'd result in injunctions or pay-offs for just about every piece of software ever. At the time, I think it was something about IBM vs. Microsoft, but frankly I wonder why Google is taking the approach that they are. The hands-off approach to the lawsuits from Apple against HTC and Samsung, Microsoft vs. every android device maker, and the half-serious bidding war for the Nortel patents all make me wonder if perhaps their intent is to allow this "nuclear war" to occur between enough parties that the entire consumer electronics/software industry collectively realizes that they need to eliminate software patents?
The "Me too, I have input!" syndrome, as you put it, is still about getting re-elected, if you ask me. Why else would these people chime in on a subject they can't control and have little knowledge of? To stay in the public eye, and be able to say "I opposed this" or "I supported this" when their next opponent in the campaign cycle decides to challenge them.
End re-election concerns by going to single terms, and I bet most political posturing and useless activities like this would end (or at least become significantly less).
The mere fact that we're having to pin our hopes of patent reform on corporate interests is disgusting, and proof of the inherent failure of the US government to act on behalf of the interests of the greater good of its citizens in practical matters.
There are plenty of Americans who can't believe so many others allow themselves to be abused like this. The problem is that there are a lot of folks in powerful positions who have used fear-mongering as a tactic to achieve their goals for so long that they have started to believe their own drivel.
I keep hoping for a 21st century version of Thomas Paine's Common Sense to be written, but there just doesn't seem to be much hope that it would be read by enough people to matter anyway.
Make fun of? If you wouldn't get a bit emotional seeing the last of the Space Shuttles launching, then you wouldn't have deserved to be there.
Do these wallets come with cash in them? Or is the garden not that generous?
That is like saying, "Let's provoke Russia into launching their nukes at us to prove that our missile defense system works!"
Chrome may be controlled by Google, but it is built on Chromium, which is at least open source: http://www.chromium.org/ FireFox stopped being the best browser for a whole lot of folks before this whole version number nonsense started. I had switched to Chrome before then, but when I checked out 4.0, I was shocked at how much slower it was than Chrome.
I am no fan of giving corporations singular control over things, but I'm not going to let that prevent me from using a product that is superior for my needs compared to the competition. I do hope FireFox returns to being a lean, fast browser that can retain a lot of market share. I prefer to see a variety of "platforms" pushing forward, as that will ensure standards take hold of the web, and that we never end up with another situation with IE6.
Your last statement, that "Google's offering is preventing it [Firefox] from becoming dominant." is absurd. I could say the same about FireFox having prevented IE from remaining dominant five years ago. Or about any other industry in which there is no pure monopoly. I do not want FireFox to be dominant. I do not want Chrome to be dominant. I want standards to be dominant. I want the web to be browser-agnostic.
Yeah, damn Google for being so evil to create a browser that can be installed by non-admins! Damn them for making a browser sufficiently secure that it doesn't need elevated privileges! I expect my web browser to require lower-level access to my system. How else can I get infected by the latest malware? By clicking links in email? My company's servers scrub that too well now!
Nonsense. You're sacrificing the pleasure that children would derive from you smacking him upside the head. Won't someone please think of the children?
The machine crashing randomly is CERTAIN to drive them away while power issue may or may not.
That's why everyone abandoned Windows in the 90s and fled to Apple.
Wait... that's not right.
This is exactly why Star Trek computers still had touch-based controls. All of those commands being voiced aloud would not only be loud and annoying, it would be inefficient. But there are certainly times when a voice command is going to be more efficient than any existing graphical/touch interface, especially with complex queries (presuming the voice system works as well as it does in Star trek, of course).
I don't blame developers for not reading their own forums. Most forums truly are the Mos Eisley Cantenas of the internet. That said, Blizzard developers do a phenomenal job of using their forums to interact with their customers. Ghostcrawler (Greg Street) must have the thickest skin of just about anyone on the planet to deal with the amount of flames and idiocy that exist there, but he not only reads many of the forum posts, he also replies and carries on discussions in many threads when a good point or argument is presented.
At the least, if a company is going to have forums for their products, they need to have representatives of the company there to read them (even if those representatives aren't the developers) in order to get what useful information there is out of them.
I disagree with your assessment that no greater threat exists now than in the past. The threat that presently exists is a public willingness to roll over and do nothing. How do you combat that threat? Education? Sounding the alarm doesn't really work, because the public has become jaded and is used to being told their children and/or themselves will be dead before the next morning if they don't tune in at 11/stay through the commercial break.
The terrorists have been winning this war, hands down. The casualties? Freedom and real, meaningful security.
Perhaps. The operating theory here, I think, is that at some point, a government will stop doing such idiotic things as cyber warfare because the costs are too high. Just like the threat of economic sanctions.
Part of the problem, however, is that for all the "control" we might have over the internet, it's a global network that by design can't just be turned off like that. Personally, I think that good old fashioned, "Oh, you shutdown our air traffic control system? Here, we'll shut down your airspace by destroying anything that gets more than five feet off the ground." is more effective. Excessive? You bet. That's the whole bloody point of MAD. Cyberwarfare cannot be part of a MAD policy unless you are prepared to destroy the physical connections.
Frankly, this proposal sounds like someone doesn't understand how this works. Countries like China really don't give a hoot if you block them from the internet - they'll find a way around whatever blocks you put in place, and crush (literally) anyone who internally dissents against their policies. Most of the general public has no idea this is happening. Perhaps a better solution would be raising a stink in a very public fashion at the UN, getting an international treaty in place, and *then* make it your official policy to react to cyber attacks with real, physical attacks. Otherwise, this is going to just keep happening with no real danger of reprisal that means anything to most of the countries engaged in this. Meanwhile, those nations that aren't actively trying to break things (merely spy, which is quite different) are going to get hit worse and worse with public sector damage.
Absolutely correct. However, 16,000 offenders being tracked.. 2 billion records.. Approximately 125,000 records per offender? I suppose it depends on the sort of data they are recording, and over what duration it needs to remain in an active (and not archived) state, but that just seems like an awful lot.
I guess the upside to this is that we know the US government (and it's contractors) can't actually track all ~300 million citizens with any sort of accuracy or utility then. There simply isn't enough brainpower working in government IT to build a usable system that could track us like that. Google or Facebook, though..