So I fail to see how this is an issue. If someone uses my card fruadulently, then I get reimbursed
My boss will tell you a different story. Just because the card holder gets their money back, does not necessarily mean the bank eats the cost. My boss stopped taking credit cards because he had too many people commiting fraud and then he got stuck with the chargebacks bacause the banks did not want to be stuck with the bill.
In the end, you will have to pay for someone else comming fraud on your card either by stores not taking credit card or higher prices to cover against fraud.
Why should this supprise anyone.... I had a serious discussion with my niece on a similar topic.
My view is this. The computer is great at giving information... it's just a tool. But any tool, no matter how sophisticated cannot do your job for you. If craftsman made the acme house building toolset 4000, don't expect it to build a palace for you, you still need someone to put the pieces together, and that's where the skill of the tradesman comes in. If you know how to ask the computer, it can tell you what happened at, say tianamin square, but will it tell you why the people protested their government? Will it tell you how the chinese youth railed against their communist rulers? Maybe, but there is only a certain extent to which a tool is useful. Take away that tool and the person using it is pretty much useless. My brothers and sisters went to school when slide rulers were still in fashion and when my oldest brother got to highschool, they came out with the calculators that ran on 9v batteries and had LED displays. By the time I got there, it was acceptable to have a simple caculator (not programmable) for trig functions. Now I can barely do math without a calculator, but I still understand all the math behind trigenometry, etc, and given a calculator, pen and paper I can work out my angles, distances, etc. How many highschool graduates of the last 5 years can do that without the computer?
If the bombs start falling and takes away all them fancy gadgets and doohickies, how many recent highschool graduates would be able to function? I doubt even I could.
My own parents have already forgotten far more practical world knowledge than I'll ever know and they don't suffer because they can't find the 'any key'. I think it's a disaster to allow kids below the age of 12 to be even near a computer. By highschool, their brain is still sufficiently pliable to grasp the concepts of the computer and by adulthood, they'll learn enough of it to be fully proficient.
And if these aliens find these shows interesting and start swapping them on their own bittorrent like network, then the MPAA can sue them for copyright infringement.
Not using the universal language of math, why are they trying to use pictures?
And what will that picture say? 'Take me to your leader'?
What if they see that as a declaration of war and attack us? Or a plea for help? What if they interpret that as, 'we want all your unattractive females' and we get overrun by aliens?
Maybe then I can use this line..... 'Whatever dude; at least you get to do something'...
They actually sell their content to other webpages so they can display the content.
The point I made from the start is that google plays by a certain set of rules. Those rules govern what pages they cache and what pages they don't cache
AFP can sell their content to whoever they want (say, ACME news), but if google's bots go and grab this content from that web site (in this case ACME), then why the hell is AFP bringing up a lawsuit against google?
Their problem might be with google for displaying it, but that's where the CEASE AND DESIST letter comes in, their first problem is with ACME news for allowing google to cache it in the first place.
I understand the whole point of google not having the licence to do what they did, but just because this scenario might be what happened, does that then mean AVP has the right to automatically sue google directly?
Suppose I told something in confidence to a friend who then told someone else, say a reporter, and it got on the news? Would I be more upset at the reporter who then told the whole world or the friend who betrayed my trust?
This might not be the same thing, but it's pretty close. You start at the source of the problem, then spread out from there.
What exactly do you mean by this? I can't figure out the context.
I have read google news and can make several observations about it, but probably not the kind you're thinking of in reference to your response's parent.
Google, despite what it is, doesn't exactly go around ripping all the web pages off the internet just because it could. Even now, it still does so by invitation.
AFP has requested google to do so. I'm not sure how google determines what to include and what not to include, but does it not have something to do with metatags? For whatever reason, google cached some pages, they never did want/now they don't want cached.
Now AFP is all in a snit that google has cached content they at least now have determined they don't want cached and they now seek damages.
In anotherwise sane world, would it not simply have been better off to send a cease and desist letter to google saying "THIS IS OFF BOUNDS", and failure to comply, *THEN* sue?
As others posted already, isn't this just a ploy to get an easy 17.5 mil cash grab? They're going straight for the throat, so I'm thinking, "What is your malfunction?????"
It seems SCO is the posterchild of this kind of questionable lawsuit practice in the world today. "OH, WE'VE BEEN WRONGED!!!! QUICK SUE".
Could it be the death of civility is the direct cause of the death of common sense??
If there was no fork(); system call, no program could start another without terminating itself, so why is it unreasonable to have while (1) fork();
Vulnerability is a very broad and subjective term.
It *IS* possible to use a stack overflow in intel pcs to be able to run code on a computer and through that do a while (1) fork(); to bring the linux/unix based remote computer to a grinding halt.
Even if there are remote code execution vulnerabilities open to linux, how many of those can actually allow a very interested third party to gain root level access and take control?
All you need is an absent minded or computer ignorant user to click a button to download and run an active x control on windows and you have instant spyware/virus/trojan/malware.
I've been playing in an unpatched xp sandbox for spyware, playing the social engineering game (some users *WANT* the crack to their favorite game and to do so, they *NEED* to install this active x control before this crack site will let them do it) and I got the sandbox up to 55 different pieces of spyware before it got so horribly unstable I couldn't use it anymore for anything. That needed a harddrive wipe and reinstall.
A fork() bomb can only exhaust the resources to the point where nothing more can run. Ultimately, a reboot will fix that. Suppose it exists and a regular user gets spyware on their linux box and that spyware manages to run, it shows up as a regular user task. Unable to gain root level access and replace key utilities such as ps, top, etc, they can't hide. Without a fork bomb to cover its tracks, the root user on a different terminal can scan the process list and kill it. If the OS is designed, implemented and maintained properly, there is no theoretical way spyware can do any actual harm to the system as a whole, only to what that user has the privilege to do.
what about a malloc bomb???? Windows is just as vulnerable.... It only takes one process that hides itself from the task list to alloc whatever vm it can get to make the computer unusable (I have this example sleep 1000ms between each 1mb allocs to delay its detection, but it would only take 1 minute to exhaust 512 mb of virtual memory).
while (1) { malloc(1024000); sleep(1000); }
You can also say a single blow to the genitals is relatively safe from permanant damage, but what about 10 or 100 or 1000 or 1000000?
The only secure computer is the unplugged computer, and even then only if it's locked in a high security vault, safe from a thief. But then, what good would that computer be?
What happens when starter edition becomes infested with spyware?
"Sorry, you've reached your limit of spyware. To be able to run more than 30 pieces of spyware, you need to buy the full version. For a low price of $50(us) you can upgrade to the full copy, then you can run all the spyware you want"
The plastic bag is on the inside and doesn't matter once the cement has cured. The outside is _cement_. Neither UV nor "the environment" break concrete down "instantly". Or even slowly.
??????
The structure is made from cement impregnated fabic, that is sealed in an easily transportable plastic bag
Sounds to me like the structural part of the shelter is a combination of a fabric and cement sealed inside a plastic bag. A lot like those instant casts doctors use for broken bones. If you *CAN* remove the plastic bag when it's hard, I'd bet the unexposed cement impregnated fabric will crumble come enough freeze/thaw cycles. Once it's hard, I suppose you could coat it with a fairly thick layer of real concrete, but what would be the point of those 'just add water' shelters?
It's not the concrete itself that would deteriorate, it's the fabric that would disintegrate/absorb water/be consumed by microorganisms and through its deterioration destroy the shelter through weakening from the inside out.
Actually, what VMWare does is to give up a block of physical ram on guest vm power on, locking it down and then doing some clever tricks with virtual memory mapping.
As long as the guest os thinks it's running in protected mode, it really is, and even when it thinks it's in non protected mode (as in kernel mode), it still is and any accesses outside what's been afforded for it via the virtual memory manager gets trapped translated and emulated via host os level drivers.
VMware emulates a BX (if I remember correctly) chipset and it appears to be running on a motherboard of the P2 era. All devices are also emulated.
It might be possible to page windows out and 'warm boot' into linux, but paging windows back in after linux is done would be problematic at best, not to mention with windows even temporarily out of the way linux could decide not to give control back to windows, in which case it would be a complicated one-way context switcher, rather than a platform emulator.
My computer has dual boot linux and windows, but it's running linux 99% of the time and for the odd windows stuff I start a VMWare session with a secondary copy of windows loaded to do my stuff. Linux still runs and is still in charge of everything, all it does is sacrifice HD space and access, some ram temporarily and cpu cycles. Even then however, there's a definite performance hit through the emulator, and though it might be good enough for the odd thing, it's not that great for any serious stuff and impossible for some things (games).
As for carrying on why specifically this winos+qemu+knoppix would be of any use, I'll just shut up now in case I might get modded down to redundant again.
I suppose these would be better where things might get a bit frigid at times. Suppose a devastating earthquake hit moscow in october or november.
Instead of popping up tent city and trying to keep these things warm which is very hard to do, these things would provide a durable shell that holds the snow and acts like insulation.... kinda like an instant igloo.
Of course if it happened in the middle of winter, you might have a hard time getting the cement to cure.
a structure like that would be reasonably adequate until spring when they could finally deal with the original problem.
Other than an application like this or, as someone else pointed out, semi-permanant habitat for developing countries, I don't see a point to this type of structure...
What happens if it's used for so long the UV breaks down the plastic bag and the environment instantly destroys the shell? Lawsuit, probably, if it collapses on someone's head?
Turns out our email server crashed a few months ago and all emails pertaining to this trial got wiped out because of filesystem corruption.
We're really embarassed about it so we'll just say they got deleted because quite frankly, the technology from burst.com no longer interests us.
It's not our fault, really it's not, and we didn't steal their technology, really we didn't, but we're really nice people here, so we're willing to settle and forget the whole thing. Is that ok with you, your honor? We'll pay 60 million dollars in unmarked bills. Is that ok your honor?
I might also add that they probably do bundle spyware, only that it's not necessary to do so. There are so many other ways to get riddled with spyware withouth the help of installing the p2p network software.
1) The likes of bittorrent. You download from an authoritative server a 'control' file that has an MD5 checksum of a file you want. Very difficult or impossible to spoof the saved file.
2) The likes of kazaa. You query other machines on the network for files and pray it's not riddled with spyware, etc. It's probably far too easy to create a virus, giving it an enticing name like 'xpcrack.exe' and plop it in your shared folder and wait for someone to pick it up.
Why would the makers of kazaa bundle spyware/trojans etc directly into their application when it's easier to allow the user to search for something they want and have a hit not on what they really wanted but spyware masquerading as what they wanted?
I've loaded kazaa on a sandbox computer and downloaded executable files pertaining to cracks of various kinds, and virtually all of them were not cracks at all but were trojans/viruses, etc.
Bundling trojans/spyware into an application is slow, restrictive and pointless when there are so many more effective ways to do so, including activex, email worms, seeded trojans in the p2p network, etc.
Kazaa itself and the multitude of files associated with its install for example is reported as spyware, but probably in the most generic term of the fact that whatever files are set up as shared are accessible and thus the program is considered "spyware" for giving that information up. If you go into its options and set up the shared directory, or what you want to share or not, it's not likely to divulge or give up any serious information or data.
But I don't really care, because I don't really trust apps these days that don't have source code with it.
- paper-clippy - waste of resources everyone hates - ms bob - failed so dismally, was pulled from the shelf - puppydog search - instead of spending all its time on searching, the computer wastes valuable CPU time on its stupid animation and very few people find it amusing after the first 0.5 seconds
Maybe the ms bob team is slithering around rock bottom and can't look anywhere but up and keeps keeps coming up with useless shite noboby wants.
Instead of the stupid puppy dog for the search assistant, I'd like see two hot chicks strip search each other. That would be a step up for that team. Maybe make it so you can change the animation to something like a mpeg avi file that has appropriate navigation markers for various operations.
Companies nowadays - and microsoft pretty much from day one - seem to show a nasty habit of buying out another company, big or small that poses a threat, acquires their resources, mashes some elements of the acquired technologies into their own and discard the rest.
Groove, if any elements of it remains, is pretty much done in for, like microsoft swooping in like a cloud of locusts, consuming everything and moving on.
With all the resources at microsoft's disposal, why is it easier to buy out other technologies than to design their own? Is their R&D dept that dysfunctional they can't do anything themselves?
The acquire trend is not unique. I worked for a local high tech firm that bought out another, including most of their employees, and now practically everyone who was there when I was hired is long gone, fired, laid off or quit and the products designed by the original dev teams are scrapped and to a greater extent the acquired tech is no longer recognizable. I quit 5 years ago because we were ourselves bought out by another and for all my hard work, I was given a token job as their sole QA person rather than remain as a software developer switching from unix to windows. The irony is that now, the very product they develop runs on linux. If they'd just kept me on, even in a junior developer role for the windows environment, I might have been a really good asset to them when they went to linux.
That was a severe blow, I suppose for both myself and for them.
Technologies bought out is quickly obsoleted and the human resources are finicky and tempermental and will also surely become unrecognizable years later.
Now when I see takeovers, hostile or otherwise, I see it as the purchaser unable or unwilling to come up with their own technology and essentially commiting a psychotic act (large companies exhibit the same psychotic traits as individuals). In 5 years, what will be the shape of that technology, if it even exists in any usable form? That's what I'd like to know.
Slashdot Mirror
Only friends and family know my cellphone number and perhaps my car garage.
I've never been bothered by telemarketers on my cell phone yet. With this, you can get harrassed by them all day long.
With this, you'll need to leave town to get peace and quiet.
In the end, you will have to pay for someone else comming fraud on your card either by stores not taking credit card or higher prices to cover against fraud.
Why should this supprise anyone.... I had a serious discussion with my niece on a similar topic.
My view is this. The computer is great at giving information... it's just a tool. But any tool, no matter how sophisticated cannot do your job for you. If craftsman made the acme house building toolset 4000, don't expect it to build a palace for you, you still need someone to put the pieces together, and that's where the skill of the tradesman comes in. If you know how to ask the computer, it can tell you what happened at, say tianamin square, but will it tell you why the people protested their government? Will it tell you how the chinese youth railed against their communist rulers? Maybe, but there is only a certain extent to which a tool is useful. Take away that tool and the person using it is pretty much useless. My brothers and sisters went to school when slide rulers were still in fashion and when my oldest brother got to highschool, they came out with the calculators that ran on 9v batteries and had LED displays. By the time I got there, it was acceptable to have a simple caculator (not programmable) for trig functions. Now I can barely do math without a calculator, but I still understand all the math behind trigenometry, etc, and given a calculator, pen and paper I can work out my angles, distances, etc. How many highschool graduates of the last 5 years can do that without the computer?
If the bombs start falling and takes away all them fancy gadgets and doohickies, how many recent highschool graduates would be able to function? I doubt even I could.
My own parents have already forgotten far more practical world knowledge than I'll ever know and they don't suffer because they can't find the 'any key'. I think it's a disaster to allow kids below the age of 12 to be even near a computer. By highschool, their brain is still sufficiently pliable to grasp the concepts of the computer and by adulthood, they'll learn enough of it to be fully proficient.
Does that mean if you tip it upside down and shake vigorously the imagaes on the screen disappear??
And if these aliens find these shows interesting and start swapping them on their own bittorrent like network, then the MPAA can sue them for copyright infringement.
Not using the universal language of math, why are they trying to use pictures?
And what will that picture say? 'Take me to your leader'?
What if they see that as a declaration of war and attack us? Or a plea for help? What if they interpret that as, 'we want all your unattractive females' and we get overrun by aliens?
Maybe then I can use this line..... 'Whatever dude; at least you get to do something'...
NURSE: doctor, you're hitting the bone
DOCTOR: Oh so I am. It does make a lovely scraping sound though.
AFP can sell their content to whoever they want (say, ACME news), but if google's bots go and grab this content from that web site (in this case ACME), then why the hell is AFP bringing up a lawsuit against google?
Their problem might be with google for displaying it, but that's where the CEASE AND DESIST letter comes in, their first problem is with ACME news for allowing google to cache it in the first place.
I understand the whole point of google not having the licence to do what they did, but just because this scenario might be what happened, does that then mean AVP has the right to automatically sue google directly?
Suppose I told something in confidence to a friend who then told someone else, say a reporter, and it got on the news? Would I be more upset at the reporter who then told the whole world or the friend who betrayed my trust?
This might not be the same thing, but it's pretty close. You start at the source of the problem, then spread out from there.
I have read google news and can make several observations about it, but probably not the kind you're thinking of in reference to your response's parent.
Let me see if get this right.
Google, despite what it is, doesn't exactly go around ripping all the web pages off the internet just because it could. Even now, it still does so by invitation.
AFP has requested google to do so. I'm not sure how google determines what to include and what not to include, but does it not have something to do with metatags? For whatever reason, google cached some pages, they never did want/now they don't want cached.
Now AFP is all in a snit that google has cached content they at least now have determined they don't want cached and they now seek damages.
In anotherwise sane world, would it not simply have been better off to send a cease and desist letter to google saying "THIS IS OFF BOUNDS", and failure to comply, *THEN* sue?
As others posted already, isn't this just a ploy to get an easy 17.5 mil cash grab? They're going straight for the throat, so I'm thinking, "What is your malfunction?????"
It seems SCO is the posterchild of this kind of questionable lawsuit practice in the world today. "OH, WE'VE BEEN WRONGED!!!! QUICK SUE".
Could it be the death of civility is the direct cause of the death of common sense??
be damned.
I saw his re-release and didn't like it. For me, star wars is the original and I have them on VHS.
Anybody know if the DVD special edition version has the original unmodified release?
Is it?
If there was no fork(); system call, no program could start another without terminating itself, so why is it unreasonable to have while (1) fork();
Vulnerability is a very broad and subjective term.
It *IS* possible to use a stack overflow in intel pcs to be able to run code on a computer and through that do a while (1) fork(); to bring the linux/unix based remote computer to a grinding halt.
Even if there are remote code execution vulnerabilities open to linux, how many of those can actually allow a very interested third party to gain root level access and take control?
All you need is an absent minded or computer ignorant user to click a button to download and run an active x control on windows and you have instant spyware/virus/trojan/malware.
I've been playing in an unpatched xp sandbox for spyware, playing the social engineering game (some users *WANT* the crack to their favorite game and to do so, they *NEED* to install this active x control before this crack site will let them do it) and I got the sandbox up to 55 different pieces of spyware before it got so horribly unstable I couldn't use it anymore for anything. That needed a harddrive wipe and reinstall.
A fork() bomb can only exhaust the resources to the point where nothing more can run. Ultimately, a reboot will fix that. Suppose it exists and a regular user gets spyware on their linux box and that spyware manages to run, it shows up as a regular user task. Unable to gain root level access and replace key utilities such as ps, top, etc, they can't hide. Without a fork bomb to cover its tracks, the root user on a different terminal can scan the process list and kill it. If the OS is designed, implemented and maintained properly, there is no theoretical way spyware can do any actual harm to the system as a whole, only to what that user has the privilege to do.
what about a malloc bomb???? Windows is just as vulnerable.... It only takes one process that hides itself from the task list to alloc whatever vm it can get to make the computer unusable (I have this example sleep 1000ms between each 1mb allocs to delay its detection, but it would only take 1 minute to exhaust 512 mb of virtual memory).
while (1) { malloc(1024000); sleep(1000); }
You can also say a single blow to the genitals is relatively safe from permanant damage, but what about 10 or 100 or 1000 or 1000000?
The only secure computer is the unplugged computer, and even then only if it's locked in a high security vault, safe from a thief. But then, what good would that computer be?
So, computer vulnerability is relative.
One bee sting hurts like hell....
one thousand will bring you to your knees.
one million will kill you.
That's interesting...
What happens when starter edition becomes infested with spyware?
"Sorry, you've reached your limit of spyware. To be able to run more than 30 pieces of spyware, you need to buy the full version. For a low price of $50(us) you can upgrade to the full copy, then you can run all the spyware you want"
It's the difference between a kid's bike and a kid's bike with training wheels....
Quick! Get out the booster cables, whip out the XP corp with FCKGW.....
It's not the concrete itself that would deteriorate, it's the fabric that would disintegrate/absorb water/be consumed by microorganisms and through its deterioration destroy the shelter through weakening from the inside out.
Actually, what VMWare does is to give up a block of physical ram on guest vm power on, locking it down and then doing some clever tricks with virtual memory mapping.
As long as the guest os thinks it's running in protected mode, it really is, and even when it thinks it's in non protected mode (as in kernel mode), it still is and any accesses outside what's been afforded for it via the virtual memory manager gets trapped translated and emulated via host os level drivers.
VMware emulates a BX (if I remember correctly) chipset and it appears to be running on a motherboard of the P2 era. All devices are also emulated.
It might be possible to page windows out and 'warm boot' into linux, but paging windows back in after linux is done would be problematic at best, not to mention with windows even temporarily out of the way linux could decide not to give control back to windows, in which case it would be a complicated one-way context switcher, rather than a platform emulator.
My computer has dual boot linux and windows, but it's running linux 99% of the time and for the odd windows stuff I start a VMWare session with a secondary copy of windows loaded to do my stuff. Linux still runs and is still in charge of everything, all it does is sacrifice HD space and access, some ram temporarily and cpu cycles. Even then however, there's a definite performance hit through the emulator, and though it might be good enough for the odd thing, it's not that great for any serious stuff and impossible for some things (games).
As for carrying on why specifically this winos+qemu+knoppix would be of any use, I'll just shut up now in case I might get modded down to redundant again.
What's the point? Whatever stability linux has is destroyed by being emulated through some virtual machine while windows is still running?
Are some people just that lazy to take the extra step of rebooting their machine or is their windows uptime just that important to them?
I suppose these would be better where things might get a bit frigid at times. Suppose a devastating earthquake hit moscow in october or november.
Instead of popping up tent city and trying to keep these things warm which is very hard to do, these things would provide a durable shell that holds the snow and acts like insulation.... kinda like an instant igloo.
Of course if it happened in the middle of winter, you might have a hard time getting the cement to cure.
a structure like that would be reasonably adequate until spring when they could finally deal with the original problem.
Other than an application like this or, as someone else pointed out, semi-permanant habitat for developing countries, I don't see a point to this type of structure...
What happens if it's used for so long the UV breaks down the plastic bag and the environment instantly destroys the shell? Lawsuit, probably, if it collapses on someone's head?
Turns out our email server crashed a few months ago and all emails pertaining to this trial got wiped out because of filesystem corruption.
We're really embarassed about it so we'll just say they got deleted because quite frankly, the technology from burst.com no longer interests us.
It's not our fault, really it's not, and we didn't steal their technology, really we didn't, but we're really nice people here, so we're willing to settle and forget the whole thing. Is that ok with you, your honor? We'll pay 60 million dollars in unmarked bills. Is that ok your honor?
I might also add that they probably do bundle spyware, only that it's not necessary to do so. There are so many other ways to get riddled with spyware withouth the help of installing the p2p network software.
There are two types of p2p networks.
1) The likes of bittorrent. You download from an authoritative server a 'control' file that has an MD5 checksum of a file you want. Very difficult or impossible to spoof the saved file.
2) The likes of kazaa. You query other machines on the network for files and pray it's not riddled with spyware, etc. It's probably far too easy to create a virus, giving it an enticing name like 'xpcrack.exe' and plop it in your shared folder and wait for someone to pick it up.
Why would the makers of kazaa bundle spyware/trojans etc directly into their application when it's easier to allow the user to search for something they want and have a hit not on what they really wanted but spyware masquerading as what they wanted?
I've loaded kazaa on a sandbox computer and downloaded executable files pertaining to cracks of various kinds, and virtually all of them were not cracks at all but were trojans/viruses, etc.
Bundling trojans/spyware into an application is slow, restrictive and pointless when there are so many more effective ways to do so, including activex, email worms, seeded trojans in the p2p network, etc.
Kazaa itself and the multitude of files associated with its install for example is reported as spyware, but probably in the most generic term of the fact that whatever files are set up as shared are accessible and thus the program is considered "spyware" for giving that information up. If you go into its options and set up the shared directory, or what you want to share or not, it's not likely to divulge or give up any serious information or data.
But I don't really care, because I don't really trust apps these days that don't have source code with it.
Let's see:
- paper-clippy - waste of resources everyone hates
- ms bob - failed so dismally, was pulled from the shelf
- puppydog search - instead of spending all its time on searching, the computer wastes valuable CPU time on its stupid animation and very few people find it amusing after the first 0.5 seconds
Maybe the ms bob team is slithering around rock bottom and can't look anywhere but up and keeps keeps coming up with useless shite noboby wants.
Instead of the stupid puppy dog for the search assistant, I'd like see two hot chicks strip search each other. That would be a step up for that team. Maybe make it so you can change the animation to something like a mpeg avi file that has appropriate navigation markers for various operations.
Companies nowadays - and microsoft pretty much from day one - seem to show a nasty habit of buying out another company, big or small that poses a threat, acquires their resources, mashes some elements of the acquired technologies into their own and discard the rest.
Groove, if any elements of it remains, is pretty much done in for, like microsoft swooping in like a cloud of locusts, consuming everything and moving on.
With all the resources at microsoft's disposal, why is it easier to buy out other technologies than to design their own? Is their R&D dept that dysfunctional they can't do anything themselves?
The acquire trend is not unique. I worked for a local high tech firm that bought out another, including most of their employees, and now practically everyone who was there when I was hired is long gone, fired, laid off or quit and the products designed by the original dev teams are scrapped and to a greater extent the acquired tech is no longer recognizable. I quit 5 years ago because we were ourselves bought out by another and for all my hard work, I was given a token job as their sole QA person rather than remain as a software developer switching from unix to windows. The irony is that now, the very product they develop runs on linux. If they'd just kept me on, even in a junior developer role for the windows environment, I might have been a really good asset to them when they went to linux.
That was a severe blow, I suppose for both myself and for them.
Technologies bought out is quickly obsoleted and the human resources are finicky and tempermental and will also surely become unrecognizable years later.
Now when I see takeovers, hostile or otherwise, I see it as the purchaser unable or unwilling to come up with their own technology and essentially commiting a psychotic act (large companies exhibit the same psychotic traits as individuals). In 5 years, what will be the shape of that technology, if it even exists in any usable form? That's what I'd like to know.