Posts by Eadon
2483 posts • joined Monday 3rd August 2009 06:33 GMT
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Re: Dark matter
@NumptyScrub - galaxies behave as if embedded in a larger ephemeral cloud of dark matter. Increasing the central mass would not fit the spectrum of distance from centre vs velocity
In other words, $20 isn't going to sway anyone - WRONG
@Testman Your dichotomy is false.
This squeeze will sway x% of people where x is much greater than 0. People do not like being messed about and treated like fools. They can see the writing on the wall. Also, Apple charges about as much for an entire operating system upgrade.
All the time LibreOffice looks more and more attractive. As does Google Docs come to that.
Microsoft are going to upset Mac-using execs here
MS are squeezing people in a time of austerity and cuts and desire for cost-savings.
"Hikes up prices by 17% to push users towards Office 365"
They risk pushing users towards Google Docs too.
MS are terrified of Google Docs. They missed the Internet but recovered. Then they missed capitalising on the smart phone mobile revolution. They missed the Cloud. And now they are terrified of missing out on cloudy office suits.
This is another reactive move by MS but it will cause their market share to fall, in the hope of locking people into Office 360 -thereby keeping some users for longer, arguably.
If people fall for it, then they will have a devil of a time migrating their data in the future, Office 365 is the ultimate lock in. Governments and corporations wouldn't fall for it... would they?
Don't do it kids - Libre Office 4 is pretty good, and the software and the data is YOUR data not their data. You don't have to pay an annual fee. Or any fee!
Finally - remember the MS Azure disaster - still recovering data after a week of outage? That would never happen with Office 365. Nah, never!
Re: Clueless security
@pPPPP in my original post I did say, "Data that is competently encrypted is a bit of a grey area"
BUT!
To take your example of internet banking - encryption of the data in the database is not the same as encryption of the data over the web. When you receive data that is encrypted via SSL or TLS, that data has typically been taken out of the database unencrypted and subsequently been encrypted prior to sending.
I'm talking about data that is maintained by the bank, which the bank has to be able to decrypt to maintain it. If such systems are hosted in a foreign country, then those systems are inherently insecure, because the host country can access the data in unencrypted form. It comes down to trusting the managers of that data.
OTOH if reliably encrypted data is stored abroad, then that is less risky, though, why not just store it here?
Re: Dark matter
"it's a sign that the basic theory is flawed and incomplete
A huge challenge in physics is to discover and explain the true nature of dark matter, and, even more mysterious than dark matter, is the baffling dark energy, which is accelerating the universe towards a BIG RIP, where all matter will ultimately be torn apart.
@Normal Hartnell - dark matter is a real enigma. But as for string theory - it cannot be proved or disproved, that's the issue with it. It's not real science as it is not falsifiable, and never conceivably will be. Pity that.
Re: re. " ...mythical string physics,..."
@fank ly - True. String theoreticians have had far too much control over physics research, squandering great minds and many years lost on a wild goose chase. And only now losing their power.
Splendorous comparison. One I have thought of before but, with restraint, I declined to mention it :)
Dark matter WIMPS
Quoth the article, "positron (a positive electron)"
Technically it's an anti-electron.
The LHC has not seen any signal associated with these WIMPs so it would be quite surprising if they were producing these positrons. If this turns out to be true, and I am not optimistic, then it will create an extremely badly needed boon for high energy physics.
In fact such a discovery will be much more important than the discovery of the Higgs, especially because it will be new physics, not just a confirmation of known physics. If true everyone in physics will go mental. but... it's a very long shot methinks.
The only down side is that String theorists will hype it as evidence for their mythical string physics, like they do for most other things.
Netbook market
Remember netbooks, MS killed that market - or they thought they had. Now they have left a niche open, and that could be a fatal mistake - as Google have suddenly occupied it.
MS were able to dislodge Linux by strong-arming OEM's into installing XP (then more recent versions of windows) in its place. But MS will not be able to achieve that stung against Google because Google is at least as powerful as MS.
What we will see now is Google establishing ChromeOS in the netbook niche, then gradually work its way up from there.
These two computers being reviewed are adequate for the netbook crowd, and therefore they should sell quite well. Myself, I'd much rather see a pure Linux company doing this, but as I say, it takes a powerful company like Google to have a hope of gaining any desktop share from MS.
Google's advantage over MS is the same as that of Linux, that they can charge OEM's less per operating system install. MS has to make larger profits per sale or it's profits will decay even faster.
So Google is taking on the low-end of the market. Apple owns the prestige high-margin end of the market. MS is in a kind of no-mans land betwixt the two, with nowhere to expand into. With a shrinking cash cow MS can only hope for a miracle, perhaps a Gerstner or Jobs-like CEO with the vision to reinvent the company.
I might take a look at a Chromebook myself. I just wish this hardware came with Linux.
Re: Clueless security
@pPPPP
By definition, data that is accessible through the internet is not protected. So your argument is meaningless.
Re: Microsoft are in the mobile phone business? Bing copied Googles Search results
@AC 11:58 why are you posting anon, are you ashamed of your own bullshit? MS were gamed? Yes, because they were cheating and fell into a trap, that's how they were "gamed".
The gist of what happened is this (from the below link):
"Google suspected that they were being copied by Bing, so they set up a honey trap. They set up three nonsense words: “hiybbprqag”, “mbzrxpgjys” and “indoswiftjobinproduction” – which were specifically coded to go to completely unrelated sites. The first one would go to The Wiltern Theatre website, the second would go to RIM’s website (not Android – make your own assumptions) and the third would go to Sandra Lee’s webpage on the Food Network site (“Hi y’all.”) These results did not come up on Bing and Google would be able to tell if Bing was copying them.
Unfortunately, all three results were matched on Bing (don’t bother searching for them now, the results have become flooded with articles about this story). Google has come out, accusing Bing of cheating off of them. Google’s Amit Singhal said:"
http://nexus404.com/2011/02/01/bing-copies-googles-search-results-says-google-google-honeypot-catches-bing-copying-google-search-results-for-nonsense-search-terms-bing-claims-that-googles-results-are-just-outliners-mor/
No matter how you spin this, it looks very bad if Google put up search results that can only have been copied from Google and nowhere else - that ended up on the Bing search results.
MS were caught red handed stealing results, the end result is irrefutable.
SMACKDOWN!
Re: Microsoft are in the mobile phone business?
@dogged, When you lose your temper, you have lost the argument.
Clueless security
"protect data stored on Indian servers "
What could possibly go wrong? Data must be kept within the confines of these very shores if it is to have any hope of being protected. Data that is competently encrypted is a bit of a grey area, but one simply cannot trust other nations. As Machiavelli knew, and, well, just about everybody else.
Re: Well that's a relief!
@Erix - " The destruction however might be limited merely to our own galaxy" - not likely, the phase change would ripple through the entire universe like ice spreading through a supercooled glass of water. Once seeded (assuming the theory is true) then the reaction will be a runaway reaction.
Re: Vacuum state of the universe
@HolyFreakinGhost "there will be inflation within that domain"
Lucky you said later that this is speculative :-) Inflation has not been shown to be a correct story, and aspects of inflation are decidedly dodgy. Inflation is an ugly hack to try to explain why the tiny size of the vacuum energy is in such violent disagreement with quantum mechanics predictions.
Regarding your analogy, actually a better analogy is a liquid freezing. It moves to a lower energy state but in the process gives out latent heat, hence the trouble!
Re: Gates has just OSBORNED the Win 8 phone
@AC - true, I since soldered the caps lock back to the keyboard.
Re: Microsoft are in the mobile phone business?
@dogged ", it works exactly the same way as the, er, Google toolbar"
My non-technical friend, let me explain it to you. Bing toolbar is a copy of Google toolbar but Bing added the feature that it was nicking Google's search results. Then Bing was then showing those same search results. I explain how MS were caught doing this in a separate post but it involved a honeypot.
That Bing used Bing toolbar to steal Google's results is a trifling matter, the fact is Microsoft knew that google's results were better so MS simply stole them. It's called cheating and copying, Microsoft's modus operandi. MS confessed to it.
Re: Microsoft are in the mobile phone business? Bing copied Googles Search results
Bob V. is correct. Short answer, Bing stole Google's search results.
How? Longer answer: Google created a honey pot. Microsoft's Bing entered the honey pot. Then Microsoft's Bing came up with the "search results" that it could only have got from the Google honeypot.
Bingo! Microsoft were caught red handed with search results in Bing that it copied from Google. Check and mate.
This is not controversial. It really happened, Bing was nicking Google's search results and they got caught. QED. It's one of the most hilarious of Microsoft's fails.
Vacuum state of the universe
If the universe is sitting in a higher energy state than optimal, a bit like a ball rolling around in an indentation close to another indentation, then sooner or later the ball may roll into the deeper indentation. If it does then we're stuffed.
It's not really a shadow universe though. It's just this universe changing its state. All this talk of shadow universes and parallel universes is pseudo science. As is String theory.
Re: Gates quote - XBox is a success myth
XBox cost 11 billion dollars and is still in the red by a similar amount. Games Consoles are struggling as their market is under fire from mobile and up-coming competition from Linux consoles, including one from Valve.
XBox has been a costly adventure by MS. But Bing has cost them even more, currently it is losing 2 billion every year.
Gates has just OSBORNED the Win 8 phone
The Nokia board must be happy, having hired Elop who jumped on the platform that wasn't so much on fire but never even became big enough to catch fire!
Gates meanwhile has admitted that Windows 8 is a failure and MS needs a new strategy.
So, developers, no need to write Metro Apps then. Metro will doubtless get condemned, just like Silverlight got canned and .NET has quietly been abandoned, in favour of, er, HTML5 (MS flavour) and javascript.
It will be fun to see what Strategy they move onto for Windows Phone 9 after Win Pho 7 and Win Pho 8 both failed.
Again, it's not taking too many liberties of exaggeration to say,
Nokia again - first MS OSBORNED Win Pho 7. Now they have just OSBOURNED Win Pho 8. Time to move to Android (which is the result of a succeeding strategy) or revive Symbian and/or Meego - and FAST!
Epic. Fail.
Dell and Linux
Last I heard Dell were selling Linux systems that were more expensive than systems of the same specs with Windows on them. Linux users are likely to buy a Windows system and then install Linux on that.
The way to succeed is to do what the Netbook guys did, sell cheap systems with Linux on them. This is possible because Linux can be set up to run fast on modest hardware.
If you do that, then you'll lose MS discounts and you will not be competitive in the Windows market. But if the Windows market is in decline, then it's a matter of time before someone big starts putting serious marketing muscle behind Linux desktops.
They should be selling Linux Mint on desktops, because Ubuntu has an ugly UI and is selling out to Amazon thereby compromising users privacy with their Amazon search insanity. How money corrupts!
Canonical really screwed up. Suddenly people want a fine alternative to Windows - as Windows 8 has a dumbed down stupid ugly UI but Canonical went and put a dumbed down stupid, ugly UI on Ubuntu.
A great mind at work..... NOT!
From the article. "But the way that we went about it didn't allow us to get the leadership, so it's clearly a mistake."
The strategy was obviously a mistake years ago. Gates and Balmer can play only one kind of game, exploiting a monopoly (well, two: Desktop and Office). They did that and got insanely rich but it was obvious years ago that once their monopoly matured, then returns would be diminishing. Then the game was up and it was a case of keeping the car on the road for as long as possible.
In the mobile market MS's strategy was initially to port the desktop UI to phones. Then it's Windows Phone 7 / Windows 8 strategy was to port a touch UI to Desktop.
Both strategies failed, as Windows 8 is failing for similar reasons as to why Win CE phones ultimately failed when iPhone and Android came along.
However, the Windows 7 strategy had the additional disadvantage that it's UI was rejected by the market in the first place. The Windows Phone 7 was a failure. So porting a failed UI to desktop means that now the desktop market is failing too.
The *correct* strategy was to make a mobile UI that people actually like, and not to port that UI to the desktop. But it is too late now. To gain market share in a growing market is much cheaper than to gain market share in a maturing market.
Now that MS has lost mobile, it will gradually lose everything else, as the mobile players will move onto MS's home turf. MS will milk governments and enterprises by continuing to raise Corporate licence fees, milking the cash cows before they finally drop dead.
The remaining strategy of MS is, take the money and run.
MS STRATEGY FAIL
FB
abbrev. F******G B******DS!
Posted in Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
Re: Go Linux
@AC 13:31 - typical FUD.
Bottom line - Munich have already saved 11 million euros! And in the future, with switching overhead over and done with, they will save even more even faster.
So I am not sure how saving 11 million euro's means they have gone over budget. They have saved money, how can that be over budget?
Ha ha ha ha ha you desperate AC microsoft apologists are hilarious!
Bottom line - a pubicly funded body saved a fortune of tax payers money by switching from Windows to Linux. And these days it would be much easier than when it was when Munich started porting, because both Linux and Libre / Open Office have improved dramatically in the mean time. Whilst Windows and MS get worse. (Ribbons, DRM, Metro, bloat).
Microsoft partners are hurting
Thinly disguised coded statement, "and the transition to new products"
Translated, this means, the market has the new Windows 8 machines. As Windows is expensive to OEM's, who exist on razor thin margins, then a drop of turnover is deadly. They use volume to make up for tiny profits made per machine sold.
The tablet market is exploding right now in the way smart phones did three years or so ago. But Microsoft's partners are not able to profit from that, because people want iPads or Androids.
Any hope Windows 8 had on tablets were annihilated when MS brought out the Surface and it instantly became a joke. Too hefty to be a tablet. Too underpowered to be a laptop. the Surface difficult to use than either.
Everytime I see those Windows 8 screenshots I cringe, the UI looks repulsive. Apple showed the world that style goes a long way. Classy computers on good hardware that looked gorgeous sold at double the price. And they were considered good value because the computers were good quality, they lasted a long time and gave much satisfaction. Though I much prefer Linux myself.
In any case, Microsoft do not have a beautiful looking OS in Windows 8. They have a pig. A pig so ugly that even its mother doesn't love it. And MS do not have a repuation for quality. Their systems are so insecure they need virus scanners to be run! And who wants a machine loaded with Norton and other crapware - the Microsoft experience? No one. Not on mobiles and now not on desktops. Apple has shown people that computers do not need antivirus software if they are designed to be secure in the first place - the UNIX way.
People have wised up. No one is buying these Windows 8 computers, and those that do take the computer to a friend to replace Windows 8 with Win 7 or Linux.
Meanwhile Microsoft's partners are being forced to sell this pig on their kit. And that will harm their own reputations, their own brand value. And now they get no profits and are being humiliated by falling sales whilst others make a mint on the exciting mobile market.
The only way MS can sustain profits now is to keep increasing CAL's and other corporate licence fees. Currently MS pays nokia to put Windows on its phones. How long before MS has to start paying OEMs to put windows on their desktop kit, to attempt to keep Google Chrome OS, and even Linux at bay?
MICROSOFT PARTNER FAIL!
Posted in Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
Re: Free Is Good @The Dim View - LO IS as good as MS office, better in some ways
When comparing LibreOffice and MS Office, people always analyse it in terms of Can LO do everything that MS Office does?
What they forget is that MS Office cannot do very well what LO does brilliantly, especially the new version 4. And that list includes being good at opening Office Docs.
ODF support - superb in LO, crippled in MS Office. MS Office has been crippled with a ribbon UI, LibreOffice has the much nicer and more productive toolbar/menu UI.
MS Office is expensive, has product activation based DRM and you can get audited for using it, and it is closed source and doesn't even properly support its own OOXML "standard" (at least not yet).
LibreOffice is free from those disadvantages of MS Office.
I'd argue that LibreOffice is already better than MS Office, but there are definitely issues when it comes to switching. But, you know what? For most workers, they can get on with their jobs using LO just fine.
Have you seen the new MS Office 2013 UI? It is HORRIFIC! So why do people keep saying that LO is not as good as MS Office as if that's some kind of fact?
MS Office should not be used in systems paid for by the tax payer. It's our money, and a free,. mature alternative exists that is fine for professional use for 98+% of workers.
Mint is the best distro at the mo
The latest Fedora release has been criticised for being somewhat poor. In any case, Fedora is more for bleeding edge stuff than anything.
Ubuntu has "dumbed down UI" disease.
Mint on the other hand has a fork of Gnome 2 as a UI and this is really nice. Those familiar with Win 7 or XP will find Mint pretty straight forward. The other thing about Mint is they do not have legal constraints that prevent them from having stuff like codecs for media players installed by default, so it's a "works out of the box" distro.
At home I use Linux Mint and it's my fave OS right now. I'm a power user but it's also fine for the newbie. A newbie will find the transition from Win 7 or Win XP to Linux mint easier than the transition to Windows 8.
Also they will be pleased that you don't need a virus scanner and the install has no crapware.
If you are not locked into certain windows-only apps (this is becoming less of a problem each year) then Linux Mint is the best OS money can buy. And it costs nothing, being open source.
Ramping down FB
I'm using FB less and less. I have useful contacts on it, and use it a bit for business, but I'm less inclined to feed the damned thing.
Worldwide, regulatory laws need to be changed to stop encouraging mega-corps from behaving sociopathically. That doesn't mean compromising capitalism, it's about preventing corruption.
Posted in Australia cuts Microsoft bill by AU$100m
Set up Switch-to-Open Source government projects
And implement them in a serious way.
By "moving" to open source, Governments then have a choice. Governments can then can accept increasingly large bribes that MS will offer them in "discounts" for delaying the transition to the open source alternatives (Linux desktop + Libre Office for many workers, say).
Alternatively the Governments can follow through and actually switch to the open source solutions. Munch council did this and saved 11 million euro's. It will continue to save money indefinitely now that it is free from having to pay MS licences. The TCO of linux based systems is lower than for MS based systems.
Corporations can do the same. The best way to cut your MS cost overheads is to move away from MS towards open source systems. Not everyone needs Excel-specific macro functions and those that do can run Excel within a VM. It's not rocket science.
Re: Data in clouds
@Steady Eddy - I said it wasn't ready, not that it wasn't being used :-)
Re: "That Windows experiment cost them a trillion pounds."
@AC 17.06 - why are you complaining about Java 1.4? That's about then years old now. Java has improved massively since then.
Regarding garbage collection in the JVM, for the majority of enterprise / business systems it is not economical to pay developers to write code with manual memory management. That is why business moved away from writing C++ software to writing Java software on the server side. One advantage of Java for Enterprise systems is it has some fantastic IDE's for it and many enterprise strength application containers, frameworks and libraries - most of which are open source - that no other language can come close to matching.
When deploying to production systems it is not uncommon to tune the garbage collector to prevent performance issues. I'm not aware of any fundamental issues with the Java GC, and I've never once heard anyone suggesting manual memory management for typical enterprise systems.
As for MS creating crap code, an independent engineer analysed this code and he found it to be "unmaintainable". Others have commented that there are about fifty "layers" in Windows, all interconnected in tangled ways, and that any one developer can master only about three of these layers.
In comparison, the source code for Linux is highly maintainable. MS's philosophy has always been "good enough" and they push stuff out that is not ready until "service pack 1" or in the case of Vista, Windows 7 :-) The original NT kernel was apparently quite good (being based on VMS) but it has since accumulated all those layers of cruft. MS API's are also quite horrendous, look at the struggles of Wine to implement Win 32.
Re: M$ go to hell and die
@AC "People generally don't want free software any more than people want to knit their own jumper or make their own clothes"
That's news to me. Android is fee software. Last time I checked, the people generally seem to want. So much so it has more market share than any other mobile phone OS. Just to use one single counter example to your AC FUD.
Open source, free software can be - and is - commercial. Linux, for example is free, but it is also commercial. IBM, Google, Amazon use it heavily for enterprise computing. Redhat package Linux as an Enterprise service offering and so on.
Let's come back to Azure. In comparison to Linux-based cloud systems, Azure systems are extremely rare, which would seem also to contradict your hypothesis. Azure is commercial software, obviously but either it is not liked or it is not "good quality". Or both.
Re: Microsoft IS a tech disaster....
@seansaysthis
"Linux does not = Reliability any more than Windows = Reliability"
You seem to be assuming that the kernels of both operating systems are of exactly the same quality. That is incorrect.. That Linux is more reliable than windows (more secure, more robust, requires fewer reboots and is more resilient) is not controversial.
You are correct that sys admins are also important, but the kernel quality matters in tandem.
As for recovering the data following a catastrophic crash then this depends on two things - the quality of the data store and the quality of the engineers in terms of extracting and restoring the data / backups.
I am reminded of the terrible difficulties suffered when Microsoft's systems crashed, losing the data of the customers of the Danger phones. This turned out to be the fault of an exec who allegedly ordered no back-up to be made of the data before a system upgrade. The engineers tried to warn her. That decision by the exec was made in an attempt to meet a deadline. She didn't get fired.
The engineering nous of Execs is important also :-)
Re: "That Windows experiment cost them a trillion pounds."
@Arctic Fox, you're worse than @dogged asking for "citations".
As requested - links are:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_suffers_net_crash
""As Reuters reported, "We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world ... and then we can't trade. It's terrible," one trader said.""
"TradElect, the Microsoft .Net based trading platform for the London Stock Exchange, was offline for about seven hours, meaning that their 5-nines SLAs are shot for approximately the next 100 years. The TradElect system was launched back in June of 2007 and was designed for increased speed and system capacity"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/09/08/us-lse-idUSL01084620080908
That's why you do not put mission critical systems on Windows servers and why you do not write .NET software for serverside systems. You use Java and Linux.
Remember - and this is not a controversial fact to techies - MS writes shoddy code. You cannot trust it for anything more than serving emails. And even then you have security issues.
The evolution of servers
@ShelLuser
On the one hand you have the usual way, major releases on the server. Then Amazon and Google et all came along with their clouds. The serverside was evolving rapidly.
Given the colossal data loads that Amazon and Google are dealing with (both internal and the hosting customer data in clouds) what they do, from a technical standpoint of managing big data, is phenomenal.
MS on the other hand have, we can safely assume, only a small fraction of these data volumes. Yet they are struggling with serious problems. I don't know about the five nines standard, Azure here has failed to meet even two nines (assuming operation for the rest of the year).
So MS were thinking, if Google and Amazon can do it, so can we! And Azure has much to do to get to the prowess of Googel and Amazon. So MS put the pedal to the metal, and... CRASH!
This reminds me of the London Stock exchange. They moved to Windows and .NET and CRASH! The finest engineers MS has worldwide were rushed in, but they couldn't get the Stock Exchange working again. So the Stock Exchange reverted to Linux and Java and has been fine ever since. That Windows experiment cost them a trillion pounds.
I wonder if MS feeds these kinds of Windows-tech disasters, including the ongoing Azure farce, into their TCO comparisons with Linux systems...
Data in clouds
"Microsoft writes multiple replicas of user data to multiple devices ensuring the data is still available even if single or multiple catastrophic hardware failures take place"
There are two problems here. One, the outage means that Azure users are suck in limbo. Two - even if the data is available, data collation happens in real time and any disruption to it can cause real problems. The customer has to put into place work arounds.
That Azure is not resilient or robust to a "hardware" failure (if that happened) means that Azure is not fit to be a cloud system. The whole point of the cloud is that it is supposed to work, regardless of hardware failures (data being replicated between physical sites).
Windows is not ready for the data centre. And never will be. It is not robust. It is not resilient. It is not scalable.
AZURE EPIC FAIL!
Intellectual property nightmare
No one can move these days due to lawyers and solicitors and attorneys, the parasites are a scourge to IT, jobs, profits and sanity.
Time to fund more asteroid spotting investment
To be a bit flippant: a bailout of banks is bad, but that's nowt compared to bailing out civilisation after an asteroid strike! Mind you, such as catastrophe would server to cancel out world debt, which would be bad for banks. So banks should be funding these asteroid spotting activities.
Selling
It could be worse, at least he is not (yet) selling ladies.
Cool business card
Director of shooting asteroids with lasers.
Re: Welcome to the Muppet Show
@dogged - I agree with you that companies that collect and sell data are evil. So we do have some common ground, even though you are not as technical and have naive views.
For example, "Steve Ballmer is just a guy who loves Microsoft (I don't think this can be argued, actually) and just wants it to make the best stuff" - yes he does love Microsoft, I agree. It made him extremely rich and he's on the mother of all ego trips running a famous corporation. I also agree that he wants to make the best stuff.
HOWEVER! He plays dirty. You and me may disagree on this point, but it is a big reason I dislike MS. Giving SCO 60 million bucks to sue Linux users - now that is classic Balmer. He's not a pleasant chap, it's just not cricket.
Also, Balmer should fire himself as he has clearly failed to execute. His mobile strategy and his search strategy has failed, in fact, none of his strategies have succeeded apart from one. He knows how to fleece corporations and governments, that's for sure. But even there, Apple and Google are moving in, and Linux (mainly driven by IBM) owns the data centre.
You make a point about Android being the least closed "linux distro". But on the other hand, it is the most open of the major phone operating systems. Microsoft's phone is locked down.
P.S. if you don't think MS are not collecting data, via Bing, their ad business, XBox, Windows mobile devices, Skype, email systems and even Windows update, then you are indeed naive. And they will sell that data, publicly traded corporations have only one rule - to make money for their shareholders.
P.S. the guy you upvoted called you a muppet, in case that went over your head also. ;-)
Lumia 820 rocks even easy to fix - That says it all. It broke then!
@A Butler -
Goes to show the Lumia's are made from cheap materials. Oddly enough, the last phone that I had where the screen broke was a nokia, back in about 2006.
" all almost all the Android devices are cheap and nasty; the horrible Samsung Ace comes to mind." - I have a Samsung Galaxy and it's simply superb. The market agrees, it has been the most successful of the smart phones over the last year. Lumia/Win Pho 8, in comparison, offers no advantages but has many disadvantages.
And my Samsung is 18 months old, has been dropped many times and has never broken.
Re: Another argument ..
@AC - yes I did not mean to imply that diversity isn't good, differential systems are a good thing, mainly because it can limit the scope of certain types of attack.
However, I'd argue that any system of Linux, Mac and Windows boxes is to a certain extent as secure as the weakest link - the windows box. A diverse system with a Windows box may be less secure than a less diverse system without a windows box. Yes, we can quibble over whether Windows really is more insecure. It is my opinion that this is so, but other people's views differ from mine, especially here :-)
Jesus phone meets Judas Server
T'was the "Microsoft Exchange servers" - sounds like a lame excuse but the word "Exchange" makes it awfully plausible.
Love it :-)
Re: Google please take note.
@AC @13:11 - I do not post as AC - but thanks anyway @dogged.
Brilliant publicity
You can't buy this kind of publicity - Tesla have been pretty crafty here.
Re: Strategy mixup
@mmeier "My Win-CE phone(s) of HTC make worked just fine" - you were one of the lucky ones then.
"And so far WP7 has shown one benefit over Android - UPDATES! Even now they get them (WP7.8)."
Didn't you get the memo? Your phone will not be upgraded to Win Pho 8. You will not even be able to run Win Pho 8 apps. MS has betrayed you.
"ChromeOS is a no-player in corporate environments" - ChromeOS is making inroads, corporations are evaluating it. And this will put pressure on MS salesmen to lower their prices, at the very least.
As for IE - corporations are finally moving away from IE, largely due to the mobile devices forcing them to support multiple browsers. IE has been a huge security and incompatibility headache for corporations. Remember ActiveX?
As for Munich - they moved to Linux and saved 11 million Euros. MS Office is losing share now to Open Office and Libre Office in corporations and indeed, elsewhere. Managers are shunning Windows and even MS Office for Apple gear. Myself, at work I have MS Office but I use Libre Office mainly because I don't like the MS Office ribbon. I can work faster on LibreOffice.
Linux desktop share is increasing, it is now double what it was ten years ago. MS's desktop share is falling every year. Sales of Windows 8 have been abysmal.
Re: Plan A
@OrsonX
The Games consoles market is stagnating. Worse, Xbox will have to battle new competitors appearing - mainly Linux based consoles like the Ouya (sp?) and the upcoming Steam Box from valve. And hard core gamers are protesting and rebelling indignantly about the UI and having to use the rental Live Gold service or whatever it is. They bought stuff and now they are being made to buy it over and over again.
The iToys have lost their "shine" you say, but MS lost a fifth of its mobile customers in the last quarter of 2012. Apple gained customers of its iToys over the same period. and of course, iToys are intensely popular compared to Win Phones and Surfaces (which are essentially wannabe copies of the iToys).
Windows 8 - "it accounts for just 2 per cent of PC operating systems four months after launch versus the 5 per cent penetration achieved by Windows 7 the same time after Win7's launch"
And to think we were told by MS that Windows 8 was as popular as Windows 7! Curiously weren't the licences for Windows 8 much cheaper also, with the discount?
In any case, IE 10. MS have indicated a Microsoft favour of HTML 5 that it uses for app dev for Metro apps. I am wondering if IE 10 has this flavour or whether it follows the W3C spec (unfinished) as closely as it can. History teaches that things may not be too sweet with regards to standards compliance.
And, most importantly of all, how fast is IE10 at downloading Firefox? ;-)
