Of course! THAT will fix everything

A really unbelievable head in the sand approach to the problem, don't you think? Can anyone image what would have happened had the Windows 8 "feature set" been rolled out, without advance warning, on a regular Patch Tuesday? Stunning.

US should refuse to intervene

Given the long succession of HP CEOs (including Ms. Whitman) and board members who have railed against government regulation I think this would be the perfect opportunity for the US government to tell HP to go pound sand on their request for government action here. There IS precendent for this, of course. No one was prosecuted for the financial meltdown of 2008, it was all about "moving on", and "going forward". Same here. If HP's shareholders want to take the obviously seriously overdue step of sweeping out the present board and executives, then that's up to them -- but I'm not sure I want my tax dollars to go towards cleaning up a mess that they all made through their own negligence and refusal to acknowledge reality (as others have pointed out the numbers in this deal never made any sense, a moderately intelligent child could have figured out they were being defrauded -- more proof that most of those complaining now are just a bunch of not-too-bright spoilt children after all).

Gnome 3 started this

Trying to out tablet-os Apple, Google and Microsoft. Tile interfaces are for teenagers looking to "consume multimedia content", not for adults who have to get actual work done throughout the day. As for the privacy issues, invasive schlockware for Linux was actually long overdue. It figures that we'd see it first from Ubuntu, because they're the most prone to "Windows envy". Of course I never really thought much of the "Linux for the masses" thing. Most people actually don't have a clue what to do even with the limited computing power in their smartphone or media tablet. I've come to the conclusion that they must really like the flashing lights and shiney widgets that only ask that they "click and swipe". I use RHEL at work because that's how we deliver the power of a few thousand servers to the business. I use RHEL clones at home because they're rock solid stable and don't turn the world upside down every few weeks. If everyone else wants to continue running the Windows treadmill, they're welcome to it. If Ubuntu wants to morph into Windows with a Linux Kernel that's their business.

"The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

-- Lenin

But he's dead now. So are Stalin, Menlenkev, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko.

The last guy in charge there sold *us* the rope we nearly used to hang *him* (recall the quality of support Gorbachev received from the US during the coup in 1991).

Why do we keep these restrictions in place? That's easy. Supply and demand. Restricting access to any technology makes it cost more. And *that* is in the interests of the industries that make this stuff. It's *those* interests that drive this. Why else do we have a 3/4 trillion dollar a year military "20 years after the Cold War ended"? (the Chinese have a single, thus far non-operational, aircraft carrier of questionable vintage -- it's really their ICBMs, land-based aircraft and ship borne missiles that are a threat to US forces in the Pacific, but only if the US continues to insist on bigfooting its way around the world it has since the latter half of the 20th century when there was at least a theoretical threat of Soviet aggression to justify it).

It's all about the design

Of the hardware, the software, but most importantly THE PROCESS. These systems could be designed to work and their execution successful if you get the preliminaries right. The problem is that those who oversee things don't even know the right questions to ask, and decision-making is dictated more by public relations and crony capitalism than by actual requirements. That's something that government IT shares with its private sector counterparts. High incidences of project failure are endemic in the private sector. We just don't hear about them because they're ... private.

Same old, same old

Prediction: Microsoft will fight to the bitter end on this. As with the netbook market, they'd rather see ARM die as a platform than concede any ground to their competitors on a key desktop component like the web browser. It is the ARM manufacturers, and government, that need to step up here. But I wouldn't hold my breath.

How long before they start offering vacations?

I can't be the only one thinking this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Westworld_ver2.jpg

Good take, just multiply by 100

Everything pointed out in the main article is true, especially in large organizations (200+ IT staff and 10 times that in users). In fact the bigger the IT org gets, the more applicable Moore's law applies to things like change (and configuration) management. It's not the number of physical or virtual devices, servers, etc. alone, it's the processes used to manage them, and more importantly the quality of communications between the "managers" (or should I say, "individual contributors").

Not that anyone who counts is listening...

How long does it take to forget how to do due process right?

Well, I guess this was a test case of sorts. So used to circumventing and skirting due process requirements in other cases, it seems pretty obvious that U.S. authorities have forgotten how it's done. Although you'd think even a few of those involved might have recalled something from their first year civil procedure class... apparently not.

Sheetrock!

So we now know we'd have one essential component to build suburbs on Mars. All we need now is to find some lumber for framing. We also learn that nukes are good for powering around faster and further, but in the end good old solar buys you upwards of decade in staying time.

A poverty of knowledge

Let me start off by saying, "longtime subscriber, not a first time poster." I also don't have a dog in this fight because I don't own a smartphone or tablet of any kind. After 60 or more hours a week tending multiple application server farms, installing and using Java apps on electronic devices is really not high on my list of things to do. To me even myhumble feature phone is just another tether work can use to reel me in on a moment's notice (when I get home the cell gets turned off and thrown in a drawer).

This was a very well-written and entertaining article. A real testament to the literary talent of the author. Unfortunately it is also factually ... incomplete. Not sure exactly what link jcurtis01 intended to share (it is cut off in his comment) but there are a number of threads over on the XDA Developers forum that discuss how to get it done without having to root the Fire. So it is doable, although not without some effort to initially learn the technique and track down sources. But that's not nearly as amusing as the story in the article.

No man's property is safe while the legislature is in session

The whole point of copyright was to encourage the people to publish art and useful stuff by giving them the ability to make a living at it. Here that original purpose has been twisted until it is unrecognizable. If we continue down this road no one will be able to publish except those with the wealth to engage in courtroom trench warfare -- and many of those people are not the sharpest knives in the drawer, having come on their wherewithal by the smarts of those around them (who they change as often as they do their own socks). Perhaps the question should be put to Astrolabe as to what value they put on their copyright "rights" here: for example would they be willing to trade them to continue to receive access to the public Internet for the brief time their company will continue to exist before it collapses on itself through stupid business moves like this?

They (Astrolabe) would also do well to heed the wise saying in the title of this comment.

Windows Everywhere!

n/t

on state sponsored

Remember, to a CEO, any computer user that knows WinKey+R opens Run dialog and "cmd" is the shell executable is "sophisticated".

***

Really priceless quote.

PKI has been hamstrung by the "good enough" approach long enough, as have been most parts of the Internet infrastructure. The mere mention of "you also have to bend DNS" immediately brought to mind the cache poisoning exploit discovered 3 years ago. In that case the most troubling quote I saw was from Kaminsky himself, when he said, "this is how the Internet works."

Courts are at fault here

Really. Unlike the court in this case, my memory is slightly better than that of a 9-year old.

The tablet computer is as old as... Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", published in 1968. I know, I was 11 years-old when the book and movie came out. Apple founder Steve Jobs, who is 2 years older than me, should have an even clearer memory of it.

"When he tired of official reports and memoranda and minutes, he would plug his foolscap-sized Newspad into the ship's information circuit and scan the latest reports from Earth. One by one he would conjure up the world's major electronic papers ... Switching to the display unit's short-term memory, he would hold the front page while he quickly searched the headlines and noted the items that interested him. ... the postage-stamp-sized rectangle would expand until it neatly filled the screen and he could read it with comfort."

http://www.boingboing.net/images/newspad.jpg

Of course this had been mentioned by others before, and I think has been submitted by Samsung in at least one of its responses to Apple in the multiple cases the latter has brought against the former on this issue.

Apple should have been laughed out of court on this one, as should anyone who claims the intellectual property rights to concepts like this that have been in the public domain for *decades*. Unfortunately, ignorance of prior art like this seems to have been epidemic among patent authorities for at least a generation -- to the point that you have to wonder what alternate universe they grew up in.

no place for amateurs - but that's all there is

Here we now have conclusive evidence, if any was needed, that everyone involved in this whole cablegate this is a moron. From US gov't executives who cavalierly dumped those secret cables on a clearly insecure network, to news editors who stupidly mishandled the keys to the kingdom, to Assange [TM] and his cohorts of private actors whose megalomania has sealed their own sorry fates. People should wake up to the fact that the "experts" they've entrusted their lives and livelihoods to are a bunch of frauds who really need to be shown the door -- of a prison cell.

American software?

Sorry, but we don't make that here anymore. Like Anonymous said, the big guys have mostly managers here now -- and even those are getting scarce. But I think AudiGuy is on to something, this isn't really about *needing* to save money -- it's just that the corporate brain trust either can't or won't look to any other metric for executive performance (you know, like organic growth in market share as opposed to growth by acquisition). It's a failure of imagination on the part of the guys who make the big bucks to spend all day thinking about these kinds of things, which is ultimately they are doomed as well.

Executive delusions

Not to pile on Dr. Park, whose name now gets about a gazillion non-so-flattering hits on Google, but you have to wonder if he also believes in gravity-free zones like the rest of those who live up in the rarefied air at the top of the corporate ladder.

$10

Whitter is right, you'd only need something as little as $10 to stop this nonsense. Small enough to avoid hurting struggling authors (they pay more than that for monthly Internet access, or even lunch on a trip to meet with those brick-and-mortar publishers they're also pitching too) but more than enough to trash the business model of the spammers.

Not a big deal, unless it helps RHAT survive

We run RHEL at work and I have a personal license of my own for home, even though I actually run CentOS on all my test machines there. For me this isn't a really big deal, because I'm using the centosplus kernel anyway. It *will* make things harder on the CentOS guys, and that's regrettable because they really do provide a tremendous service to the FOSS community. But if this change helps Red Hat survive, then I'm going to have to support it -- because as someone else mentioned *Red Hat* is the one who has invested in paying the salaries of hundreds of engineers who contribute back to FOSS every damn day. They're a resource I don't think we can afford to lose.

Of course I'll have to eat those words if RHAT winds up selling out to ORCL or another big player that then leeches off open source until there's nothing left to save.

This is a good thing, really

It will be so much easier for US and UK intel agencies to hack into German Foreign Office systems now -- not to mention open a plethora of attack vectors by bad guys deploying the latest worms, trojans, and bots for Windows. Of course German government officials will seek to suppress, deny or minimize future evidence of increased compromises of their systems, just as the the US DOD did when their inherently insecure MS Exchange mail system got hacked by Chinese script kiddies.

The REAL Unpopular Opinion

"Elop's problem is that historically you can't really take a large bureaucracy and expect a lean, mean fighting machine to emerge. You usually just get a smaller bureaucracy."

The is that Elop is not alone in his delusion. It is shared by executives in most (if not all) big companies around the world. It is this single delusion that is the reason they fail.

Priorities

Because protecting the intellectual property of the big sports franchises and their mega-media partners is SO important to the health, safety and welfare of the United States. Half the world wants to kill us and they're out chasing after pirate video hackers? You know what, the companies whose profits they're protecting here can afford to go out and hire their own private army for this.

Of course that's exactly what they consider the U.S. government to be.

Yes, my "leaders" are morons.

There are days when I really wish I'd been born Canadian.

Hard to tell, but if true then

It's always hard to know what the deal is with stories like this because we've got so few details to do any real analysis. If the mom's allegations are true, it still doesn't mean that MS a truly evil descriminator against persons with disabilities. It could just be that they're stupid. This *is* the same company that came up with "Bob", after all. Maybe we should all hang our heads in shame for having anything to do with their products. As for the suggestion that someome get the kid a PS3, I'd say either that or a Wii -- mostly because I think the people over at Nintendo are really nice guys and to my knowledge never installed rootkits in their customer's computers.

stuck in neutral by a lack of leadership

Identity management is complex all right. So complex that when faced with major policy decisions about what products and capabilities to deploy those who are able to make intelligent decisions on whether to invest in CMOs and/or CDS's suddenly lose their resolve and are unable to commit. OK, so maybe their willingness to invest in CMO's and/or CDS's is evidence that they're not as intelligent as we thought. Point is, it's not the engineers and administrators who have stymied adoption of "anything but passwords" authentication technologies in the enterprise. It's the executives who not only control the purse strings, but also set, and presumably support, enterprise security policy. After over a decade of doing IDM, I can't say I really know what the problem is, but my guess is either an inability to focus or the fear of things not grasped.

why we're losing

We Americans like to complain. We put great effort into it.

This story is an example of why Americans are losing when it comes to defeating terrorism (both foreign, and especially domestic) stopping cross-border violence driven by the trade in illegal drugs and workers, and in the general increase in both property and violent crime.

If our police spent as much time on actually doing their jobs as they do on covering their own behinds we'd be in a much different place. Of course they're only following the lead of their politician masters, who are in turn following the lead of their corporate executive masters. The problem isn't that these people are stupid (although in this case and many others they clearly proved to be) it's that they're so self-absorbed that they've lost sight of what they were hired to do.