Posts by dogged 4790 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Nov 2009
> The assumption is that if they were legitimate Microsoft wouldn't mind people knowing what they were.
But the point is that we don't know what they are, we (I use the term to encompass the majority opinion here) are simply assuming that because we don't know, they are worthless and anyone who does know and paid up quite a lot of money because they know knows less than us, which is as we agree, nothing.
That is not a defensible position, logically speaking.
(Btw, upvoted for a sensible answer rather than frothing rage).
> But in a couple of years no-one will be paying them for android - at some point they will have to confront Google.
I wonder whether they started to. That would explain the big G flogging off Motorola Mobility and losing that lovely tax write-off. It would be a hard lawsuit at the moment though, since Google don't sell Android and could probably argue that they don't make money from it. Not well enough to convince a techie but well enough to convince a judge.
The OEMs though, they make devices that depend upon Android, for money. So they're straightforward targets.
This default assumption that MS are lying about their patents amuses me. Good to know that the Reg's commentards know more about the workings of Android than the companies who implement it, 99% of whom have just coughed up the money.
Not really. I have a L920 running it at the moment as dev/test machine and it's still very much a WPx phone, just with more stuff and a fancy voice assistant if you change your language and region to US.
The assistant is kind of fun but insists on calling me "Dave" when refusing to open the pod bay doors.
> Oh very much indeed. Still ~95% of desktop share; that is a massive monopoly to hit OEMs over the head with and enforce dubious patent ransoms.
You're quite right, MS should simply refuse to let anyone use their OS until they have encouraged freedom and competitiveness by driving everyone to a different OS.
Are you sober?
> I am so sorry, I guess we should all just bow down and accept whatever convicted monopoly abuser (which is a fact, look it up) decides to offer us.
It was a fact in 1998, or rather the lawsuit was, and it was initiated for actions taken in 1994. 20 years ago. Were you even born when what you're whining about happened?
Current monopoly abuser? Not so much. Not so much as illegally leveraging a monopoly in personal music players into phone and digital downloads or illegally leveraging a 94% majority share of search traffic into selling extra "value added" services that the user can't switch off.
Wake up, AC. The coffee isn't 20 years old. The coffee is fresh and somebody else is serving it to you by the bucketful.
> When MS stop being anti-competitive, anti-freedom and monumental dicks; the hate will stop.
It seems they stopped years ago. The hate continues.
So far we have established that exactly none of AC's issues with MS are based on fact.
What a surprise that is. It's almost as if AC had been getting his/her information from internet retards on comment boards rather than bothering to look anything up.
Research is hard. Internet hate is easy.
> I've never used Lotus Notes, but I don't believe that's a possibility for small business and personal use, and anyway it seems to be universally loathed.
Lotus Notes was designed as an internal project to make X.400 look simple, attractive and easy to manage.
I think it's quite literally the single worst piece of software I've ever encountered in 20 years in this industry and yes, that includes crappy in-house programs written for deranged accountants, council-written unusable tripe and bloatware frameworks that do everything in a spectacularly complex way that ends in an undocumented exception. And Access.
I'm not even kidding.
Out of interest, do you use Google Docs?
I don't really get the "personal" thing. A "personal" sub would appear likely to be a sole trader of some definition or other, possibly somebody who writes for a living and that user would be far better served using either the Business versions (where they can license themselves as a single user really cheaply) or something else entirely.
The "home" kind of makes sense, in the same way that the "business" versions make sense. Count in "Office to go" and they're basically outsourcing the productivity suite and associated storage. If the subs cost less than doing the whole thing in-house including support... that's what business will go for.
The "home" benefit is presumably the mixed platforms and multiple licenses; again handy if your family prefers its platforms mixed up and messed up. And if you hate support work as much as I do, I suppose.
But "Personal"? No, that one's weird.
> ISO ballot stuffing over OOXML
Name a company that doesn't lobby for their interests. Google lobbied for ODF but both are published and independently maintained standards. Just because one has become an article of religious fiath for the F/OSS crowd doesn't mean the other isn't open.
> Patent threats against Android.
Assume that all those companies pay up not because they're scared of the big bad Beast of Redmond ( I very much doubt that Samsung are scared, for example) but rather because the patents hold up. If that's the case, would you rather MS just gave their work away? Do you think their shareholders would like that?
> Windows tax (refunds no longer possible).
That's more about OEMs than MS and you know it.
> ODF FUD
Office supports ODF as detailed above.
> Secure Boot (MS made sure the implementation was fecked and that they control the keys)
Now this is FUD. MS use a part of the UEFI standard and in order to gain certification, OEMs must enable the user to turn off secure boot in UEFI. Either you have no idea what you're ranting about or... well, you already know the "or".
So basically, your objections are religious, then?
Do MS HATE YOUR FREEDOM AC? Like Saddam?
Sarcasm aside, I'd like to see what you mean by "anti-competitive" though. Browser ballots, open sourcing their frameworks, pushing their office suite onto all platforms, linux hosting on Azure, Oracle interop, supporting Xamarin...
Hard to see how they could possibly be called anti-competitive these days. Compared to whom?
You can certainly pay less or even nothing with Libre Office.
However, MS Office does in fact support open standards. The very first question it asks is whether you want ODF or OOXML set as default. Even if not default, it'll still open and save save ODF if specified.
So, I mean, no doubt, you can pay less. Why not concentrate on that rather than FUD the proceedings?
Most developers I know regard it as just a job. They go home and play XBox or cycle or go to the pub.
I'm one of the rare ones who still wants to code his own stuff but childcare pretty much kills all ambitions in that direction. Shame. The good ideas keep coming but the time is simply not available.
I think Jeff Bezos is out to kill iTunes. Most of Amazon's digital content moves since the creation of the Kindle Fire support this view, if you think about it.
I don't think he cares much about iThings or flogging shiny underspecced PCs to hipsters, pseuds and video editors but that content delivery and payment processing... in JB's mind, those belong to Amazon by right and will be retaken, whatever happens.
Statement of (lack of) interest - the Mrs is deep into Apple's walled garden, I own a 2nd gen Kindle and like ebooks. Beyond that, I have no horse in this race.
I just think Jeff Bezos is one scary motherfucker and if anyone could do it, he could.
> As far as I'm concerned you've come up with some piff-paff distractions rather than address the point that your mooted renationalisations would raise no worthwhile income and have a fair few downsides.
Granted. Absolutely granted. They would raise no worthwhile income over what's generated now and would indeed have several downsides but I think they'd also have plenty of upsides. First is the national asset-balance and even the possibility of public bond ownership. Thatcher basically kept the country alive on oil revenue and flogging off assets while claiming an economic miracle, if you recall. Not sustainable in the long term.
Second is the restoration of public trust, and that's a form of credit that's been absolutely despoiled.
Then I'd have all the lobbyists rounded up and publicly pelted with stones. Maybe not, but certainly lobbying and SPADS would be driven out and anyone caught taking the banks' dirty money would never work in public service again.
And then we move along to further activities like scrapping the ludicrous "50% of all children must get a degree" drivel Blair introduced and Brown and Cameron maintained was a good idea. The leaving of the EU as a "whole thing" and (re)joining of EFTA. The encouragement of Scottish independence, and also Welsh and Northern Irish independence while we're about it. The proposition of not just regional devolution but regional legal and tax powers - so for example, the North East needs investment and can offer inducements to that effect whereas the South West needs to be able to stop people owning second, third, fourth houses there so that their population stops getting priced out of their own homes. The regional economies vary and pretending Westminster can rule them all is a lie.
Further, I'd want small regional government and miniscule national government. It's easier to control your cheating, scheming, bought-and-sold political servants when they're not hiding away somewhere. For that reason, I'd also end all police (and other) protection on politicians.
Then I'd restore your right to protest and introduce rights of recall so if I suck, you can sack me without waiting for an election. Just do it. Then I'd hobble Terrorism powers and cut GCHQ's funding by about 80% because fuck them, they spied on the people they were supposed to be working for.
Then I'd do something about pension ages. When the state pension was introduced, you were lucky if you got three years of it before you died. Now people live 25 years longer. Time for the pension age to reflect that, and all associated freebie benefits.
And well, public service. It's meant to be about public service. That's what's gone. That's what needs to return.
> Why are socialists so economically illiterate?
I don't know, but then I'm not a socialist. I certainly wouldn't restore the monopoly positions.
Why do people who have a political leaning in one of the traditional directions always assume everyone else has the opposite leaning?
Further, you talk about taxes on nationalized industries -
Well. Why do government employees pay tax? Why aren't their salaries just paid at "less tax" rates and save all the paperwork? To take it to the actual level of absurdity, how much does HMRC spend on collecting tax from HMRC?
Politicians always talk about cutting waste but they always see waste as "stuff we spend on the population" rather than "bullshit we use to keep civil servants in jobs".
> child benefit, winter fuel payments, free bus passes, free tv licenses etc.
All but one of these have something important in common.
> The reality that they took the money out of your wallet in the first place, process it and then give it back to you as some kind of special favor seems to pass everyone by.
However, the recipients of all but one of those bribes no longer work or pay tax. But they do vote - they vote for the biggest bribes where the rest of us have pretty much given up in despair.
Me. I should be PM.
First thing I'd do is end prohibition on drugs, saving the country 65% of all court and police costs and utterly destroying organized crime.
Then I'd use the money to renationalize BT and the Post Office and re-merge them. Then I'd use the colossal wealth this can generate to renationalize the railways and rather subsidize wankers to give us a shit hugely expensive "service" with more cancellations than trains, I'd make passenger trains free. The figures support it - we'd spend no more than we now spend on subsidizing shitty rail companies and we'd save all the ticketing and profit-protection expense.
There's a whole lot of other stuff too but I reckon just a manifesto with that stuff (backed up by the figures) would get me elected by everyone except criminals, corrupt businessmen and the police (because we'd need so many fewer of them).
The fundamental tax reform that would follow would probably get me assassinated, though.
> The poor dont have to buy cars
You live in a big city with public transport, then. That's nice for you.
My best mate is a farm worker. He earns £8.68 per hour and has two small children to support. In order to afford the rent, he has to live in a small town 8 miles from his job. Rich people from cities bought up all the farm workers' cottages for holiday homes. Are you suggesting he get on his bike?
Easy to rant when it's not you, isn't it Mr Anonymous Fuckwad? Or shall we just call you Norman Tebbit?
> Only that last one would hit the poor who can't afford efficient hybrids.
And who tend to drive cheap old cars inefficient cars which cost more money, all of which is liable for VAT.
If you buy a brand new car, you don't even need an MOT for three years. Your fuel bills could reasonably be expected to be lower.
If you buy a car for £2K, you can expect to spend at least £200 every year on getting the bloody thing through an MOT (plus forty quid for the certificate itself) and the emissions are likely to be higher meaning they'll hit you for more road tax.
Basically, rich people spend less.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” - Terry Pratchett
Because there's a limit on how much you can (physically) spend.
Let's take an example, just to see how this works.
I need to buy a new towel. I buy a new towel. For the sake of argument, it costs me £10.
Assume I am on minimum wage, that towel just cost me nearly two hours work. (And half an hour of that went to the government who graciously allow me the freedom to dry myself provided I do not offend them while doing so).
Now let's say Alan Sugar needs a new towel. He buys a new towel. It might be a bit more expensive than my towel but not much because a towel is a fucking towel.
The odds on it costing him more than seconds of his time are so small that I can't even begin to calculate them.
Being rich doesn't mean you buy more. Somebody on a comfortable income might buy £100 worth of ebooks per month. Somebody on an obscene income is unlikely to read more than that or to watch more films (regardless of how expensive their telly is) or even drink more beer.
As a proportion of income, the poor pay many times in VAT what the rich do, which is exactly how the rich like it.
I miss Singapore.
Amazing food, nice people, sticky climate but who cares, tall buildings, crazy jungle and work 14 hours days six days per week.
What?
Better than being in the UK, having childcare to do after work, a commute via First Great Western Fuck You We Already Got Your Money, Bitch and this shitty weather.
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