Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 10 2013 @ 08:22 PM EDT |
Now I understand what it's all about. Or is
Bloomberg simply preening?
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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 10 2013 @ 10:03 PM EDT |
McAfee observes a Trojan targetting S Korea,
f-secure adds
that the
data dump is in HongKong,
ironic twist, the bait is American
coffee
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Authored by: Gringo_ on Wednesday, April 10 2013 @ 10:58 PM EDT |
Hammered by the popularity of tablets and the
unpopularity of
Windows 8, PC sales plunged 14 percent in
the first three months of 2013 -- the
worst drop in nearly
20 years.
Microsoft launched Windows 8 in October
hoping to help
bolster PC sales, but IDC said the software instead
exacerbated
the decline in sales.
"It's a terrible product," said Trip Chowdhry, managing
director of equity research for Global Equities Research.
"It's the wrong
product with the wrong ecosystem trying to
address the wrong
environment.
Link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, April 10 2013 @ 11:16 PM EDT |
PC sales plunge as Windows 8 flops
Global shipments of PCs see
biggest drop since 1994
CBC has a story on the drop in PC sales, which
they are attributing partially to Windows 8.
PC sales plunge as Windows 8
flops
Microsoft's Windows 8 software appears to be driving
buyers away from PCs and toward smartphones and tablets, research firm IDC said
Wednesday. That's leading to the fastest drop in PC sales the firm has ever
seen.
Global shipments of PCs fell 14 per cent in the first three
months this year, IDC said. That's the sharpest plunge since the firm started
tracking the industry in 1994.
Since Microsoft relies on
bundling of MS Windows with new PCs, a decline in PC sales hits directly at
their sales figures. As MS Windows is one of their cash cows (along with MS
Office), This should be a serious problem for them.
The
report comes after a year of bad news for the PC. Consumers, especially in
wealthy countries like the U.S., are steering their dollars toward tablets and
smartphones rather than upgrading their home PCs. It's the biggest challenge to
the personal computer since the IBM PC was released in
1981.
This is why Microsoft is so desperate to become
relevant in the phone and tablet market. This in turn is the reason for the
attacks on Google and Android. Android is occupying the same market niche in the
phone and tablet space that Microsoft occupies in the PC space - the default
third party OS which all the low cost hardware manufacturers ship with their
product.
In an attempt to keep the PC relevant, Microsoft
released a radical new version of Windows on Oct. 26. Windows 8 has a completely
new look and forces users to learn new ways to control their
machines.
"Unfortunately, it seems clear that the Windows 8 launch not
only didn't provide a positive boost to the PC market, but appears to have
slowed the market," IDC Vice-President Bob O'Donnell
said.
Microsoft's strategy has always been to try to
break into a new market by tying the new product to MS Windows. The problem is
that there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to do that here. People aren't
going to run out and buy a new tablet and a new PC together. They're buying new
tablets instead of buying new PCs. If they have a tablet which does most
of what they want, they're not going to turn on their PC very often, so why
spend money on a new one as long as the old one still works?
The
business market is still locked in to Microsoft, but the problem is that all the
things that companies are doing to make their stuff work with tablets means that
their stuff is more cross-platform. That weakens the vendor lock-in which
Microsoft depends on.
IBM dominated mainframes (and still does), DEC
was the industry leader in mini-computers, Microsoft dominated PCs, and now it
looks like Android will dominate the phone/tablet era. That doesn't mean that
Microsoft will disappear (just like IBM didn't disappear). It does mean though
that MS Windows is now a "legacy system", just like OS/390 and VMS.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 02:22 AM EDT |
The US government will have to prove that the
WikiLeaks
source,
Bradley Manning, had "reason to believe" that his
disclosure of state secrets
could be harmful to the US and
beneficial to foreign nations, the judge
presiding over the
soldier's court martial ruled on Wednesday.
The ruling
from Colonel Denise Lind, sitting in a military
court at Fort Meade in
Maryland, raises the burden of proof
for the prosecutors who are trying to have
the US soldier
jailed for life for his actions in passing hundreds of
thousands of classified state documents to the anti-secrecy
website WikiLeaks.
Manning has pleaded guilty to the
leak,
but only to lesser charges that
carry an upper sentence of
20 years in military jail.
He has pleaded not
guilty to the most serious charge, that
he knowingly "aided the
enemy".
Ed Pilkington, The
Guardian[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 06:25 AM EDT |
"A method for organizing a message thread containing one
or more messages. A
root message and reply groupings are
identified, each reply grouping depending
from the root
message" .. link [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 06:29 AM EDT |
My colleague Ray Coye and I spent four years
mining obscure
primary-source accounts and journals from the era from the
mid-1400s to the
early 1600s to write Mutiny and Its Bounty.
This was the time when seafarers
like Vasco da Gama,
Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan, and Henry Hudson
undertook risky ventures at sea. Their venturing began in
Portugal and Spain
and went on for hundreds of years and
with staggering volume.
It's a rarely
studied era, but it holds deep lessons in
human enterprise — even more, in many
respects, than the
study of modern industrial organizations.
Mutinies were
as common as the wind on Age of Discovery
seafaring ventures. What's more, the
people participating in
them often had very sophisticated conceptualizations of
leadership and service. They also recorded firsthand much of
what happened.
Our analysis of records and diaries from
their long enterprises shows that
mutinies are successfully
carried out when a few conditions are present:
-
Leadership is destructive [...]
- Values have been flouted [...]
-
Ringleaders are strong [...]
- The external environment is uncertain and
features novel
threats [...]
Patrick J. Murphy, Harvard Business Review
---
Traitorous eight -
Wikipedia [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 07:10 AM EDT |
The first of two parts, complete with telling data -
second will cover the
EU situation:
The IPKat: The rise of patent
monetization entities Part One: the situation
in the US
a research paper published yesterday by Sara
Jeruss,
Robin Feldman and Thomas Ewing, which analyses
13.000 patent cases from recent
years (2007-2008 and 2011-
2012). The study uses data provided by Lex Machina
(which
also provided data for a US Government Accountability Office
study on
the same issue - a comment based on the GAO's data
can be found here), a
company which specialises in
collecting and analysing IP litigation data
(founded by
Professor Mark Lemley at Stanford University). The
researchers
observed that there has been a steady rise in
the number of infringement cases
brought by patent
monetization entities: in 2012, PMEs filed 56% of the patent
lawsuits in the US, and occupied nine out of ten spots in
the top ten list of
patent litigators. There also appears to
be an active market for patent
transfers before and after
litigation. Further, data hint at an increase in the
number
of patents filed for the primary purpose of assertion.
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 07:26 AM EDT |
Google + WhatsApp = The Next
Privacy
Trap
Never going to trust this guy... ever
ever.
Simon Davies (of Privacy
International, and 80/20 Thinking) on Phorm
The founder of
Privacy International responds to criticisms of his role in
Phorm's present publicity.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 07:38 AM EDT |
Things You Don't See Every Day:
MPAA Argues
For Fair Use In Court
Broadcast Treaty Is
Baaaaaack: Plan To Create Yet Another Copyright-Like Right
For Hollywood
How
Washington DC Went
From Locking Up Laws To Releasing Them In The Public Domain
Within Days [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: JamesK on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 07:53 AM EDT |
As if that news wasn't troubling enough, it appears that a pivotal
makeover of Microsoft's ubiquitous Windows operating system seems to have done
more harm than good since the software was released last
October.
--- The following program contains immature subject
matter.
Viewer discretion is advised. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Dear Ballmer - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 01:07 PM EDT
- Beg to differ - Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 04:56 PM EDT
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 10:08 AM EDT |
The
Conspiracy
to Kill Martin Luther King Jr: Not a Theory But a Fact,
According to Our Own
Legal System
I'm not American, so I don't know where to look, but
did a jury really return
this finding of
facts?
Waynehttp://madhatter.ca [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 11:22 AM EDT |
The End
Run
Waynehttp://madhatter.ca
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