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Aereo and Old Geezers | 141 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Aereo and Old Geezers
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?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Cyber Warfare, at Ground Level
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

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

PC industry sees worst sales quarter in nearly 20 years
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 | # ]

CBC: PC sales plunge as Windows 8 flops
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.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Manning trial judge to US: prove suspect KNEW leaks would 'aid enemy' - raises burden of proof
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 | # ]

AOL patents displaying threaded email messages ..
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 | # ]

Is it Time for Mutiny?
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 | # ]

The rise of patent monetization entities
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.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Hmm... from "Simon Davies" who supported Phorm in UK?!!! Google + WhatsApp = Privacy Trap
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 | # ]

3 from Mike Masnick at Techdirt
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 | # ]

PC outlook darkens as sales slump deepens in 1Q
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 | # ]

  • 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
The Conspiracy to Kill Martin Luther King Jr: Not a Theory But a Fact, According to Our Own Lega
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?

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

New Help Desk Comic - The End Run
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 11 2013 @ 11:22 AM EDT

The End Run

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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