Yes, I know that the New York Stock Exchange was down for a bit over 3 hours today because of a software glitch, probably from a faulty update.
It’s not a big deal. This happens to electronic stock exchanges every few years.
Additionally, unlike 40 years ago, there are a plethora of other exchanges which can pick up the slack, and they did.
Keurig, the coffee maker company, recently introduced version 2 of their coffee maker.
Among the various “upgrades” was the introduction of digital rights management systems that prevented the use of 3rd party cups and refillable cups.
Sales have cratered, and now have backtracked on their policies:
It’s been called the “razor blade business model.” A company sells a product like a battery-operated razor blade handle at a relatively low price in order to sell a complementary consumable product later, like the astoundingly costly Gillette Power Fusion Proglide cartridge, $18 for four blades, which then get thrown away.
But it could also be called the Keurig “K-Cup” business model. Once a consumer buys the coffee machine, the coffee drinker may spend as much as $50 to $60 per pound on the coffee contained in the K-Cups, considerably more than the cost of even Starbucks’s breakfast blend, which goes for about $11.95 per pound.
Some years back, thousands of Keurig single-serve machine fans found a cheaper alternative, however — refillable, non-disposable K-cups, little plastic coffee grounds holders, which the company graciously sold under the brand of “My K-Cup.”
Not only was it cheaper, but the coffee drinker had more choice, as “My K-Cup” could be filled with any brand of coffee off the shelf.
But in August 2014, when Keurig introduced its “2.0” line of coffeemakers, it stopped making “My K-Cup” for it and made the machine incompatible with any K-cups already in existence, as well as with any unlicensed disposable K-cups made by other companies.
It was $50 a pound and a trail of waste — or nothing.
That was two provocations, but two too much. The reaction was fast and furious, on sites such as Amazon, as well as on Keurig’s own social media sites.
………
Keurig’s explanation was a model of what not to tell angry consumers. The company said the change was for the consumer’s own good.
………
Clever competitors moved quickly to fill the void, with ways to, in effect, hack into the Keurig technology. The Rogers Family Company’s “Freedom Clip” was sold patriotically as “Our Gift To You and Everyone …. Freedom Of Choice!”
………
Worse for Keurig, as executives acknowledged Wednesday during its quarterly earnings briefing, sales of Keurig machines tanked and they began to accumulate on the shelves across the country. Sales of brewers and accessories declined by 23 percent, the company reported. Its stock price fell 10 percent in after hours trading.
With that, Keurig’s CEO did what he had to do. He capitulated Wednesday in a call with market analysts.
“We heard loud and clear from consumers,” said Brian Kelley, “who really wanted the My K-Cup back. We want consumers to be able to bring any brand and bringing the My Cup back allows that.
I am kind of surprised that they didn’t stick to their guns, and file DMCA cease and desist actions against their competitors.
That does seem to be the normal way of doing business in America: Piss off your customers, and boost your profits through rent seeking behavior.
It’s a lot easier than making a better/cheaper product. Just look at how your local phone and cable companies treat you.
The Democratic Party has found a generally friendly reception in Hollywood, and as a result, they have been at least as supportive of draconian and stupid legislation and regulation to increase the profits of Hollywood.
The Obama administration has now taken this to its absurd extreme, and has has filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court supporting Oracle’s claim that APIs should be copyrightable:
The Justice Department is weighing in on the hot-button intellectual property dispute between Google and Oracle, telling the Supreme Court that APIs are protected by copyright.
The Obama administration’s position means it is siding with Oracle and a federal appeals court that said application programming interfaces are subject to copyright protections. The high court in January asked for the government’s views on the closely watched case.
The dispute centers on Google copying names, declarations, and header lines of the Java APIs in Android. Oracle filed suit, and in 2012, a San Francisco federal judge sided with Google. The judge ruled that the code in question could not be copyrighted. Oracle prevailed on appeal, however. A federal appeals court ruled that the “declaring code and the structure, sequence, and organization of the API packages are entitled to copyright protection.”
Google maintained that the code at issue is not entitled to copyright protection because it constitutes a “method of operation” or “system” that allows programs to communicate with one another.
“That argument is incorrect,” the administration told the justices.
In an amicus brief, computer scientists urged (PDF) the Supreme Court to reverse last year’s appeals court decision. “The Federal Circuit’s decision poses a significant threat to the technology sector and to the public,” they wrote. “If it is allowed to stand, Oracle and others will have an unprecedented and dangerous power over the future of innovation. API creators would have veto rights over any developer who wants to create a compatible program—regardless of whether she copies any literal code from the original API implementation. That, in turn, would upset the settled business practices that have enabled the American computer industry to flourish, and choke off many of the system’s benefits to consumers.”
Does the court really want operating system vendors to pick and choose who can write software, and what sort of software can be written, on their systems.
This is nuts. The purpose of copyright is to, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,”* and there is no way that expanding copyright in this manner does anything to promote progress.
This is insane, and this sort of IP extremism is at the heart of much that is wrong with things like the DMCA, the TPP, Evergreening, and the continual extension of copyright because Disney does not want Steamboat Willie to enter the public domain.
This is nuts.
In Windows 8, Microsoft implemented UEFI secure boot, which was nominally a system to prevent malicious software from loading a low level, but also has the effect of making it very difficult alternate operating systems.
With Win 8, Microsoft required that the hardware vendors include an option to disable the secure mode, though it was buried in the “BIOS”* setup screen.
It appears that Microsoft will no longer require a switch to disable the lockdown, which means that it could lock out many alternate operating systems:
Those of you with long memories will recall a barrage of complaints in the run up to Windows 8’s launch that concerned the ability to install other operating systems—whether they be older versions of Windows, or alternatives such as Linux or FreeBSD—on hardware that sported a “Designed for Windows 8” logo.
To get that logo, hardware manufacturers had to fulfil a range of requirements for the systems they built, and one of those requirements had people worried. Windows 8 required machines to support a feature called UEFI Secure Boot. Secure Boot protects against malware that interferes with the boot process in order to inject itself into the operating system at a low level. When Secure Boot is enabled, the core components used to boot the machine must have correct cryptographic signatures, and the UEFI firmware verifies this before it lets the machine start. If any files have been tampered with, breaking their signature, the system won’t boot.
This is a desirable security feature, but it has an issue for alternative operating systems: if, for example, you prefer to compile your own operating system, your boot files won’t include a signature that Secure Boot will recognize and authorize, and so you won’t be able to boot your PC.
However, Microsoft’s rules for the Designed for Windows 8 logo included a solution to the problem they would cause: Microsoft also mandated that every system must have a user-accessible switch to turn Secure Boot off, thereby ensuring that computers would be compatible with other operating systems. Microsoft’s rules also required that users be able to add their own signatures and cryptographic certificates to the firmware, so that they could still have the protection that Secure Boot provides, while still having the freedom to compile their own software.
This all seemed to work, and the concerns that Linux and other operating systems would be locked out proved unfounded.
This time, however, they’re not.
At its WinHEC hardware conference in Shenzhen, China, Microsoft talked about the hardware requirements for Windows 10. The precise final specs are not available yet, so all this is somewhat subject to change, but right now, Microsoft says that the switch to allow Secure Boot to be turned off is now optional. Hardware can be Designed for Windows 10 and can offer no way to opt out of the Secure Boot lock down.
If I am a mass market computer maker, there is no upside to allowing a user to disable UEFI secure boot unless you are specifically are targeting power users.
While this may not be a big deal, for anyone who, for example, wants to retask a old or used PC as a firewall, or a print server, etc., it is likely that the choice of operating systems will be severely constrained.
It’s good for the business of PC manufacturers, it means that used machines are less likely to be repurposed or resold, and it is good for Microsoft, because it means that installing many flavors of Linux on an old box becomes problematic.
For the rest of us, it sucks like a thousand Hoovers all going at once.
*Technically, UEFI is not BIOS, it replaces the exclusively 16 bit BIOS, but “BIOS Setup Screen” is a good shorthand for that screen you get when you hold down the F2 key while booting.
People have been asking for the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA) to make data available to allow accurate real-time actual schedules for some time, but MTA has said that it is too technically difficult and too expensive to make a mobile app, or to make the data available to 3rd parties.
It took a self described “civic hacker” less than a week to do this on their spare time:
Despite promises of transparency and efforts to create “open data” in the hopes of latching onto the “app economy”—words frequently used in government agency press releases—much of the data that would be of the greatest value to citizens often ends up out of reach. For example, if you want to plan a trip on public transportation in many cities (or even just find out when your bus will show up), you often have to turn to Google Maps or another transit-tracking application on your mobile device. In Baltimore, however, that data has been locked behind the firewalls of the Maryland Transit Administration (MTA).
But now a civic hacker has made that data available to app developers by doing what the MTA claimed would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to complete—simply tapping into websites that the agency has already built. And the hacker did it without spending a dime of taxpayer money. The work took just a few man-days’ worth of spare time and a commercial app development team’s afternoon.
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The reason the MTA gave for not doing a mobile app—or opening the data to third parties—was cost. “The data received from the bus [Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL)] system to operate My Tracker is not sent in a format that can be easily used to create an application—called General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). We know in many cases, the information needed to create an application is made public so private firms can attempt to develop an application at their own expense. However, it would cost approximately $600,000 more to be able to format the data from our 25-yr-old CAD/AVL system into GTFS for use by outside developers,” the MTA said.
However, within days of the MTA’s Web app going live, geo-data developer and open government data advocate Chris Whong had already done what the MTA refused to do. Whong took a look at the bus tracker Web app and found that its AJAX interface was polling the site every 10 seconds to get new location data. As it turns out, the app was retrieving JSON-formatted data from the MTA’s servers, encoded in a format called the General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS). The MTA had already published the GTFS metadata describing bus routes. Whong wrote in a blog post that it took a few hours of trial and error to confirm the data feed format, but in the end he and a small team of “civic hackers” were able to construct a framework that would allow applications to pull, for free, the very data the MTA said would cost $600,000 to publish. The team also produced a live tracking site on the Heroku application hosting platform to demonstrate the framework and then posted the whole thing on Github to allow others to use it.
And use it they did. The Montreal-based developer Transit App was one team that grabbed onto Whong’s project. “With Chris’ help, we were able to pull the real-time vehicle positions from the MTA system ourselves,” the Transit App team said in a blog post. “Using that data, we generated approximate bus arrival times with our in-house prediction engine. We then compared those predictions with the MTA’s tracker to verify our accuracy. And—with just an afternoon of work—Baltimore finally has the real-time tracking app it deserves. $600,000 under budget.”
My guess as to why the MTA thought that they needed more than ½ a million dollars to do what took one guy a few days is tied in with that whole “Reinventing Government” thing that Clinton started in the 1990s.
Basically, it involved taking a lot of core competencies in government agencies, and outsourcing them to private contractors.
The MTA probably does not possess the internal knowledge base to understand just how trivial doing this was.
Intellectual Ventures, the patent troll founded Nathan Myhrvold, has won its first patent suit, but it appears to be a Pyrrhic victory, with a small award, and a denial of ongoing royalty payments:
More than four years after it launched its first waves of lawsuits, the world’s biggest “patent troll” has won its first victory in a jury trial.
Late Friday, a Delaware jury ordered Symantec to pay $17 million to Intellectual Ventures, the Washington-based “invention marketplace” created by ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold, which boasts more than 30,000 patent assets.
In its verdict [PDF], the jury found that Symantec had infringed two US patents, numbered 5,987,610 and 6,073,142. A third patent, 6,460,050, was found to be not infringed.
The complaint [PDF], filed in 2010, accuses Symantec’s Brightmail Gateway and Web Gateway of infringing the ‘142 patent. That patent was filed in 1997 by Utah’s Park City Group and essentially describes a system for distributing e-mail according to a set of predetermined “business rules.”
The ‘610 patent originated with Ameritech, later bought by AT&T. The ‘050 patent was filed in 1999 by two columnists for computer magazine InfoWorld, Brooks Talley and Mark Pace.
While jurors sided with Intellectual Ventures, they awarded the patent holder less than six percent of the $299 million its lawyers sought, according to a Symantec spokesperson. The verdict form indicates the company was also asking for ongoing royalty payments, which the jury rejected.
“We are pleased the verdict came back for substantially less than the amount that Intellectual Ventures was seeking, and are considering our options to reduce the damages even further,” the spokesperson said via e-mail.
In a statement, IV expressed gratitude to the jury for upholding the patents’ validity. “We remain committed to defending inventor rights and protecting the interests of our investors and customers,” said IV’s head of litigation, Melissa Finocchio.
Admittedly, it was Symantec that won, and I really hate their software, I always felt that their Norton AV was worse than the viruses that it was protecting against, but this is clearly a victory, albeit not a complete one, against the patent trolls.
Unfortunately, on appeal, it goes to the Patent Court (the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit) who would slap a patent on a rainy day, (in fact that court literally did allow for a patent on a rainy day) and my guess would be that they would not be a friendly venue for Symantec.
Canada has just passed a law making illegal for software to update without the specific consent of the user. It’s an anti spyware/malware law:
Installing computer programs without consent became a civil offence punishable by fines in Canada this week.
Under the new regulations that form part of Canada’s anti-spam legislation, it is now illegal for a website to automatically install software on a visitor’s computer or for an app on your phone to be updated without first obtaining express consent from the owner or another authorised party. The updated rules are designed to protect Canadians from the “most damaging and deceptive forms of spam and online threats” without interfering with legitimate business.
The revised rules are targeting nuisances and worse such as adware on PCs and rogue apps on smartphones. False or misleading representations of products or services are also prohibited under the new regulations.
I will note that that this also has the effect of making Apple’s automatic, “Break your competitor’s software,” illegal.
I would like to see a similar law in the US.
While I am at it, I would also like to see an uninstaller as being mandatory under law.
The number of times that I’ve had to tediously uninstall a buggy update that installed itself (Adobe Acrobat comes to mind) pisses me off.
While I am at it, I want a pony.
My talking alarm is speaking in a Slavic language.
It does do talking alarms, but normally it speaks ……… Well ……… English.
(on edit)
My bad, I tracked it down to a setting in my alarm app, AlarmDroid, and it wasn’t Russian, it was Polish.
FWIW, it’s actually a pretty good app.
A top National Security Agency official will no longer be moonlighting part-time with a private consulting firm run by former NSA chief Keith Alexander. The end of that arrangement comes days after the NSA said this particular work situation was “under internal review” due to potential conflicts of interest.
The private company at issue— IronNet Cybersecurity—was founded by Alexander, who ran the spy agency from August 2005 until March 2014. IronNet Cybersecurity offers protection services to banks for up to $1 million per month. Patrick Dowd, the NSA’s current chief technology officer, had been working with Alexander’s private venture for up to 20 hours per week.
20 hours a week? For the chief f%$#ing technology officer for the f%$#ing National f%$#ing Security Agency?
Tell me that this isn’t about using his connections to benefit his new firm.
And then there is the fact that while still heading the NSA, Keith Alexander, the NSA white washed his wide ranging, and highly suspicious tech investments:
New financial disclosure documents released this month by the National Security Agency (NSA) show that Keith Alexander, who served as its director from August 2005 until March 2014, had thousands of dollars of investments during his tenure in a handful of technology firms.
Each year disclosed has a checked box next to this statement: “Reported financial interests or affiliations are unrelated to assigned or prospective duties, and no conflicts appear to exist.”
Alexander repeatedly made the public case that the American public is at “greater risk” from a terrorist attack in the wake of the Snowden disclosures. Statements such as those could have a positive impact on the companies he was invested in, which could have eventually helped his personal bottom line.
The NSA did not immediately respond to Ars’ requests for further comment.
The documents were obtained and published Friday by Vice News as the result of a Freedom of Information Act request and subsequent lawsuit against the NSA brought by Vice News reporter Jason Leopold.
BTW, here is the money quote from the Vice article:
That said, Alexander’s interest in surveillance was not limited to his tenure as NSA director. He also invested in firms that are on the cutting edge of surveillance technology.
For example, Alexander invested as much as $15,000 in: Pericom Semiconductor, a company that has designed technology for the closed-circuit television and video surveillance markets; RF Micro Devices designs, which manufactures high-performance radio frequency technology that is also used for surveillance; and as much as $50,000 in Synchronoss Technologies, a cloud storage firm that provides a cloud platform to mobile phone carriers (the NSA has been accused of hacking into cloud storage providers).
Like I said, mighty white of the NSA to give the good General a pass on all of this.
And did I forget to mention this last bit? Since leaving the NSA earlier this year, Alexander has filed at least 9 patents on computer security, that is a something north of 1 patent a month, and the NSA has dutifully signed off of their being unrelated to his work at the NSA:
In an interview Monday with former National Security Agency Director General Keith Alexander, Foreign Policy‘s Shane Harris learned that Alexander plans to file “at least” nine patent applications—“and possibly more”—pertaining to technology for detecting network intruders.
Alexander left his government post in early 2014 and went on to co-found a private company, IronNet Cybersecurity Inc., with unnamed business partners. Alexander said that these business partners helped him create the “unique” method for detecting hackers that he plans to patent. Of course, Alexander himself had unparalleled access to classified security operations from 2005, when he took charge of the NSA, to 2014, when he retired.
Since starting IronNet, Alexander has been peddling his consulting services to major corporations, especially those in the financial industry, and has quoted fees of up to $1 million per month. That astronomical number drew at least one federal representative to suggest that Alexander might be disclosing or misusing classified information.
Presumably, Alexander’s expensive consulting will include access to IronNet’s future patented technology, which will cover “a system to detect so-called advanced persistent threats, or hackers who clandestinely burrow into a computer network in order to steal secrets or damage the network itself,” Foreign Policy reported. Alexander specified to the magazine that IronNet’s technology is unique because it uses “behavioral models” to anticipate a hacker’s next moves.
You know, if I didn’t know better, I would swear that this whole dysfunctional security-industrial complex thing would sound like an awful like like our dysfunctional military-industrial complex, where increasingly large sums of money seem to result in nothing more than massive remuneration for retired generals.
Finally dropped the old tables from the older version of the BBS.
I have a help ticket into the provider about what our current usage levels are, and what our limits are.
I’m an admin at the Stellar Parthenon BBS, and the board is having problem, so I am attempting to fix it.
A bit of an adventure, considering my lack of knowledge of SQL.
Wish me luck.
The essay, at Ask Slashdot speaks specifically to documentation for open source software, but I would argue that it could be applied almost anywhere:
Back when Sourceforge wasn’t a sh%$-heap of garbage in every possible way I did a lot of documentation for various programs. I’m not a programmer at all, but I can use the damn things and tell others how to do so as well. The biggest problems I had were ALWAYS at the hands of the developer. They’d have these posts desperately looking for documentation writers then treat us like total f%$#ing garbage when we had to ask questions. I can’t f%$#ing tell you how many times I was told to read the f%$#ing source, despite me being very up-front about my lack of coding ability. “If you can’t figure out how to use the program then how can you write documentation?”
MOTHERf%$#ER, IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT. F%$# you in your goddamn asshole you f%$#ing arrogant f%$#ing pricks.
I stopped bothering when I stopped using Linux, which is a story in itself. The fact of the matter is the majority of programmers are assholes that have no business operating in normal society. Lock them in the f%$#ing closet and let them read the f%$#ing source until they jizz all over their crusty beards while fantasizing about Stallman’s brown pucker. Maybe THEN the people that make documentation will give enough of a sh%$ to try to do so again.
BTW, that is a comment, not the main post, but I think that he “gets” it.
When the programming community, whether open or closed source, holds documentation writers in abject contempt, the loser is the user.
H/T E-Cop at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Microsoft filed a lawsuit to seize domains from No-IP.com. Their reason?
In a blog post, Richard Domingues, assistant general counsel for the Microsoft digital crimes unit, said Microsoft pursued the seizure for No-IP’s role “in creating, controlling, and assisting in infecting millions of computers with malicious software—harming Microsoft, its customers and the public at large.” He added: “We’re taking No-IP to task as the owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims with the Bladeabindi (NJrat) and Jenxcus (NJw0rm) family of malware.”
(emphasis mine)
To quote the great Anna Russell, “I’m Not Making This Up, You Know.”
Seriously, “Zero Day” Microsoft, the creater of of Windows™, is complaining about someone being the “Owner of infrastructure frequently exploited by cybercriminals to infect innocent victims?”
Really?
The irony here is stunning.
In Oracle vs. Google, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeal, aka the “Patent Court”, has once again taken a delusionally extremist position on IP, and ruled that software APIs are subject to copyright. As Timothy B. Lee observes, “The court that created the patent troll mess is screwing up copyright too.”
A few years ago, the database company Oracle sued Google, arguing that Google’s Android operating system infringed the copyright of Oracle’s Java technology. On Friday, a federal appeals court sided with Oracle in the long-running dispute.
The decision seems to reflect a fundamental lack of understanding of how software works. And it could create serious headaches for companies that want to make their software compatible with that of competitors.Why did Oracle sue Google?
The lawsuit focuses on technical decisions Google made when it created the Android operating system.
Google wanted people who wrote programs in the popular programming language Java to be able to re-use their code in Android apps. To do that, Google had to ensure that Java code written for other purposes ran exactly the same on Android. But negotiations with the company behind Java, Sun Microsystems (which was later acquired by Oracle), broke down, so Google decided to create its own version of Java from scratch.
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The trial court judge, William Alsup, sided with Google. Copyright only protects the creative aspects of a work, not its functional characteristics. Judge Alsup ruled that because the names of Java functions was essential to achieving interoperability, they were a functional characteristic rather than a creative aspect of Java, and using them wasn’t copyright infringement.
But on Friday, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed. The court was unimpressed with Google’s argument that function names were functional characteristics not protected by copyright. In the Federal Circuit’s view, the list of Java functions was just another kind of “code” that couldn’t be copied without its creator’s permission.
The court’s reasoning didn’t impress James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at the University of Maryland. “Not only do they not understand how computers work, they can’t even read,” he says.
………
The Federal Circuit is the court that hears appeals in all patent cases. Over the last three decades, it has shown a consistent bias in favor of patent holders, setting legal precedents that made the current patent troll problem possible.
Ordinarily, copyright cases in California would be heard by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. But because Oracle’s fight with Google also includes some patent issues, the Federal Circuit gets jurisdiction.
And evidently, the Federal Circuit has a bias toward copyright holders to go with its pro-patent bias.
Needless to say, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals is completely insane, and should be abolished, and the judges on that court should be told to take up knitting.
Google has fired the head of its Google+ effort, and will be redirecting its resources:
When Vic Gundotra, the head of Google+, suddenly announced his departure from Google today, many were left wondering “why” and what it meant for the future of Google+. He didn’t give a reason for leaving, but according to a report from TechCrunch, the likely reason is a major shakeup for Google’s social network.
In short, Google seems to be backing away from the original Google+ strategy. The report states that Google+ will no longer be considered a product that competes with Facebook and Twitter, and that Google’s mission to force Google+ into every product will end. With this downgrade in importance comes a downgrade in resources. TechCrunch claims that 1000-1200 employees—many of which formed the core of Google+—will be moved to other divisions. Google Hangouts will supposedly be moved to Android, and the Google+ photos team is “likely” to follow. “Basically, talent will be shifting away from the Google+ kingdom and towards Android as a platform,” the report said. The strange part is that both of these teams create cross-platform products. So if the report is true, there will be a group inside the Android team making iOS and Web apps, which doesn’t seem like the best fit.
A Google spokesperson gave Ars the same statement the company gave TechCrunch: “Today’s news has no impact on our Google+ strategy—we have an incredibly talented team that will continue to build great user experiences across Google+, Hangouts, and Photos.” On Gundotra’s announcement post, Larry Page wrote “we’ll continue working hard to build great new experiences for the ever-increasing number of Google+ fans.”
Despite Google’s denial, it makes sense for the company to back away from Google+. The social network hasn’t gained the massive userbase it would need to rival Facebook, and the aggressive integration strategy has been universally hated by users. As Google gets bigger and bigger, it faces harsher scrutiny, and few things the company has done have been more disliked than Google+. According to the report, Google+’s YouTube takeover was seen as “a rocky move” even inside the company.
The G+ strategy was driven by abject terror of Facebook, and the change in direction implies that Google is no longer driven by this.
My guess is that Google sees something in the reams of data that they accumulate showing that Facebook’s “threat” is of less concern.
In any case, I’m just glad that they won’t continue to break their other apps in order to foist Google+ on the rest of us.
I’m an engineer, and I have seen way too many PowerPoint slides.
So I exult in the fact that the forum for the Large Hadron Collider at Fermilabs has banned PowerPoint slides in their presentations:
A physicist is more than the sum of his or her slides.
That’s why, about six months ago, organizers of a biweekly forum on Large Hadron Collider physics at Fermilab banned PowerPoint presentations in favor of old-fashioned, chalkboard-style talks.
“Without slides, the participants go further off-script, with more interaction and curiosity,” says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and a co-organizer of the forum. “We wanted to draw out the importance of the audience.”
In one recent meeting, physics professor John Paul Chou of Rutgers University (pictured above) presented to a full room holding a single page of handwritten notes and a marker. The talk became more dialogue than monologue as members of the audience, freed from their usual need to follow a series of information-stuffed slides flying by at top speed, managed to interrupt with questions and comments.
“We all feel inundated by PowerPoint,” Askew says. “With only a whiteboard, you have your ideas and a pen in your hand.”
If Zombie Osama bin Laden were to were to wage Jihad against PowerPoint, I would gladly join his evil minions.
Seriously, there is doing the smart thing, and doing the stupid thing, and then there is putting Mark Penn in charge of your strategic planning:
In the biggest shuffling of Microsoft’s executive ranks since the company’s new chief executive, Satya Nadella, took over, Mark Penn, the former aide to the Clinton family, is becoming the company’s chief strategy officer.
The change will give Mr. Penn, who has been an executive vice president at Microsoft overseeing advertising and strategy, a bigger hand in determining which markets Microsoft should be in and where it should be making further investments, according to a person briefed on the change who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been publicly announced.
Tami Reller, the company’s executive vice president for marketing, who shared leadership of advertising and marketing at Microsoft, will leave the company, as will Tony Bates, Microsoft’s executive vice president of business development, this person said.
After the way he handled the Hillary campaign in 2008, when he thought that the Democratic primaries were winner take all, when delegates were proportionately allocated , I’m surprised that anyone would employ him at anything.
This is not bad strategy, this is death throes.
H/t Atrios.
I’m not surprised, given that they have conspired to make security protocols less secure in order to make it easier for the NSA to hack into systems:The NSA has asked Linus Torvalds to inject covert backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux. This was revealed in this week’s hearing on mass surveillance in the European Parliament. Chalk another one up of the United States NSA trying to make information technology less secure for everyone.
The father of Linus Torvalds, Nils Torvalds, is a Member of the European Parliament for Finland. This week, Nils Torvalds took part in the European Parliament’s hearing on the ongoing mass surveillance, and brought a revelation:
The United States security service NSA has contacted Linus Torvalds with a request to add backdoors into the free and open operating system GNU/Linux.
The entire inquiry is available here on YouTube (uploaded by Hax).
Nils Torvalds’ revelation was presented in an episode which started (at 3:06:58) by me pointing out to the Microsoft representative in the panel, that in a system like GNU/Linux, built on open source, you can examine the source code to see that there aren’t any back doors. In Microsoft’s systems, this possibility is absent, since the source code is secret to outsiders.
Backdoors are deliberate security holes in a system, and notwithstanding the claims of its proponents, (largely debunked by the evidence of abuse by NSA personnel) regarding checks and balances, this is just a complete clusterf%$# for American tech.
Any foreign company that does not think twice about working with a US tech firm is deluded.
Google is killing its Google Reader RSS Reader:
Google Reader, one of the world’s most popular RSS readers, is shutting down on July 1, 2013, Google announced Wednesday.
The search giant is pulling the plug on the 7-year old project citing “declining usage.” Google says it is shuttering Reader and deprecating or shutting down a number of other services as part of the company’s “spring cleaning” initiative — one that seeks to help the company focus on the features that need the most use.
Seeing as how this app has been pretty much on autopilot for a while, it’s not like it was sucking up much in the way of resources.
My guess is that Google™ saw it as an alternative to Google+™, they dumped some sharing features from the program a year ago, and this was a large part of the reason to axe the program.
They are terrified of Facebook, and so they push G+.
As an aside, one of the problems with Google+™ is that G+ still sucks.
For example, there is still no way to feed your blog RSS to G+, which you can do in Facebook, Twitter, and even lowly MySpace. (If someone knows a work around, tell me)
And to go further down the “We Love Evil” path, Google has now banned ad blocking software from its Android Market, the Play Store:
Google has removed all ad blocking apps from Google Play, its online store for Android applications, on the basis that they interfere with other services. Searches for “adblock” and related terms on Wednesday evening no longer returned any references to ad blocking software.
Till Faida, co-founder of Adblock Plus, condemned the decision, calling it a threat to consumer choice. “By unilaterally removing these apps, Google is stepping all over the checks and balances that make the Internet democratic,” he said in a statement, suggesting that Google’s actions threaten Internet freedom in the same way that SOPA and PIPA did.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In its letter to Adblock Plus, Google said the software violates Section 4.4 of the company’s Developer Distribution Agreement.
Section 4.4 states, “You agree that you will not engage in any activity with the Market, including the development or distribution of Products, that interferes with, disrupts, damages, or accesses in an unauthorized manner the devices, servers, networks, or other properties or services of any third party including, but not limited to, Android users, Google or any mobile network operator.”
Evil. It’s what’s dinner.
On a related note, my guess is that Feedburner will be done away with in the near to medium term, so if you have an email subscription, you would need to change.
I’m looking at alternatives.
