08.19.11
Links – Microsoft Partner HP Exits the PC Business, Bilski Takes a Bite
Reader’s Picks
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HP to Spin Off PCs, Eyes Software Purchase
Hewlett-Packard Co., the world’s largest computer maker … has been aiming to lessen its dependence on lower-margin PCs, where growth has stalled as consumers flock to tablet-style computers like those made by Apple Inc.
Microsoft dominates the low margin pile.
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HP: Big Changes
HP has proven there’s not much money in being M$’s partner in Wintel. Perhaps the next owner of the business will drive a harder bargain or even run GNU/Linux straight away… Either way this could cost M$ money or share.
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HP Investor Relations
HP will discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones. The devices have not met internal milestones and financial targets. HP will continue to explore options to optimize the value of webOS software going forward.
Was the purchase of Palm just to shut down webOS because it could have been a Wintel beater? The scant two years from Palm launch to HP trash can is suspicious and should attract anti-trust investigation. Apple made a ton of money off their non free mobile OS, HP might have too. Perhaps the final lesson, with Android taking over, is that non free software is just not profitable. Who knows, HP might go back to being an instrumentation company. The Pee Cee gig did not last very long.
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Defence/Police/Aggression
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How Safe Are You? What Almost $8 Trillion in National Security Spending Bought You Really $11 trillion.
Does anything remain of the international goodwill toward our country that was the one positive legacy of the infamous attacks of September 11, 2001? Unlikely.
I’d say that the US has squandered most of its cold war good will too by attacking civil rights, torturing and spying on everyone, abandoning technical pursuits and free market competition in favor of patent colonialism and the big sell out to Communist China, all of which has wrecked US standards of living. Chernobyl was the beginning of the end of the USSR because it demonstrated deadly incompetence and criminal face saving. The even bigger bank “bail outs”, Deepwater Horizon and Fukushima are similar blows to US corporate influence. US government influence has been a joke for years because it is clear that the US government exists to please it’s biggest corporations.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Issue of Radiation-Tainted Food in Japan Escalates
Mushrooms joined the threats to Japan’s food chain from radiation spewed by Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant … Radiation exceeding safety levels has been found in produce, tea, milk, fish and beef sourced as far as 360 kilometers from the nuclear plant. … Last month, hay contaminated with as much as 690,000 becquerels a kilogram, compared with a government safety standard of 300 becquerels, was found to have been fed to cattle. … Levels of cesium-134 in seawater near the Fukushima plant’s No. 3 reactor rose to levels 30 times the allowed safety standards last month … The nation’s forestry agency urged Fukushima prefecture to prevent shipments of any wood or charcoal that has been stored outdoors since the nuclear crisis … Radioactive iodine has been detected in the thyroids of half of 1,000 Fukushima children
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BPing the Arctic: How Shell’s Dangerous Drilling Is Being Fast-Tracked.
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100 Irish occupied Shell’s pipeline construction site in Rossport, Ireland. Four protesters were violently injured by Shell’s private and public police.
Explanation of why Shell’s pipeline is dangerous, and the local reaction.
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A GM corn variety specialized to make ethanol production more efficient threatens to ruin corn grown for food. It is lunacy to do genetic engineering in a plant whose pollen spreads far on the wind.
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Finance
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SEC shredded evidence of fraud.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission violated federal rules when it destroyed investigative records over a 17-year period … Darcy Flynn, a 13-year-veteran of the SEC, decided to blow the whistle after learning the SEC had destroyed over 9,000 so-called “matters under inquiry,” [preliminary documents the SEC compiles when it receives evidence of possible securities violations] … the SEC destroyed files on important, high-profile cases, including Bernard Madoff, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, trading in American International Group Inc credit-default swaps, alleged frauds at Wells Fargo & Co and Bank of America Corp and insider-trading probes at Deutsche Bank AG, Lehman Brothers and hedge fund SAC Capital.
This is one of those reasons we need sunshine laws and electronic public libraries. Copies of these records should be widespread and verifiable.
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Warren Buffet has a nice essay about taxing the rich but he has his money sheltered unaccountably in the Gates Foundation
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Ethanol subsidies a bust.
For farmers like Schipper, and ethanol refiners, there will be little reason to mourn the end of the subsidy, arguing that the money went directly to the oil industry anyway.
But campaign groups estimate it could lead to a slight drop in corn prices. “It won’t make a big difference for American farmers but it could make a huge difference for impoverished countries,” said Marie Brill, an analyst at ActionAid.Laws protecting markets against speculation have been undermined so the ordinary relation between supply and demand is broken. Thanks to GM, most corn contains insecticides that can’t be washed off so it might be better to burn it.
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Anti-Trust
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The CEO Which Turned Nokia From Master To Mistress Warns Of Google-Motorola Deal
According to my observation the message Mr. Elop seems to be giving is: Nokia’s shutdown of MeeGo is OK, Microsoft’s repeated attack on Android players it OK, Spreading FUD via proxies (Edward J. Naughton, Florian Mueller) is OK, But if Google acquires Motorola to protect itself from the attacks of Microsoft that is not OK.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying
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How the Koch Brothers Funded Public-School Segregation
Local reporters, some of whom are interviewed in the film, connected the push to eliminate busing with the philosophies of AFP and its funders. “They’re definitely pushing an agenda to resegregate these schools, but there’s also a real push toward privatization,” … The fact that millionaires can put hundreds of thousands of dollars into a local election and essentially deprive people of their rights, in many ways, and mess with their school system,” he [a film maker] says. “It seems to us one of the strongest examples of the really incredible way money takes away our democracy.”
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Getting him to write a story about it … priceless.
The reporter should not have mentioned brand names.
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Censorship
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BART Pulls a Mubarak in San Francisco
BART said today that it had instituted the following rules, including: “No person shall conduct or participate in assemblies or demonstrations or engage in other expressive activities in the paid areas of BART stations, including BART cars and trains and BART station platforms.” What does that mean? We can’t talk?
University and protest “free speech areas” which kettle up dissent effectively banned free speech outside of the areas. Now we see explicit violations of the right to assemble.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Court Ruling Opens The Door To Rejecting Many Software Patents As Being Mere ‘Mental Processes’
In a new ruling at the Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC), the court appears to open up a potentially broad path for rejecting all sorts of bad (mostly software) patents by deciding that the Supreme Court’s Bilski ruling might not have been so narrow after all.
- Software patent owners claimed Bilski was narrow.
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Copyrights
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New Zealand’s Parliament passed a law to punish Internet users for file-sharing but is at risk of punishment themselves.
Like Parliament, schools, libraries and universities run the risk of fines or disconnection. Unitec in Auckland has even said they might cease providing internet services for students due to possible copyright liability
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Content is available under CC-BY-SA
Needs Sunlight said,
August 19, 2011 at 1:10 pm
The margins on low-end computers is higher without the Windows tax. Using Linux would increase profitability there.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
August 19th, 2011 at 6:27 pm
What large OEMs still sell “Windows only”?
twitter Reply:
August 19th, 2011 at 7:09 pm
Dell is still firmly in Microsoft’s orbit. The IT guys here tried to buy me a computer from Dell. For one reason or another, they ended up sending me a box with FreeDOS. Searching the site for “Linux” I see 11 desktop models with Ubuntu as one of fifteen OS choices (13 of them were Vista/Windows 7 with various intentional missing features up to “Ultimate”). Dell still says, “Dell recommends Windows® 7.” on every search result page. Looking at their computers, I see “Dell recommends Internet Explorer 9 Learn more>” It’s nice to see free software as an option but we know from the Walmart case that Microsoft tries to make OEMs offer inferior hardware with gnu/linux. I asked for Linux and they shoved all of that stuff in my face instead of making it easy to find what I want. Why should I trust them?
The story has a happy ending for me. I was able to move my hard drive from my old computer to the new one without changing a single configuration file. Everything just worked.
The price Microsoft demands for compliance is the reason HP has left the business. Microsoft is unreasonable.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
August 20th, 2011 at 2:36 am
See Hurd’s E-mails to Ballmer amid the Vista debacle. The court released those a few years ago. Hilarious.
Windows did considerable harm to HP’s reputation.