08.05.10
Posted in Finance, Microsoft, Office Suites, Windows at 4:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: As Microsoft approaches the leeching business model (software patents), its actual core business suffers a blow
MICROSOFT’S TWO cash cows are not in a good position. Windows is not selling well and Office too is having a hard time, struggling to sell itself based on merit (despite new releases having arrived less than a year ago).
The mass hypnosis Microsoft has arranged through the mainstream media was never enough to fool Wall Street, which is why Microsoft's stock declined when it announced its results last month. Microsoft’s stock declines again with a downgrade that’s explained with rational, sobering analysis that includes:
THE SPARK: Chowdhry, who downgraded Microsoft to “Equal Weight” from “Overweight,” said in a note to investors he does not expect the company to see any upside to his estimates for the next 12 to 18 months.
[...]
He also said attach rates for Office 2010 are declining, especially in the public and education sectors and in call centers, which in all make up about 10 percent of the Office business. Attach rates refer to copies of Office sold per each copy of Windows owned.
Sales of Office disappoint, but Microsoft is comparing year of release to a non-release year, having reported a decline in Office business in the previous quarter. No wonder Steve Ballmer is still being pressured to leave.
Based on this other new post, Vista Phone 7 [sic] is another “KIN” in the making. It should be called KINdows Phone 7 as it already receives poor reviews. The KIN was a disaster of unprecedented proportions and smartphones continue to be the main growth area. █
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Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Patents at 3:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: ACT goes to the United States Congress to lobby for Microsoft, under the disguise of supposedly representing small businesses
“ACT [is] promoting software patents in US Congress,” explained the FFII’s president who found this new post from Microsoft’s front group the Association for Competitive Technology. In this post which brags about “Storm[ing] the House!” it says:
On patents, Congressman Luetkemeyer referenced a constituent of his who said ‘filing a patent lets your competitors see what you are doing, and then they just tweak it to work around, so why bother?’ [ACT's] Peter noted that this is the heart of the patent system; it drives innovation forward because by teaching others how you do things, they come up with ways to jump ahead. In exchange for sharing the secret of how my invention works, I get a time restricted monopoly on my design. I share so that I can get (temporary) exclusivity. But this delicate balance is being thrown out of whack by a patent system that takes far too long between publishing and granting. During that nearly 2 year gap of time the patent filer can do next to nothing to protect his idea.
As we showed in the previous post, Microsoft needs those patents to extort its competitors/rivals. █
“Petitioning again, they said Judge Penfield Jackson’s decision to appoint a “special master” was not appropriate and that the company would challenge it. On December 23 Microsoft did just that and filed a motion to remove Lawrence Lessig from the case. [...] In trying to get rid of Lessig, Microsoft argued the law, but they also argued bias.”
–Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, a book composed
by the daughter of Microsoft’s PR mogul
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Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, Servers at 3:38 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another timely lesson about the harms of software patents, which help Microsoft extort its rivals without ever taking them to court and having the patents tested
SOFTWARE patents are a nasty thing. In fact, over in Australia (and now in Slashdot) Ben Sturmfels works towards abolishment of software patents (for background see [1, 2, 3]). This is important because of precedence. In light of this heroic Australian action, OStatic brings up Sun’s Schwartz’ testimony about Microsoft extortion from Gates and Ballmer.
Schwartz goes on to detail a meeting he was in with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer from Microsoft, in which Gates allegedly “skipped the small talk” and said: “Microsoft owns the office productivity market, and our patents read all over OpenOffice.”
The move by Australian software leaders to abolish patents seems a little over the top. Some ideas scream out for patents, and many software titans have been built on fairly patented software. Still, if anyone has any question that software patents get exploited, Schwartz’s post called “What I Couldn’t Say” is worth rereading.
Microsoft racketeering with software patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] recently hit Salesforce, which Microsoft sued with software patents for no apparent reason other than greed (it was sued by Salesforce in return). Salesforce uses GNU/Linux just about everywhere, at least on the server side. According to this press release from Microsoft, Salesforce allowed Microsoft to have itself extorted. Yes, Microsoft has once again successfully extorted using software patents and Mary Jo Foley says that ‘[w]hile the terms of the agreement aren’t being disclosed “Microsoft is being compensated by Salesforce.com”.’
The press calls it a “settlement”, but it doesn’t quite capture the fact that Microsoft is being paid a ‘patent tax’ by Salesforce (it’s the same with TomTom, which shows Microsoft becoming a Linux-sucking leech). From the Wall Street Journal:
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) announced Wednesday a settlement to their patent suits against one another, ending a three-month tussle the two software companies had over various software patents.
More on this racketeering:
In other news, a ‘company’ (patent troll) that sued Microsoft for patent violations didn’t get its way.
It is possible that Salesforce would have won against Microsoft in court, but litigation is expensive. By issuing threats/lawsuits Microsoft has managed to turn Salesforce into a cash cow, using just a few papers with the USPTO’s rubber stamp.
Software patents need to die because they destroy the software industry and only empower monopolies. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:58 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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The Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field is famous, but the Microsoft Reality Distortion Field is much, much bigger and more pervasive. How else to explain so much devotion to a malware-ridden, inefficient, overpriced under-performing computing platform? Oh I know, those license fees don’t really matter, and Windows 7 is really good and really secure any day now! World wide botnet? Don’t be silly, when Linux gets popular it too will be riddled with malware.
Yes, many people really do believe that stuff, even in the face of years of overwhelming data to the contrary.
Should Linux admins also know Apple and Windows? Yes. Because, again, the real world is mixed environments. Running mixed networks, making a good business case for Linux adoption, making a migration plan, and performing migrations requires knowledge. It also makes you appreciate Linux more.
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Airline IT systems and transactions business company Amadeus yesterday announced it will completely migrate its commercial airline transaction processing systems onto Linux by 2012, saying proprietary platforms were “very limiting” and criticised the lack of open standards in the industry.
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Desktop
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Driven by an urge to move out of my old, stale (to me, anyhow: I’ve been using KDE for years) KDE desktop environment, I went on an install binge, successively slapping Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10.04 (UNE), plain ol’ Ubuntu 10.04, and Linux Mint 9 onto unsuspecting hardware that I had laying around. Yes, I know these are all Debian-based distros. I’ve served my RPM time with Mandrake/Mandriva, RHEL, CENTOS, and Fedora. It’s Debian-based distros for me from now on, if I have a choice.
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Applications
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The good news is that there are free and open-source alternatives for virtually every package a small business might need, and most of them are excellent. Whether or not you’ve already made the switch to Linux — there are, after all, myriad security and other reasons for doing so — these free apps can be just what any small business needs to succeed.
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Instructionals
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Red Hat Family
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DLT Solutions, a value-added reseller of information technology to the public sector, today announced that Red Hat, Inc. has recognized the company as its 2009 Public Sector Partner of the Year at the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World held in Boston earlier this year.
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Sub-notebooks
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An initiative within the Laboratory for Technological Literacy caught our eye since it focuses on free and open source issues–FOSS@RIT. The FOSS@RIT group officially began in January 2009, as an offshoot of RIT’s Department of Interactive Games and Media. A course in Interactive Games and Media generated interest in open game development for the One Laptop Per Child project (OLPC), and led to the creation of FOSS@RIT. Though the group still does lots of work with OLPC development and education projects, it also has a broader purpose that includes general educational efforts around open source tools and processes, particularly in education.
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Jolicloud is available as a free download. Founder Tariq Krim says premium features will be available later this year.
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Setup for Jolicloud is simple: Simply download and run the tiny installer, and follow the on-screen instructions to create a dual-boot installation of Jolicloud and Windows. Alternatively, you can download an image file to create an installation CD, or create a bootable USB flash drive.
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THE OPEN AJAX ALLIANCE (OAA) is using open source web 2.0 initiatives to improve Internet access for the elderly and disabled.
The OAA announced the open source tooling technology to help developers create accessible web 2.0 enabled sites that meet online accessibility standards. The guidelines followed are the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, version 2.0 (WCAG 2.0), considered as the industry-wide global standard for accessibility.
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Intel Corp., the world’s largest computer chipmaker, can’t use threats, retaliation or exclusive deals to block customers from buying competitors’ products under a settlement of antitrust charges, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission said.
The settlement covers graphics chips, central processors and chipsets, the FTC said.
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Science
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The cooling system is essential for maintaining the temperature inside the station. There are two “loops” in the system, one that uses water and draws heat from the inside of the station and one that dumps the heat into space, which uses ammonia as the fluid. Ammonia is used because it freezes at a much lower temperature than water.
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The Nature article makes it clear that researchers in other fields, including astronomy, are starting to try similar approaches to getting the public to contribute something other than spare processor time to scientific research. As long as the human brain continues to outperform computers on some tasks, researchers who can harness these differences should get a big jump in performance.
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Security/Aggression
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Finance
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Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.
And I worry that those in power, rather than taking responsibility for job creation, will soon declare that high unemployment is “structural,” a permanent part of the economic landscape — and that by condemning large numbers of Americans to long-term joblessness, they’ll turn that excuse into dismal reality.
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U.S. consumer spending and incomes were unexpectedly flat in June while personal savings were the highest in a year, implying an anemic economic recovery for the remainder of this year.
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Households across a majority of large U.S. cities received more foreclosure warnings in the first six months of this year than in the first half of 2009, new data shows.
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Despite months-long speculation that the nation is primed for a housing recovery, homeownership — a tenet of the quintessential American life — is far from making a comeback.
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While many businesses have been hurt by the recession, the comic book collection industry has received a boost. It all started in the spring of 2009, in the bleakest days of current downturn, when ComicConnect sold a copy of Action Comics No. 1 for $317,200 – a record at the time.
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The warning screams at you: “Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs!” Yes, this Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover reads like National Enquirer or a flashing neon sign on the Vegas Strip.
And just in case you didn’t get the warning, B/W repeats it twice more, on the cover: “Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs … Do Not Buy Commodity ETFs.” Then, as if afraid you still won’t get it, they scream even louder: Commodity ETFs are “America’s worst investment.”
Worst? Add toxic, deadly, evil. Commodity ETFs are rapidly becoming a malicious virus breeding chaos in the global markets pricing all commodities: food, farm lands, metals, oil, natural gas, livestock, water and other natural resources are the assets under commodity derivatives and their ETFs, pricing that’s now controlled more by Wall Street speculators than the weather, adding wild swings in volatility and trillions in global derivative risks.
And once again the usual suspects, the Goldman Conspiracy of Wall Street Banksters, are in the lead.
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he basic idea behind Brown’s bill is that state aid should be funded using preexisting stimulus dollars. That’s what he talks about in the video. He doesn’t say anything about conditions. And to double-check, I read the bill. Still nothing.
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A new report on Tuesday showed a slight dip in overall wages and salaries in June, caused partly by employees working fewer hours.
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The Obama administration plans to send $600 million to help unemployed homeowners avoid foreclosure in five states.
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The trading bots visualized in the stock charts in this story aren’t doing anything that could be construed to help the market. Unknown entities for unknown reasons are sending thousands of orders a second through the electronic stock exchanges with no intent to actually trade. Often, the buy or sell prices that they are offering are so far from the market price that there’s no way they’d ever be part of a trade. The bots sketch out odd patterns with their orders, leaving patterns in the data that are largely invisible to market participants.
In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly what they’re up to or gauge their impact. Are they doing something illicit? If so, what? Or do the patterns emerge spontaneously, a kind of mechanical accident? If so, why? No matter what the answers to these questions turn out to be, we’re witnessing a market phenomenon that is not easily explained. And it’s really bizarre.
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Censorship/Privacy/Civil Rights
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In this short essay, written for a symposium in the San Diego Law Review, Professor Daniel Solove examines the nothing to hide argument. When asked about government surveillance and data mining, many people respond by declaring: “I’ve got nothing to hide.” According to the nothing to hide argument, there is no threat to privacy unless the government uncovers unlawful activity, in which case a person has no legitimate justification to claim that it remain private. The nothing to hide argument and its variants are quite prevalent, and thus are worth addressing. In this essay, Solove critiques the nothing to hide argument and exposes its faulty underpinnings.
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Sixty-three percent of people believe that it is acceptable for their government to spy on another country’s computer systems
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has asked the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), host of Wikinews and its sister projects, to take down its image of the FBI seal from its websites. However, the WMF declined, saying that FBI lawyers had misinterpreted the relevant federal law.
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Copyrights
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ACTA
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Nokia’s global director of brand protection has published a critical column on ACTA in the World Trademark Review (sub required). The column says that ACTA is unnecessarily broad and that by excluding key countries from the negotiations, those countries “are practically forced into a position of opposition.”
Stallman in the program Dissertation of Channel Andalusia
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