Posts by localzuk 1629 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Jul 2011
Usually with services like this, the terms basically preclude claims like this as they say things like the information is not to be used for XYZ purposes, and is provided with no warranty/guarantee of accuracy etc...
So, I doubt this will go anywhere.
Surely they should be suing whoever is in charge of maintaining that road for not putting up barriers?
So, yes, Microsoft are big, and they still have 69% of the desktop OS market share, but does calling them a monopoly any more work?
They're not a monopoly in the consumer OS space. They're not a monopoly in the web browser space. Nor the server space.
If someone were to try and claim they abuse a monopoly position, I suspect they'd have a lot more wiggle room these days.
But yes, this obsession with upsell/marketing in their OS is just going to annoy people.
Blaming it on a nebulous "administration" is silly. The issue is with how government agencies are funded - and this is determined by the US Constitution to be Congress who decides that.
As it is a purely political body, the people in control are always going to choose things that get them good PR, and get things for their own states over good management and administration.
Without a change to the way the USA works in its entirety (from the very basis of it being a federal state, to its constitution), you aren't going to fix this.
It is pointless blaming "administration".
You're just showing your lack of understanding of how NASA is funded with that misguided comment.
NASA doesn't just get given a giant pot of money by Congress and get told "here you go, spend as you want".
The budget is prepared and presented to Congress, and they adjust and send back what they will actually fund. So, you know when NASA asks for money to sort out buildings, and money to fly to the moon, and Congress is looking to make cuts but not reduce the PR opportunities? The buildings get cut, the moon doesn't.
You are mixing up "works" with "supported".
You can install Windows 95 still. It will work (depending on the hardware), but it won't be supported. And no, you can't install newer versions of MacOS on old hardware. They changed the entire CPU type three times over the years. You gonna install current MacOS on a Mac Classic?
And you can't install ChromeOS at all. You can reflash an existing Chromebook with it supported OS (just like an iPad). So, saying you can't install modern ChromeOS after the end date seems like a weird thing to state.
Google announced that ALL chromebooks manufactured after 2020 would get an 8 year support period from date of release. Not just high end. I have 1400 of the things here, all of which have their 8 year life span, each priced between £125 and £200 each. So all low end devices.
So, simply put you are wrong.
You are incorrect. All Chromebooks released after 2020 now have an 8 year support life from the release date. Even the £150 ones. I know this as I manage 1400 of the things. So, not an incorrect assumption there at all. The key is "from release date". If you buy a 3 year old model, you only get 5 years... Google have a very simple website which is easy to find the support life for all Chromebooks in their documentation titled "Auto Update policy". Has them all listed there. Simple.
The second problem you list "no technical reason for the end of support". There isn't for Microsoft stopping providing Windows updates either. Or Apple providing MacOS or iPadOS updates. Yet, they both do? The device doesn't cease to work at the end of support date either. It simply receives no more updates. Just like an iPad.
Your entire post is, frankly, nonsense.
I keep seeing people decrying the limited lifespan of Chromebooks but, honestly, I don't get it?
The majority of Chromebooks sold are low cost devices with low power CPUs. At release, they are given an 8 year support life.
Are people really wanting to be able to run low end hardware for more than 8 years?
What use case is there for 8 year old, slow portable devices? After 8 years, a lot of laptops are physically in bad shape anyway!
Fancy shops are great and all, but they're still a shop - with expensive real estate costs, operating costs etc...
Surely the next big step is fully automated grocery shopping? Your house learns what you eat/drink, and orders a shop weekly with everything you are missing/need. With or without a human confirming the list is OK.
That'll be the next big marketing opportunity.
"The WFH movement seems to be faltering across the IT industry"
So, an industry that has seen massive growth in "work at home" technologies is pulling back on their own staff working from home? Companies like Google etc, all sing their own praise about how their services can be accessed anywhere (indeed, that's one of the ways cloud companies promote themselves), yet they want their own workers in their cubicles.
If they themselves don't think it works, why would people buy their products/services?
This case will backfire horribly if it ends up in court. Discovery will reveal the real statistics of hate speech, and we all know they aren't lower than ever as Musk tries to make out. We also will know that Musk happily takes payment from people who post hate speech and don't get banned. And, we'll know just how much of a mess the company is in with regards its advertisers...
So, all that will do is drive even more advertisers away.
The issue isn't people reporting on the hate speech, Musk, it is the hate speech itself. Companies aren't scared by reports of it. They're scared off by the hate speech... Shooting the messenger is just bad business.
Mastodon is not a platform. It is a federation of servers linked by a protocol.
Good servers block bad servers. So, "normal" Mastodon. The kind of experience you would get as a user signing up to a "normal" server? You won't see CSAM or the like. Any server that allows such things would be defederated immediately.
But, you could join a dodgy server, and see the content it hosts and any other dodgy servers it federates with.
So, declaring the software "Mastodon" as being rife with CSAM is misguided at best, just plain nonsense at worst.
The patent in question is not about broadcasting data direct from your phone to the TV. It is about using your phone to navigate content on the internet, selecting that content and telling your TV to play it, from the internet.
Eg. You open Youtube and tell it to play a video on your TV. Your phone is not playing that video at all. Your TV is streaming it from the net. You can then control that stream from your phone, without the video data running on your phone.
None of those things do what the patents describe. DLNA is not a system where you use a phone to connect to a server to select media and then get another device (the media player) to play that content. Nor does IR blasting, HDMI CEC is entirely irrelevant as well.
Did you read the patents?
Saying they need to provide more facts as it seems "implausible" is evidence of the judge not knowing how this AI tech works.
Which kinda makes sense, in general judges aren't the most tech savvy bunch. It's down to the people suing to outline exactly how the system works.
Another great way to increase IT security is to throw all your computers in a pit and fill it with concrete. No way to hack those then.
What a bizarre experiment.
If you have sensitive stuff being developed, you would run a split environment. One set of devices for the low needs day to day use, and then an isolated, high security environment for those high risk things.
Its especially weird to consider when your primary business is literally providing services on the internet.
Except, again, Microsoft aren't a monopoly. They haven't been for quite some time. Office has fewer users than Google Workspace. Zoom has more users than Teams. Android has more users than Windows. Linux has more server users than Windows Server. PlayStation has more users than Xbox. AWS has more users than Azure.
I'm actually struggling to see where Microsoft are the market leader for anything. So calling them a monopoly doesn't seem to ring true any more. Unless you start trying to chop markets up into odd sub groupings.
This isn't the same as the Internet Explorer or Media Player cases back in the day - they were bundled and non-removable as part of the OS.
This is Teams being bundled into a product a customer can choose to buy separately. Teams is quite a useful productivity tool, and Office is a productivity suite. So it seems like a natural progression of that suite to have a productivity tool like this included.
Microsoft Office is not the monopoly office suite any more - Google Workspace has more users. So, the question is, why aren't MS allowed to iterate and modernise their Office suite to compete?
I've lost count of the number of distro's I've used over the last 20+ years. It just surprises me that a distro that styles itself as a user friendly one has such basic flaws. The version I tried was the KDE one. To a normal user trying a distro for the first time, it would be a poor introduction.
Its a shame really, as Manjaro has worked nicely for me on other systems in the past.
Yes. That's very much the case. I tried out Manjaro Linux on my desktop PC at home. I suppose I'm a little "niche" compared to an average user, as I have 2 monitors (a 4k screen and a 1080p screen), running on a Nvidia 4070 Ti. I was quite surprised to find how poorly it handled it.
Issues with scaling/DPI, changing things per guidance online broke the GUI in total forcing me back to editing text files on a terminal screen.
If this had been Windows, it would've had GUI out of the box, without needing to fiddle. Changing DPI scaling is a simple dropdown and didn't need me to know about the specifics of my display manager, or which driver I was using, or which desktop environment etc...
Not really the same thing. The app store is a curated experience again.
The choice of the entire OS is a different ball-game, as people simply don't have a frame of reference for the things they need to choose from. Having multiple distros, multiple display managers, etc is something no-one has ordinarily had other than in this specific environment.
When they've bought a PC in the past, it came with an OS with a single desktop type. Or a Mac. Or a tablet. Or a phone.
And those choices then introduce complexity. Why doesn't this app look the same as the other ones, when they choose a GTK based app over a KDE based app etc...
Then throw in configuration. There's millions of configuration choices in Linux. Only a minute fraction are revealed to them via GUIs, and you end up being sent to configuration files to edit text instead. Great for flexibility. Great for freedom. Horrific for user experience.
I've been using Linux since 2000. The basic underlying user experience hasn't changed in that time. The community hasn't changed in that time, with gatekeeping rife still (just look at this article). The only thing that has changed is that some aspects of the system work out of the box, on some devices.
"What is of interest is the freedoms that non-Chrome-OS Linux distros tend to provide"
And this is actually the main thing holding Linux back from being a great desktop experience for most users, and why Chromebooks have succeeded where $otherLinux hasn't.
Normal, every day, people do not want an enormous array of choice. They generally want a curated experience. Look at the phone ecosystem - iPhone and Android are both very rigid in how they work. Sure, you can jailbreak Android and fiddle more, or do some sideloading etc, but the normal experience for an end user is simple.
Having a choice of a thousand distros, and then the sub choices within them (desktop environment, whether to use something like snap or flatpak, etc...) confuses people.
Freedom is great, sure, but a lot of people want simple, not freedom. (And that appears to apply to all aspects of life it seems).
"Chromebooks are the Netbooks of the 2020's. Designed to be used a bit and thrown away which is not what we should be doing."
Hate to tell you this but this applies to pretty much all computers. They aren't designed to last exceedingly long times. Laptops are usually designed for a 3-5 year life span. Sure, some last longer, but they aren't designed to. Where would the profit be in that?
Chromebooks are designed to get 8 years of support from their original model release date (not from when you buy it).
The idea that ChromeOS is a "fake linux" is, well, nonsensical - as this article makes clear.
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