FTA: "We’re already used to Google’s search engine pushing Chrome, Yahoo linking to Firefox, and Bing recommending Edge. This year, Microsoft has upped the ante in the browser war with Windows 10."
One could make the argument that making the push from the OS is a different level than from the website.
There's less of a lock-in effect though. The only thing stopping you from using a different search engine is that you're more comfortable with Google, it provides better (catered to you) results, etc.. That is, competitive advantage.
When people leave Google Search (and they will, nothing lasts forever), they'll leave fast.
That may be true of Google search, but Gmail? Or Google Accou ts, for that matter? Almost certainly not. It's far easier to switch from Windows to a Mac or Chromebooks or even Linux than it is to switch from Google and its associated services.
Further, because of mobile, there are significantly greater number of Google users than there are Windows users.
I guess I am annoyed because as someone who uses Firefox as their primary browser, it always frustrated me that there was t more outrage at Google pushing people away from Firefox. But the moment MS started doing it, it became an outrage.
The account would be by far the hardest thing for me to walk away from. Email is federated and I can export the mail out of Gmail without too much hassle. I don't because I like the interface they provide (for now). Calendar, same deal. I'm there for the convenience, not because another calendar application wouldn't work for me.
Accounts would be the hard part because that's my phone login, and there's no standard account service I could migrate to that would give me a functional replacement.
The real thing keeping me on the Google platform is the convenience of having these things tied together. But that's not exactly a strong lock for me. I can and do hop services while sacrificing convenience. This might be a stronger hold on others but it's still not Microsoft's you-can't-do-work-in-any-organization level of hold between Office, Windows, Exchange, etc..
Google has lock in, it's just less obvious. Other search engines might not be as good because they don't have access to my search history* and email data for instance.
* This has actually been annoying for me lately. The results favor the things I've already clicked on which is often exactly not what I'm after.
I'm not saying there's no lock-in, just that it's not as rigid or strong. Better search results (for you) is exactly the kind of reason you want to be using one search engine over another. If another search engine started providing better results, you'd be able to swap, and the only effect would be the psychological disorientation from the change interface (I struggle to use DuckDuckGo because my eyes scan the wrong part of the screen while trying to take in the results).
Have you tried these search engines? These are proxy to Google's or other's results. You will not feel lock in with this for sure because it is bare bone.
I think it's a poor argument. The difference between OS, application, and web-level content is blurring more and more each year. We have web apps built into OSes, OSes built on top of web browsers, etc.
That depends. Some vulnerabilities aren't easy or worth the hassle to exploit. If this one is being exploited by someone already, you're letting attackers know that it's worth the effort, and handing them the manual as well.
If someone is exploiting it then you _know_ the manual is already out there. How far it has been disseminated is unknown, but arguably it's better to assume it's being disseminated. Otherwise anybody could argue that "not enough" attackers know about an exploit as justification for criticizing disclosure.
The most interesting part to me is that the slate-only tablet form factor appears to be dying. This is surprising given that phones have completely adopted touch over physical keys, and yet tablets seem to be headed back to supporting both.
That's really a figment of IDC's decision to count Microsoft Windows tablets and 2-in-1s as tablets when the tablet format is usually more incidental than essential. (1)
It also means that IDC's PC industry numbers are also misleading. If somebody buys a Windows 2-in-1, that gets counted as a tablet and not counted as a PC. This makes the PC market decline look worse than it really is.
(1) "Pure" Windows tablets -- ones with ARM chips that didn't run traditional x86 software -- crashed and burned.
I don't think that's true at all -- I think they have the same lifecycle as a PC. I still use an iPad 2 pretty regularly... probably will buy a replacement next year, but I'm a cheapskate.
Professionally, I have several hundred line of business users with iPad 3's. They are just starting to complain about battery life, etc. So you're looking at a 39-48 month lifespan, similar to a PC.
So, what's the most evil Oracle can be against future versions of Android given this?
And who actually guides the Java roadmap? The OpenJDK trademark grant (http://openjdk.java.net/legal/openjdk-trademark-notice.html) seems to spin on whether or not "the Software is a substantially complete implementation of the OpenJDK development kit or runtime environment source code retrieved from a single Website, and the vast majority of the Software code is identical to that upstream Original Software"?
What's to stop Oracle from deciding that future Java roadmaps are going to exclude Android-specific commits? Neither IBM nor Apple's interests seem particularly aligned with Google here (I'm assuming they throw some kind of weight in the OpenJDK politics).
Time and time again we see such short term thinking does not pay off. It wouldn't be evil on Oracle's part to do that, it would be just plain stupid. The resurgence of Microsoft shows that being open and transparent is the actual winning strategy. Goodwill among developers is not a quantifiable thing but it makes a huge difference.
The story I heard was that Larry Ellison was driving his sports car down 101, when a cop tried to pull him over for speeding, so he called ahead to Oracle security and had them stop the perusing cops at the security gate when they tried to follow him into the Oracle compound.
Too bad the ATF and Attorney General Janet Reno didn't take charge of the situation.
I find that story challenging to believe. Fleeing an officer would be probable cause for an officer to enter the property to make an arrest. I can't count the number of times I saw it on Cops (when I worked at a TV station that aired the show)...someone fleeing from a minor traffic violation goes into their home, police follow and make a dramatic arrest. It's not like playing "tag"; there is no "base" that protects you from being tagged by police in pursuit.
Funny you say that! This was a problem with drug smuggling. Now they have the shiprider program [0]. Basically a Canadian patrol boat has 1 american officer on it to make arrests if it crosses a border, and vice versa.
If I ever make a driving game... This will be in it.
I just love the absurdity of running a red light somewhere like California, Texas or Florida, then just going "F*&( it, TO CANADA!!!!!" <sound of engine revving up as driver floors it>
I bet OJ Simpson wishes he had his own private police force, a well defended secure compound, and a world class legal department on retainer and speed dial, like Larry Ellison does.
I don't think you deserve a down vote for being factually correct -- though a little hyperbole ain't gonna kill you. :)
But ORCL has gone from being an innovator to a rentier, and they're not averse to using hardball tactics on top of their historical position to try and stay relevant. Not using that HCM suite? Okay, but before you jump to a competitor just know that we'll increase your licensing fees if you stop using any of our products. Oracle is losing ground when it comes to new clients, but they're great at extracting every last drop of revenue from their legacy client base.
Their contracting arm is most notorious for massive boondoggles (USAF's ECSS, scrapped after a billion dollars of sunk costs; Cover Oregon, which ended in recriminations, lawsuits and an FBI criminal investigation), and its software was at the epicenter of the HealthCare.gov catastrophe. Oracle could have owned cloud computing -- hell, they bought the company that reinvented the concept and instead tried to use it to force expensive hardware purchases on their expensive software customers. Now they're a minor player in a field that is steadily expanding to cover their core business sector and they're milking their cash cows furiously in an attempt to extract maximum value from a dying field.
In other words, they're Blockbuster the year after Netflix debuted streaming; their model is faltering and they don't know how to replace it and still stay in business.
No, they're not evil, just a nasty piece of work to do business with, and they're not stupid, but they're slowly dying. I only wish they weren't taking the last remains of Sun with them.
"You actually don't need to be open minded about Oracle. You are wasting the openness of your mind. Go be open minded about lots of other things. I mean, let's face it: it's work to be open minded, right? I mean, you've got to constantly discard data and be like "ok, I need to be open minded about this". No, with Oracle, just be close-minded. It's a lot easier. Because the thing about Oracle, and this is just amazing to me, is, you know: what makes life worth living is the fact that stereotypes aren't true, in general. It's the complexity of life. And as you know people, as you learn about things, you realize that these generalizations we have, virtually to a generalization, are false. Well except for this one, as it turns out. What you think of Oracle is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle." -Bryan M. Cantrill
> The resurgence of Microsoft shows that being open and transparent is the actual winning strategy.
Or at least being a little bit open and transparent enough to build good will, anyway. There's a lot of non-open, non-transparent, non-friendly things about Windows 10.
He probably was but the way he phrased it he made it sound like Microsoft is widely open and trustworthy, when it's not. Some teams are able to be open and transparent, but the company as a whole is not.
I don't recall Microsoft saying that they would promise to stop. What they've done instead was to act in more honorable ways. The jury is still out when it comes to forgiveness, but they've made a pretty good start at it.
It's not just a promise. They have open sourced basically all the core parts of their developer infrastructure. What twitter did was be a dick and then promise to do better whereas Microsoft is actually doing it.
The trademark is orthogonal to the license and its patent grant. Why would Google be particularly concerned whether they can call what they ship "OpenJDK"?
Because ultimately the trademark is as much the "thing" as anything else could be said to be, at least as far as I could think it through.
Everything I can read also makes it seem like the patent grants (above the GPL) are all tied to the condition of generating a compatible implementation of Java.
If Google wants to fork OpenJDK at some point down the road, they'd better have faith in the GPL.
Pointless. New York state, New York city, etc. which feature in the article are the among the wealthiest regions in the world. You are not talking about a coal mining company in rural Kentucky or a mom and pop hardware store in Alabama. This is Amazon, which on paper at least, has the wealth to implement humane policies.
So California is 75 times richer than Vermont?
Vermont might be a terrible place to live... it's even poorer than the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
My point, in case it's not obvious enough, is that GDP is not a good definition of richness in the context of a discussion about how can these things happen "in the richest country in the world".
Except that GDP is a perfectly fine definition for that. A national healthcare system is something which is strongly inflenced by things like economies of scale; measuring by any metric other than GDP and government budget would make very little sense. If the DoD can afford to burn trillions on a jack-of-all-trades fighter that sucks at pretty much all the jobs it's meant to take on, it can almost certainly afford to give every American free healthcare, free college educations, and at least two moon colonies to boot.
The point of the "richest country in the world" remark is that the U.S. could very well afford to be the most progressive modern society if it chose to do so. Instead, it opts to sink money in failed fighter projects and nebulous "terrorist"-hunting surveillance and drone strike programs.
Irrelevant. We're close enough to the top that it makes no difference to the person's point. It should be absolutely unacceptable that this happens in a civilized nation.
Except they only acknowledge that it was a problem because they did it wrong and introduced security issues in the process, not that it was a problem to do it at all. And to the best of my knowledge, the Windows "feature" to read and execute a binary from firmware at startup still exists.
