Published by Robert Pogson July 2nd, 2012
in technology.
Some folks need focus. That has never been my problem. I often concentrate so tightly I ignore impending disasters all around… The claim is being made that Ubuntu’s Unity GUI forces people to focus and become more efficient. Nonsense… I know exactly what I am doing and if a single application won’t do everything I need, I do need to switch from one to another. That’s not inefficiency. That’s getting the job done.
Example: I browse a lot for my blog. When I find a likely story, I am using the browser most likely. I start the post from a different tab of the browser and from time to time, I need to enter other data. If it does not exist, I have to create data, say a graph or table. There are better tools for that, like the office suite, LibreOffice. I may also take a screenshot, download files, do a calculation, run a process on another computer… I pick the tools I think are best for those tasks and I want to quickly change tasks as a part of the work I do. It’s not multi-tasking so much as doing complex tasks and the browser is not the tool I choose to use for everything. I doubt there is a browser that would work exactly the way I want to do the job. I could create some web applications to do some tasks, but it’s just better to use familiar tools sometimes. I should not have to change how I work to suit Canonical’s vision. I could restrict myself to the browser but that would eliminate a lot of features relevant to the tasks at hand.
“Unity is making the desktop seriously efficient again by making the user focus on a single task”
see DistroWatch News.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson July 2nd, 2012
in technology.
Inspires confidence, eh? A company that has conned the world into believing the world owes M$ a living now reaps what it sews. The world has discovered it does not need to buy what M$ sells. What card will fall next? The desktop OS? The office suite?
“As a result of its annual assessment of goodwill – the amount paid for a company above its net assets – Microsoft said on Monday it would take a non-cash charge of $6.2 billion, indicating the aQuantive acquisition is now worthless.
The charge will likely wipe out any profit for the company’s fiscal fourth quarter. Wall Street was expecting Microsoft to report fiscal fourth-quarter net profit of about $5.25 billion, or 62 cents a share, on July 19.”
See Microsoft takes $6.2 billion charge, slows Internet hopes | Reuters.
see The 8-K “Material Impairment”
“On June 28, 2012, Microsoft Corporation (the “Company”) concluded it will take a noncash, non-tax-deductible charge of approximately $6.2 billion for impairment of goodwill in its Online Services Division segment in the quarter ending June 30, 2012. The conclusion was made in connection with the Company’s annual impairment testing of goodwill for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2012. While the Online Services Division business has been improving, the Company’s expectations for future growth and profitability are lower than previous estimates.”
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson July 2nd, 2012
in technology.
“we should never be locked into that relationship by force of technological restriction or law. Software that enforces such restrictions is malware. Companies like Microsoft that push these restrictions also have a terrible track record when it comes to security, which makes their platitudes about restricting us for our own good both hollow and deceitful.”
Amen. That’s the way I see “Secure Boot”. M$ is welcome to nail shut its coffin from the inside but we don’t have to go there.
see Free Software Foundation recommendations for free operating system distributions considering Secure Boot — Free Software Foundation — working together for free software.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson July 2nd, 2012
in technology.
Joinup has quotations from three women involved in the movement to open government by use of IT and FLOSS. They spoke at the Semantic Interoperability Conference 2012. The majority hold that FLOSS is a good match for open government and that similar opposition is faced by open government and FLOSS:
- Jeanne Holm, Evangelist for Data.Gov, the open government initiative of the US government. “Open source makes it easier for organisations, even those without much funds, to start working on sets of government data. This type of software gathers the intelligence of the whole community.”
- “Julia Glidden, e-government expert and managing director of the UK-based 21c Consultancy: IT departments can come up a million excuses for not using open source, she said.”
- “Katleen Janssen, a legal researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law and ICT at the Catholic University of Leuven is less sure of the link between open data and open source. “If open data becomes part of the philosophy of the public administrations, they will also move to open source. If open data is something they do because everybody else is, or because they are forced to, the effect will be limited.”"
That’s not unlike the relationship of FLOSS with educational institutions. FLOSS is mostly off the radar but when the product comes on-line it is more familiar/less threatening and the advantages emerge. People had to change in order to adapt to that other OS and M$’s machinations. Now that they seem “normal”, changing to GNU/Linux and FLOSS applications takes a little effort. It all works out in the end.
'Governments that embrace open data will also switch to open source' | Joinup.
- Robert Pogson
Published by Robert Pogson July 2nd, 2012
in technology.
“Worldwide PC shipments will total 363 million in 2012, a decline of 1.5 million units or 0.4% from 365 million shipped in 2011, the Chinese-language Commercial Times quoted data from Gartner as indicating. This will be the second time global PC shipments register a decline since the dot-com bubble in 2001.”
Meanwhile, including tablets, growth of shipments is 14% per annum. Good-bye, Wintel. That ship has sailed. Talk of Wintel lasting forever or continuing to be the foundation of IT are clearly wrong. IT evolves and Wintel is too inefficient to adapt to the change. Wintel is locked in to inefficient ways and cannot compete. Even M$’s move to ARM is too little and too late. The world will reject raising the prices on ARMed devices just to prop up M$’s revenue and Intel will get little revenue from tablets for the same reason. Wintel cannot hide its high prices when consumers have seen small cheap computers everywhere.
see Global PC shipments to decline 0.4% in 2012, says paper.
- Robert Pogson
17445
12767
206
3
2
23889 
11849 
11701 
4638 
4257 
1642 
198 
14 
2 
0 
0 
0 
Recent Comments