Robert Pogson

Losing a smart executive with a long history at Google could indicate many things:

• Google is short-sighted and didn’t offer appropriate challenges,
• Google’s new boss squeezed her out,
• She got tired of waiting for a higher positions, or
• Google has peaked in innovation and has become another old-boys-club.

I suppose not everyone can be the boss and there comes a time in every career when a personal decision has to override all the good relations with the current situation. Whatever the situation Marissa Mayer does have a challenge at Yahoo. Yahoo does some of the same things as Google and uses FLOSS but has a completely different aura.

I have met a few people who absolutely love the way Yahoo does things but I hate it. I have hated it ever since I tried to register a school’s website with their search engine and they wanted me to place it in one and only one category. That made no sense to me then and it makes no sense now. I think others felt that way and got better search from Google because Google never looked back.

To refresh my dislike of Yahoo, I did a search for “Linux Russian Schools” and found some hits, but:

• no ordering by date,
• no targeted search by date,
• and very few options.

Yahoo, a computer can do anything while searching. Why limit the choices? Even your advanced search doesn’t allow searching by date which is a crucial lever to narrow down slices of the web into relevance. You need Marissa Mayer. Don’t let her get away without changing your direction seriously.

Google’s Marissa Mayer named Yahoo’s new CEO | Executive | Financial Post.

see also SJVN’s take on the move

M$ and its fans are only too willing to tout the energy and excellence of M$’s work and products. How, then, does stuff like this happen?
Skype text messages I received have gone to another contact: “Few days ago one friend from my contact list has received few messages I had already received before from other my skype contact. It seemed these messages were sent by me. It is really confusing.”

Come to think of it, what on Earth is M$ doing that causes this behaviour? How does software relaying messages from one to another forward messages to a third party without direction from the user? Did they cripple the group chat stuff (extra cost) somehow and it escaped for the freebies? How do they get it to be random? That’s actually hard to do. You have to flip a coin at some point and how do you decide who the recipient will be? Is this the tip of some gigantic ice-berg?

Things like this just inspire confidence (sarcasm). Who will do e-mail with an outfit with such abilities? It’s as if they have emulated the old process of tossing paper envelopes into an array of pigeon holes and occasionally there is a miss… Brilliant. Do e-mail the same way you used to send envelopes, with your fingers crossed…

No doubt M$ has a patent on this technology. It’s so warm and fuzzy they will want to keep it away from Apple.

I recommend folks use Debian GNU/Linux. Those guys actually care where your messages go.

UPDATE There is an update on this story:“This issue occurs only when a user’s Skype client crashes during a Skype IM session, which may in some cases result in the last IM entered or sent prior to the crash being delivered to a different IM contact after the Skype client is rebooted or logged in as a new user”

Ooohh! Brilliant! The residues of that other OS’ early years when it was single-user and single-task and not networked reappear. Oh, and crashing, that’s the ticket…

In his investigations of the response of the world to “8″ and “secure boot”, SJVN reports:

“In my conversations with original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s many of them have also had trouble laying their hands on this hardware. With Windows 8 being released to manufacturing (RTM) in early August That makes me wonder just how many Windows 8 systems actually will be rolling out in the 3rd and 4th quarters. That, of course, leaves aside the entire question of how much demand will there really be for Windows 8 PCs anyway.”

So, not only is M$ messing with competition by insisting on “secure boot” but M$ is making uptake of “8″ a “next-year” thing. More vapour-ware…

By the time M$ and “partners” get their acts together, the world will have moved on to FLOSS on ARM and hardware not locked-in to M$.

via Linux developers working on Windows UEFI secure boot problem | ZDNet.

Planning to work for a living, eventually, M$ got out of MSNBC. NBC, desiring freedom, waved “Good-bye”.

This partnership was forged in the bad old days of the OS wars when M$ was trying to lock everyone into their platform. They almost succeeded but now everything is coming apart. OEMs are selling competitive products. FLOSS is everywhere and computers are small, cheap, and portable.

see Microsoft sells out of MSNBC.com, plans to open own news pipe • The Register.