Comments on: Can The News Get Slower?

By: Bryan

Bryan — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 17:55:52 +0000

After MS-DOS 6.0 and the Stacker/DBLSPACE debacle, anyone who trusts M$ also smokes while fueling cars or hand-loading ammo.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 09:04:15 +0000

“I hope nobody is stupid enough to trust their data in any Microsoft cloud project ever again…”

That’s for damned sure certain! It’s why I deleted my account the day the takeover was announced. Anyone who trusts m$ for anything is an idiot.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 03:20:26 +0000

I expect this to be as rousing a success as their acquisition of Danger. The T-Mobile Sidekick was “the” hip thing to carry back in the day. Until Microsoft bought the manufacturer, Danger, and destroyed them. The final straw was when Danger’s Oracle database that was the single point of failure for the entire Sidekick network crashed and the few people left at Microsoft who knew anything about it realized that their backups hadn’t been working for years. Everybody’s contacts, notes, photos, everything just vanished in that giant clusterf**k, because the Sidekick of course stored everything in the cloud.

I hope nobody is stupid enough to trust their data in any Microsoft cloud project ever again…

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 23 Jun 2016 02:20:41 +0000

That sort of thing requires people dedicated to the project from both sides who have deep understanding of their individual systems so they can meld them.

Another expensive failure. I could be a failure and would only cost them a billion dollars – same result but you save $25 billion. Now that’s a win-win….

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Wed, 22 Jun 2016 15:25:27 +0000

The New Yorker has an analysis/editorial on the acquisition (M$ paid somethiing over US$26 billion):

WHY MICROSOFT WANTED LINKEDIN

…
Announcing the acquisition, Nadella made it clear that he’s buying the social-networking company because he believes it can improve Microsoft’s existing cloud-based services. Microsoft wants LinkedIn for its rich, detailed data about companies’ workers, which it hopes to bake into Microsoft services like Outlook and Skype, to make those services more engaging. One slide in the companies’ presentation to investors shows a woman using Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, ahead of a meeting with someone named Sam. Cortana tells her what it knows about Sam, based partly on his LinkedIn profile: “You and Sam both went to the University of Washington and you both know Cindy Smith. Good news, the Huskies won last night’s game. Do you want to look at Sam’s profile?” As he showed the slide, Nadella told investors, “Just imagine you’re walking into a meeting, and Cortana now wakes up and tells you about the people you’re meeting for the first time, but tells you all the things that you want to know before walking into meeting someone.”
…
It’s apparent, then, why this deal appealed to both Microsoft and LinkedIn. What’s less clear is how much value Microsoft will get out of LinkedIn. Microsoft’s track record isn’t great. It made a similar acquisition in 2012, when it bought Yammer, a workplace-oriented social-networking tool, for more than a billion dollars. At the time, Ballmer said something very similar to what Nadella is saying now: “Yammer adds a best-in-class enterprise social networking service to Microsoft’s growing portfolio of complementary cloud services.” But Microsoft was slow to integrate Yammer into its existing products, and nowadays Yammer, which was once a much-talked-about startup, doesn’t often get mentioned in Silicon Valley.
…

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 20:11:24 +0000

Frankly people have put too much information out on the ‘Net which makes identity theft a lot easier than it once was.

Given all of the information they are able to glean from systems running Windows 10, I don’t see what the point of buying LinkedIn is for M$.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Thu, 16 Jun 2016 09:39:14 +0000

RE LinkedIn: True badtux. Unfortunately, there are many companies (such as a few companies I deal with) that used LinkedIn to keep track of their customers, and their customers dutifully put up a lot of personal info and link to friends & professional acquaintances, etc. There is a considerable amount of useful information on LinkedIn.

Re Pi3: I like it also. 🙂 Wish I had more time right now to play with it! Oh well. Soon(ish) if all goes well (he say’s laughingly!) 😉 😀

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 21:05:39 +0000

Re the RPi 3 I put the heatsinks on as a matter of course, and the case provides good airflow. The Bluetooth and WiFi built-in make it more convenient than my 2. I like it.

I see how the creators got their ROI [find fools with more dollars than sense to buy the company] but where is the profit to justify the purchase?

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 16:24:15 +0000

I don’t put anything on Linkedin that I don’t want publically available anyhow. It’s basically a place to stash your resume and any articles that you think will raise your value in the job market and a place to keep track of your former coworkers for networking so that when you’re on the market, you can ask them to submit your resume to their bosses. Microsoft owning the place isn’t going to change that. They had hoped to be “the Facebook for professionals”, but that’s not how they turned out to be — they turned out to be Dice.com on steroids.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Wed, 15 Jun 2016 12:24:54 +0000

Hey Bryan… Did you end up getting the Pi 3?

the CPU on mine got pretty warm after some full on use. So I got a small BGA heatsink which seems to be working fine. I just got one of these:

Heatsink, BGA, 27K/W, 13 x 13.5 x 10mm, Adhesive Foil Mount

I haven’t really had time to use mine much. Typically, my available play time shrank considerably not long after I got it! LOL But I mainly got it for IoT research anyway, which I won’t really be ready for until later this year.

And Samsung is now selling the 4TB 850 EVO SSD (at least in Europe anyway). Only price I found was in 1,349 EU. About US$1,500, what I expected. Though, given my first 10 MB Winchester cost about AU$3,500 from memory… It’s not a bad price! LOL

Has 4 GB DDR3 Cache! LOL