That's the game. You are "freeing" the rank and file employees to play on a level field with all the other companies... Right after the investors and managers get THEIR CASH OUT. Essentially, these deals borrow money against existing paid-off capital to payoff investors to reduce the number to qualify as a private company again. So you are trying to pay people extra money to cash out and leave now.

Even the bankers are in on it, because the employees are saddled with higher interest rates on everything, even things the old boss paid cash for. That's where the cry for "work ethics" kicks in for workers to "do what it takes" to keep their jobs. And how Unions become the big bad guys.. Because they are working for cash at WORK TIME for the new managers when the old owners cleared out the cash long before. This is what killed Twinkies.

Or in this case, Dell buys ITSELF back from stockholders "at large" and gets to decide who plays. So they can run the company without month-to-month dealing with these frivolous stockholder games.

Didn't Dell's board strike a deal with Ichan just a month ago and he wasn't going to go the "make a bunch of noise" route? More importantly he was going to stop causing trouble?

The publisher is about BUSINESS not writing. If it took them more than 5 minutes to understand, then they already lost their attention span. Selling it or spinning it off would require more than 5 minutes to figure out what it was worth and who would want it.
They WANTED other ZD assets to add to their collection and the rest were for the bin. That's how large companies work.

Because lots of people create content that's NOT ON A COMPUTER. Auto mechanics, plumbers, trainers, artists, birthday clowns.... While Square helps them Create Bank Account! If you were one of those professions, you could do 75% of your daily work from your phone or tablet, you just need the PC for Taxes and such.

"The trick is providing something that is truly useful without cannibalizing Laptop/Desktop sales"...

That is why Microsoft FAILS. Apple let's iPad be what it wants to be, and its WAY BIGGER than all the Macs Apple Sells. Microsoft Could easily get $60 per iPad with a full Office suite. That's MORE MONEY than they get per PC for Windows... Microsoft cannot see how to "bet the farm" on something and make it stick, they have basically failed to create one NEW product line that beats the profits of their previous products.

The need for clumsy printing hacks is more to do with how companies build printers that REQUIRE CPU-sucking drivers than anything Apple is doing. iOS and android can almost directly print to "pure" postscript or PCL printers. The ones that corporate networks use.

It's just that Gates talked everybody into using "software" drivers to enhance profits by declaring no more drivers and make you buy new stuff.

It took this ONE judge basically collecting 5-10 other Fedral cases after putting out an order to consolidate Prenda's cases to fewer jurisdictions. It was only after getting a half dozen other circuit courts to agree, he could even read that they had been using different names and such in different courts. He broke down a lot of the corporate veil judges normally don't get to do.

It took special permissions from other courts and over a year of sorting paperwork to get ONE SET of troll lawyers. Effectively all this does its chase the trolls out of HIS court, and into courts where the judges won't catch them.

Mr 500 I'd point out that MySQL was never FOR Fortune 500 companies. MySQL was for a guy running a shop making parts for your suppliers. He's got one IT manager that doubles as bookkeeper and zero budget for $10k software licenses. Those people were NEVER going to buy Oracle, and probably not buy Microsoft SQL either. What happened is that in the decade of MySQL, those little shops got big enough to buy, and the 500 kids liked what they were doing on a budget of duct tape and peanuts so MySql got into the doors of companies that demand to pay for support. And MySQL AB became a billion dollar company... Which isn't really that big... But their product was FREE and people bought support anyway.

Well mr 500. Plenty of companies DID choose to grow into paying for MySQL support INSTEAD of paying for expensive Oracle servers. Then Oracle bought MySql.
Personally, I think that the creator/owner of MySQL did right by selling to somebody that had the ability to actually FURTHER the product. And provide support to paying customers. Nobody else could afford to buy the size of company that MySQL had become... But at the same time it was still a "toy" database company. ID point out that Oracle was gradually cutting off MySql air supply. They were buying up other opensource projects.. Like Sleepy Cat that created SQLite and other pieces MySql needed. So Ellison was actively trying to corner the DB market on Linux.

The problem is that company was ORACLE. And many people stayed on puny MySQL EXPRESSLY NOT to give Ellison's ego more money. Monty and pals took a few years off MySQL but its obvious Oracle isn't moving the product forward.

The BIGGEST reason for using ANY spinoff is that Oracle is gradually making the distribution of "original MySQL" more onerous for Red Hat, Ubuntu, Zend etc. Oracle eats its partners more violent than Microsoft ever did. So it's just bad business to base YOUR BUSINESS on MySQL remaining on its "graceful" terms much longer.

IT security at most companies has their noses do brown they will flat out lie to get employees to sign that waiver. Most will just add it to the "company policy" and if your boss TELLS you to use your personal device, you will go it or get fired.. They only wipe your device if you get fired, so its not their problem and you deserved it.

That's exactly the point, and that's how it's being sold. From my companies boss, he wants to give everybody a stipend for "a device" load up Citrix and said lockdown for company days, then let them do whatever they want.

So basically his version of BYOD is letting you use "any"device but the company is still going to tell YOU what to do with it. Extend that to the cheap-ass employers that will just expect you to bring your OWN PAID FOR device in and bastard IT people that wipe YOUR data whenever the boss says.

It's a whole "bag of hurt" for legal reasons as well. Jailbreaking, personal medical or legal data, not to mention music or media (and porn) all being carried around the workplace all day. It's an HR nightmare! I have just enough ODD to put clopping fan service as a screensaver just to piss one of those chea ass bosses off.

It's Citrix kids. My company already runs all their SAP instances, even for internal machines off Citrix VMs. It's trivial to allow an iPad to drive one remotely, and all the information stays on the VM if you lock it down tight enough.

The problem is that mobile networks are nowhere near fast and reliable enough to run Citrix all the time for email and messaging.. So companies are still going to want THEIR DATA on YOUR device and cry about "losing it" just as fast.

BINGO! and that is why I carry TWO devices. Work stuff is done on Work provided equipment, personal stuff (like Slashdot posts) from personal equipment. I do little "lunchtime surfing" from work machines anymore.

That's been the "best practice" the last 5 years or so... Lock the hell out of company owned machines. It was as much for LICENSING purposes as security. All the software houses sued employers for per worker access, so companies locked their stuff down. And it makes a great environment to manage.

Most of this is driven by moving to Citrix where you just use "personal" devices to drive the super locked-down VM instance... You can barely take screen shots on the personal device. I'm not going to tolerate ANY MONITORING OR LOCKDOWN on MY personal device. Not to mention the flagrant attempt to grab UNPAID work hours by pushing everything to YOUR equipment do you can't get away.

Call Japan and PSY! Gundams fly to Lagrange points! JarJar is already there in style!

Seriously, if we want to explore just the solar system, we need to start building tools in space. The Moon was an obvious choice, more because we need a place to PRACTICE stuff and the Moon is nearby. We WASTED thirty years on the Shuttle because we let the project die on the vine back in the 1980's and never progressed. We should have had Orion or whatever was next a DECADE ago. And just kept improving craft to go "a little further" each mission. We should have MULTIPLE IIS bases at the L points... Then we are halfway building a safety net to MARS!