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Comment Re:Apple trying to protect the market from Amazon (Score 1) 129

Blatant collusion in price-fixing is illegal, and screaming "But Amazon!" doesn't change that.

And, oh, my, Senator Schumer of New York says things that support New York-based publishers in a dispute with Washington-based Amazon? Next up, we'll ask congressmen from West Virginia what they think about nuclear power as an alternative to coal; it'll be just as reliable.

Comment Re:Sure! (Score 1) 404

Nope. A weakness is not the same thing as a vulnerability. Weaknesses are things that already have gone wrong and are already accounted for in market share; vulnerabilities are things that haven't gone wrong yet. Weaknesses don't kill market-dominating platforms; vulnerabilities do. Fragmentation and lack of updates are not new things that are going to suddenly appear and kill Android.

On the other hand, the next iPhone's hardware sucking hard, the next version of iOS sucking hard, carriers getting pissed at Apple and ending subsidies/ads/support, or Apple screwing up the App Store, those are all things that have not yet hurt Apple market share, but could. That doesn't mean they will; Apple doesn't have to screw up. But they can, and if they do, it's an opportunity for rivals (assuming Android's weaknesses keep it from just eating that share of the market anyway).

Comment Sure! (Score 1) 404

iOS is vulnerable, because Apple can screw up. Apple can screw up the hardware, the OS, the App Store, or carrier relations, and cripple it as a result. And somebody else can become #2.

Android, on the other hand, is set. If a handset manufacturer screws up, it'll just get eaten by one of the others. If Google screws up the OS, it'll get forked from the source to the previous version. Google Play turns bad, there's Amazon's Appstore, and plenty more less well-known alternatives. There isn't any one controlling entity to screw up carrier relations, either.

Comment Re:Online International Newspapers (Score 4, Informative) 163

I suspect it's an attempt to replicate the Wall Street Journal model. The Wall Street Journal business/finance reporting, especially focused on the New York exchanges, is not generally replicated among mass-market newspapers. And it constitutes genuinely valuable work-related information to certain people who also have employer-provided expense accounts, these people go ahead and subscribe, and the subscriptions are paid by their employer as a business expense.

The Washington Post at least had (I don't know if they currently still do) a reputation for doing detailed nuts-and-bolts political/policy reporting on the US Federal Government in depth that nobody else matched. That is similarly genuinely valuable work-related information to certain people who also have employer-provided expense accounts, who will (presumably) then go ahead and subscribe, the subscriptions are paid by their employer as a business expense.

The Buffet-owned papers are, according to the article, going to go with "local, local, local stuff." Which is to say, the theory is the subscription will be worth it for the stuff that you can't get from a general-interest international paper. I'm more suspicious of this model; it doesn't have the advantage of the expense accounts. But it does at least try to sell something other than AP wire reports.

Comment Re:one way to increase windows 8 adoption (Score 5, Funny) 255

What was Microsoft thinking? Thinking had nothing to do with it; they had no choice.

See, Windows 98 SE was followed by Windows Me, which sucked more.
Windows Me was followed by Windows XP, which sucked less.
Windows XP was followed by Windows Vista, which sucked more.
Windows Vista was followed by Windows 7, which sucked less.

Windows 7 accordingly had to be followed by a "sucked more" release.

Comment Re:Doubtfull, Google won't make a stand (Score 2) 350

Given how Google handled the French-language press in Belgium, and that they've already said they'd stop indexing French news sites if required to pay, I think it's fairly obvious that they will make a stand.

Indeed, the current major complaint from the French government is that saying they'll de-index rather than pay is "threaten[ing] a democratically elected government."

Comment Re:Is this Sufficient? What else could you want? (Score 1) 255

Mere source code disclosure is worthless as proof of trustworthiness, and has been known to be worthless to that end to everyone with the slightest knowledge of the subject ever since Ken Thompson gave his Reflections on Trusting Trust speech 29 years ago.

The real question is, given anyone who knows anything about the subject knows the source code disclosure proves nothing, why did Huawei offer to disclose the source?

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