shooper

There is plenty of such software on the Play Store.

E.g. Rom managers such as this one. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.koushikdut...

> I don't know WTF the cyanogenmod team was thinking, non-technical people messing with CM will just lead to negative press.

I know atleast three people who tried to install Linux and formatted their Windows partition in the process. So you mean Linux CDs and DVDs should never have been bundled with magazines?

I don't think there's any danger of grandma seeking out CM and going through the process to install it. CM has over 8M installs, having a handful of bricking incidents is nothing at that scale.

Hopefully this has nothing to do with CM making its own handsets http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2013/09/20/cyanogen-aims-cre...

>So you think that a user should be able install an OS that bricks their phone and still have the phone still covered by warranty?

Yes

>How does that make sense?

It makes sense the same way that installing Linux and/or wiping Windows doesn't void a PCs warranty.

Should users be allowed to install any programs including keylogging malware on Windows computers? Shouldn't Microsoft protect them by locking it down so that only approved apps from their app store can be installed? Like mobile app stores?

What about embbedding iframes?

The funny thing is that many of the same people you talk about were vehemently against UEFI Secure Boot on Windows 8 being on by default although it actually protects tens of millions of normal users from undetectable rootkits and bootkits because it made installing Linux slightly more difficult by needing to fiddle with the boot settings.

Now the reason being given for this removal is that it needs root(a lot of apps in the Play Store require root on Android, including ROM managers) and that it may brick a few devices, while ignoring the fact that for many who are stuck without security updates because of OEMs and carriers actually benefit from CM. Also wonder if this news was strategically timed before Thanksgiving when most people are on vacation traveling or busy with family.

So between you and me, we uncovered more than the entire Finnish press with a few minutes of web searching?

This is looking more and more like a thread in /r/conspiracy.

Anyway, I don't know what Dodge & Cox achieved if they really influenced anything, Nokia stock went from ~$11 to $1.60 to $8 after the acquisition, and whatever Microsoft share price gained during the same time, it wasn't because of the Nokia acquisition or Windows Phone.

Hedge fund ownership for the level of influence you're talking about is public information. One can easily compile and compare lists of top hedge fund holders in Microsoft and Nokia.

E.g. the current list of big Nokia holders is here. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/nok/institutional-holdings

Microsoft: http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/msft/institutional-holdings

Historical data should also be easy to find if someone really wants to look.

The article is in Finnish and seems to be pretty short and not even attempt some basic research for what would be a big story. Even if that were true, what has this got to do with Microsoft executives? The deal certainly didn't raise Microsoft's share price. In fact, Microsoft's share price dropped when the takeover deal was announced, so these alleged hedge funds went from a Nokia share price of $11 before they got Elop hired and ended up with $7 with a low of $1.60(!!!) after influencing the decision to go Windows Phone? Does not make much sense to me.

Again, acting in other's companies' shareholders' interests is illegal for board members, and IIRC punishable by fines and prison time.

Maybe someone from Finland can tell us if the media outlet you referenced is more like the New York Times or a tabloid trying to cash in on a controversy while peddling conspiracy theories.

I find this kind of comments very funny. If Microsoft had the ability to install their moles as CEOs, why don't they do the same thing to Samsung, Apple, Google, HTC, etc. etc.?

How exactly does one company go about installing their moles as CEOs of other companies? Bribe and blackmail the board members? You're ascribing Microsoft the powers of a comic book supervillain while they cannot even sell a few million Surface RT tablets.

For reference, this is the profile of the chairman of the board. Do you think a bribe from Microsoft is likely to influence this person's decisions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorma_Ollila

>Jorma Jaakko Ollila (born 15 August 1950) is a Finnish businessman, since 1 June 2006, Non-Executive Chairman of Royal Dutch Shell. He was Chairman (1999–2012) and CEO (1992–2006) of Nokia Corporation. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Ford Motor Company (2000– ), UPM-Kymmene (1997– ), and Otava Books and Magazines Group Ltd. (1996–). >For Nokia, he was credited with turning the company into the then world's largest handset maker.[1]

>As CEO of Nokia he has led the strategy that restructured the former industrial conglomerate into one of the major companies in the mobile phone and telecommunications infrastructure markets.

So you're telling me that Microsoft somehow bribed that guy, who no doubt would've made tens of millions from turning Nokia into a $100+ bilion dollar company, made him risk everything including national shame and prison time if exposed and seeing the company he built destroyed and hand over the reins to a Microsoft mole?

Or perhaps the Nokia board evaluated their options and wanted Nokia to have the bags of cash from Microsoft which Google reportedly was not willing to supply and save Nokia jobs instead of turning it into another slowly dying RIM and wanted to go Windows Phone, and hired Elop to do the transition. Now, the merits of the decision itself is subject to analysis, doubt and discussion, but the accusations of Elop being a mole derail the discussion that can be had about the Symbian and Blackberry burning platforms.

My conclusion is that a number of people who so strongly seem believe in this idea on tech forums either a) Don't know how CEOs are hired or what a Board of Directors of a company does b) Listen to the conspirational ideas on Slashdot, Groklaw, /r/Android and /r/linux and take it as gospel without thinking it through because the story fits the "Evil M$ kills a Linux OS" victim mentality narrative they want to believe in and they want a 41MP Nokia Android phone real bad c) Jump on the popular anti-MS bandwagon without any rational thought, oh hey, free and easy karma points! d) Believe in the NASA moon hoax too.

That comment says more about the writer than what it says about Elop, how can otherwise smart people succumb to such group thinking?. I haven't found one remotely plausible explanation about how Microsoft installed Elop as the CEO of Nokia. Maybe someone can help me and explain it here, but I am not holding my breath.

Edit: Why the downvotes?

From the infamous burning platform memo, the rationale for leaving Meego for Windows Phone:

>"The battle of devices has now become a war of ecosystems, where ecosystems include not only the hardware and software of the device, but developers, applications, ecommerce, advertising, search, social applications, location-based services, unified communications and many other things. Our competitors aren’t taking our market share with devices; they are taking our market share with an entire ecosystem. This means we’re going to have to decide how we either build, catalyze or join an ecosystem."

Jolla's move to support Android apps is to try to mitigate the above effect, but it may lead to the Windows vs. OS/2 scenario where OS/2 ran Windows programs too well, so companies never bothered making native OS/2 apps, after all, why waste precious resources on supporting yet another incompatible platform?

On the other side, as I said in another comment, you have huge companies selling smartphones at or below cost using their profits from other lines of business(Nexus 5, Moto G, Lumia 520(a surprisingly good smartphone for $59 off contract?!!)). They're doing this to either gain marketshare for the ecosystem effects(Microsoft) or as a moat, to sell ads, or to commoditize and reduce Apple's smartphone margins(Google)[1].

Jolla has to compete with these and ultracheap Chinese and India OEMs at the low end and the iPhones, high end Galaxies, Lumias with 41MP cameras and 6" screens, HTC, LG phablets at the high end.

I wish them luck, they need it.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

It's unfair to compare a phone hardware company that needs to make money to survive to a company that gets almost all its money from ads, searches, cloud and personal data and uses that money to subsidize hardware as a loss leader(or making bare profits) both to gain marketshare and also to undercut and weaken other smartphone companies' profit margins so that they have less money to compete in web search now or in the future. [1]

From a consumer point of view, you're right though. The market is heading towards commoditization and Jolla will most likely fall into the moat if people compare them on price alone.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/

Kinda off topic, but as soon as I opened that page in a new background tab, it froze my browser and PC for about a minute with an hourglass before it would respond to my inputs. I thought it crashed the system, but everything is okay now. I did close the tab after giving it a cursory look because it looked too noisy and light on content. Perhaps someone can analyze how much RAM, CPU and bandwidth that page takes up. And I am rocking a quadcore computer with 8 gigs of RAM.

Sigh, the more the hardware giveth, the more the new fangled web pages taketh away.

Thanks, very nice. How do you get story point scores from the RSS feed? The last time I looked at it, it was missing that crucial bit of information, and I don't see it now either. Or are you using parsing or another data source to get at them?

There is http://www.hckrnews.com/

It shows articles that came to the front page, in chronological order, so there's no ranking. If the article goes dead, it shows it crossed out.

I guess this is why class actions are sometimes good. Even though the lawyers are the one that enrich themselves, atleast the company suffers the monetary cost so that it will think twice before repeating such shenanigans.

You're assuming that the confusion isn't intentional. It is, to make people sign up for Google+ while disguising it as a identity service.

And more and more normal customers seem to be noticing, especially on Youtube. Here's one woman crying about about how the confusing G+ prompts lead her to lose all her uploaded videos. (Warning, strong language) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccxiwu4MaJs

Also, the Open Handset Alliance terms may prohibit OEMs from replacing Chrome with, say Firefox.

From http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-...

>Any OEM hoping to license Google Apps will need to pass Google's "compatibility" tests in order to be eligible. Compatibility ensures that all the apps in the Play Store will run on your device. And to Google, "compatibility" is also a fluid concept that an Android engineer once internally described as "a club to make [OEMs] do what we want." While Google now has automated tools that will test your device's "compatibility," getting a Google apps license still requires a company to privately e-mail Google and "kiss the ring" so to speak. Most of this is done through backroom agreements and secret contracts, so the majority of the information we have comes from public spats and/or lawsuits between Google and potential Android deserters (see: Acer).

>Another point of control is that the Google apps are all licensed as a single bundle. So if you want Gmail and Maps, you also need to take Google Play Services, Google+, and whatever else Google feels like adding to the package. A company called Skyhook found this out the hard way when it tried to develop a competing location service for Android. Switching to Skyhook's service meant Google would not be able to collect location data from users. This was bad for Google, so Skyhook was declared "incompatible." OEMs that wanted the Google Apps were not allowed to use them. Skyhook sued, and the lawsuit is still pending.

>this feels like a non-issue getting attention because the business agreements around Android are relatively public compared to other OSes.

Are they? Where can we see them?

The page at [1] about the Open Handset Alliance contains a lot of noise about openness etc. but there are no details of the agreements or how much it actually costs for a Google apps license.

I remember everyone was surprised when Google forced Acer to pull phones based on Aliyun OS because of the OHA agreement, which IIRC, is under NDA and secrecy.

[1] http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_overview.html

What's stopping the Senate from reverting back to the old rules just before the next Senate/Presidential elections?

Google isn't backing them with $300M/year because Mozilla is pumping out good open source software. They are doing it to maintain their dominance in search and keep Bing, DDG, Blekko at bay. For example, they have a similar deal with the closed source(till recently) Opera browser.

I wish Mozilla would stick to its principles and switch the default to a privacy conscious search engine like DuckDuckGo and give it a much needed boost in keyword relevance data.

I think a better argument is that Mozilla needs to diversify its revenue sources. Chrome is taking away marketshare from Firefox thanks to advertising and paying a lot to be bundled with Java, Flash, Acrobat etc. updates or just being shipped as default by the PC OEMs. It makes sense for Google because then they needn't pay out so much to Mozilla. For many non tech folks where I had replaced IE with Firefox, I now see them using Chrome, and when I asked if they installed it, they usually have no idea how it got on their computer. This is a real danger that Firefox and Mozilla face.

Not sure what's the state now but a few years ago the CEO was being paid ~400K/yr to run Mozilla Corp. For that kind of money, one would expect that Mozilla would have more diverse revenue than being a one-trick pony.

Hope the new CEO puts an end to this nonsense and invests the money into improving Bing instead.

>Is there a large contingent of bitter MS employees on HN?

Huh what? What leads you to that conclusion? I'm totally lost here.

What's the point?

I believe that's true for contributions from private companies who don't have to report their earnings. Maybe a finance guru can pitch in, but don't public companies like IBM and Microsoft have to declare such donations in their earnings statements?

Indeed, but it's a distinction without a difference since the biggest cost is TV and Radio campaigns and Super PACs run ads.

The issue was that Obama blessed a super PAC officially and his cabinet and campaign folks talked to the donors at their meetings.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72531.html

That actually sounds logical to me, like Obama taking money from companies despite opposing the Citizen's United verdict. The rules are the same for all, and people take advantage of the rules.

It is also similar to Google warning about the patent issues with H.264 while pushing WebM and then later (through Motorola) asking for exorbitant licensing fees for H.264 patents, from Microsoft and Google. They got fined over the FRAND abuse by the courts.

http://www.idownloadblog.com/2013/09/06/apple-google-motorol...

Hate the game, not the players.

>According to the article, IBM and Microsoft are notable for their portfolio size and lobbying budgets

This is what tech companies spent in Q3 2013, maybe someone else can post IBM's stats but Microsoft's spending doesn't look all that high to me.

Google 3.4M

Microsoft 2.2M

Facebook 1.7M

Apple 0.97M

Amazon 0.78M

I think the real story is how cheap the lobbying costs are.

What I completely fail to understand with all the Snowden revelations and stories like this is that Silicon Valley tech folks have enormous salaries and high disposable income.

If they would actually contribute some of that to a PAC or to the EFF, it would be way more productive than sitting in Starbucks sipping a $5 latte and posting "Not going to get the Xbox from M$. Getting a PS4 for $400 + games for $60 each instead! That's going to teach them! And Bill Gates sucks despite helping the poorest people in Africa and India!" from their latest MacBook or iPad Air on HN articles such as these(you can see those posts below).

I guess gathering HN karma feels better and is cheaper than actually trying to make a real difference on issues that people seem to write emotional posts about.

Having seen a lot of such issues and discussions from my Slashdot days, my prediction is that nothing will come out of it except a lot of hot air discussion.