Microsoft put billions into Windows Phone and many (including me) think it's superior to iOS and Android, but what's its market share now? What I mean is, even if it is technically better, will Google Cloud get customers? AWS has a huge head start with significant mindshare, and Microsoft has its pre-existing enterprise customers sewed up. With tech funding drying up, where will Google find its customers?
You're vastly underestimating the computing market. Startups/tech funding are a microscopic part of the industry. There are millions of small businesses and thousands of major corporations that are slowly moving into the cloud which are all new customers for the taking.
AWS has a head start and a great product catalog, Azure has the windows/office/server ecosystem, but Google has been doing scaled computing for a very long time and has contributed to many of the innovations in the industry. Although they're newer with less features, what they do have is more advanced and the Google name carries a lot of weight and reputation.
Most corporations are still focused on just moving over to IaaS with compliance and security first and Google has done a great job building a solid foundation for this which should pay dividends in the future.
Never liked the downvoting idea, but if it must be, then it would be nice if people were at least required to comment while downvoting and open themselves to downvotes for their whacked, baseless downvotes.
Says the guy paid by Google. Tell me, when Alsup issued his "name your shills" order, was yours amongst those Google released? I certainly see you (or at least your handle) commenting on various Google-related threads here and on Ars.
Another key point (in my view) is that these APIs are textual whereas BIOS / protocols / binary interfaces are purely functional. Copyright is meant to cover "forms of expression". Text can have "expressive" creativity, but binary interfaces can have only functional creativity, which is expressly the realm of patents.
Of course, the only reason code is copyright-protected is because it's text, and text can have expressivity and code can be creative. But that does not mean code has creative expression. Most code does not express anything, not in the way other artworks do -- most code exists only to solve specific problems and hence is functional. Sure we can use whatever names we want for the methods and variables but you'll notice they all tend to be very descriptive of what they do. Not much creativity in the text of the code itself (at least for "good" code). All the creativity in software is in the technical ideas, approaches, algorithms and abstractions we use to solve those problems, but unfortunately only patents protect that, if at all.
The real problem here is the use of copyright to protect code. It's a legal hack, enacted because there was nothing better around to use. And to make the hack uglier, binaries enjoy copyright protection because they are "derivative works" from copyright-eligible program code. We need something more appropriate, lying between patents and copyright to protect software.
IIRC, it was some bytes of object code they copied to be interoperable, so that string could just as well have been an array of random numbers as far as being the key to interoperability was concerned.
Of course it's faster and more densely connected. And? Extrapolating that because people shared before, and now they can share BETTER, to "the music industry is doomed" (or whatever statement you care to make), is what is 'not a valid extrapolation'. I wasn't extrapolating anything, just saying "this is not a new behavior", and given no other data, the fact of that behavior is not in and of itself a death knell.
> Sure. But music sharing didn't kill the industry then; there's little reason to believe it'll be the reason for its death now.
To me that translated to: "Sharing some songs between a handful of friends once every few days didn't harm the music industry; hence being able to share hundreds of songs with millions of people in a few seconds will harm it now."
The second statement sure looks like an extrapolation from the first, and given the mind-boggling difference in scale, an invalid one.
As for lack of data, music industry revenues have been decimated since the turn of the industry. Sure, there are several factors involved, but can you really pretend the terabytes of copyrighted music being torrented every month has nothing to do with it?
But did you actually read beyond the first few lines: 'On 2 February 2012, the Supreme Court of India ruled on a public interest litigation (PIL) related to the 2G spectrum scam. The court declared the allotment of spectrum "unconstitutional and arbitrary", cancelling the 122 licenses..'
In short the malpractice was arrested and licences of telcos cancelled.
My personal experience (India) has been good as far as the telco regulator is concerned. They take personal interest in ensuring that telcos behave as per requirements and mandates as far as consumers are concerned.
Are you saying the government does not do "vigorous enforcement of drug laws, long punishments for criminals"? These are topics that are the source of perennial complaints on HN. I think rayiner's point is that outside the HN echo chamber, there is a lot of implicit support for all kinds of empowerment of government and law enforcement agencies to "keep people in line". These same people may possibly even condone surveillance if it helps catch some small fry drug dealers.
I see the same thing when it comes to TSA threads. I know people who actually want the TSA around, and when stories of TSA ineffectiveness come out, their reaction is not "security theatre!", it's "fund them more!"
The point is, the government is literally doing what most of the populace wants it to do. The opinions on HN are in the minority.
The original point was that people should fear corporations more than the government, because the government is the instrument of the people, whereas corporations have other less savory motives.
But its not true - the government is not to be trusted. It has a monopoly on military / police force, which it abuses incessantly. Moreover, it is effectively controlled by a private duopoly (Democrats + Republicans), with the same motives as any corporate coalition. What's more, corporations effectively control the duopoly. Just look at what happened with TTIP (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/04/secrets...).
And it is not doing what most of the populace wants, if that's not clear from the current election, look at the Congress approval ratings (http://www.gallup.com/poll/1600/congress-public.aspx). It's barely gone above 20% in the last 6 years. And has only once briefly gone above 50% in the past 30 years.
And if we view the government as a type of corporation? The populace ("founders"?) theoretically are still on the board of directors (if they ever were, really, but for the sake of argument...) but the "venture capitalists" using their usual bag o' tricks have watered down the shares and kicked most of the directors off the board.
America needs a down round, perhaps... or how does one kick VCs off the board? Dissolve the company and start another one?
Actually the problem these days is that standard-essential patents are considered less valuable because they tend to require FRAND licensing. This is the problem companies like Motorola and Samsung ran into during the smartphone patent wars. They could not ask for injunctions or high royalties for many of their patents as they were standards-essential, and they lost a lot of leverage.
Secondly, standards setting bodies are usually a conglomerate of members from competing companies and hence a huge political bureaucratic mess, so it's not as easy to get something into the standard just for some money.
Not really, it's just compliance with the license that a piece of software is offered with. Things are no less silly in the world of open source. You are bound to honor the license of the open source software that you use. For instance, if your app links to a GPL library, you are bound to offer your code under the GPL too. However if it links to a BSD-licensed library that does the exact same thing, you don't have to.
