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Microsoft plans to announce a major new round of layoffs as early as Wednesday, as the company seeks to further cut costs in a shifting technology landscape.
The layoffs are in addition to the about 18,000 employees that Microsoft said it planned to let go a year ago, according to people briefed on the plans, who asked for anonymity because the details were confidential. The new job cuts are expected to affect people in Microsoft's hardware group, among other parts of the company, including the struggling smartphone business that it acquired from Nokia last year in a $7.2 billion deal.
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In June, Microsoft said it was selling its online display advertising business to AOL, as the company exited a business for which it once had high hopes.Another area in which Microsoft is stumbling is smartphones, a market in which it has continued to lose market share since acquiring Nokia's handset business. Microsoft has so far failed to turn the Windows Phone operating system, which runs on its handsets, into a vibrant alternative to the two leading mobile platforms, iOS from Apple and Android from Google.
How do you read the tea leaves, Soylent? What does the future hold for Microsoft?
Original Submission
(Score: 3, Informative) by edIII on Wednesday July 08 2015, @07:56PM
I've already completely given up on any kind of advanced phone system in my pocket. Not only do I have no privacy, but corporations are just sucking up the data on a constant basis. That data is my location, where I go, how long I stay there, and where supported, just what aisle I was in. All of that in addition to who I talk to, and when. Every new device, or software I install, I have to disable all of the location based software already.
A phone is merely a tracking system for governments and corporations that splits the data between the intelligence communities and Big Data proffering lucrative predictions of consumer activity . We can only hope that the intelligence community has our best interests at heart, but I don't believe that for a second.
I'm exclusively on burner phones that I swap out regularly. What I would like to do is go full retro-tard and develop a bluetooth connection that allows us to negotiate a connection over the phone line like t38 fax support. It wouldn't be all that great (t38 isn't a silver bullet for faxes over VOIP), but you could at least layer on instant messaging with 100% unbreakable privacy between two nodes. (Use a custom OTP setup)
I think you have to take it that far, since endpoint-to-endpoint encryption on the phones themselves can never be trusted. Likewise, the Red Phone, Black Phone, Banana Phone, Whatever Phone, all suffer from the exact same problems. They might *possibly* be more private, but you're still leaking massive amounts of information just being connected to a carrier at all.
My only solution is using disposable (or exchangeable) burner phones connected up to your own equipment to treat the phone as an untrusted route.
Aside from that, our only hope is to marginalize the carriers themselves, and that will only happen with a vibrant Wi-Fi collective that can deliver coverage in the cities. It's coming, but not anywhere near close to the coverage areas of the cellular carriers. The ones I know about in Northern California are pretty nice for $5 a month, but don't have enough coverage to reach parity with a cell phone.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.