I find it interesting how this show up the day after I had to call the customer service to clarify an interest fee on my account that din't make sense. So here is what happened, I got hit with a $12.xx monthly interest on a $2000ish purchase which I made less than 30 days ago and hasn't shown up on my previous statement. For clarification, my current APR on the card is 5.99%.
It took me two reps and two accounts managers to learn how these things are calculated:
1) Interests are daily compounded.
2) Interests are not calculated on actual balance but on the average daily balance.
3) If you don't pay your statement balance in full by the end of the month, you lose your grace period for future purchases and interest would start accruing as soon as the transactions goes through. To reset this it would require you to make two full statement payments in a row.
4) If you purchase something and return it and the return takes a few days to process, you would still pay interest on for those days.
The rep and the first account manager that spoke to weirdly dint have the basic understanding of interest rates. She argued that the $12 interest was on the $2000 for 4 days at the rate of 5.99%. Funny enough, she still din't find anything odd when I pointed out that it would mean, by the end of the year, I would pay $1095 ie. > 50% of the principal in interest!
Anyways the second rep was knowledgeable enough to explain it.
Is this for a US based credits card? I have never heard of needing pay off for two full months. Or for the average daily balance used in calculation and I'm pretty sure neither is the case for any of my cards. But I will need to check.
Hm, this seems like just ordinary pronunciation corruption of the kind which happens a million times to a million words, not reflecting any actual mistaken interpretation as in taking "cherise" as the plural of a hypothetical "cherri".
Yes, it is... So it was not the "Europeans" who misspelled the word, it was the British. The Portuguese were the first to get to that part of the world from Europe, so they might have brought the word to Europe themselves.
I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth. Here are some counter points. Nokia came back into my view when they started launching the Lumia phones. It was slick, fast and solid phones with amazing camera. Any mention of Nokia here on HN and Reddit before that was met with DOA as the top comment. When they started releasing the Lumia phones, the tune started to switch to "if they made an android phone, I would totally buy!". Remember the whole silly fiasco with even Siri calling Lumia 900 the best phone in the market? [1]
I think Microsoft gave it a premiere spot with Windows Mobile which would have otherwise gone unnoticeable in the Android market. Despite me jumping ship from Windows Phone, I still believe Windows Mobile was one of the best (*subjective) of all mobile OSes. Its extremely fast, less resource hog and well designed (flatness before it got trendy). Given the stereotypes about Windows OS, the mobile OS seemed nothing like it. Heck, I bought a $15 Lumia phone from Best buy and it seems like a $200 buttery smooth phone.
Lumia also had good set of apps, which created an amazing group of loyal buyers.
Offline GPS - You could download the maps for the entire world on your phone.
Offline Radio - Download the entire mix radio to you phone and use it where you went.
Camera Apps - Nokia cinematography, Live Images, Selfie, Panorama.
However, I do believe that Microsoft's Nokia buyout was a stupid idea. Nokia was amazing at advertising, viral marketing and creating a brand loyalty. Microsoft however sucks at both advertisements and marketing but they seem to be very good at pissing off even their loyal followers.
There is an interesting story by the New Yorker: "It wasn’t just that Nokia failed to recognize the increasing importance of software, though. It also underestimated how important the transition to smartphones would be. And this was, in retrospect, a classic case of a company being enthralled (and, in a way, imprisoned) by its past success. Nokia was, after all, earning more than fifty per cent of all the profits in the mobile-phone industry in 2007, and most of those profits were not coming from smartphones. Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era."
> Diverting a lot of resources into a high-end, low-volume business (which is what the touch-screen smartphone business was in 2007) would have looked risky. In that sense, Nokia’s failure resulted at least in part from an institutional reluctance to transition into a new era.
It's a bit of a nitpick, but Nokia had put considerable resources into Series 60, Symbian, and subsequently Maemo. Nokia's management, before Elop, was in no way reluctant about a smartphone future beyond high-volume S40 devices. The S60 features of integrated PIM apps are foundational to smartphones, and Maemo/Meego was a credible smartphone OS. As I recall, Tomi Ahonen had good reason to think the N9 was outselling Windows Phone when Meego was killed.
I guess I wasn't clear. I dint claim Microsoft made them, just that it came exclusively with the Lumia phones. If I recall correctly, back then if you searched for it in the store using a non-lumia phone, you wouldn't even find it listed.
I wonder if you're from the US, because I heard that Nokia as a brand never really quite took off in the way it did Europe. Over here before smartphones came along you were pretty much mad to buy anything except a Nokia. So why didn't it work with windows mobile? It did to start with, people bought them because of the Nokia name, but the lack of apps for the platform killed that good will pretty quickly.
Combine their superb industrial design with android and it would have been significantly more potent.
>> Such a shame trojan horse Elop tanked the company by partnering with Microsoft
> I have heard this statement so many times and I feel it doesn't justify the truth
To me when people talk about the Windows Phone being great they are talking about the hardware. Which is something Nokia used to excel at. I have a Lumia on my desk and it is a really nice phone, its the lack of the latest Apps that lets it down.
Elop failed to leverage the software developers at Nokia, you had great Qt/C/C++ developers and suddenly the company is Silverlight/C#?
The biggest mistake I attribute to his management was his announcement that the phones they were just launching would not upgrade to Windows Phone 8. As a buyer you are just going to wait 6 months, that killed the sales channel and App developers decided to hold off.
I don't think Elop was a trojan, I think he was out of his depth or the wrong man. The board should never have appointed him. But he did tank the company through a string of bad decisions.
To echo nivla's point: One of my favorite phones was the Lumia 950. Its fatal flaw was the lack of app support, but everything else was fantastic. The OS was fast and easy to use, the apps that were there were well done, the build was fantastic, etc.
Instead of being "just another" high-end android, Nokia got to be the flagship phone for an entire OS. Today it seems like a crazy call, but it's easy to understand why they would pick WP over Android.
In this thread a lot of people don't understand the meaning of monopoly and assumes a monopoly is only synonymous with the companies they hate. It has more to do with having a dominant control over a market and abusing that dominant position to own advantage. Google has pulled a lot of stunts in the past that clearly defines this. Remember the only way to have pictures on your search listing was to link your blog/site with Google+? A result with an image next to it had better clicks that the one without. Next was the shopping fiasco: The shopping results that shows up on the top had barely anything to do with ranking, instead it was a set of sponsored listing that was paid for by companies. Hmm the blending out the background of the ads with the rest of the results is another story of its own.
Although my primary search engine is still Google (like the majority here), I still don't agree nor do I encourage the direction Google is taking with their search engine.
One of the primary characteristics of a monopoly is high customer switching costs. For example, a business running on the Microsoft platform in 1995 could not realistically switch to Apple, Solaris, etc. During the heyday of Standard Oil, you could either buy from them or find a way to get your oil shipped from overseas. If you didn't want to use AT&T in 1975, you'd... uh, have to work at the speed of telegrams?
Meanwhile, if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.
>One of the primary characteristics of a monopoly is high customer switching costs.
The algorithms are of no value and can be duplicated by anyone. The real value google has is the search click data, which can't be obtained or generated. So yes there is actually an extremely high barrier to entry.
>Meanwhile, if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.
Well, no, because Google's customers are companies. The users are not the customers. The companies will go where the users go. How do the customers take their advertising data to the new search engine? They cant. Also, building a better product matters only sometimes. "Better" here implies that users are rational and are capable of evaluating competing products. If that were the case most companies would be out of business. Thankfully it isn't. Ironically, I suppose there is _some_ hope. Not by building a better product, but using either trends/fads/viral memes/ or pure marketing or other means of attracting users. But yeah, probably several hundreds of millions of dollars would be my guess.
High switching costs can make monopolies worse. And yes, it is possible to switch away from Google search. But it's still a monopoly, and it's held in place by various means.
For example, the vast majority of people - not tech people like us - do think that they can't switch away. They don't understand the distinction between a web browser, a search engine, email, etc. For them, Google is how they access the internet, and that means google.com, and often also means Chrome and gmail.
The monopoly is also held in place by Android, which defaults to Google services (search, email, etc.) very strongly. Of course, us tech people know how to avoid that if we want, but the majority of people don't even know they can. And even if they do, it's not easy for them.
There isn't a single default search that's Google on any OS besides Safari on Apple and Android. Windows defaults to bing, Linux via Firefox defaults to Yahoo. People CHOOSE to use Google. No one is forcing them.
There was a successful antitrust case against microsoft because of the way they abused their OS to get browser share with IE. I believe that the case was mostly because MS purposefully raised the switching cost by adding non standard features to their browser.
>> if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.
The point here is not that Google is a monopoly, rather that it's treating its competitors unfairly.
The fact that Google has competitors indeed means the "only shop in town" excuse holds no water. Google does have competitors, except they're not in the search business, they use Google's search business. And Google uses this fact to put them out of business and take their customers.
Also- just because you don't have any options when someone puts a gun to your head doesn't mean it's fair for them to do so.
Healthy competition is best for consumers, and a free market is paramount to this... being able to abuse a dominant position to gain dominance in new markets is anticompetitive and bad for the consumer long term.
Now, a single competitor should not necessarily have a leg to stand on, but the acts of a first party like google have sweeping repercussions.
> Meanwhile, if someone builds a better search engine, all of Google's customers could switch to it in ten seconds and never look back.
Google's customers are advertisers. Someone would have to build a more effective advertising platform to get Google's customers to switch.
And that new platform would have to collect and analyze even more product (a.k.a. users) data, which would likely be an even greater perceived invasion of privacy.
See you are arguing that only a monopoly is illegal and unethical. Fact is, there are forms of non monopolistic market manipulation that are illegal. In the US, you can't form cartels or segment markets by colluding with competitors. Similar laws apply in Europe.
> In this thread a lot of people don't understand the meaning of monopoly and assumes a monopoly is only synonymous with the companies they hate. It has more to do with having a dominant control over a market and abusing that dominant position to own advantage.
No, it just has to do with the former (usually defined through possession of pricing power, which is very hard to argue Google has in many of the free services in which it is dominant.) The latter is abusing a monopoly, not having one.
Perhaps; they certainly have a very large share of search advertising and its a paid market, but whether they have pricing power is a fact question that I haven't seen strong reasons to believe either way on. Its pretty clear that there are competing places for online, even search-specific, advertising, and that firms make cost-benefit considerations in choosing these; its not clear to me that there is any range in which Google can increase AdWords prices without losing some business to its competitors, even if AdWords is so attractive at its current price point that it draws the vast majority of spending.
> And Google dictates the rules of the auction marketplace.
Every company "dictates the rules" on which its sells product. Pricing power -- the key test in antitrust for a monopoly -- requires that they be able to change those rules so as to raise prices within some range without business moving to alternatives; in the case of AdWords, it would mean that Google could make it more expensive for the same results without any net migration to any other advertising vendor.
Is that the case? I don't see compelling evidence either way.
We live in a world full of many pressing issues. My google results page is not one of them. What I'd like to know is - how did these regulators prioritize their backlog in such a way that this is the current priority - and everything else is a lesser one. That process is what's broken. Not Google.
The people who distribute food aid are generally not mostly astronauts. Europe's economy is not without serious problems, yet the same people who would otherwise be charged with considering those instead busy themselves with critical study of search results. That doesn't seem to be exactly the same situation.
What's your point. That space exploration is in principle a good investment? That investing in lowing the cost of living is a bad investment? You're a little sparse on details.
Well, they're also researching other stuff, but Google, for example, saying "you can't have yahoo ads on a page with AdSense ads or YouTube embeds" was kinda problematic.
Luckily, that stopped a few years ago, yet it was still very crazy.
What dumb argument is that? If Google is allowed to just display whatever the fuck they want, then they could easily obliterate the economy of whatever country you reside in. Yes, as long as they don't abuse that, there is no problem, but that's not a reason to not have a law.
Not sure what you need an explanation for. By now a quite significant portion of internet traffic is delegated over Google and a quite significant portion of commerce depends on the internet.
Google could decide to suddenly stop displaying links to the webpages of companies in your country, which would severely damage your country's export.
They could filter the search results to only display negative search results for things in your country or even add in some faked articles bubbling up into the Google top results about some contagious disease in your country to wreck tourism.
Other great articles to fake would be about some financial instabilities in your country. Traders have to react quickly when something like that crops up, and so they would probably already try to sell assets in your country before anything is even vaguely confirmed.
Chances are that even some TV shows, newspapers etc. will report about it and give it more credibility, as even journalists today also often just google things and then report whatever sounds somewhat plausible, especially when it sounds like a good story.
> Google could decide to suddenly stop displaying links to the webpages of companies in your country
This is the crux of your argument. Google already pulled out of China because of prohibitive regulation which makes my point exactly. The more regulation that's added to make search "safe" the greater the barrier to entry for new competitors is. This isn't even theoretical free-market mumbo jumbo, this is simply historically evident.
> They could filter the search results to only display negative search results
Sure. If I search for xbox, they could decide to only show me nintendo results. But the result sucks and I'll move to a different search engine. The market is wonderfully magical that way. Consumers don't need Microsoft's benevolent lobbyists to protect us from the dangers of Google.
So my point is, the motivation for these regulators action is not from the interest of the general public - but more like the well financed interests of market competitors who can't win by providing better results.
I don't understand the shopping results argument listed on the top of the pages for search results. I have personally never confused them with actual results, and doesn DuckDuckGo Bing and Yahoo do this? If so, then why single out Google?
I rather no company patent them than any do-no-evil company. Besides why do you think they won't use/abuse it? The whole point of spending so much ridiculous amount of money on a patent is to get exclusive rights to be the only one to use it. Isn't competition better than stagnation by a single company?
Nope, but that doesn't matter - as enforcement is the concern, and there prior art shines. If the motive is purely defensive (and I don't include the menacing of a portfolio in that category), then it is the ideal move to make - as bad actors waste more energy filing poorly researched and easily refuted patents.
Probably doesn't prevent the granting of a patent, however it makes it impossible to enforce the patent. Mike and I published this in 1998 http://www.rage.net/wireless/wireless-howto.html . A Cisco legal team found this in 2008 and contacted me because the owners of patent #7035281 were coming after them. Doing a simple write-up of what I thought was obvious at the time - stick a wireless card into a Linux PC and have it route packets - may have saved all of us from having the wifi router in everyone's home restricted by patents. So whatever ideas you implement, be sure to blog about them and make sure archive.org gets a copy.
The problem is that other people will just create one or more patents which are around using your breakthrough algorithm in different contexts. The famous amazon one-click shopping patent as an example. The internet is the breakthrough, but because there's no patent on that, its easy to surround with patents that should be too obvious to be patents, but have legal teeth even so.
If you patent the core idea, the other patents become a lot less useful. (Not that I think Google is thinking this way. It's just a PR problem to them. When no one is looking, I bet they do whatever they can to get as much money/power as they can.)
It is a terrible situation, and putting out prior art certainly doesn't fix that - but the alternatives courses of action are worse (assuming purely defensive interests). I think you're right though, if the internet was somehow patented then we wouldn't have one-click shopping patents... or much of anything really - we'd likely be having this discussion over a Minitel service.
>Honestly, say what you will about Google, but I can't imagine them ever threatening another software company with software patents.
That is a naive fanboy outlook towards a company. Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft. Although I still believe it is the game that is flawed and not the players. Google has also done things that could hold back the Windows Phone ecosystem. However, none of that should discount how much Google has contributed to betterment of the web just like Facebook or Microsoft. Open-Source is open source, the only thing that matters is license here and it is as liberal as it could get MIT.
I am not a Google fanboy, I am merely saying they abide by the spirit of Open Source. I just used them as an example. RedHat is another example.
> Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft.
Can you post a link to Google suing Microsoft first (not in retaliation)? Google was way behind in the patent game until they got hurt. Google bought Motorola to have a defensive patent portfolio. Also, see their Open Patent Non-Assertion Pledge https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/
> Open-Source is open source, the only thing that matters is license here and it is as liberal as it could get MIT.
Open Source is where it is today from the decades of hard work by many, many people (in the early days, just for the love of it with no pay). MS is doing Open Source today because it really has no choice. There is no comparison between these two.
Open Source can welcome MS, but it should demonstrate a willingness to work towards the best interests of the movement. There are bigger goals here.
Google replaced their XMPP messaging system by Hangouts, a 100% closed protocol with no signs of even wanting to open source it.
From a FOSS pov, both Google and Microsoft have positive and negative sides to it. They're massive companies, you can't judge them as one giant blob.
What MS is doing right now with .NET is fantastic for open source. Just like what Google is doing right now with Hangouts is frankly bullshit. Judge actions, not entities.
Google's treatment of open messaging, albeit terrible, has nothing to do with its patent behavior.
Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and many other companies are known aggressors who use software patents as weapons of war to destroy competition and extort other companies. Google has consistently refused to participate in such immoral behavior without first being attacked by similarly sized companies.
XMPP had a fair amount of shortcomings and the real issue is that federated systems don't solve spam. So everyone living in this "we'll run our own IM systems, just like email" is deluded, as spam in email is barely a solved issue. And much of the solution involves blocking "independent" servers.
> MS is doing Open Source today because it really has no choice
And that's a good thing. It shows the strength of open source.
MS is a company. Just as Google. Companies will "work towards the best interests of the movement" as long as those interests converge with theirs: make money.
AFAIK large portions of Google's core business are closed source. They are not in open source for love.
MS has had in the past a systematic pattern of bullying, lying, cheating and a willingness to destroy social welfare by eliminating the competition and making their products the only option available in the market. This is extremely damaging. Yes every company wants to make money, but not every company will resort to that kind of sociopathic behaviour. Maybe they've changed, although I doubt it. I'm just saying - be careful.
> Maybe they've changed, although I doubt it. I'm just saying - be careful.
Corporations aren't people where past behaviour predicts future behaviour. If MS's original executives are all gone, the fact that MS is behaving differently isn't surprising at all.
Throughout all the patent wars and all the rhetoric Google produced about competitors abusing patents, it was Google, as the owner of Motorola, that was the only company penalized in court for actually abusing patents:
Sure, the lawsuit was started 2 months before Google acquired Motorola, and it was in response to an MS lawsuit, but the continued abuse of FRAND patents and the ensuing 14M penalty happened on Google's watch. Literally no other company in the smartphone wars suffered this fate.
"Those demands from Motorola should more properly be seen as a counter-offensive prompted by Microsoft’s demands for royalties on every Android implementation."
There is the licensing and the ecosystem side which are part of the 'meta runtime' of the code and then there is the political story.
Is it possible that since the superiority of the open source model in several places is so obvious (i.e. when the code itself contains no secret sauce) this political narrative of whose development model is better is no longer pertinent?
I would say privacy is partly a different arena altogether, as well are software patents.
My head is too small to fit all of this into a coherent view. All I see is a delightful and shiny MIT license.
Google purchased Motorola for the patents as a defensive measure, so they ward of suits from Apple, MS and Intellectual Ventures. Google has NEVER sued another company over patents. Examine the timeline of patent suits on Wikipedia:
Last time I checked Microsoft was still threatening Android OEM's with their prior art ridden / pile of junk patents (M-CAM analysis). I don't believe Google has ever used patents for offensive purposes, but Microsoft continues to collect quite a bit of money from shaking down Android OEM's.
"Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft."
Really? Which suits were that?
Google has never sued another company over patents. They've made counterclaims when themselves sued, but claiming otherwise is just a fiction.
And they bought Motorola because Motorola was threatening to start suing all of the other Android makers, causing infighting that Google didn't want. So Google bought Motorola....to stop those patents from being used to sue, further diminishing your point.
On the whole, Google is very much the good guys, and Microsoft are very much the bad guys.
However I will say it is naive to assume this will continue forever. There was a period where Microsoft seldom threatened anyone, and we all held quaint notions about all of their "defensive" patents. Situations and markets change, and suddenly desperation takes foot and the company that was hugs and kisses becomes claws and kicks, so I would never assume that Google will always be a fairly good citizen. It could change.
Ya that I too agree with this, pretty much all applications can now deal with \n just fine. Having CR LF (2 Bytes) is not only wasting storage space but also wasting bandwidth when transmitting.
While at it, I also wish if Linux distros could get done with case sensitiveness in filenames. Is there any advantage to allowing both Filename.ext and filename.ext? The only time I seen this is when a malware is trying to stay hidden. Also some naming conventions would be nice, when you can have any character including '/' and '.' as a filename, it gets annoying to deal with them in a cli.
> Is there any advantage to allowing both Filename.ext and filename.ext?
Sorting by ascii order put capitalized files to the top of the list. Exactly where you should look for important stuff like README and Makefile.
Case preservation without case sensitivity is just dumb. Why bother, because it's pretty? Also, what's up with spaces in filenames? And furthermore, what are all these kids doing on my lawn?
> not only wasting storage space but also wasting bandwidth when transmitting
Such an utterly minuscule amount though (especially in the modern times when storage and bandwidth are cheap and ubiquitous), I think you typing that sentence has wasted more storage and bandwidth.
I think a better reason is to avoid issues when working with code files across systems and version control. This actually causes major annoyance.
And it's still minuscule, even added up, even a billion times over.
My point is that there's no shortage of digital storage space and bandwidth is only getting better. And if CRLF does cause a shortage of storage and bandwidth, I'm sure MS would address it.
It's not a Linux distro thing, all Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc systems are case sensitive because it's the 21st century.
The only widely used file system without case sensitivity is HFS[1]. NTFS to its credit is case sensitive, but Win32 is not, for legacy reasons (same reason as why MAX_PATH still plagues Windows).
And if you actually go out of your way to try and use the case sensitive HFS+ on a Mac, you have a pretty good chance of getting tripped up by user space software that doesn't like it, like Photoshop[1].
Well to be fair, you are not paying to use Win 10 and also its a free upgrade. On the bright side, unlike FB, you can actually install 3rd party apps and setup firewall to gain that privacy back.
> install 3rd party apps and setup firewall to gain that privacy back.
Yet you're still paying for Win 10 with either money or market share, thus signaling your acceptance of that spyware. MS will continue adding exploitative features until it starts to hurt the only things they care about: revenue or market share.
You are also paying for the Oculus hardware while having no recourse to privacy even if you wanted. I am not saying Windows 10 doesn't have privacy issues, but when compared to Facebook's approach, it is far better.
He is the CEO, he is responsible for the actions of his employees that are work related. Under the same guise, he shouldn't receive praises for anything everyone else under him does either.
Wouldn't that be worse security wise? Say if there is an exploit in the wild. The customer upgrades it to the latest version. Now all the bad guy has to do is to mess around with the firmware enough to trick the system into downgrading to the exploitable version.
A car that has an app, a car that can be remotely updated, and a car that has all communication running through the same BUS, may be susceptible to remote break in without requiring any sort of physical access. Now the firmware may require signature verification to be patched, however in this case all we need is to corrupt the existing firmware or atleast make it seem like we had access to it in order to trigger an auto-downgrade.
Regardless, even under your logic an auto-downgrade without a user's input is completely unwarranted for.
It took me two reps and two accounts managers to learn how these things are calculated:
1) Interests are daily compounded.
2) Interests are not calculated on actual balance but on the average daily balance.
3) If you don't pay your statement balance in full by the end of the month, you lose your grace period for future purchases and interest would start accruing as soon as the transactions goes through. To reset this it would require you to make two full statement payments in a row.
4) If you purchase something and return it and the return takes a few days to process, you would still pay interest on for those days.
The rep and the first account manager that spoke to weirdly dint have the basic understanding of interest rates. She argued that the $12 interest was on the $2000 for 4 days at the rate of 5.99%. Funny enough, she still din't find anything odd when I pointed out that it would mean, by the end of the year, I would pay $1095 ie. > 50% of the principal in interest!
Anyways the second rep was knowledgeable enough to explain it.