Microsoft staff cuts extend to Silicon Valley research lab
As Satya Nadella's axe continues to fall at Microsoft, the corporation's Silicon Valley research lab has been the next to succumb to the severe round of staff reductions ongoing this year.
In a move that appears to reflect a new level of urgency to Nadella's consolidation plans, the Redmond giant has closed one of its flagship engineering facilities and released dozens of world-class scientists into the job market - and the welcoming arms of its competitors. The Mountain View site reportedly employed a team of 75 that focused exploring new applications for distributed computing - the fundamental concept behind the cloud - in areas such as natural language search, data privacy and network security.While the cuts were met with stockholder approval, there's speculation Nadella's staff reductions are a strategy of short term gains that will jeopardize the corporation's long term prospects.
But although the lab itself is no longer operational, Microsoft is still clinging to its Silicon Valley research investment. Projects that were ongoing at the time of the termination have been transferred to other research facilitates along with key members of the original team, which indicates that business will continue more or less as usual at those sites for the foreseeable future.
If I have a script on my Mint/MATE desktop I can open it (usually double-click just like in Windows) and allow it to be run as an executable (it asks). I've never done it except by accident and always said no so maybe it actually doesn't work (that would be surprising though, however just as in WIndows it will need to run with the appropriate permissions for what it's trying to do, Windows used to be a lot more permissive in that deparment and maybe they still are). Both Ubuntu and Mint has or had (in Ubuntu's case, haven't used any of their crazy new stuff) this behavior, maybe other distributions too, maybe only Gnome & Gnome-inspired stuff has it but probably all of them do.
Btw have you tried out Mint? For straight use it's pretty much the same as Windows was when I quit Windows, none of the new Windows nonsense and none of the new Ubuntu nonsense :D (but sadly systemd nonsense soon).
Since I'm not your father or aunt or in college I don't know precisely how bad those snags are, anyway here's my thoughts:
- Maybe those porn sites use silverlight or other super-propriatory stuff (both non-free and with added cost/requirements) which does require lots of hoops and jumping like RealPlayer used to (don't know if that ancient stuff still exists/is used), that sounds like it would require work. Linux can't change things like that, they have no influence on it on their own just like if I made something propriatory and didn't allow others to easily use it without paying up (like XChat did/tried on Windows a few years back).
- Your aunt's phone sounds like it's weird then again so much stuff is crippled these days; when I plug my (admittedly old non-Apple, non-Android, non-smartphone) mobile into the computer with the appropriate USB cable the computer opens up the folder on the phone and then I copypaste the pictures or videos or recordings or music or anything else I've put there. I've also done the same only by moving the microSD card between phone and computer (that was before I bought the USB cable). There's nothing Linux-specific about that, nor anything specific to the phone-maker (it's just a cheap Nokia from a few years ago).
- This could be only me and my machine (most likely is, I really haven't put any effort into this at all) but I have to admit I don't use Youtube since they (or I) managed to break both Flash and HTML5 in Firefox (it stutters, although I haven't tested it recently, other video sites work fine or at least I haven't noticed anything) so if there really is something there I have to watch I'll just download it (one of the FireFox plugins) and watch it locally (the transfer from Google is fast enough to max my frugal connection for the few seconds it lasts). Other LInux users will have to chime in but I suspect it works for most Linux-using people and/or there's an easy fix, it used to work for me for years and I just haven't bothered (and nearly all the good stuff started being removed from YouTube anyway, the stuff I used to watch isn't there any more, I get it elsewhere).
- I find it a tad hard to believe LibreOffice-created .doc files aren't good enough for college (aka high-school) or that .doc files are a requirement for college (aka university). Yeah they're called something else than .doc now aren't they? Still... MS formats are an important priority for LibreOffice, last I heard they had better backwards compability with Office versions than Office itself has. Or for that matter that .rtf or anything else doesn't work either. Even so Microsoft is moving towards Office as a service on the web aren't they? (Just as Adobe did with their suite including Photoshop, I had forgotten that when I wrote the last comment, or maybe that failed? I don't know). Since I don't use it (MS office, Adobe) I can't claim that it works on Linux but either way once again it's not something GNU/Linux can be blamed for.
From memory when I still used Windows I had to do a lot of stuff to figure things out or tweak or fix broken stuff (and defragmentation and reinstallations and blue screens lol!) if it was possible, run updates both from Microsoft and others, not to mention the constant fight to stay reasonably secure (i.e. not NSA stuff, back then one really though they had better things to do). I've done far less of that kind of stuff on Linux, a lot of it simply isn't necessary or even there because it doesn't apply and updates & "normal" security is fast and simple.TL;DR Using a computer will always involve some work.
Anyway whatever works for them/you is fine by me, thanks for getting specific :)