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Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
60% of Americans sleep with their phones, harboring germs. Cleaning regularly with UV sanitizer or alcohol wipes can help keep your phone and bed germ-free.
Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
EULA – The Biggest Lie on the Web
Tuesday, January 28, 2020, is international Data Privacy Day (DPD). The purpose of Data Privacy Day is to raise awareness and promote privacy and data protection best practices. One privacy best practice is to actually read the end-user license agreements (EULA) that come with everything you download from the Internet.
If you can’t wade through the legal gibberish telling you they are going to sell all your data to someone you never heard of? I don’t blame you – two law professors analyzed the terms and conditions of 500 popular U.S. websites and found that more than 99% of them were “unreadable,” far exceeding the level most American adults read at but are still enforced. The researchers wrote that the average readability level of the EULA agreements they reviewed was comparable to articles in academic journals – take a look at “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” (ToS;DR).
EULA grades
ToS;DR is a project started to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time. The service grades website EULA’s from Amazon to Zappos from A (best) to E (worst) once a comprehensive list of cases has been reviewed by volunteers. Some of the ratings are:
A – The best terms of services: they treat you fairly, respect your rights, and will not abuse your data.- B – The terms of services are fair towards the user but they could be improved.
- C – The terms of service are okay but some issues need your consideration.
- D – The terms of service are very uneven or there are some important issues that need your attention.
- E – The terms of service raise very serious concerns.
- No Class Yet ToS;DR has not sufficiently reviewed the terms yet.
Here are the privacy ratings of the FAANG largest websites according to ToS;DR:
- Facebook = Not rated yet,
- Apple = Not rated yet,
- Amazon = Class C,
- Netflix = Not rated yet,
- Google = Class C.
There are a few sites that respect users privacy and get a Class A rating from ToS;DR:
DuckDudkGo (Search engine),- Kolab Now (Email/groupware),
- SeenThis (Advertising),
- WindowsLogic Productions (Software developer).
Other well-known sites with ToS;DR ratings:
- IMDb = Class C,
- YouTube = Class D,
- Twitter = Class D,
- Stack Overflow Class E.
You can download the ToS;DR:browser extensions here.
Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
PC Market Show Signs of Life
After 7 years of consistent declines – PC sales finally stopped their slide. Market researchers Gartner and IDC reported that PC sales grew during the fourth quarter of 2019, boosting all of 2019 into the positive. For the entire year, global PC shipments were up 2.7%, according to the IDC. That makes 2019 the “first full year of PC growth” since 2011.
PCWorld reports that 2019 new PC numbers from Gartner and IDC and are remarkably similar. Gartner reported that PC sales grew 2.3% in 2019 Q4 to 70.6 million units and 261 million units for the year. Rival analyst firm IDC largely agreed, estimating that PC unit sales grew 4.8%, to 71.8 million units. IDC said that worldwide PC sales grew 2.7% for 2019 as a whole.
Among the results:
- The top three global PC vendors—Lenovo, HP, and Dell—all consolidated their market share, reaching 65% of the PC market.
IDC and Gartner concur that Lenovo (LNVGY) is the world’s top PC vendor for 2019. IDC reports Lenovo had a 24.8% global market share and Gartner said it had a 24.1%.- Globally HP (HPQ) ranked #2 with 23.9% by IDC and 22.2% by Gartner.
- Dell was ranked #3 worldwide with 17.4% by IDC and 16.8% by Gartner. Dell’s unit sales climbing by nearly 11%, according to IDC’s estimates.
In the U.S. market the ‘Q4-19 rankings differed:
HP is #1 with a 31.2% market share and a modest 4.4% bump in U.S PC sales for the quarter.- Dell ranked #2 with a 26.8% market share and a gain of 15.9% for the period.
- Lenovo came in #3 with a 14.9% share and 11.2% increase in share.
The tech prognosticators attributed the surge in sales to firms swapping their hardware to Windows ahead of MSFT”s Windows 7 end of support, giving new PC sales a one-time shot in the arm. Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC’s Worldwide Mobile Device Trackers, said in a statement.
The market will still have its challenges ahead, but this year was a clear sign that PC demand is still there despite the continued insurgence of emerging form factors and the demand for mobile computing.
Ranjit Atwal, a research senior director at Gartner, in a statement to PCWorld, cast doubt on future growth. He says,
The PC market’s future is unpredictable because there will not be a Windows 11. Instead, Windows 10 will be upgraded systematically through regular updates …As a result, peaks in PC hardware upgrade cycles driven by an entire Windows OS upgrade will end.
rb-
Don’t do your happy dance just yet.
Gartner and IDC both predict global sales to steadily decline again over 2020 as MSFT’s drives to a subscription-based model. Other threats to the PC market include:
China – The Chinese government has ordered all PC hardware and operating systems imported from foreign countries to be replaced in the next three years.
HP- Xerox – I have covered Xerox’s maneuvers to take over HP. The possible disruption to HP by a Xerox hostile takeover could rattle the entire sector. Especially if Acer or Asus cannot scale up fast enough.
History – Data from Statista says that annual PC sales have dropped nearly 1/3 from their peak in 2011.
| Year | # of PC's | Change YoY |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 364.0 | - |
| 2012 | 349.3 | -14.7 |
| 2013 | 315.1 | -34.2 |
| 2014 | 308.3 | -6.8 |
| 2015 | 275.8 | -32.5 |
| 2016 | 260.2 | -15.6 |
| 2017 | 259.6 | -0.6 |
| 2018 | 258.5 | -1.1 |
| 2019 | 261.0 | 2.5 |
| 2020 * | 254.3 | -6.7 |
Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Awesome Elephant Treecycling
Now that the holiday season is gone. What are you going to do with your dead Christmas tree? You can use the pine needles for mulch. Most of us end up throwing the tired yule tree to the curb for the city to stick it in the wood chipper or add it to the community “treecycling” pile or repurpose it into a bird sanctuary.
While these are eco-friendly ways to say goodbye to this year’s evergreen. None of these solutions are as awesome as the green strategy employed by zoos around the world. Zoo’s from Berlin to Prague to Tennessee give some animals unsold Christmas trees donated from local tree farms and vendors. The critters don’t get the post-holiday discards from the general public. That’s because trees kept in a house could have chemicals or other contaminants on them, and the elephants prefer to eat fresh, moist trees — not the dried-up, crispy fire hazards that many people have up well into the new year. The plants serve as a good (but prickly) addition to the pachyderms’ usual winter diets.
In Hohenwald, TN the annual Christmas Tree Drive collects the trees for The Elephant Sanctuary. The Elephants are given the trees and the festivities begin..
Those who know this stuff say the trees are nutrient-rich, the tree’s needles are said to help an elephant’s digestion. But beyond all that, it’s pretty cool.
Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2020, Christmas tree, Elephant, Elephant Sanctuary, Green, Recycling, Zoo
Veeam Backup Bought
I
n a move to improve its U.S. market share, Veeam Software has agreed to be bought by private equity firm Insight Partners. The deal valued a $5 billion, is Insight’s second major acquisition of 2020. Veeam is cloud-focused data protection, backup, and disaster recovery software company.
Backup, and disaster recovery company.
Veeam was founded in 2006 and owned by Russians Andrei Baronov and Ratmir Timashev. The firm has grown to 365,000 customers worldwide and annual sales of more than $1 billion by capitalizing on the VMware-led server virtualization boom. As part of the take-over, the founders will leave the firm and Veeam will become a U.S. company based in New York. The company had been based in Baar, Switzerland.
Veeam’s products include backup solutions, cloud security offerings, and cloud data management. Veeam’s cloud data management portfolio consists of Veeam Backup for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, Veeam Universal License (VUL), and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure.
Private equity plans
The private equity company has a three-stage program to help the companies in which it invests grow, including the Startup stage of focused on companies looking for early growth in their markets, the ScaleUp stage for companies with strong businesses, and the Corporate stage for companies ready for IPOs or other exits, Mike Triplett, a managing director of Insight Partners and new Veeam board member told CRN.
ZDNet says Veeam is in the second “ScaleUp” stage as customers are now also utilizing hybrid cloud setups with AWS, Azure, IBM, and Google, the firm’s “Act II” is to capitalize on a growing need for cloud data management across these environments. Mr. Triplett claims Insight Partners can bring the right resources to bear to move Veeam from the “ScaleUp” stage to the “Corporate” stage.
Other Insight Partners investments
Insight Partners also owns other data protection companies — including Unitrends and Spanning. In addition to data protection, the VC has invested heavily in cybersecurity and MSP-friendly technology markets. Other key Insight Partners investments include:
- Kaseya (IT management)
- Darktrace (network security)
- OneTrust (privacy management)
- Recorded Future (threat intelligence)
- SentinelOne (endpoint security)
- Sysdig (container monitoring)
- Tenable (vulnerability scanning)
- Thycotic (privileged access management)
rb-
Expect to see lots of PE activity this year (decade?). Channele2e reports that private equity investors are sitting on a record $1.5 trillion in cash. This kind of war chest is no wonder private equity firms and hedge funds have a bad reputation. VC firms have a history of acquiring businesses, loading them up with debt, and cutting staff to boost profits. The most recent examples being Sears and Toys R Us. Channele2e points out that U.S. presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren is calling for new private equity restraints to combat “legalized looting.”
I have seen that Veeam has a Russian problem. Back in the day when I shared technical services, I tried to replace an HP LTO2 tape library (PDF) with a Veeam solution and the powers-that-were did not want Veeam – we spent a lot more money to maintain the old HP LTO2 technology.
Related article
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Data protection |
Tags: 2020, Amazon, AMZN, AWS, Azure, Cloud storage, Mergers and Acquisition, Microsoft, MSFT, Office 365, Private equity, Russia, VMware
