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The headline is misleading: its "high share price", not "too big". Its perfectly possible for a small company to have a high share price.

Share prices can be much higher, Berkshire Hathaway has a price of 103,000

The main reason the Dow is used by the media, is because ignorant financial journalists think its the best measure - it is in their terms, where "best" means most brand recognition.

The only legitimate reason for using it is for long term comparisons: it has existed a lot longer than the S & P 500, or any properly constructed index.

Full explanation here http://moneyterms.co.uk/dow-jones/

Economics theory refers to what you're talking about as a Giffen Good. As prices rise, so does the appeal and therefore so does the demand. The usual laws regarding supply-and-demand, etc, don't work. Prices will rise to what the market will bear, but as prices rise the desirability ensures that the markets will always bear just that little bit more. Which is why you get market bubbles in the first place. The greater the overpricing, the greater the prestige in owning the commodity.

Ultimately, all bubbles burst and when the IPv4 market bubble burts it is going to cause a LOT of pain because none of those caught in the bubble will have bothered preparing for IPv6. They'll assume that there'll always be some way to extend the range, some way to inflate the bubble still further. We've all seen similar posts on Slashdot even, where people should be smarter than that,

Yes, for human attackers (who are the biggest threat in data theft for the time being, but expect zombies to get better at it). An automatic attack can't tell if a.b.c.d has one user or a million, it's just an IP address that the code will scan and attack if it has the script for it.

Also, if the increase in security exceeds the increase in temptation, you're better off aggregating. Which means, however, that there's a practical limit to how far you should ever aggregate (since the practical limit on how secure a system can get is equal to the security you can buy for how much you stand to lose on average per break-in). If it costs $D per break-in per year, but also costs $D per year to prevent a break-in, a company will put the money in the bank. Always. The interest rate, no matter how low, will always make screwing the user over the better deal for them - even if the cost of cleaning up the mess afterwards by those users and other organizations swamps the costs of improving the security. It isn't their money.

When you push data into the cloud, you're hoping that the company at the other end did NOT put the money in the bank but actually invested it in security fixes and audits. (If using code they can audit, that would include code audits as well.) With the cloud, and even with gridded systems, you cannot possibly know what the other person did. This enters the realm of the Prisoner's Dilemma (quote from Wikipedia: 'In this game, as in most game theory, the only concern of each individual player (prisoner) is maximizing his or her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff'). And game theory suggests that "betrayal" (in this case, the cloud provider not investing in security proportionally to the increase in risk) is the most likely outcome.

The cloud users are unlikely to be too bothered by this, because of a perversity in economics - when something becomes a status symbol, it grossly inflates in value. The fashion world, and apparently British universities, rely heavily on this. All the normal "common sense" aspects of economics go to hell in a handbasket, the Invisible Hand gets roaring drunk and you end up with a complete mess.

This is one reason I am for (appropriate) oversight and regulation. When it is appropriate (has such a thing ever happened?) the individual player's payoff becomes tied to the payoff of the others such that the whole Prisoner's Dilemma argument doesn't hold. Likewise, it has to keep enough market flexibility that no option becomes so overwhelmingly attractive that it destroys the market it is in. However, too far over that threshold and the regulations themselves destroy the markets. And since nobody has a bloody clue what the threshold even looks like, let alone where it is or how they'd know it if they found it, we end up with companies that resemble a trampoline QA facility.

You are correct about counterfeiting (experienced bank cashiers can often tell a note is wrong immediately), and the notes are reasonably durable.

Comparing notes and coins in circulation to GDP is not comparing like to like. Money changes hands several times a year so GDP is much bigger than money supply. You should be comparing dollar notes and coins in circulation globally to M3 less foreign currency deposits in the US plus supply of dollars outside the US.

You are correct about counterfeiting (experienced bank cashiers can often tell a note is wrong immediately), and the notes are reasonably durable.

Comparing notes and coins in circulation to GDP is not comparing like to like. Money changes hands several times a year so GDP is much bigger than money supply. You should be comparing dollar notes and coins in circulation globally to M3 less foreign currency deposits in the US plus supply of dollars outside the US.

No we cannot. The voters want:

1) Good education, health, well equipped armed forces, good infrastructure, a policeman on every street corner state subsidies to protect jobs (especially in marginal constituencies!), etc.
2) Low taxes
3) The elderly looked after, good state pensions, etc.
4) No immigration to balance out the ageing demographics
5) Civil liberties, fair trials, an end to the surveillance society
6) The government to monitor and stop everyone who MIGHT be a terrorist, paedophile or whatever
7) No interfering nanny state
8) The government to prevent every domestic crime and fix every dysfunctional family.

Brown managed the financial side of this with off balance sheet financing in the form of PFI,PPP and various other ways of hidden borrowing from the private sector, but the price for that has started materialising with the recession.

The banks and credit ratings agencies said exactly the same thing. All financial models that get used are thoroughly back tested

When you are predicting a change that is very different from what happened in your historical data your back testing has no real value.

I am sure you can make good prediction if things stay broadly similar to your historical data, but if you are predicting changes well outside that range.

Telling me how limited your test dataset is has done more to make me sceptical about climate change than anything I have every read before. I am going to try to find something to confirm what you have said (it is just a slashdot comment, after all), and if it is true it is enough to make me a "denialist".

Because the climate models include actual physics and the economic models used by banks and credit ratings agencies are just statistical masturbation with no anchoring to reality?

Your comment assumes that the climate models are stochastic simulators that only take the historical data as input and then try to predict the future based only on the climate record. This is simply not true - all the models simulate the physical environment and its interconnections based largely on known physical laws that have been derived independently (e.g. the radiation properties of C02). Only then are the models compared to the climate record. In the few places where there are "magic numbers" research is actively taking place to replaces those numbers with more detailed physical laws.

Taken a little further, your argument could be used against any scientific prediction - after all, empiricism is based entirely on historical data! The difference is that science assumes that the physical world is lawful and corrects its understanding of those laws as best it can. Economics, as far as I can tell, appears to be mostly puritan ideology that has been translated into mathematics.

The banks and credit ratings agencies said exactly the same thing. All financial models that get used are thoroughly back tested

When you are predicting a change that is very different from what happened in your historical data your back testing has no real value.

I am sure you can make good prediction if things stay broadly similar to your historical data, but if you are predicting changes well outside that range.

Telling me how limited your test dataset is has done more to make me sceptical about climate change than anything I have every read before. I am going to try to find something to confirm what you have said (it is just a slashdot comment, after all), and if it is true it is enough to make me a "denialist".

Can someone please tell me the difference between morality and ethics? The OED definition of ethical is "morally correct" (OK it can mean a precription drug as well, but that is clearly not what we mean in this content).

The real moral problem I can see here is that someone argues that it is legal, therefore it is OK even though it is inethical - i.e. do anything you can get away with and stuff the ethics of it.

The distinction you are trying to make is between debt capital (e.g. bonds, long term bank loans, any thing else that is financing) and other liabilities. Shareholders equity is not shown as a liability, and is not connected to the share price.

The number you want is net assets, but it is not really relevant to valuing a company link Novell except for establishing a floor to the valuation.

You may need a sum of parts valuation (I am not sure how diverse Novells businesses are), but a simple profit multiple may do.

Novell's management have got some key shareholder backing for rejecting the offer, so they are not the only ones who think they will get more.

The distinction you are trying to make is between debt capital (e.g. bonds, long term bank loans, any thing else that is financing) and other liabilities. Shareholders equity is not shown as a liability, and is not connected to the share price.

The number you want is net assets, but it is not really relevant to valuing a company link Novell except for establishing a floor to the valuation.

You may need a sum of parts valuation (I am not sure how diverse Novells businesses are), but a simple profit multiple may do.

Novell's management have got some key shareholder backing for rejecting the offer, so they are not the only ones who think they will get more.

"I fear that without radically different selection of management based on psychological profiles that prevent those seeking power from getting into management in the first place, neither problem can be solved."

Speaking of which I had an interview last week that was going fairly well. He then asked me why I got my degree in Business rather than Computer Science. I told him I wanted to become a manager and learn business processes and understand the ROI on what I do so I can fulfill a company's needs better. The manager got nervous and mentioned there is no place to move up in a medium sized business like this one and a manager is as far as anyone could possible go. The interview went downhill after that and he quickly thanked me for my time and set me on my way.

I figured I either blew smoke from quoting common knowledge that I read on forums such as Slashdot or he got nervous that I would challenge him for his job.

I found this quite bizarre as I would assume a good manager would want someone with both skillsets who knows about business processes and understanding customer problems. After all I work for a business. If a great engineer can not provide value to his employer then whats the point? Maybe I am too naive thinking that managers with great salaries would be more loyal to their employer needs. I guess not. I could not live with myself and go to work each day if I were in it only for me.

Maybe the best managers do not have an ego like what you mentioned.

I'm sorry, do you *remember* Netscape 4? IE was a far superior product

Yes, but Opera was better than either at the time, and got nowhere.

And on Macintosh it won the market fair and square, there being no "stranglehold."

Not true: IE4 was bundled with MacOS as the default browser as part of a deal between Apple and MS. The crowds reaction to the announcement this was clearly not what users wanted.

Notice:

1) The cross licensing deal (cross licensing is bad because it blocks new entrants)
2) MS also bought this by promising to keep developing MS Office for Mac (i.e. they were trying to leverage the Office monopoly).
3) MS also bailed Apple put financially as part of the deal: i.e. they actually bought market share for cash.

The reason is that if someone with a 5% market share offers a product that uses a proprietary protocol I can easily say "no thanks" and move to the next alternative.

If someone has 90% of the market, I may have to use their product to be compatible with everyone else - i.e. because of network effects

A other people predicted it (or at least pointed out the high risk) as well.

People did not want to listen. People never listen to warnings during the good times. It happens during every single economics boom or asset price bubble.

Day trading is entirely different from private equity.

Day trading is entirely different from private equity.

That is why traders co-locate servers is stock exchange data-centers

On the other hand, why have Millennium and everyone else who has developed a reasonably good trading platform chosen too use something other than Windows (Millennium originally used Solaris btw).

Of course the LSE is not interested in using open source, but the fact is that an open source OS was the best solution they could find.

I used to work for Millennium. I have already blogged about what I thought of the deal.

The more stuff I read about patent litigation the less I understand why the corporations don't come to the conclusion that it doesn't do them any good.

In a word: cross-licensing. Read the last paragraph of the page linked to.

Technical insolvency has a clear definition which is unrelated to whether one has built up a good credit record. While technical insolvency doesn't necessarily lead to actual insolvency - it is possible to keep up a required income - the technically insolvent are huge credit risks. It is all the more risky to offer them credit if they don't have a history of successfully maintaining this irresponsible lifestyle!

The original AC, by putting completely the wrong spin on technical insolvency, is as good as lying.

Slashdot has a critical mass in its community, so it is still the best of its kind despite being run badly.

To put it another way, a bad product wins because of network effects. Very like Microsoft....

Ireland's taxes are lower than most of the rest of the EU, so it makes sense for any company doing pan-EU business to be based there.

In other words it is a tax haven within the EU.

It also has had a number of years where it was a cheap place to get labor, and had workers that were educated and spoke English, though there's recently been a lot of business moving to Eastern Europe, especially Poland, where the labor's cheaper.

Eastern European competition would not hurt them anything like as much - the whole of Western Europe has to cope with that.

For more about Ireland and how companies (especially MS) use it to dodge tax, read:

1. http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/category/ireland/
2. http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/category/microsoft/
3. http://moneyterms.co.uk/blog/200811-irish-economic-problem

Or to put in in a more strictly financial way: the change increase in the NPV of the income generated by a copyright by extending copyright beyond about 20 or 30 years from the date a work is finished, is very small. The increase in changes such as increasing copyright from life + 50 to life + 70 is negligible.

Things have changed: they broke up Standard Oil and AT & T, but they have not broken up Microsoft, and current regulation of telecoms is pretty poor.

It is not just a US problem either. "Business friendly" governments and regulators all over the world are prepared to accept fairly weak arguments for tolerating monopolies, and seem to be quite happy to regard oligopoly as an adequate level of competition.

Any capitalist pollyanna who thinks that capitalism maximizes efficiency and gives the buyer what they want just isn't paying attention here.

Competition maximises efficiency. Perfect comeptition guarantees a pareto optimal outcome.

The problem is that the level of comeptition in the OS market, like many others is ....?

it's called vendor lock-in.

Vendor lock-in is the problem a particular consumer faces in switching products: for example because they have a lot of data they cannot transfer out of a proprietary format, or because their new camera has to use their existing lenses.

Although MS does benefit from vendor lock-in as well, the main reason for its monopoly are network effects (which it deliberately strengthens).

Lots of money, tough maths, and as secure as high-flying financial sector jobs are because demand for those skills is likely to keep increasing in the long term.

I see links images on Flickr on lots of websites. I cannot remember seeing any to Photobucket.

My guess is that Photobucket has more hits, but Flickr has greater reach.

The same problem can occur in a market with three or more suppliers - it jsut becomes less likely as the number of supplier increases. That is why it is called an Oligopoly.

They are not just picking stocks.

They are being used to do things like:

• devising portfolios for tracker funds.
• finding complex arbitrage opportunities.
• Managing risk and hedging

Incidentally the article is pretty useless: it does not actually have very much specific content, does it?

They are not just picking stocks.

They are being used to do things like:

• devising portfolios for tracker funds.
• finding complex arbitrage opportunities.
• Managing risk and hedging

Incidentally the article is pretty useless: it does not actually have very much specific content, does it?

Low barriers to entry are not important to capitalism, they are important to a free market economy.

What the telcos want (for their own industry, they would not want it for their suppliers) is capitalism without free markets.

Because the last mile is a natural monopoly the best solution is to regulate it to ensure competitors have access. In Europe this is done through local loop unbundling (mandatory throughout the EU) and the regulation of the sale of wholesale services.

Low barriers to entry are not important to capitalism, they are important to a free market economy.

What the telcos want (for their own industry, they would not want it for their suppliers) is capitalism without free markets.

Because the last mile is a natural monopoly the best solution is to regulate it to ensure competitors have access. In Europe this is done through local loop unbundling (mandatory throughout the EU) and the regulation of the sale of wholesale services.

It is called local loop unbundling and it is mandatory throughout the EU. It works much as you would expect and customers are now getting quite a good choice of telcos.

That said I think net neutrality would still need to be enforced because major telecoms companies would still have too much power by controlling access to customers. Part of the problem is that most of their customers would not realize that a tiered internet is in place and it would not affect their choice of ISP.

It is highly unlikely that Trolltech will want to go to the expense of having ADRs listed in the US.

Most European firms with US listings want to cancel them them because the cost of a US listing is high - complying with US regulatory requirements were always costly and Sarbanes-Oxley has made it a lot worse.

Cable and Wireless is forcing Americans with small shareholdings to sell so it can end its SEC registration.

This is actually a very good reason for Google not to issue guidance - because even they can not be sure of what will happen in the next quarter.

From the analysts' point of view, the uncertainty means that THEY are likely to get it wrong and lose clients money. It is preferable for Google to get it wrong so it is not the analysts fault.

In many other markets (including major ones like London) earnings guidance is not always given and analysts live with it. If you get guidance its good, if you do not you do your own forecast.

Yes I have worked as an analyst. Mostly buy-side although I started on the sell-side many years ago.

This is actually a very good reason for Google not to issue guidance - because even they can not be sure of what will happen in the next quarter.

From the analysts' point of view, the uncertainty means that THEY are likely to get it wrong and lose clients money. It is preferable for Google to get it wrong so it is not the analysts fault.

In many other markets (including major ones like London) earnings guidance is not always given and analysts live with it. If you get guidance its good, if you do not you do your own forecast.

Yes I have worked as an analyst. Mostly buy-side although I started on the sell-side many years ago.

What are you talking about? I can use any of:
http://toolbar.google.com/firefox/index.html
http://www.quirk.co.za/searchstatus/
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=262&application=firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=570&application=firefox
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=193&application=firefox

The Page Rank Status extension has been around for awhile.

Now with all this talk of SEO how do I work my sites in? Financial websites, in a discussion about SEO. Umm...OK, just admit I want to SEO them:

http://investmentideas.co.uk/ http://moneyterms.co.uk/

Actually I do not believe links from /. help very much - not if you already have any decent incoming links anyway.

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25161

The Inquirer is a fairly busy site and widely enough read to be a reasonable sampling of tech-savvy readers.

Few visitors to my main sites (UK oriented, investment related, mostly read during working hours) using Firefox. I think it is fairly obvious why.

On the other hand only 14 of the last 70 visitors to my blog used IE: about equal to Safari + Konqueror! Most of them are looking for my Wordpress plugins, both of which are of niche interest.

The community is very helpful and there is already a huge range of themes and plugins available. There are even several threads in the support forums on family blogs

A search for "EV/EBITDA" brought the page on EV/EBITDA on my .co.uk site up as the first result.

Shifting the slider to "research" pushed it down to sixth place but my page on EBITDA (obviously a less good match) was the third result.

Shifting the slider to shopping lost both my pages from the front page.

The normal Yahoo search brought up the same page at a different (old, now redirected) URL as the first result, as did some intermediate settings of the slider.

A search for "EV/EBITDA" brought the page on EV/EBITDA on my .co.uk site up as the first result.

Shifting the slider to "research" pushed it down to sixth place but my page on EBITDA (obviously a less good match) was the third result.

Shifting the slider to shopping lost both my pages from the front page.

The normal Yahoo search brought up the same page at a different (old, now redirected) URL as the first result, as did some intermediate settings of the slider.