People like you are going to keep the open source movement from advancing.
Dear Microsoft,
I wield a lot of influence. Apparently, I even have the power to keep the open source movement from advancing. Please cut me a big check and I will this little problem of yours go away.
learning curves measure how much learning (y axis) per how much experience (x axis). So, steep learning curves (which I would map onto your "high") mean "easy to learn", the opposite of what you are suggesting.
Unless someone put a gun to your head, I don't see how you were forced to do anything...
yep, and when people in our democracy decide that monopolies are not good for our industry, no one will force Microsoft to compete. They can be a monopoly that doesn't sell their their products, or they can make sweaters, or...
whine, whine, whine...
yep, and cut it out! If we inspect the reasons that we have laws and regulations, we discover that they are good reasons. You don't have to accept our laws and regulations, nobody is putting a gun to your head. You could starve yourself to death, you could depart from the computer industry, you could... nobody is holding a gun to your head.
The military uses many complex acronyms for just about everything, and they do lots of research including primates... didn't somebody once say that if you put a million monkeys at typewriters and tell them to create acronyms, they would eventually produce all of the recursive acronyms?
To that, I can only add that I expect that monkey team to win, place and show in the perl poetry contest, too.
We really need a new term to be able to remove this confusion.
The word people are using for a bunch of this stuff is "appliance". This generally refers to the "instant-on" category, where you don't see an OS "booting", and then you don't see a shell either, except to implement what is generally considered an Application. Problem is, appliance by itself is not distinguished from washing machines, so there's the urge to say information appliance which works great for palms and webpads but not for "gameboys" or who knows what. How about application appliances, or "app-apps". Catchy?
indentation is important for readability, I'd consider a program badly written if it didn't have correct indentatation, but to to make it significant is a mistake
Why is it a mistake? Why aren't the other programs that can't handle it considered mistakes instead? Seems to me that if I post something it ought to look like I pasted it, and any tools that violate this are broken. And, plenty of perl programs will break when posted anyway. A large subset will work, but by no means all... think about print Seems to me that the answer is: both. I think a language that requires indentation is a good thing, but have the syntax be redundant so that the indentation can be regenerated if it is lost; then build a "beautifier" into the language so it will recreate indented source. Yes, there are different indentation styles, but it's easy enough to get used to any one. My preference is for just following one simple rule: once you open something, everything on succeeding lines of it are indented till it is done. Most people do not indent this way, i.e. function header blocks usually have the curly brace out at the left margin (why?) and closing curlies are usually brought back out to line up with the opening line (why, esp. since that's not where the opening curly is?)
Clearly, the poison pill for you is the uncertainty, rather than the GPL itself. This is what I was referring to: it would seem to make sense for the embedded platform vendor to do all the leg and legal work on this so they could deliver software with no uncertainties attached. They might be able to contact all of the individual licensors that they include in their distro to get agreement in advance.
So, the question in this case is: is there any inherent problem with the GPL? It doesn't seem that there is because Transmeta has crossed this bridge. If there is no problem, that needs to be made clear by... ? by advocates who wish to see either linux or the GPL adopted.
But, Embedded Guy, have you looked at BSD licensed stuff at all? Also, who are you embed with? ha ha.
The article didn't touch on licensing. Distributing linux in an embedded system all takes place under the GPL, correct? As the purchaser of a hypothetical LinuxPilot, I'd be entitle also to receive the source. But, would it be the source to the OS... or everything? I mean, if the code is all in binary form in a ROM, and the OS never exposes itself directly, where does the app stop and the OS start? Do the developers simply have to observe a "chinese-wall" model for developing, keeping the OS in one set of directories and the "app" in the other, and linking/stitching them together only as the last step before ROMming?
It seems that economic model for open source that makes a lot of sense in the embedded market is for the chipmakers, who are not software companies particularly, to port an open OS and then give it to their OEMs to make a more attractive packaged offering for their chips. But in that case, wouldn't some embedded systems makers who are in hotly competitive areas prefer to have an OS without the "gotta hand over the source to our modifications" feature? I.e, isn't there room for the BSD license here? Linux and the *BSDs are essentially the same from the chipmakers standpoint. Hire a small staff, do/maintain a port, give it away with the chips... what do their customers want?
I prefer the GPL myself, but it does have to compete against the BSD license and I want to explore/understand the implications, since the embedded systems area is going to be so big.
It's because the server that your link is pointing to is sending either a "location" HTTP header, or a META redirect in HTML that has an instant timeout on it instead of a "this will take you there in N seconds".
Many people think that websites should not redirect quickly, but since mostly you would like to go directly, I think browsers should not keep redirected pages in the history list. Then the BACK button would always work. Probably too much to hope for that Mozilla will correct this? It's not released yet...
The "joke" I was making was that Microsoft would be the company to steal the idea because every idea Microsoft has had, they have stolen. I put joke in quotes because it's not a joke, it's serious, but I was using it in a dark humor sort of way.
That said, your point is right, you just draw the wrong conclusion: since Big Business uses them against Open Source, yes it is OK to use them back. That's not hypocritical, it's called tit-for-tat in game theory.
I am up in arms against Microsoft because they not only steal ideas, but because they are a monopolist, the worst anti-consumer thing one can be. Apple is an also-ran, but I'd be happy to use whatever means to bring them down too.
OK, thanks for the straight shooting. My second point there ("stop praising us and help!":) was better than cute: you're gonna see that sucker again because it seems irrefutable by "don't complain" theorists.
And I am stopping, but ya gotta do me a favor and get LinuxNewbie to change at least this line from their credo page [italics added]:):):)
Instead of
fuddling with the difficult to read 'man pages'and HOWTO files,...
just a joke, folks, anybody can make a typo!...see you all, around.
US Constitution supposedly guarantees the assumption of innocence
This is widely believed but for good or for bad, it is not true. You are entitled to the presumption of innocence in court, i.e. before the judge and jury at your trial. However, the rest of the system is entitled to presume you guilty with reasonable suspicion. That's why the police can get warrants to search, that's why they can arrest you and that's why they can hold you in jail if they think you are harmless but probably will run away.
I think morally and as a courtesy it is nice for the public at large to also give you a presumption of innocence, but it's clear that the only way to run the bureaucracy is pretty much they way that it is run.
I am not familiar with the Mitnick case specifics, but it is quite common for defendants to give up the right not to self incriminate as part of a plea-bargain. If he agreed to cooperate, for example, then I can see both sides of this dispute.
Also, it is interesting: encryption brings up a question that does not exist in meatspace so new law might be required: we don't give burglary tools back to burglars. Encrypted files have this weird property that you can hold them in your hands but not be able to tell what they are. I believe that if the government offers him immunity from any new prosecution, that he may not claim the right not to self incriminate because he would not be. Then it becomes a privacy issue and there really is very little law protecting actual privacy.
oh, good point, I accept the correction. I guess what I was thinking about was the Slashdot discussion of the LinuxNewbie review. That discussion didn't cover new ground, it was just the same old slanging about "they should be stopped." That tainted my impression of the whole topic. Sorry.
See, that's how you should respond to a post, directly, like nobody has to my original. And the moderator up above who "redundanted" me? That post covered new ground and answered plenty of specific questions people had. The post it was in response to was redundant, as were all of the flames I received. I guess honesty does not figure amongst your own traits (not you, treatment, I'm still talking to the moderator).
Be inventive about the features and patent the novel ideas. Hang on to the patents, and then when MS steals the code, enlist IBM's aid in fighting back
Also, have faith that in the long run, the open source version will win anyway. Think of it like forking: the main branch will prevail. Remember, Stallman started on the whole endeavor by de-closing features he wanted. It looked hopeless but it turns out it he was pulling on a thread that unravelled the whole wooly closed source sweater.
Gartner Group is staffed by high level people, consultanty types who make a lot of money off of the work done by their minions, junior analysts who do all of the work while they are being groomed to become the next generation of high level consultanty types.
This paper may reflect a lot of the values of the open and free software communities, and it may eventually have an impact and sink in at the top... but it is the way it is because the junior analyst who wrote it is a script kiddy of the analyst world and he was sitting in the back orifice, he downloaded the docs from the various sites, reformatted, hit "print" and carried it out to the front office : )
"open source" and "ui" have nothing to do with one another. Open source is winning the OS world because
source code is the programmers UI
programmers prefer open source
programmers control OSes
OSes are at the root of the tree and have the greatest commonality, i.e. it's the shared-est part of the software world and the beneficial econmics of sharing source showed up there first.
There's nothing about the vaunted Windows or the Mac end-user UIs that can't run on Unix and those UIs will show up there eventually when the open unixes complete their takeover of programmer mindshare. They're not there yet because
OSes don't have UIs, they have APIs so we don't get one for free and
existing end user UIs are OS dependent so they haven't been ported yet. Takes time.
Whether they will show up in an open sourced form or not depends on the economics of those markets, whether they
"need" to be proprietary to make them worthwhile for someone to develop for (think of verticals like airline reservations) or
are broadly allowed to be proprietary with some monopolist controlling them
I hope they are open source and I hope there's no monopoly, but open source is the "programmers UI" and GUIs are the end-user's UIs and they are on orthogonal coordinates.
--------------
So, all that said, as two asides:
there's much to the XWindows system to recommend it, and the Windows or Mac UIs on a "real" OS with the better client/server separation of XWindows will inevitably be a better Windows than Windows, and
can I say, sendmail.* has no business talking about UI to anybody. sendmail.cf was their UI, and as horrible as it was, the m4 stuff is in many ways worse : )
I was actually using "flavor of the decade" to refer to investment strategies, not particular companies. But, using it the way you interpreted it, the flaw is you have simply substituted the flavor company of the decade for the flavor company of the month. If you only look at "quality" companies based on past performance, you will never get to invest in new companies with new ideas that will take over markets from old dinosaurs. You will always dismiss the new "flavor" as "risky", so your money will be in IBM till after it's clear that Microsoft will cut them down to size, and then you'll sit in Microsoft till RedHat has cut them down, Intel till AMD, Howard Johnson's v. McDonalds, etc. etc.
You will earn money, but by not taking risks you will miss all new trends. If some newcomer got you to pay $7 for a bagel and coffee, it sounds to me like they know what they are doing, or maybe the rent on that streetcorner is high. What, you want to invest in people who get you to pay 26 cents for a 25 cent cup of coffee? I say, shop there a lot, but only invest a little. If Coke can change their price from 25 cents to 75 with changing times, why can't Apple Bagel change their prices as demand changes... or maybe, like Starbucks or Ben and Jerries, they'll make the new prices stick?
The people who run Apple Bagel have all of their money in it and they are paying very close attention to that market. I'm not endorsing their particular strategy. Rather, collectively all of the bagel companies have created and captured the value of the entire bagel market which you are dismissing as a bad investment. I'm saying it is worthy of its share of the market, and McDonalds its share. The problem with your advice is that it offers no particular formula but is based on your opinion, which you form over a long time instead of a short one.
I personally choose not to invest in foreign equities
If your investments are dollar denominated and you earn a healthy 15% return, but the dollar drops 10% against other currencies, guess what? You didn't earn 15%, you earned 5. In your retirement, you'll be the same as your neighbors, but not as well off as you could be. Yes, there are risks in the world economy, but the point is that "hiding" your head in the US sand does not protect you from currency risk. What about the giant size of the collective European economy, achieved from essentially zero at the end of WWII? You don't want to participate in that growth? What about Japan, phenomenal for decades, slow for the last one. What about China? You are going to ignore the growth of a huge economy. You won't realize what you missed since the US economy will also grow, but the rates of return in China will be higher.
Investment returns come from the productivity and ingenuity of people, everywhere they are allowed to create value. And what would your recommendation to Europeans be? To the Chinese? Put all their money in the US like you, or none of it? You are propounding a random collection of thoughts which happen to work OK because you live in a healthy economy, but they are not principles that can be followed all the time, anywhere in the world to maximize return and minimize risk.
Nobel Prize winners do not apply to the real world, and never will.
That's funny... Wall Street hires them, pays them, and listens to them, and hires their students. Wall Street pumps money into economies everywhere. When Wall Street asks for your opinion, it's so that they can design and market an investment flavor to you. Once again, this is not my opinion, this is what is learned and taught by and to the people who run the economy that you love to invest in.
Well, let me check my server logs... she's a single white female who seems to like puppies and chocolate. She sleeps around a bit, has good credit... ha ha, just kidding.
I'm trying to make the point that wanting to learn about people and their backgrounds and motives is just what Doubleclick does. I'm not saying I'm in favor of it, but folks who wish to regulate it have to realize that there are free speech implications. We are allowed to learn things and share what we learn, it's part of a free society.
The point is that you stay out of such a speculative market.
No, the point is to invest in the market portfolio. Don't blame me if you don't like the following advice, but you should know that a number of Nobel prizes have been awarded for it. You should spread your risky portolio around and invest in absolutely everything, with each fractional investment weighted by the weight of that security's market cap. That is, if the market valuation of IBM is.5% of all companies in the world, you should have.5% of your money in IBM (including bonds). I said "risk portfolio" because you may choose to have a portion long or short in debt to adjust the overall level of risk.
Now, since such a strategy is difficult to implement, you should be heartened to know that a portfolio of 40 or so diversified equities can be constructed that will perform the same as the market to a few digits of accuracy. This is what index funds are for. BTW, don't forget to include significant (at least 33%) foreign investment or currency risk will predominate.
Now, I realize I haven't explained the whole thing sufficiently to convince anyone, but perhaps some of it will sound like advice you've heard before, and knowing that top economists in the world actually agree on the answer will get a few people to stop listening to this month's flavor from the Mostly Fools who predominate in the personal finance biz.
you guys clearly know way more than average about finance and have a very good sense of it, so I don't want to criticize but you aren't using the language precisely enough and your quibbles keep requiring more quibbles. All in good fun, of course:)
the definition of an asset is something that you own which is expected to provide future benefit, i.e. future expectations are built into asset so you don't need to quibble about it. If you want to quibble, it's book values that are wrong unless the asset is marked to market as in your cash example.
and there isn't a separate discount for risk, but rather the discount rate must reflect the risk or you aren't discounting, you're fudging
it is the law that companies pay dividends, and there is only an exception to retain them for growth, so expecting future dividends is reasonable.
On that latter point, the definition of valuation that talks about dividiends is simply pointing out that the only way owners can get cash value from their equity is by selling the equity or by getting a dividend from the company (and I guess dissolution?), so valuation must be based on future dividends and future value of equity.
To continue, so I can get to my editorial ; ) Dividends are paid after tax earnings, but dividends are then immediately subject to a second round of personal income tax so investors hate getting them. Investors would rather choose when to sell their equity and they'd rather pay the capital gains tax which is lower. But the IRS wants its taxes so thats why dividends payouts are required. It's highly suspect for a company at one moment to not pay dividends because they're "needed for growth," and in the next moment to buy back equity because it's "undervalued". In actuality, stock buybacks are sleazing the tax law to convert income into capital gain so the dividend taxes don't need to get paid, and so that different investors can make different choices about the timing of the income. But it is even more sleazy for the government to tax income twice, so I hate to complain about this little bit of subterfuge. The real answer is to eliminate corporate income tax altogether and simply require taxes be paid on unrealized capital gain, but I guess that will never happen. If the tax rate were flat we could do the opposite: eliminate personal income tax and just tax businesses which would be massively simpler and would end up with the same tax revenue and less drain on the economy.
By the way, if you are a reader who has not really understood what we are talking about here: It is really unfortunate because most of this is fairly simple common sense arithmetic with a few basic concepts but accountants have invented all of this terminology which is more confusing than helpful till you digest it all. suggestion for slashdot certain kinds of the accumulated knowledge I see on Slashdot should be put into SlashFAQs for Finance, Accounting, etc. It's so sad to see it drift away into the past....
Coz Linuxnewbie did a great job of exposing LinuxOne's fake-distro.
LinuxOne's fake distro was exposed a LLLLOOOOONNGGG time ago. You may be an old-timer on LinuxNewbie, but you clearly have not been reading Slashdot. Want to see what'll show up as the next LinuxNewbie expose'? Get a little taste of the future! Come read this! hee hee.
you misinterpreted me a little. I was/am really interested in getting other people's opinions (about LinuxNewbie) so I wanted to let angry people know that I was still listening despite their best efforts to get me to stop. I meant what I said more as a parish priest than as a pope.
I am, however, infallible (ha ha, ok, too obvious a joke)
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Microsoft,
I wield a lot of influence. Apparently, I even have the power to keep the open source movement from advancing. Please cut me a big check and I will this little problem of yours go away.
Sincerely Yours,
Matthew Mann
OK, we won that whole open software thing. Hardware? Time to start stressing the importance of "free, as in beer" :) heh heh
what could be easier? Try doing that with Microsoft's windows.
with enough eyes, all new hardware is shallow : )
a high learning curve
learning curves measure how much learning (y axis) per how much experience (x axis). So, steep learning curves (which I would map onto your "high") mean "easy to learn", the opposite of what you are suggesting.
yep, and when people in our democracy decide that monopolies are not good for our industry, no one will force Microsoft to compete. They can be a monopoly that doesn't sell their their products, or they can make sweaters, or...
whine, whine, whine...
yep, and cut it out! If we inspect the reasons that we have laws and regulations, we discover that they are good reasons. You don't have to accept our laws and regulations, nobody is putting a gun to your head. You could starve yourself to death, you could depart from the computer industry, you could... nobody is holding a gun to your head.
To that, I can only add that I expect that monkey team to win, place and show in the perl poetry contest, too.
The word people are using for a bunch of this stuff is "appliance". This generally refers to the "instant-on" category, where you don't see an OS "booting", and then you don't see a shell either, except to implement what is generally considered an Application. Problem is, appliance by itself is not distinguished from washing machines, so there's the urge to say information appliance which works great for palms and webpads but not for "gameboys" or who knows what. How about application appliances, or "app-apps". Catchy?
Why is it a mistake? Why aren't the other programs that can't handle it considered mistakes instead? Seems to me that if I post something it ought to look like I pasted it, and any tools that violate this are broken. And, plenty of perl programs will break when posted anyway. A large subset will work, but by no means all... think about print Seems to me that the answer is: both. I think a language that requires indentation is a good thing, but have the syntax be redundant so that the indentation can be regenerated if it is lost; then build a "beautifier" into the language so it will recreate indented source. Yes, there are different indentation styles, but it's easy enough to get used to any one. My preference is for just following one simple rule: once you open something, everything on succeeding lines of it are indented till it is done. Most people do not indent this way, i.e. function header blocks usually have the curly brace out at the left margin (why?) and closing curlies are usually brought back out to line up with the opening line (why, esp. since that's not where the opening curly is?)
So, the question in this case is: is there any inherent problem with the GPL? It doesn't seem that there is because Transmeta has crossed this bridge. If there is no problem, that needs to be made clear by... ? by advocates who wish to see either linux or the GPL adopted.
But, Embedded Guy, have you looked at BSD licensed stuff at all? Also, who are you embed with? ha ha.
It seems that economic model for open source that makes a lot of sense in the embedded market is for the chipmakers, who are not software companies particularly, to port an open OS and then give it to their OEMs to make a more attractive packaged offering for their chips. But in that case, wouldn't some embedded systems makers who are in hotly competitive areas prefer to have an OS without the "gotta hand over the source to our modifications" feature? I.e, isn't there room for the BSD license here? Linux and the *BSDs are essentially the same from the chipmakers standpoint. Hire a small staff, do/maintain a port, give it away with the chips... what do their customers want?
I prefer the GPL myself, but it does have to compete against the BSD license and I want to explore/understand the implications, since the embedded systems area is going to be so big.
Many people think that websites should not redirect quickly, but since mostly you would like to go directly, I think browsers should not keep redirected pages in the history list. Then the BACK button would always work. Probably too much to hope for that Mozilla will correct this? It's not released yet...
That said, your point is right, you just draw the wrong conclusion: since Big Business uses them against Open Source, yes it is OK to use them back. That's not hypocritical, it's called tit-for-tat in game theory.
I am up in arms against Microsoft because they not only steal ideas, but because they are a monopolist, the worst anti-consumer thing one can be. Apple is an also-ran, but I'd be happy to use whatever means to bring them down too.
And I am stopping, but ya gotta do me a favor and get LinuxNewbie to change at least this line from their credo page [italics added] :) :) :)
just a joke, folks, anybody can make a typo! ...see you all, around.
This is widely believed but for good or for bad, it is not true. You are entitled to the presumption of innocence in court, i.e. before the judge and jury at your trial. However, the rest of the system is entitled to presume you guilty with reasonable suspicion. That's why the police can get warrants to search, that's why they can arrest you and that's why they can hold you in jail if they think you are harmless but probably will run away.
I think morally and as a courtesy it is nice for the public at large to also give you a presumption of innocence, but it's clear that the only way to run the bureaucracy is pretty much they way that it is run.
I am not familiar with the Mitnick case specifics, but it is quite common for defendants to give up the right not to self incriminate as part of a plea-bargain. If he agreed to cooperate, for example, then I can see both sides of this dispute.
Also, it is interesting: encryption brings up a question that does not exist in meatspace so new law might be required: we don't give burglary tools back to burglars. Encrypted files have this weird property that you can hold them in your hands but not be able to tell what they are. I believe that if the government offers him immunity from any new prosecution, that he may not claim the right not to self incriminate because he would not be. Then it becomes a privacy issue and there really is very little law protecting actual privacy.
See, that's how you should respond to a post, directly, like nobody has to my original. And the moderator up above who "redundanted" me? That post covered new ground and answered plenty of specific questions people had. The post it was in response to was redundant, as were all of the flames I received. I guess honesty does not figure amongst your own traits (not you, treatment, I'm still talking to the moderator).
Also, have faith that in the long run, the open source version will win anyway. Think of it like forking: the main branch will prevail. Remember, Stallman started on the whole endeavor by de-closing features he wanted. It looked hopeless but it turns out it he was pulling on a thread that unravelled the whole wooly closed source sweater.
This paper may reflect a lot of the values of the open and free software communities, and it may eventually have an impact and sink in at the top... but it is the way it is because the junior analyst who wrote it is a script kiddy of the analyst world and he was sitting in the back orifice, he downloaded the docs from the various sites, reformatted, hit "print" and carried it out to the front office : )
Right now, he's slaving on the next project.
There's nothing about the vaunted Windows or the Mac end-user UIs that can't run on Unix and those UIs will show up there eventually when the open unixes complete their takeover of programmer mindshare. They're not there yet because
Whether they will show up in an open sourced form or not depends on the economics of those markets, whether they
I hope they are open source and I hope there's no monopoly, but open source is the "programmers UI" and GUIs are the end-user's UIs and they are on orthogonal coordinates.
--------------
So, all that said, as two asides:
I was actually using "flavor of the decade" to refer to investment strategies, not particular companies. But, using it the way you interpreted it, the flaw is you have simply substituted the flavor company of the decade for the flavor company of the month. If you only look at "quality" companies based on past performance, you will never get to invest in new companies with new ideas that will take over markets from old dinosaurs. You will always dismiss the new "flavor" as "risky", so your money will be in IBM till after it's clear that Microsoft will cut them down to size, and then you'll sit in Microsoft till RedHat has cut them down, Intel till AMD, Howard Johnson's v. McDonalds, etc. etc.
You will earn money, but by not taking risks you will miss all new trends. If some newcomer got you to pay $7 for a bagel and coffee, it sounds to me like they know what they are doing, or maybe the rent on that streetcorner is high. What, you want to invest in people who get you to pay 26 cents for a 25 cent cup of coffee? I say, shop there a lot, but only invest a little. If Coke can change their price from 25 cents to 75 with changing times, why can't Apple Bagel change their prices as demand changes... or maybe, like Starbucks or Ben and Jerries, they'll make the new prices stick?
The people who run Apple Bagel have all of their money in it and they are paying very close attention to that market. I'm not endorsing their particular strategy. Rather, collectively all of the bagel companies have created and captured the value of the entire bagel market which you are dismissing as a bad investment. I'm saying it is worthy of its share of the market, and McDonalds its share. The problem with your advice is that it offers no particular formula but is based on your opinion, which you form over a long time instead of a short one.
I personally choose not to invest in foreign equities
If your investments are dollar denominated and you earn a healthy 15% return, but the dollar drops 10% against other currencies, guess what? You didn't earn 15%, you earned 5. In your retirement, you'll be the same as your neighbors, but not as well off as you could be. Yes, there are risks in the world economy, but the point is that "hiding" your head in the US sand does not protect you from currency risk. What about the giant size of the collective European economy, achieved from essentially zero at the end of WWII? You don't want to participate in that growth? What about Japan, phenomenal for decades, slow for the last one. What about China? You are going to ignore the growth of a huge economy. You won't realize what you missed since the US economy will also grow, but the rates of return in China will be higher.
Investment returns come from the productivity and ingenuity of people, everywhere they are allowed to create value. And what would your recommendation to Europeans be? To the Chinese? Put all their money in the US like you, or none of it? You are propounding a random collection of thoughts which happen to work OK because you live in a healthy economy, but they are not principles that can be followed all the time, anywhere in the world to maximize return and minimize risk.
Nobel Prize winners do not apply to the real world, and never will.
That's funny... Wall Street hires them, pays them, and listens to them, and hires their students. Wall Street pumps money into economies everywhere. When Wall Street asks for your opinion, it's so that they can design and market an investment flavor to you. Once again, this is not my opinion, this is what is learned and taught by and to the people who run the economy that you love to invest in.
Well, let me check my server logs... she's a single white female who seems to like puppies and chocolate. She sleeps around a bit, has good credit... ha ha, just kidding.
I'm trying to make the point that wanting to learn about people and their backgrounds and motives is just what Doubleclick does. I'm not saying I'm in favor of it, but folks who wish to regulate it have to realize that there are free speech implications. We are allowed to learn things and share what we learn, it's part of a free society.
you meant to say the cookies file, not the bookmarks.
No, the point is to invest in the market portfolio. Don't blame me if you don't like the following advice, but you should know that a number of Nobel prizes have been awarded for it. You should spread your risky portolio around and invest in absolutely everything, with each fractional investment weighted by the weight of that security's market cap. That is, if the market valuation of IBM is .5% of all companies in the world, you should have .5% of your money in IBM (including bonds). I said "risk portfolio" because you may choose to have a portion long or short in debt to adjust the overall level of risk.
Now, since such a strategy is difficult to implement, you should be heartened to know that a portfolio of 40 or so diversified equities can be constructed that will perform the same as the market to a few digits of accuracy. This is what index funds are for. BTW, don't forget to include significant (at least 33%) foreign investment or currency risk will predominate.
Now, I realize I haven't explained the whole thing sufficiently to convince anyone, but perhaps some of it will sound like advice you've heard before, and knowing that top economists in the world actually agree on the answer will get a few people to stop listening to this month's flavor from the Mostly Fools who predominate in the personal finance biz.
On that latter point, the definition of valuation that talks about dividiends is simply pointing out that the only way owners can get cash value from their equity is by selling the equity or by getting a dividend from the company (and I guess dissolution?), so valuation must be based on future dividends and future value of equity.
To continue, so I can get to my editorial ; ) Dividends are paid after tax earnings, but dividends are then immediately subject to a second round of personal income tax so investors hate getting them. Investors would rather choose when to sell their equity and they'd rather pay the capital gains tax which is lower. But the IRS wants its taxes so thats why dividends payouts are required. It's highly suspect for a company at one moment to not pay dividends because they're "needed for growth," and in the next moment to buy back equity because it's "undervalued". In actuality, stock buybacks are sleazing the tax law to convert income into capital gain so the dividend taxes don't need to get paid, and so that different investors can make different choices about the timing of the income. But it is even more sleazy for the government to tax income twice, so I hate to complain about this little bit of subterfuge. The real answer is to eliminate corporate income tax altogether and simply require taxes be paid on unrealized capital gain, but I guess that will never happen. If the tax rate were flat we could do the opposite: eliminate personal income tax and just tax businesses which would be massively simpler and would end up with the same tax revenue and less drain on the economy.
By the way, if you are a reader who has not really understood what we are talking about here: It is really unfortunate because most of this is fairly simple common sense arithmetic with a few basic concepts but accountants have invented all of this terminology which is more confusing than helpful till you digest it all. suggestion for slashdot certain kinds of the accumulated knowledge I see on Slashdot should be put into SlashFAQs for Finance, Accounting, etc. It's so sad to see it drift away into the past....
LinuxOne's fake distro was exposed a LLLLOOOOONNGGG time ago. You may be an old-timer on LinuxNewbie, but you clearly have not been reading Slashdot. Want to see what'll show up as the next LinuxNewbie expose'? Get a little taste of the future! Come read this! hee hee.
you misinterpreted me a little. I was/am really interested in getting other people's opinions (about LinuxNewbie) so I wanted to let angry people know that I was still listening despite their best efforts to get me to stop. I meant what I said more as a parish priest than as a pope.
I am, however, infallible (ha ha, ok, too obvious a joke)