A few years ago, the company I was working at decided to upgrade a few favoured individuals with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. There was no good reason for them to have it, other than looking cool, but they got it anyway.
The first one was installed, and was a great success. The user loved being able to move their keyboard and mouse without, uh, being limited by a cable. They didn't actually move it, but they liked the fact that they could. Or maybe it was the fact that their desk didn't have any wires cluttering it up. Whatever it was, they loved it.
So the second one was installed, on a desk maybe ten metres away from the first.
It was a disaster. The two sets of devices conflicted with each other. Basically, the first one to switch on in the morning got control of both computers. When the second one was turned on, it found the devices on the other desk instead of its own ones, and then anything the first user did was echoed on the second machine as well.
It didn't take the engineering team long to fix the problem -- the two sets of devices were set to the same ID -- but it did nothing to inspire confidence. What that incident tells me is that if I want to hack these devices, all I need is a computer with a compatible receiver with the same ID, and hide it somewhere in range of their desk.
Things may have improved since then, but frankly I don't see the need for these devices to be wireless (especially on a desktop computer); no matter how good they make them, they'll still be an open security hole because the signals will always be available outside of your control.
This applies to any wireless device. But some wireless devices are more useful than others. For example, a mobile phone is a good use of wireless technology because it provides significant usability improvement over a wired phone. But for me a device like a wireless keyboard really doesn't provide enough of an improvement over a wired one to justify the security implications from using it.
Nah, it doesn't cost them anything like that. That's probably what it would cost if every one of those "feeling lucky" people had instead clicked on an ad, but let's be honest here, that would never have happened.
Those people who use it are (a) people who already know that the result they want is the first one and wouldn't click anything else anyway. (b) people doing silly google-hacks, like "miserable failure", or whatever. (c) people who will come back any use google's regular search anyway for more results once they've seen the "lucky" one.
For all these people, using the "feeling lucky" button isn't stopping them clicking on any ads, because they wouldn't click them anyway. In fact, it is actually likely to be adding to their brand awareness of google, and thus making them more likely to come back to google for other searches where they might click on ads.
So yes, it might lose them a *few* ad clicks on the *actual* search involved, but long term, those people will be back and will click on other ads. Google isn't losing anything from this.
I don't know the details of this story, whether there's any merit in the school's arguments or not, because I haven't read the original blog (and even if I did, I'd be reading a one-sided biased view), but they are being seen to have gone in heavy-handed with the lawyers, and the result is that a small local dispute has been syndicated in Slashdot, and probably plenty of places elsewhere.
Effectively by calling in the lawyers, they've turned a small amount of bad publicity into a very large amount of much worse publicity. This is something I've noticed happening a lot lately (most obviously with the RIAA etc).
So regardless of the merits of the case, the lesson seems to be if you're considering calling the lawyers, you'd be wise to try less drastic steps first to get your point across. And if you're on the receiving end of a nasty letter from the lawyers, blog about it in a way that focuses on how it affects your rights, and make sure Slashdot gets to hear it.
The thing is SCOX has a market cap of around $5m at present. So a hostile takeover would cost considerably less than $36m. So how is this good value fo r the equity company and its investors?
Because they're just buying the assets and not the debts, bad name, lawsuits, etc. SCO gets to keep all that junk.;-)
This is basically a private equity buyout. Private Equity is the big buzzword in the world of big money at the moment.
What generally happens is that the buyer sees a company which it feels is underperforming and has a depressed share price, and offers a good enough price for it that the shareholders can't refuse.
The money all comes from bank loans, which are secured on the company being bought -- a bit like a mortgage is secured on the house you're buying -- so as long as the bank agrees to the loan, it doesn't actually cost the buying company anything up-front.
Once the purchase has gone through, they buying company needs to get the money to pay off the loan. This money comes from making savings at the company they've bought. Typically this would mean asset stripping, re-organising, selling off product lines and divisions, or whatever else it takes to make the money back. Wholesale redundancies are also almost certain.
When a reasonably solid, viable company is bought out by private equity, they usually end up getting transformed into a much leaner and smaller company, and getting sold on again in the space of a couple of years.
When it happens to a company that isn't solid and viable, the private equity firm will generally just sell off all the assets of the company, aiming to make a profit on the purchase price, and then quietly close down the husk that remains. This is what I predict will happen in this case. The buyer is looking at the assets -- the Unix operating system, the patents, licenses, and all the rest, and they've decided that it's worth more than $36 million.
Of course, the strategy only works if there are people out there willing to buy the assets for more than $36 million. I suspect there probably are. Even with the lawsuit results, there is enough left to cherry pick.
You can be pretty certain they'll get rid of the lawsuits as quickly as they can; they're paying a block of lawyer fees up front to secure the purchase, but they won't want to pay any more, as it'll eat into the profitability of their bid. The law suits would require a long-term strategy, but a buyout like this will be geared solely toward making a short-term profit.
The asset management company certainly won't be buying any of their debts, so the $36 million goes to the remaining SCO company (SCO Mobile? I guess they'll rename themselves to try to get rid of the burden of the name SCO). Pays off their lawyer bills, pays off their debts to Novell and other creditors, maybe even leaves them with a few pennies to rub together at the end if they're lucky, leaving SCO Mobile as a theoretically viable (albeit not particularly valuable) company.
What other industry is there that abuses their customers like this?
Hmmmmm......
Music, film, automobile, fuel, aviation, big retail, banking..... I'd better stop before I get too depressed.
Let's be honest here -- you're pretty much getting taken for a ride every time you buy anything these days. Unless you spend all your money at the local privately-run organic farm store.
The thing is here that the US has been very very aggressive in enforcing WTO rules when they're in its favour. It's all very well saying how terrible the WTO is in this case, but trust me, the rest of the world has been saying pretty much the same thing every time a ruling goes the other way, and the US wins fair trade in something somewhere.
The fact here is that the US allows online gambling. But only if the gambling company is based in the US. The justification given is that gaming companies outside the US aren't regulated, but this is a false argument: external companies could easily be required to conform to US regulations when they operate in the US, but the US has chosen to ban them entirely. This is against the rules. Every other country in the world that allows online gambling is forced to allow US online gambling companies to operate in their country. Why should the US be any different?
To put it another way, let's apply it to another industry.... let's say.... selling software online. And put the same conditions in place: Now US-based software companies are free to sell in the US, provided they conform to US law, but offshore all software companies are banned from selling in the US, on the grounds that they might not conform to US law.
I work for a software house based outside the US that sells software to US-based firms. If we were banned from operating in the US, while our US-based competitors were allowed to operate there, as well as compete with us in our own country, we would be justifiably upset. This is the position that offshore gambling companies are in now. They're happy to comply with US regulation, but that just isn't enough; the US won't allow them to operate.
The point is that for fair trade, the same rules must be applied to onshore and offshore companies. If the US did this, there would be no suit.
Are we talking about something they see as imminent -- could happen at any moment? Or are we talking about geological time scales -- it'll happen in a few hundred thousand years, give or take? Or do they mean cosmological scales -- where 'about to happen' means somewhere in the next ten or twenty million years?
Or is the whole question of when a silly thing to ask, given that they're talking about the end of time as sequential/chronological?
Trackballs were never *that* popular, especially as a stand-alone device, but changes in mouse technology have made them more expensive to produce, and therefore even less popular. Alow me to explain....
Once upon a time, all mice worked by having a small ball in their underbelly which rolled as you moved the mouse around. This is basically the same as a trackball upside-down.
For this reason, companies that produced mice could produce trackballs very easily using most of the same components, and therefore even though mice were more popular, trackballs were not overly expensive.
Lately, optical mice have taken over. These work entirely differently, and as a result, factories that produce these cannot use the same components to make trackballs. So costs of production go up while demand remains low, and there's no longer any synergy for companies to make mice and trackballs together, so no-one bothers to make them any more.
How did this money making scam make it to slashdot???
This is just some guy using Google's adsense to provide search results, and probably make a load of cash out of it. The black colour/power saving thing is just a way of getting you to visit; the whole point here is that once you start using this site as your search engine, you'll start clicking the paid ads, and the owner will start making money (and probably a *lot* of money, given how many times I've seen it mentioned), from a site that is basically nothing more than a single, very simple HTML page, with a google search box on it.
So, to reiterate: The email that is doing the rounds advertising this site contains several lies:
1) It claims that Google has set the site up to show the power savings; this is not true, it's just some guy with an adsense account.
2) It claims the search result page is the same as normal google; this is not true, it's the same as a normal adsense search results page, but not the same as normal google, because it's laid out differently, and doesn't have links to things like google images.
3) It claims a noticeable power saving from using it; this is not really true either, because it only really applies to CRT monitors, and even then you'd only really notice it with older CRTs, so it's irrelevant for most of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless keyboards? Pah, I'll never trust 'em.
A few years ago, the company I was working at decided to upgrade a few favoured individuals with a wireless keyboard/mouse combo. There was no good reason for them to have it, other than looking cool, but they got it anyway.
The first one was installed, and was a great success. The user loved being able to move their keyboard and mouse without, uh, being limited by a cable. They didn't actually move it, but they liked the fact that they could. Or maybe it was the fact that their desk didn't have any wires cluttering it up. Whatever it was, they loved it.
So the second one was installed, on a desk maybe ten metres away from the first.
It was a disaster. The two sets of devices conflicted with each other. Basically, the first one to switch on in the morning got control of both computers. When the second one was turned on, it found the devices on the other desk instead of its own ones, and then anything the first user did was echoed on the second machine as well.
It didn't take the engineering team long to fix the problem -- the two sets of devices were set to the same ID -- but it did nothing to inspire confidence. What that incident tells me is that if I want to hack these devices, all I need is a computer with a compatible receiver with the same ID, and hide it somewhere in range of their desk.
Things may have improved since then, but frankly I don't see the need for these devices to be wireless (especially on a desktop computer); no matter how good they make them, they'll still be an open security hole because the signals will always be available outside of your control.
This applies to any wireless device. But some wireless devices are more useful than others. For example, a mobile phone is a good use of wireless technology because it provides significant usability improvement over a wired phone. But for me a device like a wireless keyboard really doesn't provide enough of an improvement over a wired one to justify the security implications from using it.
Nah, it doesn't cost them anything like that. That's probably what it would cost if every one of those "feeling lucky" people had instead clicked on an ad, but let's be honest here, that would never have happened.
Those people who use it are
(a) people who already know that the result they want is the first one and wouldn't click anything else anyway.
(b) people doing silly google-hacks, like "miserable failure", or whatever.
(c) people who will come back any use google's regular search anyway for more results once they've seen the "lucky" one.
For all these people, using the "feeling lucky" button isn't stopping them clicking on any ads, because they wouldn't click them anyway. In fact, it is actually likely to be adding to their brand awareness of google, and thus making them more likely to come back to google for other searches where they might click on ads.
So yes, it might lose them a *few* ad clicks on the *actual* search involved, but long term, those people will be back and will click on other ads. Google isn't losing anything from this.
I don't know the details of this story, whether there's any merit in the school's arguments or not, because I haven't read the original blog (and even if I did, I'd be reading a one-sided biased view), but they are being seen to have gone in heavy-handed with the lawyers, and the result is that a small local dispute has been syndicated in Slashdot, and probably plenty of places elsewhere. Effectively by calling in the lawyers, they've turned a small amount of bad publicity into a very large amount of much worse publicity. This is something I've noticed happening a lot lately (most obviously with the RIAA etc). So regardless of the merits of the case, the lesson seems to be if you're considering calling the lawyers, you'd be wise to try less drastic steps first to get your point across. And if you're on the receiving end of a nasty letter from the lawyers, blog about it in a way that focuses on how it affects your rights, and make sure Slashdot gets to hear it.
The thing is SCOX has a market cap of around $5m at present. So a hostile takeover would cost considerably less than $36m. So how is this good value fo r the equity company and its investors? Because they're just buying the assets and not the debts, bad name, lawsuits, etc. SCO gets to keep all that junk. ;-)
This is basically a private equity buyout. Private Equity is the big buzzword in the world of big money at the moment. What generally happens is that the buyer sees a company which it feels is underperforming and has a depressed share price, and offers a good enough price for it that the shareholders can't refuse. The money all comes from bank loans, which are secured on the company being bought -- a bit like a mortgage is secured on the house you're buying -- so as long as the bank agrees to the loan, it doesn't actually cost the buying company anything up-front. Once the purchase has gone through, they buying company needs to get the money to pay off the loan. This money comes from making savings at the company they've bought. Typically this would mean asset stripping, re-organising, selling off product lines and divisions, or whatever else it takes to make the money back. Wholesale redundancies are also almost certain. When a reasonably solid, viable company is bought out by private equity, they usually end up getting transformed into a much leaner and smaller company, and getting sold on again in the space of a couple of years. When it happens to a company that isn't solid and viable, the private equity firm will generally just sell off all the assets of the company, aiming to make a profit on the purchase price, and then quietly close down the husk that remains. This is what I predict will happen in this case. The buyer is looking at the assets -- the Unix operating system, the patents, licenses, and all the rest, and they've decided that it's worth more than $36 million. Of course, the strategy only works if there are people out there willing to buy the assets for more than $36 million. I suspect there probably are. Even with the lawsuit results, there is enough left to cherry pick. You can be pretty certain they'll get rid of the lawsuits as quickly as they can; they're paying a block of lawyer fees up front to secure the purchase, but they won't want to pay any more, as it'll eat into the profitability of their bid. The law suits would require a long-term strategy, but a buyout like this will be geared solely toward making a short-term profit. The asset management company certainly won't be buying any of their debts, so the $36 million goes to the remaining SCO company (SCO Mobile? I guess they'll rename themselves to try to get rid of the burden of the name SCO). Pays off their lawyer bills, pays off their debts to Novell and other creditors, maybe even leaves them with a few pennies to rub together at the end if they're lucky, leaving SCO Mobile as a theoretically viable (albeit not particularly valuable) company.
What other industry is there that abuses their customers like this?
Hmmmmm......
Music, film, automobile, fuel, aviation, big retail, banking..... I'd better stop before I get too depressed.
Let's be honest here -- you're pretty much getting taken for a ride every time you buy anything these days. Unless you spend all your money at the local privately-run organic farm store.
Oh, @#$! -- Slashdot ate my carriage-returns. I didn't type it like that, honest! :-(
The thing is here that the US has been very very aggressive in enforcing WTO rules when they're in its favour. It's all very well saying how terrible the WTO is in this case, but trust me, the rest of the world has been saying pretty much the same thing every time a ruling goes the other way, and the US wins fair trade in something somewhere. The fact here is that the US allows online gambling. But only if the gambling company is based in the US. The justification given is that gaming companies outside the US aren't regulated, but this is a false argument: external companies could easily be required to conform to US regulations when they operate in the US, but the US has chosen to ban them entirely. This is against the rules. Every other country in the world that allows online gambling is forced to allow US online gambling companies to operate in their country. Why should the US be any different? To put it another way, let's apply it to another industry.... let's say.... selling software online. And put the same conditions in place: Now US-based software companies are free to sell in the US, provided they conform to US law, but offshore all software companies are banned from selling in the US, on the grounds that they might not conform to US law. I work for a software house based outside the US that sells software to US-based firms. If we were banned from operating in the US, while our US-based competitors were allowed to operate there, as well as compete with us in our own country, we would be justifiably upset. This is the position that offshore gambling companies are in now. They're happy to comply with US regulation, but that just isn't enough; the US won't allow them to operate. The point is that for fair trade, the same rules must be applied to onshore and offshore companies. If the US did this, there would be no suit.
I'd like to know how they define "about to flip".
Are we talking about something they see as imminent -- could happen at any moment?
Or are we talking about geological time scales -- it'll happen in a few hundred thousand years, give or take?
Or do they mean cosmological scales -- where 'about to happen' means somewhere in the next ten or twenty million years?
Or is the whole question of when a silly thing to ask, given that they're talking about the end of time as sequential/chronological?
Trackballs were never *that* popular, especially as a stand-alone device, but changes in mouse technology have made them more expensive to produce, and therefore even less popular. Alow me to explain.... Once upon a time, all mice worked by having a small ball in their underbelly which rolled as you moved the mouse around. This is basically the same as a trackball upside-down. For this reason, companies that produced mice could produce trackballs very easily using most of the same components, and therefore even though mice were more popular, trackballs were not overly expensive. Lately, optical mice have taken over. These work entirely differently, and as a result, factories that produce these cannot use the same components to make trackballs. So costs of production go up while demand remains low, and there's no longer any synergy for companies to make mice and trackballs together, so no-one bothers to make them any more.
How did this money making scam make it to slashdot??? This is just some guy using Google's adsense to provide search results, and probably make a load of cash out of it. The black colour/power saving thing is just a way of getting you to visit; the whole point here is that once you start using this site as your search engine, you'll start clicking the paid ads, and the owner will start making money (and probably a *lot* of money, given how many times I've seen it mentioned), from a site that is basically nothing more than a single, very simple HTML page, with a google search box on it. So, to reiterate: The email that is doing the rounds advertising this site contains several lies: 1) It claims that Google has set the site up to show the power savings; this is not true, it's just some guy with an adsense account. 2) It claims the search result page is the same as normal google; this is not true, it's the same as a normal adsense search results page, but not the same as normal google, because it's laid out differently, and doesn't have links to things like google images. 3) It claims a noticeable power saving from using it; this is not really true either, because it only really applies to CRT monitors, and even then you'd only really notice it with older CRTs, so it's irrelevant for most of us.