Hand it to Ballmer: the guy was quick on his feet and was smart enough to find some good cover. Plenty of CEO's would have gotten a heart attack just rounding the corner of that desk.
I'm more scared of them supporting ODF than I am of OOXML. How do we know they aren't going to try to do what they successfully did to Netscape. They could easily add a bunch of their own stuff into ODF so that nothing but Office would be able to read the ODF files Office puts out.
If however they are really trying to comply with ODF then hats off to MS for being serious about embracing standards.
The problem is that these things aren't build it and forget it. They have moving parts and need maintenance. And maintenance means you need them to be easy to get to. Also deserts will have a tendency to make things break more often.
Using upgraded OS "Linux" so that viruses are not a problem. Result? Viruses? I don't have no stinking viruses!
I wish people would stop spreading this around. There ARE viruses for Linux and people should take care to keep their Linux boxes safe. In fact, taking over a Linux box is considered a big win because of their long uptimes without a reboot.
Yeah Linux is safer than Windows but it isn't bulletproof. Get yourself ClamAV or something else and keep your machine and data safe.
Why should India waste their time, money and resources, and degrade themselves in the eyes of their people and other countries by supporting US
For a bunch of people that keep demanding the US let more and more of you guys in, you sure like to complain about how bad the US is. If it's so bad then stop coming here.
Notice how the people on that Microsoft site don't look anything like programmers? First of all, there are far more women than men. More than half are black or hispanic. In my life I have only met 1 black guy who programmed. And only 1 asian in the picture. They are also all smiling instead of looking depressed. They are all well dressed and clean looking (not even one of them has a cow lick.)
But as a computer science graduate and a UNIX user who cares a lot about operating system design, I think Vista is a huge step up...I think Vista is a huge step up
You think it is a step up to provide drastically lower performance and use drastically more system resources? And forget about how awful that security stuff is. I have to run most of my older programs as administrator anyway since Vista is a pile of crap and won't let them save files if I dont run them that way.
Please note that I always used to be a MS user. Mainly because I have some apps that only run on MS. Vista was the straw that broke this camel's back.
I finally got off my ass and read up on Linux and installed it. I was shocked that it took less time to get Linux installed and running than it was to get Vista running on a machine where it was preinstalled!!! I had to go through a maze of registrations and tons of other dialogs on Vista before it would run. I remember cursing like a sailor in the middle of it and driving off to the local bar to cool off (im lucky and have a bar a nice 5 minute walk away from me.) I went through fewer (I am NOT making this up) dialog boxes installing Linux than I did to do all the dumb registrations on Vista.
I will probably never go back to MS again. They offer nothing over Linux that is worth an extra $100 - in fact they offer less.
I agree that Microsoft is futilely flailing in trying to beat down Linux.
When Linux gets a 5% market share (right now it is less than 1%) of the desktop market, I'll start believing it. Note that I am a happy Linux user, but let's get real about their market share.
If Microsoft ever faces stiff competition, it will likely come from Apple and not Linux.
Ok, Ill make one last attempt at you, but I doubt it will work.
I'm saying that the market price may not actually reflect something's real worth. Things can be over- or under-valued, yes? And we wouldn't want to sell them if we think they're undervalued, yes? Not even for a higher-but-still-undervalued price?
By undervalued or overvalued you are talking about what you think the price will be in the future relative to the price today. The price of oil is around $120/barrel. It is neither overpriced nor under-priced.
Anyway, the problem here is that you're a speculator who thinks he's an investor, so you don't get the distinction.
Which would you rather invest in? Investment A: will give you 10% interest after 24 hours. Investment B:will give you 10% interest 10 years from now. I don't know about you but I'll take investment A. MS is offering an immediate and guaranteed double digit return to Yahoo shareholders. What is Yahoo offering: "well maybe at some time in the future, we dont know when, we think the price will possibly be worth more than what Microsoft is guaranteeing." Yeah, I'm a real "speculator" for wanting the guaranteed and immediate double digit return on investment. But you are a smart "investor" who is gambling that at some point in the future a company that continuously finds new ways to lose market share will eventually give a great return.
It's also humorous that you think that investing in the stock market isn't speculative. Newsflash, but just because the US stock market has averaged 10% over its lifetime is no guarantee that you'll make a profit in stocks. Even Buffet is speculating. He's a big Coca-Cola investor. Who knows? Maybe some day in the future Coke could get involved in some scandal and the stock folds (unlikely but its still possible.)
And, incidentally, if you think that that's true, then you'd be leery of the deal too, since half its value comes in the form of an interest in a company which is overpaying for Yahoo
God you are dense. They are offering investors a PREMIUM over the price of the shares in order to make the deal more likely. Picture a person in a rush to move out of the state (maybe he got a good job offer somewehre out of state)..he might very well sell his house under the market value in order to convert the transaction more quickly. In other words he's willing to take X dollars for his house today than wait 2 months for 1.25X dollars. Microsoft is willing to pay a premium to investors to complete the deal quickly so that they can quickly use Yahoo to compete against Google.
If you don't do your own research, sure, you could trust the share price for your valuation, but that's likely to be incorrect in any timeframe longer than a couple weeks. That's the thinking of a speculator, not an investor.
That's so wrong its scary. Find me a person that is willing to buy or sell a stock (or anything) at a price different than the market price and you have created a money pump.
An investor -- like the person you vehemently disagreed with at the start of this thread -- is concerned with "what the company does in the longer run." Your counterargument essentially endorsed stock price speculation, rather than doing your own evaluation based on a company's fundamentals.
How about you give the full quote, where the guy said that the value of a company to an investor isn't the value of the share but what a company does in the long run. As an investor I could care less if the company invests in solar energy or decides to go into the edible underwear business. The return on my investment (dividend + stock price) is ALL I CARE ABOUT. You apparently measure return on investment in another way.
Then you go into a long story about how completely inferior dividends are. Listening to you talk, you'd think a person was about to declare bankruptcy if he is getting a 20% return on investment and it's coming from a dividend. But let's ignore that and take a look at your blatant lack of reading comprehension. When did I say that a company's stock price going up is inferior to a dividend? I said "nice stock price and/or dividend". What's funny is you keep saying that I keep trying to change what I said.
Buffett does not invest in stocks that "will grow their stock price" -- that's thinking like a high-trade-volume speculator. He invests in companies that he epxects will grow their profitability, with a rising stock price as a happy result.
Are you being serious with this, or do you not understand basic logic? Let's check what you just wrote (I'll add some variables to make things easier.)
A = Buffet owns stocks that have grown their stock price.
B = Buffet owns companies that have increased profitability.
NOT A (your first sentence)
B and (B => A)
Lets simpligy and see what we get
B and (B => A) and NOT A
B AND A AND NOT A = FALSE
But if you had used some common sense you wouldn't have such warped logic. How does Buffet make money investing? Answer: the stocks he buys go up in price. How does that differ from my opinion?
There's this Warren Buffett [wikipedia.org] guy... maybe you've heard of him? He's supposed to be doing okay, though it sounds like you probably have a better handle on the stock market than he does.
Please get basic thinking skills.
Warren Buffet invests in companies that pay a nice dividend or that he believes will grow their stock price. How is that any different than what I said? That's right, it isn't.
If you want to just tinker with the digital side and you are willing to learn vhdl or verilog, then get a dev board from Xilinx or Altera. Some of them come with lcd screens, so you can have fun sending output to the screen.
It's corny but there's a lot more of a sense of accomplishment when you get your first LED light blinking on and off than when you write your first Hello World program.
Shareholder value is not equal to stock value, its about what the company does in the longer run.
NO! Who the hell invests their money for anything other than a nice stock price and/or dividend? If I am a Yahoo investor, and Microsoft offers to buy my shares at a nice premium over the market price, then yes I would like to sell them the shares.
Do you honestly expect Yahoo stock to hit the price MS was offering in a reasonable amount of time? I doubt it, the way that Google is dancing rings around them.
MSFT is very aware of the problems facing them, and the credit needs to go to the top dog -- Ballmer.
Their major problem is that they are losing market share. (When did anyone think that Apple would control 7% of the OS market?) But instead of trying to focus on fixing up the problems with their operating system, Balmer is focusing all the company's attention on trying to acquire Yahoo so that he can do battle against Google.
People are ONLY using MS since it enjoys the benefits of a monopoly. If MS starts losing any more share, then there could be a snowball effect of people dumping their stuff.
If both these restrictions are removed, companies will not be able to afford to pay their employees less than the fair market value.
I hate when people make that argument. It is simple economics: increase the supply of something (labor) and the cost (wages) will decrease. The statistics of stagnant US tech wages support my view of there being no shortage whatsoever of labor.
How is turning ethanol to gasoline supposed to help the food shortage the ethanol production makes?
They are claiming that they can convert any plant with this, not just food plants. So you could just grab some weeds and make fuel out of them, as opposed to growing crops which is far more expensive(weeding, insects.)
It also doesn't take into account any gains the software industry itself makes from OSS.
Exactly right. Consider the benefits OSS gives to companies making embedded hardware. First of all, you dont have to buy a bunch of expensive development tools. And more importantly you don't have to shell out $2-3 for EVERY SINGLE device you produce.
Linux and OSS have been the greatest boon to embedded hardware I can think of in recent times. It's no surprise that we have seen an explosion in the number of interesting consumer devices that have come on the market with the release of Linux. A lot more people would be out of work without them and consumers would have a lot less choice.
Amen to that. I went to Caltech. Good Lord if you could have seen the bizarre relationships that were going on there. You'd have a decent looking guy going out with a fat monstrosity (Im talking about things like 150lb guys going out with 200 lb girls.)
I know of at least 2 guys (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP, AND NO IT WASN"T ME) that turned gay since they couldn't take it any more. The dances were one of the saddest things you could imagine. There would literally be one girl dancing with a ring of 3 or 4 guys around her.
A couple of times I would manage to get one of them to go out with me. It was worse than being alone. Guys would be jumping out of everywhere trying to steal your girl from you. God that school was a joke
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Hand it to Ballmer: the guy was quick on his feet and was smart enough to find some good cover. Plenty of CEO's would have gotten a heart attack just rounding the corner of that desk.
I'm more scared of them supporting ODF than I am of OOXML. How do we know they aren't going to try to do what they successfully did to Netscape. They could easily add a bunch of their own stuff into ODF so that nothing but Office would be able to read the ODF files Office puts out.
If however they are really trying to comply with ODF then hats off to MS for being serious about embracing standards.
The problem is that these things aren't build it and forget it. They have moving parts and need maintenance. And maintenance means you need them to be easy to get to. Also deserts will have a tendency to make things break more often.
I wish people would stop spreading this around. There ARE viruses for Linux and people should take care to keep their Linux boxes safe. In fact, taking over a Linux box is considered a big win because of their long uptimes without a reboot.
Yeah Linux is safer than Windows but it isn't bulletproof. Get yourself ClamAV or something else and keep your machine and data safe.
For a bunch of people that keep demanding the US let more and more of you guys in, you sure like to complain about how bad the US is. If it's so bad then stop coming here.
I've noticed the same thing. Why is there this love for Google? Is it because they are seen as a threat to Microsoft?
Who cares? Why are they giving out people's info ? "Don't be evil, unless there's ca$h in it."
Notice how the people on that Microsoft site don't look anything like programmers? First of all, there are far more women than men. More than half are black or hispanic. In my life I have only met 1 black guy who programmed. And only 1 asian in the picture. They are also all smiling instead of looking depressed. They are all well dressed and clean looking (not even one of them has a cow lick.)
If Google gains any more market share we'll be able to see office chairs orbiting the Earth with it.
You think it is a step up to provide drastically lower performance and use drastically more system resources? And forget about how awful that security stuff is. I have to run most of my older programs as administrator anyway since Vista is a pile of crap and won't let them save files if I dont run them that way.
Please note that I always used to be a MS user. Mainly because I have some apps that only run on MS. Vista was the straw that broke this camel's back.
I finally got off my ass and read up on Linux and installed it. I was shocked that it took less time to get Linux installed and running than it was to get Vista running on a machine where it was preinstalled!!! I had to go through a maze of registrations and tons of other dialogs on Vista before it would run. I remember cursing like a sailor in the middle of it and driving off to the local bar to cool off (im lucky and have a bar a nice 5 minute walk away from me.) I went through fewer (I am NOT making this up) dialog boxes installing Linux than I did to do all the dumb registrations on Vista.
I will probably never go back to MS again. They offer nothing over Linux that is worth an extra $100 - in fact they offer less.
When Linux gets a 5% market share (right now it is less than 1%) of the desktop market, I'll start believing it. Note that I am a happy Linux user, but let's get real about their market share.
If Microsoft ever faces stiff competition, it will likely come from Apple and not Linux.
Ok, Ill make one last attempt at you, but I doubt it will work.
I'm saying that the market price may not actually reflect something's real worth. Things can be over- or under-valued, yes? And we wouldn't want to sell them if we think they're undervalued, yes? Not even for a higher-but-still-undervalued price?By undervalued or overvalued you are talking about what you think the price will be in the future relative to the price today. The price of oil is around $120/barrel. It is neither overpriced nor under-priced.
Anyway, the problem here is that you're a speculator who thinks he's an investor, so you don't get the distinction.Which would you rather invest in?
Investment A: will give you 10% interest after 24 hours.
Investment B:will give you 10% interest 10 years from now.
I don't know about you but I'll take investment A. MS is offering an immediate and guaranteed double digit return to Yahoo shareholders. What is Yahoo offering: "well maybe at some time in the future, we dont know when, we think the price will possibly be worth more than what Microsoft is guaranteeing." Yeah, I'm a real "speculator" for wanting the guaranteed and immediate double digit return on investment. But you are a smart "investor" who is gambling that at some point in the future a company that continuously finds new ways to lose market share will eventually give a great return.
It's also humorous that you think that investing in the stock market isn't speculative. Newsflash, but just because the US stock market has averaged 10% over its lifetime is no guarantee that you'll make a profit in stocks. Even Buffet is speculating. He's a big Coca-Cola investor. Who knows? Maybe some day in the future Coke could get involved in some scandal and the stock folds (unlikely but its still possible.)
And, incidentally, if you think that that's true, then you'd be leery of the deal too, since half its value comes in the form of an interest in a company which is overpaying for YahooGod you are dense. They are offering investors a PREMIUM over the price of the shares in order to make the deal more likely. Picture a person in a rush to move out of the state (maybe he got a good job offer somewehre out of state)..he might very well sell his house under the market value in order to convert the transaction more quickly. In other words he's willing to take X dollars for his house today than wait 2 months for 1.25X dollars. Microsoft is willing to pay a premium to investors to complete the deal quickly so that they can quickly use Yahoo to compete against Google.
That's so wrong its scary. Find me a person that is willing to buy or sell a stock (or anything) at a price different than the market price and you have created a money pump.
An investor -- like the person you vehemently disagreed with at the start of this thread -- is concerned with "what the company does in the longer run." Your counterargument essentially endorsed stock price speculation, rather than doing your own evaluation based on a company's fundamentals.How about you give the full quote, where the guy said that the value of a company to an investor isn't the value of the share but what a company does in the long run. As an investor I could care less if the company invests in solar energy or decides to go into the edible underwear business. The return on my investment (dividend + stock price) is ALL I CARE ABOUT. You apparently measure return on investment in another way.
Then you go into a long story about how completely inferior dividends are. Listening to you talk, you'd think a person was about to declare bankruptcy if he is getting a 20% return on investment and it's coming from a dividend. But let's ignore that and take a look at your blatant lack of reading comprehension. When did I say that a company's stock price going up is inferior to a dividend? I said "nice stock price and/or dividend". What's funny is you keep saying that I keep trying to change what I said.
Buffett does not invest in stocks that "will grow their stock price" -- that's thinking like a high-trade-volume speculator. He invests in companies that he epxects will grow their profitability, with a rising stock price as a happy result.Are you being serious with this, or do you not understand basic logic? Let's check what you just wrote (I'll add some variables to make things easier.)
A = Buffet owns stocks that have grown their stock price.
B = Buffet owns companies that have increased profitability.
NOT A (your first sentence)
B and (B => A) Lets simpligy and see what we get
B and (B => A) and NOT A
B AND A AND NOT A = FALSE
But if you had used some common sense you wouldn't have such warped logic. How does Buffet make money investing? Answer: the stocks he buys go up in price. How does that differ from my opinion?
Please get basic thinking skills.
Warren Buffet invests in companies that pay a nice dividend or that he believes will grow their stock price. How is that any different than what I said? That's right, it isn't.
If you want to just tinker with the digital side and you are willing to learn vhdl or verilog, then get a dev board from Xilinx or Altera. Some of them come with lcd screens, so you can have fun sending output to the screen.
It's corny but there's a lot more of a sense of accomplishment when you get your first LED light blinking on and off than when you write your first Hello World program.
Is Reiser4 really a dead project? (no pun intended) Seemed like it was just breaking some kernel coding standards but was working.
Would be a shame for the project to get scrapped. The performance numbers were great (faster and files were smaller.) ext4 is a LOT less interesting.
NO! Who the hell invests their money for anything other than a nice stock price and/or dividend? If I am a Yahoo investor, and Microsoft offers to buy my shares at a nice premium over the market price, then yes I would like to sell them the shares.
Do you honestly expect Yahoo stock to hit the price MS was offering in a reasonable amount of time? I doubt it, the way that Google is dancing rings around them.
Agreed.
Microsoft : gets a nice $150 check for almost every computer made on earth.
Yahoo : runs a search engine that everyone except the biggest internet fossils stopped using about 5 years ago.
Their major problem is that they are losing market share. (When did anyone think that Apple would control 7% of the OS market?) But instead of trying to focus on fixing up the problems with their operating system, Balmer is focusing all the company's attention on trying to acquire Yahoo so that he can do battle against Google.
People are ONLY using MS since it enjoys the benefits of a monopoly. If MS starts losing any more share, then there could be a snowball effect of people dumping their stuff.
Not just you. It has no practical purpose but I like the thing too.
I hate when people make that argument. It is simple economics: increase the supply of something (labor) and the cost (wages) will decrease. The statistics of stagnant US tech wages support my view of there being no shortage whatsoever of labor.
They are claiming that they can convert any plant with this, not just food plants. So you could just grab some weeds and make fuel out of them, as opposed to growing crops which is far more expensive(weeding, insects.)
Exactly right. Consider the benefits OSS gives to companies making embedded hardware. First of all, you dont have to buy a bunch of expensive development tools. And more importantly you don't have to shell out $2-3 for EVERY SINGLE device you produce.
Linux and OSS have been the greatest boon to embedded hardware I can think of in recent times. It's no surprise that we have seen an explosion in the number of interesting consumer devices that have come on the market with the release of Linux. A lot more people would be out of work without them and consumers would have a lot less choice.
Amen to that. I went to Caltech. Good Lord if you could have seen the bizarre relationships that were going on there. You'd have a decent looking guy going out with a fat monstrosity (Im talking about things like 150lb guys going out with 200 lb girls.)
I know of at least 2 guys (I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP, AND NO IT WASN"T ME) that turned gay since they couldn't take it any more. The dances were one of the saddest things you could imagine. There would literally be one girl dancing with a ring of 3 or 4 guys around her.
A couple of times I would manage to get one of them to go out with me. It was worse than being alone. Guys would be jumping out of everywhere trying to steal your girl from you. God that school was a joke
I like how the Nordic banks handled their problem, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/03/31/cnfed131.xml
1) The government goes in and takes over the bank to prevent a crisis
2) All the executives and board members of the bank get the boot
3) Shareholders get nothing
This way, the culprits get punished but at the same time, the government steps in to prevent a wide catastrophe.