You're right, their primary source of revenue comes from comissions, but in an event like the one I described, they would benifit even though it's not their primary business model.
He most likely sold the shares through a brokerage, which would have done the following:
1) Filled any orders from its own customers that could be filled against Ballmer's order. The price charged to those customers would likely be a little bit higher than the price Ballmer wanted to sell it for, since there is typically a difference (called buy/sell spread) in the price to buy vs sell a share of the same stock. The brokerage would have likely determined the buy price for its customers based on the best price available anywhere in the market (this is typically a part of the agreement between a brokerage and its customers). The difference in price becomes brokerage profit.
2) Assuming that once all of the Brokerage's customers' orders had been filled there were still some of Ballmer's shares left over, the Brokerage might buy some of the shares itself (they are cheaper than market price, because of the avoidance of the buy/sell spread).
3) If there are any shares left, the brokerage would likely attempt to fill any orders submitted to the electronic trading system (a computerized system that matches buyers and sellers). Again, doing this allows the Brokerage to keep the spread.
4) The remaining shares would be sold to one or more market making firms. Market making firms (or "Market Makers") are in the business of owning positions in a variety of stocks and profit based on the buy/sell spread when shares are bought and sold. Incidentally, competetive forces between market makers keep the buy/sell spread small, since most brokerages will typically do business with the market maker offering the best price.
I've just described what would happen if Ballmer decided to sell a relatively small chunk of stock (small enough that some people might talk about it a bit, and it might even appear on Slashdot, but not large enough to cause a major market movement). Suppose Ballmer wanted to sell ALL of his Microsoft shares...
If Ballmer wanted to sell all of his shares, he might expect to be able to sell them for $22 per share (for example). Suppose the market realized that this was happening. Prices would likely fall as people considered the impact of a large sell off. Opportunistic investors would quickly sell their own shares, expecting the price to fall further, and would plan to buy the shares back later once the price had fallen (there are also a variety of speculative financial instruments that would simplify executing this kind of strategy). Ballmer would now be unable to liquidate his shares for a reasonable price, because once the market knows that he is determined to sell, he'll have lots of competition.
Obviously, this would never happen, because it would greatly diminish the benefit of Ballmer's decision to sell, and would dissuade him from making the decision.
To accomodate this situation, Ballmer's broker would attempt to arrange the transaction behind the scenes, without the use of all of the machinery described above. This would likely take the form of a few phone calls to the large trades desk at other brokerages. "Psst. If you have a client interested in a large trade of MSFT, I might be able to help". The advantage is to be secretive so as to avoid giving away information that would tip off the market, while still finding someone to sell the shares to.
The eventual price of the shares would probably fall significantly below the market price of the stock. Why? To put it simply, liquidity costs money. It is still cheaper to use this approach than to try to sell a massive number of shares on the open market.
So, Ballmer may have made a life changing decision to sell all of his shares, or he may just want to diversify a bit, but his best move is always to sell it in small chunks in order to get the best price possible for the shares. As you can see, liquidity costs money.
Ballmer wanted to sell his stock. He would not have been able to sell it unless there existed a buyer. He most likely sold the shares through a brokerage, which would have done the following:
1) Filled any orders from its own customers that could be filled against Ballmer's order. The price charged to those customers would likely be a little bit higher than the price Ballmer wanted to sell it for, since there is typically a difference (called buy/sell spread) in the price to buy vs sell a share of the same stock. The brokerage would have likely determined the buy price for its customers based on the best price available anywhere in the market (this is typically a part of the agreement between a brokerage and its customers). The difference in price becomes brokerage profit.
2) Assuming that once all of the Brokerage's customers' orders had been filled there were still some of Ballmer's shares left over, the Brokerage might buy some of the shares itself (they are cheaper than market price, because of the avoidance of the buy/sell spread).
3) If there are any shares left, the brokerage would likely attempt to fill any orders submitted to the electronic trading system (a computerized system that matches buyers and sellers). Again, doing this allows the Brokerage to keep the spread.
4) The remaining shares would be sold to one or more market making firms. Market making firms (or "Market Makers") are in the business of owning positions in a variety of stocks and profit based on the buy/sell spread when shares are bought and sold. Incidentally, competetive forces between market makers keep the buy/sell spread small, since most brokerages will typically do business with the market maker offering the best price.
I've just described what would happen if Ballmer decided to sell a relatively small chunk of stock (small enough that some people might talk about it a bit, and it might even appear on Slashdot, but not large enough to cause a major market movement). Suppose Ballmer wanted to sell ALL of his Microsoft shares...
If Ballmer wanted to sell all of his shares, he might expect to be able to sell them for $22 per share (for example). Suppose the market realized that this was happening. Prices would likely fall as people considered the impact of a large sell off. Opportunistic investors would quickly sell their own shares, expecting the price to fall further, and would plan to buy the shares back later once the price had fallen (there are also a variety of speculative financial instruments that would simplify executing this kind of strategy). Ballmer would now be unable to liquidate his shares for a reasonable price, because once the market knows that he is determined to sell, he'll have lots of competition.
Obviously, this would never happen, because it would greatly diminish the benefit of Ballmer's decision to sell, and would dissuade him from making the decision.
To accomodate this situation, Ballmer's broker would attempt to arrange the transaction behind the scenes, without the use of all of the machinery described above. This would likely take the form of a few phone calls to the large trades desk at other brokerages. "Psst. If you have a client interested in a large trade of MSFT, I might be able to help". The advantage is to be secretive so as to avoid giving away information that would tip off the market, while still finding someone to sell the shares to.
The eventual price of the shares would probably fall significantly below the market price of the stock. Why? To put it simply, liquidity costs money. It is still cheaper to use this approach than to try to sell a massive number of shares on the open market.
So, Ballmer may have made a life changing decision to sell all of his shares, or he may just want to diversify a bit, but his best move is always to sell it in small chunks in order to get the best price possible for the shares. As you can see, liquidity costs money.
Medical care is expensive because doctors need to go through so much expensive training and certification, and because there is so much liability associated with medical care and malpractice which necessitate a huge insurance expense.
If you want cheaper medical care, I recommend finding a doctor in Canada or Mexico, or anywhere in the third world.
He's probably begun reading Slashdot for his investment advice and now believes that.NET will soon fail.
Of course, Slashdot is riddled with Millionaires.
Re:Not just from its libraries
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
I can see why some people might feel that way... although what it amounts to is making a decision to forego efficiency in the short term due to uncertainty about the future. Obviously, Microsoft wouldn't sell too much.net technology if people thought it was going to disappear any day. Of course, there will be some people who wait until every aspect of their software development is within their control (to the extent that the typcical programmer would actually be able to modify/update the source code to a component of his application if required).
My thought is that since C# represents a step forward technologically, it makes sense to embrace it today and begin benefitting from it immediately. If technology continues to improve, a rewrite in the next language/library system to come out won't likely be all that costly.
For example, porting a JAVA app to C# would likely be easier than porting a C++ app to C#, simply because of the greater similarity between Java and C# and the likely design consequences.
So, it really comes down to what is more costly: having to rewrite using slightly newer libraries, or having to potentially maintain very old source code.
Wasn't C++ invented by Bell Labs like C was? As someone in a parallel thread pointed out, C++ became an ANSI standard in 1998. C# was registered with ECMA as a standard since its inception. That means, anyone (including and especially Miguel) can create their own implementation of it. Of course, much of what is snazzy about C# has to do with the rest of the.net framework, but it's a very nice language in and of itself, and could be useful in all sorts of ways even without.NET
Re:Dan 'Obvious' Appleman
on
Hijacking .NET
·
· Score: 1
I'm sure a lot of slashdotters will now be inspired to try.net
How is this any different from needing to include stdio.h when writing hello world in c?
Sure, the.net runtime may be a bit bigger than the standard c libraries, but it does a heck of a lot more.
BTW, vb.net and c# were not really designed to create a hello world with a small memory footprint. In fact, no OO language would really be ideal for that.
Programming shoudl be done as far removed from the hardware layer as possible, so that it is generic and portable. Sure there are some people who can hand-optimize code for a particular architecture, but that takes time and diminishes portability. Also, those people are the minority. In most cases, the compiler does a much better job of machine level optimization than the programmer.
For many projects, it makes sense to use a high level langauge so that the semantics of the application can be clearly defined, and the application is actually a model of the problem it is intended to solve. It is generally harder to do this when you're worrying about a lot of machine level details.
The above paragraph is a statement about design. If that application doesn't perform well enough, then a business decision must be made: Does it make more sense to add hardware or to rewrite portions of the application in a lower-level language in order to eek out a bit more performance?
Perhaps your needs do require coding in c for your command line utilities. I think it's a bit of a stretch to extrapolate from that that all high level languages suck.
BTW, if you are running n copies of that hello world app in vb.net, your machine will only need to load one copy of the.net runtime to handle all of them.
Correction: A console-based Hello World program in VB.NET creates a 6.5KB executable.
Re: Penny minting - Inflation?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
If non-cash transactions took place using Penny amounts, how would they be reconciled? Sure they could exist, but at the moment when they were reconciled they would need to be rounded.
The knowledge that the pennies would eventually be rounded to the nearest nickel would result in investors making decisions based on the nearest nickel.
Also, both the NYSE and the NASDAQ have been using decimal values for stocks for the past couple of years.
Re: Penny minting - Inflation?
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
I would guess that eliminating pennies would make at least as big a difference in the number of coins required to make change as using 18c coins. Let's find out:
Assume any amount of change between $.05 and $.95 is equally probable.
Of course, there would be a cost in terms of economic efficiency. Stocks could only move by $.05 per share at a time, etc. Over billions of transactions, the missing "resolution" that pennies provide would make make financial markets far less liquid.
At the retail level, however, it would probably save 10 to 15 seconds every time someone paid cash.
Wrong. The best thing to do would be to lower taxes further so that Americans can invest and risk their own money rather than trusting the government to do so. BTW, asking congress to lower taxes is like asking a kid to give up his allowance.
Further, there is no moral justification for progressive taxation. Of course the richest Americans will benefit most from a reversal of progressive taxation, since they have had to suffer under it the longest.
The other thing that you have missed is that a minimal tax cut will likely fail to stimulate the economy.
Laffer curve models describe the governmnent's revenue maximizing tax strategy. The Reagan era tax cuts (cutting taxes from 70% down to 40% for the very rich) did actually result in those very rich people paying more dollars in taxes to the government. Further, there is no reason to believe that the 40% level is anywhere near the optimal point on the laffer curve for the very rich.
What you witnessed in financial markets after 9/11 was the result of widespread uncertainty about the solidity of those organizations. Would the insurance industry survive? Would markets be able to continue functioning? Bush's focus on eliminating the double tax on dividends rightly puts shareholders' incentives in line with those of CEOs and board members. The double tax led investors to believe that there were good reasons why they were not receiving a dividend, which was part of an overall deception that allowed corporate leaders to act in ways that were largely unscrutinized by those who provide capital (shareholders).
Once the double tax is gone, companies will have no reason not to pay dividends, and investors will be able to rationally decide whether the company needs that money for growth, or if it is just using it to inflate the stock price, etc. This will strengthen the underpinnings of our financial institutions and restore investor confidence. Confidence in what? Confidence in the idea that markets are operating on accurate information: That one's dollars are going toward the company that is actually performing the best.
It's a C++ problem. One of these days, IE will be written in VB.NET or C#, and problems like these (as well as those that don't cause a crash but cause a security vulnerability) won't happen nearly as often.
Wrong. The key to business success is specialization which is something Microsoft is edging toward. Think about it, the economy used to consist of a handful of conglomerates that were in all sorts of businesses simultaneously.
Over time, smaller companies proved better able to compete, and the conglomerates began to die. There are still a few left, but they are getting weaker every day, particularly in mature industries.
Microsoft has a vision of the future in which barriers to becoming a programmer are minimal, and solid technology (such as.NET) underlies the efforts of even the most amateur programmers. This will allow for greater productivity, and a seamless integration between office apps, development tools, enterprise apps, and human beings.
Most people don't care what OS they are using, they care about what they can do with it. That is why Microsoft has won every round to date.
Interesting comment... can you talk a bit more about why you don't use C# and asp.net for your personal projects? I'm curious about your thoughts on this subject and on your thoughts about C# and asp.net in general and in comparison to php.
You seem to think that it's a crooked way of doing business. Try bringing a Model T into your local Ford dealership and see what they say when you request an oil change or some other minor maintenance or repair.
Why would Microsoft want to continue patching its outdated products when doing so costs a lot of money and they aren't even selling those products anymore? Sure, they could write the patches and charge for them, but those patches would probably cost a lot more than a copy of Win2k (server or pro). So, in other words, the upgrade is the patch and it's not free.
I apologize on behalf of my fellow slashdotters... it is obvious from most of the highly modded posts that very few posters and very few moderators actually took a few minutes to look over H20 and understand what it really is.
In fact, the balkanization you refer to is widely prevalent in the majority of comments posted to this particular story.
Actually, so is the phenomenon that you mentioned in which people rush to post quickly because otherwise their post will be lost in the noise.
H20 appears to intelligently combat most if not all of the drawbacks of "status quo" online discussion. In particular, it addresses some of the problems that would inevitably occur if a typical online discussion were used in a course scenario.
One thing that I would love to see added to H20 would be a recommender system (possibly using collaborative filtering) to identify threads/rotisseries/projects that the recommender predicts would be of interest to each user. The unique structure of the rotisserie would prevent the recommender from creating total groupthink, and one would hope that individuals' decisions on how to rate a particular post would not be solely on the basis of agreement.
I got news for you. People innovate, engineer, program, research, etc., in large part because they have an itch to do so
This is rather out of touch. Why do we use money? Because it works. What I mean is, it may be exchanged for most things that people want. That "itch" that you are speaking of is not sufficient to get would-be inventors out of bed in the morning. That's not to say that every software patent that has been awarded of late is reasonable: The book I recommended also cautions against excessive protection of intellectual property.
Patents are a critical part of the foundation of successful free markets. Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?
I highly recommend The Lever of Riches to anyone who wants an accessible but rich economic analysis of innovation. The book attempts to answer the question of why different countries and civilizations have had varying levels of technological success. Patents are discussed, and in particular how different kinds of patent law influece the kind of innovation that is produced.
If the content in wave A is uncorrelated with the content in wave B (for example, two different radio stations playing different songs), then their addition will be essentially random -- and hence sound like noise (because it is noise).
I haven't had a chance to read up on GNU Radio yet, but in a nutshell how does it fit into Dr. Reed's argument?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, their primary source of revenue comes from comissions, but in an event like the one I described, they would benifit even though it's not their primary business model.
He most likely sold the shares through a brokerage, which would have done the following:
1) Filled any orders from its own customers that could be filled against Ballmer's order. The price charged to those customers would likely be a little bit higher than the price Ballmer wanted to sell it for, since there is typically a difference (called buy/sell spread) in the price to buy vs sell a share of the same stock. The brokerage would have likely determined the buy price for its customers based on the best price available anywhere in the market (this is typically a part of the agreement between a brokerage and its customers). The difference in price becomes brokerage profit.
2) Assuming that once all of the Brokerage's customers' orders had been filled there were still some of Ballmer's shares left over, the Brokerage might buy some of the shares itself (they are cheaper than market price, because of the avoidance of the buy/sell spread).
3) If there are any shares left, the brokerage would likely attempt to fill any orders submitted to the electronic trading system (a computerized system that matches buyers and sellers). Again, doing this allows the Brokerage to keep the spread.
4) The remaining shares would be sold to one or more market making firms. Market making firms (or "Market Makers") are in the business of owning positions in a variety of stocks and profit based on the buy/sell spread when shares are bought and sold. Incidentally, competetive forces between market makers keep the buy/sell spread small, since most brokerages will typically do business with the market maker offering the best price.
I've just described what would happen if Ballmer decided to sell a relatively small chunk of stock (small enough that some people might talk about it a bit, and it might even appear on Slashdot, but not large enough to cause a major market movement). Suppose Ballmer wanted to sell ALL of his Microsoft shares...
If Ballmer wanted to sell all of his shares, he might expect to be able to sell them for $22 per share (for example). Suppose the market realized that this was happening. Prices would likely fall as people considered the impact of a large sell off. Opportunistic investors would quickly sell their own shares, expecting the price to fall further, and would plan to buy the shares back later once the price had fallen (there are also a variety of speculative financial instruments that would simplify executing this kind of strategy). Ballmer would now be unable to liquidate his shares for a reasonable price, because once the market knows that he is determined to sell, he'll have lots of competition.
Obviously, this would never happen, because it would greatly diminish the benefit of Ballmer's decision to sell, and would dissuade him from making the decision.
To accomodate this situation, Ballmer's broker would attempt to arrange the transaction behind the scenes, without the use of all of the machinery described above. This would likely take the form of a few phone calls to the large trades desk at other brokerages. "Psst. If you have a client interested in a large trade of MSFT, I might be able to help". The advantage is to be secretive so as to avoid giving away information that would tip off the market, while still finding someone to sell the shares to.
The eventual price of the shares would probably fall significantly below the market price of the stock. Why? To put it simply, liquidity costs money. It is still cheaper to use this approach than to try to sell a massive number of shares on the open market.
So, Ballmer may have made a life changing decision to sell all of his shares, or he may just want to diversify a bit, but his best move is always to sell it in small chunks in order to get the best price possible for the shares. As you can see, liquidity costs money.
Interest group?
Ballmer wanted to sell his stock. He would not have been able to sell it unless there existed a buyer. He most likely sold the shares through a brokerage, which would have done the following:
1) Filled any orders from its own customers that could be filled against Ballmer's order. The price charged to those customers would likely be a little bit higher than the price Ballmer wanted to sell it for, since there is typically a difference (called buy/sell spread) in the price to buy vs sell a share of the same stock. The brokerage would have likely determined the buy price for its customers based on the best price available anywhere in the market (this is typically a part of the agreement between a brokerage and its customers). The difference in price becomes brokerage profit.
2) Assuming that once all of the Brokerage's customers' orders had been filled there were still some of Ballmer's shares left over, the Brokerage might buy some of the shares itself (they are cheaper than market price, because of the avoidance of the buy/sell spread).
3) If there are any shares left, the brokerage would likely attempt to fill any orders submitted to the electronic trading system (a computerized system that matches buyers and sellers). Again, doing this allows the Brokerage to keep the spread.
4) The remaining shares would be sold to one or more market making firms. Market making firms (or "Market Makers") are in the business of owning positions in a variety of stocks and profit based on the buy/sell spread when shares are bought and sold. Incidentally, competetive forces between market makers keep the buy/sell spread small, since most brokerages will typically do business with the market maker offering the best price.
I've just described what would happen if Ballmer decided to sell a relatively small chunk of stock (small enough that some people might talk about it a bit, and it might even appear on Slashdot, but not large enough to cause a major market movement). Suppose Ballmer wanted to sell ALL of his Microsoft shares...
If Ballmer wanted to sell all of his shares, he might expect to be able to sell them for $22 per share (for example). Suppose the market realized that this was happening. Prices would likely fall as people considered the impact of a large sell off. Opportunistic investors would quickly sell their own shares, expecting the price to fall further, and would plan to buy the shares back later once the price had fallen (there are also a variety of speculative financial instruments that would simplify executing this kind of strategy). Ballmer would now be unable to liquidate his shares for a reasonable price, because once the market knows that he is determined to sell, he'll have lots of competition.
Obviously, this would never happen, because it would greatly diminish the benefit of Ballmer's decision to sell, and would dissuade him from making the decision.
To accomodate this situation, Ballmer's broker would attempt to arrange the transaction behind the scenes, without the use of all of the machinery described above. This would likely take the form of a few phone calls to the large trades desk at other brokerages. "Psst. If you have a client interested in a large trade of MSFT, I might be able to help". The advantage is to be secretive so as to avoid giving away information that would tip off the market, while still finding someone to sell the shares to.
The eventual price of the shares would probably fall significantly below the market price of the stock. Why? To put it simply, liquidity costs money. It is still cheaper to use this approach than to try to sell a massive number of shares on the open market.
So, Ballmer may have made a life changing decision to sell all of his shares, or he may just want to diversify a bit, but his best move is always to sell it in small chunks in order to get the best price possible for the shares. As you can see, liquidity costs money.
Medical care is expensive because doctors need to go through so much expensive training and certification, and because there is so much liability associated with medical care and malpractice which necessitate a huge insurance expense.
If you want cheaper medical care, I recommend finding a doctor in Canada or Mexico, or anywhere in the third world.
He's probably begun reading Slashdot for his investment advice and now believes that .NET will soon fail.
Of course, Slashdot is riddled with Millionaires.
I can see why some people might feel that way... although what it amounts to is making a decision to forego efficiency in the short term due to uncertainty about the future. Obviously, Microsoft wouldn't sell too much .net technology if people thought it was going to disappear any day. Of course, there will be some people who wait until every aspect of their software development is within their control (to the extent that the typcical programmer would actually be able to modify/update the source code to a component of his application if required).
My thought is that since C# represents a step forward technologically, it makes sense to embrace it today and begin benefitting from it immediately. If technology continues to improve, a rewrite in the next language/library system to come out won't likely be all that costly.
For example, porting a JAVA app to C# would likely be easier than porting a C++ app to C#, simply because of the greater similarity between Java and C# and the likely design consequences.
So, it really comes down to what is more costly: having to rewrite using slightly newer libraries, or having to potentially maintain very old source code.
Wasn't C++ invented by Bell Labs like C was? As someone in a parallel thread pointed out, C++ became an ANSI standard in 1998. C# was registered with ECMA as a standard since its inception. That means, anyone (including and especially Miguel) can create their own implementation of it. Of course, much of what is snazzy about C# has to do with the rest of the .net framework, but it's a very nice language in and of itself, and could be useful in all sorts of ways even without .NET
I'm sure a lot of slashdotters will now be inspired to try .net
How is this any different from needing to include stdio.h when writing hello world in c?
.net runtime may be a bit bigger than the standard c libraries, but it does a heck of a lot more.
.net runtime to handle all of them.
Sure, the
BTW, vb.net and c# were not really designed to create a hello world with a small memory footprint. In fact, no OO language would really be ideal for that.
Programming shoudl be done as far removed from the hardware layer as possible, so that it is generic and portable. Sure there are some people who can hand-optimize code for a particular architecture, but that takes time and diminishes portability. Also, those people are the minority. In most cases, the compiler does a much better job of machine level optimization than the programmer.
For many projects, it makes sense to use a high level langauge so that the semantics of the application can be clearly defined, and the application is actually a model of the problem it is intended to solve. It is generally harder to do this when you're worrying about a lot of machine level details.
The above paragraph is a statement about design. If that application doesn't perform well enough, then a business decision must be made: Does it make more sense to add hardware or to rewrite portions of the application in a lower-level language in order to eek out a bit more performance?
Perhaps your needs do require coding in c for your command line utilities. I think it's a bit of a stretch to extrapolate from that that all high level languages suck.
BTW, if you are running n copies of that hello world app in vb.net, your machine will only need to load one copy of the
Correction: A console-based Hello World program in VB.NET creates a 6.5KB executable.
If non-cash transactions took place using Penny amounts, how would they be reconciled? Sure they could exist, but at the moment when they were reconciled they would need to be rounded.
The knowledge that the pennies would eventually be rounded to the nearest nickel would result in investors making decisions based on the nearest nickel.
Also, both the NYSE and the NASDAQ have been using decimal values for stocks for the past couple of years.
I would guess that eliminating pennies would make at least as big a difference in the number of coins required to make change as using 18c coins. Let's find out:
.05 = 1 .10 = 1 .15 = 2 .20 = 2 .25 = 1 .30 = 2 .35 = 2 .40 = 3 .45 = 3 .50 = 1 .55 = 2 .60 = 2 .65 = 3 .70 = 3 .75 = 2 .80 = 3 .85 = 3 .90 = 4 .95 = 4
Assume any amount of change between $.05 and $.95 is equally probable.
Assume nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollar coinage:
The average is 2.315 coins per amount.
Of course, there would be a cost in terms of economic efficiency. Stocks could only move by $.05 per share at a time, etc. Over billions of transactions, the missing "resolution" that pennies provide would make make financial markets far less liquid.
At the retail level, however, it would probably save 10 to 15 seconds every time someone paid cash.
Wrong. The best thing to do would be to lower taxes further so that Americans can invest and risk their own money rather than trusting the government to do so. BTW, asking congress to lower taxes is like asking a kid to give up his allowance.
Further, there is no moral justification for progressive taxation. Of course the richest Americans will benefit most from a reversal of progressive taxation, since they have had to suffer under it the longest.
The other thing that you have missed is that a minimal tax cut will likely fail to stimulate the economy.
Laffer curve models describe the governmnent's revenue maximizing tax strategy. The Reagan era tax cuts (cutting taxes from 70% down to 40% for the very rich) did actually result in those very rich people paying more dollars in taxes to the government. Further, there is no reason to believe that the 40% level is anywhere near the optimal point on the laffer curve for the very rich.
What you witnessed in financial markets after 9/11 was the result of widespread uncertainty about the solidity of those organizations. Would the insurance industry survive? Would markets be able to continue functioning? Bush's focus on eliminating the double tax on dividends rightly puts shareholders' incentives in line with those of CEOs and board members. The double tax led investors to believe that there were good reasons why they were not receiving a dividend, which was part of an overall deception that allowed corporate leaders to act in ways that were largely unscrutinized by those who provide capital (shareholders).
Once the double tax is gone, companies will have no reason not to pay dividends, and investors will be able to rationally decide whether the company needs that money for growth, or if it is just using it to inflate the stock price, etc. This will strengthen the underpinnings of our financial institutions and restore investor confidence. Confidence in what? Confidence in the idea that markets are operating on accurate information: That one's dollars are going toward the company that is actually performing the best.
Public String name;
??
It's a C++ problem. One of these days, IE will be written in VB.NET or C#, and problems like these (as well as those that don't cause a crash but cause a security vulnerability) won't happen nearly as often.
RH 5 came with WindowMaker and GNOME/KDE. So you are wrong.
Wrong. The key to business success is specialization which is something Microsoft is edging toward. Think about it, the economy used to consist of a handful of conglomerates that were in all sorts of businesses simultaneously.
.NET) underlies the efforts of even the most amateur programmers. This will allow for greater productivity, and a seamless integration between office apps, development tools, enterprise apps, and human beings.
Over time, smaller companies proved better able to compete, and the conglomerates began to die. There are still a few left, but they are getting weaker every day, particularly in mature industries.
Microsoft has a vision of the future in which barriers to becoming a programmer are minimal, and solid technology (such as
Most people don't care what OS they are using, they care about what they can do with it. That is why Microsoft has won every round to date.
Interesting comment... can you talk a bit more about why you don't use C# and asp.net for your personal projects? I'm curious about your thoughts on this subject and on your thoughts about C# and asp.net in general and in comparison to php.
You seem to think that it's a crooked way of doing business. Try bringing a Model T into your local Ford dealership and see what they say when you request an oil change or some other minor maintenance or repair.
Why would Microsoft want to continue patching its outdated products when doing so costs a lot of money and they aren't even selling those products anymore? Sure, they could write the patches and charge for them, but those patches would probably cost a lot more than a copy of Win2k (server or pro). So, in other words, the upgrade is the patch and it's not free.
I apologize on behalf of my fellow slashdotters... it is obvious from most of the highly modded posts that very few posters and very few moderators actually took a few minutes to look over H20 and understand what it really is.
In fact, the balkanization you refer to is widely prevalent in the majority of comments posted to this particular story.
Actually, so is the phenomenon that you mentioned in which people rush to post quickly because otherwise their post will be lost in the noise.
H20 appears to intelligently combat most if not all of the drawbacks of "status quo" online discussion. In particular, it addresses some of the problems that would inevitably occur if a typical online discussion were used in a course scenario.
One thing that I would love to see added to H20 would be a recommender system (possibly using collaborative filtering) to identify threads/rotisseries/projects that the recommender predicts would be of interest to each user. The unique structure of the rotisserie would prevent the recommender from creating total groupthink, and one would hope that individuals' decisions on how to rate a particular post would not be solely on the basis of agreement.
I'm never reading Slashdot again!
This is rather out of touch. Why do we use money? Because it works. What I mean is, it may be exchanged for most things that people want. That "itch" that you are speaking of is not sufficient to get would-be inventors out of bed in the morning. That's not to say that every software patent that has been awarded of late is reasonable: The book I recommended also cautions against excessive protection of intellectual property.
Patents are a critical part of the foundation of successful free markets. Why would anyone want to innovate if not to profit from his innovations?
I highly recommend The Lever of Riches to anyone who wants an accessible but rich economic analysis of innovation. The book attempts to answer the question of why different countries and civilizations have had varying levels of technological success. Patents are discussed, and in particular how different kinds of patent law influece the kind of innovation that is produced.
I haven't had a chance to read up on GNU Radio yet, but in a nutshell how does it fit into Dr. Reed's argument?
Instead of insulting him, why don't you offer an intelligent counter-argument?