People may not know how to make billions but people with a basic understanding of numbers can see how Microsoft is worth less than half of what it was when Ballmer started which, to most people is an indication that the company is fucking things up.
He has been CEO since June, 1998.
MSFT Market Cap in 1998 was $244.79 billion.
MSFT market Cap is currently $284.47 billion.
I realize that 16% growth kind of sucks over a 15 year period, but I'm finding it hard to walk away from the numbers thinking that Microsoft is "worth less than half of what it was when Ballmer started"
1999 was their record year for a market cap ($447.21 billion), but that was right before the dot-com bubble burst, so actual thinking people that can recognize cherry picking arent going to let you use that year as a starting year (it was $288.91 when the dust cleared in 2002, the bubble collapse was 2000 and 2001.)
If you want to get into their failures in emerging markets, thats all true, but their desktop software market is still near its peak using every honest measure such as those numbers that you wanted people to look at.
Why is it that every smarmy little shit on Slashdot thinks everyone else is an idiot?
Maybe because there are idiots like you complaining about not being able to control the master RSA key (I even quoted you doing it.)
You are a completely ignorant fuck by making that the issue. Thats why I get to be smarmy. The problem here is that you want there to be an issue, but because you don't know what issues are real and what are FUD you just go with everything.
You willingly chose to harp on the FUD. I quoted you doing it. You willingly did it. Either you knew that it was FUD making you an idiot for using it anyways, or you didn't know that it was FUD making you an idiot for just parroting someone else without any understanding at all of your own. In both cases, your real intent is quite clearly not to be informative.
You are the reason that I get to be a "smarmy little shit" yet still have outstanding karma.
well, they DO have access to internet, they just dont want to move out of certain areas to get it. there are libraries in pretty much every major city in the country
Ah, everyone has access to the internet.. as long as they are willing to move to a major city. Got it.
That uncomfortable feeling that you get when you continue to update this thread can be avoided right now by simply stopping. Future situations that will lead to this same uncomfortable feeling can be avoided by putting actual effort into saying accurate things.
True as that may be, there are encryption keys stored in there that the owner of the device doesn't control.
The only key that software does not control is the master RSA key, which of course you cannot control because the safeguard is that every device ever to be made (should) have a unique one, which is why its burned into the silicon (not rewritable by anyone.. ever.. not you.. not by the operating system.. not by a software update)
Why is it that people on slashdot dont have a clue how technology works anymore?
Essentially the root key is like a UUID taken to the hardware level, but instead of passing around ID numbers you pass around certificates. Instead of "My name is FOO." its "Here is proof that I'm the same guy that you talked to yesterday. Call me whatever the hell you want."
Everything else about TPM -- all the DRM hypermania and so on -- is entirely software-based. Don't want to run software that utilizes the TPM chip instead of some other certification method, then don't run that software.
We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost.
Poverty is the #1 killer on the planet. Inefficiency increases poverty. Lives will be lost by artificial carbon reduction.
Now what value did you use for a life, and what lives lost estimates did you use and what were the demographics of those lives lost?
The last thing the AGW crowd wants is to admit that carbon reduction costs lives. Not even the UN's IPCC claims that Global Warming is known to represent a cost. But you seem to know better than them, right?
The problem with religion is that you have no citations. Leave the conclusions to the scientists, moron.
You already declared that everyone has access to the internet, but then again you dont put in any effort at all to be accurate when telling others how it is.
if you are now going to tell me that some races are too poor to have internet, im going to tell you that you are a racist
Lets ask the Democrats."Those without photo ID are disproportionately low-income, disabled, minority, young, and older voters."
Would not the same argument exist for the internet, or is the internet a magical service that doesnt have disproportionate enrollment vs low-income, disabled, minority, young, and the elderly?
What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.
We dont even know the sign of this value, yet you say its easily trillions. It might easily be trillions in benefit, rather than cost, and thats also presuming the projections are at all accurate which is well below 100% confidence.
But of course you seem to think that you know the optimal temperature of the earth and that its less than the current temperature, so why wouldnt you also be 100% confident about the projections....
Stop pedaling your religion to people with more knowledge than you about the state of knowledge of the climate scientists. Seriously. You just look like a parrot selling a story when you make such egregious errors about knowledge that even the IPCC admits isnt known.
If only most of these "uninformed voters" actually were rational...
You missed the point. Its rational to be an uninformed voter because it costs more to be an informed voter than its worth to make informed voted.
Thats what happens when a government unit that represents hundreds of millions has most of the power. Your vote is only 1 out of millions, and therefore cannot be of much value. Would you invest many hours of your time for an expected value of $1?
Does this mean that the nuclear stations have to divert their power when the wind picks up or the sun comes out? I'm certainly no expert, but I thought in the US it is the opposite, so that the wind stations have to go on bypass and the dams/nuclear stations have priority.
In a free market the two would have a price war to determine who gets to sell during those times. The benefit of this is that the loser would have an incentive to invest in ways to efficiently store their over-production.
I'm not so sure about your plan to let ~150 W / sq. m the sun is beaming down here all day be completely wasted forever, either.
If Germany was having some sort of electricity shortage crisis where they just couldn't build any more power plants of any kind, you might have a point.
In reality there are more efficient ways to generate electricity, there are places to do it, and there is fuel to do so. No real shortage at all. They are forcing by mandate that their residents pay more than necessary for electricity. Inefficiency. Look up the definition.
Germany's electricity prices are about the same as California's.
Residents in Germany are paying ~$0.35/kWh while residents in Californian are paying ~$0.16/kWh, and California isnt a good example of efficiency either.
In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.
But lets not let facts get in the way of a good P.R. piece about solar power, right?
Indeed. Apartment complexes have an economy of scale that cannot be attained with a single-family or two-family dwelling, and those savings are frequently passed on in part to the renter if the local market isnt starved of housing.
You lose some freedom in the arrangement, but you also lose some responsibilities as well.
Wasn't the next tesla vehicle going to compete against the $50k luxury SUV's?
In this case, this is the "next" vehicle that you heard about. You were either reading an old article, or read an article before the introduction of the model S.
I was (as many are apparently) mistaken in the paper industry - marihuana connection.
Seems obvious since it would be the lumber industry and other industries related to the ability to reduce lumber to a suitable pulp (the raw material producers), not the paper industry, that has a stake in tree chopping.
The reason that it gets this way is essentially a market failure.
The thing is while most people apply the idea of a market failure to asymmetric incentives in economics where an outcome could be a net negative for everyone as a whole but a net positive for all the principle players such as both the business and its customers, it also applies to all forms of governance.
In democratic or representative republic forms of governance, the personal investment required to be an informed voter is a cost that is much greater than the benefit of actually making an informed vote. Part of this is due to a lot of noise within the available information, but it also has to do with the number of people that themselves are uniformed.
The upshot of this is that other uninformed voters creates an incentive to be an uninformed voter yourself, a self-sustaining entirely rational population of uninformed voters.
If you don't think there's a massive difference between the set of people who license copyrighted material and the people who are FCC licensed, I don't know what to say.
Have you ever observed the FCC reduce its regulator scope, or has it always been increasing its regulator scope?
What makes the controller chips in a SSD fail so often?
It isn't the controller chips that are failing (a hardware fault,) its buggy logic in the controller firmware (a software fault) that leaves the data stored within the flash in an incoherent state (garbage in, garbage out.)
So what exactly is the difference between a write cycle and an erase cycle in practical terms?
The difference is that there is no such thing as a "write cycle." The guy that you are replying to doesnt actually know much about what he is talking about.
In regard to the general difference between writes and erases the terminology on the table are supposed to be write amplification, block size (typically 256KB), and page size (typically 4KB.) Write amplification occurs when data smaller than a page is frequently written or "modified."
In practice write amplification is typically below 2x on modern controllers, and obviously always larger than 1x.
Worst case write amplification is horrendous at 4096x but the typical scenario where near-worst-case amplification does occur turns out to be low volume traffic in practice (for every near-worst-case page write the SSD experiences, it experiences thousands of near-best-case page writes.)
The worst cases turn out to be log file writes, but thats very small change compared to other write activity (its like worrying about that $1 surcharge on your $150/month cable bill.)
Slashdot Mirror
People may not know how to make billions but people with a basic understanding of numbers can see how Microsoft is worth less than half of what it was when Ballmer started which, to most people is an indication that the company is fucking things up.
He has been CEO since June, 1998.
MSFT Market Cap in 1998 was $244.79 billion.
MSFT market Cap is currently $284.47 billion.
I realize that 16% growth kind of sucks over a 15 year period, but I'm finding it hard to walk away from the numbers thinking that Microsoft is "worth less than half of what it was when Ballmer started"
1999 was their record year for a market cap ($447.21 billion), but that was right before the dot-com bubble burst, so actual thinking people that can recognize cherry picking arent going to let you use that year as a starting year (it was $288.91 when the dust cleared in 2002, the bubble collapse was 2000 and 2001.)
If you want to get into their failures in emerging markets, thats all true, but their desktop software market is still near its peak using every honest measure such as those numbers that you wanted people to look at.
No, only when they fight wars in an efficient manner.
or require that rights to their material return to themselves after a certain period.
The standard contractual rights end when the book/work goes out of print.
Convicted monopolist.
So is Intel, twice convicted on anti-trust charges in the United States and at least once that I can recall in the European Union.
Anti-trust convictions are just a cost of doing business.
Why is it that every smarmy little shit on Slashdot thinks everyone else is an idiot?
Maybe because there are idiots like you complaining about not being able to control the master RSA key (I even quoted you doing it.)
You are a completely ignorant fuck by making that the issue. Thats why I get to be smarmy. The problem here is that you want there to be an issue, but because you don't know what issues are real and what are FUD you just go with everything.
You willingly chose to harp on the FUD. I quoted you doing it. You willingly did it. Either you knew that it was FUD making you an idiot for using it anyways, or you didn't know that it was FUD making you an idiot for just parroting someone else without any understanding at all of your own. In both cases, your real intent is quite clearly not to be informative.
You are the reason that I get to be a "smarmy little shit" yet still have outstanding karma.
well, they DO have access to internet, they just dont want to move out of certain areas to get it. there are libraries in pretty much every major city in the country
Ah, everyone has access to the internet.. as long as they are willing to move to a major city. Got it.
That uncomfortable feeling that you get when you continue to update this thread can be avoided right now by simply stopping. Future situations that will lead to this same uncomfortable feeling can be avoided by putting actual effort into saying accurate things.
True as that may be, there are encryption keys stored in there that the owner of the device doesn't control.
The only key that software does not control is the master RSA key, which of course you cannot control because the safeguard is that every device ever to be made (should) have a unique one, which is why its burned into the silicon (not rewritable by anyone.. ever.. not you.. not by the operating system.. not by a software update)
Why is it that people on slashdot dont have a clue how technology works anymore?
Essentially the root key is like a UUID taken to the hardware level, but instead of passing around ID numbers you pass around certificates. Instead of "My name is FOO." its "Here is proof that I'm the same guy that you talked to yesterday. Call me whatever the hell you want."
Everything else about TPM -- all the DRM hypermania and so on -- is entirely software-based. Don't want to run software that utilizes the TPM chip instead of some other certification method, then don't run that software.
We do know the sign. Global Warming is definitely a cost.
Poverty is the #1 killer on the planet. Inefficiency increases poverty. Lives will be lost by artificial carbon reduction.
Now what value did you use for a life, and what lives lost estimates did you use and what were the demographics of those lives lost?
The last thing the AGW crowd wants is to admit that carbon reduction costs lives. Not even the UN's IPCC claims that Global Warming is known to represent a cost. But you seem to know better than them, right?
The problem with religion is that you have no citations. Leave the conclusions to the scientists, moron.
You already declared that everyone has access to the internet, but then again you dont put in any effort at all to be accurate when telling others how it is.
if you are now going to tell me that some races are too poor to have internet, im going to tell you that you are a racist
Lets ask the Democrats. "Those without photo ID are disproportionately low-income, disabled, minority, young, and older voters."
Would not the same argument exist for the internet, or is the internet a magical service that doesnt have disproportionate enrollment vs low-income, disabled, minority, young, and the elderly?
What is Global Warming eventually going to cost us all? Easily trillions, if we have to relocate coastal infrastructure to higher ground.
We dont even know the sign of this value, yet you say its easily trillions. It might easily be trillions in benefit, rather than cost, and thats also presuming the projections are at all accurate which is well below 100% confidence.
But of course you seem to think that you know the optimal temperature of the earth and that its less than the current temperature, so why wouldnt you also be 100% confident about the projections....
Stop pedaling your religion to people with more knowledge than you about the state of knowledge of the climate scientists. Seriously. You just look like a parrot selling a story when you make such egregious errors about knowledge that even the IPCC admits isnt known.
If only most of these "uninformed voters" actually were rational...
You missed the point. Its rational to be an uninformed voter because it costs more to be an informed voter than its worth to make informed voted.
Thats what happens when a government unit that represents hundreds of millions has most of the power. Your vote is only 1 out of millions, and therefore cannot be of much value. Would you invest many hours of your time for an expected value of $1?
Does this mean that the nuclear stations have to divert their power when the wind picks up or the sun comes out? I'm certainly no expert, but I thought in the US it is the opposite, so that the wind stations have to go on bypass and the dams/nuclear stations have priority.
In a free market the two would have a price war to determine who gets to sell during those times. The benefit of this is that the loser would have an incentive to invest in ways to efficiently store their over-production.
I'm not so sure about your plan to let ~150 W / sq. m the sun is beaming down here all day be completely wasted forever, either.
If Germany was having some sort of electricity shortage crisis where they just couldn't build any more power plants of any kind, you might have a point.
In reality there are more efficient ways to generate electricity, there are places to do it, and there is fuel to do so. No real shortage at all. They are forcing by mandate that their residents pay more than necessary for electricity. Inefficiency. Look up the definition.
Germany's electricity prices are about the same as California's.
Residents in Germany are paying ~$0.35/kWh while residents in Californian are paying ~$0.16/kWh, and California isnt a good example of efficiency either.
In Europe, only the people of Denmark pay more than Germans and most of Europe pays ~40% less than Germans.
But lets not let facts get in the way of a good P.R. piece about solar power, right?
But at what cost?
Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.
So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.
Indeed. Apartment complexes have an economy of scale that cannot be attained with a single-family or two-family dwelling, and those savings are frequently passed on in part to the renter if the local market isnt starved of housing.
You lose some freedom in the arrangement, but you also lose some responsibilities as well.
..and in other parts, $100K/year leaves you with $80K/year to go full retard with.
Wasn't the next tesla vehicle going to compete against the $50k luxury SUV's?
In this case, this is the "next" vehicle that you heard about. You were either reading an old article, or read an article before the introduction of the model S.
I was (as many are apparently) mistaken in the paper industry - marihuana connection.
Seems obvious since it would be the lumber industry and other industries related to the ability to reduce lumber to a suitable pulp (the raw material producers), not the paper industry, that has a stake in tree chopping.
The reason that it gets this way is essentially a market failure.
.
The thing is while most people apply the idea of a market failure to asymmetric incentives in economics where an outcome could be a net negative for everyone as a whole but a net positive for all the principle players such as both the business and its customers, it also applies to all forms of governance.
In democratic or representative republic forms of governance, the personal investment required to be an informed voter is a cost that is much greater than the benefit of actually making an informed vote. Part of this is due to a lot of noise within the available information, but it also has to do with the number of people that themselves are uniformed
The upshot of this is that other uninformed voters creates an incentive to be an uninformed voter yourself, a self-sustaining entirely rational population of uninformed voters.
If you don't think there's a massive difference between the set of people who license copyrighted material and the people who are FCC licensed, I don't know what to say.
Have you ever observed the FCC reduce its regulator scope, or has it always been increasing its regulator scope?
Thanks for not accepting reality.
What makes the controller chips in a SSD fail so often?
It isn't the controller chips that are failing (a hardware fault,) its buggy logic in the controller firmware (a software fault) that leaves the data stored within the flash in an incoherent state (garbage in, garbage out.)
So what exactly is the difference between a write cycle and an erase cycle in practical terms?
The difference is that there is no such thing as a "write cycle." The guy that you are replying to doesnt actually know much about what he is talking about.
In regard to the general difference between writes and erases the terminology on the table are supposed to be write amplification, block size (typically 256KB), and page size (typically 4KB.) Write amplification occurs when data smaller than a page is frequently written or "modified."
In practice write amplification is typically below 2x on modern controllers, and obviously always larger than 1x.
Worst case write amplification is horrendous at 4096x but the typical scenario where near-worst-case amplification does occur turns out to be low volume traffic in practice (for every near-worst-case page write the SSD experiences, it experiences thousands of near-best-case page writes.)
The worst cases turn out to be log file writes, but thats very small change compared to other write activity (its like worrying about that $1 surcharge on your $150/month cable bill.)
around the 10k order of magnitude, for the latest generation TLC.
You are thinking of SLC, not TLC, and are also probably off by a generation.