It is a problem because investors have difficulty finding out how much revenue came out from sales and how much of the revenue recorded this quarter is just accounting.
This information is there in the 10-K filings, but you have to dig much deeper (and IIRC, they don't breakdown the recognition of unearned revenue by Operating system - so eventhough Microsoft earned $10 from Windows XP, 2003 and Longhorn this month, we won't know what the breakdown amongst them is).
Actually it is a way of semi-cooking the books and the SEC has questioned Microsoft about it (and they found nothing illegal).
But it is not a way of making them look richer than they are . When Microsoft sells a OS CD, they get $300. But they record only $25 as assets and the rest as unearned. So it temporarily makes them look poorer (assets are what counts, unearned income is liability) . But the big advantage of this is that it allows Microsoft to smoothen out their income/revenue over quarters and this is something that investors like. On the other hand it makes it very difficult to find out how well (or badly) MSFT is doing at any given moment unless you dig really deep.
The difference between Microsoft and Bestbuy is in how much is recorded as "unearned" - Microsoft records a huge percentage as unearned at the time of sales. Best buy on the other hand records most of revenue as earned.
Sorry to nitpick, but as a voter you have a seat on the board of directors of the company. As an investor/taxpayer you are a shareholder in the country. As a political donor you are a voting shareholder for the company:-)
The Slashdot link is to a single paragraph of text with no information. There is a further link there to "The Independent" which explains this a bit more
Ryanair has been refusing business to these sites for a while. But the booking sites have been screen-scraping Ryanair website and selling tickets for them. Ryanair wants the ability to sell car rentals/hotel bookings etc. through their site and is actively trying to destroy the screen-scrapers.
And I don't think class-action lawsuits are all that prevalent outside USA
That is a pretty ridiculous argument to make
On a per capita basis India and China pollute 1/10 or less as much as US. On a per dollar of GDP basis, US, India and China are comparable for pollution. Additionally, China is the de facto factory of the world, while US is becoming more and more of a middleman with most manufacturing being done elsewhere.
The problem that is evident in Beijing in due to the fact that China is so much more densely populated than the US. They already are trying to fix that (1 child per family) and also clean up the city when Americans are visiting their country - so cut them some slack.
It is not like US is going to let half a billion Chinese into US to balance out the population density, now is it?
No package manager in Windows, yet things insist on storing dependencies in a shared manner.
The above is not true. Msi packages have a way of installing libraries in a shared manner and reference counting them automatically. But what really kills the whole idea is the set of rules which need to be followed to get it right which no package developer understands. Very commonly, you may need to run a dll on an install or an upgrade and you need to be sure that you are using the right version. So msi developers simply bend/break the rules and force the dlls to be on the system "just in case".
If you are going to work for a multinational, speaking more than a language helps a lot, even if you never travel outside your country
I speak a smattering of French and German and surprisingly enough I have used the knowledge atleast once each when customers send me emails about products. Chinese/Japanese is useful too since almost all of electronic manufacturing happens in China, Taiwan or Japan and only Taiwan is really English speaking. Knowing enough Japanese to say Arigato is appreciated a lot by Japanese and knowing Chinese is useful in many eastern countries.
My money is that the story is a fake.
It reads like a fluff piece and mentions the company by name too many times. Even better, since the story does not talk about any arrests, the alleged crime is untraceable. No one can go around and ask questions if no police records exist.
My guess would be that someone decided to disconnect a controller for a few days, filed a missing report , then connected it back and then went out and wrote this story up about it.
You missed a "???" step.
Music industry enjoys significant network effects, ie more people listen to a band, more others will listen to it. The payola scandal around radio was related to this. So the labels could act as "seeders" by playing songs on radio and generating interest. They later recoup their investment by selling cassettes.
Their current problem is that the "barrier to entry" to radio like mediums has fallen. Anyone can upload a video to youtube (or download an mp3 off of a website). So the bands can no longer control public opinion. It is also possible that the CD sales are also falling.
Whether the "music industry lobster" can adopt depends on if they can add value by selecting good songs and then promoting them on youtube (or other mediums). Ie by actually adding value
I have a blog where I post business stories/news and let people comment (www.quarterbuck.com). I have Google ads on that page. I get around 100 people visitng my site, but no one clicks the ads on the page. But whenever some one does click (it appears once in two days or so) Google pays me a dollar or something of that order.
I have no idea if music sites deserve the same pay rate, but 1 cent per dollar seems way too low.
I did not understand your concern with those sentences.
The first "smart box" reference is to Tivo, where linux modifications were rendered unusable to rest of the world using DRM. GPLv3 tries to prevent this from happening. The web service reference is to Google which uses modified Free software internally but has not released (all?) of them externally because GPLv2 does not require them to. This was a concern during GPLv3 creation and was debated endlessly. I think saying that it caused "consternation" is correct.
Could you please expand upon your concerns?
The article provides a nice explanation. Free is Freedom , but not for users (or second party developers), but for Software. The software is free to be developed without restrictions.
The article also explains the so called anti-corporate stance. The article says that it restricts the ability of companies to provide differentiated solutions, which is correct. As long as the differentiation exists only in software and the hardware is non-unique (even if DRM locked down), GPL will level the playing field. The differentiation has to be in the product, which I think is acceptable and promotes innovation.
BSD is a free license in the sense that its users are free to do what they want, but restricts the freedom of the software to be developed without restrictions.
Add one more to the list
I worked for a company for 5 years and then decided to go back and get a masters degree. I told my manager a full year ago that I may be leaving (I needed her recommendation letter) and then gave official notice to the company after 6 months. All the company asked me to do was to start working on a transition plan, hire a replacement and continue working on whatever else I had time for. I worked till the day before I left to school.
I think the trust has been mutually beneficial. I still know people who could work at my earlier job and refer them whenever I can, and my ex-managers (I had lots of them) introduce me to their friends/contacts whenever they are in town.
The description of the story is really messed up.
The one case where someone insulted Sivaji has nothing to do with Google. It has to do with Airtel, a phone company in India.
The other case is one where someone slandered a politician - The story does not say what the actual insult/slander was, but the cops did not prosecute just for criticizing -- the owner of the discussion group was left alone. There was a much better written story , but the editors picked the wrong one.
If saying "add tea bag to water" counts for an algorithm, I can think of something older.
The instructions "go fuck yourself" clearly is older than the recipe for tea. Even better, it has better exception handling too.
That comment is funnier than was intended.
Arabic probably has the greatest history of calligraphy it is considered a holy art because it allows the preservation of the words of the Quran. And the reason for such great development of this art ? The book writers were not allowed to paint any pictures in their books - so writing beautifully was the only creative outlet.
I think CoreCodec CEO is a decent guy.
But overall, I think this move is stupid. First mistake was made when the lawyer sent out the DMCA notice when none should have been sent. The second (as far as CoreCodec goes) was made when the CEO went public with the information. The lawyer sends out the takedown notice under the pain of perjury - so b admitting that the notice was a lie, the lawyer can now be tried in court.
It is true that ORF did not turn up in court. It is also true that there is a reasonable trademarks dispute with two firms that have similar names and sell similar products.
That said, the idea of negative adwords is a bad idea. If there is a valid trademark dispute, ORF should be forced to pay restitution to Orion or forced to change the name. But. now due to the negative keywords ruling, even if ORF changes its name to Uranus corporation, they still are bound not to advertise on a page where user searches for Orion. They essentially cannot offer their services to a user who is searching for Orion.
This is similar to saying that in a newspaper where there is a news article about Netscape, Microsoft should not be allowed to advertise just because in the past Microsoft played dirty with Netscape.
My experience with Ubuntu has been the exact opposite - The OS on my laptop (Lenovo X60 Tablet ) crashed and I switched to Ubuntu because getting OS media was hard (Lenovo kept me on hold on fone for hours).
Gimp still isn't a satisfactory replacement for Photoshop. I used Gimp for a lot of website work and it is a perfect replacement, especially for someone who is a student (and cash-crunched). The only thing I was unable to do was to edit text in images that were created in Photoshop.
Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player.
Never had any of these issues - Flash and VLC media played does all of these just fine
This doesn't even begin to take into account that most businesses I've come across use some kind of custom industry application. CAD applications, specialized accounting applications, lending an loan applications, guess what they're all written for? Windows. Linux still doesn't work for those customers. .
For businesses this is certainly true. But for me atleast wine has ran many applications well enough (Photoshop, Word etc.)
If the Linux community wants to advance they're going to have to give up on some of their ideals and actually provide what people are looking for, which is a stable operating systems that run applications people actually want to use with a consistent look and feel everywhere. I ran Ubuntu for over a year and reverted to XP because I couldn't deal with the slowdowns for no reason, application crashes, incompatibilities, mystery feature additions and removals based on the whims of the developers (what's pigeon going to include or disable this week!), and decisions that were made purely for philosophical reasons (no mp3 support by default? please.)
That completely defeats the idea of a community. The community is not there because they hate Windows and want a replacement. The community is there so that they can create something "free" and usable. You can't ask a community of volunteers to give up their ideals - that immediately is the end of the community. Maybe you can try forming another one to make a windows replacement - but that may be better served by businesses like Canonical.
And what version of Ubuntu are you running ? Mysterious slowdown is a rather rare symptom on Linux -- I never faced it on any version I ever used (redhat, Ubuntu) in over 8 years. Application crashes, unfortunately are more common.
Besides, Outlook is still the best email/productivity/calendaring application out there. Nothing I've seen on UNIX even comes close, especially when I need to share data with others. I have to agree with you about Outlook. Google is the only one that comes close.
I can't believe NYtimes can't do some basic fact checking. This is certainly not the last factory in the world - Chinese are making them like everything else. A quick search on Alibaba is all that would have been needed
Slashdot Mirror
It is a problem because investors have difficulty finding out how much revenue came out from sales and how much of the revenue recorded this quarter is just accounting.
This information is there in the 10-K filings, but you have to dig much deeper (and IIRC, they don't breakdown the recognition of unearned revenue by Operating system - so eventhough Microsoft earned $10 from Windows XP, 2003 and Longhorn this month, we won't know what the breakdown amongst them is).
Actually it is a way of semi-cooking the books and the SEC has questioned Microsoft about it (and they found nothing illegal).
But it is not a way of making them look richer than they are . When Microsoft sells a OS CD, they get $300. But they record only $25 as assets and the rest as unearned. So it temporarily makes them look poorer (assets are what counts, unearned income is liability) . But the big advantage of this is that it allows Microsoft to smoothen out their income/revenue over quarters and this is something that investors like. On the other hand it makes it very difficult to find out how well (or badly) MSFT is doing at any given moment unless you dig really deep.
The difference between Microsoft and Bestbuy is in how much is recorded as "unearned" - Microsoft records a huge percentage as unearned at the time of sales. Best buy on the other hand records most of revenue as earned.
Sorry to nitpick, but as a voter you have a seat on the board of directors of the company. As an investor/taxpayer you are a shareholder in the country. As a political donor you are a voting shareholder for the company :-)
The Slashdot link is to a single paragraph of text with no information. There is a further link there to "The Independent" which explains this a bit more
Ryanair has been refusing business to these sites for a while. But the booking sites have been screen-scraping Ryanair website and selling tickets for them. Ryanair wants the ability to sell car rentals/hotel bookings etc. through their site and is actively trying to destroy the screen-scrapers.
And I don't think class-action lawsuits are all that prevalent outside USA
That is a pretty ridiculous argument to make
On a per capita basis India and China pollute 1/10 or less as much as US. On a per dollar of GDP basis, US, India and China are comparable for pollution. Additionally, China is the de facto factory of the world, while US is becoming more and more of a middleman with most manufacturing being done elsewhere.
The problem that is evident in Beijing in due to the fact that China is so much more densely populated than the US. They already are trying to fix that (1 child per family) and also clean up the city when Americans are visiting their country - so cut them some slack.
It is not like US is going to let half a billion Chinese into US to balance out the population density, now is it?
No package manager in Windows, yet things insist on storing dependencies in a shared manner.
The above is not true. Msi packages have a way of installing libraries in a shared manner and reference counting them automatically. But what really kills the whole idea is the set of rules which need to be followed to get it right which no package developer understands.
Very commonly, you may need to run a dll on an install or an upgrade and you need to be sure that you are using the right version. So msi developers simply bend/break the rules and force the dlls to be on the system "just in case".
I was thinking that he may go into research in a firm like Xerox or IBM...
If you are going to work for a multinational, speaking more than a language helps a lot, even if you never travel outside your country
I speak a smattering of French and German and surprisingly enough I have used the knowledge atleast once each when customers send me emails about products. Chinese/Japanese is useful too since almost all of electronic manufacturing happens in China, Taiwan or Japan and only Taiwan is really English speaking. Knowing enough Japanese to say Arigato is appreciated a lot by Japanese and knowing Chinese is useful in many eastern countries.
Its how america is spelled in Anarchist's Cookbook
My money is that the story is a fake.
It reads like a fluff piece and mentions the company by name too many times. Even better, since the story does not talk about any arrests, the alleged crime is untraceable. No one can go around and ask questions if no police records exist.
My guess would be that someone decided to disconnect a controller for a few days, filed a missing report , then connected it back and then went out and wrote this story up about it.
Ivory ? Too easy .
What about a Mammoth tusk ?
You missed a "???" step.
Music industry enjoys significant network effects, ie more people listen to a band, more others will listen to it. The payola scandal around radio was related to this. So the labels could act as "seeders" by playing songs on radio and generating interest. They later recoup their investment by selling cassettes.
Their current problem is that the "barrier to entry" to radio like mediums has fallen. Anyone can upload a video to youtube (or download an mp3 off of a website). So the bands can no longer control public opinion. It is also possible that the CD sales are also falling.
Whether the "music industry lobster" can adopt depends on if they can add value by selecting good songs and then promoting them on youtube (or other mediums). Ie by actually adding value
I have a blog where I post business stories/news and let people comment (www.quarterbuck.com). I have Google ads on that page. I get around 100 people visitng my site, but no one clicks the ads on the page. But whenever some one does click (it appears once in two days or so) Google pays me a dollar or something of that order.
I have no idea if music sites deserve the same pay rate, but 1 cent per dollar seems way too low.
I did not understand your concern with those sentences .
The first "smart box" reference is to Tivo, where linux modifications were rendered unusable to rest of the world using DRM. GPLv3 tries to prevent this from happening. The web service reference is to Google which uses modified Free software internally but has not released (all?) of them externally because GPLv2 does not require them to. This was a concern during GPLv3 creation and was debated endlessly. I think saying that it caused "consternation" is correct.
Could you please expand upon your concerns?
The article provides a nice explanation. Free is Freedom , but not for users (or second party developers), but for Software. The software is free to be developed without restrictions.
The article also explains the so called anti-corporate stance. The article says that it restricts the ability of companies to provide differentiated solutions, which is correct. As long as the differentiation exists only in software and the hardware is non-unique (even if DRM locked down), GPL will level the playing field. The differentiation has to be in the product, which I think is acceptable and promotes innovation.
BSD is a free license in the sense that its users are free to do what they want, but restricts the freedom of the software to be developed without restrictions.
Add one more to the list
I worked for a company for 5 years and then decided to go back and get a masters degree. I told my manager a full year ago that I may be leaving (I needed her recommendation letter) and then gave official notice to the company after 6 months. All the company asked me to do was to start working on a transition plan, hire a replacement and continue working on whatever else I had time for. I worked till the day before I left to school.
I think the trust has been mutually beneficial. I still know people who could work at my earlier job and refer them whenever I can, and my ex-managers (I had lots of them) introduce me to their friends/contacts whenever they are in town.
The description of the story is really messed up.
The one case where someone insulted Sivaji has nothing to do with Google. It has to do with Airtel, a phone company in India.
The other case is one where someone slandered a politician - The story does not say what the actual insult/slander was, but the cops did not prosecute just for criticizing -- the owner of the discussion group was left alone. There was a much better written story , but the editors picked the wrong one.
My favorite is this one again from the BBC.
If saying "add tea bag to water" counts for an algorithm, I can think of something older.
The instructions "go fuck yourself" clearly is older than the recipe for tea. Even better, it has better exception handling too.
I wonder if the "John Walker" who holds the copyright on that code is still around? The comment says that the code was written between 1972-1978.
That comment is funnier than was intended.
Arabic probably has the greatest history of calligraphy it is considered a holy art because it allows the preservation of the words of the Quran. And the reason for such great development of this art ? The book writers were not allowed to paint any pictures in their books - so writing beautifully was the only creative outlet.
I think CoreCodec CEO is a decent guy.
But overall, I think this move is stupid. First mistake was made when the lawyer sent out the DMCA notice when none should have been sent. The second (as far as CoreCodec goes) was made when the CEO went public with the information. The lawyer sends out the takedown notice under the pain of perjury - so b admitting that the notice was a lie, the lawyer can now be tried in court.
It is true that ORF did not turn up in court. It is also true that there is a reasonable trademarks dispute with two firms that have similar names and sell similar products.
That said, the idea of negative adwords is a bad idea. If there is a valid trademark dispute, ORF should be forced to pay restitution to Orion or forced to change the name. But. now due to the negative keywords ruling, even if ORF changes its name to Uranus corporation, they still are bound not to advertise on a page where user searches for Orion. They essentially cannot offer their services to a user who is searching for Orion.
This is similar to saying that in a newspaper where there is a news article about Netscape, Microsoft should not be allowed to advertise just because in the past Microsoft played dirty with Netscape.
Gimp still isn't a satisfactory replacement for Photoshop. I used Gimp for a lot of website work and it is a perfect replacement, especially for someone who is a student (and cash-crunched). The only thing I was unable to do was to edit text in images that were created in Photoshop.
Sound in flash still doesn't work correctly out of the box on Ubuntu systems, there's no mp3 support by default, nor does Quicktime really work. There's still not a decent movie player.
Never had any of these issues - Flash and VLC media played does all of these just fine
This doesn't even begin to take into account that most businesses I've come across use some kind of custom industry application. CAD applications, specialized accounting applications, lending an loan applications, guess what they're all written for? Windows. Linux still doesn't work for those customers. .
For businesses this is certainly true. But for me atleast wine has ran many applications well enough (Photoshop, Word etc.) If the Linux community wants to advance they're going to have to give up on some of their ideals and actually provide what people are looking for, which is a stable operating systems that run applications people actually want to use with a consistent look and feel everywhere. I ran Ubuntu for over a year and reverted to XP because I couldn't deal with the slowdowns for no reason, application crashes, incompatibilities, mystery feature additions and removals based on the whims of the developers (what's pigeon going to include or disable this week!), and decisions that were made purely for philosophical reasons (no mp3 support by default? please.)
That completely defeats the idea of a community. The community is not there because they hate Windows and want a replacement. The community is there so that they can create something "free" and usable. You can't ask a community of volunteers to give up their ideals - that immediately is the end of the community. Maybe you can try forming another one to make a windows replacement - but that may be better served by businesses like Canonical.
And what version of Ubuntu are you running ? Mysterious slowdown is a rather rare symptom on Linux -- I never faced it on any version I ever used (redhat, Ubuntu) in over 8 years. Application crashes, unfortunately are more common.
Besides, Outlook is still the best email/productivity/calendaring application out there. Nothing I've seen on UNIX even comes close, especially when I need to share data with others. I have to agree with you about Outlook. Google is the only one that comes close.
I can't believe NYtimes can't do some basic fact checking. This is certainly not the last factory in the world - Chinese are making them like everything else. A quick search on Alibaba is all that would have been needed