Most taxi companies before Uber serviced a single city, or maybe just a few suburbs of a city
The idea of economies of scale is not new. So you have to ask yourself why there were no global or even national taxi companies before Uber. The reason is that the taxi business doesn't scale. The economies of scale are not big enough to offset the increased organisational overhead.
Furthermore Uber has only scaled the dispatch service to the whole globe. The things that really cost a taxi company money - cars, drivers, servicing, licensing are as small scale in Uber as it is possible to be. Ubers drivers all behave like one man businesses. A large taxi company can make some savings by buying one model of car thus probably getting a discount from the manufacturer and some savings in maintenance. This is not available to Uber drivers because they all buy their own cars.
Uber's business model doesn't work. If they charged sustainable prices, they would have no competitive advantage over the traditional taxi services.
First, I never said revenue was profit and I understand the difference,
No, I don't think you do.
We have to assume there some percentage of $7.4 Billion per year is profit (Uber won't tell us),
No we don't. Why do we have to assume that any part of $7.4 billion is profit?
Last year Uber had revenues (income) of about $7.4 billion. That means $7.4 billions were paid into its bank account.
But Uber had expenses of about $9.4 billion (estimated because they don't publish financial information much). That means $9.4 billions were paid out of its bank account. Profit is calculated as income - expenses or $-2 billion.
Revenue is not profit. Gross revenue is what gets charged to the customers. Net revenue is what is left to Uber after the driver takes his or her cut.
Burning through $10.7 billion over nine years is an average loss of $1.2 billion per year. If they lost $1.2 billion last year on revenues of $7.4 billion, that's pretty bad. In fact, it's worse than that. Uber's loss last year was closer to $2 billion.
Uber is a taxi company. They have hundreds of competitors Everywhere they operate. That's why they can't turn a profit, because, if they charged the true cost of a journey plus a margin, they would no longer have competitive advantage.
i've run pure Java applications on Windows, Linux and MacOS. As a rule, the only issues I've seen are with path names. Java contains everything you need for platform agnostic paths but people often fail to use them..
Anyway, on your list, number 4 is true but so what? OO is a good thing. Number 7 is also true, but the main problem there is people seeing Oracle as a bogeyman instead of facing the reality of the situation. If the worst thing they are going to do is not allow Eclipse to use the Java trademark, so what.
Everything else just speaks to an irrational hatred of Java.
Yeah, that's bollocks. You can't name any such vessels and if you could, Gates wasn't the one improperly applying the patches.
Furthermore, the NSA could equally have saved more lives than were lost by spying on Windows computers. You don't know because they don't tell you such things.
No, banks do not have to have actual bills in a vault. At the moment there are about $1.61 trillion dollars in circulation - that's all the notes and coins. It's only a fraction of the total US money supply.
Yes because the root shell has magical properties that stop you from making typos. Oh, no wait, it doesn't.
I've seen people su to root and forget they are logged in a shoo and do things like "I'll just empty my home directory", type "cd" then "rm -rf * ". On Linux this is not such a disaster but on traditional unixes, root's home directory is /
Just opened Word 2016 on my Mac with an new blank document and it'a up to 289 Mb. Still, it's by no means the worst memory hog. SourceTree (a graphical git and mercurial client) is up to nearly 600Mb and we won't even talk about Safari.
He also caused the people who stood bail for him to lose a lot of money. If you were robbed of £140,000 wouldn't you want the perpetrator to go to prison?
Apart from the crime of skipping bail, it should be remembered that, in order to get bail in the first place, Assange had to promise to give the authorities money if he broke his bail conditions. A lot of the money was guaranteed by some of his supporters who were all totally shafted by his decision to flee to the Ecuador Embassy.
So, he's a rapist (must be, otherwise, why did he flee) and he defrauded his friends of a lot of money. I really don't know why anybody thinks of him as anything other than a shit.
assange did not feel that the law was correct and I agree that he was being targeted unfairly
Let;'s be clear about this. Assange was arrested for allegedly having sex with a woman who was asleep without her consent. Here in the civilised world, we call that rape.
So you are saying that you feel the law against rape is not correct.
Also. All that fanaticism about type checking is misplaced.
No, really it isn't.
Sure it's nice to have a compiler detect such errors at compile time. But if you are doing things right you have unit tests and integration tests in place. They will find your silly mistakes fast enough.
Writing unit tests is boring. I'd rather just write tests that prove my code meets the specification than also have to write tests that prove I have added two numbers together rather than concatenated a string and a number.
Next you'll be saying it's nice to have a debugger. But, if you are doing things right you have debug logging...
There are two... TWO... major phone brands. Samsung and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software platforms... Android and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software marketplaces. Itunes and Play Store.
This is about as close as you can come to a monopoly; and is absolutely leading to higher prices and a problematic distribution of wealth.
No, really it isn't. The closest you can come to a monopoly is one brand. I thought that was bleeding obvious.
Your analysis is wrong anyway. There are plenty of mobile phone manufacturers, it is just that only Apple and Samsung make phones desirable enough to sell at a profit. It's not their fault that everybody else is in a race to the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
Most taxi companies before Uber serviced a single city, or maybe just a few suburbs of a city
The idea of economies of scale is not new. So you have to ask yourself why there were no global or even national taxi companies before Uber. The reason is that the taxi business doesn't scale. The economies of scale are not big enough to offset the increased organisational overhead.
Furthermore Uber has only scaled the dispatch service to the whole globe. The things that really cost a taxi company money - cars, drivers, servicing, licensing are as small scale in Uber as it is possible to be. Ubers drivers all behave like one man businesses. A large taxi company can make some savings by buying one model of car thus probably getting a discount from the manufacturer and some savings in maintenance. This is not available to Uber drivers because they all buy their own cars.
Uber's business model doesn't work. If they charged sustainable prices, they would have no competitive advantage over the traditional taxi services.
First, I never said revenue was profit and I understand the difference,
No, I don't think you do.
We have to assume there some percentage of $7.4 Billion per year is profit (Uber won't tell us),
No we don't. Why do we have to assume that any part of $7.4 billion is profit?
Last year Uber had revenues (income) of about $7.4 billion. That means $7.4 billions were paid into its bank account.
But Uber had expenses of about $9.4 billion (estimated because they don't publish financial information much). That means $9.4 billions were paid out of its bank account. Profit is calculated as income - expenses or $-2 billion.
Revenue is not profit. Gross revenue is what gets charged to the customers. Net revenue is what is left to Uber after the driver takes his or her cut.
Burning through $10.7 billion over nine years is an average loss of $1.2 billion per year. If they lost $1.2 billion last year on revenues of $7.4 billion, that's pretty bad. In fact, it's worse than that. Uber's loss last year was closer to $2 billion.
Uber is a taxi company. They have hundreds of competitors Everywhere they operate. That's why they can't turn a profit, because, if they charged the true cost of a journey plus a margin, they would no longer have competitive advantage.
i've run pure Java applications on Windows, Linux and MacOS. As a rule, the only issues I've seen are with path names. Java contains everything you need for platform agnostic paths but people often fail to use them..
Anyway, on your list, number 4 is true but so what? OO is a good thing. Number 7 is also true, but the main problem there is people seeing Oracle as a bogeyman instead of facing the reality of the situation. If the worst thing they are going to do is not allow Eclipse to use the Java trademark, so what.
Everything else just speaks to an irrational hatred of Java.
Yeah, that's bollocks. You can't name any such vessels and if you could, Gates wasn't the one improperly applying the patches.
Furthermore, the NSA could equally have saved more lives than were lost by spying on Windows computers. You don't know because they don't tell you such things.
All I can say is that this "stupid idea" has been working for years over here in Europe.
How adorably naive.
No, banks do not have to have actual bills in a vault. At the moment there are about $1.61 trillion dollars in circulation - that's all the notes and coins. It's only a fraction of the total US money supply.
It's surprising to me. I would have expected nearly all of them to fail pretty much straight away.
Yes because the root shell has magical properties that stop you from making typos. Oh, no wait, it doesn't.
I've seen people su to root and forget they are logged in a shoo and do things like "I'll just empty my home directory", type "cd" then "rm -rf * ". On Linux this is not such a disaster but on traditional unixes, root's home directory is /
I want better than "pretty stable" for my file system, I want stable. Pretty stable suggests not completely stable.
Almost since day 1, OS X had an option to repair file system permissions in Disk Utility.
Windows is not generations ahead of OS X or even ahead really,
If they are planning to scrap it, they could rename it to anything. I vote for fartscrabbler.
Yes there was. I remember when my company upgraded my lap top to it from Win98. It was a revelation and it is still my favourite version of Windows.
Just opened Word 2016 on my Mac with an new blank document and it'a up to 289 Mb. Still, it's by no means the worst memory hog. SourceTree (a graphical git and mercurial client) is up to nearly 600Mb and we won't even talk about Safari.
Why did he flee justice if the rape charges were bullshit? His actions were those of somebody who believes themselves to be guilty.
He also caused the people who stood bail for him to lose a lot of money. If you were robbed of £140,000 wouldn't you want the perpetrator to go to prison?
Apart from the crime of skipping bail, it should be remembered that, in order to get bail in the first place, Assange had to promise to give the authorities money if he broke his bail conditions. A lot of the money was guaranteed by some of his supporters who were all totally shafted by his decision to flee to the Ecuador Embassy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
So, he's a rapist (must be, otherwise, why did he flee) and he defrauded his friends of a lot of money. I really don't know why anybody thinks of him as anything other than a shit.
The charges against him were rape.
In Sweden.
He ran away.
My conclusion is therefore that he is a rapist.
Let;'s be clear about this. Assange was arrested for allegedly having sex with a woman who was asleep without her consent. Here in the civilised world, we call that rape.
So you are saying that you feel the law against rape is not correct.
You are a fuckwit.
Gravity obeys a relatively (sorry for the pun) simple law.
It is not conscious.
This whole thing is bullshit.
Also. All that fanaticism about type checking is misplaced.
No, really it isn't.
Sure it's nice to have a compiler detect such errors at compile time. But if you are doing things right you have unit tests and integration tests in place. They will find your silly mistakes fast enough.
Writing unit tests is boring. I'd rather just write tests that prove my code meets the specification than also have to write tests that prove I have added two numbers together rather than concatenated a string and a number.
Next you'll be saying it's nice to have a debugger. But, if you are doing things right you have debug logging...
Well, for one thing, the white space wouldn't minify very well.
White space should never be a syntactic element of a language. It's a testament to Python it is a good language in spite of its white space rules.
There are two... TWO... major phone brands. Samsung and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software platforms... Android and Apple. There are two... TWO... major phone software marketplaces. Itunes and Play Store.
This is about as close as you can come to a monopoly; and is absolutely leading to higher prices and a problematic distribution of wealth.
No, really it isn't. The closest you can come to a monopoly is one brand. I thought that was bleeding obvious.
Your analysis is wrong anyway. There are plenty of mobile phone manufacturers, it is just that only Apple and Samsung make phones desirable enough to sell at a profit. It's not their fault that everybody else is in a race to the bottom.
Apple does not have a monopoly in anything.