They are a non-profit organization that is tax exempt.
All I understand that in non-profit org, there are no shareholders and hence no dividend.
Other than that, I see Mozilla is very similar to other orgs. They *pay* the members of the board (which can include what the members would receive if they had been entitled to dividends) and they also spend money on advertisement.
Is there a reason it should not be taxed as much as a private entity?
I agree with the sue part, but what would be the compensation claimed by the shareholders and who should pay for it?
Should it from the pockets of Yang and the board of directors or should it be from the company's coffers (which coming to think of it, would inturn pull down the share value even further and spawning a new set of law suits)
It would be bad if yahoo's market shares was gobbled by google. I hope yahoo survives atleast till there is a good enough competitor in the search engine market (of course other than google).
He is taking about Investors (nowadays called long term investors). These people depend on how good the companies fundamentals are( its called Fundamental analysis as opposed to Technical analysis). They buy stock of companies that have a good P/E (price to earnings ratio) and have promising revenues and cash flow.
The main source of returns they expect is dividend (which depends on the earnings of the company and the free cash it is sitting on). They enjoy the dividends, hold on to the stock, till they believe the company is not going to grow further or they are negative about the outlook about the company or they have need to redeem their investment for investing in companies or papers that they believe offer better returns.
But nowadays companies do not bother about being investor-friendly and stick with their excess cash. AAPL (Apple) is one of those, they have huge huge cash reserves, but do not give dividends, neither announce buy-back of shares. I would rate them among the least investor friendly companies.
In case of YHOO, it is more cash starved and can actually use some from MSFT.
And for the ones who wonder how dividents/buy-backs etc would help the company, its sort of paying money to your investors, so that in case you need cash later, you can get it back from them. You buyback/give_dividents when you are cash rich, the stock value rises as a result, and then when you need cash you sell the share you brought or issue new share at the higher price. Sounds good doesnt it.
Any distribution or Unix maker out there who want to include the Fluendo MP3 plug-in with their distribution can do so by just signing a contract with Fluendo to become an official redistributor. This contract includes no monetary compensation to Fluendo for getting the right to redistribute the Fluendo MP3 plug-in and no demands of additional purchases from Fluendo. The main purpose of the contract is to satisfy our upstream contractual requirements. By signing this contract any distribution can support mp3 out of the box without any additional license fee. Take a look at the example contract and contact us at info@fluendo.com for details.
They also claim to have an error margin of 10%. But with the measurements gp mentions, I would assume a error margin of atleast 50% (read, an arbitrary result)
Google has something called a "Phone Search" here. They provide a toll-free number, which you can call and feed it with queries and make it read out the results.
They even have an option to send a particular result via sms to your phone.
Wouldn't it make MORE sense to perhaps spend the human/technical resources FIXING the most exploitable bugs rather than standing around with a beer in hand saying 'yep, that's going to explode for sure'.
Yes it indeed would, and thats exactly what they have done and the story is about the review of the practice that happened at the end of the month (read during a review of what became an exploit and what got fixed at the right time)
If they know their software is filled with bugs, why not just fix them and be done with it before it's released.
Ahh that wouldnt be interesting, would it be? Microsoft of course wants to release them with lot of bugs. Thats how they get all the free media coverage with MS fixing the bugs while the Open Source community simply does not fix bugs
Ok lets see... Some company (say Canonical or MSFT) builds a huge software and releases it. And a third party finds a bug and reports it to them. Now would be good to predict the severity of the bug, so that the more exploitable ones can be fixed first? Thats exactly what they are doing, and they are able to get the severity 40% of the time right, with no false negatives (that not a single severe one has been classified as a low priority one).
So, now, do you think this is bad or wrong or something?
If they were guessing the answer of an yes or no question, I would agree with you, getting an yes or no wrong 60% of the time is pretty bad.
But I doubt MSFT would find such a measurement for exploits useful. I would think that, they probably, would guess the probability of an exploit code being created. Like, there is a 90% probability that an exploit code would run amok in the internet.
And getting this probability right 40% of the time, is not bad at all, sounds pretty significant to me.
Why not use WiMax? It's higher bandwidth, requires less infrastructure overall to install (since you don't have to bypass transformers, etc.) and works for mobiles.
Wimax has it own issues too. I am posting this on my Wimax connection in semi-urban Bangalore. While I have no issues with my connection as I live with-in 300m from the tower and the tower is "line-of-sight" from my antenna, I know a lot of people who are completely dissatisfied with it.
I am not sure if it is because of the bad implementation by my ISP, or its the Wimax standard itself, but if the distance between the wimax tower and the subscriber exceeds 400 m, the connectivity becomes really bad.
And presence of trees between the tower and our antenna greatly degrades the signal strength. (Microwaves are absorbed by water)
India will drop its flag on the moon to establish its presence, Nair said in an interview. This will make India the fourth country after the US, Russia, and Japan to have its flag on the moon.
With today's (on 8th Nov) successful manoeuvre, India becomes the fifth country to send a spacecraft to Moon. The other countries, which have sent spacecraft to Moon, are the United States, former Soviet Union, Japan and China. Besides, the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries, has also sent a spacecraft to moon.
Slashdot Mirror
They are a non-profit organization that is tax exempt.
All I understand that in non-profit org, there are no shareholders and hence no dividend.
Other than that, I see Mozilla is very similar to other orgs. They *pay* the members of the board (which can include what the members would receive if they had been entitled to dividends) and they also spend money on advertisement.
Is there a reason it should not be taxed as much as a private entity?
What makes Mozilla different than say a non-listed private company?
and looked at me :(
I hope she did not mean you. ;)
hmm DNA extracted from hairs of balls would be more interesting.
I agree with the sue part, but what would be the compensation claimed by the shareholders and who should pay for it?
Should it from the pockets of Yang and the board of directors or should it be from the company's coffers (which coming to think of it, would inturn pull down the share value even further and spawning a new set of law suits)
hmmm, I am surprised they dont have a space agency yet, which means they pay and depend on other countries for launching sats.
OTOH The implications are too many, like they cannot secret sats like the rest of the world.
It would be bad if yahoo's market shares was gobbled by google. I hope yahoo survives atleast till there is a good enough competitor in the search engine market (of course other than google).
You could buy General Motors lock, stock, and barrel for $14 billion, name all the cars "Google Sucks," and get more bang for the buck."
wouldnt it be cheaper to have windows screensaver say "Google Sucks" instead?
He is taking about Investors (nowadays called long term investors). These people depend on how good the companies fundamentals are( its called Fundamental analysis as opposed to Technical analysis). They buy stock of companies that have a good P/E (price to earnings ratio) and have promising revenues and cash flow.
The main source of returns they expect is dividend (which depends on the earnings of the company and the free cash it is sitting on). They enjoy the dividends, hold on to the stock, till they believe the company is not going to grow further or they are negative about the outlook about the company or they have need to redeem their investment for investing in companies or papers that they believe offer better returns.
But nowadays companies do not bother about being investor-friendly and stick with their excess cash. AAPL (Apple) is one of those, they have huge huge cash reserves, but do not give dividends, neither announce buy-back of shares. I would rate them among the least investor friendly companies.
In case of YHOO, it is more cash starved and can actually use some from MSFT.
And for the ones who wonder how dividents/buy-backs etc would help the company, its sort of paying money to your investors, so that in case you need cash later, you can get it back from them. You buyback/give_dividents when you are cash rich, the stock value rises as a result, and then when you need cash you sell the share you brought or issue new share at the higher price. Sounds good doesnt it.
That would void Novells support agreement. Compiling your own libs for a production server never happpens.
Besides why do you think they pay Novell for?
1. No fecking media support! I get XMMS inform me on first attempt at playing an MP3 that it won't because of licensing conflict.
Why dont the distros use the Fluendo's mp3-plugin. Its Open Source, free, license/patent-fee-free. Am I missing something, any insights about this?
For the one who are not aware of it - http://www.fluendo.com/resources/fluendo_mp3.php :
Any distribution or Unix maker out there who want to include the Fluendo MP3 plug-in with their distribution can do so by just signing a contract with Fluendo to become an official redistributor. This contract includes no monetary compensation to Fluendo for getting the right to redistribute the Fluendo MP3 plug-in and no demands of additional purchases from Fluendo. The main purpose of the contract is to satisfy our upstream contractual requirements. By signing this contract any distribution can support mp3 out of the box without any additional license fee. Take a look at the example contract and contact us at info@fluendo.com for details.
They also claim to have an error margin of 10%. But with the measurements gp mentions, I would assume a error margin of atleast 50% (read, an arbitrary result)
Am I the only one thinking, this should be an idle section story
Google has something called a "Phone Search" here. They provide a toll-free number, which you can call and feed it with queries and make it read out the results.
They even have an option to send a particular result via sms to your phone.
Its still in Google Labs though
http://www.hindu.com/2008/11/15/stories/2008111550580100.htm would be a better source for the story.
Wouldn't it make MORE sense to perhaps spend the human/technical resources FIXING the most exploitable bugs rather than standing around with a beer in hand saying 'yep, that's going to explode for sure'.
Yes it indeed would, and thats exactly what they have done and the story is about the review of the practice that happened at the end of the month (read during a review of what became an exploit and what got fixed at the right time)
Hmmm I dont have statistics about number of security holes in MSFT apps vs say adobe acrobat/flash or any close sourced software.
But given that they are closed source, I would tend to think they are doing ok.
And yes I am playing a devils advocate here, though I do hate their bloatware
If they know their software is filled with bugs, why not just fix them and be done with it before it's released.
Ahh that wouldnt be interesting, would it be? Microsoft of course wants to release them with lot of bugs. Thats how they get all the free media coverage with MS fixing the bugs while the Open Source community simply does not fix bugs
/sarcasm
Slashdot crowd *loves* MSFT bashing doesnt it.
Ok lets see... Some company (say Canonical or MSFT) builds a huge software and releases it. And a third party finds a bug and reports it to them. Now would be good to predict the severity of the bug, so that the more exploitable ones can be fixed first? Thats exactly what they are doing, and they are able to get the severity 40% of the time right, with no false negatives (that not a single severe one has been classified as a low priority one).
So, now, do you think this is bad or wrong or something?
Only 40%, which is already "a success", but they can improve this score,
Ahh you are a manager arent you?
I wish my manager was as optimistic.
Hint: 40% is worse than guessing.
Hmm, lets see...
If they were guessing the answer of an yes or no question, I would agree with you, getting an yes or no wrong 60% of the time is pretty bad.
But I doubt MSFT would find such a measurement for exploits useful. I would think that, they probably, would guess the probability of an exploit code being created. Like, there is a 90% probability that an exploit code would run amok in the internet.
And getting this probability right 40% of the time, is not bad at all, sounds pretty significant to me.
Why not use WiMax? It's higher bandwidth, requires less infrastructure overall to install (since you don't have to bypass transformers, etc.) and works for mobiles.
Wimax has it own issues too. I am posting this on my Wimax connection in semi-urban Bangalore. While I have no issues with my connection as I live with-in 300m from the tower and the tower is "line-of-sight" from my antenna, I know a lot of people who are completely dissatisfied with it.
I am not sure if it is because of the bad implementation by my ISP, or its the Wimax standard itself, but if the distance between the wimax tower and the subscriber exceeds 400 m, the connectivity becomes really bad.
And presence of trees between the tower and our antenna greatly degrades the signal strength. (Microwaves are absorbed by water)
And latency would be yet another issue.
Before someone flames me, knocking meant looking for jobs at ISRO and not outsource to ISRO.
I know you are trying to funny. But this moon mission has indeed prompted NASA scientist of Indian Origin to knock at Indian ISRO's door. Source: http://ibnlive.in.com/news/space-there-nasa-scientists-call-up-isro/76741-11.html?from=search
India will drop its flag on the moon to establish its presence, Nair said in an interview. This will make India the fourth country after the US, Russia, and Japan to have its flag on the moon.
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/India_will_plant_flag_on_the_moon_ISRO_chief/articleshow/3620255.cms
With today's (on 8th Nov) successful manoeuvre, India becomes the fifth country to send a spacecraft to Moon. The other countries, which have sent spacecraft to Moon, are the United States, former Soviet Union, Japan and China. Besides, the European Space Agency (ESA), a consortium of 17 countries, has also sent a spacecraft to moon.
Source: http://www.hindu.com/nic/0061/release11.htm