Funny, people have adapted sailboats to work on roads. Or off them even.
Just because something is technically possible doesn't make it a good idea. An amphibious sailboat is a fun but dumb idea. A flying car is a fun but dumb idea.
It's hard to think of a boat that's more fuel efficient than a sailboat.
Not to mention that sailing is a solved problem. You can move a huge sailboat vast distances with comparatively modest power requirements and nobody is trying to get a sailboat to be amphibious. What would be absurd would be trying to adapt a sailboat to drive on roads. That is basically what people are trying to do with flying cars (which really are driving planes). Even if you manage to get it to work it's not going to do a very good job of flying or driving (or sailing). A sailboat is great in the water. A plane is great in the air. A car is great on the road. Combining them isn't likely to prove productive and doesn't solve any obvious problem in an economically practical way.
Electric, V/STOL, automated so there's no real skill required. Sounds useful to me as long as it can safely land in a parking lot.
We don't have an energy source adequate to do electric flying propulsion - not even close. V/STOL is very expensive - you're basically talking about a helicopter or tilt-rotor - and very complicated. The maintenance alone would be prohibitively expensive. We don't have anywhere close to the level of automation required for fully automated piloting and we don't have appropriate infrastructure either. You can't just land in a parking lot safely. Prop wash is a real thing and you have to design landing pads or runways to land safely.
Doesn't sound feasible to me, but then self-driving cars didn't either 5 years ago.
Not the same problem at all. Self driving cars are a problem of sensors and routing and logic. Flying cars are problem of physics and infrastructure in addition to the problems of sensors, and routing. Getting something big enough to carry people to fly takes a LOT of energy even if it is very light. A flying car is a FAR more difficult problem to solve than a self driving car and we aren't in any danger of solving it anytime soon.
This is slightly off topic, but does anyone else find it weird that we are on the cusp of all these radical new technology breakthroughs, yet we can no longer build enough new houses each year to keep up with population growth?
What are you talking about? We have no trouble building enough housing. If anything we have the problem that we have too much housing in many places. That's a big part of the reason we had the economic crash in 2008. The housing market is cyclical and sometimes there is more capacity than others but there isn't any sort of meaningful inability to build enough housing.
Imagine telling someone in the 1960s, when houses and transport infrastructure were being developed at record pace, that in the future we would indeed have the wrist watch phones and flying cars, but a high income family wouldn't be able to afford a rundown victorian era worker's cottage within an hour's commute of their job.
I don't know where you live but that doesn't describe anywhere within a 500 mile radius of where I live. Out here in the real world that people commuting more than 40 minutes to their job is fairly rare. Average travel time to work in the US is right around 25 minutes right now. Now if you insist on working in downtown San Francisco where all the Google workers are jacking up the rent, then it might be a problem but that doesn't apply to 99+% of us. If you can't afford to live someplace, move to where you can afford it. A house in the midwest where I live costs literally 1/5 of the same house near New York City.
About time for what? A fragile, expensive, complicated, inefficient vehicle that won't fly or drive very well, that few people can actually operate safely and that nobody actually needs? What problem does a flying car actually solve for anyone better than what is available now? To fly it you have to drive to an airport anyway in most cases where there already are planes available. How is a flying car any more useful than driving to an airport, flying in a real plane and then renting a car at your destination? The number of use cases where a flying car would provide an actual advantage is vanishingly small.
But will this really make commuting easier?
Not even a little bit even if we presume that it is technologically or economically feasible. Which it isn't.
Flying cars will (almost certainly) never be a significant thing within the lifetime of anyone reading this. Yes it technically it is possible to build a (crappy) car that will fly with current technology but not in a way that has any meaningful utility. To have a genuinely useful flying car there would have to be a massive advance in compact energy sources and there is no reason to believe that will happen any time soon. There also would have to be substantial advances in automated piloting because there are relatively few trained pilots and even fewer with the financial resources to buy a frivolous vehicle like a flying car. A huge portion of the driving public can barely operate a car safely and competently. Anyone who thinks these people can handle a plane is delusional.
Building a flying car necessarily means you end up with a device that can't fly very well and can't drive very well and fills a nonexistent need. Someone else rightly pointed out that they are really driving planes, not flying cars. To make it light enough to fly necessarily means sacrificing durability and crash-worthiness on the road. Even minor fender benders would render the vehicle unable to fly safely. Driving one in bad weather (especially snow) seems like a terrible idea. Handling will suck and it will be hard to make it comfortable and quiet. Even if you do manage make one it's going to be outrageously expensive because the market is tiny and the vehicle is needlessly complicated. So it doesn't work physically and it doesn't make sense economically.
Cars aren't TVs, there are still people that fix cars.
That's kind of a problem to my mind. The fact that we still have such a huge car repair industry is a bug, not a feature. If someone wants to buy and repair old junky cars they aren't going away any time soon. But looking forward I'd prefer cars that don't actually need to be repaired or rebuilt because doing so is largely a wasteful activity.
I agree, but then why do people here, a tech sites fully of supposedly technically mided people, keep saying they want a 1970s level of technology in their cars? That was my point.
Because change is hard even for people who like technology. Furthermore just because someone reads slashdot doesn't mean they are necessarily progressive in their views on technology. Slashdot has a small contingent of idiots here arguing against vaccines for crying out loud.
Once people get used to something a certain way it can be incredibly hard to get them to change, even if all the evidence indicates that the change will be for the better. Many people like to drive a manual transmission car even though the technology now under performs many forms of automatic and semi-automatic transmissions. There is no rational performance basis today to prefer a traditional manual transmission and yet they persist.
Motor vehicles can be used as weapons. I prefer to be 100% in control of them at all times.
Well chances are that you aren't a particularly talented driver and there is ample evidence that you being "100% in control of them at all times" is almost certainly actually a safety hazard. Both to yourself and more importantly to the rest of us. Insisting on 100% control of a car is as ridiculous as insisting that you be the one to pilot the airplane or you being the train engineer. Just because you feel more comfortable doesn't actually make it a good idea. If technology can get better results and keep you (and more importantly me) safe from your control issues then I don't give a damn what your preferences are.
does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left?
Yahoo hasn't been in good shape for quite a while now. The only real assets the company had that were really worth much were the stake in Alibaba and some residual business from 10+ years ago when the company was still relevant. A sale of the company and it's assets, together or separately, was clearly the most likely outcome even before Marissa Mayer became CEO. That's the way things go sometimes. Most companies don't last forever and Yahoo is no exception. It will continue to exist as a portion of some other company or companies and nothing of value will be lost. Yahoo hasn't been well managed for a while. The dumbest thing their management ever did was declining the buyout offer from Microsoft for an absurd amount of money. (Conversely that might be the biggest bullet Microsoft ever dodged...)
Run a business into the ground and make $100 million? What a great scam.
Marissa Mayer did not run Yahoo into the ground. That had been accomplished before she ever arrived at the company. Frankly if anything she's done a fairly good job of mitigating the damage. Yahoo lost it's way a long time ago and has largely been coasting on previous accomplishments for the better part of a decade. I doubt anyone could have really fixed the problems Yahoo had. The best solution was always likely to be to sell the company. Anyone with a brain coming into a train wreck like Yahoo would have negotiated a severance package because why else would you bother taking on the job? The long term prospects of the company were poor and anyone with the chops to run the company would know it.
not going to happen, because: Cell Phones, Chromebooks, Firefoxbooks only have 2GB-4GB of ram
Not relevant on my PC or my Mac. I'm typing this on a PC with 24GB of RAM and my Mac at home has 16GB. As long as it doesn't consume memory needed by other applications I don't mind at all if it uses lots of RAM to improve performance. If the machine has less RAM then adjust accordingly.
Why is this not a story on slashdot's front page, then?
How about because the investigation isn't over and it's not news at this point. Why would "nothing to report so far" be worthy of the slashdot front page? As of right now there is no story and no findings of criminal wrongdoing. That may change but right now any implications that Hillary has broken any laws are suppositions not supported by actual evidence.
Oh, because Mediaite is a known bullshit news site.
20 seconds on Google will find you hundreds of them. Look it up yourself. Mediaite is merely the first on the comes up and they were merely passing on what CNN is reporting. If CNN is not a "real" news outlet I don't know what is.
So far there are no findings of note. None. The investigation continues. If there are findings worthy of prosecution I'm sure we'll hear all about it. If Hillary did break the law then she should get whatever punishment is appropriate.
The FBI has enough evidence that they believe is cause for an indictment. The Department of Justice is just sitting on it and not pursuing the indictment.
That is not true at all apparently. The FBI has found "no criminal wrongdoing". The Justice Department isn't sitting on anything because so far there is nothing to sit on. While the investigation goes on, so far it is much ado about (almost) nothing.
The whole thing is sleazy and it's showing just how incestuous DC can be.
Sleazy politicians? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you... [/sarcasm]
For those outside the US, Hillary is the hawk urging for "regime change" and invading other countries.
No more so than any number of Republicans and less than some of them. Yeah she's more hawkish than Bernie but that's not news.
With her as president, it won't take long before the next war(s) start and other countries are called upon to clean the US-caused mess.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Can't be any worse than Bush the Lesser.
Trump is more focused inward, proposes a more isolationalist view and seems less likely to mess up anywhere else on the planet.
Spare me. The only thing Trump is focused on is the Trump brand. Trump isn't proposing any sort of focused policy and the "proposals" he has floated are idiotic. I shudder to think how fast Trump would manage to cause international incidents by running his mouth and his shoot first ask questions never approach to policy issues. 2/3 of the job of president is foreign relations and I can think of few people less appropriate for that job than Donald Trump.
I suspect he isn't quitting because he can still win. It involves all the superdelegates switching sides, but it can still happen.
Lots of things can happen in theory that won't in reality. Yes in principle he could still get the nomination. It is extremely unlikely at this point unless Hillary has a major medical issue or some other catastrophe occurs that her campaign can't manage. I would probably prefer Bernie as the candidate but it would take a minor miracle for him to get the nomination at this point.
Now why would the superdelegates switch to Bernie? Well, the FBI hasn't finished their investigation in Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of State yet...
They won't switch to Bernie unless Hilllary drops out. Wishful thinking to assume otherwise. If the FBI hasn't got anything yet regarding the private server I very much doubt it will ever be a real issue beyond some poo for republicans to fling at her.
What I don't get about Hillary is why she seems to draw such special hate from some people. I get disagreement with her political stances and have no problem with an honest difference of opinion. I don't agree with much of what she says as well but it seems to be more than that. Clearly some of the ire is poorly disguised sexism. A powerful smart woman scares a lot of insecure people both men and surprisingly many women too. Many claim they don't trust her but there is NO evidence that she is meaningfully more or less trustworthy than most any other politician running for high office. To get to high office almost by definition means doing some things that put skeletons in your closet. By default I assume all of them are power seeking self interested liars and if you don't then you are an idiot. I don't trust Hillary but I don't trust any of her opponents (except maybe Bernie by just a little) any more than her and some I trust far less (Trump) with real power. At least with Hillary I have a pretty good idea what I'm getting even if I have to hold my nose at times.
Some of it was real but much was fabricated by would be con artists and ambulance chasers. There were a lot of people making false and/or unsubstantiated claims in the hopes of settlement money.
When will people stop lying about Tesla's Autopilot mode crashing their cars?
Only when it becomes clear that there is no money to be made by doing so. People lied about Audi's "uncontrollably accelerating" when in fact it was people standing on the accelerator pedal when they thought they were on the brake. People lied about Toyota Prius's too because they though there was a chance for settlement money. I have no doubt Telsa and every other company that comes out with autopilot technology is going to get hit with fraudulent claims as well.
But being "the cloud" is generally new, what would be an "acceptable" way to make an estimate for renewal rate?
Ahh, you've hit on the crux of the problem. With any new business model there exists the problem of trying to figure out what accounting practices are considered reasonable for that business. Usually this takes a bit of time and eventually there is usually guidance from the IFRS, IRS, SEC and other bodies for acceptable booking practices. Remember that GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and much of GAAP (and IFRS even more so) is principle based rather than black and white rule based. Because every company is a bit different the accounting treatments can be different as well to best reflect the structure of the business. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Oracle was being rather aggressive with their accounting treatments. In all likelihood the subscriptions will probably be treated much like the accounting for magazine subscriptions.
Personally I'm not overly familiar with the nuances of accounting for subscription based businesses but here is a little primer.
Or, could Oracle just say "it's a new field so we simply guessed" in their official accounting? Or, would they be expected to survey somewhat similar services, such as mainframe or super-computer subscriptions, to find a rough approximation?
Basically yes. They can probably hide behind the fig leaf that they weren't sure because there wasn't official guidance on the matter. In reality I'm sure Oracle's accountants are pretty bright so it's more of plausible deniability thing. Personally I don't see how cloud subscriptions are any different from other types of subscriptions and that is well understood in accounting practice. What will probably happen is that the IRS will probably weigh in on the matter at some point (if they haven't already) and that will effectively write the law about how it should be handled going forward. If there isn't fraud in play then it probably is a matter of overly aggressive accounting practices.
Accounting rules are crazy. Whenever I have something explained to me by an accounting, I'm often baffled at how it works.
No they aren't crazy. You just have to understand some basic principles.
Strangely (to me anyway), even though the organization got all $100 at once from their member when a card was bought, they only accrued income when a punch was used.
That's not strange at all. To understand it you have to understand double entry accounting. Every transaction has two entries - a debit and a credit. Think of them kind of like and In and an Out - they have to balance. There are basically five categories of ledger accounts. Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expenses. Every transaction has a debit of an account in one of the five categories and a credit in an account of one of the five categories. The debit and credit can be in the same category or different ones.
That transaction you mentioned works like this: When the card is bought Assets (cash) increased (debit) by $100. Liabilities (future punches) increased (credit) by $100. Later when a punch is used Liabilities decrease (debit) by $10 and Income increased (credit) by $10. (this is when the sale occurs)
Basically the company has traded an liability (the obligation of services for the punch) for an asset (cash). As that obligation is fulfilled the company realizes the income from that sale. It's done this way for several reasons but most important is the matching principle - basically that expenses and income should be booked when they occurred, regardless of when the actual cash transfer took place. The company didn't actually sell it's product until the customer used the punch (the punch is the product) so it would be inappropriate to say they sold something until the punch transaction results in Income.
it still seems kind of bizarre that you actually *gain* $100 but don't actually count it except $10 at a time over time.
It seems weird because you are thinking of the $100 as income when in fact it is an asset. To make it easier instead of getting $100 for the card let's say the customer gave the money to buy an orange on their behalf. Orange slices are just another form of asset like cash. So when the customer gets their card punched the company would give the customer an orange slice. The company had to pay something to buy that orange slice so until they actually trade it to a customer a sale hasn't occurred. It seems confusing because we usually associate receiving cash with income but they aren't necessarily the same thing.
A customer can't buy a liability which is what the customer is doing when he pays $100 for the card. He can only buy a good or a service which is what they can do with the card. So until that good or service is rendered to the customer then it isn't income to the company. The fact that cash changed hands before the good or service was rendered is immaterial to when the company actually realized the income. It's a bit like buying something on layaway.
In their case, it seems extra weird because the punch cards never expired and so there's the risk they would be never redeemed.
That is EXACTLY what happens and is why you typically see expiration notices on checks and cards. If they never expired and were never used then the company would have to carry them on the books forever. If they don't expire and the customer loses the card then the company has to carry that obligation in theory forever. In practice there are ways to work around it but they are considerably more problematic.
Considering more and more companies are using non-GAAP accounting measures [marketwatch.com] to deceive investors, it appears they've already determined what method to use while not making it clear what they're doing.
Well if you are a global company you aren't using GAAP outside the US anyway. You probably are using IFRS. If you are an investor seeing words like Pro-Forma you should . Pro-Forma is roughly translated from latin as "Fairy Tale" or "Bullshit we made up".
That being said, any accountant worth their per-diem can use GAAP accounting that is perfectly legal and still obfuscate what is really going on. Plenty of companies do it. Go pull the financial records of any large bank and if you claim you can make sense of them you are either in line for a Nobel prize or a liar and I'm going to lean towards the later. I'm a certified accountant and I can't make heads or tails of them.
The accounting firm can only comment on whether the records they receive are consistent and have a correct process based on their inputs.
That's not true at all. I'm an accountant and audits absolutely can and generally should investigate whether the records they review are factual and evidence based. In fact an auditor is supposed to look for evidence of fraud or mismanagement when doing a financial audit. If an accounting firm is not doing this when auditing the books for a large company then they are not doing their job properly.
If the wrong stuff is far enough upstream of the books, there's a GIGO problem.
That's when the auditor is supposed to decline to sign off on the books. Unfortunately audit firms have something of a conflict of interest. If they don't sign off on the books they might lose that client ($$$) and so they sometimes aren't are independent as they really should be.
Is it Oracle, for allegedly inflating their sales numbers? Or is it the accounting firms that audit the books and sign off on it?
The answer is Yes. As in both of them are at fault. If the auditing firm misses something big like that then they are potentially liable if Oracle really is inflating their numbers. Also the company management bears substantial responsibility as does the board of directors.
One thing to bear in mind however is that when an auditor signs off on the books they are NOT claiming that the books are absolutely correct to the penny. That would be impossible for a company of any significant size. What they are saying is that they believe the books are materially representative of the financial picture of the company. It would be impossible for them to claim that there were no errors or flaws in the books. Basically the best they can do is say "yeah, this is pretty close to reality and you can depend on these numbers for decision making". If they miss a big fraud then obviously the auditor screwed up and that is a big problem. But it also means that management screwed up (or lied) too.
"We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct." == "We are confident we paid off the right politicians to get nothing beyond a slap on the wrist for our doctored books."
I'm a certified accountant (among other things). What it probably really means is that the rules are sufficiently poorly defined that Oracle figures they have enough weasel room to claim what they are doing is permissible. And they may be correct in that assertion. It also probably means that what they are doing won't result in any issue worse than a fine and probably will have minimal impact on their stock price or bottom line long term. I don't have any idea if Oracle is doing something illegal here or not but I'm not surprised they would make a statement like that. Could result in some fines after years of litigation but probably won't amount to anything material for them even if it should.
One of the problems (especially with intangible goods) is consistently determining when to book the goods as a sale. This often isn't as straightforward as you might think and there are often several potential acceptable answers. The important thing is that A) what method they are using is understood and made clear and B) that they follow it consistently. For example my company books a sale when we receive a purchase order from a customer. A cloud software company might choose to book the sale based on expected retention rates and then adjust the numbers later for bad debts based on actual cash received. There are accounting guidelines for what is generally considered acceptable and what isn't through the FASB, the IRS and some other government agencies like the SEC. Obviously making up sales out of whole cloth is clearly illegal but if there is anything backing up the numbers at all then it can get a lot fuzzier real fast.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, people have adapted sailboats to work on roads. Or off them even.
Just because something is technically possible doesn't make it a good idea. An amphibious sailboat is a fun but dumb idea. A flying car is a fun but dumb idea.
It's hard to think of a boat that's more fuel efficient than a sailboat.
Not to mention that sailing is a solved problem. You can move a huge sailboat vast distances with comparatively modest power requirements and nobody is trying to get a sailboat to be amphibious. What would be absurd would be trying to adapt a sailboat to drive on roads. That is basically what people are trying to do with flying cars (which really are driving planes). Even if you manage to get it to work it's not going to do a very good job of flying or driving (or sailing). A sailboat is great in the water. A plane is great in the air. A car is great on the road. Combining them isn't likely to prove productive and doesn't solve any obvious problem in an economically practical way.
Electric, V/STOL, automated so there's no real skill required. Sounds useful to me as long as it can safely land in a parking lot.
We don't have an energy source adequate to do electric flying propulsion - not even close. V/STOL is very expensive - you're basically talking about a helicopter or tilt-rotor - and very complicated. The maintenance alone would be prohibitively expensive. We don't have anywhere close to the level of automation required for fully automated piloting and we don't have appropriate infrastructure either. You can't just land in a parking lot safely. Prop wash is a real thing and you have to design landing pads or runways to land safely.
Doesn't sound feasible to me, but then self-driving cars didn't either 5 years ago.
Not the same problem at all. Self driving cars are a problem of sensors and routing and logic. Flying cars are problem of physics and infrastructure in addition to the problems of sensors, and routing. Getting something big enough to carry people to fly takes a LOT of energy even if it is very light. A flying car is a FAR more difficult problem to solve than a self driving car and we aren't in any danger of solving it anytime soon.
This is slightly off topic, but does anyone else find it weird that we are on the cusp of all these radical new technology breakthroughs, yet we can no longer build enough new houses each year to keep up with population growth?
What are you talking about? We have no trouble building enough housing. If anything we have the problem that we have too much housing in many places. That's a big part of the reason we had the economic crash in 2008. The housing market is cyclical and sometimes there is more capacity than others but there isn't any sort of meaningful inability to build enough housing.
Imagine telling someone in the 1960s, when houses and transport infrastructure were being developed at record pace, that in the future we would indeed have the wrist watch phones and flying cars, but a high income family wouldn't be able to afford a rundown victorian era worker's cottage within an hour's commute of their job.
I don't know where you live but that doesn't describe anywhere within a 500 mile radius of where I live. Out here in the real world that people commuting more than 40 minutes to their job is fairly rare. Average travel time to work in the US is right around 25 minutes right now. Now if you insist on working in downtown San Francisco where all the Google workers are jacking up the rent, then it might be a problem but that doesn't apply to 99+% of us. If you can't afford to live someplace, move to where you can afford it. A house in the midwest where I live costs literally 1/5 of the same house near New York City.
Well, it's about time.
About time for what? A fragile, expensive, complicated, inefficient vehicle that won't fly or drive very well, that few people can actually operate safely and that nobody actually needs? What problem does a flying car actually solve for anyone better than what is available now? To fly it you have to drive to an airport anyway in most cases where there already are planes available. How is a flying car any more useful than driving to an airport, flying in a real plane and then renting a car at your destination? The number of use cases where a flying car would provide an actual advantage is vanishingly small.
But will this really make commuting easier?
Not even a little bit even if we presume that it is technologically or economically feasible. Which it isn't.
Flying cars will (almost certainly) never be a significant thing within the lifetime of anyone reading this. Yes it technically it is possible to build a (crappy) car that will fly with current technology but not in a way that has any meaningful utility. To have a genuinely useful flying car there would have to be a massive advance in compact energy sources and there is no reason to believe that will happen any time soon. There also would have to be substantial advances in automated piloting because there are relatively few trained pilots and even fewer with the financial resources to buy a frivolous vehicle like a flying car. A huge portion of the driving public can barely operate a car safely and competently. Anyone who thinks these people can handle a plane is delusional.
Building a flying car necessarily means you end up with a device that can't fly very well and can't drive very well and fills a nonexistent need. Someone else rightly pointed out that they are really driving planes, not flying cars. To make it light enough to fly necessarily means sacrificing durability and crash-worthiness on the road. Even minor fender benders would render the vehicle unable to fly safely. Driving one in bad weather (especially snow) seems like a terrible idea. Handling will suck and it will be hard to make it comfortable and quiet. Even if you do manage make one it's going to be outrageously expensive because the market is tiny and the vehicle is needlessly complicated. So it doesn't work physically and it doesn't make sense economically.
Cars aren't TVs, there are still people that fix cars.
That's kind of a problem to my mind. The fact that we still have such a huge car repair industry is a bug, not a feature. If someone wants to buy and repair old junky cars they aren't going away any time soon. But looking forward I'd prefer cars that don't actually need to be repaired or rebuilt because doing so is largely a wasteful activity.
I agree, but then why do people here, a tech sites fully of supposedly technically mided people, keep saying they want a 1970s level of technology in their cars? That was my point.
Because change is hard even for people who like technology. Furthermore just because someone reads slashdot doesn't mean they are necessarily progressive in their views on technology. Slashdot has a small contingent of idiots here arguing against vaccines for crying out loud.
Once people get used to something a certain way it can be incredibly hard to get them to change, even if all the evidence indicates that the change will be for the better. Many people like to drive a manual transmission car even though the technology now under performs many forms of automatic and semi-automatic transmissions. There is no rational performance basis today to prefer a traditional manual transmission and yet they persist.
Motor vehicles can be used as weapons. I prefer to be 100% in control of them at all times.
Well chances are that you aren't a particularly talented driver and there is ample evidence that you being "100% in control of them at all times" is almost certainly actually a safety hazard. Both to yourself and more importantly to the rest of us. Insisting on 100% control of a car is as ridiculous as insisting that you be the one to pilot the airplane or you being the train engineer. Just because you feel more comfortable doesn't actually make it a good idea. If technology can get better results and keep you (and more importantly me) safe from your control issues then I don't give a damn what your preferences are.
does Yahoo seem to be dismantling their company piece by piece until nothing of value is left?
Yahoo hasn't been in good shape for quite a while now. The only real assets the company had that were really worth much were the stake in Alibaba and some residual business from 10+ years ago when the company was still relevant. A sale of the company and it's assets, together or separately, was clearly the most likely outcome even before Marissa Mayer became CEO. That's the way things go sometimes. Most companies don't last forever and Yahoo is no exception. It will continue to exist as a portion of some other company or companies and nothing of value will be lost. Yahoo hasn't been well managed for a while. The dumbest thing their management ever did was declining the buyout offer from Microsoft for an absurd amount of money. (Conversely that might be the biggest bullet Microsoft ever dodged...)
Run a business into the ground and make $100 million? What a great scam.
Marissa Mayer did not run Yahoo into the ground. That had been accomplished before she ever arrived at the company. Frankly if anything she's done a fairly good job of mitigating the damage. Yahoo lost it's way a long time ago and has largely been coasting on previous accomplishments for the better part of a decade. I doubt anyone could have really fixed the problems Yahoo had. The best solution was always likely to be to sell the company. Anyone with a brain coming into a train wreck like Yahoo would have negotiated a severance package because why else would you bother taking on the job? The long term prospects of the company were poor and anyone with the chops to run the company would know it.
Oganesson and symbol Og
So THAT is what they mean when they say someone is the "OG"...
not going to happen, because: Cell Phones, Chromebooks, Firefoxbooks only have 2GB-4GB of ram
Not relevant on my PC or my Mac. I'm typing this on a PC with 24GB of RAM and my Mac at home has 16GB. As long as it doesn't consume memory needed by other applications I don't mind at all if it uses lots of RAM to improve performance. If the machine has less RAM then adjust accordingly.
Why is this not a story on slashdot's front page, then?
How about because the investigation isn't over and it's not news at this point. Why would "nothing to report so far" be worthy of the slashdot front page? As of right now there is no story and no findings of criminal wrongdoing. That may change but right now any implications that Hillary has broken any laws are suppositions not supported by actual evidence.
Oh, because Mediaite is a known bullshit news site.
20 seconds on Google will find you hundreds of them. Look it up yourself. Mediaite is merely the first on the comes up and they were merely passing on what CNN is reporting. If CNN is not a "real" news outlet I don't know what is.
So far there are no findings of note. None. The investigation continues. If there are findings worthy of prosecution I'm sure we'll hear all about it. If Hillary did break the law then she should get whatever punishment is appropriate.
The FBI has enough evidence that they believe is cause for an indictment. The Department of Justice is just sitting on it and not pursuing the indictment.
That is not true at all apparently. The FBI has found "no criminal wrongdoing". The Justice Department isn't sitting on anything because so far there is nothing to sit on. While the investigation goes on, so far it is much ado about (almost) nothing.
The whole thing is sleazy and it's showing just how incestuous DC can be.
Sleazy politicians? I'm shocked, shocked I tell you... [/sarcasm]
For those outside the US, Hillary is the hawk urging for "regime change" and invading other countries.
No more so than any number of Republicans and less than some of them. Yeah she's more hawkish than Bernie but that's not news.
With her as president, it won't take long before the next war(s) start and other countries are called upon to clean the US-caused mess.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss. Can't be any worse than Bush the Lesser.
Trump is more focused inward, proposes a more isolationalist view and seems less likely to mess up anywhere else on the planet.
Spare me. The only thing Trump is focused on is the Trump brand. Trump isn't proposing any sort of focused policy and the "proposals" he has floated are idiotic. I shudder to think how fast Trump would manage to cause international incidents by running his mouth and his shoot first ask questions never approach to policy issues. 2/3 of the job of president is foreign relations and I can think of few people less appropriate for that job than Donald Trump.
I suspect he isn't quitting because he can still win. It involves all the superdelegates switching sides, but it can still happen.
Lots of things can happen in theory that won't in reality. Yes in principle he could still get the nomination. It is extremely unlikely at this point unless Hillary has a major medical issue or some other catastrophe occurs that her campaign can't manage. I would probably prefer Bernie as the candidate but it would take a minor miracle for him to get the nomination at this point.
Now why would the superdelegates switch to Bernie? Well, the FBI hasn't finished their investigation in Hillary Clinton's time as Secretary of State yet...
They won't switch to Bernie unless Hilllary drops out. Wishful thinking to assume otherwise. If the FBI hasn't got anything yet regarding the private server I very much doubt it will ever be a real issue beyond some poo for republicans to fling at her.
What I don't get about Hillary is why she seems to draw such special hate from some people. I get disagreement with her political stances and have no problem with an honest difference of opinion. I don't agree with much of what she says as well but it seems to be more than that. Clearly some of the ire is poorly disguised sexism. A powerful smart woman scares a lot of insecure people both men and surprisingly many women too. Many claim they don't trust her but there is NO evidence that she is meaningfully more or less trustworthy than most any other politician running for high office. To get to high office almost by definition means doing some things that put skeletons in your closet. By default I assume all of them are power seeking self interested liars and if you don't then you are an idiot. I don't trust Hillary but I don't trust any of her opponents (except maybe Bernie by just a little) any more than her and some I trust far less (Trump) with real power. At least with Hillary I have a pretty good idea what I'm getting even if I have to hold my nose at times.
The Toyota problem was a real issue
Some of it was real but much was fabricated by would be con artists and ambulance chasers. There were a lot of people making false and/or unsubstantiated claims in the hopes of settlement money.
When will people stop lying about Tesla's Autopilot mode crashing their cars?
Only when it becomes clear that there is no money to be made by doing so. People lied about Audi's "uncontrollably accelerating" when in fact it was people standing on the accelerator pedal when they thought they were on the brake. People lied about Toyota Prius's too because they though there was a chance for settlement money. I have no doubt Telsa and every other company that comes out with autopilot technology is going to get hit with fraudulent claims as well.
But being "the cloud" is generally new, what would be an "acceptable" way to make an estimate for renewal rate?
Ahh, you've hit on the crux of the problem. With any new business model there exists the problem of trying to figure out what accounting practices are considered reasonable for that business. Usually this takes a bit of time and eventually there is usually guidance from the IFRS, IRS, SEC and other bodies for acceptable booking practices. Remember that GAAP stands for Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and much of GAAP (and IFRS even more so) is principle based rather than black and white rule based. Because every company is a bit different the accounting treatments can be different as well to best reflect the structure of the business. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Oracle was being rather aggressive with their accounting treatments. In all likelihood the subscriptions will probably be treated much like the accounting for magazine subscriptions.
Personally I'm not overly familiar with the nuances of accounting for subscription based businesses but here is a little primer.
Or, could Oracle just say "it's a new field so we simply guessed" in their official accounting? Or, would they be expected to survey somewhat similar services, such as mainframe or super-computer subscriptions, to find a rough approximation?
Basically yes. They can probably hide behind the fig leaf that they weren't sure because there wasn't official guidance on the matter. In reality I'm sure Oracle's accountants are pretty bright so it's more of plausible deniability thing. Personally I don't see how cloud subscriptions are any different from other types of subscriptions and that is well understood in accounting practice. What will probably happen is that the IRS will probably weigh in on the matter at some point (if they haven't already) and that will effectively write the law about how it should be handled going forward. If there isn't fraud in play then it probably is a matter of overly aggressive accounting practices.
Accounting rules are crazy. Whenever I have something explained to me by an accounting, I'm often baffled at how it works.
No they aren't crazy. You just have to understand some basic principles.
Strangely (to me anyway), even though the organization got all $100 at once from their member when a card was bought, they only accrued income when a punch was used.
That's not strange at all. To understand it you have to understand double entry accounting. Every transaction has two entries - a debit and a credit. Think of them kind of like and In and an Out - they have to balance. There are basically five categories of ledger accounts. Assets, Liabilities, Equity, Income, Expenses. Every transaction has a debit of an account in one of the five categories and a credit in an account of one of the five categories. The debit and credit can be in the same category or different ones.
That transaction you mentioned works like this:
When the card is bought Assets (cash) increased (debit) by $100. Liabilities (future punches) increased (credit) by $100.
Later when a punch is used Liabilities decrease (debit) by $10 and Income increased (credit) by $10. (this is when the sale occurs)
Basically the company has traded an liability (the obligation of services for the punch) for an asset (cash). As that obligation is fulfilled the company realizes the income from that sale. It's done this way for several reasons but most important is the matching principle - basically that expenses and income should be booked when they occurred, regardless of when the actual cash transfer took place. The company didn't actually sell it's product until the customer used the punch (the punch is the product) so it would be inappropriate to say they sold something until the punch transaction results in Income.
it still seems kind of bizarre that you actually *gain* $100 but don't actually count it except $10 at a time over time.
It seems weird because you are thinking of the $100 as income when in fact it is an asset. To make it easier instead of getting $100 for the card let's say the customer gave the money to buy an orange on their behalf. Orange slices are just another form of asset like cash. So when the customer gets their card punched the company would give the customer an orange slice. The company had to pay something to buy that orange slice so until they actually trade it to a customer a sale hasn't occurred. It seems confusing because we usually associate receiving cash with income but they aren't necessarily the same thing.
A customer can't buy a liability which is what the customer is doing when he pays $100 for the card. He can only buy a good or a service which is what they can do with the card. So until that good or service is rendered to the customer then it isn't income to the company. The fact that cash changed hands before the good or service was rendered is immaterial to when the company actually realized the income. It's a bit like buying something on layaway.
In their case, it seems extra weird because the punch cards never expired and so there's the risk they would be never redeemed.
That is EXACTLY what happens and is why you typically see expiration notices on checks and cards. If they never expired and were never used then the company would have to carry them on the books forever. If they don't expire and the customer loses the card then the company has to carry that obligation in theory forever. In practice there are ways to work around it but they are considerably more problematic.
Considering more and more companies are using non-GAAP accounting measures [marketwatch.com] to deceive investors, it appears they've already determined what method to use while not making it clear what they're doing.
Well if you are a global company you aren't using GAAP outside the US anyway. You probably are using IFRS. If you are an investor seeing words like Pro-Forma you should . Pro-Forma is roughly translated from latin as "Fairy Tale" or "Bullshit we made up".
That being said, any accountant worth their per-diem can use GAAP accounting that is perfectly legal and still obfuscate what is really going on. Plenty of companies do it. Go pull the financial records of any large bank and if you claim you can make sense of them you are either in line for a Nobel prize or a liar and I'm going to lean towards the later. I'm a certified accountant and I can't make heads or tails of them.
The accounting firm can only comment on whether the records they receive are consistent and have a correct process based on their inputs.
That's not true at all. I'm an accountant and audits absolutely can and generally should investigate whether the records they review are factual and evidence based. In fact an auditor is supposed to look for evidence of fraud or mismanagement when doing a financial audit. If an accounting firm is not doing this when auditing the books for a large company then they are not doing their job properly.
If the wrong stuff is far enough upstream of the books, there's a GIGO problem.
That's when the auditor is supposed to decline to sign off on the books. Unfortunately audit firms have something of a conflict of interest. If they don't sign off on the books they might lose that client ($$$) and so they sometimes aren't are independent as they really should be.
Is it Oracle, for allegedly inflating their sales numbers? Or is it the accounting firms that audit the books and sign off on it?
The answer is Yes. As in both of them are at fault. If the auditing firm misses something big like that then they are potentially liable if Oracle really is inflating their numbers. Also the company management bears substantial responsibility as does the board of directors.
One thing to bear in mind however is that when an auditor signs off on the books they are NOT claiming that the books are absolutely correct to the penny. That would be impossible for a company of any significant size. What they are saying is that they believe the books are materially representative of the financial picture of the company. It would be impossible for them to claim that there were no errors or flaws in the books. Basically the best they can do is say "yeah, this is pretty close to reality and you can depend on these numbers for decision making". If they miss a big fraud then obviously the auditor screwed up and that is a big problem. But it also means that management screwed up (or lied) too.
"We are confident that all our cloud accounting is proper and correct." == "We are confident we paid off the right politicians to get nothing beyond a slap on the wrist for our doctored books."
I'm a certified accountant (among other things). What it probably really means is that the rules are sufficiently poorly defined that Oracle figures they have enough weasel room to claim what they are doing is permissible. And they may be correct in that assertion. It also probably means that what they are doing won't result in any issue worse than a fine and probably will have minimal impact on their stock price or bottom line long term. I don't have any idea if Oracle is doing something illegal here or not but I'm not surprised they would make a statement like that. Could result in some fines after years of litigation but probably won't amount to anything material for them even if it should.
One of the problems (especially with intangible goods) is consistently determining when to book the goods as a sale. This often isn't as straightforward as you might think and there are often several potential acceptable answers. The important thing is that A) what method they are using is understood and made clear and B) that they follow it consistently. For example my company books a sale when we receive a purchase order from a customer. A cloud software company might choose to book the sale based on expected retention rates and then adjust the numbers later for bad debts based on actual cash received. There are accounting guidelines for what is generally considered acceptable and what isn't through the FASB, the IRS and some other government agencies like the SEC. Obviously making up sales out of whole cloth is clearly illegal but if there is anything backing up the numbers at all then it can get a lot fuzzier real fast.