I'll remember this next time they raise prices. Dicks.
Yeah, they're real "dicks" for actually giving a shit about their employees. You would prefer they work in some third world sweatshop I presume so you can get discount? How nice of you.
I see this can be efficient and useful inside a company with mainly highly-educated workers, with stringent admission standards. But would such a thing work in society in general?
It could. The US trails the rest of the civilized world in maternity/paternity leave policies by a WIDE margin. It works if we insist everyone play by the same rules. There is no competitive advantage to be gained if everyone is allowed to take leave to care for a newborn. It would be harder for small companies to do this but there are ways of working around that too with a little government help. Basically this sort of policy is just a way of showing that you actually care about the well being of your fellow citizens. I can't figure out why so many people in the US think that is somehow a bad thing.
If you don't like the start menu and prefer the old Windows 7 style start menu, then there are alternatives.
Yes there are and that is the clearest indication that the interface sucks. There should be no need for a third party application to make the default interface useable. I had to buy a few machines with Windows 8 on them for work and I absolutely loathe the interface. Might be fine on a tablet (haven't tried) but on a PC with a keyboard and mouse it is just horrid. The UX people at Microsoft that let that monstrosity out the door should never be able to find work in "design" again. Dumbest design decision since Microsoft Bob.
It's nice that Microsoft is finally considering good GUI design.
Just because some design association threw a meaningless award at Microsoft's way-too-late attempt to fix their stupid decisions in Windows 8 doesn't mean they are "finally considering good GUI design". Let's see how good it is when the General Public gets their hands on it. Their recent track record has been less than brilliant to say the least so I'm pretty confident they haven't had some sort of design epiphany. Basically it looks to me that they got their ass handed to them over Windows 8 and they're scrambling to fix something that they never should have broken in the first place.
I'm getting REALLY tired of "designers" making pointless, needless and often-as-not counterproductive changes to user interfaces. I'm particularly sick of the game of hide the menu which is particularly in vogue lately. Good design is about making things useful first and beautiful second and it seems we have a lot of self anointed UX "experts" who have that backwards. We seem to have too many art school graduates claiming to be "designers" even though they clearly have no particular skill at user interface design.
I spend a lot of time on/. and other forums defending animal agriculture because, while I would be the first to admit we can do better, I think we do a much better job caring for our animals than most people believe.
You are right that a lot of people have a poor to non-existent idea of what good animal husbandry involves. But agribusiness has kind of brought the problem on themselves by turning a blind eye to some of the more egregious practices in the industry. The basic problem is that ag corporations are not financially incentivized to be humane to the animals. The bottom line rules all and if push comes to shove, humane treatment of animals too often gets sacrificed needlessly. I'm not even talking about the folks who simply have no sense of compassion with regard to livestock though there are too many of those out there. The problem is really that there clearly hasn't been sufficient effort put into making industrial scale farming also humane farming.
Animal rights groups do not concern themselves over much with things like facts, accuracy, or fair descriptions of why we do things the way that we do, but that does not mean that we should try to silence them.
You claim that agribusinesses aren't being treated fairly (sometimes true) but you are painting with the same broad brush. Most animal advocacy groups are not a bunch of lunatics like PETA just like not every farmer is doing horrid things to their livestock. And just because things in agriculture are done a certain way doesn't automatically make them ethical or humane or smart. I've got enough of a background in agriculture to understand a lot of the practices rather well but I also simply think a fair number of them are rather stupid and even counterproductive. And it's not hard to find evidence to back me up on that.
You are quite right that there are VERY good reasons for many of the practices in agriculture. Safety not the least among them. But there also are a lot of practices that are obsolete, unnecessary or needlessly harsh or dangerous or even counterproductive. (like overuse of antibiotics) The goal should be to get everyone to the very best practices with the latest and most humane techniques and that is most assuredly NOT being done.
I'm under no illusions where my food comes from but the moment they engage in and/or cover up inhumane treatment of animals my sympathy for those engaged in such practices goes away. Folks who pass laws clearly designed to protect unethical conduct should be treated just like we treat any other criminals who abuse animals because that is what they are trying to protect. They are circling the wagons without even giving a moment's reflection on whether what is going on is justified or right. They really only have themselves to blame.
Last time I tried using Open Office 6 or 7 years ago it was a massive pile of shit.
I standardized our company on OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice) about 5 years ago. It's worked great. There may be specific features in Microsoft Office that make it a non-starter for some people but I think most people will hardly notice the difference. If your company already is tied to Microsoft then switching might be painful but if you are starting from scratch I would go with LibreOffice in most cases over Microsoft Office.
Is LibreOffice a significant improvement?
OpenOffice in my experience has been progressing more slowly than LibreOffice for the last few years. I switched our company to LibreOffice as a result.
Does the word processor start up as fast as M$ Word?
Kind of a meaningless question. Both can be loaded on system startup and thus will "start up" in just a few seconds as a result. If that is your biggest concern however I think you really didn't take a very hard look at OpenOffice "6 or 7 years ago".
That's such a broad enough charter as to make any sort of nerd filter meaningless.
There have always been stories on slashdot for stuff that doesn't involve science and microchips. You should know that by now. Very little of the Snowden stuff really is about technology. It's about government overreach, free speech, violation of constitutional rights, etc. The fact that it happened on a computer is almost incidental.
Then every free speech case in the country is going to be posted on/.?
Have you seen every free speech case posted on slashdot? Seriously, let it go my friend. It's an important topic worthy of discussion. If no one cares then it will get ignored.
It's "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". You've got a low enough user ID you should know that. This falls under the stuff that matters though I'm pretty sure nerds care about free speech too. Plus more than a few of us actually care about animal abuse.
Leaders always get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when they go badly.
Let's use a sports analogy. Think about your favorite football team. Everybody worships the quarterback and he's clearly the guy running the show but he's just one of 11 guys. If the receiver drops the ball or the lineman misses a block it doesn't matter how good the quarterback is. The quarterback can do everything right but the other guys still have to perform. The good quarterback can make a team better but it still requires the whole team to be talented and work together.
Think about how much blame the president gets for the state of the economy even though he really has very little influence or ability to influence the economy. But he's the guy in charge that we know about so people think he's brilliant when things are going well and he gets far too much blame when they aren't. It's not really fair but it is what happens. Too much credit and too much blame.
Guys like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs set the direction but the most important thing they do is deciding who to hire. After that it is mostly out of their hands. The people they hire have to perform. If they hired the right people the company has a good chance to do well. If they hire the wrong people they are probably screwed. Private equity guys when they are deciding whether to invest in a company the #1 thing they care about is WHO is on the team running the company. Sure the business model still has to make sense but a good team can make a mediocre business work. A bad team can make a great business tank.
So he gave up refrigeration? an ac synchronous motor is much more efficient than DC alternatives.
You can go with a gas or propane powered refrigerator. My family has one at a cottage which is too remote for electricity. Works pretty well though I can't vouch for it being particularly efficient. Uses ammonia as the coolant. I understand they are often used in RVs too.
I've yet to see a color laser that can print photos as well as even the cheapest color ink jets.
So what? There are print shops for that unless you are printing a LOT of photos. And very few people print a lot of photos these days. Unless you have a very specific need for an inkjet there is really no reason not to buy a color laser these days. I use laser's exclusively. On the rare occasion I want to actually print a photo I can get it done at my local print shop, drug store or even Walmart.
I think laser printing tech doesn't lend well to making photographic prints.
The high end copiers are laser based and they'll do pretty much as nice a job as most inkjets.
You know what, stop telling us about Flash vulnerabilities... when Flash hasn't been used in an exploit in several months, that will news worthy.
I think the hope is that if we keep bashing Flash that eventually it will go away forever. We're almost there but some lazy/cheap websites still cannot be bothered to update and ban flash entirely. Frankly if Adobe were a responsible company they would simply abandon flash altogether and that might finally move things along but that's almost certainly a pipe dream.
If, on the other hand, you want the Google Play store, then you have to pay Google, agree to ship other Google apps in the default firmware install, and agree not to ship competing apps in a few categories in the default install.
The amount of money Google makes from this is almost negligible. Something north of 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising so whatever they are charging to access Google Play it doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Microsoft on the other hand basically makes all their revenue from software sales so they pretty much have to charge something for it since they lack a supporting revenue stream. (unless you want to count desktop software sales but that would be kind of dumb of them)
A lot of that is marketing. It's far more a brand problem than a design culture.
Marketing isn't some magical pixie dust you can waive over a company to make people want their products. Marketing at its core is relationship development and that takes a lot of careful work and time. Microsoft has mostly done a terrible job developing relationships with customers. They've been the beneficiary of a monopoly so their survival never depended heavily on people having warm fuzzies when they think about Microsoft. Apple on the other hand has been arguably brilliant at it, almost from their beginning. Think about how many Apple stickers you've seen on the backs of cars. Probably quite a few - I see them regularly. People LOVE Apple even when they shouldn't. Apple has one of those brands like Harley-Davidson that people have almost a fetish for. Now how many Microsoft stickers have you seen? Probably none. By and large people don't love Microsoft or their products. Microsoft has the money to change this I suppose but it will take a lot of careful effort and time and frankly I doubt they have the corporate culture to pull it off.
Oh bull shit. Value of the company? Please we are talking about perception to investors.
No we are talking about the book value of the company and to some degree the intrinsic value. The secondary market value of the company is a separate concern.
The only thing a write-off decreases is the profits of the company at the time the write-off is booked.
Wrong. It decreases the assets of the company and increases expenses. It also affects the equity of the company because assets decreased and so equity must decrease also if you aren't adding liabilities. The write off also means that the expected future earnings from the asset are reduced which reduces the net present value of the enterprise. The notion that the only thing that is affected is the profits in that one financial period is demonstrably wrong and any accountant should be able to easily show you why.
It may also reduce the company's tax liability - by reducing its profit.
If you have an impaired asset you record the difference as a loss but it is no different than any other investment gone south. Put in simple terms what you are suggesting is selling a $2 bill for $1 to try to intentionally realize a $0.15 tax savings. The company is worse off by $0.85 so worrying about the $0.15 in reduced tax is idiotic. Any reduced tax liability should be small consolation for shareholders in the face of a $7 billion writedown.
Actually, this is pretty common trick to improve the bottom line.
It does not improve the bottom line at all. That is an accounting fact. It has other effects but improving the bottom line isn't one of them.
It doesn't improve the bottom line in that quarter, of course, but the single huge writeoff concentrates all the losses in the one quarter, making all the other quarters look better. Management then passes off the one bad quarter as an anomaly.
You are talking about the Big Bath tactic. That is an earning management tactic to try to prop up the stock price by showing artificial profits in other financial periods. It is a fairly transparent and rather shady technique used to try to take advantage of the short memory of investors but make no mistake that it does nothing to improve the bottom line. Whether you take the hit all in one quarter or over time is irrelevant to the effect on profitability. Writing off an investment - any investment - reduces the value of the company.
Disclosure: Among other things I am a certified accountant.
I can't be the only person in the US who purchased said phone, can I?
No but you aren't in a large crowd. I know I can count the number of Windows Phones I've seen in the wild on my fingers. Windows Phone was pretty much a solution nobody asked for several years later than anyone cared. Android and iOS already were large and dominant and developers weren't really looking to support a third platform. Technically it's probably fine but it offers nothing that people care about that the competition doesn't already have.
Furthermore Google is basically giving Android away so the handset makers have no incentive to care about Windows. Why would Samsung want to pay Microsoft for a product nobody wants anyway? Microsoft lacks the design culture and brand to compete with Apple on the high end (through vertical integration) and Google is undercutting them on price on the low end. Frankly I think Microsoft is screwed in the mobile phone market. I just don't see a path to profitability for them.
The fact that Microsoft not only could write this off, but did write this off shows how little they care about anything but the bottom line.
Umm, writing this off does not in anyway improve their bottom line. Quite the opposite in fact. It's an admission that they bought something for a lot of money that is now worthless. What it shows is that they are not doing a very good job of maintaining the bottom line because the company is throwing money at bad investments. It's also a strong indicator that management at the time (read Balmer) was of questionable competence.
No argument from me. I make wiring harness that go into automobiles (among other things) for a living. The amount of useless customization and non-standard parts used would make your head explode. For example one of the parts we make uses a custom wire, had two custom connectors designed for it, and uses two different grommets because the engineers for cars in the same family couldn't be bothered to talk to each other to commonize a hole size. This means that the price is probably 50% higher than necessary and instead of having material lead times of a few days, we have to order materials 4 MONTHS in advance with minimums close to 50K units. I am an engineer but I'm astonished at how incompetent some engineers are at their jobs.
You are correct that the price the auto companies pays is too high but that is their own choice. You are correct that the price the auto companies pays is too high but that is their own choice.
It's less that they don't want people upgrading them (though that is a part of it) but rather that they are trying desperately to find ways to differentiate their products from the other guys even when there is no point in doing so. There is a LOT of Not-Invented-Here going on. Heaven forbid that you find the same part on a GM and a Ford. Seriously, they get pissed if you even try to sell them the same product the other guy uses. It's ridiculous. I've literally seen a GM engineer start yelling because he found some part that was also used on a Chrysler vehicle.
By "road trip", I mean things like Sturgis, SD, to Mt Rushmore on to the Devil's Tower and ending up at Buffalo, WY.
The big thing will be getting recharge times down. That's going to take another 10-15 years minimum I think. (The superchargers are nice but not quite there yet) Until then long distances with EV will be via hybrids. I think it won't be long before we start seeing long distance haulers and trucks being hybrids. Lots of torque from the electric motors and it will help the automakers meet CAFE standards. Wouldn't be surprised to see some diesel electric hybrids at some point.
Cannot do that in an electric, nor can I pause for an hour while running 400 miles of errands in the LA basin.
Cannot do that in an electric YET. Give it 5-10 years and it could happen. Heck the notion of an EV that can do 400 miles on a charge isn't in the realm of science fiction. The Tesla can do over 230 now and it isn't optimized for range. I don't have any trouble envisioning an EV with double that range.
It's not the waistline, it's the seat-to-crown height (I'm 6'4'', 265 lbs.) I have tried on the Tesla and could barely enter (my shoulder hits the upper door sill, same as a BMW 7-series).
So how do that equate to "pathetic"? I get that it might not be a good fit for you but that's just how it goes sometimes. Very tall and very short people unfortunately have necessarily limited options because accommodating them tends to ruin the ergonomics for "normal" sized people who constitute the majority of the buying public. I dated a girl once who was about 4'9" and she actually needed blocks on the pedals of her truck to drive it. I prayed the airbag never went off on her because she had to sit so close it would likely have killed her. Most really tall guys I know end up driving big SUVs of some description. Kind of sucks but that's the way it goes. I think you'll probably see somebody do some big trucks in pure EV and there already are hybrids out there.
The only reason the F-150 is #1 is that GM splits it's pickup sales across Chevy/GMC.
You are correct but kind of missing the point. The Ford does outsell the Chevy (which is true) but the point you glossed by is that there is no objective reason for this to be the case based on the technical merits of the respective vehicles. In some years the Chevy is an objectively better vehicle and the prices are so similar as to be identical. So if people were buying entirely based on objective evidence you would expect the sales crown to pass to Chevy or even Ram from time to time. But this doesn't happen.
It's not actually clear that buyers in a GMC dealership would necessarily buy the Chevy over the Ford even though the GMC is completely identical to the Chevy in all meaningful respects. Hence they have to break them out even though you are quite correct that they are the same vehicle mechanically and could rightfully be viewed as one for sales.
Against this, goes our European wonders who bought Chrysler for 36 billion dollars and then sold it to Fiat for 6 billion dollars!
Daimler did not sell Chrysler to Fiat. They bought Chrysler in 1998 for $38 billion. They sold Chrysler to Cerebus Capital Management in 2007. Fiat bought their interest in Chrysler in 2009 alongside the bankruptcy and they did not acquire a majority interest until fairly recently.
Google/Android is working towards an integrated auto-infotainment system standard. Apple is muscling in. Once the standards are published by SAE it is curtains for the auto industry selling GPS system at 2000% markup.
I can assure you that they've never managed to sell a GPS system "at 2000% markup" even though the price does seem outrageous. To understand why you have to understand product costing in the auto industry. The auto industry does not do huge volumes of consumer electronics like GPS systems. This means their unit prices are rather high. Furthermore each GPS system is to a non-trivial degree customized for the vehicle it is going into which makes the price quite a lot higher. This means that that $2000 GPS option actually probably costs a substantial percentage of that price because they don't sell enough of them to get the cost down lower.
My company makes parts that go into some of the custom wiring harnesses for things like this. Best case they are probably making about a 2-3X markup on the GPS option depending on the volume of the vehicle it goes on. Chances are good they are making less than that especially if it is standard equipment. Remember that even the most profitable auto manufacturer in the world (currently Porsche) has something like 10% net profit margins. So no they aren't making "2000% markup" on pretty much anything.
If you want to know what a part really costs to make, go to your automotive dealer and see what price they are selling it for as a service part. As a crude rule of thumb the markup from manufacturers cost is usually around 6-8X. So for example my company sells a wire harness to our OEM customer for about $2. If you could buy that harness from your GM dealer it would probably cost you about $35-55 retail. Basically the harness goes through somewhere between 2 and 5 suppliers and each one marks it up by around 10-30% along the way. Then when the dealer gets it they basically double whatever price they paid for it (sometimes more) which gets you to a roughly 6-8X the original cost to build.
In the 1970s, all of them were selling absolutely awful products by the metric shitload
And people were buying them because they were the best alternative available in most cases. Yes they were very often crap but there was no non-crap option available. Once there was and they started bleeding market share they eventually (albeit late) starting making better products. The reason for the recent bankruptcies was because their labor and benefits costs because uncompetitive in a competitive market. But the cars they make have continued to appeal and sell, even in the darkest days of bankruptcy. Sales has never truly been the big problem for the Big 3, even with reduced market share. People like their products even when they probably shouldn't if they were being objective about it.
I agree with you in principle that Detroit actually has some life in it, but making that point with sales numbers isn't actually convincing proof.
It's only not proof if you think people are nothing more than gullible sheep with no concept of what interests them. Since that isn't actually true we have to consider that people buy what actually appeals to them and that sales figures are actually the best data available on what constitutes a compelling product.
Umm, completely different cars in completely different market segments. Not even remotely a meaningful comparison. One is a performance luxury car that sells for nearly six figures to wealthy tech nerds. The other is a compact runabout purchased almost entirely by the granola crowd for eco cred. Would be hard to be more different.
Tesla's "grip" on the EV sector is imaginary. They are certainly in a very, very nice position in the industry. But they are a medium sized player and their "lead" is mostly imaginary and one of perception.
Perception matters. For example there is no technical reason the Ford F150 has been the best selling vehicle in the US for the last 32 years. In a given year the Chevy or Ram offerings are often objectively better for that model year. Yet Ford out sells them every single year. Why? Perception. Having a brand people like and are comfortable with matters a lot.
And as far as size goes, Telsa is a tiny auto maker. GM sells more vehicles in a month than Tesla has sold in their entire history. The big auto makers could introduce an all electric vehicle very quickly if they wanted to but mostly they are working on hybrids and watching the market. If Tesla can prove the market (good chance of that) then you'll see them jump in later on in a big way. But the longer they stay out of the market the better it will be for Tesla if they can do what they are working on. Tesla has a brand with very high appeal right now.
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I'll remember this next time they raise prices. Dicks.
Yeah, they're real "dicks" for actually giving a shit about their employees. You would prefer they work in some third world sweatshop I presume so you can get discount? How nice of you.
I see this can be efficient and useful inside a company with mainly highly-educated workers, with stringent admission standards. But would such a thing work in society in general?
It could. The US trails the rest of the civilized world in maternity/paternity leave policies by a WIDE margin. It works if we insist everyone play by the same rules. There is no competitive advantage to be gained if everyone is allowed to take leave to care for a newborn. It would be harder for small companies to do this but there are ways of working around that too with a little government help. Basically this sort of policy is just a way of showing that you actually care about the well being of your fellow citizens. I can't figure out why so many people in the US think that is somehow a bad thing.
If you don't like the start menu and prefer the old Windows 7 style start menu, then there are alternatives.
Yes there are and that is the clearest indication that the interface sucks. There should be no need for a third party application to make the default interface useable. I had to buy a few machines with Windows 8 on them for work and I absolutely loathe the interface. Might be fine on a tablet (haven't tried) but on a PC with a keyboard and mouse it is just horrid. The UX people at Microsoft that let that monstrosity out the door should never be able to find work in "design" again. Dumbest design decision since Microsoft Bob.
It's nice that Microsoft is finally considering good GUI design.
Just because some design association threw a meaningless award at Microsoft's way-too-late attempt to fix their stupid decisions in Windows 8 doesn't mean they are "finally considering good GUI design". Let's see how good it is when the General Public gets their hands on it. Their recent track record has been less than brilliant to say the least so I'm pretty confident they haven't had some sort of design epiphany. Basically it looks to me that they got their ass handed to them over Windows 8 and they're scrambling to fix something that they never should have broken in the first place.
I'm getting REALLY tired of "designers" making pointless, needless and often-as-not counterproductive changes to user interfaces. I'm particularly sick of the game of hide the menu which is particularly in vogue lately. Good design is about making things useful first and beautiful second and it seems we have a lot of self anointed UX "experts" who have that backwards. We seem to have too many art school graduates claiming to be "designers" even though they clearly have no particular skill at user interface design.
I spend a lot of time on /. and other forums defending animal agriculture because, while I would be the first to admit we can do better, I think we do a much better job caring for our animals than most people believe.
You are right that a lot of people have a poor to non-existent idea of what good animal husbandry involves. But agribusiness has kind of brought the problem on themselves by turning a blind eye to some of the more egregious practices in the industry. The basic problem is that ag corporations are not financially incentivized to be humane to the animals. The bottom line rules all and if push comes to shove, humane treatment of animals too often gets sacrificed needlessly. I'm not even talking about the folks who simply have no sense of compassion with regard to livestock though there are too many of those out there. The problem is really that there clearly hasn't been sufficient effort put into making industrial scale farming also humane farming.
Animal rights groups do not concern themselves over much with things like facts, accuracy, or fair descriptions of why we do things the way that we do, but that does not mean that we should try to silence them.
You claim that agribusinesses aren't being treated fairly (sometimes true) but you are painting with the same broad brush. Most animal advocacy groups are not a bunch of lunatics like PETA just like not every farmer is doing horrid things to their livestock. And just because things in agriculture are done a certain way doesn't automatically make them ethical or humane or smart. I've got enough of a background in agriculture to understand a lot of the practices rather well but I also simply think a fair number of them are rather stupid and even counterproductive. And it's not hard to find evidence to back me up on that.
You are quite right that there are VERY good reasons for many of the practices in agriculture. Safety not the least among them. But there also are a lot of practices that are obsolete, unnecessary or needlessly harsh or dangerous or even counterproductive. (like overuse of antibiotics) The goal should be to get everyone to the very best practices with the latest and most humane techniques and that is most assuredly NOT being done.
I'm under no illusions where my food comes from but the moment they engage in and/or cover up inhumane treatment of animals my sympathy for those engaged in such practices goes away. Folks who pass laws clearly designed to protect unethical conduct should be treated just like we treat any other criminals who abuse animals because that is what they are trying to protect. They are circling the wagons without even giving a moment's reflection on whether what is going on is justified or right. They really only have themselves to blame.
Last time I tried using Open Office 6 or 7 years ago it was a massive pile of shit.
I standardized our company on OpenOffice (and later LibreOffice) about 5 years ago. It's worked great. There may be specific features in Microsoft Office that make it a non-starter for some people but I think most people will hardly notice the difference. If your company already is tied to Microsoft then switching might be painful but if you are starting from scratch I would go with LibreOffice in most cases over Microsoft Office.
Is LibreOffice a significant improvement?
OpenOffice in my experience has been progressing more slowly than LibreOffice for the last few years. I switched our company to LibreOffice as a result.
Does the word processor start up as fast as M$ Word?
Kind of a meaningless question. Both can be loaded on system startup and thus will "start up" in just a few seconds as a result. If that is your biggest concern however I think you really didn't take a very hard look at OpenOffice "6 or 7 years ago".
That's such a broad enough charter as to make any sort of nerd filter meaningless.
There have always been stories on slashdot for stuff that doesn't involve science and microchips. You should know that by now. Very little of the Snowden stuff really is about technology. It's about government overreach, free speech, violation of constitutional rights, etc. The fact that it happened on a computer is almost incidental.
Then every free speech case in the country is going to be posted on /.?
Have you seen every free speech case posted on slashdot? Seriously, let it go my friend. It's an important topic worthy of discussion. If no one cares then it will get ignored.
but how is this news for nerds?
It's "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". You've got a low enough user ID you should know that. This falls under the stuff that matters though I'm pretty sure nerds care about free speech too. Plus more than a few of us actually care about animal abuse.
Leaders always get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when they go badly.
Let's use a sports analogy. Think about your favorite football team. Everybody worships the quarterback and he's clearly the guy running the show but he's just one of 11 guys. If the receiver drops the ball or the lineman misses a block it doesn't matter how good the quarterback is. The quarterback can do everything right but the other guys still have to perform. The good quarterback can make a team better but it still requires the whole team to be talented and work together.
Think about how much blame the president gets for the state of the economy even though he really has very little influence or ability to influence the economy. But he's the guy in charge that we know about so people think he's brilliant when things are going well and he gets far too much blame when they aren't. It's not really fair but it is what happens. Too much credit and too much blame.
Guys like Elon Musk and Steve Jobs set the direction but the most important thing they do is deciding who to hire. After that it is mostly out of their hands. The people they hire have to perform. If they hired the right people the company has a good chance to do well. If they hire the wrong people they are probably screwed. Private equity guys when they are deciding whether to invest in a company the #1 thing they care about is WHO is on the team running the company. Sure the business model still has to make sense but a good team can make a mediocre business work. A bad team can make a great business tank.
So he gave up refrigeration? an ac synchronous motor is much more efficient than DC alternatives.
You can go with a gas or propane powered refrigerator. My family has one at a cottage which is too remote for electricity. Works pretty well though I can't vouch for it being particularly efficient. Uses ammonia as the coolant. I understand they are often used in RVs too.
I've yet to see a color laser that can print photos as well as even the cheapest color ink jets.
So what? There are print shops for that unless you are printing a LOT of photos. And very few people print a lot of photos these days. Unless you have a very specific need for an inkjet there is really no reason not to buy a color laser these days. I use laser's exclusively. On the rare occasion I want to actually print a photo I can get it done at my local print shop, drug store or even Walmart.
I think laser printing tech doesn't lend well to making photographic prints.
The high end copiers are laser based and they'll do pretty much as nice a job as most inkjets.
You know what, stop telling us about Flash vulnerabilities ... when Flash hasn't been used in an exploit in several months, that will news worthy.
I think the hope is that if we keep bashing Flash that eventually it will go away forever. We're almost there but some lazy/cheap websites still cannot be bothered to update and ban flash entirely. Frankly if Adobe were a responsible company they would simply abandon flash altogether and that might finally move things along but that's almost certainly a pipe dream.
If, on the other hand, you want the Google Play store, then you have to pay Google, agree to ship other Google apps in the default firmware install, and agree not to ship competing apps in a few categories in the default install.
The amount of money Google makes from this is almost negligible. Something north of 95% of Google's revenue comes from advertising so whatever they are charging to access Google Play it doesn't amount to much in the grand scheme of things. Microsoft on the other hand basically makes all their revenue from software sales so they pretty much have to charge something for it since they lack a supporting revenue stream. (unless you want to count desktop software sales but that would be kind of dumb of them)
A lot of that is marketing. It's far more a brand problem than a design culture.
Marketing isn't some magical pixie dust you can waive over a company to make people want their products. Marketing at its core is relationship development and that takes a lot of careful work and time. Microsoft has mostly done a terrible job developing relationships with customers. They've been the beneficiary of a monopoly so their survival never depended heavily on people having warm fuzzies when they think about Microsoft. Apple on the other hand has been arguably brilliant at it, almost from their beginning. Think about how many Apple stickers you've seen on the backs of cars. Probably quite a few - I see them regularly. People LOVE Apple even when they shouldn't. Apple has one of those brands like Harley-Davidson that people have almost a fetish for. Now how many Microsoft stickers have you seen? Probably none. By and large people don't love Microsoft or their products. Microsoft has the money to change this I suppose but it will take a lot of careful effort and time and frankly I doubt they have the corporate culture to pull it off.
Oh bull shit. Value of the company? Please we are talking about perception to investors.
No we are talking about the book value of the company and to some degree the intrinsic value. The secondary market value of the company is a separate concern.
The only thing a write-off decreases is the profits of the company at the time the write-off is booked.
Wrong. It decreases the assets of the company and increases expenses. It also affects the equity of the company because assets decreased and so equity must decrease also if you aren't adding liabilities. The write off also means that the expected future earnings from the asset are reduced which reduces the net present value of the enterprise. The notion that the only thing that is affected is the profits in that one financial period is demonstrably wrong and any accountant should be able to easily show you why.
It may also reduce the company's tax liability - by reducing its profit.
If you have an impaired asset you record the difference as a loss but it is no different than any other investment gone south. Put in simple terms what you are suggesting is selling a $2 bill for $1 to try to intentionally realize a $0.15 tax savings. The company is worse off by $0.85 so worrying about the $0.15 in reduced tax is idiotic. Any reduced tax liability should be small consolation for shareholders in the face of a $7 billion writedown.
Actually, this is pretty common trick to improve the bottom line.
It does not improve the bottom line at all. That is an accounting fact. It has other effects but improving the bottom line isn't one of them.
It doesn't improve the bottom line in that quarter, of course, but the single huge writeoff concentrates all the losses in the one quarter, making all the other quarters look better. Management then passes off the one bad quarter as an anomaly.
You are talking about the Big Bath tactic. That is an earning management tactic to try to prop up the stock price by showing artificial profits in other financial periods. It is a fairly transparent and rather shady technique used to try to take advantage of the short memory of investors but make no mistake that it does nothing to improve the bottom line. Whether you take the hit all in one quarter or over time is irrelevant to the effect on profitability. Writing off an investment - any investment - reduces the value of the company.
Disclosure: Among other things I am a certified accountant.
I can't be the only person in the US who purchased said phone, can I?
No but you aren't in a large crowd. I know I can count the number of Windows Phones I've seen in the wild on my fingers. Windows Phone was pretty much a solution nobody asked for several years later than anyone cared. Android and iOS already were large and dominant and developers weren't really looking to support a third platform. Technically it's probably fine but it offers nothing that people care about that the competition doesn't already have.
Furthermore Google is basically giving Android away so the handset makers have no incentive to care about Windows. Why would Samsung want to pay Microsoft for a product nobody wants anyway? Microsoft lacks the design culture and brand to compete with Apple on the high end (through vertical integration) and Google is undercutting them on price on the low end. Frankly I think Microsoft is screwed in the mobile phone market. I just don't see a path to profitability for them.
The fact that Microsoft not only could write this off, but did write this off shows how little they care about anything but the bottom line.
Umm, writing this off does not in anyway improve their bottom line. Quite the opposite in fact. It's an admission that they bought something for a lot of money that is now worthless. What it shows is that they are not doing a very good job of maintaining the bottom line because the company is throwing money at bad investments. It's also a strong indicator that management at the time (read Balmer) was of questionable competence.
Sit back and watch Facebook turn to #2 in social networks.
I'd say they're #2 already... oh wait you meant second place. Never mind...
That is a bad choice on their part.
No argument from me. I make wiring harness that go into automobiles (among other things) for a living. The amount of useless customization and non-standard parts used would make your head explode. For example one of the parts we make uses a custom wire, had two custom connectors designed for it, and uses two different grommets because the engineers for cars in the same family couldn't be bothered to talk to each other to commonize a hole size. This means that the price is probably 50% higher than necessary and instead of having material lead times of a few days, we have to order materials 4 MONTHS in advance with minimums close to 50K units. I am an engineer but I'm astonished at how incompetent some engineers are at their jobs.
You are correct that the price the auto companies pays is too high but that is their own choice. You are correct that the price the auto companies pays is too high but that is their own choice.
It's less that they don't want people upgrading them (though that is a part of it) but rather that they are trying desperately to find ways to differentiate their products from the other guys even when there is no point in doing so. There is a LOT of Not-Invented-Here going on. Heaven forbid that you find the same part on a GM and a Ford. Seriously, they get pissed if you even try to sell them the same product the other guy uses. It's ridiculous. I've literally seen a GM engineer start yelling because he found some part that was also used on a Chrysler vehicle.
By "road trip", I mean things like Sturgis, SD, to Mt Rushmore on to the Devil's Tower and ending up at Buffalo, WY.
The big thing will be getting recharge times down. That's going to take another 10-15 years minimum I think. (The superchargers are nice but not quite there yet) Until then long distances with EV will be via hybrids. I think it won't be long before we start seeing long distance haulers and trucks being hybrids. Lots of torque from the electric motors and it will help the automakers meet CAFE standards. Wouldn't be surprised to see some diesel electric hybrids at some point.
Cannot do that in an electric, nor can I pause for an hour while running 400 miles of errands in the LA basin.
Cannot do that in an electric YET. Give it 5-10 years and it could happen. Heck the notion of an EV that can do 400 miles on a charge isn't in the realm of science fiction. The Tesla can do over 230 now and it isn't optimized for range. I don't have any trouble envisioning an EV with double that range.
It's not the waistline, it's the seat-to-crown height (I'm 6'4'', 265 lbs.) I have tried on the Tesla and could barely enter (my shoulder hits the upper door sill, same as a BMW 7-series).
So how do that equate to "pathetic"? I get that it might not be a good fit for you but that's just how it goes sometimes. Very tall and very short people unfortunately have necessarily limited options because accommodating them tends to ruin the ergonomics for "normal" sized people who constitute the majority of the buying public. I dated a girl once who was about 4'9" and she actually needed blocks on the pedals of her truck to drive it. I prayed the airbag never went off on her because she had to sit so close it would likely have killed her. Most really tall guys I know end up driving big SUVs of some description. Kind of sucks but that's the way it goes. I think you'll probably see somebody do some big trucks in pure EV and there already are hybrids out there.
The only reason the F-150 is #1 is that GM splits it's pickup sales across Chevy/GMC.
You are correct but kind of missing the point. The Ford does outsell the Chevy (which is true) but the point you glossed by is that there is no objective reason for this to be the case based on the technical merits of the respective vehicles. In some years the Chevy is an objectively better vehicle and the prices are so similar as to be identical. So if people were buying entirely based on objective evidence you would expect the sales crown to pass to Chevy or even Ram from time to time. But this doesn't happen.
It's not actually clear that buyers in a GMC dealership would necessarily buy the Chevy over the Ford even though the GMC is completely identical to the Chevy in all meaningful respects. Hence they have to break them out even though you are quite correct that they are the same vehicle mechanically and could rightfully be viewed as one for sales.
Against this, goes our European wonders who bought Chrysler for 36 billion dollars and then sold it to Fiat for 6 billion dollars!
Daimler did not sell Chrysler to Fiat. They bought Chrysler in 1998 for $38 billion. They sold Chrysler to Cerebus Capital Management in 2007. Fiat bought their interest in Chrysler in 2009 alongside the bankruptcy and they did not acquire a majority interest until fairly recently.
Google/Android is working towards an integrated auto-infotainment system standard. Apple is muscling in. Once the standards are published by SAE it is curtains for the auto industry selling GPS system at 2000% markup.
I can assure you that they've never managed to sell a GPS system "at 2000% markup" even though the price does seem outrageous. To understand why you have to understand product costing in the auto industry. The auto industry does not do huge volumes of consumer electronics like GPS systems. This means their unit prices are rather high. Furthermore each GPS system is to a non-trivial degree customized for the vehicle it is going into which makes the price quite a lot higher. This means that that $2000 GPS option actually probably costs a substantial percentage of that price because they don't sell enough of them to get the cost down lower.
My company makes parts that go into some of the custom wiring harnesses for things like this. Best case they are probably making about a 2-3X markup on the GPS option depending on the volume of the vehicle it goes on. Chances are good they are making less than that especially if it is standard equipment. Remember that even the most profitable auto manufacturer in the world (currently Porsche) has something like 10% net profit margins. So no they aren't making "2000% markup" on pretty much anything.
If you want to know what a part really costs to make, go to your automotive dealer and see what price they are selling it for as a service part. As a crude rule of thumb the markup from manufacturers cost is usually around 6-8X. So for example my company sells a wire harness to our OEM customer for about $2. If you could buy that harness from your GM dealer it would probably cost you about $35-55 retail. Basically the harness goes through somewhere between 2 and 5 suppliers and each one marks it up by around 10-30% along the way. Then when the dealer gets it they basically double whatever price they paid for it (sometimes more) which gets you to a roughly 6-8X the original cost to build.
In the 1970s, all of them were selling absolutely awful products by the metric shitload
And people were buying them because they were the best alternative available in most cases. Yes they were very often crap but there was no non-crap option available. Once there was and they started bleeding market share they eventually (albeit late) starting making better products. The reason for the recent bankruptcies was because their labor and benefits costs because uncompetitive in a competitive market. But the cars they make have continued to appeal and sell, even in the darkest days of bankruptcy. Sales has never truly been the big problem for the Big 3, even with reduced market share. People like their products even when they probably shouldn't if they were being objective about it.
I agree with you in principle that Detroit actually has some life in it, but making that point with sales numbers isn't actually convincing proof.
It's only not proof if you think people are nothing more than gullible sheep with no concept of what interests them. Since that isn't actually true we have to consider that people buy what actually appeals to them and that sales figures are actually the best data available on what constitutes a compelling product.
Nissan has outsold Tesla by 3-4X.
Umm, completely different cars in completely different market segments. Not even remotely a meaningful comparison. One is a performance luxury car that sells for nearly six figures to wealthy tech nerds. The other is a compact runabout purchased almost entirely by the granola crowd for eco cred. Would be hard to be more different.
Tesla's "grip" on the EV sector is imaginary. They are certainly in a very, very nice position in the industry. But they are a medium sized player and their "lead" is mostly imaginary and one of perception.
Perception matters. For example there is no technical reason the Ford F150 has been the best selling vehicle in the US for the last 32 years. In a given year the Chevy or Ram offerings are often objectively better for that model year. Yet Ford out sells them every single year. Why? Perception. Having a brand people like and are comfortable with matters a lot.
And as far as size goes, Telsa is a tiny auto maker. GM sells more vehicles in a month than Tesla has sold in their entire history. The big auto makers could introduce an all electric vehicle very quickly if they wanted to but mostly they are working on hybrids and watching the market. If Tesla can prove the market (good chance of that) then you'll see them jump in later on in a big way. But the longer they stay out of the market the better it will be for Tesla if they can do what they are working on. Tesla has a brand with very high appeal right now.