I wonder if this is just a bit too late. It seems that Samsung has surpassed Sony as the everywhere premium electronics brand Sony was in the 90's.
All it would take to fix that is a series of good and popular products. Sony has a decent brand, good distribution and talented engineers so it's certainly possible. While I'm not optimistic about their prospects, I certainly think it is premature to count them out entirely.
My personal take on Sony is that they have good hardware engineers but are not so great at software. This has become a bigger problem over time. They also have a tendency to try to lock in people with proprietary technology even when they've clearly lost the battle (betamax v VHA, minidisc v CD, SD vs Memory Stick, etc) which I think bites them. They have too much of a Not Invented Here syndrome. Worst of all they also have a built in conflict of interest between their content division and their equipment divisions. They try to lock down the content WAY too much. This makes their engineers essentially unable to provide the products people actually want.
Don't forget, "independent" auditing firms, like Accenture and PWC, actively solicit bribes to certify compliance for those not compliant.
Accenture is not an auditing firm. They are a consulting firm which has nothing directly to do with auditing. They used to be part of an auditing firm but have not been for some time. Furthermore having actually worked with big accounting firms myself, they generally are actually pretty honest, albeit flawed. They serve a very useful purpose which is to verify that the financial statements are a reasonable (not perfect - that is impossible) representation of the financial situation of a company. For the most part they succeed in this endeavor. However sometimes greed, incompetence or plain old fraud manages to get by. Sometimes that is the fault of the auditor, sometimes it is the fault of the company being audited, sometimes both.
The accounting firms approved Enron's activities long after the illegal stuff started.
Which was primarily the fault of the partners charged with that account and a failure of Arthur Anderson's audit control procedures. Arthur Anderson was basically executed for the corrupt/incompetent actions of a relatively few individuals. If you have ever looked at Enron's financial statements (I have), they were made intentionally so complex that it was extremely difficult to determine that anything illegal was happening. I truly pity any honest auditors that were trying to provide an opinion on the financial statements of Enron. It was a hopeless task. On top of an engineering degree I have a masters in finance and am a certified accountant and I barely follow much of what they did.
Furthermore Arthur Anderson was not remotely alone in their complicity in the Enron matter. The banks were probably more guilty if anything since they were the ones funding Enron and theoretically should have been casting the most jaded eye at their activities. They really shouldn't have been funding Enron but greed overwhelmed good sense and they put money into something they could not have possibly fully understood.
Auditing firms are leaches who lie for a living...
Since you don't even know which firms actually are accounting firms I'm going to ahead and say you probably don't know what you are talking about.
"-1 Citation Needed" seems like you're trying to turn the moderation into a measure of truth. It's not.
I disagree. Moderators already are evaluating the comments for veracity. They just don't say so explicitly. We've all had comments moderated down because someone disagreed with them or thought they were wrong. Furthermore, I would rather a factually wrong or unsupported comment get moderated down than have a half a dozen responses correcting it.
If you only get 6 mods, which would you choose?
I think 6 is too few but if I had to pick just 6:
+1 Interesting (I'd drop Insightful and Informative because they are used interchangeably) +1 Funny -1 Inaccurate -1 Troll -1 Off Topic -1 Redundant
my next choices would be
-1 Groupthink +1 Clever +0 Meme (so it can be filtered)
This is the perfect chance to find out the real cost of a first world nation not having internet access.
You haven't been to northern Canada have you? It's about as sparsely populated a place as you are ever likely to find. The vast majority of the population lives within a few hours drive of the southern border.
Boy are people going to be surprised when they find out the government has all these regulations and very few employees to monitor compliance and initiate enforcement actions.
That will come as a surprise to precisely no one. The SEC has been purposely underfunded for decades. You think that is by accident? The financial firms and their, ahem, elected representatives want it that way so they can't cause too much trouble. Hard to monitor wrongdoing when you don't have enough manpower. Congress can effectively neuter any regulatory agency simply by cutting their budget. Doesn't matter what laws are actually on the books if they can't be enforced.
You post. Posting has more effect than moderation anyway.
Don't always want to post or have time and I certainly don't always have mod points. Mod points are more effective because there is less chance of the wrong info being read and replied to thus wasting multiple people's time.
We also need emoticons. Really.
I always figured we needed a "-1 Whoosh!" moderation for that...
On those cases, I've seen everyone mods "Overrated" a lot. There's someone with a signature on the lines of "'Overrated' is '-1 Disagree'", and I concur.
I agree that happens but it's not just for honest disagreements. There is no way to explicitly moderate something as being factually wrong. Overrated is the only way to moderate something down that isn't a troll or flamebait. I think we need an "innacurate" or "misleading" mod option. Of course like everything it would get abused some but it would be useful too.
The moderation system seriously needs thinking and redone.
My main critique is that there is no way to moderate something explicitly as inaccurate or misleading. Much stuff that is posted is just plain wrong but isn't flamebait or a troll or even overrated.
All the stories are filled with slashdot groupthink comments...
I'm not sure there is a decent solution for that. If you have any ideas on how to improve it I'd be interested.
Yes, this demonstrates the vast value of government. Throw a few hundred billion in, get a billion dollar rocket out.
I hope you were joking because the ROI on research dollars invested in NASA to the US economy is somewhere between 3X and 14X depending on which study you look at. There are over 1650 spin off technologies. NASA may run an inefficient manned space program but they are a genuine research powerhouse that MORE than pays for itself once you consider it's net effect on the economy. Just because the benefit isn't a direct one doesn't mean it isn't a benefit.
Chrome is simply easier to use than IE or Firefox.
My own usage does not bear this out as a fact. I have my company using Chrome as our primary web browser since we use gmail for our email communications. However, printing in Chrome is clunky and slow, it handles PDFs and other files rather clumsily, and I do not find it to be meaningfully better than the latest version of Firefox overall. You may like Chrome better and that is fine but I reject your argument that it is "simply easier". That is very much a matter up for debate.
The minimalistic design is actually a triumph
A "triumph"? That is very much a matter of opinion. Personally I'm rather indifferent to how it looks. The minimalist look also has the downside of confusing some of our users. Nothing horrible but it is a drain on my time.
I think that some atheists have an axe to grind when it comes to religion and try to use science as a means to destroy the faith of those who believe in a religion.
Do you know what the most hated minority group in America is? It's not blacks, hispanics, jews or muslims. It is atheists. Our last president (Bush the lesser) even said "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Is it any wonder that some atheists respond rather negatively to such overt hatred among religious followers directed towards them? When religions stop trying to convert everyone to their particular brand of hallucinatory dogma, I suspect you'll find most atheists will at worst express a mild contempt for their weird behavior.
I have no problem at all with combating irrational behavior using scientifically determined facts. If that "destroys the faith" of some, they probably were already doubtful of the veracity of their received "wisdom" to begin with. Religion is not sacred. Neither religion or its followers are above criticism.
It is not the duty of religion to say HOW things happen, but WHO is behind it.
The fault in that line of reasoning is that there may not be any "who" behind any of it. We all can observe how things happen and describe them. Attempts to describe the nature of a deity are 100% made up mythology with no credible evidence to back any of it up. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is every bit as credible as Jesus if you are trying to say who created the universe. Even if there is a "who" behind the whole thing, religious believers cannot possibly have any idea as to the nature of such an entity.
No, the conflict between science and religion is a false conflict created by atheists as a way to denigrate religion and make it seem as if atheism is supported by science.
I think you greatly overestimate how much atheists care about religion. Some point out that there is no evidence for the existence of any deity and that the behavior of religious followers is HIGHLY irrational and illogical. Atheists generally only bother to pay attention to religion when religious followers try to foist their bizarre belief systems on others, sometimes at the point of the proverbial sword. Atheism is by definition the absence (sometimes a rejection) of a belief in a deity. It has nothing to do with science at all. It merely happens that science ALSO does not take the existence of a deity as an axiom. Neither science nor atheism explicitly supports the other but unless there arises some scientific evidence for the existence of a deity (presently there is none), atheism and science are not logically incompatible either.
Apparently you think that atheists are plotting to destroy religion. In actual fact virtually all atheists could not care less what crazy things you believe so long as you either back them up with facts or keep them to yourself.
The Old Testament which has been superseded by the New.
Unless of course you happen to be Jewish...
I think it is very funny that people are supposed to ignore the old "word of god" in favor of the "newly revised word of god". What, did god make a mistake the first time around? Guess god isn't infallible after all...
Telephone soliciting is still prohibited, and if a debt collector is after you I think you have other things to worry about.
That's the same argument as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about". The premise of the argument is faulty. Debt collectors frequently go after the wrong person. A guy I work for has been getting hammered with calls from debt collectors who have mistaken him for someone else with the same name. Additionally, sometimes collections agents are sent after someone who has a legitimate dispute. Collections agents are not compensated for being scrupulous about whom they harass or how they behave. They are compensated ONLY when they get money for the clients. While I have no issue with anyone taking reasonable and prudent measures to collect debts they are owed that does not mean any and all measures should be permissible.
In fact, the only scenario I can see as a real problem is when debt collectors rack up charges robo-calling you. Just take every charge off the amount you owe until it's a wash.
Why on earth should anyone have to waste their time fighting with the phone company to get charges removed that shouldn't have been there in the first place?
Are these pay rates just salary comparisons or do they include benefits? Benefits can be 50% of the base salary or more.
Are they doing the same job?
Contractors typically get hired because they have specific expertise that is lacking in the organization. It's not clear that the government workers have the necessary skill sets or can be hired in a reasonable time frame if the necessary expertise is lacking.
Are they including overhead costs in these calculations? The cost of a worker is more than just salary. Contractors charge more because they have overhead and also need to make a profit.
Are they including search costs? It takes time to find workers to do a job (contractor or not) and it's not clear that these costs are included.
What about the opportunity cost of delaying while the government gets their people working on the job.
What liability issues are in play if any?
How much net savings are we talking about here? If we are just talking about a few dozen employees, then we probably don't care very much. If it is thousands then we might be talking about some real money.
I'm a cost accountant in my day job and a good cost analysis is not a simple salary comparison.
You don't need a college degree to get a job, although we as a society have done a very good job of convincing young people otherwise.
The odds say otherwise if you want one with decent pay. It is and always will be possible to do well without a college degree but the simple fact is that there is copious data to support that, on average, having a college degree will result in significantly higher pay. Many/most professional jobs these days won't even give you an interview unless you have a degree. We can debate whether that is a good thing or not (probably not) but those are the facts.
What do you think would happen if we pitted a modern equivalent of the P-51 against the F-22? Take a cheap-and-quick-to-build airframe, put 10,000 of them in the air, and keep the replacements coming. What would the outcome be?
A massacre of the P-51 because the F-22 does not exist in a vacuum. P-51s would be shot out of the sky in massive quantities by modern anti-aircraft defenses, other fighters, and destroyed on the ground by attack aircraft that can level operating bases with a single sortie. How are your P51s going to operate when their bases are turned into smoldering ruins?
Furthermore your notion that you could bring 10,000 P-51s to bear, to be generous, and absurd hypothetical. Real wars don't work that way.
Unmanned spacecraft require just as much science and engineering, and is a better investment.
It requires DIFFERENT science and you can never tell in advance which will be the better investment. If you knew ahead of time it would not be research by definition.
I have to agree that the current state of the US economy pretty much rules out meaningful human space exploration at the moment.
Nonsense. NASA's budget is a rounding error compared to the DOD, not to mention Social Security and Medicare. There is plenty of money to fund manned spaceflight if we decide that is our priority. So far we have decided to fund other things but the state of the economy is not the problem.
It seems during this economic downturn companies have started throwing caution to the wind in an attempt to ravenously feed on each others still warm carcasses.
What warm carcasses? Companies have been reporting massive profits, Apple certainly not the least of them. Companies are sitting on gi-normous piles of cash. Unemployment is high but so are profits. There is a lot of uncertainty (economic, consumer demand, political, healthcare, etc) in the economy so companies are keeping their powder dry and waiting for things to settle down a bit.
All these lawsuits are because we are at a tipping point where PCs are becoming less important and mobile devices are rapidly becoming more important. We're simply seeing companies fighting to establish dominance in this new world. Despite the patent system being rather broken, companies pretty much are forced to use every weapon at their disposal. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
Bingo. If they are looking for someone to fill in for a few months in the CEO chair while they look for a long term replacement, I could see Whitman doing that. She knows what it's like to be CEO of a big company and while she has little enterprise experience she could keep the parts moving for a while without blowing things up. Big companies generally can operate on autopilot for quite a while regardless of who is the person in the corner office.
On the other hand if they want her to be more than a short term (months) interim CEO, then the board is likely making a huge mistake in my opinion. I'm not remotely convinced she would be the right person for the job long term. EBay was lightning in a bottle - right place, right time, right situation. HP is a much different animal. Maybe she could do it and I'm wrong but I very much doubt it.
The majority of RedHat's income is from investments, not software...
Red Hat's Statement of Cash Flows says otherwise. Over the most recent 12 months reported Red Hat had $23,378,000 in investment income against $107,278,000 in Net Income and $909,277,000 in Revenue. That works out to about 2.5% of Red Hat's income coming from investments. Last time I checked, 2.5% does not constitute a "majority".
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I wonder if this is just a bit too late. It seems that Samsung has surpassed Sony as the everywhere premium electronics brand Sony was in the 90's.
All it would take to fix that is a series of good and popular products. Sony has a decent brand, good distribution and talented engineers so it's certainly possible. While I'm not optimistic about their prospects, I certainly think it is premature to count them out entirely.
My personal take on Sony is that they have good hardware engineers but are not so great at software. This has become a bigger problem over time. They also have a tendency to try to lock in people with proprietary technology even when they've clearly lost the battle (betamax v VHA, minidisc v CD, SD vs Memory Stick, etc) which I think bites them. They have too much of a Not Invented Here syndrome. Worst of all they also have a built in conflict of interest between their content division and their equipment divisions. They try to lock down the content WAY too much. This makes their engineers essentially unable to provide the products people actually want.
Don't forget, "independent" auditing firms, like Accenture and PWC, actively solicit bribes to certify compliance for those not compliant.
Accenture is not an auditing firm. They are a consulting firm which has nothing directly to do with auditing. They used to be part of an auditing firm but have not been for some time. Furthermore having actually worked with big accounting firms myself, they generally are actually pretty honest, albeit flawed. They serve a very useful purpose which is to verify that the financial statements are a reasonable (not perfect - that is impossible) representation of the financial situation of a company. For the most part they succeed in this endeavor. However sometimes greed, incompetence or plain old fraud manages to get by. Sometimes that is the fault of the auditor, sometimes it is the fault of the company being audited, sometimes both.
The accounting firms approved Enron's activities long after the illegal stuff started.
Which was primarily the fault of the partners charged with that account and a failure of Arthur Anderson's audit control procedures. Arthur Anderson was basically executed for the corrupt/incompetent actions of a relatively few individuals. If you have ever looked at Enron's financial statements (I have), they were made intentionally so complex that it was extremely difficult to determine that anything illegal was happening. I truly pity any honest auditors that were trying to provide an opinion on the financial statements of Enron. It was a hopeless task. On top of an engineering degree I have a masters in finance and am a certified accountant and I barely follow much of what they did.
Furthermore Arthur Anderson was not remotely alone in their complicity in the Enron matter. The banks were probably more guilty if anything since they were the ones funding Enron and theoretically should have been casting the most jaded eye at their activities. They really shouldn't have been funding Enron but greed overwhelmed good sense and they put money into something they could not have possibly fully understood.
Auditing firms are leaches who lie for a living...
Since you don't even know which firms actually are accounting firms I'm going to ahead and say you probably don't know what you are talking about.
"-1 Citation Needed" seems like you're trying to turn the moderation into a measure of truth. It's not.
I disagree. Moderators already are evaluating the comments for veracity. They just don't say so explicitly. We've all had comments moderated down because someone disagreed with them or thought they were wrong. Furthermore, I would rather a factually wrong or unsupported comment get moderated down than have a half a dozen responses correcting it.
If you only get 6 mods, which would you choose?
I think 6 is too few but if I had to pick just 6:
+1 Interesting (I'd drop Insightful and Informative because they are used interchangeably)
+1 Funny
-1 Inaccurate
-1 Troll
-1 Off Topic
-1 Redundant
my next choices would be
-1 Groupthink
+1 Clever
+0 Meme (so it can be filtered)
This is the perfect chance to find out the real cost of a first world nation not having internet access.
You haven't been to northern Canada have you? It's about as sparsely populated a place as you are ever likely to find. The vast majority of the population lives within a few hours drive of the southern border.
Boy are people going to be surprised when they find out the government has all these regulations and very few employees to monitor compliance and initiate enforcement actions.
That will come as a surprise to precisely no one. The SEC has been purposely underfunded for decades. You think that is by accident? The financial firms and their, ahem, elected representatives want it that way so they can't cause too much trouble. Hard to monitor wrongdoing when you don't have enough manpower. Congress can effectively neuter any regulatory agency simply by cutting their budget. Doesn't matter what laws are actually on the books if they can't be enforced.
Slashdot has probably of the best comment systems on Earth.
Talk about damning with faint praise...
You post. Posting has more effect than moderation anyway.
Don't always want to post or have time and I certainly don't always have mod points. Mod points are more effective because there is less chance of the wrong info being read and replied to thus wasting multiple people's time.
We also need emoticons. Really.
I always figured we needed a "-1 Whoosh!" moderation for that...
Oh, and more selection on the moderation. -1 Insane and +1 Really Insane and -1 Fanbois and +1 Well Played, Sir
+1 Well Played, Sir.
I'd add: -1 Inaccurate, -1 Misleading, -1 Citation Needed, +1 Citation Provided, -1 Whoosh!
On those cases, I've seen everyone mods "Overrated" a lot. There's someone with a signature on the lines of "'Overrated' is '-1 Disagree'", and I concur.
I agree that happens but it's not just for honest disagreements. There is no way to explicitly moderate something as being factually wrong. Overrated is the only way to moderate something down that isn't a troll or flamebait. I think we need an "innacurate" or "misleading" mod option. Of course like everything it would get abused some but it would be useful too.
The moderation system seriously needs thinking and redone.
My main critique is that there is no way to moderate something explicitly as inaccurate or misleading. Much stuff that is posted is just plain wrong but isn't flamebait or a troll or even overrated.
All the stories are filled with slashdot groupthink comments...
I'm not sure there is a decent solution for that. If you have any ideas on how to improve it I'd be interested.
Yes, this demonstrates the vast value of government. Throw a few hundred billion in, get a billion dollar rocket out.
I hope you were joking because the ROI on research dollars invested in NASA to the US economy is somewhere between 3X and 14X depending on which study you look at. There are over 1650 spin off technologies. NASA may run an inefficient manned space program but they are a genuine research powerhouse that MORE than pays for itself once you consider it's net effect on the economy. Just because the benefit isn't a direct one doesn't mean it isn't a benefit.
Chrome is simply easier to use than IE or Firefox.
My own usage does not bear this out as a fact. I have my company using Chrome as our primary web browser since we use gmail for our email communications. However, printing in Chrome is clunky and slow, it handles PDFs and other files rather clumsily, and I do not find it to be meaningfully better than the latest version of Firefox overall. You may like Chrome better and that is fine but I reject your argument that it is "simply easier". That is very much a matter up for debate.
The minimalistic design is actually a triumph
A "triumph"? That is very much a matter of opinion. Personally I'm rather indifferent to how it looks. The minimalist look also has the downside of confusing some of our users. Nothing horrible but it is a drain on my time.
I think that some atheists have an axe to grind when it comes to religion and try to use science as a means to destroy the faith of those who believe in a religion.
Do you know what the most hated minority group in America is? It's not blacks, hispanics, jews or muslims. It is atheists. Our last president (Bush the lesser) even said "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Is it any wonder that some atheists respond rather negatively to such overt hatred among religious followers directed towards them? When religions stop trying to convert everyone to their particular brand of hallucinatory dogma, I suspect you'll find most atheists will at worst express a mild contempt for their weird behavior.
I have no problem at all with combating irrational behavior using scientifically determined facts. If that "destroys the faith" of some, they probably were already doubtful of the veracity of their received "wisdom" to begin with. Religion is not sacred. Neither religion or its followers are above criticism.
It is not the duty of religion to say HOW things happen, but WHO is behind it.
The fault in that line of reasoning is that there may not be any "who" behind any of it. We all can observe how things happen and describe them. Attempts to describe the nature of a deity are 100% made up mythology with no credible evidence to back any of it up. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is every bit as credible as Jesus if you are trying to say who created the universe. Even if there is a "who" behind the whole thing, religious believers cannot possibly have any idea as to the nature of such an entity.
No, the conflict between science and religion is a false conflict created by atheists as a way to denigrate religion and make it seem as if atheism is supported by science.
I think you greatly overestimate how much atheists care about religion. Some point out that there is no evidence for the existence of any deity and that the behavior of religious followers is HIGHLY irrational and illogical. Atheists generally only bother to pay attention to religion when religious followers try to foist their bizarre belief systems on others, sometimes at the point of the proverbial sword. Atheism is by definition the absence (sometimes a rejection) of a belief in a deity. It has nothing to do with science at all. It merely happens that science ALSO does not take the existence of a deity as an axiom. Neither science nor atheism explicitly supports the other but unless there arises some scientific evidence for the existence of a deity (presently there is none), atheism and science are not logically incompatible either.
Apparently you think that atheists are plotting to destroy religion. In actual fact virtually all atheists could not care less what crazy things you believe so long as you either back them up with facts or keep them to yourself.
The Old Testament which has been superseded by the New.
Unless of course you happen to be Jewish...
I think it is very funny that people are supposed to ignore the old "word of god" in favor of the "newly revised word of god". What, did god make a mistake the first time around? Guess god isn't infallible after all...
2) Love Other People As Much As Yourself.
And what if you hate yourself?
Telephone soliciting is still prohibited, and if a debt collector is after you I think you have other things to worry about.
That's the same argument as "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about". The premise of the argument is faulty. Debt collectors frequently go after the wrong person. A guy I work for has been getting hammered with calls from debt collectors who have mistaken him for someone else with the same name. Additionally, sometimes collections agents are sent after someone who has a legitimate dispute. Collections agents are not compensated for being scrupulous about whom they harass or how they behave. They are compensated ONLY when they get money for the clients. While I have no issue with anyone taking reasonable and prudent measures to collect debts they are owed that does not mean any and all measures should be permissible.
In fact, the only scenario I can see as a real problem is when debt collectors rack up charges robo-calling you. Just take every charge off the amount you owe until it's a wash.
Why on earth should anyone have to waste their time fighting with the phone company to get charges removed that shouldn't have been there in the first place?
Lots of important details are left out of TFA:
I'm a cost accountant in my day job and a good cost analysis is not a simple salary comparison.
You don't need a college degree to get a job, although we as a society have done a very good job of convincing young people otherwise.
The odds say otherwise if you want one with decent pay. It is and always will be possible to do well without a college degree but the simple fact is that there is copious data to support that, on average, having a college degree will result in significantly higher pay. Many/most professional jobs these days won't even give you an interview unless you have a degree. We can debate whether that is a good thing or not (probably not) but those are the facts.
What do you think would happen if we pitted a modern equivalent of the P-51 against the F-22? Take a cheap-and-quick-to-build airframe, put 10,000 of them in the air, and keep the replacements coming. What would the outcome be?
A massacre of the P-51 because the F-22 does not exist in a vacuum. P-51s would be shot out of the sky in massive quantities by modern anti-aircraft defenses, other fighters, and destroyed on the ground by attack aircraft that can level operating bases with a single sortie. How are your P51s going to operate when their bases are turned into smoldering ruins?
Furthermore your notion that you could bring 10,000 P-51s to bear, to be generous, and absurd hypothetical. Real wars don't work that way.
Unmanned spacecraft require just as much science and engineering, and is a better investment.
It requires DIFFERENT science and you can never tell in advance which will be the better investment. If you knew ahead of time it would not be research by definition.
I have to agree that the current state of the US economy pretty much rules out meaningful human space exploration at the moment.
Nonsense. NASA's budget is a rounding error compared to the DOD, not to mention Social Security and Medicare. There is plenty of money to fund manned spaceflight if we decide that is our priority. So far we have decided to fund other things but the state of the economy is not the problem.
It seems during this economic downturn companies have started throwing caution to the wind in an attempt to ravenously feed on each others still warm carcasses.
What warm carcasses? Companies have been reporting massive profits, Apple certainly not the least of them. Companies are sitting on gi-normous piles of cash. Unemployment is high but so are profits. There is a lot of uncertainty (economic, consumer demand, political, healthcare, etc) in the economy so companies are keeping their powder dry and waiting for things to settle down a bit.
All these lawsuits are because we are at a tipping point where PCs are becoming less important and mobile devices are rapidly becoming more important. We're simply seeing companies fighting to establish dominance in this new world. Despite the patent system being rather broken, companies pretty much are forced to use every weapon at their disposal. I don't see this changing anytime soon.
It all depends on what they want her to do.
Bingo. If they are looking for someone to fill in for a few months in the CEO chair while they look for a long term replacement, I could see Whitman doing that. She knows what it's like to be CEO of a big company and while she has little enterprise experience she could keep the parts moving for a while without blowing things up. Big companies generally can operate on autopilot for quite a while regardless of who is the person in the corner office.
On the other hand if they want her to be more than a short term (months) interim CEO, then the board is likely making a huge mistake in my opinion. I'm not remotely convinced she would be the right person for the job long term. EBay was lightning in a bottle - right place, right time, right situation. HP is a much different animal. Maybe she could do it and I'm wrong but I very much doubt it.
The majority of RedHat's income is from investments, not software...
Red Hat's Statement of Cash Flows says otherwise. Over the most recent 12 months reported Red Hat had $23,378,000 in investment income against $107,278,000 in Net Income and $909,277,000 in Revenue. That works out to about 2.5% of Red Hat's income coming from investments. Last time I checked, 2.5% does not constitute a "majority".