Back on subject. USB on linux is a priority for Mac users. It was not a priority for linux before then. The floppy disk as we know is going to be gone eventually. Do you have a 5.25" disk drive on your computer? Hmmm, that was available a few years ago.
So were 5 megabyte hard drives. What's your point? If your point is that things change in the computer industry and that it somehow follows that the floppy disk drive should be abandoned, I have to disagree with you.
Actually, 5 meg hard disks went out much sooner that 5.25" floppies; you're talking 1989 vs. 1994 or so there. And this meant something, because when OS/2 Warp came out, you had to install it from a PC that was set up to boot off of one of those new-fangled 1.44MB floppy drives. The whining that went up over that was intense, but lasted all of 3 months.
What people really want is not a floppy drive or a zip drive, but a CD-RW drive that also plays DVDs. And I believe such units are just about to be coming out, which means that in a year to 18 months, they will be cheap enough to be built into every consumer system, at which point the whole idea of a floppy seems very quaint:
Who will want an unreliable floppy disk that complicates the whole PC when they can have a "one slot" media experience that does everything from back-up to playing music and videos to, yes, replacing the standard uses of a floppy drive?
Now, this is not to say that Apple may have jumped the gun a bit on this trend, but do you really not think that next year's iMac 3 won't have the one combo drive, followed by all other PC makers in the next dozens of months?
But then, if you turn to the processor's name, Crusoe, you'll quickly realize as I did that it's just an anagram for SOURCE.
Actually, I'm worried now:
TRANSMETA'S CRUSOE
is an anagram for:
NSA'S SOURCE MATTER
I'm pretty sure that this explains the impenetrable cloak of secrecy around the company and it's "products". And also why they have access to so much cash...
The key idea is to keep not just the data, but to cache partially complete data views for later re-use with different real-time data.
Philip and Alex don't appear to specifically suggest this.
So you're saying that it's not the template idea itself, but the use of explicit caching to partially fill the template? Whee! If that's the case, you're probably right, although I'll bet that, in the bowels of many an Oracle database application, similar things have happened for a long time. And implicit caching is just the way you build a workable RDBMS.
The claim still sound pretty shaky, even if Phil and Alex don't count as prior art against this form of the claim.
Suggesting that the per-user files in transactional databases would count is very interesting.
My guess is they would not represent enough of the content of a served screen to count as "template programs". But definitely a good try.
I agree that they wouldn't necessarily represent enough of the content, but they certainly could do so, and almost certainly have done so many times in real life. But, here, the question could boil down to whether the webification of an old and boring idea can still be new in the eyes of the patent attorneys who will determine whether this actually gets challenged.
Another question, I suppose, is whether Media Lab work in the late 80s on electronic personalized newspapers could count as prior art, although here again, if merely using http as a means of transmission makes it new, then this wouldn't count either. Well, unless somebody else has already patented a similar idea making claims against a broader class of electronic media than has Yahoo.:-)
2. Using a page server, a method of providing real-time responses to user requests for customized pages, the method comprising the steps of: [etc., rest deleted]
I have a cold today, so my virus-addled mind may be missing something here, but it would appear that this claim really amounts to a description of a data-base view on a transactions-oriented database that just happens to be executed over-the-web? Or does the claim hinge on the notion that the view was "user-generated" (also pretty weak, given current DB products)?
Presumably the idea of a database view cannot be patentable these days given a metric buttload of prior art, but is the "mere" webification of such an idea legally patentable, given the theory that it wasn't trivial to do since database-backed web sites didn't exist from day one?
If so, I note that this patent was filed on June 12, 1997, and I am therefore virtually certain it is invalid due to the specific prior art of Philip Greenspun's online version of the bookDatabase Backed Web Sites, which originally appeared on the web before it's 1997 publication, and was republished as Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in 1999. Chapter 10 ("Sites that are really programs") and Chapter 11 ("Sites that are really databases") being te most relevant pieces.
Really, I think Greenspun's prior art tells you exactly how to achieve the central claim of this patent, so I would be very interested to see somebody argue how the Yahoo claim holds any water at all, even in the "we webified it!" sense.
I once got paid to do finance theory research work, working on code that compared Black/Scholes calculations with the results of computations coming from a similar calculation using discrete steps. I presently have about $10K invested in index funds. It would be pretty silly for me to imply that index funds are only for stupid people, and that's certainly not what I said.
Upon further review of what you *did* say, and suddenly remembering on what topics I'd seen you posting here before, I have to say "oops".:-)
I got confused by the tone of your post and what I think might have been a stray word (read while cruising the thread at a 2+ ratings filter) and probably not having read what you were directly replying to.
So I guess you can really put me in the same category as only stupid people for more reasons than just buying index funds.:-)
More seriously, I'm not sure that most people truly appreciate how amazing it is that index funds "work", or how tough it is to construct a low-maintenance portfolio that has that kind of return and those tax advantages at almost any level of risk. I know people who pay serious money for crappy performance and tax headaches, year after year.
His claim of fraud is, in itself, fraudulent (or incompetent).
I think everybody not in the Raving Loony Party aggrees with this.:-)
[snip]
1) the existence of large number of options understates the potential number of shares. This is true--if there are 100 shares and 200 stock options, 1 real share represents not 1%, but 1/3% of the company. Thus the earnings per share are overstated. This is what the "footnote" business is: the "diluted" earnings, spreading earnings out over potential shares rather than actual shares, only occur in footnotes. The result is indeed that earnings *per share* are lower than reported. It does *not* affect total earnings.
That much is obvious, but isn't it also obvious why this course of action would affect the price of each share, and specifically the shares that were owned before the dilution? I mean, assuming that people were assigning a value to these shares in terms of the value of future dividends or earnings in some way.
The "debt" from these. Here is where this turns into nonsense. Many companies, including microsoft, do indeed buy back the shares when employees excercise options, in order to keep the total number of shares outstanding stable. But they have *NO* obligation to do so. Microsoft could simply allow more shares to exist.
Done. No cost to Microsoft.
Again, it's clear that, as you say, there is no "debt" here (assuming that Microsoft the firm is legally organized in such a way that it can just print up new shares for this purpose).
But I think the root of the problem is this: Microsoft is not obligated to buy back these shares, only to sell shares to employees for the option's exercise price. And this creates a dilemna:
If Microsoft does not (or cannot) buy back the option shares, they dilute the stock, and this has a material effect on existing stockholders.
If Microsoft does buy back the option shares, then the cash used to perform the buy back has to come from *somewhere*, and this also has a material effect on existing stockholders.
Now, the only problem is where and how to communicate to the stockholders what effect the exercise of stock options will have on the per-share earnings of the stock holders. This is what the accounting standards people are fighting about right now.
If we assume, though, that a corporation *will* buy back the stock, it may make some sense to include that future cost (after discounting) to the business in some way (there are a number of ways to do this). However, to do so, we have to estimate or know the future price of the stock. If we knew this with certainty, this would also be the current price (less the interest in the mean time). And the important thing about options is that they are issued at *more* than the current price. If the current price is ten, the corporation might issue options to buy at a price of twelve. This would show each option as an *asset* rather than a liability (which, of course, is also nonsense).
I don't think that's right; everybody knows that an option to buy at $12 won't be exercised if the price is only $10, so the options would show up either as a Zero or a liability. And I think there have to be far more sensible ways to estimate the likely value of the option, or at least its possible effect on shareholders. One way would be to use the company's historical data: how much was an option of $X over the market price really worth in the past? Another way would be to use "normative" data over a market sector: in the software services sector, what is the current value of an option of $X over the market price? The problems with those methods, however, are clear: the past history might not be relevant, or there may be no history at all.
Would there be any potential to use the system developed to put a concrete pricetag on a bank's possible future loan losses (loan loss provisions) as a model for this kind of accounting?
King Babar wrote: Now, what would be a concern is if Microsoft was so dependent on this tactic that they felt the need to do any of the following things: Issue an ever increasing number of options, with the possibility of accelerating dilution or having those options appear less attractive as inducements to sign up with the company. Manipulate earnings so that the stock price continues to grow as steady-as-she-goes, so that the options ploy will always work. Manipulate the stock price itself, so that the options are always exercised and the expense of employee compensation is kept low (or even lowered further)
Well, forgive me for being a little puzzled here, but I was under the impression that this was what they were doing.
I think this might be what some people have accused them of doing, but, so far, the evidence is hardly overwhelming. I certainly didn't see any direct evidence cited in the Parish report. If you want to find holes to poke in the idea that Microsoft is the best company to invest in at the moment, you can find them without assuming that the company is engaging in some nutty fraudulent activity that would lead to financial armageddon when it becomes unraveled.
That said, it is clear that if MSFT ever did suffer from an earnings growth hiccup, the consequences could be pretty severe in the current investment environment.
If someone is so stupid that they are incapable of understanding
[easy stuff omitted]
I feel no need to be sensitive to their needs.
People that choose to be this ignorant have no place investing in the stock market.
They should buy:
Long term government bonds, or
Index funds
both of which are more suited to the action of those that wish to remain blithering idiots.
Well, I agree that people who don't understand the basics of investing get what they deserve to some extent; it certainly would be implausible that they understand the risks involved, for example.
But the idea that index funds are only suited for idiots is just, um, stupid. If you wanted to buy stocks and I told you that I had a mutual fund that out-performs more than 2/3 of all funds on a year-to-year basis and outperforms almost every mutual fund in the long-term, you would probably be interested. If I told you that, in addition, you wouldn't end up paying cap gains taxes when all you did was buy and hold the fund, you should be even more interested.
And this magic fund is, of course, the cheapest index fund in the sector of your choice, or just the S&P500 index if you really don't want to be burdened with the choice. And, for heaven's sake, the idea that index funds, just because they don't require lots of effort or knowledge, are somehow only for stupid people is just silly.
It's not that you couldn't do better picking your own stocks, but you would be accepting more risk in doing so, and that's not always appropriate, no matter how smart or stupid you are.
Basically, the situation is like this. Company X issues a stock option to employee Y at, say, $10/share. Let's say a year passed and the stock of company X is now trading at $100. You *can* say that the company sustained a $90 unrealized loss (I am ignoring the time value of money for simplicity) and that's exactly what Parish is saying. However, in the real world if the option gets cashed in, the company will not go onto the open market, buy a share for $100 and give it to the employee in exchange for $10. The company will just issue more stock.
Not to give a Raving Loony more than his due (I'm talking about Parrish, not this poster), but Parrish also seemed to be suggesting a second kind of earnings problem as well. That story goes like this:
Microsoft has employees, and those employees are compensated by some combination of boring benefits, wages/salary, and those nifty stock options. Now, the possibility of income from exercising those stock options looks as good as money in the bank, because the stock is always going up, so the options are never worthless. This is a very nice situation for Microsoft, since it means that the salary and other benefits they pay don't have to be as high as those of other companies that can't essentially pay people with stock options that are as good as gold. So Microsoft has a smaller expense for wages and such, which makes their earnings larger.
The problem for Parrish is that there is nothing wrong with this, taken by itself. Indeed, you could argue that if Microsoft didn't take advantage of opportunities like this, that they would be wronging their shareholders.
Now, what would be a concern is if Microsoft was so dependent on this tactic that they felt the need to do any of the followint things:
Issue an ever increasing number of options, with the possibility of accelerating dilution or having those options appear less attractive as inducements to sign up with the company
Manipulate earnings so that the stock price continues to grow as steady-as-she-goes, so that the options ploy will always work.
Manipulate the stock price itself, so that the options are always exercised and the expense of employee compensation is kept low (or even lowered further)
Regardless of whether or not any of these things are illegal or unethical, it's reasonable to question whether this is the kind of financial footwork you'd like to see supporting the stock price of a $500 billion company.
The reason the number on the balance sheet is smaller now (this unearned revenue) is that Microsoft reduced the % of revenue that was postponed. I think this change is a respones to the the SEC investingating Microsoft for "cookie jar reserve accounting."
Very interesting. I had no idea. But it made me look and notice another interesting thing about Microsoft earnings: they've had positive earnings surprises for (at least) five consecutive quarters. One way to achieve this would be to forever be finding yet another way to generate more cash flow. Another way would be to play with your unearned revenue numbers.
At the end of the year the reserves were $6 billion and I doubt that this indicates that Microsofts sales are falling.
I'd be stunned if Microsoft's sales were falling, but I'd be less surprised if their sales (and earnings) growth began to slow down after the next big product cycle. And that's pretty critical when your stock is:
trading at 60 times current earnings
paying no dividend now (or ever?)
increasingly likely to be squeezed on margins
I mean, shoot, if Microsoft ever began trading at even a merely absurd P/E, then that could whack the stock price in half.
Legos were a big step up. As a kid, I missed out on all the cool new stuff.
Tell me about it. Everything is way better now than it was back then. Even the fairly tame stuff is pretty cool. And it's not jsut computers and electronic stuff. I mean, don't you wish you'd had access to Stomp Rockets? And on and on...
Gosh, I guess I never thought I needed a book to teach me anything about sex. I mean if there's anything that is self-documenting, sex has got to be it.:-)
5) Christmas won't be as merry as expected in Cupertino, CA.
One, there won't be any revenues from those $3,500 G4-500's. [snip]
Another poster has noted that most of the revenue (and revenue growth) will come from making deliveries of (and Santa taking new orders for) the new iMacs and iBooks. And I wouldn't be shocked if Apple's price from Motorola on the G3s wasn't made, shall we say, more attractive in light of the G4 debacle.
Two, rising DRAM prices will put even more pressure on those profit margins.
Well, that depends a lot on how Apple structures their DRAM supplier contracts in the upcoming months. DRAM prices certainly went up, but when I checked today, the "benchmark" PC100 64 MB SIMM was down to $112 at thechipmerchant.com, where it had been well over $160 in the very recent past.
Meanwhile, prices on hard disks are still going down just as fast as always.
Reading the article, it looks like the reason for the change was the increased DRAM prices lately.
Face it, when the chips have tripled in cost in the last month or so, that really cuts into Apple's profits on the machines, so something has to go.
What you say is true, but raising the price on an existing computer line basically breaks the first law of selling computers: You can never raise the price of an existing computer system and expect to retain market share.
Once upon a time, actually about 10 years ago, I believe, Apple Computer pulled what was essentially the same stunt: raising prices on the current models because of a DRAM crisis in order to protect their gross margins. What ended up happening was the beginning of the long, painful slide in market share that nearly killed the company.
In this case, the price rise is much smaller, and confined (for now) to a single model line, so I don't forecast the death of the firm. But Apple's recent turn around has had much more to do with getting stunningly good press and providing products that people were happy to buy, because they did not think they were being screwed. Stuff like this does not help.
Western Europe has consistently underestimated Russia, and was caught by surprise when, under Leninism, it exploded economically and fully became a world power.
You have got to be kidding. The real truth about the former Soviet Union was that it was an economic disaster. There was no real question about this before World War II; the surprise result of the war against fascism was that such a strong defense could be mounted despite such obvious economic weakness. And being on the winning side of that ward led not to the underestimation of the Soviet economy, but the consistent and enormous overestimation of that economy by the most world powers, most notably the CIA.
There is no dispute that the Soviet Union was a world military power, but that pre-eminence was attainable because while central planning was very poor at creating wealth, the apparatus was very good at sustaining patriotic fervor and directing what resources there were into military hardware.
Indeed, the ironic thing about the use of the former USSR in this discussion is that the whole regime crumbled when faced with the challenge of a truly piddling amount of free market capitalism. The fact that Russia is currently an economic moonscape is not primarily because the old system was dismantled (it just got new owners) but because it produced virtually nothing that had value in a free market economy, and turning that around will take a lot more time and effort than most Western governments would have expected.
King Babar
Re:$1299 Model also has DVD and Firewire.
on
New iMac Rolled Out
·
· Score: 1
To go from $1299 to $1499 you add 64MB more RAM, 3 GB more HD and the graphite color, but all of the iMacs except the base model come with DVD and Firewire.
You also get a free cable to hook your digital video camera into your iMac. Actually, given the recent huge rise in the price of DRAM, the $1499 model looks like a really good deal.
The only problem I see is that you have to spend extra for your Airport, and it's not clear that to me that Linux will run on it, yet...
King Babar
Re:$1299 Model also has DVD and Firewire.
on
New iMac Rolled Out
·
· Score: 1
To go from $1299 to $1499 you add 64MB more RAM, 3 GB more HD and the graphite color, but all of the iMacs except the base model come with DVD and Firewire.
You also get a free cable to hook your digital video camera into your iMac. Actually, given the recent horrificly high price of DRAM, the $1499 model looks like a really good deal.
The only problem I see is that you have to spend extra for your Airport, and it's not clear that to me that Linux will run on it, yet...
Most of you have probably heard about Python, Perl, Java, and the other languages Havoc Pennington mentioned in his answer to the potentially flame-inducing "what's the best language" question. Here's the URL to the Haskell Home Page that has lots more info on the language and down-loadable implementations of Haskell compilers and interpreters.
It might not be the language for everybody, of course...
A lot of people argue that capital gains taxes should not be taxed as well (especially when it comes to estates).
Looks like there's a typo here somewhere... But, anyway, I'd like to point out that the best capital gains tax break actually does occur when the owner of the assets dies: the inheritor gets a stepped-up basis. No, that doesn't mean you can't get burned by inheritance taxes, but it's still one heck of a break.
But, being the way it is, a person who invests in stocks for the long haul (buying and holding), is in a much better position than someone who is investing interest bearing securities (bonds, cd's REIT's, etc...).
And people have argued that this is just screwy, since it gives people a weird incentive to structure everything to look like a stock, or, more bluntly, to make every income stream look like a capital gain, because the tax rate is so much lower.
Investing in individual stocks is also a much better route than investing in mutual funds, which often have a capital gains tax every single year, not just when you realize a gain.
Hold it. That certainly doesn't apply to tax-deffered investment situations like your IRA, 401(k) or 403(b). Moreover, index funds generally don't give you the nasty capital gains problems that some other managed funds do (and perform quite nicely, too).
But there is a really good argument to be made for owning lots of individual stocks if you've got enough money to be well-diversified. In that case, you can generate your income stream by just selling winners and off-setting losers in the ideal proportion to reduce your taxes (to zero, if you like) and meet your investment objectives. Eventually, you will be rich, and you might even end up paying some inheritance taxes, but anything your heirs inherit will have that groovy stepped-up basis.
Dell releases their earnings every quarter, and growth is always astronomical. What happens to the stock? It tanks! Straight down the tubes. So business is great, we're earning money hand over fist, and what is the stock doing? Plummeting. Make sense to you?
You must be talking about a different "Dell" than the one I'm thinking of. Dell Computer (symbol: DELL) has been one of the best performing stocks of all time. If you don't believe me, take a look at this. Adjusting back in time for stock splits, the price has gone from $0.05 per share in January, 1990 to $48.81 per share at the end of August.
Gosh golly, I could use a stock that tanked like that, couldn't you?
Just to make sure, I checked Dell's performance over the last year; creams the S&P 500 over the last year, and over the last 3 months. If all you're talking about is some very short term "sell on the news" fluctuaions, well, fine. Feel free to try and make money off of that if you like.
The part I find weird is not the market reaction, since earnings were below forecast, but that anybody put any weight in the forecast itself...
Insert day-traders into this equation and you should not be suprised at all.
No, actually, I would have assumed that real day-traders would be the last peole to care about what the analyst forecasts were, since they've gone in and out of the stock five times during the earnings conference call.:-)
Seriously, I would assume day-traders would move on generalized news rather than specific earnings forecasts. Am I really wrong?
Operating at a loss, but then we all knew that would happen for a while.
Ahh, I love it how everybody's favorite example of how profitable open source can be, now becomes "we all knew that would happen for a while."
My memory was that the old saw was "you can make money off of free software." And I can guarantee you that there are (former) RHAT stockholders who have proved that this is true. Profits are a more interesting thing, in that there is sometimes a big incentive to postpone having any.
In this case, we're talking about a company that does a public offering in order to raise capital so that they can grow more quickly. They then report revenue growth of 95% on a year over year basis; yes, that does appear to be fairly healthy revenue growth. So where did that revenue go? A lot of it (over $1 million, I believe) went into R&D, that is, paying people to design and code stuff (hmm...guess those people are profiting from free software). Another chunk went for more marketing and advertising. If all goes well, the revenue stream will continue to grow, and grow faster than their costs, and then you'll see some serious profits, not the $100K they probably could have gotten this quarter if they went for the immediate bucks.
Of course, they might not make enough money to justify a $7.4 Billion market valuation, but they could potentially get $20 million in sales this year, which is incredible given that their product is, well, free.
Sometimes the stock market is hilarious. I mean...here you have a company that practically screams "WE'RE GOING TO OPERATE AT A LOSS FOR A WHILE"...and still...their earnings report comes out, announces a loss, and their stock price slips (not much...but it's slipped today).
Two possibilities come to mind. Even though Red Hat broadcast the fact they would be showing operating losses for a while, some of their investors might have been so optimistic that they really did expect either a completely trivial loss or even a surprise profit.
A second possibility is that some investors were actually taking analysts seriously when the consensus forcast came in for RHAT to lose $0.05 per share, when they actually lost $0.09 per share (Well, sort of...their IPO was this quarter, so the number of shares to use in earnings per share calculations is just an accounting fiction.)
The part I find weird is not the market reaction, since earnings were below forecast, but that anybody put any weight in the forecast itself...
The last quarterly earnings for MSFT I could fine states MS brought in revenues of $4,331,000,000 for the quarter ending March 31st. Versus $4,400,000 for RHAT.
Or put another way, it takes Microsoft a little over 131 minutes to bring in revenues equal to what RHAT brings in during a quarter!
Very true, and I wouldn't want to argue that Red Hat is worth $7.4 billion at the moment. On the other hand, Red Hat does have approximately 100% year-over-year revenue growth. They can't keep that up forever, to be sure, but six years of that would give them about $1 billion in annual sales, earnings of over $100 million or so, and a stock value within shouting distance of what they have today.
So, what's the value of those future earnings? Whatever the market says it is.:-)
Nor does it [the book Shadow Syndromes] support the conclusion that many single-minded geeks have an attenuated form of autism: autism is not a psychiatric or behavioural disorder but a neurological one, with manifest and concrete differences between the normal brain and the autistic one.
Well, I'm an eliminative materialist, so you'd have to go lots further than this to convince me that there's any meaningful distinction to be made between "psychiatric" or "behavioral" and "neurological".
Moreover, you seem to be equating "neurological" and "anatomical" at some level. Anatomy is certainly important, but so are (at least) the pharamacology and physiology of the system.
Which gets me to the point where you claim there are "manifest and concrete differences between the autistic brain and the normal one." That's probably true at some level, but the trick is that there is not yet general agreement on what those differences are exactly. In particular, most autistic brain MRI scans are read as "normal" in radiology clinics. You have to go to really careful 3-d volume studies to get consistent data. So, Courchesne's work is mentioned in the article: roughly, autistic children have smaller lobes VI and VII of the vermis of the cerebellum. That's nice, but more recent work by Courchesne has demonstrated that life is more complicated; a subset of the autistic children whose brains he scanned show reliably larger than normal lobes VI and VII as well. In other words, the autistic samples have a greater variance in size. That's not uninteresting, but it does make the correct interpretation of the data less obvious, especially since it was a statistical finding to begin with.
Consider also Occam's Razor, where the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one.
Uh, but that's not Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor as usually translated states:
Entities must not be multiplied beyond what is necessary.
Occam's Razor is a nice thing to trot out, but I think it would tough to argue that we have a sufficiently good idea about what the entities are at this point to wonder which theory has more of them (or even whether there are two theories that even fit the data).
Do you think that many geeks find social activity difficult because they are relatively inexperienced in it, or because they have a mild form of a rare neurological disorder?
That begs the question of why they are inexperienced with it, of course. And the difficulty with making the "autism is rare" argument here is that the whole discussion is about whether autism is a really rare neurological disorder that always has devestating consequences, or whether it is a far more common disorder that, in (statistically) extreme cases leads to the very bad outcomes we usually label as autism.
And this entire discussion begs the question of whether we should be talking about autism as anything other than a set of DSM-III diagnostic criteria. In the last 20 years or so, several biologically distinct causes of autistic behavior have been found, ranging from Fragile X syndrome to tubercular sclerosus. Naturally, the brain-imaging work of Courchesne and others tries to rule out some of the obvious confounds, but you should all keep in mind that autism is diagnosed based on tricky check-list criteria rather than specific genetic markers or gross anatomical abnormalities.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, 5 meg hard disks went out much sooner that 5.25" floppies; you're talking 1989 vs. 1994 or so there. And this meant something, because when OS/2 Warp came out, you had to install it from a PC that was set up to boot off of one of those new-fangled 1.44MB floppy drives. The whining that went up over that was intense, but lasted all of 3 months.
What people really want is not a floppy drive or a zip drive, but a CD-RW drive that also plays DVDs. And I believe such units are just about to be coming out, which means that in a year to 18 months, they will be cheap enough to be built into every consumer system, at which point the whole idea of a floppy seems very quaint:
Who will want an unreliable floppy disk that complicates the whole PC when they can have a "one slot" media experience that does everything from back-up to playing music and videos to, yes, replacing the standard uses of a floppy drive?
Now, this is not to say that Apple may have jumped the gun a bit on this trend, but do you really not think that next year's iMac 3 won't have the one combo drive, followed by all other PC makers in the next dozens of months?
Actually, I'm worried now:
TRANSMETA'S CRUSOE
is an anagram for:
NSA'S SOURCE MATTER
I'm pretty sure that this explains the impenetrable cloak of secrecy around the company and it's "products". And also why they have access to so much cash...
So you're saying that it's not the template idea itself, but the use of explicit caching to partially fill the template? Whee! If that's the case, you're probably right, although I'll bet that, in the bowels of many an Oracle database application, similar things have happened for a long time. And implicit caching is just the way you build a workable RDBMS.
The claim still sound pretty shaky, even if Phil and Alex don't count as prior art against this form of the claim.
I agree that they wouldn't necessarily represent enough of the content, but they certainly could do so, and almost certainly have done so many times in real life. But, here, the question could boil down to whether the webification of an old and boring idea can still be new in the eyes of the patent attorneys who will determine whether this actually gets challenged.
Another question, I suppose, is whether Media Lab work in the late 80s on electronic personalized newspapers could count as prior art, although here again, if merely using http as a means of transmission makes it new, then this wouldn't count either. Well, unless somebody else has already patented a similar idea making claims against a broader class of electronic media than has Yahoo. :-)
I have a cold today, so my virus-addled mind may be missing something here, but it would appear that this claim really amounts to a description of a data-base view on a transactions-oriented database that just happens to be executed over-the-web? Or does the claim hinge on the notion that the view was "user-generated" (also pretty weak, given current DB products)?
Presumably the idea of a database view cannot be patentable these days given a metric buttload of prior art, but is the "mere" webification of such an idea legally patentable, given the theory that it wasn't trivial to do since database-backed web sites didn't exist from day one?
If so, I note that this patent was filed on June 12, 1997, and I am therefore virtually certain it is invalid due to the specific prior art of Philip Greenspun's online version of the bookDatabase Backed Web Sites, which originally appeared on the web before it's 1997 publication, and was republished as Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in 1999. Chapter 10 ("Sites that are really programs") and Chapter 11 ("Sites that are really databases") being te most relevant pieces.
Really, I think Greenspun's prior art tells you exactly how to achieve the central claim of this patent, so I would be very interested to see somebody argue how the Yahoo claim holds any water at all, even in the "we webified it!" sense.
Upon further review of what you *did* say, and suddenly remembering on what topics I'd seen you posting here before, I have to say "oops". :-)
I got confused by the tone of your post and what I think might have been a stray word (read while cruising the thread at a 2+ ratings filter) and probably not having read what you were directly replying to.
So I guess you can really put me in the same category as only stupid people for more reasons than just buying index funds. :-)
More seriously, I'm not sure that most people truly appreciate how amazing it is that index funds "work", or how tough it is to construct a low-maintenance portfolio that has that kind of return and those tax advantages at almost any level of risk. I know people who pay serious money for crappy performance and tax headaches, year after year.
I think everybody not in the Raving Loony Party aggrees with this. :-)
That much is obvious, but isn't it also obvious why this course of action would affect the price of each share, and specifically the shares that were owned before the dilution? I mean, assuming that people were assigning a value to these shares in terms of the value of future dividends or earnings in some way.
Again, it's clear that, as you say, there is no "debt" here (assuming that Microsoft the firm is legally organized in such a way that it can just print up new shares for this purpose).
But I think the root of the problem is this: Microsoft is not obligated to buy back these shares, only to sell shares to employees for the option's exercise price. And this creates a dilemna:
Now, the only problem is where and how to communicate to the stockholders what effect the exercise of stock options will have on the per-share earnings of the stock holders. This is what the accounting standards people are fighting about right now.
I don't think that's right; everybody knows that an option to buy at $12 won't be exercised if the price is only $10, so the options would show up either as a Zero or a liability. And I think there have to be far more sensible ways to estimate the likely value of the option, or at least its possible effect on shareholders. One way would be to use the company's historical data: how much was an option of $X over the market price really worth in the past? Another way would be to use "normative" data over a market sector: in the software services sector, what is the current value of an option of $X over the market price? The problems with those methods, however, are clear: the past history might not be relevant, or there may be no history at all.
Would there be any potential to use the system developed to put a concrete pricetag on a bank's possible future loan losses (loan loss provisions) as a model for this kind of accounting?
There just has to be a better way than this.
I think this might be what some people have accused them of doing, but, so far, the evidence is hardly overwhelming. I certainly didn't see any direct evidence cited in the Parish report. If you want to find holes to poke in the idea that Microsoft is the best company to invest in at the moment, you can find them without assuming that the company is engaging in some nutty fraudulent activity that would lead to financial armageddon when it becomes unraveled.
That said, it is clear that if MSFT ever did suffer from an earnings growth hiccup, the consequences could be pretty severe in the current investment environment.
Well, I agree that people who don't understand the basics of investing get what they deserve to some extent; it certainly would be implausible that they understand the risks involved, for example.
But the idea that index funds are only suited for idiots is just, um, stupid. If you wanted to buy stocks and I told you that I had a mutual fund that out-performs more than 2/3 of all funds on a year-to-year basis and outperforms almost every mutual fund in the long-term, you would probably be interested. If I told you that, in addition, you wouldn't end up paying cap gains taxes when all you did was buy and hold the fund, you should be even more interested.
And this magic fund is, of course, the cheapest index fund in the sector of your choice, or just the S&P500 index if you really don't want to be burdened with the choice. And, for heaven's sake, the idea that index funds, just because they don't require lots of effort or knowledge, are somehow only for stupid people is just silly.
It's not that you couldn't do better picking your own stocks, but you would be accepting more risk in doing so, and that's not always appropriate, no matter how smart or stupid you are.
Not to give a Raving Loony more than his due (I'm talking about Parrish, not this poster), but Parrish also seemed to be suggesting a second kind of earnings problem as well. That story goes like this:
Microsoft has employees, and those employees are compensated by some combination of boring benefits, wages/salary, and those nifty stock options. Now, the possibility of income from exercising those stock options looks as good as money in the bank, because the stock is always going up, so the options are never worthless. This is a very nice situation for Microsoft, since it means that the salary and other benefits they pay don't have to be as high as those of other companies that can't essentially pay people with stock options that are as good as gold. So Microsoft has a smaller expense for wages and such, which makes their earnings larger.
The problem for Parrish is that there is nothing wrong with this, taken by itself. Indeed, you could argue that if Microsoft didn't take advantage of opportunities like this, that they would be wronging their shareholders.
Now, what would be a concern is if Microsoft was so dependent on this tactic that they felt the need to do any of the followint things:
Regardless of whether or not any of these things are illegal or unethical, it's reasonable to question whether this is the kind of financial footwork you'd like to see supporting the stock price of a $500 billion company.
Very interesting. I had no idea. But it made me look and notice another interesting thing about Microsoft earnings: they've had positive earnings surprises for (at least) five consecutive quarters. One way to achieve this would be to forever be finding yet another way to generate more cash flow. Another way would be to play with your unearned revenue numbers.
I'd be stunned if Microsoft's sales were falling, but I'd be less surprised if their sales (and earnings) growth began to slow down after the next big product cycle. And that's pretty critical when your stock is:
I mean, shoot, if Microsoft ever began trading at even a merely absurd P/E, then that could whack the stock price in half.
Tell me about it. Everything is way better now than it was back then. Even the fairly tame stuff is pretty cool. And it's not jsut computers and electronic stuff. I mean, don't you wish you'd had access to Stomp Rockets? And on and on...
Gosh, I guess I never thought I needed a book to teach me anything about sex. I mean if there's anything that is self-documenting, sex has got to be it. :-)
Another poster has noted that most of the revenue (and revenue growth) will come from making deliveries of (and Santa taking new orders for) the new iMacs and iBooks. And I wouldn't be shocked if Apple's price from Motorola on the G3s wasn't made, shall we say, more attractive in light of the G4 debacle.
Well, that depends a lot on how Apple structures their DRAM supplier contracts in the upcoming months. DRAM prices certainly went up, but when I checked today, the "benchmark" PC100 64 MB SIMM was down to $112 at thechipmerchant.com, where it had been well over $160 in the very recent past.
Meanwhile, prices on hard disks are still going down just as fast as always.
King Babar
What you say is true, but raising the price on an existing computer line basically breaks the first law of selling computers: You can never raise the price of an existing computer system and expect to retain market share.
Once upon a time, actually about 10 years ago, I believe, Apple Computer pulled what was essentially the same stunt: raising prices on the current models because of a DRAM crisis in order to protect their gross margins. What ended up happening was the beginning of the long, painful slide in market share that nearly killed the company.
In this case, the price rise is much smaller, and confined (for now) to a single model line, so I don't forecast the death of the firm. But Apple's recent turn around has had much more to do with getting stunningly good press and providing products that people were happy to buy, because they did not think they were being screwed. Stuff like this does not help.
King Babar
You have got to be kidding. The real truth about the former Soviet Union was that it was an economic disaster. There was no real question about this before World War II; the surprise result of the war against fascism was that such a strong defense could be mounted despite such obvious economic weakness. And being on the winning side of that ward led not to the underestimation of the Soviet economy, but the consistent and enormous overestimation of that economy by the most world powers, most notably the CIA.
There is no dispute that the Soviet Union was a world military power, but that pre-eminence was attainable because while central planning was very poor at creating wealth, the apparatus was very good at sustaining patriotic fervor and directing what resources there were into military hardware.
Indeed, the ironic thing about the use of the former USSR in this discussion is that the whole regime crumbled when faced with the challenge of a truly piddling amount of free market capitalism. The fact that Russia is currently an economic moonscape is not primarily because the old system was dismantled (it just got new owners) but because it produced virtually nothing that had value in a free market economy, and turning that around will take a lot more time and effort than most Western governments would have expected.
King Babar
You also get a free cable to hook your digital video camera into your iMac. Actually, given the recent huge rise in the price of DRAM, the $1499 model looks like a really good deal.
The only problem I see is that you have to spend extra for your Airport, and it's not clear that to me that Linux will run on it, yet...
King Babar
You also get a free cable to hook your digital video camera into your iMac. Actually, given the recent horrificly high price of DRAM, the $1499 model looks like a really good deal.
The only problem I see is that you have to spend extra for your Airport, and it's not clear that to me that Linux will run on it, yet...
Most of you have probably heard about Python, Perl, Java, and the other languages Havoc Pennington mentioned in his answer to the potentially flame-inducing "what's the best language" question. Here's the URL to the Haskell Home Page that has lots more info on the language and down-loadable implementations of Haskell compilers and interpreters.
It might not be the language for everybody, of course...
King Babar
Looks like there's a typo here somewhere... But, anyway, I'd like to point out that the best capital gains tax break actually does occur when the owner of the assets dies: the inheritor gets a stepped-up basis. No, that doesn't mean you can't get burned by inheritance taxes, but it's still one heck of a break.
And people have argued that this is just screwy, since it gives people a weird incentive to structure everything to look like a stock, or, more bluntly, to make every income stream look like a capital gain, because the tax rate is so much lower.
Hold it. That certainly doesn't apply to tax-deffered investment situations like your IRA, 401(k) or 403(b). Moreover, index funds generally don't give you the nasty capital gains problems that some other managed funds do (and perform quite nicely, too).
But there is a really good argument to be made for owning lots of individual stocks if you've got enough money to be well-diversified. In that case, you can generate your income stream by just selling winners and off-setting losers in the ideal proportion to reduce your taxes (to zero, if you like) and meet your investment objectives. Eventually, you will be rich, and you might even end up paying some inheritance taxes, but anything your heirs inherit will have that groovy stepped-up basis.
King Babar
You must be talking about a different "Dell" than the one I'm thinking of. Dell Computer (symbol: DELL) has been one of the best performing stocks of all time. If you don't believe me, take a look at this. Adjusting back in time for stock splits, the price has gone from $0.05 per share in January, 1990 to $48.81 per share at the end of August.
Gosh golly, I could use a stock that tanked like that, couldn't you?
Just to make sure, I checked Dell's performance over the last year; creams the S&P 500 over the last year, and over the last 3 months. If all you're talking about is some very short term "sell on the news" fluctuaions, well, fine. Feel free to try and make money off of that if you like.
King Babar
No, actually, I would have assumed that real day-traders would be the last peole to care about what the analyst forecasts were, since they've gone in and out of the stock five times during the earnings conference call. :-)
Seriously, I would assume day-traders would move on generalized news rather than specific earnings forecasts. Am I really wrong?
King Babar
My memory was that the old saw was "you can make money off of free software." And I can guarantee you that there are (former) RHAT stockholders who have proved that this is true. Profits are a more interesting thing, in that there is sometimes a big incentive to postpone having any.
In this case, we're talking about a company that does a public offering in order to raise capital so that they can grow more quickly. They then report revenue growth of 95% on a year over year basis; yes, that does appear to be fairly healthy revenue growth. So where did that revenue go? A lot of it (over $1 million, I believe) went into R&D, that is, paying people to design and code stuff (hmm...guess those people are profiting from free software). Another chunk went for more marketing and advertising. If all goes well, the revenue stream will continue to grow, and grow faster than their costs, and then you'll see some serious profits, not the $100K they probably could have gotten this quarter if they went for the immediate bucks.
Of course, they might not make enough money to justify a $7.4 Billion market valuation, but they could potentially get $20 million in sales this year, which is incredible given that their product is, well, free.
King Babar
Two possibilities come to mind. Even though Red Hat broadcast the fact they would be showing operating losses for a while, some of their investors might have been so optimistic that they really did expect either a completely trivial loss or even a surprise profit.
A second possibility is that some investors were actually taking analysts seriously when the consensus forcast came in for RHAT to lose $0.05 per share, when they actually lost $0.09 per share (Well, sort of...their IPO was this quarter, so the number of shares to use in earnings per share calculations is just an accounting fiction.)
The part I find weird is not the market reaction, since earnings were below forecast, but that anybody put any weight in the forecast itself...
King Babar
Very true, and I wouldn't want to argue that Red Hat is worth $7.4 billion at the moment. On the other hand, Red Hat does have approximately 100% year-over-year revenue growth. They can't keep that up forever, to be sure, but six years of that would give them about $1 billion in annual sales, earnings of over $100 million or so, and a stock value within shouting distance of what they have today.
So, what's the value of those future earnings? Whatever the market says it is. :-)
King Babar
Well, I'm an eliminative materialist, so you'd have to go lots further than this to convince me that there's any meaningful distinction to be made between "psychiatric" or "behavioral" and "neurological".
Moreover, you seem to be equating "neurological" and "anatomical" at some level. Anatomy is certainly important, but so are (at least) the pharamacology and physiology of the system.
Which gets me to the point where you claim there are "manifest and concrete differences between the autistic brain and the normal one." That's probably true at some level, but the trick is that there is not yet general agreement on what those differences are exactly. In particular, most autistic brain MRI scans are read as "normal" in radiology clinics. You have to go to really careful 3-d volume studies to get consistent data. So, Courchesne's work is mentioned in the article: roughly, autistic children have smaller lobes VI and VII of the vermis of the cerebellum. That's nice, but more recent work by Courchesne has demonstrated that life is more complicated; a subset of the autistic children whose brains he scanned show reliably larger than normal lobes VI and VII as well. In other words, the autistic samples have a greater variance in size. That's not uninteresting, but it does make the correct interpretation of the data less obvious, especially since it was a statistical finding to begin with.
Uh, but that's not Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor as usually translated states:
Occam's Razor is a nice thing to trot out, but I think it would tough to argue that we have a sufficiently good idea about what the entities are at this point to wonder which theory has more of them (or even whether there are two theories that even fit the data).That begs the question of why they are inexperienced with it, of course. And the difficulty with making the "autism is rare" argument here is that the whole discussion is about whether autism is a really rare neurological disorder that always has devestating consequences, or whether it is a far more common disorder that, in (statistically) extreme cases leads to the very bad outcomes we usually label as autism.
And this entire discussion begs the question of whether we should be talking about autism as anything other than a set of DSM-III diagnostic criteria. In the last 20 years or so, several biologically distinct causes of autistic behavior have been found, ranging from Fragile X syndrome to tubercular sclerosus. Naturally, the brain-imaging work of Courchesne and others tries to rule out some of the obvious confounds, but you should all keep in mind that autism is diagnosed based on tricky check-list criteria rather than specific genetic markers or gross anatomical abnormalities.
King Babar