Depends where you are. If you're in india the 'auditor' determines how much your fine is based on how much you bribe him. In cash. Italy is notoriously similar, but not quite as bad. Small businesses are trying to dodge tax everywhere. But yes, big companies generally in civilized countries have to honestly report their business. Too many people need to know honest numbers for them to be able to lie about it. Investors, CEO's, CFO's, the government, unions etc. You can't have an on books revenue of 100 million dollars and have inexplicable outlays of 150 million dollars but no borrowing without raising some eyebrows.
Though as I say, small businesses everywhere are always trying to dodge tax. Ever paid a small business in cash? Especially a services business (repair guys for example), tipped a waiter in cash, paid a restaurant in cash? They're all trying to dodge tax on that, regularly. It's technically evasion and illegal. With big companies they simply pay the government for rules that let them expense things or offshore the money or the like.
How does it increase compliance? Unless you force everything to electronic transaction (and watch the privacy advocates on/. have a fit about that). It doesn't increase compliance, it eases it, those are two different things. I'm not an american, but I believe for out purposes I face a similar problem. My income is derived from 3 sources, work, scholarships, and research grants. My work income is obvious enough. Scholarships aren't taxable, again, obvious enough, but they do count towards total family income for certain low income benefits, and different benefits may or may not count them. Research grants are taxable, after expenses, and what is a valid expense can involve dozens of pages of paperwork.
If they were all just 'income' that would significantly ease my compliance costs, because I don't have to spend 8 or 9 hours every year reading through this years rules and sorting out all of the various ways those rules apply.
But that doesn't mean it increases compliance. In fact, with higher point of sales taxes it's in my interest to not declare purchases or sales of services to the government, since that could cut down costs for my customers and myself by 20% (if I was in the EU for example), and it would give me a competitive advantage over a big company that can't do that. Which is exactly what happens in Italy and Greece, and is presumably now happening in spain. Those huge masses of 'unemployed' people in spain and greece aren't just sitting around posting on/. all day. They're working under the table so to speak, and of course, unreliably. Cash transactions facilitate this because they aren't traceable.
Fundamentally the US, Canadian and a few other systems assume tax payers are trying to be honest. That's as flawed an assumption for the "Fair Tax" as it is for the existing income tax structures. Some countries happen to be more honest, or coerced into compliance through the use of credit cards and mobile phone payments etc. (e.g. Japan and Sweden) and some are quite happy to do business in cash under the table, for everything (Italy, Greece, India, Bangladesh). Making it easier for people to comply doesn't mean they will, and the more 'in your face' the tax is, the more likely people are to try and dodge it.
We may be at the point where those different architectures aren't worth enough to care about either, at least for most consumer facing devices. Whether my speakers use 59 cents in one architecture cpu or 65 cents in another doesn't matter, my cable set top box might use 15 or 20 dollars in a CPU but they'll all do the job and it's not like I'm buying hundreds of these personally.
For places where ISA's can really matter, high performance servers for example, I don't see these as mattering much as we'd expect, MIPS alpha and power are all basically dead, ARM is competitive with x86 if the new intel android phone in india can be believed, and the UPU which is the presumptive choice will have to be competitive, or they'll have to allow exemptions or other special rules so that a block of ARM cpus can be controlled by a UPU approved CPU.
This sounds a lot less about spying and a lot more about protectionism and what the north koreans call Juche. Self reliance. The chinese are happy to sell us stuff, but don't ever want to have to buy anything that isn't dug directly out of the ground in return. The xbox 3 and PS4 will be x86, those will be banned, PC's, Mac or Windows, those will be banned or have to port to UPU. I suppose that makes ARM a viable choice since there will be a windows ARM option soon enough, but that might be a good argument against ARM too (from chinas perspective). Chosing UPU would effectively lock every major software and hardware vendor out of the chinese market.
actually there are a lot of problems with those. Notice that you can't ever convert xbox points back to cash? Same with frequent flier miles? If you could, they would be considered taxable income. As it is you're buying microsoft 'points' which *legalese translated* have no real value, and MS is free to hand out a million of them at their discretion, take them away from you at their discretion etc. Frequent flier miles is the same deal, they can be taken away, disappear over time etc. If it was convertible *back* into currency then you'd be into trouble.
In ontario canada where I live we've gone so far as to change gift cards because they are effectively a form of currency that could 'expire' so they've had to add in layers of regulation around them. I'm not 100% sure what the rules are, and i'm too lazy to look it up, because it probably doesn't in detail matter.
Acknowledging something exists isn't the same as liking it. Taking it as a nod from the treasury that they're happy about is absurdly naive. Even getting them into FinCen registration could nailing its own coffin because now that means the government is going to ask just what is moving where, and that puts them in the unenviable position of filing paperwork the government may not want to read. The government has agreed the entity exists and is going to try and file the appropriate paperwork and follow the appropriate rules. The moment you start having to do that there becomes a lot less value to doing business in bitcoins. What good does it do you to run a business in bitcoins that you then have to convert into US dollars for tax purposes every year? That by the way, is a very real very messy accounting problem for foreigners who have to file US taxes, because currency fluctuation means your assets are now worth relatively different things all the damn time. As per the disclaimer on the MSB site "The inclusion of a business on the MSB Registration Web site is not a recommendation, certification of legitimacy, or endorsement of the business by any government agency.". http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstateselector.html
Why? It's a p2p network. Poison the network, or get a node on the network and go after anyone they fin.
Treat all undisclosed bitcoin income as terrorist funding. It has value because people can accept it, if no sane business will touch the stuff it's worth nothing so no one will bother with it.
It's because they are intellectually living in the fantasy land of austrian economics. They are 'mining' all the 'gold/bitcoins' possible (apparently 21 million bitcoins) and that will be the whole currency supply.
Mining as a term does kinda make sense. If money was still on a gold standard then all the money in the world is both the extracted gold in circulation and the gold under the ground waiting to be dug up. In the case of bitcoins there is a limit on the number of mathematical problems that they can solve which caps supply at 21 million. Whether you mine gold, or 'mine' bitcoins the effect on their respective dependent currency supply is the same.
Though I suppose they can always add new problems to solve to expand the supply, they are stuck on the theory that a fixed currency supply with fractional reserve banking will somehow not be an unmitigated disaster. With gold you run into the problem of previously uncounted supplies of going being added in.
A 560 and 660 will probably both eat around 150 watts, though the 680's use less power than the 580's. The x80 series use roughly the same form factor and power draw from the 8800 up to the 580 and then a bit less (but not a lot) for the 680.
Much of GPU design is what you can cram into a given power envelope (between 6 and 8 pin connectors on the side and what you can draw from the mobo). CPU design has been the same way for quite a while with power points of 45 75, 95, 140 W TDP for intel parts. There are lower power parts too, and the new ivy bridges like the GTX 680 seem to be lower power than the previous generation.
But yes, you're going to hit diminishing returns on being able to mine bitcoins with a GPU as they run out of problems to solve, so you get less and less bitcoins per watt, even on a faster GPU.
One of the things it enables is fast global transactions. I created a site to sell digital downloads for Bitcoin called CoinDL: https://www.coindl.com/ and the processing time is averaging under 10 seconds which is pretty impressive considering there's no company, government or other centralized organization involved in the transfer.
Um... other way around. You'd expect anything going through a company or government to take time as they have legal requirements for verification and recording which they really really really can't fuck up.
When governments decide bitcoin is a giant scheme to dodge tax (note: I'm not saying it is, but governments will come to that conclusion eventually) it's going to get the beat down from all sorts of organizations. The whole premise 'idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities' (as per your linked wiki) directly contravenes the charters of those 'central authorities' - as the sole provider of national currencies and sole arbiters of the creation of money.
It's an amusing theoretical project, but eventually bitcoins are either going to need to be adopted as someones currency or they're going to get run into the ground, or both. And any followup project will not survive nearly as long once the precedent is set with bitcoins. That doesn't mean some of the underlying technology won't transfer into real money trading, but when the government decides your bitcoin business is a scheme to dodge tax, and decides to tax you in british pounds or USD or Euro and you can't produce a trail of transactions which can be converted into one of those currencies you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble without any easy way out.
Also, a decentralized currency without a central authority controlling the money supply is a stupid idea. Bitcoin supply is regulated by a rate at which mathematical problems can be solved, and then a fixed exchange between problem solved and bitcoin gained. Which has absolutely no relationship to a useful supply rate for money. One can (as economists do) argue over which of the various competing theories for money supply a given central bank or currency authority should be using at any given time, but none of those sane options are remotely similar to what bitcoin is.
That doesn't make it evil, that makes it a commercial enterprise. You telling your buddy the key to diabetes is drinking 3 cans of coke a day is different than you charging for advice that says the same, or generating revenue from ad sales on your website than promotes the same.
In one case, your friend is being an idiot for listening to you. In the other you are fraudulently presenting the information commercially. Advice of various sorts (legal, medical, apparently nutritional in north caronlina) requires you be licenced so that people are protected from businesses selling snake oil to cure diabetes.
IANAL, so consider this in the advice to a buddy category. But if you have a business where you practice medicine, law, or nutrition in north carolina expect them to come after you eventually.
depends a lot on the status of the employee. A high turnover at the 3 month point just means you're trying to only retain the best. A high turnover at the 13 year points means you're trying to dodge paying senior employees senior rates.
A senior developer is one step down from a lead, or director, which are both technical and managerial positions. I don't see the distinction as black and white. Much above that and you're into the pure mindless suit types. But you don't usually want to keep 40 year olds as bottom level programmers. Senior programmer, programming lead, technical director sure. I know a lot of us in our mid 30's who are lead programmer, or technical director, lead software engineer/designer etc.
Sure, the 23 year old couldn't do a project that you could in 1/4 the alloted time. As a senior it's your job to help them get it done on time, and do it if they can't. That's where you're learning what the people on your team can or can't do, and how to find out what skills they do or do not have, and making sure they get prepared. Trying to find your own style and balance between micro managing people and macro managing is part of being a lead, as is finding what does or doesn't work for that individual being managed.
I'm not suggesting people skills don't matter. But they are the same regardless of what background you come from, and are something you learn, or don't independent of what your schooling was in.
An MBA who knows nothing about what is accomplish-able is no help to a project, and sort of by definition that's a very difficult problem for them to ever master because they come in late, and arent' prepared for it. A developer coming 'up the ranks' so to speak should know what can be done with current tools practices and tech.
That in no way suggests all developers are ever going to be good managers, far from it. But good technical management doesn't come out of business schools. Much as our business school would like you to think differently.
Which makes sense. You don't have the energy or focus to program in large stints as you get older, and finding people who can judge whether a project is doable, and by how many people requires people who've been there, done that, and are reasonably familiar with how these things work. It doesn't do anyone any favours to have clueless people setting projects and project goals. Somewhat unlike traditional engineering where there are years of history and minor improvements, in a rapidly changing field you need to rapidly change your management teams and their knowledge.
And that knowledge is never going to come from an MBA, because it will be at least 4 years out of date by the time the person starts working. Programmers are at least only a year or two removed from doing the work themselves.
It's probably a bit of both. Once they have to make (more) money they have to start doing things which make money beyond just showing some sketchy adds on the side of the page. That runs the risk of headbutting into patents that people do, or did use to make money (think amazons 1 click), and suddenly you're at risk for very expensive legal fights. The one click thing is a good example, because even though the patent is up in the air, and under discussion several places, if it is granted (in the EU for example), or if some part if it is upheld that you're infringing on you could be in deep shit fast. Facebook needs a defensive portfolio.
That's more android, they started by basically cloning the iphone but then went with more diverse handsets and more open store. So they're both trying to re-envision windows 3.1 in the phone space. And they sort of orbit around each other with some new features, and some unique features but mostly just copying each other
Microsoft is trying a completely different tactic with a completely different style (live tiles aren't really like anything else, except maybe media centre editions of windows), and they're aiming to unify with the desktop (windows phone 8), which sounds like it could be a good idea, but it might be an unmitigated disaster with ARM-Intel compatibility issues trashing the whole thing. WP7.5 is, you're right, lagging behind somewhat on some features compared to droids and iphones, but I suspect some of that is intentionally not bothering with features that will be in WP8. I'm not suggesting that's a good plan, it just seems like what they're doing.
The one thing MS should be copying from Apple is the software update model. Fuck the carriers it's available and we don't care what they have to say about it. Unfortunately they didn't do that. The 99 dollar a year developer licence to unlock your phone (or be a developer) sort of makes sense, but it charges you money for what android gives away for free. Seems kinda dumb on MS's part.
I'm not sure MS cares about the 200 dollar price point, nor particularly does android. 500 dollars, 600, maybe. For 600 bucks an ipad replacement that runs windows or ubuntu or, and does whatever the hell I want is preferable to a 500 dollar ipad that doesn't, bonus if it's x86 so it just works with every other windows app in the world.
They may simple not envision windows ARM as an enterprise product either. A windows 8 slate with an AM64/x86 CPU *should* be able to have comparable if not longer battery life compared to the arm counterparts, better compatibility, but probably a higher price. For an extra 100 bucks I could see the enterprise guys quite happy to keep it as 'regular' windows. Hell, for an extra 100 bucks I'd probably pay that as a home user device.
The problem MS is making is assuming that the home market and the enterprise can stay separate. They can't. Your desktop should be your server, domain controller, manage your 'group' policy (for one device per user and 1-4 users I'm not sure the term group really applies but it's the same basic usage scenario). Someone who goes out an buys a windows RT slate and then can't take advantage of the things that make windows windows is going to be a very angry customer. Enterprise buyers usually won't have that problem because they will have someone who knows something about the tech decide what to buy hopefully.
Put another way, I suspect Windows RT is going to be a consumer clusterfuck, but not because MS has 'ran out of time' on it, but because they don't understand how users will want to use it. If people want an ipad, let them buy an ipad. Windows slates need to be a different product than an ipad, but having a windows 8 RT shitty ipad clone that's basically a big phoneless phone, and a windows 8 x86 desktop without a keyboard sharing name and shelf space doesn't seem like a great plan.
Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now?
Good, less paper to take up space. You can also advertise this as "saving the trees". A digital manual does not take up much space, it usually fits on the same disc as the game - great. If only hardware manufacturers did that... though I think they do, other than a quick setup guide (which you may need to read before the computer is operational enough to read a pdf) the rest of the manual is on the driver disc. TV/audio equipment still comes with full manuals - instead the manuals should be on a CD, so they take up less space and can be found more easily (I would copy all of them to one CD or just keep on a hard drive - that way I could find the manual quickly and not need to keep it near the device).
I haven't seen game in boxes locally too, just the disc in a DVD case, pretty much like movies. I have no problem with that - less paper to take up space or throw out.
Yes, and it's not like people read manuals anyway. Though you're wrong on the advertising. No one, not customers, not distributors care, in the slightest. But the removal of manuals was precipitated by costs (having to print and ship manual costs a lot of money for what is today no value). But collectors editions still have manuals or art books or the like because those customers want them.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all.
I bought used monitors, tape decks, servers, UPSs and other equipment because of the price (and some devices are not made anymore). The manufacturers are for the most part still in business. If your games is so short that it can be finished quickly and has no replay value or is just bad, then of course people will want to sell it. I can return broken equipment (or even if it works as intended, but for some reason I do not like it, as long as I decide than in 14 days) for a full refund. Can I return a game? Oh, right, I can't. If your game is good then people will play it instead of reselling it immediately.
Maybe this is why used games are so popular - no returns. When I buy a used device, I cannot return it, even the warranty given is a few days, useful only if the device stops working when I bring it home. When I buy a new device, I get 1-5 year warranty and the ability to return it for any reason in 14 days. Games are sold without warranty (and without even the promise that it will work, even if the game disc was blank, I couldn't do anything) and no way to return them (and most games are bad), so the "new" has no advantage over "used". Of course, I could pirate the game, see if it is any good then buy it, but by pirating it I make the developer lose at least a billion dollars, so me buying the game afterward will still result in almost $1G loss.
I buy games on steam for up to 10EUR. Anything more expensive and I just wait for the price to drop or a Christmas sale or whatever. If the game is bad, well, I lost 10EUR, a bit much, but survivable. OTOH, if I want to buy some device that is more expensive, I study it really carefully - read reviews, get the user manual to find out if it has all the features I assume it does (I once bought a VCR that cannot output the tape trough the RF port, while it wasn't a deal breaker, it is an annoyance) and sometimes may even download the service manual to see if something is as I assume it to be (and nothing is written in the user manual) - older devices are easier, since the schematic is easier to trace to find out. This may take me a few days to choose between various options or to see if a particular device is useful to me.
Yes, exactly, but when you buy for 10 euro 7 euro goes to the publisher, which means 3.5 goes to me. (hence my 3.5 dollar example....). When gamestop resells, I get nothing. When they resell 10x over I get nothing x10. I migh
You can either dump the sales for 2 or 3 dollars for dvd's and get your materials cost back, or ship them to china and re purpose the jewel cases. Seriously. We can do this in markets where you use standard jewel cases (notably the middle east) as game developers, but they are small enough its not worth the bother. Console games can though because Xbox/PS3 use standard cases now, so you can have 500k units to re purpose for a few cents a case (which is less than their production cost).
The box for a game runs us about 3 dollars with another dollar or 2 for distribution, depending on from where to where (european publisher to north american for example will be up in the 2 dollar range). Gamestop won't touch your game if they aren't getting 7 or 8 dollars a copy, and much below that your inventory vs units sold becomes cost prohibitive if you're only moving 50k copies to 15-20k retail outlets. At least from a developer perspective, the publisher remember is taking some (something like a 50/50 split). Take a 30 dollar game, write of 10 bucks for getting it into a retail location and it you have to move a lot of wasted copies into the retail chain that you can't really afford to make.
Other than for steam sales, Origin sales, Gamersgate, and GoG sales where they see massive spikes in unit turnover. They're willing to let that happen (and, admittedly, with Steam they just sort of do it, and if that means you now get 59 cents per copy of your game sold rather than 3.50 well tough shit for you, and if steam didn't you they were doing this sale, so they ran out of keys and delisted your game, well, tough shit for you, even if you get them new keys in two hours they may not relist your game for weeks, tough shit for you). Publishers are quite agreeable to significant reductions in sales prices generally, as long as they know they can actually sell at that price.
Retail is a whole other problem because you really can't do retail for much less than 30 bucks a copy, you're losing to much to fixed costs and distribution at anything less than that. Unlike movies where publishers are happy to print a million discs for something that will barely sell 50k units, and if it doesn't sell they can repurpose the jewel cases (the expensive part) for another title with a game the box and manual are game specific and you can't afford to eat 40k in inventory that doesn't sell let alone a million units in inventory. Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now? That'd be why.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all. Unfortunately this starts 1 day after release, whereas we wouldn't mind so much if this happened day 21 or preferably day 90. Whether or not people would pay 30 bucks for your game when one was available used for 25, versus 60/55 is hard to say, but it used to be that gamestop was *the* place to have your game, have launch agreements etc. Now it's downright toxic, and you only do business with them because they're still about 25% of gaming retail. If you could could make money without ever giving them a box and only selling through a digital distribution service you will, because gamestop isn't in this to make games, they're in this to fuck you and take your money. Customer or supplier. EA has gone so far as to build their own store because they figure (probably correctly) that in the long run they'll be better off without gamestop, who were ~25 of their total business, and without losing 30% to steam and just distribute through their own store, than to have to deal with both of those hassles.
The PSN and XBL are slightly different animals, because you may have to pay them to push out patches or the like. That makes part of the pricing a matter of guessing just how much money this will cost you if you need to patch it vs how many copies will sell, and for example the Wii U won't give you a cut of sales until you hit 6k copies (which can be tough for an indie dev).
The first major iteration on how to deal with this has been DLC. Which ranges from 5 dollar horse armour to full blown expansions that you download for cash. With DLC the publisher and developer definitely get something, so it can that the only money you make on your game is from a 10 dollar DLC, and the 40-50 dollar release basically just puts the DLC store in the hands of players. Which is a sad way to think about your lovingly crafted game. The next step has been full on online distribution channels (steam, origin, gamersgate, GoG, direct2drive, impulse - now owned by gamestop etc.).
And yes, both the mentioned steam scenario and the thousands of copies in a warehouse happened to companies I worked with recently. Well the thousands of retail copies not that recently, that was 4 or so years ago. Printing all of those copies what a significant chunk of the total development budget (~15%), and they ended up in a warehouse, where, as far as I know they still are.
Publishers aren't stupid. Well, ok, they are. But not entirely as stupid as we portray them to be. They aren't going to commit to lowering prices when they don't know what the licencing fees will be (which by the way, m
Not necessarily revenue, but *potential* revenue, talent, or IP, and a customer base that wasn't already part of facebook.
He may also be seeing something that with the right investment will be worth hundreds of millions in revenue.
On talent: Deals like this usually stipulate that the leadership of the company being bought (in this case I'd guess that's most of the 13 employees) have to stick around for while or they lose shares or the like. He might be figuring they have a vision that can translate into users, or facetime on facebook, which would translate into revenue. He's also valued at probably 20 billion dollars so figuring someone else should be worth a hundred million wouldn't seem out of place.
IP. IP seems unlikely, but Instagram may own, or be able to acquire intellectual property rights on what they're doing, and that could put facebook in a bad position if it's dealing with them by duplicating their service.
Instagram customers may not be facebook customers. When you have 800 million users it's pretty hard to see where you're going to get many more from. There are only 7 billion people on the planet, half are too old or too young to be on facebook, another large blob are too poor, or illiterate or both to have internet access and facebook. Leaving, on a good day, ~2 billion potential facebook users. And some of them really don't like facebook (including half the/. crowd) so they won't be customers no matter what. He may be figuring that for a billion dollars he can increase his 'user' base from 800 - 850 or 900 million, which would increase facebooks value by 5-10 billion dollars.
In terms of future revenue he may be seeing something the rest of us aren't thinking about too much. Ads are probably worth more the more time you're on a page. Instagram may attract more facetime for existing users, as in they'll be online longer, and therefore can get more ads spewed at them, additionally getting them in the facebook team early would be preferable to having to buy them out later when they may be worth 2 billion dollars. He may know what we don't, which is how much an extra minute of time on facebook is worth, and how many minutes people are spending on instagram
Facebook is probably also paying largely with facebook stock. That means the valuation is a paper one, not a real one. You work for facebook, you get facebook stock, and if facebook tanks they aren't on the hook for anything particularly cash wise.
And he might just figure with the right investment there's could be a product worth selling.
Of course he could be completely wrong on any or all of those counts. But this is a good time for potential future shareholders to see just how much power "Zuck" really has at facebook, and whether or not they want to be involved with that.
We got a lot of those kids into university. And they didn't really know how to use word. Sure they could open it and start typing, but that couldn't format a document to change their lives. They certainly can now though.
Being able to 'use' any of the office products isn't just open them start typing win, it's being able to actually do something useful with the document. Templates, style guides, being able to produce documents for different purposes, backing up data. Even basic stuff like changing fonts or adding superscripts and subscripts, I don't have to help first year university students with that anymore. I certainly did 4 or 5 years ago though.
What people learned before was behaviours. Actions that resulted in what they wanted, with no idea what those actions were actually doing, or why, just 'click these buttons in this order and you'll get it to do this thing you wanted'. They didn't actually understand, they just wrote memorized a series of steps. They couldn't come up with steps on their own to save their lives. That applies to far more than just highschool kids, but to most users in general. The new ribbon at least sort of categorizes things by what you're trying to do. If it's not on the home screen (which is a stupid name, but whatever) then it's in sort of sensible easier to understand places. If I want to work with references I'm not trying to find where I insert references, and most of the format menu made sense when there was a lot less screen real estate but can be don't much more gracefully now. The old system was really organized the way the programmers were organized. "edit" "format" "tools" and "window" don't really convey what they actually are from a user perspective, they sound more like how the departments within microsoft were organized, so if you were in the 'tools group' your work ended up in a sub menu layer of 'tools'. You then needed to be able to guess enough about how computer software was written to figure out if the thing you were trying to do was a 'tools' problem or a 'format' problem or a 'edit' problem, and hunt for it there, if you wanted to try and understand.
Don't get me wrong, the ribbon isn't perfect, but if I want to make document mailings, or put in references or collaboratively edit the ribbon makes those tasks a lot clearer to novice users.
I'm not sure the north korean government cares about a bunch of starving mostly illiterate peasants (who are illiterate, starving, and peasants because of government policy). If they wanted food China and Russia I'm sure could spare the small fraction of a percentage it would take to feed the couple of million starving people in the DPRK anyway. Between them China and Russia feed 1.5 billion people, the 23 million in North Korea, who are in large part still fed on their own isn't exactly a huge burden.
No, I think the North Korean government has very deliberately decided it doesn't want to feed those people. That might be a bizarre attempt to guilt trip south korea (your brothers are dying here, you should feed them) so the government doesn't have to, it might be something else. It's hard to get a good policy read on why the DPRK does anything beyond 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'.
Not really true. Iran and North Korea are very much in the 'enemy of my enemy' stage of life, and they are both quite friendly with russia and to a lesser extent both with china.
They may not be ideologically aligned to each other, but given their mutual enemy and mutual ally, they're willing to talk to each other. Who do you think is still buying all this iranian oil that is being extracted now that the previous markets can't and won't buy it? China and North korea. Who does North Korea sell missiles and technology to? (The Taepodong series specifically, as well as some shorter range surface to surface missiles), Yemen, Syria, Iran and a few others. The north koreans need currency, the iranians have currency, the north koreans need oil, the iranians have oil, the iranians need missiles to strike Saudi, Iraq and Israel, the north koreans have missiles.
They are as far apart ideologically as Stalin and Hitler, and yet for years those two managed to get along oddly well, exchanging training and agreeing to carve up poland together. Iran and North Korea may not be all that ideologically compatible, but they have nothing to particularly drive a wedge between them (unlike stalin and hitler). They each have things the other wants, no directly overlapping or conflicting interests and a shared enemy in the united states, who, helpfully, binned them together in an 'axis of evil', and if they weren't playing nice before, that gave them a good kick in the ass to start playing nice with each other.
They very much are on strong speaking terms and technological exchange, through russia, through china and at sea. They are both under heavy sanctions meaning their selection of possible trade partners is rather limited, and that means they take what they can get. If you think they at least up until recently weren't on very good terms you should pull your head out of the sand. The new North Korea, under Kim Jong Un, and the current state of affairs in Iran, along with the situations in Burma and Pakistan throw into question any future agreements. A Burma out of chinas sphere of influence, and a pakistan not interested in technological exchanges significantly limit their access to resources and cash, and might significantly shake up their desired alliances.
That said, you're right, in that they have no real long term collaborative goals. At the first opportunity I'm sure both of them would love to do business with someone else. But until a better opportunity comes along you go with the friends your enemies have given you.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends where you are. If you're in india the 'auditor' determines how much your fine is based on how much you bribe him. In cash. Italy is notoriously similar, but not quite as bad. Small businesses are trying to dodge tax everywhere. But yes, big companies generally in civilized countries have to honestly report their business. Too many people need to know honest numbers for them to be able to lie about it. Investors, CEO's, CFO's, the government, unions etc. You can't have an on books revenue of 100 million dollars and have inexplicable outlays of 150 million dollars but no borrowing without raising some eyebrows.
Though as I say, small businesses everywhere are always trying to dodge tax. Ever paid a small business in cash? Especially a services business (repair guys for example), tipped a waiter in cash, paid a restaurant in cash? They're all trying to dodge tax on that, regularly. It's technically evasion and illegal. With big companies they simply pay the government for rules that let them expense things or offshore the money or the like.
How does it increase compliance? Unless you force everything to electronic transaction (and watch the privacy advocates on /. have a fit about that). It doesn't increase compliance, it eases it, those are two different things. I'm not an american, but I believe for out purposes I face a similar problem. My income is derived from 3 sources, work, scholarships, and research grants. My work income is obvious enough. Scholarships aren't taxable, again, obvious enough, but they do count towards total family income for certain low income benefits, and different benefits may or may not count them. Research grants are taxable, after expenses, and what is a valid expense can involve dozens of pages of paperwork.
If they were all just 'income' that would significantly ease my compliance costs, because I don't have to spend 8 or 9 hours every year reading through this years rules and sorting out all of the various ways those rules apply.
But that doesn't mean it increases compliance. In fact, with higher point of sales taxes it's in my interest to not declare purchases or sales of services to the government, since that could cut down costs for my customers and myself by 20% (if I was in the EU for example), and it would give me a competitive advantage over a big company that can't do that. Which is exactly what happens in Italy and Greece, and is presumably now happening in spain. Those huge masses of 'unemployed' people in spain and greece aren't just sitting around posting on /. all day. They're working under the table so to speak, and of course, unreliably. Cash transactions facilitate this because they aren't traceable.
Fundamentally the US, Canadian and a few other systems assume tax payers are trying to be honest. That's as flawed an assumption for the "Fair Tax" as it is for the existing income tax structures. Some countries happen to be more honest, or coerced into compliance through the use of credit cards and mobile phone payments etc. (e.g. Japan and Sweden) and some are quite happy to do business in cash under the table, for everything (Italy, Greece, India, Bangladesh). Making it easier for people to comply doesn't mean they will, and the more 'in your face' the tax is, the more likely people are to try and dodge it.
We may be at the point where those different architectures aren't worth enough to care about either, at least for most consumer facing devices. Whether my speakers use 59 cents in one architecture cpu or 65 cents in another doesn't matter, my cable set top box might use 15 or 20 dollars in a CPU but they'll all do the job and it's not like I'm buying hundreds of these personally.
For places where ISA's can really matter, high performance servers for example, I don't see these as mattering much as we'd expect, MIPS alpha and power are all basically dead, ARM is competitive with x86 if the new intel android phone in india can be believed, and the UPU which is the presumptive choice will have to be competitive, or they'll have to allow exemptions or other special rules so that a block of ARM cpus can be controlled by a UPU approved CPU.
This sounds a lot less about spying and a lot more about protectionism and what the north koreans call Juche. Self reliance. The chinese are happy to sell us stuff, but don't ever want to have to buy anything that isn't dug directly out of the ground in return. The xbox 3 and PS4 will be x86, those will be banned, PC's, Mac or Windows, those will be banned or have to port to UPU. I suppose that makes ARM a viable choice since there will be a windows ARM option soon enough, but that might be a good argument against ARM too (from chinas perspective). Chosing UPU would effectively lock every major software and hardware vendor out of the chinese market.
Working as designed doesn't make it good design. Please don't confuse the two.
actually there are a lot of problems with those. Notice that you can't ever convert xbox points back to cash? Same with frequent flier miles? If you could, they would be considered taxable income. As it is you're buying microsoft 'points' which *legalese translated* have no real value, and MS is free to hand out a million of them at their discretion, take them away from you at their discretion etc. Frequent flier miles is the same deal, they can be taken away, disappear over time etc. If it was convertible *back* into currency then you'd be into trouble.
In ontario canada where I live we've gone so far as to change gift cards because they are effectively a form of currency that could 'expire' so they've had to add in layers of regulation around them. I'm not 100% sure what the rules are, and i'm too lazy to look it up, because it probably doesn't in detail matter.
Acknowledging something exists isn't the same as liking it. Taking it as a nod from the treasury that they're happy about is absurdly naive. Even getting them into FinCen registration could nailing its own coffin because now that means the government is going to ask just what is moving where, and that puts them in the unenviable position of filing paperwork the government may not want to read. The government has agreed the entity exists and is going to try and file the appropriate paperwork and follow the appropriate rules. The moment you start having to do that there becomes a lot less value to doing business in bitcoins. What good does it do you to run a business in bitcoins that you then have to convert into US dollars for tax purposes every year? That by the way, is a very real very messy accounting problem for foreigners who have to file US taxes, because currency fluctuation means your assets are now worth relatively different things all the damn time. As per the disclaimer on the MSB site "The inclusion of a business on the MSB Registration Web site is not a recommendation,
certification of legitimacy, or endorsement of the business by any government agency.". http://www.fincen.gov/financial_institutions/msb/msbstateselector.html
Why? It's a p2p network. Poison the network, or get a node on the network and go after anyone they fin.
Treat all undisclosed bitcoin income as terrorist funding. It has value because people can accept it, if no sane business will touch the stuff it's worth nothing so no one will bother with it.
It's because they are intellectually living in the fantasy land of austrian economics. They are 'mining' all the 'gold/bitcoins' possible (apparently 21 million bitcoins) and that will be the whole currency supply.
Mining as a term does kinda make sense. If money was still on a gold standard then all the money in the world is both the extracted gold in circulation and the gold under the ground waiting to be dug up. In the case of bitcoins there is a limit on the number of mathematical problems that they can solve which caps supply at 21 million. Whether you mine gold, or 'mine' bitcoins the effect on their respective dependent currency supply is the same.
Though I suppose they can always add new problems to solve to expand the supply, they are stuck on the theory that a fixed currency supply with fractional reserve banking will somehow not be an unmitigated disaster. With gold you run into the problem of previously uncounted supplies of going being added in.
A 560 and 660 will probably both eat around 150 watts, though the 680's use less power than the 580's. The x80 series use roughly the same form factor and power draw from the 8800 up to the 580 and then a bit less (but not a lot) for the 680.
Much of GPU design is what you can cram into a given power envelope (between 6 and 8 pin connectors on the side and what you can draw from the mobo). CPU design has been the same way for quite a while with power points of 45 75, 95, 140 W TDP for intel parts. There are lower power parts too, and the new ivy bridges like the GTX 680 seem to be lower power than the previous generation.
But yes, you're going to hit diminishing returns on being able to mine bitcoins with a GPU as they run out of problems to solve, so you get less and less bitcoins per watt, even on a faster GPU.
One of the things it enables is fast global transactions. I created a site to sell digital downloads for Bitcoin called CoinDL: https://www.coindl.com/ and the processing time is averaging under 10 seconds which is pretty impressive considering there's no company, government or other centralized organization involved in the transfer.
Um... other way around. You'd expect anything going through a company or government to take time as they have legal requirements for verification and recording which they really really really can't fuck up.
When governments decide bitcoin is a giant scheme to dodge tax (note: I'm not saying it is, but governments will come to that conclusion eventually) it's going to get the beat down from all sorts of organizations. The whole premise 'idea of using cryptography to control the creation and transfer of money, rather than relying on central authorities' (as per your linked wiki) directly contravenes the charters of those 'central authorities' - as the sole provider of national currencies and sole arbiters of the creation of money.
It's an amusing theoretical project, but eventually bitcoins are either going to need to be adopted as someones currency or they're going to get run into the ground, or both. And any followup project will not survive nearly as long once the precedent is set with bitcoins. That doesn't mean some of the underlying technology won't transfer into real money trading, but when the government decides your bitcoin business is a scheme to dodge tax, and decides to tax you in british pounds or USD or Euro and you can't produce a trail of transactions which can be converted into one of those currencies you're going to find yourself in a world of trouble without any easy way out.
Also, a decentralized currency without a central authority controlling the money supply is a stupid idea. Bitcoin supply is regulated by a rate at which mathematical problems can be solved, and then a fixed exchange between problem solved and bitcoin gained. Which has absolutely no relationship to a useful supply rate for money. One can (as economists do) argue over which of the various competing theories for money supply a given central bank or currency authority should be using at any given time, but none of those sane options are remotely similar to what bitcoin is.
That doesn't make it evil, that makes it a commercial enterprise. You telling your buddy the key to diabetes is drinking 3 cans of coke a day is different than you charging for advice that says the same, or generating revenue from ad sales on your website than promotes the same.
In one case, your friend is being an idiot for listening to you. In the other you are fraudulently presenting the information commercially. Advice of various sorts (legal, medical, apparently nutritional in north caronlina) requires you be licenced so that people are protected from businesses selling snake oil to cure diabetes.
IANAL, so consider this in the advice to a buddy category. But if you have a business where you practice medicine, law, or nutrition in north carolina expect them to come after you eventually.
depends a lot on the status of the employee. A high turnover at the 3 month point just means you're trying to only retain the best. A high turnover at the 13 year points means you're trying to dodge paying senior employees senior rates.
A senior developer is one step down from a lead, or director, which are both technical and managerial positions. I don't see the distinction as black and white. Much above that and you're into the pure mindless suit types. But you don't usually want to keep 40 year olds as bottom level programmers. Senior programmer, programming lead, technical director sure. I know a lot of us in our mid 30's who are lead programmer, or technical director, lead software engineer/designer etc.
Sure, the 23 year old couldn't do a project that you could in 1/4 the alloted time. As a senior it's your job to help them get it done on time, and do it if they can't. That's where you're learning what the people on your team can or can't do, and how to find out what skills they do or do not have, and making sure they get prepared. Trying to find your own style and balance between micro managing people and macro managing is part of being a lead, as is finding what does or doesn't work for that individual being managed.
I'm not suggesting people skills don't matter. But they are the same regardless of what background you come from, and are something you learn, or don't independent of what your schooling was in.
An MBA who knows nothing about what is accomplish-able is no help to a project, and sort of by definition that's a very difficult problem for them to ever master because they come in late, and arent' prepared for it. A developer coming 'up the ranks' so to speak should know what can be done with current tools practices and tech.
That in no way suggests all developers are ever going to be good managers, far from it. But good technical management doesn't come out of business schools. Much as our business school would like you to think differently.
Which makes sense. You don't have the energy or focus to program in large stints as you get older, and finding people who can judge whether a project is doable, and by how many people requires people who've been there, done that, and are reasonably familiar with how these things work. It doesn't do anyone any favours to have clueless people setting projects and project goals. Somewhat unlike traditional engineering where there are years of history and minor improvements, in a rapidly changing field you need to rapidly change your management teams and their knowledge.
And that knowledge is never going to come from an MBA, because it will be at least 4 years out of date by the time the person starts working. Programmers are at least only a year or two removed from doing the work themselves.
It's probably a bit of both. Once they have to make (more) money they have to start doing things which make money beyond just showing some sketchy adds on the side of the page. That runs the risk of headbutting into patents that people do, or did use to make money (think amazons 1 click), and suddenly you're at risk for very expensive legal fights. The one click thing is a good example, because even though the patent is up in the air, and under discussion several places, if it is granted (in the EU for example), or if some part if it is upheld that you're infringing on you could be in deep shit fast. Facebook needs a defensive portfolio.
That's more android, they started by basically cloning the iphone but then went with more diverse handsets and more open store. So they're both trying to re-envision windows 3.1 in the phone space. And they sort of orbit around each other with some new features, and some unique features but mostly just copying each other
Microsoft is trying a completely different tactic with a completely different style (live tiles aren't really like anything else, except maybe media centre editions of windows), and they're aiming to unify with the desktop (windows phone 8), which sounds like it could be a good idea, but it might be an unmitigated disaster with ARM-Intel compatibility issues trashing the whole thing. WP7.5 is, you're right, lagging behind somewhat on some features compared to droids and iphones, but I suspect some of that is intentionally not bothering with features that will be in WP8. I'm not suggesting that's a good plan, it just seems like what they're doing.
The one thing MS should be copying from Apple is the software update model. Fuck the carriers it's available and we don't care what they have to say about it. Unfortunately they didn't do that. The 99 dollar a year developer licence to unlock your phone (or be a developer) sort of makes sense, but it charges you money for what android gives away for free. Seems kinda dumb on MS's part.
I'm not sure MS cares about the 200 dollar price point, nor particularly does android. 500 dollars, 600, maybe. For 600 bucks an ipad replacement that runs windows or ubuntu or, and does whatever the hell I want is preferable to a 500 dollar ipad that doesn't, bonus if it's x86 so it just works with every other windows app in the world.
They may simple not envision windows ARM as an enterprise product either. A windows 8 slate with an AM64/x86 CPU *should* be able to have comparable if not longer battery life compared to the arm counterparts, better compatibility, but probably a higher price. For an extra 100 bucks I could see the enterprise guys quite happy to keep it as 'regular' windows. Hell, for an extra 100 bucks I'd probably pay that as a home user device.
The problem MS is making is assuming that the home market and the enterprise can stay separate. They can't. Your desktop should be your server, domain controller, manage your 'group' policy (for one device per user and 1-4 users I'm not sure the term group really applies but it's the same basic usage scenario). Someone who goes out an buys a windows RT slate and then can't take advantage of the things that make windows windows is going to be a very angry customer. Enterprise buyers usually won't have that problem because they will have someone who knows something about the tech decide what to buy hopefully.
Put another way, I suspect Windows RT is going to be a consumer clusterfuck, but not because MS has 'ran out of time' on it, but because they don't understand how users will want to use it. If people want an ipad, let them buy an ipad. Windows slates need to be a different product than an ipad, but having a windows 8 RT shitty ipad clone that's basically a big phoneless phone, and a windows 8 x86 desktop without a keyboard sharing name and shelf space doesn't seem like a great plan.
Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now?
Good, less paper to take up space. You can also advertise this as "saving the trees". A digital manual does not take up much space, it usually fits on the same disc as the game - great. If only hardware manufacturers did that ... though I think they do, other than a quick setup guide (which you may need to read before the computer is operational enough to read a pdf) the rest of the manual is on the driver disc. TV/audio equipment still comes with full manuals - instead the manuals should be on a CD, so they take up less space and can be found more easily (I would copy all of them to one CD or just keep on a hard drive - that way I could find the manual quickly and not need to keep it near the device).
I haven't seen game in boxes locally too, just the disc in a DVD case, pretty much like movies. I have no problem with that - less paper to take up space or throw out.
Yes, and it's not like people read manuals anyway. Though you're wrong on the advertising. No one, not customers, not distributors care, in the slightest. But the removal of manuals was precipitated by costs (having to print and ship manual costs a lot of money for what is today no value). But collectors editions still have manuals or art books or the like because those customers want them.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all.
I bought used monitors, tape decks, servers, UPSs and other equipment because of the price (and some devices are not made anymore). The manufacturers are for the most part still in business. If your games is so short that it can be finished quickly and has no replay value or is just bad, then of course people will want to sell it. I can return broken equipment (or even if it works as intended, but for some reason I do not like it, as long as I decide than in 14 days) for a full refund. Can I return a game? Oh, right, I can't. If your game is good then people will play it instead of reselling it immediately.
Maybe this is why used games are so popular - no returns. When I buy a used device, I cannot return it, even the warranty given is a few days, useful only if the device stops working when I bring it home. When I buy a new device, I get 1-5 year warranty and the ability to return it for any reason in 14 days. Games are sold without warranty (and without even the promise that it will work, even if the game disc was blank, I couldn't do anything) and no way to return them (and most games are bad), so the "new" has no advantage over "used". Of course, I could pirate the game, see if it is any good then buy it, but by pirating it I make the developer lose at least a billion dollars, so me buying the game afterward will still result in almost $1G loss.
I buy games on steam for up to 10EUR. Anything more expensive and I just wait for the price to drop or a Christmas sale or whatever. If the game is bad, well, I lost 10EUR, a bit much, but survivable. OTOH, if I want to buy some device that is more expensive, I study it really carefully - read reviews, get the user manual to find out if it has all the features I assume it does (I once bought a VCR that cannot output the tape trough the RF port, while it wasn't a deal breaker, it is an annoyance) and sometimes may even download the service manual to see if something is as I assume it to be (and nothing is written in the user manual) - older devices are easier, since the schematic is easier to trace to find out. This may take me a few days to choose between various options or to see if a particular device is useful to me.
Yes, exactly, but when you buy for 10 euro 7 euro goes to the publisher, which means 3.5 goes to me. (hence my 3.5 dollar example....). When gamestop resells, I get nothing. When they resell 10x over I get nothing x10. I migh
You can either dump the sales for 2 or 3 dollars for dvd's and get your materials cost back, or ship them to china and re purpose the jewel cases. Seriously. We can do this in markets where you use standard jewel cases (notably the middle east) as game developers, but they are small enough its not worth the bother. Console games can though because Xbox/PS3 use standard cases now, so you can have 500k units to re purpose for a few cents a case (which is less than their production cost).
The box for a game runs us about 3 dollars with another dollar or 2 for distribution, depending on from where to where (european publisher to north american for example will be up in the 2 dollar range). Gamestop won't touch your game if they aren't getting 7 or 8 dollars a copy, and much below that your inventory vs units sold becomes cost prohibitive if you're only moving 50k copies to 15-20k retail outlets. At least from a developer perspective, the publisher remember is taking some (something like a 50/50 split). Take a 30 dollar game, write of 10 bucks for getting it into a retail location and it you have to move a lot of wasted copies into the retail chain that you can't really afford to make.
Other than for steam sales, Origin sales, Gamersgate, and GoG sales where they see massive spikes in unit turnover. They're willing to let that happen (and, admittedly, with Steam they just sort of do it, and if that means you now get 59 cents per copy of your game sold rather than 3.50 well tough shit for you, and if steam didn't you they were doing this sale, so they ran out of keys and delisted your game, well, tough shit for you, even if you get them new keys in two hours they may not relist your game for weeks, tough shit for you). Publishers are quite agreeable to significant reductions in sales prices generally, as long as they know they can actually sell at that price.
Retail is a whole other problem because you really can't do retail for much less than 30 bucks a copy, you're losing to much to fixed costs and distribution at anything less than that. Unlike movies where publishers are happy to print a million discs for something that will barely sell 50k units, and if it doesn't sell they can repurpose the jewel cases (the expensive part) for another title with a game the box and manual are game specific and you can't afford to eat 40k in inventory that doesn't sell let alone a million units in inventory. Notice game manuals are next to non existent except in collectors editions now? That'd be why.
With gamestop it doesn't matter what your price is. Their price is always lower. Always. That's how used works after all. Unfortunately this starts 1 day after release, whereas we wouldn't mind so much if this happened day 21 or preferably day 90. Whether or not people would pay 30 bucks for your game when one was available used for 25, versus 60/55 is hard to say, but it used to be that gamestop was *the* place to have your game, have launch agreements etc. Now it's downright toxic, and you only do business with them because they're still about 25% of gaming retail. If you could could make money without ever giving them a box and only selling through a digital distribution service you will, because gamestop isn't in this to make games, they're in this to fuck you and take your money. Customer or supplier. EA has gone so far as to build their own store because they figure (probably correctly) that in the long run they'll be better off without gamestop, who were ~25 of their total business, and without losing 30% to steam and just distribute through their own store, than to have to deal with both of those hassles.
The PSN and XBL are slightly different animals, because you may have to pay them to push out patches or the like. That makes part of the pricing a matter of guessing just how much money this will cost you if you need to patch it vs how many copies will sell, and for example the Wii U won't give you a cut of sales until you hit 6k copies (which can be tough for an indie dev).
The first major iteration on how to deal with this has been DLC. Which ranges from 5 dollar horse armour to full blown expansions that you download for cash. With DLC the publisher and developer definitely get something, so it can that the only money you make on your game is from a 10 dollar DLC, and the 40-50 dollar release basically just puts the DLC store in the hands of players. Which is a sad way to think about your lovingly crafted game. The next step has been full on online distribution channels (steam, origin, gamersgate, GoG, direct2drive, impulse - now owned by gamestop etc.).
And yes, both the mentioned steam scenario and the thousands of copies in a warehouse happened to companies I worked with recently. Well the thousands of retail copies not that recently, that was 4 or so years ago. Printing all of those copies what a significant chunk of the total development budget (~15%), and they ended up in a warehouse, where, as far as I know they still are.
Publishers aren't stupid. Well, ok, they are. But not entirely as stupid as we portray them to be. They aren't going to commit to lowering prices when they don't know what the licencing fees will be (which by the way, m
Not necessarily revenue, but *potential* revenue, talent, or IP, and a customer base that wasn't already part of facebook.
He may also be seeing something that with the right investment will be worth hundreds of millions in revenue.
On talent: Deals like this usually stipulate that the leadership of the company being bought (in this case I'd guess that's most of the 13 employees) have to stick around for while or they lose shares or the like. He might be figuring they have a vision that can translate into users, or facetime on facebook, which would translate into revenue. He's also valued at probably 20 billion dollars so figuring someone else should be worth a hundred million wouldn't seem out of place.
IP. IP seems unlikely, but Instagram may own, or be able to acquire intellectual property rights on what they're doing, and that could put facebook in a bad position if it's dealing with them by duplicating their service.
Instagram customers may not be facebook customers. When you have 800 million users it's pretty hard to see where you're going to get many more from. There are only 7 billion people on the planet, half are too old or too young to be on facebook, another large blob are too poor, or illiterate or both to have internet access and facebook. Leaving, on a good day, ~2 billion potential facebook users. And some of them really don't like facebook (including half the /. crowd) so they won't be customers no matter what. He may be figuring that for a billion dollars he can increase his 'user' base from 800 - 850 or 900 million, which would increase facebooks value by 5-10 billion dollars.
In terms of future revenue he may be seeing something the rest of us aren't thinking about too much. Ads are probably worth more the more time you're on a page. Instagram may attract more facetime for existing users, as in they'll be online longer, and therefore can get more ads spewed at them, additionally getting them in the facebook team early would be preferable to having to buy them out later when they may be worth 2 billion dollars. He may know what we don't, which is how much an extra minute of time on facebook is worth, and how many minutes people are spending on instagram
Facebook is probably also paying largely with facebook stock. That means the valuation is a paper one, not a real one. You work for facebook, you get facebook stock, and if facebook tanks they aren't on the hook for anything particularly cash wise.
And he might just figure with the right investment there's could be a product worth selling.
Of course he could be completely wrong on any or all of those counts. But this is a good time for potential future shareholders to see just how much power "Zuck" really has at facebook, and whether or not they want to be involved with that.
We got a lot of those kids into university. And they didn't really know how to use word. Sure they could open it and start typing, but that couldn't format a document to change their lives. They certainly can now though.
Being able to 'use' any of the office products isn't just open them start typing win, it's being able to actually do something useful with the document. Templates, style guides, being able to produce documents for different purposes, backing up data. Even basic stuff like changing fonts or adding superscripts and subscripts, I don't have to help first year university students with that anymore. I certainly did 4 or 5 years ago though.
What people learned before was behaviours. Actions that resulted in what they wanted, with no idea what those actions were actually doing, or why, just 'click these buttons in this order and you'll get it to do this thing you wanted'. They didn't actually understand, they just wrote memorized a series of steps. They couldn't come up with steps on their own to save their lives. That applies to far more than just highschool kids, but to most users in general. The new ribbon at least sort of categorizes things by what you're trying to do. If it's not on the home screen (which is a stupid name, but whatever) then it's in sort of sensible easier to understand places. If I want to work with references I'm not trying to find where I insert references, and most of the format menu made sense when there was a lot less screen real estate but can be don't much more gracefully now. The old system was really organized the way the programmers were organized. "edit" "format" "tools" and "window" don't really convey what they actually are from a user perspective, they sound more like how the departments within microsoft were organized, so if you were in the 'tools group' your work ended up in a sub menu layer of 'tools'. You then needed to be able to guess enough about how computer software was written to figure out if the thing you were trying to do was a 'tools' problem or a 'format' problem or a 'edit' problem, and hunt for it there, if you wanted to try and understand.
Don't get me wrong, the ribbon isn't perfect, but if I want to make document mailings, or put in references or collaboratively edit the ribbon makes those tasks a lot clearer to novice users.
I'm not sure the north korean government cares about a bunch of starving mostly illiterate peasants (who are illiterate, starving, and peasants because of government policy). If they wanted food China and Russia I'm sure could spare the small fraction of a percentage it would take to feed the couple of million starving people in the DPRK anyway. Between them China and Russia feed 1.5 billion people, the 23 million in North Korea, who are in large part still fed on their own isn't exactly a huge burden.
No, I think the North Korean government has very deliberately decided it doesn't want to feed those people. That might be a bizarre attempt to guilt trip south korea (your brothers are dying here, you should feed them) so the government doesn't have to, it might be something else. It's hard to get a good policy read on why the DPRK does anything beyond 'it seemed like a good idea at the time'.
Not really true. Iran and North Korea are very much in the 'enemy of my enemy' stage of life, and they are both quite friendly with russia and to a lesser extent both with china.
They may not be ideologically aligned to each other, but given their mutual enemy and mutual ally, they're willing to talk to each other. Who do you think is still buying all this iranian oil that is being extracted now that the previous markets can't and won't buy it? China and North korea. Who does North Korea sell missiles and technology to? (The Taepodong series specifically, as well as some shorter range surface to surface missiles), Yemen, Syria, Iran and a few others. The north koreans need currency, the iranians have currency, the north koreans need oil, the iranians have oil, the iranians need missiles to strike Saudi, Iraq and Israel, the north koreans have missiles.
They are as far apart ideologically as Stalin and Hitler, and yet for years those two managed to get along oddly well, exchanging training and agreeing to carve up poland together. Iran and North Korea may not be all that ideologically compatible, but they have nothing to particularly drive a wedge between them (unlike stalin and hitler). They each have things the other wants, no directly overlapping or conflicting interests and a shared enemy in the united states, who, helpfully, binned them together in an 'axis of evil', and if they weren't playing nice before, that gave them a good kick in the ass to start playing nice with each other.
They very much are on strong speaking terms and technological exchange, through russia, through china and at sea. They are both under heavy sanctions meaning their selection of possible trade partners is rather limited, and that means they take what they can get. If you think they at least up until recently weren't on very good terms you should pull your head out of the sand. The new North Korea, under Kim Jong Un, and the current state of affairs in Iran, along with the situations in Burma and Pakistan throw into question any future agreements. A Burma out of chinas sphere of influence, and a pakistan not interested in technological exchanges significantly limit their access to resources and cash, and might significantly shake up their desired alliances.
That said, you're right, in that they have no real long term collaborative goals. At the first opportunity I'm sure both of them would love to do business with someone else. But until a better opportunity comes along you go with the friends your enemies have given you.