Maybe not what you meant, but there has been a commercial satellite that orbited the moon. This was in 1998, when a launch mishap left a satellite in a useless, near Geosync orbit. It was sent around the moon (twice, I think) to help it get into GEO. I think getting a moon orbiter is well within reach on a commercial scale, but Mars is a lot tougher and landing is a lot tougher.
This was a popular theory early on, but it has soon been proven false. Oracle wasn't just "goin through the motions" when they fought the anti-trust battle with DoJ-- most aquisitors give up at that point (see MS & Intuit or Dish & DirecTV). ORCL would not have spent millions of dollars fighting a battle with the DoJ that many thought they would lose.
BTW the poison pill provisions apply if a PeopleSoft product is discontinued, so ORCL can avoid that by not discontinuing the product or negotiating with each client (which they would probably do anyways, so most clients probably spend millions of dollars each).
Well, clearly the University can't prevent the students from operating the wireless points just because they are the landlords. But can they do it as part of the student agreement? Can they do it in a housing contract? My questions are:
1) Can a landlord restrict use of a technology by explicitly putting it in the contract? The answer may seem obvious, but keep in mind that anyone can put up a DirecTV dish in their apartment no matter what the landlord says. And if they were allowed to, would landlords start restricting the use of WiFi as part of their contract or demand payement for it? I think that's what the FCC is trying to avoid.
2) Can the university bar the access points as a condition of being an enrolled student? If so, can they also ban other legal activities such as gambling, marching in protest or interracial dating? Not sure of the answer, but my guess is they can't.
I'm inclined to believe that the U. is without recourse here, at least one an affected student gets a lawyer. If they wanted to control the spectrum, they should've used a licensed band instead. I expect the policy won't last long.
The sad truth: Google is getting worse
on
Yet More Google Gazing
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Unfortunately I think Google has been getting worse at its primary function, finding relevant webpages based on simple queries, for years. I remember back in 1999 when i 1st discovered Google. The results at Altavista were littered with spurious results, and I usually had to use long boolean searches to get decent results-- usually on the 3rd try and the 4th page of results. Google came along and blew that all away, and there was 1 big reason-- no one was trying to SPAM Google's results, and I doubt anyone even knew how.
Fast forward 5 years. So many SEO types are now infiltrating Google's results that they are not nearly as relevant as they once were-- remember when Google was sued for downgrading linkfarm results, and they backed down? Anyone use the "Feeling luck?" button anymore? It's nice you can see 100 results per page, but I usually end up doing 2 or 3 queries to get the proper result these days. I still use Google, but Teoma (Ask.com, I believe) seems to work equally as well, and if Google doesn't improve their search results, they will have a long, slow decline.
Their other innovations are nice (Froogle, Google News, GMail), but they are really just sidelights to their core competency-- finding relevant webpages. I'm hoping they figure out how to do it.
Looks like gmail.com has been through a bunch of iterations. Not sure how on topic this is, but it's interesting to see the different sorts of things that the domain has been used for.
Re:Story was debunked
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'll address since it seems to be such a strong claim here. Yes, there is 5% other. But that is not exclusive to desktop share. This includes mobile phones, handheld PCs, many servers which conduct proxy searches, the odd Win 3.1, BSD, and, maybe the biggest of all, desktop apps that search Google and probably don't provide that info.
Yes, many Linux users change their agent string. But in order to reach 5%, that would suggest that 80% of Linux users have done this, and Google is not smart enough to figure it out. I thought in most spoofed strings, the real browser was ID'd somewhere in there? Heck, I run into about 1 site a week that "requires" IE, so I strongly doubt more than 20% are spoofing these days, which leaves that number in the range of the rounding error.
Google isn't the best measure of desktop installations, but it's a great measure of Google usage; to argue otherwise suggests that you're viewing the evidence with an eye skewed towards a certain conclusion. Heck, IE numbers may be skewed low (ouch!), since MSN search is built into IE.
The usage of Macs on the 'net is probably about 3x the usage of Linux on the 'net, TODAY. If you have facts to support a different conclusion, please present them, instead of believing that 80% of Linux users change their user-string (especially all those newbies using Linux who aren't techies). In two years, the number may be flipped.
Well, not debunked so much as it far overstated Linux's market share vs the Mac. They were counting sales, so many PCs are sold with Linux but a pirated version of Windows quickly replaces it, etc. Looking at Google Zeitgeist shows that the Mac is still well into the lead for desktop usage(for now). Yes, I'm wearing my flame-resistant suit. Yes, I know there are other important measures. Yes, many people have dual installations of Windows/Linux. But the best, most unbiased measure of desktop usage I can think of is Google Zeitgeist. Anyone have other suggestions?
I suggest you read the one true site for Mac news, As The Apple Turnsfor a more well-reasoned analysis of the article. Scroll to the 3rd story.
hasn't there been kiddie pr0n found in the form of books and magazines as well?
There is? Well, let's find the sick bastards who posted or sent that stuff and arrest them too. And the guys who publish the child porn magazines, and the child porn books.
I read the letter (and Corante's a little-too-flip play-by-play), and one thing is clear: any sort of threat was removed in order that they could get the signatures of as many state AGs as possible. Some of their statements are downright silly, given that Apache could be considered P2P software. OTOH, some of the P2P behaviors they reference are clearly sleezy (stealth spyware installations, default sharing of all files), and should be stopped.
The fact that child porn is available on the P2P networks (as the AGs claim) is unfortunate, but we have existing laws to go after those creeps-- and that's what the AGs should be doing. However, none of that is a good reason to ban any of this software. The P2P companies would probably be smart to engage in some customer education, if only to cover their butts. Using a strict opt-in policy for sharing files would be nice, as would the ability to easily turn off file sharing (such as when "quitting" the program).
Let's not kid ourselves: some of these P2P software makers are scum. But that doesn't mean the AGs should be able to go after guys producing great software like Limewire. My advice to the AGs: back off the rhetoric, find the creeps sharing child porn (which is flat-out illegal), and go after the P2P companies who actively try to deceive customers.
The Space Station is in the wrong orbit
on
Soyuz To The Moon?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Simply put, ISS is in the wrong orbit as a stopping point for cargo or people on the way to the moon. I stole this from an article on SpaceReview,
For the ISS, its lack of usefulness as a base for lunar exploration is due to the fact that it is in the wrong orbit. In order to make the station accessible from both Cape Canaveral and Baikonur, it is in a skewed orbit, suitable for doing useful earth observation but not for much else. The Clinton administration saw it as a symbol of US-Russian friendship and for keeping the large aerospace contractors happy, but that was about it.
The article goes on to say it's feasible if ISS is moved to an equatorial orbit, which simply won't happen unless it occurs 50 years from now.
The reason it's not useful as a lunar stop-over base is the same reason that Columbia could not have docked at ISS. Changing from one orbit to another is extremely costly (in terms of fuel), and any lunar mission has to be essentially on the equatorial plane.
Of course, the idea could still work, but the Soyuz would have to be launched to an equatorial orbit from a suitable launchsite.
Unless my math is wrong, they're paying about $500/user. $125/year. But since most companies will not upgrade the OS or applications more often than every 4 years, they basically are paying $500 to Microsoft for each user. That's a ton of money-- maybe it's all worth it, but I guess this is what people are talking about when they mention the "Microsoft Tax."
Wow, the NFL sure is spending a lot of effort to prevent people from watching their in-market game-- which any sensible DirecTV customer can do today. Sick of the Raiders game being blacked out in Oakland? Well, just "move" to Los Angeles, and you'll be able to see every game on Sunday Ticket. And there are more ways than that.
Do you think the NFL will come after me for a DMCA violation-- is this considered a workaround of an effective security method?
Geeze, I don't know where to start on this one. First, let me clarify one thing: I'm a giant Apple booster. But I use Apple products (iBook G4, PowerMac G4, Airport Express, 3G iPod, even a damn iSight) because they are great products; I don't defend Apple products strictly because Apple makes them. I've been accused of being a basher before (not that you have accused me here), oftentimes because I'm not afraid of calling a spade a spade.
I read the review last week, so my memory may be fuzzy. But Sony claims a 30 hour battery life, making the cardinal mistake of overpromising when it's unnecessary (22 hours is damn good; they also overpromised on song storage-- saying it could hold 13,000 songs was just a stupid thing to do). But in Walt's test, he got 22 hours of usage for 132kbps 8TRAC compared to 12+ hours for the iPod. It clearly is the winner.
Your other points are self-contradictory-- first saying that iPod is so small it doesn't need to be any smaller so Sony wasted their effort, then defending the iPod mini as being in a different class, so the comparison to the Sony is unfair. That's just wrong, as the Sony is small enough that many miniPod users would opt for the NW-1 instead. As for distinct markets, that's wishful thinking. There's a spectrum of MP3 players ranging from tiny flash based players,to larger (but still light) flash players to miniPod types, to the iPods and finally to the 60-80GB devices that are quite large. Apple did a very clever thing in trying to segment the market into 2 distincts, and then pointing out they have the best device in both markets. But just 'cause Apple says it, doesn't make it true.
My heart really does go out to the hardware engineers at Sony. After all, they created a really nifty device that bests the iPod in two important areas (battery life, size). All they needed was workable software and no intentional crippling, and the NW1 would have been at least a strong #2. Instead, Sony intentionally crippled it by not enabling MP3 playback, over-promised what it really did (based on lousy, lossy 48kbps ATRAC3+), and provided mediocre software at best.
One of these days, the hardware guys at Sony will get the upper hand again, and Apple really will have something to worry about.
Really, this is neat, interesting and fun. But being able to play Real's DRM'ed files on the iPod is a pretty minor problem for Apple. I 'm waiting for the other shoe to drop-- that is, how long before someone adds a capability to their MP3 player to play iTMS files on that device? That will hurt Apple (negating their lock-in advantage), and help consumers (no more lock-in). Which will help Apple, as more buy iTMS stuff and aren't worried about lock-in.
'course, if everyone just sold plain MP3s, we wouldn't have to deal with any of this crap.
I've got insomnia, so I read the email thread. So, the same buyer had been scammed out of $800 earlier on eBay. Then he saw this auction with a price, almost too-good-to-be-true, with an incorrect contact name, the wrong address, and payment demanded by cashier's check only. And he sent the money? So much for the once-burned, twice-shy theory.
Then, he goes on to antagonize him the email, responds to Sal's threats with threats of his own, and so on. C'mon! File the complaint, renew with vigor once he commits mail fraud, and that's it. The website is a nice public service, but what use did it do to let Sal know of it's existence? These actions are silly, unproductive and sorta dumb.
Finally, what's with all the depp threats about negative feedback-- why be so afriad of it, let yourself refrain from leaving rightly deserved feedback early on. That might have helped people sooner. And if I was Sal, I would view threats to leave negative feedback as helpful, as it meant that I had more time to run my scam, move money around etc. I'm sure Sal is more than happy to have $1100 & the negative feedback than he would be to have neither.
Sal is clearly the bad guy in this, and Justin clearly is the good guy. But Justin and others should pay more heed to warrning signs of fraud, avoid antogonizing obvious criminals, and trust their gut when it's yelling "no."
What do you mean-- the percent of all taxes paid, or the tax rate paid by corporations; right now, your post is rather ambiguous. That lead to start typing the text below.
No, I didn't know that, and it's certainly completely untrue. If corporations paid 5% of their revenue in taxes, that would be a very high number since net margins are typically 10%; you non-Math majors, that means the income tax rate would be 5%/10%=50%, a very high number.
Regardless, even if corporations went from paying 50% of all taxes to 5%, I don't think it happened over a period of 5 years! There may be some basis to your numbers, but I'm skeptical either way, and other readers should be equally wary. Just because you read something doesn't make it true, and try to have a first-source reference when citing "facts."
This site is getting a little slow, so here it is:
NASA Preps Mars Underground Mole
Posted by michael on Friday July 16, @08:45PM from the better-hope-they-don't-strike-oil dept. Roland Piquepaille writes "People at NASA never cease to surprise me. Searching for water or presence of past life of Mars obviously needs drilling beneath the surface. So NASA is developing the Mars Underground Mole (MUM), based on a previous device used for the European Beagle 2 mission. But here is the twist. MUM will include sensors which were previously used to collect spectral imagery of Earth from pilotless aircrafts, especially Hawaii, according to NASA. While the Mole will stay on the surface on Mars and drill up to 5 meters deep, it will transmit data via a fiber optic cable to a digital array scanning interferometer (DASI). And the spectral images produced by the DASI will enable researchers to identify possible water, ice, organics and minerals under the surface on Mars. And this MUM will be a small one, weighing less than a kilogram for a length of only 50 centimeters. For more details and pictures about MUM, please read this overview.":)
It's really not complicated. I stated P/S because that what I meant to do; the earnings part of price/earnings is easily manipulated, and when a company is restating earnings, it's probably not the best measure of a company. I prefer to look at price/sales, sales growth, and a guess of a growing company's eventual margins. I think it's a good way of estimating what the earnings will be in a few years. Sales numbers are much harder to mess with, as a 10% change in revenue recognition will completely wipe-out earnings. The myopic focus on P/E is part of the reason companies cook their books.
anyways, I was trying to point that right now Red Hat has low sales, and their margins are unlikely to improve much because their costs (mostly labor) will scale with their revenue. Many old-line companies are like this, such as Ford Motor Company & Apple. OTOH, pure software companies who make their money more from licenses than services (think Oracle and Microsoft and Adobe and Yahoo!) saw their net margins improve substantially as they grew in size. This is why Amazon is trying to get more 3rd party sales (high gross margins) as part of their sales mix to accompany their own sales (low gross margins).
In short, I don't really care what Red Hat's P/E is right now; I'm more interested in what their earnings will be in 5 years, at which point the P/E will probably be 15-30. Since their margins aren't ever going to be great, they'll need a ton of top-line growth. The P/S will probably be 4:1 eventually (based on net margins of 12-25%), which means they'll have to quintuple their sales, to $750 million. That's like 50% annual growth, and I don't think they can pull it off.
Rad Hat has annual revenue of less than $150 million. And a market cap just south of $3 Billion. A price/sales of 20. I'm sure Red Hat is a good business, and will continue to grow, but they have to grow a lot to justify that price. And since much of their revenue is for service, their costs will grow as their sales grow (in contrast to Microsoft's Windows monopoly, which requires very few marginal expenses for each sale). Nice company, can't imagine their stock will be much higher in 5 years.
I think it's already legal, DCMA notwithstanding. I'm sure there are many illegal ways to circumvent effective DVD copying (what's the current status of that anyways), but there are legal ones as well. Is buying software that isn't macrovision-enabled illegal?
I mean, I have the right to create a backup under fair-use. I have the right to make a copy for another medium. I'm not attacking the the way the story is posted, but I think it's important to re-iterate that coying your DVDs to another medium is fair-use, and fair-use is legal.
Now, maybe they are in discussions to make it easy. Somehow, I doubt it will be any easier than other methods out there (links anyone?), but it will be sanctioned by the MPAA. This is good, and it shows progress, but the MPAA does not have the power to make things legal or illegal.
Notice also that Secunia yaps on about how, for Mac OS X, "of the 36 advisories issued in 2003-2004, 61 percent could be exploited across the Internet and 32 percent enabled attackers to take over the system"-- but never mentions how many could be exploited across the Internet to enable attackers to take over the system. Personally, we aren't much concerned about exploits that require local access to a Mac, because if anyone's climbing in through a window downstairs, we've got more important things to worry about than whether or not he can mess with our Finder preferences. We picked one of those advisories at random, noted that it's tagged with an impact of "System access" and a location of "From remote," and then scoped out the description of the flaws to find that the only ones listed that appear to allow "escalation of privileges" can only be exploited by "malicious, local users." So as long as we keep the doors locked at night and don't tick off our housemates to the point of digital vandalism, we're apparently all right.
Please read the entire article, as it thoroughly points out the many flaws to this study, and points to other articles where Secunia makes other ridiculous OS X security claims. Oh yeah, and the site is damn funny too.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course Coral cache is down. The ironing is delicious. ;)
Maybe not what you meant, but there has been a commercial satellite that orbited the moon. This was in 1998, when a launch mishap left a satellite in a useless, near Geosync orbit. It was sent around the moon (twice, I think) to help it get into GEO. I think getting a moon orbiter is well within reach on a commercial scale, but Mars is a lot tougher and landing is a lot tougher.
I emailed the editors to tell 'em it was a dupe, but I guess I wass too late. The original story had better info.
This was a popular theory early on, but it has soon been proven false. Oracle wasn't just "goin through the motions" when they fought the anti-trust battle with DoJ-- most aquisitors give up at that point (see MS & Intuit or Dish & DirecTV). ORCL would not have spent millions of dollars fighting a battle with the DoJ that many thought they would lose.
BTW the poison pill provisions apply if a PeopleSoft product is discontinued, so ORCL can avoid that by not discontinuing the product or negotiating with each client (which they would probably do anyways, so most clients probably spend millions of dollars each).
Well, clearly the University can't prevent the students from operating the wireless points just because they are the landlords. But can they do it as part of the student agreement? Can they do it in a housing contract? My questions are:
1) Can a landlord restrict use of a technology by explicitly putting it in the contract? The answer may seem obvious, but keep in mind that anyone can put up a DirecTV dish in their apartment no matter what the landlord says. And if they were allowed to, would landlords start restricting the use of WiFi as part of their contract or demand payement for it? I think that's what the FCC is trying to avoid.
2) Can the university bar the access points as a condition of being an enrolled student? If so, can they also ban other legal activities such as gambling, marching in protest or interracial dating? Not sure of the answer, but my guess is they can't.
I'm inclined to believe that the U. is without recourse here, at least one an affected student gets a lawyer. If they wanted to control the spectrum, they should've used a licensed band instead. I expect the policy won't last long.
Unfortunately I think Google has been getting worse at its primary function, finding relevant webpages based on simple queries, for years. I remember back in 1999 when i 1st discovered Google. The results at Altavista were littered with spurious results, and I usually had to use long boolean searches to get decent results-- usually on the 3rd try and the 4th page of results. Google came along and blew that all away, and there was 1 big reason-- no one was trying to SPAM Google's results, and I doubt anyone even knew how.
Fast forward 5 years. So many SEO types are now infiltrating Google's results that they are not nearly as relevant as they once were-- remember when Google was sued for downgrading linkfarm results, and they backed down? Anyone use the "Feeling luck?" button anymore? It's nice you can see 100 results per page, but I usually end up doing 2 or 3 queries to get the proper result these days. I still use Google, but Teoma (Ask.com, I believe) seems to work equally as well, and if Google doesn't improve their search results, they will have a long, slow decline.
Their other innovations are nice (Froogle, Google News, GMail), but they are really just sidelights to their core competency-- finding relevant webpages. I'm hoping they figure out how to do it.
Looks like gmail.com has been through a bunch of iterations. Not sure how on topic this is, but it's interesting to see the different sorts of things that the domain has been used for.
I'll address since it seems to be such a strong claim here. Yes, there is 5% other. But that is not exclusive to desktop share. This includes mobile phones, handheld PCs, many servers which conduct proxy searches, the odd Win 3.1, BSD, and, maybe the biggest of all, desktop apps that search Google and probably don't provide that info.
Yes, many Linux users change their agent string. But in order to reach 5%, that would suggest that 80% of Linux users have done this, and Google is not smart enough to figure it out. I thought in most spoofed strings, the real browser was ID'd somewhere in there? Heck, I run into about 1 site a week that "requires" IE, so I strongly doubt more than 20% are spoofing these days, which leaves that number in the range of the rounding error.
Google isn't the best measure of desktop installations, but it's a great measure of Google usage; to argue otherwise suggests that you're viewing the evidence with an eye skewed towards a certain conclusion. Heck, IE numbers may be skewed low (ouch!), since MSN search is built into IE.
The usage of Macs on the 'net is probably about 3x the usage of Linux on the 'net, TODAY. If you have facts to support a different conclusion, please present them, instead of believing that 80% of Linux users change their user-string (especially all those newbies using Linux who aren't techies). In two years, the number may be flipped.
Well, not debunked so much as it far overstated Linux's market share vs the Mac. They were counting sales, so many PCs are sold with Linux but a pirated version of Windows quickly replaces it, etc. Looking at Google Zeitgeist shows that the Mac is still well into the lead for desktop usage(for now). Yes, I'm wearing my flame-resistant suit. Yes, I know there are other important measures. Yes, many people have dual installations of Windows/Linux. But the best, most unbiased measure of desktop usage I can think of is Google Zeitgeist. Anyone have other suggestions?
I suggest you read the one true site for Mac news, As The Apple Turnsfor a more well-reasoned analysis of the article. Scroll to the 3rd story.
hasn't there been kiddie pr0n found in the form of books and magazines as well?
There is? Well, let's find the sick bastards who posted or sent that stuff and arrest them too. And the guys who publish the child porn magazines, and the child porn books.
I read the letter (and Corante's a little-too-flip play-by-play), and one thing is clear: any sort of threat was removed in order that they could get the signatures of as many state AGs as possible. Some of their statements are downright silly, given that Apache could be considered P2P software. OTOH, some of the P2P behaviors they reference are clearly sleezy (stealth spyware installations, default sharing of all files), and should be stopped.
The fact that child porn is available on the P2P networks (as the AGs claim) is unfortunate, but we have existing laws to go after those creeps-- and that's what the AGs should be doing. However, none of that is a good reason to ban any of this software. The P2P companies would probably be smart to engage in some customer education, if only to cover their butts. Using a strict opt-in policy for sharing files would be nice, as would the ability to easily turn off file sharing (such as when "quitting" the program).
Let's not kid ourselves: some of these P2P software makers are scum. But that doesn't mean the AGs should be able to go after guys producing great software like Limewire. My advice to the AGs: back off the rhetoric, find the creeps sharing child porn (which is flat-out illegal), and go after the P2P companies who actively try to deceive customers.
The reason it's not useful as a lunar stop-over base is the same reason that Columbia could not have docked at ISS. Changing from one orbit to another is extremely costly (in terms of fuel), and any lunar mission has to be essentially on the equatorial plane.
Of course, the idea could still work, but the Soyuz would have to be launched to an equatorial orbit from a suitable launchsite.
Unless my math is wrong, they're paying about $500/user. $125/year. But since most companies will not upgrade the OS or applications more often than every 4 years, they basically are paying $500 to Microsoft for each user. That's a ton of money-- maybe it's all worth it, but I guess this is what people are talking about when they mention the "Microsoft Tax."
Wow, the NFL sure is spending a lot of effort to prevent people from watching their in-market game-- which any sensible DirecTV customer can do today. Sick of the Raiders game being blacked out in Oakland? Well, just "move" to Los Angeles, and you'll be able to see every game on Sunday Ticket. And there are more ways than that.
Do you think the NFL will come after me for a DMCA violation-- is this considered a workaround of an effective security method?
Geeze, I don't know where to start on this one. First, let me clarify one thing: I'm a giant Apple booster. But I use Apple products (iBook G4, PowerMac G4, Airport Express, 3G iPod, even a damn iSight) because they are great products; I don't defend Apple products strictly because Apple makes them. I've been accused of being a basher before (not that you have accused me here), oftentimes because I'm not afraid of calling a spade a spade.
I read the review last week, so my memory may be fuzzy. But Sony claims a 30 hour battery life, making the cardinal mistake of overpromising when it's unnecessary (22 hours is damn good; they also overpromised on song storage-- saying it could hold 13,000 songs was just a stupid thing to do). But in Walt's test, he got 22 hours of usage for 132kbps 8TRAC compared to 12+ hours for the iPod. It clearly is the winner.
Your other points are self-contradictory-- first saying that iPod is so small it doesn't need to be any smaller so Sony wasted their effort, then defending the iPod mini as being in a different class, so the comparison to the Sony is unfair. That's just wrong, as the Sony is small enough that many miniPod users would opt for the NW-1 instead. As for distinct markets, that's wishful thinking. There's a spectrum of MP3 players ranging from tiny flash based players,to larger (but still light) flash players to miniPod types, to the iPods and finally to the 60-80GB devices that are quite large. Apple did a very clever thing in trying to segment the market into 2 distincts, and then pointing out they have the best device in both markets. But just 'cause Apple says it, doesn't make it true.
My heart really does go out to the hardware engineers at Sony. After all, they created a really nifty device that bests the iPod in two important areas (battery life, size). All they needed was workable software and no intentional crippling, and the NW1 would have been at least a strong #2. Instead, Sony intentionally crippled it by not enabling MP3 playback, over-promised what it really did (based on lousy, lossy 48kbps ATRAC3+), and provided mediocre software at best.
One of these days, the hardware guys at Sony will get the upper hand again, and Apple really will have something to worry about.
Really, this is neat, interesting and fun. But being able to play Real's DRM'ed files on the iPod is a pretty minor problem for Apple. I 'm waiting for the other shoe to drop-- that is, how long before someone adds a capability to their MP3 player to play iTMS files on that device? That will hurt Apple (negating their lock-in advantage), and help consumers (no more lock-in). Which will help Apple, as more buy iTMS stuff and aren't worried about lock-in.
'course, if everyone just sold plain MP3s, we wouldn't have to deal with any of this crap.
I've got insomnia, so I read the email thread. So, the same buyer had been scammed out of $800 earlier on eBay. Then he saw this auction with a price, almost too-good-to-be-true, with an incorrect contact name, the wrong address, and payment demanded by cashier's check only. And he sent the money? So much for the once-burned, twice-shy theory.
Then, he goes on to antagonize him the email, responds to Sal's threats with threats of his own, and so on. C'mon! File the complaint, renew with vigor once he commits mail fraud, and that's it. The website is a nice public service, but what use did it do to let Sal know of it's existence? These actions are silly, unproductive and sorta dumb.
Finally, what's with all the depp threats about negative feedback-- why be so afriad of it, let yourself refrain from leaving rightly deserved feedback early on. That might have helped people sooner. And if I was Sal, I would view threats to leave negative feedback as helpful, as it meant that I had more time to run my scam, move money around etc. I'm sure Sal is more than happy to have $1100 & the negative feedback than he would be to have neither.
Sal is clearly the bad guy in this, and Justin clearly is the good guy. But Justin and others should pay more heed to warrning signs of fraud, avoid antogonizing obvious criminals, and trust their gut when it's yelling "no."
What do you mean-- the percent of all taxes paid, or the tax rate paid by corporations; right now, your post is rather ambiguous. That lead to start typing the text below.
No, I didn't know that, and it's certainly completely untrue. If corporations paid 5% of their revenue in taxes, that would be a very high number since net margins are typically 10%; you non-Math majors, that means the income tax rate would be 5%/10%=50%, a very high number.
Regardless, even if corporations went from paying 50% of all taxes to 5%, I don't think it happened over a period of 5 years! There may be some basis to your numbers, but I'm skeptical either way, and other readers should be equally wary. Just because you read something doesn't make it true, and try to have a first-source reference when citing "facts."
Of course it's redundant, that's the joke! Are you related to the guy who moderated this "informative?"
This site is getting a little slow, so here it is:
:)
NASA Preps Mars Underground Mole
Posted by michael on Friday July 16, @08:45PM
from the better-hope-they-don't-strike-oil dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "People at NASA never cease to surprise me. Searching for water or presence of past life of Mars obviously needs drilling beneath the surface. So NASA is developing the Mars Underground Mole (MUM), based on a previous device used for the European Beagle 2 mission. But here is the twist. MUM will include sensors which were previously used to collect spectral imagery of Earth from pilotless aircrafts, especially Hawaii, according to NASA. While the Mole will stay on the surface on Mars and drill up to 5 meters deep, it will transmit data via a fiber optic cable to a digital array scanning interferometer (DASI). And the spectral images produced by the DASI will enable researchers to identify possible water, ice, organics and minerals under the surface on Mars. And this MUM will be a small one, weighing less than a kilogram for a length of only 50 centimeters. For more details and pictures about MUM, please read this overview."
It's really not complicated. I stated P/S because that what I meant to do; the earnings part of price/earnings is easily manipulated, and when a company is restating earnings, it's probably not the best measure of a company. I prefer to look at price/sales, sales growth, and a guess of a growing company's eventual margins. I think it's a good way of estimating what the earnings will be in a few years. Sales numbers are much harder to mess with, as a 10% change in revenue recognition will completely wipe-out earnings. The myopic focus on P/E is part of the reason companies cook their books.
anyways, I was trying to point that right now Red Hat has low sales, and their margins are unlikely to improve much because their costs (mostly labor) will scale with their revenue. Many old-line companies are like this, such as Ford Motor Company & Apple. OTOH, pure software companies who make their money more from licenses than services (think Oracle and Microsoft and Adobe and Yahoo!) saw their net margins improve substantially as they grew in size. This is why Amazon is trying to get more 3rd party sales (high gross margins) as part of their sales mix to accompany their own sales (low gross margins).
In short, I don't really care what Red Hat's P/E is right now; I'm more interested in what their earnings will be in 5 years, at which point the P/E will probably be 15-30. Since their margins aren't ever going to be great, they'll need a ton of top-line growth. The P/S will probably be 4:1 eventually (based on net margins of 12-25%), which means they'll have to quintuple their sales, to $750 million. That's like 50% annual growth, and I don't think they can pull it off.
Rad Hat has annual revenue of less than $150 million. And a market cap just south of $3 Billion. A price/sales of 20. I'm sure Red Hat is a good business, and will continue to grow, but they have to grow a lot to justify that price. And since much of their revenue is for service, their costs will grow as their sales grow (in contrast to Microsoft's Windows monopoly, which requires very few marginal expenses for each sale). Nice company, can't imagine their stock will be much higher in 5 years.
I think it's already legal, DCMA notwithstanding. I'm sure there are many illegal ways to circumvent effective DVD copying (what's the current status of that anyways), but there are legal ones as well. Is buying software that isn't macrovision-enabled illegal?
I mean, I have the right to create a backup under fair-use. I have the right to make a copy for another medium. I'm not attacking the the way the story is posted, but I think it's important to re-iterate that coying your DVDs to another medium is fair-use, and fair-use is legal.
Now, maybe they are in discussions to make it easy. Somehow, I doubt it will be any easier than other methods out there (links anyone?), but it will be sanctioned by the MPAA. This is good, and it shows progress, but the MPAA does not have the power to make things legal or illegal.