The CRC was what I used in High School; later I graduated to the Handbook of Mathematical Functions by Abramowitz and Stegun which is far more comprehensive. I still have a copy on my bookshelf in pretty good condition.
I knew that the tables were produced during the WPA, however I never knew the details of the process. After computers came out I used A&S as a source of well documented algorithms.
Later, as I became more theoretical I started using similar collections of Fourier transforms etc.
" The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral."
Nope. Not even close.
If a company buys, say, a truck or a machine tool, there's a completely different kind of value that gets into that calculation: how much money you'll make out of using it. You know, since you claim to have some clue of economics, that's what ROI and ammortization calculations are all about. E.g., when Intel wants to build a new 65nm fab, the question is "how many chips we'll produce with it, at what running costs, and how much we can sell those for?"
Sorry, but the exact same ROI analysis is applicable to the truck as the share of stock, or anything else that you care to invest in. All are investments that are expected to yield a certain return. You don't purchase either unless you expect to make a profit. If you think they are different, you have no understanding of the subject, period.
I mean, you claim that my theory about the money coming from the shareholders themselves counts as "crack-brained wacko theories".
The money to buy the truck comes from the investors in the truck too. What is the difference? NONE.
But nevertheless, at the end of the day, that's where the share value increase really came from: from Jack and Joe's pocket, _not_ from the corporation making a profit.
Rubbish. Your example, Microsoft is paying out billions in dividends. Other companies use profits to buy back shares they issued. Companies routinely use profits to acquire other companies, buying shares from stockholders. All of this activity is funded from profits and are the primary mechanisms for returning profits to investors. Wht do you think companies do with profits? Just stuff them into a matress?
Look at something transparent like utilities for example - the value of their stock is tied entirely to the dividends they pay, and the relative rate of the payment of the dividends compared to interest rates on fixed investments.
Get a book on finance. Take a course on economics.
The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral.
The actual price is a gambling and hype game that has _nothing_ to do with that real value of the assets behind it
That is totally a misconception. The long term market value of a share of stock is a function of a) the book value of a company - i.e. the value of its assets + b) the expected return of its assets discounted relative to the value of placing the same capital in a fixed return investment minus a risk penalty. Investment valuation these days is a very quantitative science and applies across all financial instruments.
Sure there are distortions of this - that's when you start hearing things like 'the market is oversold' or 'we are in a bubble'. And not very soon after that stock prices come back to what they should be.
if it came to liquidating the company to recover your money from those assets, you'd be looking at a monumental loss.
Maybe in some internet bubble that is the case. But for stocks that maintain a well understood business model that is just not the case. In fact it is not uncommon for a company that is just ekeing along and not making a significant profit for its stock to be at book value. That was certainly the case for say Apple Computer before it hit on the iPod. Now that Apple is returning a good profit, the value of the stock is up appropriately.
The stock market as a whole is basically one big pot that people thrown their money in. It goes up as a whole as long as more people stay convinced to keep throwing more and more money into it.
You have zero point zero knowledge of investment economics and are just running your mouth off based on some crack-brained wacko theories that have no factual basis. In reality there are many competitive investments to the stock market that serve to keep prices more or less in touch with the real value of the investment.
A makes profit at B's expense, while B gives more and gets nothing in return.
Sorry, but that just doesn't happen in an aggregate sense for B will soon be out of that business if it can't make any money from that tranasction, why should it participate?
Very nice, but in most cases the CEO's salary is a negligible fraction of his compensation.
until very recently accounting for options as expenses was practically unheard of in Silicon Valley
Right. But now it is the normal practice to include options as expenses. Wall Street and the FASB are pretty much forcing accounting of options as expenses now. So CEO compensation IS being treated as an expense.
While CEO salaries are going up faster than lower level workers, the CEO salary is a cost to the corporation subtracted from the calculation of the amount of profits.
Corporate profits are used in a number of ways - funding acquisitions, paying dividends, buying back stock, etc. Generally profits end up in the hands of the stockholders in the form of increased dividends or stock value.
Absolutely correct. Who cares what the rate per person is - an innovation is not something that is consumed or used by an individual, it is an asset to the entire race as a whole.
Absolutely stupid idea to try to measure innovation on a per capita basis. Whoever came up with that needs a good swift kick in the butt.
The NIST report didn't say optical media were inheritantly unreliable at all; it said that there were big differences in media quality, and that storage conditions were important.
Personally I think hard drives are the pits for data reliability. The drives are good for MAYBE 3 years, subject to all sorts of electrical failures, and even if you have a RAID you still can lose the whole thing due to a {virus,controller,power supply,filesystem,usererror}.
I use redundant MAM-A gold stabilized CD-Rs for my data which were the most stable option in the NIST report. That works great for everything I have including digital photos.
DV might be a pain with CD-R so I would probably start with staggered redundant sliver DVD-Rs until I saw some more data on the lifetime of this media.
No way would I consider hard drives an acceptable archival solution.
but very little in terms of actual penalties will be imposed.
So you are saying that these guys don't view losing gobs of money as an actual penalty?
Don't forget that Spitzer also has a knack of driving down the stock price of the companies he goes after, so these guys are getting hit personally too.
Thank God. I really doubt if you could reproduce the quality of a good B&W film in a large format view camera with anything available from the digital world.
Does anyone have any legal pointers to what Yahoo! was obligated to do (if anything)? I've tried looking for info on the relevant US law or case law, but I've not seen anything.
Part of the point of the article is that Yahoo was not doing anything illegal.
However advertisers with Yahoo have a different standard - they don't want their advertising dollars used to support these sorts of chat rooms, and have that specifically placed terms in their contracts stating this.
So while Yahoo may not be in criminal trouble, it is going to get hammered by advertisers because Yahoo violated its advertising contracts.
The Sci-Fi channel doesn't broadcast in HD, and Firefly was recorded in 16:9, and is as well quite economical as these things go. It is one of the better DVD packages out there for SciFi fans.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows 24 Hr Vulnerabilty Patch - Would It Help?
Immediate Answer Without Thinking: No.
Answer After Thinking A Little About It: The question is nonsense because it is based on a silly premise.
Answer After Thinking More About It: Waste of Time Because No Matter What You Do Windows is Going To Remain the Giant Petri Dish of The Internet.
Bad news all around
Not sure what planet Rob and Zonk are from, but to most of us this is good news.
Nice try, but it reads Bad news for them all around
The CRC was what I used in High School; later I graduated to the Handbook of Mathematical Functions by Abramowitz and Stegun which is far more comprehensive. I still have a copy on my bookshelf in pretty good condition.
I knew that the tables were produced during the WPA, however I never knew the details of the process. After computers came out I used A&S as a source of well documented algorithms.
Later, as I became more theoretical I started using similar collections of Fourier transforms etc.
This article sure brings back memories.
So did PC World publish the half-life of this when it was connected to the Internet, apropos the previous story?
" The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral."
Nope. Not even close.
If a company buys, say, a truck or a machine tool, there's a completely different kind of value that gets into that calculation: how much money you'll make out of using it. You know, since you claim to have some clue of economics, that's what ROI and ammortization calculations are all about. E.g., when Intel wants to build a new 65nm fab, the question is "how many chips we'll produce with it, at what running costs, and how much we can sell those for?"
Sorry, but the exact same ROI analysis is applicable to the truck as the share of stock, or anything else that you care to invest in. All are investments that are expected to yield a certain return. You don't purchase either unless you expect to make a profit. If you think they are different, you have no understanding of the subject, period.
I mean, you claim that my theory about the money coming from the shareholders themselves counts as "crack-brained wacko theories".
The money to buy the truck comes from the investors in the truck too. What is the difference? NONE.
But nevertheless, at the end of the day, that's where the share value increase really came from: from Jack and Joe's pocket, _not_ from the corporation making a profit.
Rubbish. Your example, Microsoft is paying out billions in dividends. Other companies use profits to buy back shares they issued. Companies routinely use profits to acquire other companies, buying shares from stockholders. All of this activity is funded from profits and are the primary mechanisms for returning profits to investors. Wht do you think companies do with profits? Just stuff them into a matress?
Look at something transparent like utilities for example - the value of their stock is tied entirely to the dividends they pay, and the relative rate of the payment of the dividends compared to interest rates on fixed investments.
Get a book on finance. Take a course on economics.
The value of a share is decided by how much you wish to pay for it.
True for any good or service, concrete or ephemeral.
The actual price is a gambling and hype game that has _nothing_ to do with that real value of the assets behind it
That is totally a misconception. The long term market value of a share of stock is a function of a) the book value of a company - i.e. the value of its assets + b) the expected return of its assets discounted relative to the value of placing the same capital in a fixed return investment minus a risk penalty. Investment valuation these days is a very quantitative science and applies across all financial instruments.
Sure there are distortions of this - that's when you start hearing things like 'the market is oversold' or 'we are in a bubble'. And not very soon after that stock prices come back to what they should be.
if it came to liquidating the company to recover your money from those assets, you'd be looking at a monumental loss.
Maybe in some internet bubble that is the case. But for stocks that maintain a well understood business model that is just not the case. In fact it is not uncommon for a company that is just ekeing along and not making a significant profit for its stock to be at book value. That was certainly the case for say Apple Computer before it hit on the iPod. Now that Apple is returning a good profit, the value of the stock is up appropriately.
The stock market as a whole is basically one big pot that people thrown their money in. It goes up as a whole as long as more people stay convinced to keep throwing more and more money into it.
You have zero point zero knowledge of investment economics and are just running your mouth off based on some crack-brained wacko theories that have no factual basis. In reality there are many competitive investments to the stock market that serve to keep prices more or less in touch with the real value of the investment.
A makes profit at B's expense, while B gives more and gets nothing in return.
Sorry, but that just doesn't happen in an aggregate sense for B will soon be out of that business if it can't make any money from that tranasction, why should it participate?
Go take a course in economics.
Very nice, but in most cases the CEO's salary is a negligible fraction of his compensation.
until very recently accounting for options as expenses was practically unheard of in Silicon Valley
Right. But now it is the normal practice to include options as expenses. Wall Street and the FASB are pretty much forcing accounting of options as expenses now. So CEO compensation IS being treated as an expense.
So what exactly is your point?
Where are those profits going?
While CEO salaries are going up faster than lower level workers, the CEO salary is a cost to the corporation subtracted from the calculation of the amount of profits.
Corporate profits are used in a number of ways - funding acquisitions, paying dividends, buying back stock, etc. Generally profits end up in the hands of the stockholders in the form of increased dividends or stock value.
Absolutely correct. Who cares what the rate per person is - an innovation is not something that is consumed or used by an individual, it is an asset to the entire race as a whole.
Absolutely stupid idea to try to measure innovation on a per capita basis. Whoever came up with that needs a good swift kick in the butt.
If your 2.4 GHz CPU put out any significant amount of microwave radiation cordless phone and WiFi users surely would have noticed by now.
Strictly a sequential access device. OK for backups, but no good for database work.
Huh, Pi is irrational...
Not only that, but it is transcendental.
So my cheque for my failed DeskStar drives is going to be funded by Microsoft. Shweeeeeet!
Don't worry. Binary XML will soak up far more compute cycles that CPU developers can possibly invent over the next 10 years.
It only really works well with IE...
Like we need more Zombie movies on the Sci-Fi channel.
"How do other Slashdotters back up their important data?"
I encode it into articles that I place on usenet, and then let google act as my archiver.
The NIST report didn't say optical media were inheritantly unreliable at all; it said that there were big differences in media quality, and that storage conditions were important.
Personally I think hard drives are the pits for data reliability. The drives are good for MAYBE 3 years, subject to all sorts of electrical failures, and even if you have a RAID you still can lose the whole thing due to a {virus,controller,power supply,filesystem,usererror}.
I use redundant MAM-A gold stabilized CD-Rs for my data which were the most stable option in the NIST report. That works great for everything I have including digital photos.
DV might be a pain with CD-R so I would probably start with staggered redundant sliver DVD-Rs until I saw some more data on the lifetime of this media.
No way would I consider hard drives an acceptable archival solution.
but very little in terms of actual penalties will be imposed.
So you are saying that these guys don't view losing gobs of money as an actual penalty?
Don't forget that Spitzer also has a knack of driving down the stock price of the companies he goes after, so these guys are getting hit personally too.
I think there are electronic systems that are traceable enought for patent claims, but I sort of suspect a Wiki isn't one of of them.
I run a Wiki on a personal web site. So long as there is a netorked computer nearby I'm in business.
Aren't file system scalability issues why people start using databases?
Sounds like a software engineering issue.
Thank God. I really doubt if you could reproduce the quality of a good B&W film in a large format view camera with anything available from the digital world.
Does anyone have any legal pointers to what Yahoo! was obligated to do (if anything)? I've tried looking for info on the relevant US law or case law, but I've not seen anything.
Part of the point of the article is that Yahoo was not doing anything illegal.
However advertisers with Yahoo have a different standard - they don't want their advertising dollars used to support these sorts of chat rooms, and have that specifically placed terms in their contracts stating this.
So while Yahoo may not be in criminal trouble, it is going to get hammered by advertisers because Yahoo violated its advertising contracts.
Mod Parent up --
The Sci-Fi channel doesn't broadcast in HD, and Firefly was recorded in 16:9, and is as well quite economical as these things go. It is one of the better DVD packages out there for SciFi fans.