Thanks for the advice, but I did read the article. There's a significant difference between a presentation to financial analysts and a shareholder conference call.
The former is just a place for execs to try to convince wall street that their company is still great, and their ratings should be held constant or increased.
The latter is a serious matter with legal ramifications for making knowingly incorrect statements.
I see you're British, so perhaps that nuance of American business was lost on you.
In recent years, certain "open source" software business models have evolved into a growing challenge to our license-based software model. Open source commonly refers to software whose source code is subject to a license allowing it to be modified, combined with other software and redistributed, subject to restrictions set forth in the license. A number of commercial firms compete with us using an open source business model by modifying and then distributing open source software to end users at nominal cost and earning revenue on complementary services and products. These firms do not have to bear the full costs of research and development for the software. A prominent example of open source software is the Linux operating system. Although we believe our products provide customers with significant advantages in security and productivity, and generally have a lower total cost of ownership than open source software, the popularization of the open source software model continues to pose a significant challenge to our business model, including continuing efforts by proponents of open source software to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of open source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, sales of our products may decline, we may have to reduce the prices we charge for our products, and revenue and operating margins may consequently decline.
It mentions overall Intellectual Property rights as a risk as well, but does not note any offenders, nor any plans to mitigate the problem via lawsuits.
We may not be able to protect our intellectual property rights against piracy, infringement of our patents by third parties, or declining legal protection for intellectual property. We defend our intellectual property rights and combat unlicensed copying and use of software and intellectual property rights through a variety of techniques. Preventing unauthorized use or infringement of our rights is difficult. Piracy of our products represents a loss of revenue to us. While this adversely affects U.S. revenue, the impact on revenue from outside the United States is more significant, particularly in countries where laws are less protective of intellectual property rights. Similarly, the absence of harmonized patent laws makes it more difficult to ensure consistent respect for patent rights. Future legal changes could make this even more challenging. Throughout the world, we actively educate consumers about the benefits of licensing genuine products and obtaining indemnification benefits for intellectual property risks, and we educate lawmakers about the advantages of a business climate where intellectual property rights are protected. However, continued educational and enforcement efforts may fail to enhance revenue. Reductions in the legal protection for software intellectual property rights or compliance with additional intellectual property obligations impacting the rights of software developers could both adversely affect revenue.
I see nothing here that indicates a belief that Open Source and Linux in particular are nothing more than a threat to the business model, so I still think his comments are just FUD.
The fact that the business failed because it was automated is a fault in theer business practice. It is not the fault of the customers. The customer can NOT know what the business has done or what deals the business has made, or what special promotions the business is running, or a myriad of other things.
Speaking as a business owner, I agree. The real response shouldn't be to burn credit cards and good will, it should just analyze it's pre-shipping checks, and it's shopping cart tests.
If amazon even had a simple system that required manual price-check on randomly selected 1% of goods that are on promotional price, it would have been caught in an hour, before anything shipped.
If you got a notice right now saying you were undercharged 10,000 dollars for your car, would you pay?
Don't give Detroit any ideas. They might be desperate enough to do it.
I have read some truly terrible ideas on this website. (Usually followed by a chorus of inexperienced idiots blindly saying how great they are, while all the skilled and experienced people rolled their eyes.)
This is one of the worst ideas I have ever read. Intentionally introducing a large and unpredictable delay into the receipt of all e-mail.
What's next, a recommendation to cut down on telemarketing by setting your PBX to automatically disconnect 50% of all incoming calls?
It was only after I bid that I noticed the "No pick-up, postage only" clause in the description. It made me wonder why a seller that was apparently less than 10 km away wasn't prepared to let me know what they look like or where they are, yet they wanted my address.
I can think of a few possibilities:
1) Seller cares about his time, and doesn't feel like trying to match schedules with random strangers who may or may not be timely.
2) Seller cares about his safety and privacy, and doesn't want some stranger scoping out his place to rob it.
3) Seller wants to charge $30 for shipping when item costs $20 to ship, netting an extra $10.
4) Seller is afraid that buyer might be a paranoid slashtastic moron, who thinks that every single fucking thing in life is a trap.
I'm not a crook, but there isn't a chance in hell I would agree to in-person pickups.
I guess it's possible to read bias into it, but I think that's a bit silly. It asks about poker in all the different venues where it is routinely offered in America.
If you just ask about the Internet, you aren't going to be able to differentiate between people who want all gambling banned, and those who just see the Internet as being different.
Additionally, this poll was not about online GAMBLING, it was about poker in particular. Most poker players are simply trying to get an exemption for games of skill and will grudgingly live in a world without blackjack and craps, even if our inner libertarians think those games must be legal.
I had some problems where they sold me a phone with a $100 rebate that didn't exist in their system.
I got resolution by: a) Writing a letter to the president of customer service (Sorry, I don't seem to have the name and address on this computer.) b) Complaining to the BBB
They wound up crediting my account with the $100 rebate twice, once for each method of complaint. I didn't stop them, because I figured it was just compensation for the absurd amount of time it took to get it all sorted.
I got better efforts out of customer service by walking into a local T-Mobile store, where I'd purchased the phone, and asking the sales representatives to assist me with my issue, but those efforts got no results.
There are a lot of comments in these threads from people who argue that we shouldn't do anything until we have a known problem. But as any decent tech knows, that's not how you create a reliable system.
If your goal is 24/7/365 operation (and that's surely our goal for society), then you create redundant, reliable alternatives. If those alternatives aren't needed, great. But without those alternatives, you're betting the whole of society on a single point of failure.
The idea that we should wait to develop them is flawed. Do you wait until your net connection goes down before you install a secondary line? Do you wait until your first data center burns down before you install a backup?
The idea that climate and energy requiret less careful treatment than a corporate data center is absurd.
Getting into the preferred group wasn't a huge challenge. If they could find your e-mail address anywhere in their source code you got an invite. I think you also got one if they had your name on file for pretty much any other reason as well.
I actually got invited in at two different e-mail addresses, so I'm sure that half the world did as well.
It's entertainment with an attached fee. And like every other form of entertainment in the history of man, some people do it too much. Sucks to be them, but let the rest of us have our fun.
First, this proves that the government's infamous "Carnivore" either does not exist or does not work. Which is nice.
Not at all. Do you really think the spy agencies would publicly reveal one of their most valuable assets, just to get some stupid DoJ pet project finished?
This does nothing to confirm or deny the existence of echelon/carnivore/any other massive government snoop operations.
I work in finance, and we essentially let our users be. I believe there's something like a 1GB/message limit, and no mailbox limits at all.
Mailbox/Message limits create enormous hassles for employees, and also create data recovery problems (do you REALLY want potentially critical data in a pst file on somebody's laptop?).
The lost productivity from making information workers circumvent these measures meant that it was a false economy. I ended up giving a recommendation that we increase the per-person overhead cost of e-mail slightly, by massively increasing the available storage space.
It's been several years since I started recommending this policy, and it has panned out extremely favorably.
Abuse has been extremely uncommon, possibly because employees are all aware that corporate e-mail communications are all subject to a ton of different laws.
Ruby is fantastic. Rails will probably be fantastic in about two years. Right now it's an immature product that gets in your way constantly, if you do anything seriously involved in it. Rails error messages range from "moderately unhelpful" to "holy shit obscure".
It seems that premature rails hype is leading to coders looking at it, and deciding that ruby is a shitty, inflexible, immature language, when they're blaming the wrong thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the advice, but I did read the article. There's a significant difference between a presentation to financial analysts and a shareholder conference call.
The former is just a place for execs to try to convince wall street that their company is still great, and their ratings should be held constant or increased.
The latter is a serious matter with legal ramifications for making knowingly incorrect statements.
I see you're British, so perhaps that nuance of American business was lost on you.
It mentions overall Intellectual Property rights as a risk as well, but does not note any offenders, nor any plans to mitigate the problem via lawsuits.
I see nothing here that indicates a belief that Open Source and Linux in particular are nothing more than a threat to the business model, so I still think his comments are just FUD.
2. Ballers is wrong and are lying to his shareholders.
My understanding was that he is saying this in the media only.
If he's been saying it on shareholder conference calls, and putting it in the reports, then it should be considered real threat.
It's just a FUD campaign.
If they had a real argument they would have taken it to court by now. Failure to do so would be contrary to MSFT shareholder interests.
The fact that the business failed because it was automated is a fault in theer business practice. It is not the fault of the customers. The customer can NOT know what the business has done or what deals the business has made, or what special promotions the business is running, or a myriad of other things.
Speaking as a business owner, I agree. The real response shouldn't be to burn credit cards and good will, it should just analyze it's pre-shipping checks, and it's shopping cart tests.
If amazon even had a simple system that required manual price-check on randomly selected 1% of goods that are on promotional price, it would have been caught in an hour, before anything shipped.
If you got a notice right now saying you were undercharged 10,000 dollars for your car, would you pay?
Don't give Detroit any ideas. They might be desperate enough to do it.
I have read some truly terrible ideas on this website. (Usually followed by a chorus of inexperienced idiots blindly saying how great they are, while all the skilled and experienced people rolled their eyes.)
This is one of the worst ideas I have ever read. Intentionally introducing a large and unpredictable delay into the receipt of all e-mail.
What's next, a recommendation to cut down on telemarketing by setting your PBX to automatically disconnect 50% of all incoming calls?
It was only after I bid that I noticed the "No pick-up, postage only" clause in the description. It made me wonder why a seller that was apparently less than 10 km away wasn't prepared to let me know what they look like or where they are, yet they wanted my address.
I can think of a few possibilities:
1) Seller cares about his time, and doesn't feel like trying to match schedules with random strangers who may or may not be timely.
2) Seller cares about his safety and privacy, and doesn't want some stranger scoping out his place to rob it.
3) Seller wants to charge $30 for shipping when item costs $20 to ship, netting an extra $10.
4) Seller is afraid that buyer might be a paranoid slashtastic moron, who thinks that every single fucking thing in life is a trap.
I'm not a crook, but there isn't a chance in hell I would agree to in-person pickups.
I guess it's possible to read bias into it, but I think that's a bit silly. It asks about poker in all the different venues where it is routinely offered in America.
If you just ask about the Internet, you aren't going to be able to differentiate between people who want all gambling banned, and those who just see the Internet as being different.
Additionally, this poll was not about online GAMBLING, it was about poker in particular. Most poker players are simply trying to get an exemption for games of skill and will grudgingly live in a world without blackjack and craps, even if our inner libertarians think those games must be legal.
Question #1: "Should the federal government prevent Americans from playing poker?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
5% 90% 4.5% 0.4%
49 868 43 4
Question #2: "Should the federal government prevent Americans from playing poker in Las Vegas?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
5.5% 90.7% 3.3% 0.5%
53 874 32 5
Question #3: "Should the federal government prevent Americans from playing poker in Casinos on Indian Reservations?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
8.3% 86.6% 4.6% 0.5%
80 835 44 5
Question #4: "Should the federal government prevent Americans from playing poker for charitable fundraisers?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
8.1% 86.9% 4.4% 0.6%
78 838 42 6
-Page 1 of 2-
Question #5: "Should the federal government prevent Americans from playing poker on the Internet?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
18% 74.2% 7.4% 0.4%
174 715 71 4
Question #6: "Should the federal government prevent Americans from playing poker in the privacy of your own home?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
3% 94.7% 1.8% 0.5%
29 913 17 5
Question #7: "Do you believe the federal government should be managing Americans gambling behaviors on the Internet?"
YES NO DON'T KNOW REFUSED
26.9% 66.1% 6.4% 0.6%
259 637 62 6
Not to mention that 10.1 wasn't a full-cost upgrade. I think it was $10 or $20.
There's a flaw in your proposal.
I've received very similar results by being polite but firm.
Never overestimate the power of being an ass. There's usually a better way.
I had some problems where they sold me a phone with a $100 rebate that didn't exist in their system.
I got resolution by:
a) Writing a letter to the president of customer service (Sorry, I don't seem to have the name and address on this computer.)
b) Complaining to the BBB
They wound up crediting my account with the $100 rebate twice, once for each method of complaint. I didn't stop them, because I figured it was just compensation for the absurd amount of time it took to get it all sorted.
I got better efforts out of customer service by walking into a local T-Mobile store, where I'd purchased the phone, and asking the sales representatives to assist me with my issue, but those efforts got no results.
There are a lot of comments in these threads from people who argue that we shouldn't do anything until we have a known problem. But as any decent tech knows, that's not how you create a reliable system.
If your goal is 24/7/365 operation (and that's surely our goal for society), then you create redundant, reliable alternatives. If those alternatives aren't needed, great. But without those alternatives, you're betting the whole of society on a single point of failure.
The idea that we should wait to develop them is flawed. Do you wait until your net connection goes down before you install a secondary line? Do you wait until your first data center burns down before you install a backup?
The idea that climate and energy requiret less careful treatment than a corporate data center is absurd.
Getting into the preferred group wasn't a huge challenge. If they could find your e-mail address anywhere in their source code you got an invite. I think you also got one if they had your name on file for pretty much any other reason as well.
I actually got invited in at two different e-mail addresses, so I'm sure that half the world did as well.
I'm quite glad I didn't follow your advice during the RHAT and LNUX IPOs.
Since when is gambling a problem?
It's entertainment with an attached fee. And like every other form of entertainment in the history of man, some people do it too much. Sucks to be them, but let the rest of us have our fun.
I stopped using mine years ago.
In some sort of distilled form, absolutely. After all, this is prep for new legislation, and new court battles.
And if they used (secret government operation) to get the data, it'd be real hard to explain where the summary came from.
Not at all. Do you really think the spy agencies would publicly reveal one of their most valuable assets, just to get some stupid DoJ pet project finished?
This does nothing to confirm or deny the existence of echelon/carnivore/any other massive government snoop operations.
I work in finance, and we essentially let our users be. I believe there's something like a 1GB/message limit, and no mailbox limits at all.
Mailbox/Message limits create enormous hassles for employees, and also create data recovery problems (do you REALLY want potentially critical data in a pst file on somebody's laptop?).
The lost productivity from making information workers circumvent these measures meant that it was a false economy. I ended up giving a recommendation that we increase the per-person overhead cost of e-mail slightly, by massively increasing the available storage space.
It's been several years since I started recommending this policy, and it has panned out extremely favorably.
Abuse has been extremely uncommon, possibly because employees are all aware that corporate e-mail communications are all subject to a ton of different laws.
I disagree with that statement thoroughly.
Ruby is fantastic. Rails will probably be fantastic in about two years. Right now it's an immature product that gets in your way constantly, if you do anything seriously involved in it. Rails error messages range from "moderately unhelpful" to "holy shit obscure".
It seems that premature rails hype is leading to coders looking at it, and deciding that ruby is a shitty, inflexible, immature language, when they're blaming the wrong thing.
Well, Sarah L. Voisin is real, and is a staff photographer for the Washington Post.
flamebait? It's a site with hundred's of thousands of users, and yet I know exactly who moderated this message.
Grow up, Steve.
Let me phrase this differently:
AOL and Yahoo sell mail service. That service is supposed to allow reasonably reliable delivery of the mail that people want.
In the course of fighting spam, AOL and Yahoo have become incompetent, and started nixing opt-in marketing messages.
They decided that the most profitable way to solve this would be to charge senders to allow mail that never should've been blocked in the first place.
I have a lot of trouble seeing this in a positive light. To me it seem like Yahoo/AOL is simply monitizing their incompetance.