Nothing real about Groupon or Zynga has changed that caused their value to decrease 90%; those sorts of swings are entirely driven by the worst type of speculation.
I doubt that speculation reduced Zynga's profits by 95%. Either their costs have soared for some reason, their revenues plummeted or their books were just plain wrong. Or a bit of two or more of those.
I think early speculation on a Google buy out of Groupon propelled their valuation to irrational heights. Reality has been reasserting itself, in a way very reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's Mort, upon Groupon. I thought they had a marginal idea, at best, when I first hear their business model, but I'm just a nobody who said people should be buying Ford stock with every dollar they can lay their hands on, when it was at 89 cents a share in early 2009 (even at today's price of ~$10 a share that's a pretty nifty return.)
Mozilla has their own Javascript engine: SpiderMonkey. It also has a JIT compiler for javascript called TraceMonkey turned on by default since Firefox 3.5.
Thanks. I knew once Mozilla used Microsoft's but didn't know when they switched to using their own.
The barriers to entry in these fields are so low I can't figure these absurd valuations of social media - people on the internet are not just fickle, they're extreme fickle - since there's nothing really to hold them anywhere, not much of a stake.
Now eBay, they're still successful no matter how badly they handle their business, because everyone goes there because everyone is there and no other auction sites have really stuck around to compete with them. But social, who's really nailing their cart to any Social Media horse? Google+ pops up and everyone creates an account, just in case everyone else goes there.
We knew this phenomena back in the days of Fido BBSes (and even before that with message systems on college mainframes in the 1970's.)
I'd bet GM will be making an extra large contribution to Schumer's campaign this year. If Schumer was really serious about doing anything but shaking down GM, he would have introduced legislation prohibiting vehicle tracking. But that's not going to happen obviously.
Nice to see the thinking at GM has survived since the 1980's when "If it sounds like a stupid idea, let's do it" seemed to be the company motto. I don't think there's a need for legislation as present laws, it present laws are properly observed and enforced.
So your idea of competition is: company A invests tons of money in developing something useful (like 3G), company B takes company A's invention and adds ROUND CORNERS, and we let the consumer decide how the money is split up? Sounds unfair, stupid, and ultimately about as anti-competitive as you can get.
Imagine how crippling to the consumer electronics industry it would be if someone held patents on Touch Screen, Power Button, Using Software To Control A Device, Back Lighting, etc. and chose to either not licence it or charge an outrageous licence fee.
That's effectively what we, the consumer, are watching play out here.
Apple is well aware that they won't hold the market captive with their products forever, so they're attempting to strangle competition through legal means, thus protecting their market dominance. Samsung's just getting sucked into the same morass of a game. The only winning parties are the lawyers, who get paid no matter who wins or loses.
...who wants to block sales of a device because it has rounded corners.
The tab ultimately got temporarily banned because of the gallery application: It is not allowed to display thumbnails, that when tapped are displayed fullscreen, where it is then possible to scroll horizontally to the next/previous.
My point is: Apple is a hypocrite. Yes, I know there is no way around RAND patents and that there IS a way around rounded corners, but it's equally absurd.
As a consumer I expect competition to drive the best products in the market, not the courts. Kinda sick of Apple and their behaviour.
Same goes for all these other piddly IP suits which ultimately deprive the consumer.
First off we never did it, secondly we've stopped doing it. If I am ever taken to court for theft that's what I'll try, "Your honor first of all I never stole anything, secondly I just gave it all back and won't do it again".
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to Like it, does it matter?
I think this idea is DOA. A startup vs Bing vs Google. Enough said.
Wrong.
Google appeared on the scene where Yahoo was viewed as the dominant player. Google won their market with a simple, effective, search engine - no garbage ads, results ranked according to search criteria.
This statement "The main obstacle to progress 'seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination,' " is also, IMHO wrong. The main obstacle to progress is the desire to make a whopping big fortune. Google is now as bad as Yahoo was when Google appeared on the scene - people have bought 'words' searches in Google no longer are accurate to what I search for, the first things to pop up are often someone trying to sell something which (often as not) has nothing to do with what I searching for - i.e. try doing some research on crustaceans and I get recommendations on restaurants with crab on the menu.
Another player could march right in and scoop Google, but the first thing they have to do is sacrifice being billionaires. Not many people seem interested in taking on the Search For Profit companies.
Really. Wonder how he's doing on that farm after the Bank Collapse
Probably quite well, since food prices and futures have risen solidly (since he's in Ohio if he's farming wheat, corn, orsoy -- ZW, ZC, ZS -- he's probably pretty happy).
As long as he didn't have a mortgage on his property and his customers paid him for his harvest, that is entirely possible.
During the late 1970's a lot of farmers lost everything, thanks to economic issues in banking (skyrocketing interest rates, double digit inflation, revenues not keeping up with costs)
Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.
The same day you can point a computer to wikipedia and have Lt. Cmdr. Data. And no, Watson doesn't come close. Sure you can throw together some keyword software but to actually parse and understand what a legal text really is about, apply it to your case and give you something like a legal argument would take far more strong AI than what's available.
Chess is in many ways ridiculously simple, the positions are finite, the rules absolute. But your legal case is not exactly like any other legal case and good luck trying to map all the rules like "the right to free speech" but it actually means drawings too and it doesn't mean shouting fire in a crowded theater. Without a huge number of abstract concepts beyond what's in the text itself you'll get nowhere.
The comparison to Chess is to a decision making algorithm capable of sifting through possibly billions of possible iterative paths to pursue, arriving at a few plausible, ranking them according to desired strategy and executing a move -- while practicing law is more often sifting through precedents, looking for those which are relevant, ranking them and making them available.
The abstract part of law comes into play where something is said to be "In the spirit of the law" versus within the technical nature of the law. Laws, particularly those which appear to have loopholes, work on the technical nature of a law, like a piece of code which doesn't have a catch-all "else", i.e. If (i0) do_that(), but i==0 drops through.
The spirit of the law is more interested in Precedent, i.e. "In 2003, Smith vs. Ohio the court decided if (i==0) do_this() was closer to what the spec called for." Technical aspect would be more like, as i==0 is unaccounted for all actions where i==0 are undefined and therefore not covered under the law.
The 2nd amendment is a great example of the battle over Spirit of the Law and Technical Aspect. Ask someone who understands precisely what it says, based upon punctuation or lack of and you'll have a clear definition. Yet it continues to be a most contentious collection of words, around which one of the largest lobbying groups in the country pays the greatest attention to any attempt to interpret another way than their very fixed view. (I'm certain Thomas Jefferson would be aghast at how that played out, particularly with weapons technology as it exists today, but I digress.) You probably can't get all the members of the SCOTUS to agree what it actually means and doesn't mean. So much for lawyers, eh?
Ever notice how few people are really paying attention? How along the campaign trail nobody ever asks an important question like, "Would you oppose an AT&T / T-Mobile merger which really harms competition in the US?"
They had an Ohio farmer on the news, back when W was running for re-election, when asked which was more important, Social Issues or Economic Issues, the farmer said, "As long has be works to block abortion, he doesn't mind if a few eggs get broken." Really. Wonder how he's doing on that farm after the Bank Collapse. When are people going to wake up and realize they have put far too much focus on a social agenda and too little on Business and Economic issues which affect them to more devastating effect?
I suppose someone, somewhere is fine with the merger, as long as their important Social Agenda gets lip service.
And who wins here????? You guessed it, the LAWYERS!!!!
More than any other profession, those who practice law have the ability and influence to assure their lack of competition from computer aplications.
You could write a program to scour a database of every legal decision, even include some fuzzy logic to handle grey areas - at the very least to bring them to your attention, and above all put it on plain english, not that "Lawyer Speak" you see on legal documents (which I'm quite positive are there to baffle and bamboozle the general public) and you would be driven into the dirt for having the audacity to do it.
Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.
The day will come when they won't have a leg to stand on, but as Science Fiction has often charged humanity will discriminate against cyber-persons, you can see the Legal Community are at the forefront.
Imagine if we spent all the money from the war on space exploration. We'd all be able to leave this planet and not have to worry about what happens back on Earth.
Yeah, then we'd be fighting in space.
and keep out of our gated section of the asteroid belt, private space way!
Hey, they tried the Coke & Pepsi can opening in space thing, which was quite a lot more difficult to handle than most people considered. I don't think you can seriously consider space tourism until you have a Space Bar.
The patents in the ITC case are related to ways to transmit multiple services over a wireless network; the format of data packets used for high-speed data transmission; integrating Web browsing into a phone; a way to store and play digital audio; and viewing digital documents using a touch-sensitive display
I wonder how specific these patents are and how similar the Apple products are to them. Did they patent transmitting TCP/IP over wireless on a phone (something obvious), or do they have their own proprietary protocol (less obvious)?
I have a feeling there might be a lot of obscurity involved in this case.
They use programs - which is a pretty evil thing when you get down to it.
Now if Apple used a couple tin cans and a string Samsung wouldn't have a leg to stand on.
Slashdot Mirror
Protecting revenues from sale of SCTV episodes, eh!
Nothing real about Groupon or Zynga has changed that caused their value to decrease 90%; those sorts of swings are entirely driven by the worst type of speculation.
I doubt that speculation reduced Zynga's profits by 95%. Either their costs have soared for some reason, their revenues plummeted or their books were just plain wrong. Or a bit of two or more of those.
I think early speculation on a Google buy out of Groupon propelled their valuation to irrational heights. Reality has been reasserting itself, in a way very reminiscent of Terry Pratchett's Mort, upon Groupon. I thought they had a marginal idea, at best, when I first hear their business model, but I'm just a nobody who said people should be buying Ford stock with every dollar they can lay their hands on, when it was at 89 cents a share in early 2009 (even at today's price of ~$10 a share that's a pretty nifty return.)
Mozilla has their own Javascript engine: SpiderMonkey. It also has a JIT compiler for javascript called TraceMonkey turned on by default since Firefox 3.5.
Thanks. I knew once Mozilla used Microsoft's but didn't know when they switched to using their own.
They make facebook "games".
I.e. Farmville.
I must be jaded.
I must have been around a bit.
I must be a thinking human.
It surprises me in the least.
The barriers to entry in these fields are so low I can't figure these absurd valuations of social media - people on the internet are not just fickle, they're extreme fickle - since there's nothing really to hold them anywhere, not much of a stake.
Now eBay, they're still successful no matter how badly they handle their business, because everyone goes there because everyone is there and no other auction sites have really stuck around to compete with them. But social, who's really nailing their cart to any Social Media horse? Google+ pops up and everyone creates an account, just in case everyone else goes there.
We knew this phenomena back in the days of Fido BBSes (and even before that with message systems on college mainframes in the 1970's.)
Does Mozilla use the same crappy, security weak Microsoft Javascript interpreter, or is it possible to used Google's rewrite of the interpreter?
some more nefarious purposes, explain.
Exposing security holes in Windows. 'nuf said.
I'd bet GM will be making an extra large contribution to Schumer's campaign this year. If Schumer was really serious about doing anything but shaking down GM, he would have introduced legislation prohibiting vehicle tracking. But that's not going to happen obviously.
Nice to see the thinking at GM has survived since the 1980's when "If it sounds like a stupid idea, let's do it" seemed to be the company motto. I don't think there's a need for legislation as present laws, it present laws are properly observed and enforced.
The rapid eye movement, looking from side to side, peeking under things, etc. while out geocaching near guardrails.
So your idea of competition is: company A invests tons of money in developing something useful (like 3G), company B takes company A's invention and adds ROUND CORNERS, and we let the consumer decide how the money is split up? Sounds unfair, stupid, and ultimately about as anti-competitive as you can get.
Imagine how crippling to the consumer electronics industry it would be if someone held patents on Touch Screen, Power Button, Using Software To Control A Device, Back Lighting, etc. and chose to either not licence it or charge an outrageous licence fee.
That's effectively what we, the consumer, are watching play out here.
Apple is well aware that they won't hold the market captive with their products forever, so they're attempting to strangle competition through legal means, thus protecting their market dominance. Samsung's just getting sucked into the same morass of a game. The only winning parties are the lawyers, who get paid no matter who wins or loses.
...who wants to block sales of a device because it has rounded corners.
The tab ultimately got temporarily banned because of the gallery application: It is not allowed to display thumbnails, that when tapped are displayed fullscreen, where it is then possible to scroll horizontally to the next/previous.
My point is: Apple is a hypocrite.
Yes, I know there is no way around RAND patents and that there IS a way around rounded corners, but it's equally absurd.
As a consumer I expect competition to drive the best products in the market, not the courts. Kinda sick of Apple and their behaviour.
Same goes for all these other piddly IP suits which ultimately deprive the consumer.
First off we never did it, secondly we've stopped doing it. If I am ever taken to court for theft that's what I'll try, "Your honor first of all I never stole anything, secondly I just gave it all back and won't do it again".
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to Like it, does it matter?
I'll be moving over to Google+, where I know they won't spy on me. ;) ;)
Makes great science fiction settings.
and then Dr. Fu Barr was chomped by the alien, transmogrified into a hybrid human-alien and started to attack the miners ...
You must provide thrust in accelerate the mass to the appropriate velocity to maintain steady orbit.
Are they kidding?
I think this idea is DOA. A startup vs Bing vs Google. Enough said.
Wrong.
Google appeared on the scene where Yahoo was viewed as the dominant player. Google won their market with a simple, effective, search engine - no garbage ads, results ranked according to search criteria.
This statement "The main obstacle to progress 'seems to be a curious lack of ambition and imagination,' " is also, IMHO wrong. The main obstacle to progress is the desire to make a whopping big fortune. Google is now as bad as Yahoo was when Google appeared on the scene - people have bought 'words' searches in Google no longer are accurate to what I search for, the first things to pop up are often someone trying to sell something which (often as not) has nothing to do with what I searching for - i.e. try doing some research on crustaceans and I get recommendations on restaurants with crab on the menu.
Another player could march right in and scoop Google, but the first thing they have to do is sacrifice being billionaires. Not many people seem interested in taking on the Search For Profit companies.
The broker for those payments isn't PayPal, what a horrible company.
They are idiots, run by the same idiot philosophy which drives eBay - almost no customer service.
Really. Wonder how he's doing on that farm after the Bank Collapse
Probably quite well, since food prices and futures have risen solidly (since he's in Ohio if he's farming wheat, corn, orsoy -- ZW, ZC, ZS -- he's probably pretty happy).
As long as he didn't have a mortgage on his property and his customers paid him for his harvest, that is entirely possible.
During the late 1970's a lot of farmers lost everything, thanks to economic issues in banking (skyrocketing interest rates, double digit inflation, revenues not keeping up with costs)
Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.
The same day you can point a computer to wikipedia and have Lt. Cmdr. Data. And no, Watson doesn't come close. Sure you can throw together some keyword software but to actually parse and understand what a legal text really is about, apply it to your case and give you something like a legal argument would take far more strong AI than what's available.
Chess is in many ways ridiculously simple, the positions are finite, the rules absolute. But your legal case is not exactly like any other legal case and good luck trying to map all the rules like "the right to free speech" but it actually means drawings too and it doesn't mean shouting fire in a crowded theater. Without a huge number of abstract concepts beyond what's in the text itself you'll get nowhere.
The comparison to Chess is to a decision making algorithm capable of sifting through possibly billions of possible iterative paths to pursue, arriving at a few plausible, ranking them according to desired strategy and executing a move -- while practicing law is more often sifting through precedents, looking for those which are relevant, ranking them and making them available.
The abstract part of law comes into play where something is said to be "In the spirit of the law" versus within the technical nature of the law. Laws, particularly those which appear to have loopholes, work on the technical nature of a law, like a piece of code which doesn't have a catch-all "else", i.e. If (i0) do_that(), but i==0 drops through.
The spirit of the law is more interested in Precedent, i.e. "In 2003, Smith vs. Ohio the court decided if (i==0) do_this() was closer to what the spec called for." Technical aspect would be more like, as i==0 is unaccounted for all actions where i==0 are undefined and therefore not covered under the law.
The 2nd amendment is a great example of the battle over Spirit of the Law and Technical Aspect. Ask someone who understands precisely what it says, based upon punctuation or lack of and you'll have a clear definition. Yet it continues to be a most contentious collection of words, around which one of the largest lobbying groups in the country pays the greatest attention to any attempt to interpret another way than their very fixed view. (I'm certain Thomas Jefferson would be aghast at how that played out, particularly with weapons technology as it exists today, but I digress.) You probably can't get all the members of the SCOTUS to agree what it actually means and doesn't mean. So much for lawyers, eh?
For all your one-stop shopping needs.
Ever notice how few people are really paying attention? How along the campaign trail nobody ever asks an important question like, "Would you oppose an AT&T / T-Mobile merger which really harms competition in the US?"
They had an Ohio farmer on the news, back when W was running for re-election, when asked which was more important, Social Issues or Economic Issues, the farmer said, "As long has be works to block abortion, he doesn't mind if a few eggs get broken." Really. Wonder how he's doing on that farm after the Bank Collapse. When are people going to wake up and realize they have put far too much focus on a social agenda and too little on Business and Economic issues which affect them to more devastating effect?
I suppose someone, somewhere is fine with the merger, as long as their important Social Agenda gets lip service.
And who wins here????? You guessed it, the LAWYERS!!!!
More than any other profession, those who practice law have the ability and influence to assure their lack of competition from computer aplications.
You could write a program to scour a database of every legal decision, even include some fuzzy logic to handle grey areas - at the very least to bring them to your attention, and above all put it on plain english, not that "Lawyer Speak" you see on legal documents (which I'm quite positive are there to baffle and bamboozle the general public) and you would be driven into the dirt for having the audacity to do it.
Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.
The day will come when they won't have a leg to stand on, but as Science Fiction has often charged humanity will discriminate against cyber-persons, you can see the Legal Community are at the forefront.
Imagine if we spent all the money from the war on space exploration. We'd all be able to leave this planet and not have to worry about what happens back on Earth.
Yeah, then we'd be fighting in space.
and keep out of our gated section of the asteroid belt, private space way!
Orbital beer runs?
Awesome!
Hey, they tried the Coke & Pepsi can opening in space thing, which was quite a lot more difficult to handle than most people considered. I don't think you can seriously consider space tourism until you have a Space Bar.
They are going to have a hard time finding a judge or jury who isn't addicted to some Apple product methinks.
we had to dismiss half the jury for texting during the trial.
FTFA:
The patents in the ITC case are related to ways to transmit multiple services over a wireless network; the format of data packets used for high-speed data transmission; integrating Web browsing into a phone; a way to store and play digital audio; and viewing digital documents using a touch-sensitive display
I wonder how specific these patents are and how similar the Apple products are to them. Did they patent transmitting TCP/IP over wireless on a phone (something obvious), or do they have their own proprietary protocol (less obvious)?
I have a feeling there might be a lot of obscurity involved in this case.
They use programs - which is a pretty evil thing when you get down to it.
Now if Apple used a couple tin cans and a string Samsung wouldn't have a leg to stand on.