You'd have to ask them about their actual costs and levels of use, but hosting companies charge about the same for Windows hosting as they do Linux hosting:
They are decreasing the shares outstanding, which is slightly different than decreasing the float. Decreasing the float does not change the number of shares used to calculate eps, it just changes the number of shares trading on the open market.
Things like an insider (who is subject to special rules) buying or selling the stock can impact the float, independent of a share buyback.
It is a way of increasing the value of each outstanding share without imposing tax consequences on the various shareholders. I guess that might not be a good reason (if you think that they could do a better job putting the money to work than shareholders). As much as anything, it looks to me like they are growing about as fast as they can given their size, so shedding the excess cash to shareholders actually makes sense.
(they are growing their absolute revenues quite a bit faster than Google, hardly the sign of a quick death:
Microsoft's revenue growth also appears to be a little more efficient than Google's (but not by a large amount). People bat around what a threat Google is to Microsoft. Microsoft is a much bigger threat to Google.)
It isn't clear that they can spend a great deal more money on productive things. They currently spend more than $8 billion on R&D (In addition to the more than $18 billion they spend just operating the company) and still have income of more than $1 billion a month (and it is growing at a nice clip):
They already have an enormous R&D operation and would need to make massive additions (they are growing it anyway...) to increase spending in a way that would cut into the income.
The share price doesn't make any damn sense to me. The current Vista ads look a lot like a sign of weakness, but I have trouble worrying about that, as the 'weakness' Microsoft is showing looks an awful lot like a strength that most other companies in any other industry would love to have (i.e., the biggest issue Microsoft has is that they are being compared to Microsoft).
It is a poorly stated (and perhaps framed) argument.
It might be a stretch, but the point I would not say I was reaching for is that reducing your secondary workload by 80% doesn't necessarily get you more intensive per-person screening over doing nothing. If you are secondary screening is being expended on false positives, it can make sense to do a less intensive primary screening.
(putting everybody through metal detectors and x-rays for bags has high up front cost but it seems pretty likely to deliver more security per labor dollar than doing racial profiling and manual searches, and eventually, more security per dollar)
I didn't make it clear (or even touch on it) in my original post, but if you get your false negative rate low enough, I think false positives are a lot easier to stomach. If the system throws very many false negatives (on an absolute basis, not a percentage basis), false positives are unacceptable.
Yeah, that's right. If you scan 100 brown Muslims and 5 are terrorists and your system is 80% effective at recognizing suspicious behavior, there is a pretty good chance that at least 1 terrorist is going to walk right on through.
Computer analysis is getting more and more sophisticated. There are near-commercial (or better) systems that track behavior (like building or area movement) and can discern people being places they should not be and ignore non-humans. This greatly multiplies the effect of the human effort put into the system, and the systems generally are not going to get worse, only better.
The software doesn't give them grounds to do anything. That they might use it as justification is something somewhat different. Part of the solution is having the correct conversation, not the flailing inanity that comes from screaming Orwell.
That anybody would try to use a red light to justify violating a person's space is certainly offensive, but it doesn't need to be a sophisticated software system to be offensive, it could be something like a random check or some sort of enormous list.
If there is a 5% chance that a brown Muslim is a terrorist and a 0.00001% chance that a white Christian is a terrorist, you still can't usefully screen something like 100 people based on race and religion (because you overwhelm any sort of useful secondary screening with false positives).
If the vast majority of Muslims were terrorists, it would be simplest to simply not allow Muslims to fly (at least not on the same planes as everybody else). Since only a tiny minority of Muslims are terrorists, "Muslim" is not a useful piece of information.
Did you read a book over the weekend? Did it hurt?
Orwell got lots of easy stuff right (people like authority...a call for a leader starts with a desire to follow), but he missed the boat on just how easy it has become (and is becoming!) to use computers to not merely threaten to monitor anybody at any time, but to monitor everybody all the time.
Unfortunately, sarcastic bitching is not the solution.
I pay for USENET access. I blithely assume that the company I deal with charges me at some rate above their costs.
I'll continue to pay the $50 or so a year that they are charging for access to quite a lot less than they are currently providing. Of course, as what they provide diminishes, the transfer I consume goes down, taking my costs with it.
In the end, having $25 'out there' based on the hope that they eventually provide me that amount of service isn't terribly onerous.
Of course, some people might think it is condescending to insist that $0.25 (annually!) of electricity will be transformative (and that price even includes a healthy premium over the actual KW-hour charge).
Another issue is that the competition is a lot cheaper:
A village spending $100 (or otherwise obtaining/being provided) for 5 or 10 watts of solar makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $125 or $250 for the same thing.
It isn't about hating the third world and thinking that the only solution to their problems is for them to live just like me, it is about not putting a lot of hope on a (at best) marginally practical contraption (good ideas will essentially deploy themselves...treadle pumps, peanut mills, pot-in-pot refrigeration).
I'm not arguing that the interaction should be universally hostile and paranoid, I'm arguing that it should be able to withstand that particular person becoming adversarial. If you *have to* be nice, then that person has way more leverage than they should.
I think it might work out really well if copyright was reformulated as right-of-sale. I write a book? I get to profit from selling it for some period of time. If someone else wants to sell it, they have to deal with me. If someone else wants to copy it and distribute it for free, well, tough beans for me.
That way, if Apple wants to charge for access to a well organized, high quality library of music, they have to pay the artists, but if they want to give it away to prop up their hardware sales, that is their business.
Under such a system, the artists (and the people sitting in front of them) probably wouldn't get as much money, but their works wouldn't so easily get exploited by people with more money as they would in a total free for all.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have to ask them about their actual costs and levels of use, but hosting companies charge about the same for Windows hosting as they do Linux hosting:
http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/MsHosting
(you'll have to click and compare to Linux hosting for yourself)
I am juicy.
In the book, technology does not enable spying on everyone. It keeps everyone looking over their shoulders (well, the party members).
They are decreasing the shares outstanding, which is slightly different than decreasing the float. Decreasing the float does not change the number of shares used to calculate eps, it just changes the number of shares trading on the open market.
Things like an insider (who is subject to special rules) buying or selling the stock can impact the float, independent of a share buyback.
It is a way of increasing the value of each outstanding share without imposing tax consequences on the various shareholders. I guess that might not be a good reason (if you think that they could do a better job putting the money to work than shareholders). As much as anything, it looks to me like they are growing about as fast as they can given their size, so shedding the excess cash to shareholders actually makes sense.
(they are growing their absolute revenues quite a bit faster than Google, hardly the sign of a quick death:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=GOOG&annual
Microsoft's revenue growth also appears to be a little more efficient than Google's (but not by a large amount). People bat around what a threat Google is to Microsoft. Microsoft is a much bigger threat to Google.)
It isn't clear that they can spend a great deal more money on productive things. They currently spend more than $8 billion on R&D (In addition to the more than $18 billion they spend just operating the company) and still have income of more than $1 billion a month (and it is growing at a nice clip):
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=MSFT&annual
They already have an enormous R&D operation and would need to make massive additions (they are growing it anyway...) to increase spending in a way that would cut into the income.
The share price doesn't make any damn sense to me. The current Vista ads look a lot like a sign of weakness, but I have trouble worrying about that, as the 'weakness' Microsoft is showing looks an awful lot like a strength that most other companies in any other industry would love to have (i.e., the biggest issue Microsoft has is that they are being compared to Microsoft).
Your contribution is exemplary.
It is a poorly stated (and perhaps framed) argument.
It might be a stretch, but the point I would not say I was reaching for is that reducing your secondary workload by 80% doesn't necessarily get you more intensive per-person screening over doing nothing. If you are secondary screening is being expended on false positives, it can make sense to do a less intensive primary screening.
(putting everybody through metal detectors and x-rays for bags has high up front cost but it seems pretty likely to deliver more security per labor dollar than doing racial profiling and manual searches, and eventually, more security per dollar)
Naomi Klein has yet to demonstrate that she is worth listening to.
I didn't make it clear (or even touch on it) in my original post, but if you get your false negative rate low enough, I think false positives are a lot easier to stomach. If the system throws very many false negatives (on an absolute basis, not a percentage basis), false positives are unacceptable.
Yeah, that's right. If you scan 100 brown Muslims and 5 are terrorists and your system is 80% effective at recognizing suspicious behavior, there is a pretty good chance that at least 1 terrorist is going to walk right on through.
Given the implication that the system also has a high false negative rate, yes.
Computer analysis is getting more and more sophisticated. There are near-commercial (or better) systems that track behavior (like building or area movement) and can discern people being places they should not be and ignore non-humans. This greatly multiplies the effect of the human effort put into the system, and the systems generally are not going to get worse, only better.
The software doesn't give them grounds to do anything. That they might use it as justification is something somewhat different. Part of the solution is having the correct conversation, not the flailing inanity that comes from screaming Orwell.
That anybody would try to use a red light to justify violating a person's space is certainly offensive, but it doesn't need to be a sophisticated software system to be offensive, it could be something like a random check or some sort of enormous list.
If there is a 5% chance that a brown Muslim is a terrorist and a 0.00001% chance that a white Christian is a terrorist, you still can't usefully screen something like 100 people based on race and religion (because you overwhelm any sort of useful secondary screening with false positives).
If the vast majority of Muslims were terrorists, it would be simplest to simply not allow Muslims to fly (at least not on the same planes as everybody else). Since only a tiny minority of Muslims are terrorists, "Muslim" is not a useful piece of information.
Did you read a book over the weekend? Did it hurt?
Orwell got lots of easy stuff right (people like authority...a call for a leader starts with a desire to follow), but he missed the boat on just how easy it has become (and is becoming!) to use computers to not merely threaten to monitor anybody at any time, but to monitor everybody all the time.
Unfortunately, sarcastic bitching is not the solution.
I pay for USENET access. I blithely assume that the company I deal with charges me at some rate above their costs.
I'll continue to pay the $50 or so a year that they are charging for access to quite a lot less than they are currently providing. Of course, as what they provide diminishes, the transfer I consume goes down, taking my costs with it.
In the end, having $25 'out there' based on the hope that they eventually provide me that amount of service isn't terribly onerous.
Is there some way that we could get further and further away from the plot in a Terminator movie?
It uses webkit for layout, but it uses a (sort of) homegrown library for rendering:
http://gigaom.com/2008/09/02/google-open-sources-skia-graphics-engine/
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/skia/
I just want to make him pay a fine, do community service, and disclose the incident to future employers for some period of time.
Locking him up sounds like it would cost a lot more money than it would save.
Of course, some people might think it is condescending to insist that $0.25 (annually!) of electricity will be transformative (and that price even includes a healthy premium over the actual KW-hour charge).
Another issue is that the competition is a lot cheaper:
http://store.altenergystore.com/Solar-Panels/1-to-50-Watt-Solar-Panels/c675/
A village spending $100 (or otherwise obtaining/being provided) for 5 or 10 watts of solar makes a hell of a lot more sense than spending $125 or $250 for the same thing.
It isn't about hating the third world and thinking that the only solution to their problems is for them to live just like me, it is about not putting a lot of hope on a (at best) marginally practical contraption (good ideas will essentially deploy themselves...treadle pumps, peanut mills, pot-in-pot refrigeration).
So are mopeds.
I'm not arguing that the interaction should be universally hostile and paranoid, I'm arguing that it should be able to withstand that particular person becoming adversarial. If you *have to* be nice, then that person has way more leverage than they should.
Yes, but my point was that they are irrelevant. You are getting excited that a pebble made 'waves' in the ocean.
The movement you speak of is practically non existent.
Sure, there are lots of people talking about it, but they do not comprise a significant portion of the electorate.
I think it might work out really well if copyright was reformulated as right-of-sale. I write a book? I get to profit from selling it for some period of time. If someone else wants to sell it, they have to deal with me. If someone else wants to copy it and distribute it for free, well, tough beans for me.
That way, if Apple wants to charge for access to a well organized, high quality library of music, they have to pay the artists, but if they want to give it away to prop up their hardware sales, that is their business.
Under such a system, the artists (and the people sitting in front of them) probably wouldn't get as much money, but their works wouldn't so easily get exploited by people with more money as they would in a total free for all.