Vision is "I'd like to do this. How can we achive it?" Reckless is "We're going here. Do it." The difference is the question. For example, an individual major requiring Apple computers seems silly, but only slightly more so than requiring a narrow selection of such. If you learn that your vision is impossible, impractical or simply a worse off than the status quo, it would be wise to change course if possible, "wishy-washy" name callers be damned. It's not about embracing or fearing change, its about recognizing the effects of change BEFORE change happens. The submitter's question implies that he either doesn't have access to what they expect to happen, or that they simply don't know.
However, the submitter is in trouble for another reason. As a support monkey, they're responsible for maintaining and assisting in the use of the college's property and labs. The students now own the property, and if they break it, well, that's why the students bought AppleCare or Dell support. Now maybe they need help using Photoshop, but in a digital art program, its not unreasonable to think that some instructor's duties would involve teaching students how to use what the major percieves as a fundamental tool. I suppose there's still room for a "how do I check my email" guy, but that's gonna be a bit different than the kind of support a university/college normally provides to its labs. In an art school, this is probably easily passed to the guy who's job it is to make sure the printers work and such.
I'm pretty sure stuff like that Grand Seiko line is built as a prestige item rather than a commercial good. For whatever reasons, companies like to have an item to say "We make the most awesome stuff in the world." So they make this stuff and make only like 14 (overexaggeration), half of which go to the execs and the press secretary. Maybe 3 go out as prizes in a contest. What the companies want is for you to look at a magazine and think "oh, that's so awesome, i want one" and then go out and buy a nvidia 6600gt instead, or maybe choose the dell with the gf4 integrated instead of ati. I seem to recall anandtech or toms hardware calling one of the video card makers on the availablity of their top end prestige card.
Firstly, most often the needs of investors, employees, and customers are in alignment. In this case, complying with the court order would aversely impact the business's bottom line, waste the employees' time, marginally drive customers away from a service they've otherwise been enjoying. The community is pretty much the collective of investors, employees, and customers, so it would appear that the community is adversely affected as well. Furthermore, many people participate in the community in multiple roles. There are plenty of employees invested in Google. There are plenty of customers invested in Google. There are employees of Google who also use their tools! There's plenty of moderation built into the system as a result of this, and also explicitly placed in the prospectus of Google shares (they're non-voting, after all). The question is, if Google has lost value because they're fighting subpoenas (probably a false premise) then what has been lost? The answer is not much. Most of that fall was on the basis of high expectations for Google, which they missed (but still grew by 80 percent).
There's also a much better argument to be had against the grandparent than "STFU" with an extreme amount of implied vitriol and hatred. If you hate the profit motive so much, why don't you go cry in a corner for a while about the oppresion of the proletariot and come back when you've got something constructive to share?
Look at GNUtella. Years ago, a problem was noticed: some peers are far more capable than others. Search traffic became heavy enough that it was saturating dialup users. This wouldn't have been so bad if the protocol didn't also ask for pseudo anonymity; this led to the networks occasionally dividing in two as a set of dialup users flooded off the net. The solution is to organize the network so that high capacity peers are on the inside, and dialup or otherwise impaired users become "leaves" of sorts. Gnutella2 uses this approach, and this has been added back to Gnutella in some fashions.
The end result of this unequal distribution of resources is that centralization is the most efficient use of them. For the vast majority of Internet users, efficiency and performance are paramount. I hear far more complaint that Bittorrent is slow than that it's centralized or not anonymous. Even if you're willing to discount performance, the price of implementing a peering based system is greater, since it costs to maintain each link. People have tried using wifi to create mesh networks that operate sans "backbone" but this doesn't scale well either. Nor is it anonymous or difficult to tap.
A year ago I ordered serveral parts, including a case from newegg. I didn't really think about it much, but cases might not be the best thing to ship via your average UPS or Fedex etc. Anyways it arrives and the front panel is busted up. Cracked and inoperable. I read the website's procedure, followed the directions and eventually called newegg's help line. I inform them of this and rather than have me ship the whole thing back at my cost, they take my word for it and send me a new panel. Three days later I have a new panel and a working computer. I still won't be ordering cases online anymore, but that's just because its hard to really evaluate a case design from a webpage.
So has Newegg fallen to new lows since I ordered? Am I lying or simply remembering something false? Or perhaps taking a single anecdote as a trend is simply bad logic.
Wanna make a ton of money? I've got a great idea! Write a transactional database that interfaces with MySQL and let Oracle buy you out! Just in case they try to stop you from pulling the same trick twice with a non-compete clause, start up two companies doing the same thing and only actively manage one of em;).
That's one way, but you'd have to somehow instruct the compiler to use that for every pointer dereference. The easier method is to go in and change the values during compaction. Compaction is also known as stop-and-copy; it starts with a live set, everything you can reference from the stack, then copies over only the live objects while modifiying every pointer that uses it. It's messy but it works. Allocation is dead simple and fast. There's no fragmentation. And the runtime is limited by the live set rather than the heap size. There is a huge downside, however.
I wouldn't recommend mixing anything resembling C pointer maths with compaction, since its incredibly difficult to tell what's a pointer and what isn't (in fact, without modifying the compiler, it can't be done in C or C++). For this reason, the Boehm collector (a collector that replaces new and delete) goes for the Mark-and-Sweep method instead of compaction. Because you dont move objects, you don't have to worry about figuring pointers. Boehm's collector is also called conservative, not only because it doesn't modify live objects, but also in that it treats any data on the stack or in the heap as a potential pointer. If the data points inside the heap, the object containing that address is marked. This can lead to false positives on occasion, but there's no helping that without any support from the compiler (again contradicting the grandparent). The good news is that a false positive isn't going to cause direct harm in mark and sweep. All that happens is that space that could be used isn't; Boehm claims this is irrelevant in today's operating systems with virtual memory, although I doubt you'd see an entire page's worth of false positives. Certainly, I can't do any better than him.
In language R&D labs where people are paid quite well to think hard and long about things, they tend to use both approaches in what's called a "generational" collector. Young objects can be copied or collected as needed, while older objects are mark/swept away as needed. This works because old objects much more likely to stay than new ones. Last I knew, both Java and C# use generational techniques, because it makes sense in most nearly every case. However, as I described above, C++ doesn't have that, and even those libraries that replace new and delete have conventions and costs associated with it. I certainly wouldn't try to take Boehm and pidgeonhole it into Mozilla. And even if you did, it still wouldn't solve the compaction problem. All you can do is hope the virtual memory manager is doing it's job well. Even though the application and garbage collector is more likely to know what's useful than the VM manager.
Part of what makes Linux and GPL'd software so nifty is that with access to the source code one can do all sorts of wonderful and unexpected things. Port wondershape to the wrt54g. Replace svgalib with aalib and seamlessly render images and video streams as ascii art. Fit linux onto all sorts of silly places, including a windows device driver. Tune the linux scheduler parameters using adaptive genetic algorithms. Cook up packages for compiz before the distro puts it into stable. The ability to think outside the box and hack things in this manner is simultaneously the strongest advantage OSS has, and it's greatest obstacle.
The greatest obstacle? Firstly, if you simply hire people familiar with open source, those who recognize the value of the above traits, you're likely to get something that satisfies their needs not yours. Maybe that compiz package requires a lot of extra effort on your part, because nobody's written a script to handle the simple textfile changes nessecary. Secondly, integrating silly hacks back into the core is a challenge. On the one hand, integrating them into the core encourages more, which we like. It also means that the hack gets all the benefits of future improvements. On the other hand, not every hack is easily maintainable, nor easily integrated. Every time you reject a patch, you discourage people from offering in the future, and the risk of someone pissed off and forking your project increases. Not that forking things is always bad, but a fork in spite is bound to not only divide resources but increase overheads, potentially causing a net loss in future value of the software.
Shuttleworth believes he can fix this by making communication among groups more explicit. I doubt it will improve anything. On his next attempt, perhaps he should make his team a stakeholder in a very dear sense. Not bonuses for completion or anything silly. Make them run a school with the software -- Eat their own dogfood. The core team will have to shift their focus on making the software work for them in ways similar to other schools. Maybe they could start a school about hacking on OSS. Teach the newbs the labrynthian ways of the autotools, how to take a tarball and make it a.deb, that sort of thing. Something the team wants to be successful and proud of.
You could always search Lexis Nexus for cases. Newspapers don't carry everything that happens, you know. And not being in a newspaper doesnt mean it didn't happen.
"Insightful"? What the fuck. The above example is a situation in which the company (aka THE EMPLOYER) has a performance guideline for employees, and the manager (aka the EMPLOYER's PETTY MINION) has a personal grievance with the emloyee and is cherry picking examples. They haven't come up with a good excuse (aka you arent "doing the job they hired you to do") implies that he's actually doing his job quite well, despite the reviewer's best efforts to demonstrate otherwise.
Working might not be a right. But firing people you don't like from a company you also work for wouldn't a right either. I suggest you go back to Libertarian school and study hard this time.
Well, all you need to do is again answer with the TRUTH. Companies make their money in support contracts, and in assisting companies in migrating from their previous solutions. It's not easy to migrate from one UNIX to another, let alone from NT to Linux. Even if a company has human resources to run both Linux and Windows, migrating takes a specialized skillset, requiring you to know a lot about what people are doing with Windows, what the corresponding Linux architectures are, how to make up the gaps between the two and what can be added easily to improve over Windows. Companies do this because they're in the business of selling auto parts, or whatever. They don't get any benefits from having people on hand capable of patching whatever wierd things SAP convinced them to run, so asking for outside help allows them to get a leg up without having to invest dearly in it. Hopefully you haven't been saying migration was costless because it's not. Even without liscence costs, you've got opportunity costs and potential downtime costs, not to mention the extra work involved in migrating systems.
When asked for specifics, if you don't know, you've always got the option of telling them "I don't know, but you can look it up and get back on that." Redhat's earnings come from customer support fees. Ubuntu gets its money from Canonical, which does consulting services for firms in a variety of situations. Progeny does the same. Hans Reiser actually gets money from people who want to use his code _without_ having to say he made it. Redhat is profitable (and even have more cash on hand than total debt!), Progeny has been running for long enough that I'd imagine they would have given up if it wasn't. I have no idea if Canonical is making money (its site doesn't appear to have any sales pages, but Ubuntu is hiring), but I'd imagine Shuttleworth wants to give something back to the community that _lasts_ and turning a profit is one way to go about it.
In fact SAP makes a good deal of its money this way. Oracle also makes a good deal of money this way. Microsoft makes a fair bit of money this way, but it's mostly in training and certifying people capable of doing this work using their products. The one question I was unable to ascertain from browsing the 10-Qs was how much of product sales of Oracle or Windows were derived from consulting work versus the regular sales process. Certainly it would be impossible and useless to know how many corporate purchases were made with recommendations by MS Certified consultants, but it might be interesting to know that 50 percent or whatever of all Oracle liscences were purchased in contracts that specified payments for customimzation and deployment services etc.
I'd rather see something that holds DS games that fits in the GBA slot. I've seen one as part of a DS "accessory pack" but I wasn't able to find it on Amazon. Cuz I really don't feel like chucking those tiny chips in my backpack, and I also don't want to carry around the small yet slightly bulky cases either. Unfortunately I just did a sanity check and it would appear there's no way a DS card can even fit in that slot =/
Share price may be irrelevant, but price to earnings per share isn't. And Google is trading way high. The current EPS ratio is 89. For comparison, yahoo! is trading at 26 and the industry average is 30.
Clearly some of this valuation is growth related; stock holders believe that future earnings are not only in the bag, but they're also much larger than current earnings. So shorting GOOG is a bad idea. But even if you disagree with how valuable the company is, the fundamentals are still strong. They're making money, and making more money every quarter. You're right, that's not a common recipe for short selling profitably.
Well, certainly Nintendo would owe it to shareholders to consider any offers. Whether the Japanese investing market is given these considerations is another matter. I suspect the management of Japanese companies has considerably more power than in US chartered corporations. The fact that the DS is doing well and that Nintendo is turning a profit is only a sign that the company is valuable, not that it is priceless.
Even if Nintendo was in the number one spot, they'd still be the primary purchasing target, for obvious reasons. Sony and MS are simply to big to purchase. Infinium is simply 90 percent hype, 10 percent delivery. However, the company isn't a good matchup for Nintendo. Cisco would have to substantially be involved with the design of whatever next hardware comes out to make anything positive happen for either side. I don't know the Cisco culture, but I'd imagine there'd be some communication problems if they tried it.
I wouldn't be surprised however if Cisco purchased Alienware.
Normally, I'd expect the opposite. Jobs is well acquainted with mergers and acquistions by now. The man's record stands something like this: he purchased Pixar from Lucas, and not only did he survive Apple's purchase of NeXT but is now their CEO! Jobs could convievably wind up CEO of Disney, but it's a far stretch. He'd have to give up his stewardship of Apple to do so -- running both Disney and Apple would be a nightmare, and convievably a conflict of interests. While the sales of the iPod are quite nice and the company is doing well for itself, its clear that Job's objective is to somehow dethrone Gates and MS. This task is nowhere near completion and may never be. I don't follow Apple's insiders very closely, but unless he has some prodigy in training, I don't expect him to leave the task to someone else while he pursues another opportunity.
There is something strange going on though. Not only is Pixar selling to Disney, but all the insiders have been selling for well over a year. Presumably nobody expects Cars to do well, which hints at the grandparent's point of "phoning it in." If Pixar is really as set to explode as it seems, I can't see how Jobs wouldn't be aware of it, as the CEO. At the very least, I can't expect him to be disgusted with what will happen during the next 18 months. But one thing that should happen soon, that I don't see happening, is a change in style. Currently you have a Pixar look or style, which has improved somewhat since the "everything looks like a toy" days of the past, but it remains difficult to apply that style to the human form. Perhaps when Cars flops they can address this.
Well, the chain does go back further. Firstly, much of the staff behind FFT had previously made Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. Of course, far more people were involved with the creation of FFT than the previous two. So the experiences there definately shaped the direction of FFT. If you're going to cite Shining Force as an influence, well I suppose you'd just as well cite Fire Emblem, even though one didn't make it to the states. Fire Emblem apparently sold very well in Japan but it seems NOA didn't feel they could sell it to their American demographics.
As for the characters themselves, the little of Ragnarok I played didn't seem that related to FFT. But then, I haven't played much of the original FFT either.
One thing to remember is that african and south american nations desperately want open agriculture markets, and crop-generated ethonal is one way undo the European, American and other developed nation's tarriff and exchange barriers. It's not like we're forcing them into farming (you might argue that American agricultural subsidies are forcing them OUT of farming). Farmers in 3rd world countries are no more slaves to farms than the American white collar class slaves to the office.
Reguarding dictatorships, I'd suggest researching and thinking more carefully about the likely outcomes. Firstly, ethonal in 3rd world countries likely means supporting 3rd world dictatorships, of which there are many. So we're not likely to see a shift from a repressive government to anything other than another repressive government. Secondly, the revolution waiting to happen in Saudi Arabia is not likely to end in a better form of government. The Sauds are frequently attacked as ignoring the Muslim laws and faith, and being corrupted by Western influences, cropping up as armed dissidents taking over places like the Grand Mosque (Mecca, 1979). Apparently the house of Saud is not repressive ENOUGH. If anything, the revolution coming in Saudia is going to be the production of a dictator or theocrat ruling by brute force and cutting off the economic ties with the west that has brought the nation a good amount of prosperity. I hope you weren't expecting a revolution to throw off the shackles and chains of Shari'a.
"Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google."
Well I don't know how much of the following justifies the government taxation, but it certainly lists ways in which the government has assisted Google.
Firstly, Brin & Page were grad students at Stanford, recieving their undergraduate education from publicly funded Universities and reciving federal grant money to do the fundamental research that made Google what it is today. Part of their success revolves around being at the right place at the right time, but another part is that they had the opportunity to solve a problem first, and come up with the money strategy second, rather than the other way around. Because they a quality education and the government paid opportunity to study interesting problems, they were able to create an enourmous amount of weath, for themselves and for society. Hell, even Stanford operates on the charity of a former governor, rather than a series of well informed and rational choices made by students. And I think it's fair to say they still recieve a good sum of money in the form of federal research grants.
Second, Google exists to search the vast amount of information available over the Internet. For Internet Libertarians, the funding behind DARPAnet and even the development of HTML has to be a strange paradox. Certainly, there are plenty of governments under which the free dissemination, indexing and ranking of communications is not welcome. If I wished to be misleading, I might say that the Libertarian camp is divided over the issue -- there are as many Libertarian governments in favor of internet censorship as there are opposed!
Thirdly, Google the corporate entity benefits from a large number of local, state and federal services. The SEC provided them with a framework within which they could safely offer a number of shares for initial public offering, even in a unique way (despite complaints from many within the private sector), and gives shareholders confidence that the reports they read are accurate and should the need or desire arise, they can get a fair market price for their stock. The legal system provides Google with a fair and impartial jurisdiction within which suits by and against Google may be held (certainly Google gets its fair share of suits from those upset about being indexed--justified or not). Should the Googleplex burn down, the local fire department has been and will continue to be on watch for them. And for those Googlers that don't rollerskate to work, the State of California and the Federal government help to provide safe roads and highways with which to commute over. Should Google go bankrupt, the government provides a fair system of bankruptcy within which the company may survive, to the benefit of the majority of creditors.
Finally, the employees of Google don't have to worry about their status as Immigrants, Jews, Blacks, Men, or Communists interfering substantially with their business dealings. Should they be treated substandardly for these inherant traits (for example while finding a house in the SF market), the governments provide them with a recourse under the law for this irrational discrimination.
Now you're certainly welcome to claim that taxes are too high, that the government is accomplishing their goal too wastefully, or the like. But perhaps the State of California uses the high tax rates as an migratory throttle, to make sure that people planning to make money on a large scale do so outside their state? If California is still enjoying a growing economy and population, despite the high tax rate, perhaps enough people like the system to make it work?
Slashdot Mirror
Vision is "I'd like to do this. How can we achive it?" Reckless is "We're going here. Do it." The difference is the question. For example, an individual major requiring Apple computers seems silly, but only slightly more so than requiring a narrow selection of such. If you learn that your vision is impossible, impractical or simply a worse off than the status quo, it would be wise to change course if possible, "wishy-washy" name callers be damned. It's not about embracing or fearing change, its about recognizing the effects of change BEFORE change happens. The submitter's question implies that he either doesn't have access to what they expect to happen, or that they simply don't know.
However, the submitter is in trouble for another reason. As a support monkey, they're responsible for maintaining and assisting in the use of the college's property and labs. The students now own the property, and if they break it, well, that's why the students bought AppleCare or Dell support. Now maybe they need help using Photoshop, but in a digital art program, its not unreasonable to think that some instructor's duties would involve teaching students how to use what the major percieves as a fundamental tool. I suppose there's still room for a "how do I check my email" guy, but that's gonna be a bit different than the kind of support a university/college normally provides to its labs. In an art school, this is probably easily passed to the guy who's job it is to make sure the printers work and such.
Because thieves'll clean out the place after the first 3 week.
What I don't get is why they reinvented the wheel poorly. Did the old allocator work faster on scenarios not covered by the malloc-old-new benchmark?
I'm pretty sure stuff like that Grand Seiko line is built as a prestige item rather than a commercial good. For whatever reasons, companies like to have an item to say "We make the most awesome stuff in the world." So they make this stuff and make only like 14 (overexaggeration), half of which go to the execs and the press secretary. Maybe 3 go out as prizes in a contest. What the companies want is for you to look at a magazine and think "oh, that's so awesome, i want one" and then go out and buy a nvidia 6600gt instead, or maybe choose the dell with the gf4 integrated instead of ati. I seem to recall anandtech or toms hardware calling one of the video card makers on the availablity of their top end prestige card.
Firstly, most often the needs of investors, employees, and customers are in alignment. In this case, complying with the court order would aversely impact the business's bottom line, waste the employees' time, marginally drive customers away from a service they've otherwise been enjoying. The community is pretty much the collective of investors, employees, and customers, so it would appear that the community is adversely affected as well. Furthermore, many people participate in the community in multiple roles. There are plenty of employees invested in Google. There are plenty of customers invested in Google. There are employees of Google who also use their tools! There's plenty of moderation built into the system as a result of this, and also explicitly placed in the prospectus of Google shares (they're non-voting, after all). The question is, if Google has lost value because they're fighting subpoenas (probably a false premise) then what has been lost? The answer is not much. Most of that fall was on the basis of high expectations for Google, which they missed (but still grew by 80 percent).
There's also a much better argument to be had against the grandparent than "STFU" with an extreme amount of implied vitriol and hatred. If you hate the profit motive so much, why don't you go cry in a corner for a while about the oppresion of the proletariot and come back when you've got something constructive to share?
Look at GNUtella. Years ago, a problem was noticed: some peers are far more capable than others. Search traffic became heavy enough that it was saturating dialup users. This wouldn't have been so bad if the protocol didn't also ask for pseudo anonymity; this led to the networks occasionally dividing in two as a set of dialup users flooded off the net. The solution is to organize the network so that high capacity peers are on the inside, and dialup or otherwise impaired users become "leaves" of sorts. Gnutella2 uses this approach, and this has been added back to Gnutella in some fashions.
The end result of this unequal distribution of resources is that centralization is the most efficient use of them. For the vast majority of Internet users, efficiency and performance are paramount. I hear far more complaint that Bittorrent is slow than that it's centralized or not anonymous. Even if you're willing to discount performance, the price of implementing a peering based system is greater, since it costs to maintain each link. People have tried using wifi to create mesh networks that operate sans "backbone" but this doesn't scale well either. Nor is it anonymous or difficult to tap.
I've never met a micspammer who was any good at a game. The fact that they never shut up appears to distract them from actually winning.
A year ago I ordered serveral parts, including a case from newegg. I didn't really think about it much, but cases might not be the best thing to ship via your average UPS or Fedex etc. Anyways it arrives and the front panel is busted up. Cracked and inoperable. I read the website's procedure, followed the directions and eventually called newegg's help line. I inform them of this and rather than have me ship the whole thing back at my cost, they take my word for it and send me a new panel. Three days later I have a new panel and a working computer. I still won't be ordering cases online anymore, but that's just because its hard to really evaluate a case design from a webpage.
So has Newegg fallen to new lows since I ordered? Am I lying or simply remembering something false? Or perhaps taking a single anecdote as a trend is simply bad logic.
Wanna make a ton of money? I've got a great idea! Write a transactional database that interfaces with MySQL and let Oracle buy you out! Just in case they try to stop you from pulling the same trick twice with a non-compete clause, start up two companies doing the same thing and only actively manage one of em ;).
That's one way, but you'd have to somehow instruct the compiler to use that for every pointer dereference. The easier method is to go in and change the values during compaction. Compaction is also known as stop-and-copy; it starts with a live set, everything you can reference from the stack, then copies over only the live objects while modifiying every pointer that uses it. It's messy but it works. Allocation is dead simple and fast. There's no fragmentation. And the runtime is limited by the live set rather than the heap size. There is a huge downside, however.
I wouldn't recommend mixing anything resembling C pointer maths with compaction, since its incredibly difficult to tell what's a pointer and what isn't (in fact, without modifying the compiler, it can't be done in C or C++). For this reason, the Boehm collector (a collector that replaces new and delete) goes for the Mark-and-Sweep method instead of compaction. Because you dont move objects, you don't have to worry about figuring pointers. Boehm's collector is also called conservative, not only because it doesn't modify live objects, but also in that it treats any data on the stack or in the heap as a potential pointer. If the data points inside the heap, the object containing that address is marked. This can lead to false positives on occasion, but there's no helping that without any support from the compiler (again contradicting the grandparent). The good news is that a false positive isn't going to cause direct harm in mark and sweep. All that happens is that space that could be used isn't; Boehm claims this is irrelevant in today's operating systems with virtual memory, although I doubt you'd see an entire page's worth of false positives. Certainly, I can't do any better than him.
In language R&D labs where people are paid quite well to think hard and long about things, they tend to use both approaches in what's called a "generational" collector. Young objects can be copied or collected as needed, while older objects are mark/swept away as needed. This works because old objects much more likely to stay than new ones. Last I knew, both Java and C# use generational techniques, because it makes sense in most nearly every case. However, as I described above, C++ doesn't have that, and even those libraries that replace new and delete have conventions and costs associated with it. I certainly wouldn't try to take Boehm and pidgeonhole it into Mozilla. And even if you did, it still wouldn't solve the compaction problem. All you can do is hope the virtual memory manager is doing it's job well. Even though the application and garbage collector is more likely to know what's useful than the VM manager.
Part of what makes Linux and GPL'd software so nifty is that with access to the source code one can do all sorts of wonderful and unexpected things. Port wondershape to the wrt54g. Replace svgalib with aalib and seamlessly render images and video streams as ascii art. Fit linux onto all sorts of silly places, including a windows device driver. Tune the linux scheduler parameters using adaptive genetic algorithms. Cook up packages for compiz before the distro puts it into stable. The ability to think outside the box and hack things in this manner is simultaneously the strongest advantage OSS has, and it's greatest obstacle.
.deb, that sort of thing. Something the team wants to be successful and proud of.
The greatest obstacle? Firstly, if you simply hire people familiar with open source, those who recognize the value of the above traits, you're likely to get something that satisfies their needs not yours. Maybe that compiz package requires a lot of extra effort on your part, because nobody's written a script to handle the simple textfile changes nessecary. Secondly, integrating silly hacks back into the core is a challenge. On the one hand, integrating them into the core encourages more, which we like. It also means that the hack gets all the benefits of future improvements. On the other hand, not every hack is easily maintainable, nor easily integrated. Every time you reject a patch, you discourage people from offering in the future, and the risk of someone pissed off and forking your project increases. Not that forking things is always bad, but a fork in spite is bound to not only divide resources but increase overheads, potentially causing a net loss in future value of the software.
Shuttleworth believes he can fix this by making communication among groups more explicit. I doubt it will improve anything. On his next attempt, perhaps he should make his team a stakeholder in a very dear sense. Not bonuses for completion or anything silly. Make them run a school with the software -- Eat their own dogfood. The core team will have to shift their focus on making the software work for them in ways similar to other schools. Maybe they could start a school about hacking on OSS. Teach the newbs the labrynthian ways of the autotools, how to take a tarball and make it a
I think that was pretty much my point. Even if you could afford to search with it, I doubt anyone else reading your comment could.
You could always search Lexis Nexus for cases. Newspapers don't carry everything that happens, you know. And not being in a newspaper doesnt mean it didn't happen.
"Insightful"? What the fuck. The above example is a situation in which the company (aka THE EMPLOYER) has a performance guideline for employees, and the manager (aka the EMPLOYER's PETTY MINION) has a personal grievance with the emloyee and is cherry picking examples. They haven't come up with a good excuse (aka you arent "doing the job they hired you to do") implies that he's actually doing his job quite well, despite the reviewer's best efforts to demonstrate otherwise.
Working might not be a right. But firing people you don't like from a company you also work for wouldn't a right either. I suggest you go back to Libertarian school and study hard this time.
Well, all you need to do is again answer with the TRUTH. Companies make their money in support contracts, and in assisting companies in migrating from their previous solutions. It's not easy to migrate from one UNIX to another, let alone from NT to Linux. Even if a company has human resources to run both Linux and Windows, migrating takes a specialized skillset, requiring you to know a lot about what people are doing with Windows, what the corresponding Linux architectures are, how to make up the gaps between the two and what can be added easily to improve over Windows. Companies do this because they're in the business of selling auto parts, or whatever. They don't get any benefits from having people on hand capable of patching whatever wierd things SAP convinced them to run, so asking for outside help allows them to get a leg up without having to invest dearly in it. Hopefully you haven't been saying migration was costless because it's not. Even without liscence costs, you've got opportunity costs and potential downtime costs, not to mention the extra work involved in migrating systems.
When asked for specifics, if you don't know, you've always got the option of telling them "I don't know, but you can look it up and get back on that." Redhat's earnings come from customer support fees. Ubuntu gets its money from Canonical, which does consulting services for firms in a variety of situations. Progeny does the same. Hans Reiser actually gets money from people who want to use his code _without_ having to say he made it. Redhat is profitable (and even have more cash on hand than total debt!), Progeny has been running for long enough that I'd imagine they would have given up if it wasn't. I have no idea if Canonical is making money (its site doesn't appear to have any sales pages, but Ubuntu is hiring), but I'd imagine Shuttleworth wants to give something back to the community that _lasts_ and turning a profit is one way to go about it.
In fact SAP makes a good deal of its money this way. Oracle also makes a good deal of money this way. Microsoft makes a fair bit of money this way, but it's mostly in training and certifying people capable of doing this work using their products. The one question I was unable to ascertain from browsing the 10-Qs was how much of product sales of Oracle or Windows were derived from consulting work versus the regular sales process. Certainly it would be impossible and useless to know how many corporate purchases were made with recommendations by MS Certified consultants, but it might be interesting to know that 50 percent or whatever of all Oracle liscences were purchased in contracts that specified payments for customimzation and deployment services etc.
I'd rather see something that holds DS games that fits in the GBA slot. I've seen one as part of a DS "accessory pack" but I wasn't able to find it on Amazon. Cuz I really don't feel like chucking those tiny chips in my backpack, and I also don't want to carry around the small yet slightly bulky cases either. Unfortunately I just did a sanity check and it would appear there's no way a DS card can even fit in that slot =/
Share price may be irrelevant, but price to earnings per share isn't. And Google is trading way high. The current EPS ratio is 89. For comparison, yahoo! is trading at 26 and the industry average is 30.
Clearly some of this valuation is growth related; stock holders believe that future earnings are not only in the bag, but they're also much larger than current earnings. So shorting GOOG is a bad idea. But even if you disagree with how valuable the company is, the fundamentals are still strong. They're making money, and making more money every quarter. You're right, that's not a common recipe for short selling profitably.
If Ballmer throws a chair and there are no employees to hear it, does it make a sound?
Well, certainly Nintendo would owe it to shareholders to consider any offers. Whether the Japanese investing market is given these considerations is another matter. I suspect the management of Japanese companies has considerably more power than in US chartered corporations. The fact that the DS is doing well and that Nintendo is turning a profit is only a sign that the company is valuable, not that it is priceless.
Even if Nintendo was in the number one spot, they'd still be the primary purchasing target, for obvious reasons. Sony and MS are simply to big to purchase. Infinium is simply 90 percent hype, 10 percent delivery. However, the company isn't a good matchup for Nintendo. Cisco would have to substantially be involved with the design of whatever next hardware comes out to make anything positive happen for either side. I don't know the Cisco culture, but I'd imagine there'd be some communication problems if they tried it.
I wouldn't be surprised however if Cisco purchased Alienware.
Normally, I'd expect the opposite. Jobs is well acquainted with mergers and acquistions by now. The man's record stands something like this: he purchased Pixar from Lucas, and not only did he survive Apple's purchase of NeXT but is now their CEO! Jobs could convievably wind up CEO of Disney, but it's a far stretch. He'd have to give up his stewardship of Apple to do so -- running both Disney and Apple would be a nightmare, and convievably a conflict of interests. While the sales of the iPod are quite nice and the company is doing well for itself, its clear that Job's objective is to somehow dethrone Gates and MS. This task is nowhere near completion and may never be. I don't follow Apple's insiders very closely, but unless he has some prodigy in training, I don't expect him to leave the task to someone else while he pursues another opportunity.
There is something strange going on though. Not only is Pixar selling to Disney, but all the insiders have been selling for well over a year. Presumably nobody expects Cars to do well, which hints at the grandparent's point of "phoning it in." If Pixar is really as set to explode as it seems, I can't see how Jobs wouldn't be aware of it, as the CEO. At the very least, I can't expect him to be disgusted with what will happen during the next 18 months. But one thing that should happen soon, that I don't see happening, is a change in style. Currently you have a Pixar look or style, which has improved somewhat since the "everything looks like a toy" days of the past, but it remains difficult to apply that style to the human form. Perhaps when Cars flops they can address this.
Well, the chain does go back further. Firstly, much of the staff behind FFT had previously made Ogre Battle and Tactics Ogre. Of course, far more people were involved with the creation of FFT than the previous two. So the experiences there definately shaped the direction of FFT. If you're going to cite Shining Force as an influence, well I suppose you'd just as well cite Fire Emblem, even though one didn't make it to the states. Fire Emblem apparently sold very well in Japan but it seems NOA didn't feel they could sell it to their American demographics.
As for the characters themselves, the little of Ragnarok I played didn't seem that related to FFT. But then, I haven't played much of the original FFT either.
Do not look directly at the DS Lite, it may cause permenent retinal damage.
One thing to remember is that african and south american nations desperately want open agriculture markets, and crop-generated ethonal is one way undo the European, American and other developed nation's tarriff and exchange barriers. It's not like we're forcing them into farming (you might argue that American agricultural subsidies are forcing them OUT of farming). Farmers in 3rd world countries are no more slaves to farms than the American white collar class slaves to the office.
Reguarding dictatorships, I'd suggest researching and thinking more carefully about the likely outcomes. Firstly, ethonal in 3rd world countries likely means supporting 3rd world dictatorships, of which there are many. So we're not likely to see a shift from a repressive government to anything other than another repressive government. Secondly, the revolution waiting to happen in Saudi Arabia is not likely to end in a better form of government. The Sauds are frequently attacked as ignoring the Muslim laws and faith, and being corrupted by Western influences, cropping up as armed dissidents taking over places like the Grand Mosque (Mecca, 1979). Apparently the house of Saud is not repressive ENOUGH. If anything, the revolution coming in Saudia is going to be the production of a dictator or theocrat ruling by brute force and cutting off the economic ties with the west that has brought the nation a good amount of prosperity. I hope you weren't expecting a revolution to throw off the shackles and chains of Shari'a.
The question is, does the sale of stock count as taxable income? I think not.
"Ask yourself what the various levels of government have done to earn a quarter of the wealth spawned by Google."
Well I don't know how much of the following justifies the government taxation, but it certainly lists ways in which the government has assisted Google.
Firstly, Brin & Page were grad students at Stanford, recieving their undergraduate education from publicly funded Universities and reciving federal grant money to do the fundamental research that made Google what it is today. Part of their success revolves around being at the right place at the right time, but another part is that they had the opportunity to solve a problem first, and come up with the money strategy second, rather than the other way around. Because they a quality education and the government paid opportunity to study interesting problems, they were able to create an enourmous amount of weath, for themselves and for society. Hell, even Stanford operates on the charity of a former governor, rather than a series of well informed and rational choices made by students. And I think it's fair to say they still recieve a good sum of money in the form of federal research grants.
Second, Google exists to search the vast amount of information available over the Internet. For Internet Libertarians, the funding behind DARPAnet and even the development of HTML has to be a strange paradox. Certainly, there are plenty of governments under which the free dissemination, indexing and ranking of communications is not welcome. If I wished to be misleading, I might say that the Libertarian camp is divided over the issue -- there are as many Libertarian governments in favor of internet censorship as there are opposed!
Thirdly, Google the corporate entity benefits from a large number of local, state and federal services. The SEC provided them with a framework within which they could safely offer a number of shares for initial public offering, even in a unique way (despite complaints from many within the private sector), and gives shareholders confidence that the reports they read are accurate and should the need or desire arise, they can get a fair market price for their stock. The legal system provides Google with a fair and impartial jurisdiction within which suits by and against Google may be held (certainly Google gets its fair share of suits from those upset about being indexed--justified or not). Should the Googleplex burn down, the local fire department has been and will continue to be on watch for them. And for those Googlers that don't rollerskate to work, the State of California and the Federal government help to provide safe roads and highways with which to commute over. Should Google go bankrupt, the government provides a fair system of bankruptcy within which the company may survive, to the benefit of the majority of creditors.
Finally, the employees of Google don't have to worry about their status as Immigrants, Jews, Blacks, Men, or Communists interfering substantially with their business dealings. Should they be treated substandardly for these inherant traits (for example while finding a house in the SF market), the governments provide them with a recourse under the law for this irrational discrimination.
Now you're certainly welcome to claim that taxes are too high, that the government is accomplishing their goal too wastefully, or the like. But perhaps the State of California uses the high tax rates as an migratory throttle, to make sure that people planning to make money on a large scale do so outside their state? If California is still enjoying a growing economy and population, despite the high tax rate, perhaps enough people like the system to make it work?