Honestly, how did *anyone* not see this coming? For anyone that thought that the bailout was a good idea (and by anyone I mean anyone, regardless of political party or leanings), you're getting what you deserved. Unfortunately you're dragging the rest of us with you.
What did anyone expect to happen? We took businesses with a *proven* failed operating plan, and gave them more money to "keep on keepin' on." We rewarded bad decisions and then all of a sudden, the still operating failure of a business (surprise!) keeps on making bad decisions and burning through capital faster than it takes it in. I know this is a logical fallacy, but damn! you had to be stupid to not see this coming. Anymore I just chuckle at the absurdity of this whole situation... we're getting what we asked for. I can't blame AIG for this, it is doing exactly what it has been doing-- f*ing up. But when we give them free money to keep on doing it, you can't blame them for thinking it might actually be good business.
I really don't think electric cars are the answer. I think the Portland area has figured it out: bicycles and bicycle-friendly mass transit. If we really want to make a dent in vehicle emissions and vehicle congestion we need:
A much better mass transit system. Yeah, there is BART/Muni. Go to New York and then really see just how awful BART/Muni is. By comparison it's seriously freaking horrible. I've heard Japan is in even better shape, but I can't speak from personal experience.
The better mass transit system needs to be coupled with a better mainline-to-destination system, and this is where being more bicycle friendly comes in. Portland does a fantastic job in this area, making roads more bicycle safe/accessible, getting dedicated bicycle parking spots (12 bikes to a standard vehicle parking spot), installing bicycle lockers at mass transit drop-off points, and allowing bicycles on mass transit systems. BART's rush hour lockout of bicycles is part of what I'm talking about here.
As an aside, what the heck would you do if you run out of charge? Currently a can of gas is pretty portable... enough batteries to move a depleted car... not so much. I don't think it's very feasible to have a recovery vehicle come out and juice the car up for 2 hours (optimistically). That leaves towing. Not the end of the world, but a step down from the current situation.
Electric cars help on the pollution front, but do jack squat for the congestion problem, and I think that's a problem that's just as bad in the Bay. That coupled with the fact that the hippies won't budge on nuclear, and we're still burning the same hydrocarbons to make the power, we're just doing it in a different place (which might be more efficient, but is it *that* much more efficient?).
Out of curiosity (seriously), do you actually know anything about accounting? The classes are actually extremely challenging (surprised me, I was from a CS background), but for different reasons than CS (I've taken both). I know this sounds like I'm trying to start a flame, but I'm not. I've noticed that people have a weird tendency to think that whatever they've actually done is the be-all, end-all in terms of importance and difficulty and tend to discredit everything else. Oh, and I'm talking about real accounting courses like intermediate and governmental/non-profit, not basic accounting (which is pretty much bookkeeping in most places).
You are completely correct. I'm an idiot. They EXPENSED a lot of R&D on '06. I'm to lazy to look into it any further, but they were probably capitalizing in previous years and are now expensing (as they didn't show any R&D in previous periods).
Mod parent up! I've seen many posts claiming that AMD would show losses because of new plants. THIS IS WRONG. The acquisition of capital assets, like fabs, do NOT affect net income (aside from some depreciation expense recorded in the year of acquisition). A major investment would not cause a loss as reported. It could contribute due to depreciation, but these costs should be relatively minor by comparison. Also, for what it's worth, I just perused the financial statements and only saw a reported loss of $166 million. See this link to the EDGAR filing. Another glance showed they capitalized a lot of R&D in 2006, where there was non in the previous reported years. That's probably the biggest reason for the loss.
You have an interesting point. I have a counterpoint to this (although it is based on an admittedly small sample size). My best manager wasn't technical at all, and he knew it. He hired and hung on to very sharp people he trusted and he always looked them to help create a decision. This works well for two reasons. (1) It helps everyone feel like they contribute and have a say in decisions (big moral booster). (2) Given enough time in a management role, technical skills will begin to decline. After all, you are managing, not hacking, on a daily basis. Yes, there could be exceptions to this. After technical skills have eroded, you may find yourself making "informed" decisions because "you know better," when in fact you do not. Being comfortable with the fact the people working for you are the experts and looking to them for advice in decision making prevents this from happening.
There are others like me out there! It's so weird how similar behaviour traits are within the MB categories. I very well could have written your entire comment. Weird.
One thing the article mentions is NVIDIA support is an easy add from one of the repositories for FC 5. This is also true for ATI, and I'm not sure why the author didn't catch this. See rpm.livna.org. It's been that way for a while now, and getting the ATI drivers installed (with full 3d supprt) is very easy. From the site:
To install the ati drivers simply execute "yum install kmod-fglrx" or "yum install kmod-fglrx-smp" if you use a SMP-Kernel.
Granted, getting the ATI driver previous to about six months ago was, in the words of another poster "sheer agony." It's a much, much better situation today. A couple of commands and it "just works."
Wow, you must not have looked into history very deeply. For many, *many* years, AMD was a better "bang for the buck" CPU, but in terms of raw performance, Intel was vastly superior. I'm not sure when the tide turned in terms of overall performance, but Intel was definately ahead in the Pentium (even PII maybe?) days (and earlier).
Re:it's a contract dispute, not trademark
on
On Apple vs Apple
·
· Score: 1
It's true, my UID is high, but I was around LONG before there were UIDs (remember Chips and Dip?), I just never got around to getting one for a long time. And I wasn't intending to be inflammatory, but there are a good few comments that roast Apple Corp for their actions without any regard to the actual facts of the case or contract, which is... disappointing.
it's a contract dispute, not trademark
on
On Apple vs Apple
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
It's a shame to see the comments thus far. There are the usual appologists, "Apple (Computer) can do no wrong!" and some decent guessing, but without the terms of the contract to inspect, everything happening is speculation on the behalf of readers.
My understanding from what I have read is this is not a trademark dispute, but rather a contract dispute, which will be governed by different aspects of the law. There are some important unanswered questions: 1. What are the material terms of the contract? 2. What was the duration of the contract? US law requires a finite duration, otherwise it's valid for a "reasonable" amount of time (How's that for vague!).
If I permit myself to do some speculation, I'd suspect Apple Comp is treading on dangerous ground. They know and have known this, hence the contract in '92. It's not a tough argument to make for Apple Corp. We, Apple, sell music. They, Apple, sell music. See the confusion? Apple Corp, was there first and had first use and trademark. Most any lawyer ought to be able to make that argument successfully. But this isn't about the trademark, it's about the details of that contract, which I haven't seen in the article.
And a note to the applogists: I don't think Apple Corp is doing anything wrong. They have an established business that predated Apple computer. They are attempting to enforce the esisting contract with Apple Comp. Good for them, everyone should be held to their word.
Oops! I meant that I'm NOT suggesting a white suppremicist view. Man, I really should use the preview feature. Oh, and put question marks after all the questions.
And you've touched on the *really* interesting part of all of this... why is it that Europeans (straight, white, Christian withstanding) came to dominate all of these other groups and cultures. What about them was it that led to them becoming the "master race" that you refer to. Why was it not the East Indians that came to and conquered Britain and established trading posts in North America? I'm suggesting some sort of jacked up Aryan white suppremicist view, but asking a real question.
If these kinds of questions fascinate you, I suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. It realy dives into some of these issues. Good read. Oh and that link is not to some lame amazon store of mine.
I work in IT for the government (US), and we chose Red Hat. At the time it was a no brainer, there wasn't really another enterprise (in terms of support) vendor at the time. These days it's a bit different, but I think we'd make the same decision again. The one time we've needed support, it was handled very promptly and very well. We used to be a Novell shop, and in our environment that's one strike against SUSE even before it had an evaluation on technical merits.
Actually, this interests me more for countertops than roads. "Countertops?" you ask. If you've never looked at concrete countertops, you really should. Here are some pics. (I am in no way related to the site.) They seem like they have signifigant advantages over granite, namely cheap, easily formed materials, and can look just as good or better (mix in whatever you want!). However, my concern has always been dropping somehting on them and chipping, because you have to replace the whole slab if you want to fix it. Perhaps bendable concrete would be less prone to chipping.
SpamBayes is a great product *for an individual user*. Unfortunately it doesn't scale well at the enterprise level (there can be a lot of desktops in an organization) and it works at the desktop, not the server, level. For individual users this is of no great concern. The problem is wirelss devices like Blackberries: in an enterprise setting the Blackberry server picks up mail before it ever hits the users desktop mail client. So while spam is filtered from the PC, it gets sent to the Blackberry, too. This is a *MAJOR* problem for users that receive a lot of spam and an absolute barrier to wireless device adoption. For most medium to large companies, it's just not worth the hassle of distributing, managing, and updating a desktop product like SpamBayes when you have the option of deploying a central filtering solution (which you can manage from a web browser most of the time).
I like SpamBayes (a lot), but it's just not in the same boat as products like Brightmail.
A funny coincidence... my organization is going live with Barracuda Networks spam filtering product (they advertise here a lot) on Wednesday. Seems pretty good in our tests... reporting is weak, but seems like a great value.
I'm actually using a SonyEriccson GC83 with AT&T Wireless (soon to be Cingular Wireless) to post this right now. I can't comment on its Linux compatability (on Win2k w/ the work laptop), but I doubt it works because it seems to require this strange AT&T software (which is actually pretty nice, let's you control VPN connections eand everything form inside it). Overall the service is pretty quick; I get sustained d/l rates of about 20k per second. Latency seems pretty high though, although I don't have any numbers to back this up. It's about $70/month for unlimited data. Good luck!
I read the review, it didn't seem newar as negative as the poster made it out to be. All in all, I find I don't mind the whole spatial thing, as it turns out I don't navigate very deep into any areas I might do any kind of file management/editing in. And the other posters are right, it's a lot faster. I don't dual boot, so no issues there, and my sound worked out of the box. All in all, I'm happy.
I see so many comments lauding the Live subscription service because it's only one bill for all your games (excluding your broadband bill of course). At first glance this seems reasonable, but when you actually look at the situation, it just doesn't hold up. While it's actually concievable that you might recieve multiple bills for your multiple online PS2 games, it isn't the case, because the online thing is FREE for all of them (at least every one that I've seen thus far, which is, oh, four or so.) So it seems to me that it's more of a question of "monthly subscription" vs. "free" than one of "subscription" vs. "individual bills."
Of course *if* more Sony titles begin requiring a subscription fee, then all of this could change, but right now that's a big IF to make a solid conlusion about the "Value added" of a product.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly, how did *anyone* not see this coming? For anyone that thought that the bailout was a good idea (and by anyone I mean anyone, regardless of political party or leanings), you're getting what you deserved. Unfortunately you're dragging the rest of us with you. What did anyone expect to happen? We took businesses with a *proven* failed operating plan, and gave them more money to "keep on keepin' on." We rewarded bad decisions and then all of a sudden, the still operating failure of a business (surprise!) keeps on making bad decisions and burning through capital faster than it takes it in. I know this is a logical fallacy, but damn! you had to be stupid to not see this coming. Anymore I just chuckle at the absurdity of this whole situation... we're getting what we asked for. I can't blame AIG for this, it is doing exactly what it has been doing-- f*ing up. But when we give them free money to keep on doing it, you can't blame them for thinking it might actually be good business.
As an aside, what the heck would you do if you run out of charge? Currently a can of gas is pretty portable... enough batteries to move a depleted car... not so much. I don't think it's very feasible to have a recovery vehicle come out and juice the car up for 2 hours (optimistically). That leaves towing. Not the end of the world, but a step down from the current situation.
Electric cars help on the pollution front, but do jack squat for the congestion problem, and I think that's a problem that's just as bad in the Bay. That coupled with the fact that the hippies won't budge on nuclear, and we're still burning the same hydrocarbons to make the power, we're just doing it in a different place (which might be more efficient, but is it *that* much more efficient?).
Out of curiosity (seriously), do you actually know anything about accounting? The classes are actually extremely challenging (surprised me, I was from a CS background), but for different reasons than CS (I've taken both). I know this sounds like I'm trying to start a flame, but I'm not. I've noticed that people have a weird tendency to think that whatever they've actually done is the be-all, end-all in terms of importance and difficulty and tend to discredit everything else. Oh, and I'm talking about real accounting courses like intermediate and governmental/non-profit, not basic accounting (which is pretty much bookkeeping in most places).
Easy, repeat the grade. There are a lot more attractive girls at college than in the real world!
You are completely correct. I'm an idiot. They EXPENSED a lot of R&D on '06. I'm to lazy to look into it any further, but they were probably capitalizing in previous years and are now expensing (as they didn't show any R&D in previous periods).
Mod parent up! I've seen many posts claiming that AMD would show losses because of new plants. THIS IS WRONG. The acquisition of capital assets, like fabs, do NOT affect net income (aside from some depreciation expense recorded in the year of acquisition). A major investment would not cause a loss as reported. It could contribute due to depreciation, but these costs should be relatively minor by comparison. Also, for what it's worth, I just perused the financial statements and only saw a reported loss of $166 million. See this link to the EDGAR filing. Another glance showed they capitalized a lot of R&D in 2006, where there was non in the previous reported years. That's probably the biggest reason for the loss.
Drivers.
You have an interesting point. I have a counterpoint to this (although it is based on an admittedly small sample size). My best manager wasn't technical at all, and he knew it. He hired and hung on to very sharp people he trusted and he always looked them to help create a decision. This works well for two reasons. (1) It helps everyone feel like they contribute and have a say in decisions (big moral booster). (2) Given enough time in a management role, technical skills will begin to decline. After all, you are managing, not hacking, on a daily basis. Yes, there could be exceptions to this. After technical skills have eroded, you may find yourself making "informed" decisions because "you know better," when in fact you do not. Being comfortable with the fact the people working for you are the experts and looking to them for advice in decision making prevents this from happening.
Nope, they are made out of Soylent Green. That's why they have to add red dye.
There are others like me out there! It's so weird how similar behaviour traits are within the MB categories. I very well could have written your entire comment. Weird.
Is the linked site down for anyone else? Already?
Wow, you must not have looked into history very deeply. For many, *many* years, AMD was a better "bang for the buck" CPU, but in terms of raw performance, Intel was vastly superior. I'm not sure when the tide turned in terms of overall performance, but Intel was definately ahead in the Pentium (even PII maybe?) days (and earlier).
It's true, my UID is high, but I was around LONG before there were UIDs (remember Chips and Dip?), I just never got around to getting one for a long time. And I wasn't intending to be inflammatory, but there are a good few comments that roast Apple Corp for their actions without any regard to the actual facts of the case or contract, which is... disappointing.
It's a shame to see the comments thus far. There are the usual appologists, "Apple (Computer) can do no wrong!" and some decent guessing, but without the terms of the contract to inspect, everything happening is speculation on the behalf of readers.
My understanding from what I have read is this is not a trademark dispute, but rather a contract dispute, which will be governed by different aspects of the law. There are some important unanswered questions:
1. What are the material terms of the contract?
2. What was the duration of the contract? US law requires a finite duration, otherwise it's valid for a "reasonable" amount of time (How's that for vague!).
If I permit myself to do some speculation, I'd suspect Apple Comp is treading on dangerous ground. They know and have known this, hence the contract in '92. It's not a tough argument to make for Apple Corp. We, Apple, sell music. They, Apple, sell music. See the confusion? Apple Corp, was there first and had first use and trademark. Most any lawyer ought to be able to make that argument successfully. But this isn't about the trademark, it's about the details of that contract, which I haven't seen in the article.
And a note to the applogists: I don't think Apple Corp is doing anything wrong. They have an established business that predated Apple computer. They are attempting to enforce the esisting contract with Apple Comp. Good for them, everyone should be held to their word.
Oops! I meant that I'm NOT suggesting a white suppremicist view. Man, I really should use the preview feature. Oh, and put question marks after all the questions.
And you've touched on the *really* interesting part of all of this... why is it that Europeans (straight, white, Christian withstanding) came to dominate all of these other groups and cultures. What about them was it that led to them becoming the "master race" that you refer to. Why was it not the East Indians that came to and conquered Britain and established trading posts in North America? I'm suggesting some sort of jacked up Aryan white suppremicist view, but asking a real question.
If these kinds of questions fascinate you, I suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. It realy dives into some of these issues. Good read. Oh and that link is not to some lame amazon store of mine.
I work in IT for the government (US), and we chose Red Hat. At the time it was a no brainer, there wasn't really another enterprise (in terms of support) vendor at the time. These days it's a bit different, but I think we'd make the same decision again. The one time we've needed support, it was handled very promptly and very well. We used to be a Novell shop, and in our environment that's one strike against SUSE even before it had an evaluation on technical merits.
Exchange!
Well, someone had to do it: Well screw you guys... I'm goin' home!
Actually, this interests me more for countertops than roads. "Countertops?" you ask. If you've never looked at concrete countertops, you really should. Here are some pics. (I am in no way related to the site.) They seem like they have signifigant advantages over granite, namely cheap, easily formed materials, and can look just as good or better (mix in whatever you want!). However, my concern has always been dropping somehting on them and chipping, because you have to replace the whole slab if you want to fix it. Perhaps bendable concrete would be less prone to chipping.
I like SpamBayes (a lot), but it's just not in the same boat as products like Brightmail.
A funny coincidence... my organization is going live with Barracuda Networks spam filtering product (they advertise here a lot) on Wednesday. Seems pretty good in our tests... reporting is weak, but seems like a great value.
I'm actually using a SonyEriccson GC83 with AT&T Wireless (soon to be Cingular Wireless) to post this right now. I can't comment on its Linux compatability (on Win2k w/ the work laptop), but I doubt it works because it seems to require this strange AT&T software (which is actually pretty nice, let's you control VPN connections eand everything form inside it). Overall the service is pretty quick; I get sustained d/l rates of about 20k per second. Latency seems pretty high though, although I don't have any numbers to back this up. It's about $70/month for unlimited data. Good luck!
I read the review, it didn't seem newar as negative as the poster made it out to be. All in all, I find I don't mind the whole spatial thing, as it turns out I don't navigate very deep into any areas I might do any kind of file management/editing in. And the other posters are right, it's a lot faster. I don't dual boot, so no issues there, and my sound worked out of the box. All in all, I'm happy.
Of course *if* more Sony titles begin requiring a subscription fee, then all of this could change, but right now that's a big IF to make a solid conlusion about the "Value added" of a product.