Nothing good of this will come of it. It never has and never will. "Hedge fund" guys know only one thing: slash and burn.
And that may be the right thing to do at this point. The marker is moving -- very quickly. The pace at which it is increasing its speed is also increasing.
A company the size of Yahoo can't spend the money it needs to in order to really innovate years out, and not months out, once it gets behind the curve. They've got 17 years of legacy crap they need to continue supporting if they want to remain "Yahoo". Seventeen years worth of cruft, acquired services and the ilk. If they can't break even on those, they need to do MASSIVE restructuring to eliminate legacy support debt to even have a prayer of coming up with something new and delivering it before the market leaves that behind, too.
Microsoft can keep innovating because they've got massively profitable products and services around the majority of the support debt. Apple got where it was because it had basically failed when Jobs started to turn it around. (It'll be interesting to see if they can continue to innovate as they end up with a half billion people they need to keep happy... I own a lot of Apple stock, and I have to say that Cook's tenure so far has me pretty nervous from that standpoint!)
Yahoo, though? The scenario you described may be in the best short and long term interest of both the employees and the stockholders. The 2000 people laid off are 2000 people getting severance while there is money to be had, and have the opportunity to get into a company that has a better chance. And if they trim it enough, shed enough services, get the company lean enough that it can invest in real future-looking research, maybe some of the employees left will be able to weather that storm.
Its short sighed to assume that you can wish a company into success, and sometimes the safer bet is to be honest about where you are and where you can get from there.
This isn't news for nerds, is it? It's not even stuff that matters, really. It's just more spam from Hugh Pickens, slashdot definitely needs to stop posting all of his offtopic submissions.
Its political, but not overtly so. It'll probably cause some big partisan shitstorm, though. Slashdot editors aren't stupid. Ads pay their salaries, and shitstorms drive ad views. The content of the front page will make a lot more sense if you always keep that in mind. Slashdot hasn't been a place for intelligent discussion on topics of interest to "nerds" since the 90's.
Editors stay in your lane. There is nothing relevant in this case to tech, or nerd issues.
Nerds frequently walk around looking awkward, wearing hoodies, and scaring simpletons who think they must be D&D satan worshippers. Seems relevant to me.
(And, yes, the D&D satan thing probably is dating me...)
I may be odd-man out on here, but I don't find $60 a particularly large amount of money to spend on something I get 10-20 hours of enjoyment out of. And there are plenty of games that I've gotten 10x that out of for the same $60. I happen to like the big, detailed, long games that require teams of 250 people a couple of years to make. I don't expect to pay $5 for a game like that, nor do I feel its right to thank them for their hard work by buying the game from someone else used.
Hell, I even like having authors of books I happen to like actually being paid for the work they did for me.
Here's the reality: If you don't value your entertainment to that level, don't buy it. The game makers will get the hint. Maybe the market really has shifted to $5 throw-away casual games, with companies like Zynga shooting for quantity, not quality. Maybe the market can only really sustain a dozen or two games with mid-eight-figure development budgets a year.
I do find it baffling how little people value the efforts of those who are providing entertainment to them. I'm not so poor that paying $10 to see a movie I'm excited about is a problem, nor am I so poor or easily amused that I value my entertainment at $1 an hour.
Of course implementing these fixes would cost more than just paying the scammers, so we'll never see it happen.
It has -- quite literally -- nothing to do with the cost of the fixes. Most of the world has already gone chip+PIN. The reason you don't see it in the US is very simple: it slows down the transaction. That's why Visa and MC have been pushing for contactless payments. Tap your card and off you go. Simple as that. Its also why most stores no longer require signatures under $25 -- the networks have mandated that. You can actually lose your merchant account or pay penalties if you are caught asking people to sign for low-cost transactions.
The banks make money from people using the cards. They know exactly how much they lose from fraud, and how much they lose from slowing down transactions. As long as the latter is more than the former, nothing will change. You saw the change elsewhere because the spending patterns aren't the same as in the US, and fraud rates were higher.
When I got home, I went on Amazon.com, read a few reviews, and ordered excatly what I wanted. Its on its way as I type this, sure I didn't have it same day...but when you can no longer even FIND what you're looking for in a big box store, what the hell is the point?
And, on top of that, in a bunch of the country you probably could've gotten same-day from Amazon... and still paid less.
If you told them you wanted the Monster Cable option for the mouse, for higher precision tracking, they would've probably found one for you.
Now that is the kind of post you should never make on the Internet. If I were going to interview you, and knew about this, I'd never interview you in a million years. Who knows what of it might end up posted for the world to see. And hey, you wouldn't want him making the same kind of post about YOU, naming you and saying what a pain you are to interview--even if he was wrong to ask those things.
If you're going to do this, you never names! And you should post as AC too.
Plus it opens the GP up for a libel lawsuit. Hands down the dumbest, and most bizarre, post I've seen on Slashdot. And I've been on Slashdot a VERY long time.
You have to be a Comcast *TV* provider to use those services. If you stream HBOGO over your Comcast internet connection, when you get TV via FIOS, you pay for that bandwidth, because you're not a Comcast TV customer.
This isn't a net neutrality case, this is a case of Comcast delivering content from your *TV* service to you via IP instead of QAM.
I'd actually be pissed off if they weren't doing this, because it would mean it was free to watch on-demand using their cable boxes, but not my devices.
I could go on and on and on... Use google and see how MS really treated their customers when the RROD was first reported.
Yeah, if you actually called them and didn't gripe to your friends on the Internet, or try to pitch a fit at the store, they replaced them. And did so very quickly. (The early failure repairs were 2-day in-and-out shipping, and if you had it to UPS first thing Monday, you frequently had it back before the weekend.)
A lot of companies got burned during that time by the switch to no-lead solder... and Microsoft, unlike a lot of consumer electronics companies, stood behind their devices.
Wii won in unit sales, but they have turned a generation off with a (yes, huge-selling) fad device and continued rehashes of old franchises.
And, more to the point, lost *badly* in game sales. There are a LOT of people with Wii consoles, and most of them have Wii Sports and maybe another game or two.
That didn't put Nintendo out of business, as they don't sell the Wii at a loss, but it sure limits the upside of each sale. Sony and MS make dramatically more money per console sold, because they sell so many more games per console.
Microsoft is planning to have XBOX 720 run a variation of Windows 8. This would finally kill the 'black sheep' from their platform lineup and complete their "Windows Everywhere" vision.
Both versions of the Xbox ran versions of the Windows kernel, so technically speaking they've never been "black sheep".
Up until recently, Massachusetts clung to centuries-old laws banning the sale of alcohol in retail stores on Sundays. Naturally, the local liquor industry lobbied continuously to have the ban lifted, so it finally was a few years ago. Now people can happily shop for liquor seven days a week.
But I wonder if something was lost in the process. Back when sales were banned on Sunday, you either had to plan ahead or improvise if you wanted something to drink on Sunday. Of course, sometimes this wasn't feasible so this became an unscheduled "dry" day. That's not necessarily a bad thing as sort of a random test of self-control.
Even more bizarre, even before then you *could* within a certain distance of the border -- because they didn't want MA to lose out on liquor sales to NH and RI.
The disks were supposed to be cheaper than videotape because they could be easly mass produced. Video tape prices fell and laserdisk remained expensive.
I have a LOT of laserdiscs going back to the early 80's, and I can't remember anyone EVER claiming they were supposed to be cheaper. And *any* modern technology like DVD or BluRay would do *very* well to last as long as LaserDiscs did -- they had a 22 year run in the US. DVD will hit that soon, but probably at its very trailing edge as well. BluRay will never hit 22 years.
LaserDiscs were always about quality and durability, not price.
Interesting but, do any of the various "home" 3-D printers have the ability to produce things with enough accuracy? You can't be off even a tiny bit with thickness or sizing for a LEGO to not fit, etc
I've seen the output from a Makerbot plenty of times, and never got the impression it had the ability to make something that fine grained, much less strong enough.
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
You're mistakenly equating the cost to send someone to Mars and what YOU would pay to go to Mars. High demand and almost zero supply doesn't drive up what it costs SpaceX to do it, just what it costs you to pay SpaceX to do it.
Musk didn't say he could sell tickets to Mars for $500k in 15 years, he said he could send people to Mars for $500k. That's a HUGE difference, and means there is no question of demand or supply involved.
AWS runs Windows Server, which has very different licensing (including VM).
Plus, the up-front cost of reserved instances covers the license cost.
These companies are about providing either terminal services infrastructure or VDI infrastructure, both of which don't have license types for that kind of service. (Note, AWS doesn't have the terminal services role, for example.)
while regularly auditing license compliance for companies like tuCloud that provide legitimate virtual desktop services.
If you own a volume license, yes, they can do that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
There is no such thing as a volume license for Windows -- there's enterprise agreements, and you get a volume license key, but that key is only valid if used to replace the OEM key that comes with new hardware. (I.E., its provided to EA customers so you can push out desktop images to your hardware, but you can only do so to hardware that *came* with an OEM license. There's no concept of a "new" VLK license.)
The *only* legal option companies like this have are getting an OEM distribution license (which Microsoft doesn't do for non-hardware vendors), or use full retail copies. There's nothing MS can do to prevent OnLive from using full retail copies, but at $200ish a VM, the cost to the end user goes up. And what you can't do is use guest accounts and published applications from the cloud, because you don't have CALs for those users.
There are routes that companies can do to make it work, but not routes that somehow magically bypass the cost of buying Windows.
(And, FWIW, I am completely informed here -- I've gone through this process for similar services before.)
Nobody said electronic devices can "bring down" a plane. The issue has always been interference with a plane's navigation system. There have been documented cases where a jetliner mysteriously lost function in electronic systems, only to regain it after the flight crew went around turning off everyone's electronic gadgets. Some of them can emit quite a bit of RF.
No, that's never -- not once, for even a moment -- been the issue. Did you know the use of those electronic devices are banned by the FAA in gliders and hot air balloons? Did you know the bans were put in place at the request of the FCC?
You can't use those sort of devices in the air because they used to cause havoc in radio systems on the ground. Cell phones used to cause the network to (in layman's terms) "freak the fuck out" if a handset was visible from too many towers. The *FCC* passed rules about the use of radio electronics in the air, and the FAA enforces it. Modern networks are fine with it, now, which is why you don't have calls dropping because some dimwit didn't turn their phone off.
The reason they don't want laptops and crap out has *nothing* to do with RF and everything to do with heavy pointy things flying around the airplane in an emergency.
Not to mention that much of the unemployment situation's not due to the article author's supposition (nor would doing what he claims FIX the problem...) but more due to many illegals taking positions and companies offshoring work.
And THAT has been demonstrated to be patently false.
The unemployment rate is because of a skills mismatch, not outsourcing, or people working over time or any of the other BS. Its very simple, really: too many underqualified people, too many people thinking they're more qualified than they are, and too few qualified people. The jobs that tend to have a lot of illegal workers are jobs that the business owners typically can't get Americans to do, because people seem to have some sense that society owes them something for nothing.
AT&T isn't really advertising falsely, the data is unlimited. The speeds are limited.
Which means the data is effectively limited as well. If you sell "unlimited plans" and then throttle speeds to the point where downloading 24/7 for a month will only net you 1GB of data, that's not very unlimited is it?
So by that bizarre logic, you're suggesting that ATT is legally obligated to ensure they can sustain 100% of theoretically possible 3G bandwidth at every possible location in their network where there is any viable signal at all?
Azure was released in 2010, Amazon EC was released in 2006.
Should also add -- clearly you haven't used them. I've got systems hosted in both. Amazon EC is a server-in-the-cloud model, Azure is a service-in-the-cloud model. They're completely different products, for completely different use cases. (In fact, until recently, I had Azure services that were calling into an EC2 back-end, using S3 for storage, because EC2 and Azure provided very different types of capabilities.)
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing good of this will come of it. It never has and never will. "Hedge fund" guys know only one thing: slash and burn.
And that may be the right thing to do at this point. The marker is moving -- very quickly. The pace at which it is increasing its speed is also increasing.
A company the size of Yahoo can't spend the money it needs to in order to really innovate years out, and not months out, once it gets behind the curve. They've got 17 years of legacy crap they need to continue supporting if they want to remain "Yahoo". Seventeen years worth of cruft, acquired services and the ilk. If they can't break even on those, they need to do MASSIVE restructuring to eliminate legacy support debt to even have a prayer of coming up with something new and delivering it before the market leaves that behind, too.
Microsoft can keep innovating because they've got massively profitable products and services around the majority of the support debt. Apple got where it was because it had basically failed when Jobs started to turn it around. (It'll be interesting to see if they can continue to innovate as they end up with a half billion people they need to keep happy... I own a lot of Apple stock, and I have to say that Cook's tenure so far has me pretty nervous from that standpoint!)
Yahoo, though? The scenario you described may be in the best short and long term interest of both the employees and the stockholders. The 2000 people laid off are 2000 people getting severance while there is money to be had, and have the opportunity to get into a company that has a better chance. And if they trim it enough, shed enough services, get the company lean enough that it can invest in real future-looking research, maybe some of the employees left will be able to weather that storm.
Its short sighed to assume that you can wish a company into success, and sometimes the safer bet is to be honest about where you are and where you can get from there.
In my experience, not having a demo available is probably a good sign that the game sucks...
So I don't buy them. Simple as that. I wouldn't spend $20 on a game I wasn't sure I was going to like, either.
This isn't news for nerds, is it? It's not even stuff that matters, really. It's just more spam from Hugh Pickens, slashdot definitely needs to stop posting all of his offtopic submissions.
Its political, but not overtly so. It'll probably cause some big partisan shitstorm, though. Slashdot editors aren't stupid. Ads pay their salaries, and shitstorms drive ad views. The content of the front page will make a lot more sense if you always keep that in mind. Slashdot hasn't been a place for intelligent discussion on topics of interest to "nerds" since the 90's.
Please stop, this is not news for nerds.
Editors stay in your lane. There is nothing relevant in this case to tech, or nerd issues.
Nerds frequently walk around looking awkward, wearing hoodies, and scaring simpletons who think they must be D&D satan worshippers. Seems relevant to me.
(And, yes, the D&D satan thing probably is dating me ...)
I saw this announced six weeks ago, so its a big lead-up to an April Fools, if so.
I may be odd-man out on here, but I don't find $60 a particularly large amount of money to spend on something I get 10-20 hours of enjoyment out of. And there are plenty of games that I've gotten 10x that out of for the same $60. I happen to like the big, detailed, long games that require teams of 250 people a couple of years to make. I don't expect to pay $5 for a game like that, nor do I feel its right to thank them for their hard work by buying the game from someone else used.
Hell, I even like having authors of books I happen to like actually being paid for the work they did for me.
Here's the reality: If you don't value your entertainment to that level, don't buy it. The game makers will get the hint. Maybe the market really has shifted to $5 throw-away casual games, with companies like Zynga shooting for quantity, not quality. Maybe the market can only really sustain a dozen or two games with mid-eight-figure development budgets a year.
I do find it baffling how little people value the efforts of those who are providing entertainment to them. I'm not so poor that paying $10 to see a movie I'm excited about is a problem, nor am I so poor or easily amused that I value my entertainment at $1 an hour.
Of course implementing these fixes would cost more than just paying the scammers, so we'll never see it happen.
It has -- quite literally -- nothing to do with the cost of the fixes. Most of the world has already gone chip+PIN. The reason you don't see it in the US is very simple: it slows down the transaction. That's why Visa and MC have been pushing for contactless payments. Tap your card and off you go. Simple as that. Its also why most stores no longer require signatures under $25 -- the networks have mandated that. You can actually lose your merchant account or pay penalties if you are caught asking people to sign for low-cost transactions.
The banks make money from people using the cards. They know exactly how much they lose from fraud, and how much they lose from slowing down transactions. As long as the latter is more than the former, nothing will change. You saw the change elsewhere because the spending patterns aren't the same as in the US, and fraud rates were higher.
When I got home, I went on Amazon.com, read a few reviews, and ordered excatly what I wanted. Its on its way as I type this, sure I didn't have it same day...but when you can no longer even FIND what you're looking for in a big box store, what the hell is the point?
And, on top of that, in a bunch of the country you probably could've gotten same-day from Amazon... and still paid less.
If you told them you wanted the Monster Cable option for the mouse, for higher precision tracking, they would've probably found one for you.
either you innovate or you are out of business really soon
Yeah, the only thing worse than a Rim job is a Palm job these days.
Now that is the kind of post you should never make on the Internet. If I were going to interview you, and knew about this, I'd never interview you in a million years. Who knows what of it might end up posted for the world to see. And hey, you wouldn't want him making the same kind of post about YOU, naming you and saying what a pain you are to interview--even if he was wrong to ask those things.
If you're going to do this, you never names! And you should post as AC too.
Plus it opens the GP up for a libel lawsuit. Hands down the dumbest, and most bizarre, post I've seen on Slashdot. And I've been on Slashdot a VERY long time.
You have to be a Comcast *TV* provider to use those services. If you stream HBOGO over your Comcast internet connection, when you get TV via FIOS, you pay for that bandwidth, because you're not a Comcast TV customer.
This isn't a net neutrality case, this is a case of Comcast delivering content from your *TV* service to you via IP instead of QAM.
I'd actually be pissed off if they weren't doing this, because it would mean it was free to watch on-demand using their cable boxes, but not my devices.
I could go on and on and on... Use google and see how MS really treated their customers when the RROD was first reported.
Yeah, if you actually called them and didn't gripe to your friends on the Internet, or try to pitch a fit at the store, they replaced them. And did so very quickly. (The early failure repairs were 2-day in-and-out shipping, and if you had it to UPS first thing Monday, you frequently had it back before the weekend.)
A lot of companies got burned during that time by the switch to no-lead solder... and Microsoft, unlike a lot of consumer electronics companies, stood behind their devices.
Wii won in unit sales, but they have turned a generation off with a (yes, huge-selling) fad device and continued rehashes of old franchises.
And, more to the point, lost *badly* in game sales. There are a LOT of people with Wii consoles, and most of them have Wii Sports and maybe another game or two.
That didn't put Nintendo out of business, as they don't sell the Wii at a loss, but it sure limits the upside of each sale. Sony and MS make dramatically more money per console sold, because they sell so many more games per console.
Microsoft is planning to have XBOX 720 run a variation of Windows 8. This would finally kill the 'black sheep' from their platform lineup and complete their "Windows Everywhere" vision.
Both versions of the Xbox ran versions of the Windows kernel, so technically speaking they've never been "black sheep".
Up until recently, Massachusetts clung to centuries-old laws banning the sale of alcohol in retail stores on Sundays. Naturally, the local liquor industry lobbied continuously to have the ban lifted, so it finally was a few years ago. Now people can happily shop for liquor seven days a week.
But I wonder if something was lost in the process. Back when sales were banned on Sunday, you either had to plan ahead or improvise if you wanted something to drink on Sunday. Of course, sometimes this wasn't feasible so this became an unscheduled "dry" day. That's not necessarily a bad thing as sort of a random test of self-control.
Even more bizarre, even before then you *could* within a certain distance of the border -- because they didn't want MA to lose out on liquor sales to NH and RI.
The disks were supposed to be cheaper than videotape because they could be easly mass produced. Video tape prices fell and laserdisk remained expensive.
I have a LOT of laserdiscs going back to the early 80's, and I can't remember anyone EVER claiming they were supposed to be cheaper. And *any* modern technology like DVD or BluRay would do *very* well to last as long as LaserDiscs did -- they had a 22 year run in the US. DVD will hit that soon, but probably at its very trailing edge as well. BluRay will never hit 22 years.
LaserDiscs were always about quality and durability, not price.
Interesting but, do any of the various "home" 3-D printers have the ability to produce things with enough accuracy? You can't be off even a tiny bit with thickness or sizing for a LEGO to not fit, etc
I've seen the output from a Makerbot plenty of times, and never got the impression it had the ability to make something that fine grained, much less strong enough.
Well, whatever you do, a 500 K$ per person price tag for the whole trip doesn't work. Even if you solve all major technical obstacles -- with that price, you're gonna be flooded with many thousands of applicants, whom you cannot all provide with a seat in a space ship, which means that basic supply-demand mechanisms will drive the price up.
You're mistakenly equating the cost to send someone to Mars and what YOU would pay to go to Mars. High demand and almost zero supply doesn't drive up what it costs SpaceX to do it, just what it costs you to pay SpaceX to do it.
Musk didn't say he could sell tickets to Mars for $500k in 15 years, he said he could send people to Mars for $500k. That's a HUGE difference, and means there is no question of demand or supply involved.
If anyone -- literally anyone -- other than Musk said it, I'd agree.
But he's got a decade of proving people wrong when they said bullshit, and he's demonstrated he doesn't say things lightly.
AWS runs Windows Server, which has very different licensing (including VM).
Plus, the up-front cost of reserved instances covers the license cost.
These companies are about providing either terminal services infrastructure or VDI infrastructure, both of which don't have license types for that kind of service. (Note, AWS doesn't have the terminal services role, for example.)
while regularly auditing license compliance for companies like tuCloud that provide legitimate virtual desktop services.
If you own a volume license, yes, they can do that, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.
There is no such thing as a volume license for Windows -- there's enterprise agreements, and you get a volume license key, but that key is only valid if used to replace the OEM key that comes with new hardware. (I.E., its provided to EA customers so you can push out desktop images to your hardware, but you can only do so to hardware that *came* with an OEM license. There's no concept of a "new" VLK license.)
The *only* legal option companies like this have are getting an OEM distribution license (which Microsoft doesn't do for non-hardware vendors), or use full retail copies. There's nothing MS can do to prevent OnLive from using full retail copies, but at $200ish a VM, the cost to the end user goes up. And what you can't do is use guest accounts and published applications from the cloud, because you don't have CALs for those users.
There are routes that companies can do to make it work, but not routes that somehow magically bypass the cost of buying Windows.
(And, FWIW, I am completely informed here -- I've gone through this process for similar services before.)
Nobody said electronic devices can "bring down" a plane. The issue has always been interference with a plane's navigation system. There have been documented cases where a jetliner mysteriously lost function in electronic systems, only to regain it after the flight crew went around turning off everyone's electronic gadgets. Some of them can emit quite a bit of RF.
No, that's never -- not once, for even a moment -- been the issue. Did you know the use of those electronic devices are banned by the FAA in gliders and hot air balloons? Did you know the bans were put in place at the request of the FCC?
You can't use those sort of devices in the air because they used to cause havoc in radio systems on the ground. Cell phones used to cause the network to (in layman's terms) "freak the fuck out" if a handset was visible from too many towers. The *FCC* passed rules about the use of radio electronics in the air, and the FAA enforces it. Modern networks are fine with it, now, which is why you don't have calls dropping because some dimwit didn't turn their phone off.
The reason they don't want laptops and crap out has *nothing* to do with RF and everything to do with heavy pointy things flying around the airplane in an emergency.
Not to mention that much of the unemployment situation's not due to the article author's supposition (nor would doing what he claims FIX the problem...) but more due to many illegals taking positions and companies offshoring work.
And THAT has been demonstrated to be patently false.
The unemployment rate is because of a skills mismatch, not outsourcing, or people working over time or any of the other BS. Its very simple, really: too many underqualified people, too many people thinking they're more qualified than they are, and too few qualified people. The jobs that tend to have a lot of illegal workers are jobs that the business owners typically can't get Americans to do, because people seem to have some sense that society owes them something for nothing.
Which means the data is effectively limited as well. If you sell "unlimited plans" and then throttle speeds to the point where downloading 24/7 for a month will only net you 1GB of data, that's not very unlimited is it?
So by that bizarre logic, you're suggesting that ATT is legally obligated to ensure they can sustain 100% of theoretically possible 3G bandwidth at every possible location in their network where there is any viable signal at all?
Azure was released in 2010, Amazon EC was released in 2006.
Should also add -- clearly you haven't used them. I've got systems hosted in both. Amazon EC is a server-in-the-cloud model, Azure is a service-in-the-cloud model. They're completely different products, for completely different use cases. (In fact, until recently, I had Azure services that were calling into an EC2 back-end, using S3 for storage, because EC2 and Azure provided very different types of capabilities.)