Netscape was a great business (and had a great browser) when it was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999. Most of the issues with the browser started after that.
You're crazy. Here's what Netscape had when they were bought by AOL for $4.2 billion:
A browser that was mostly given away for free, and was rapidly losing market share to Internet Explorer
A www server that was well on its way to oblivion, courtesy of Apache
A popular portal site which would almost certainly decline once the browser no longer dominated the market
By 1999, most people had a clear idea that these insane dotcom stock valuations couldn't continue. But the massively inflated price AOL paid for Netscape was a high-water mark for me.
I wonder about the $4.2 billion figure, though. Was most of that in AOL stock? Were they swapping massively inflated dotcom stock for massively inflated dotcom stock, so it was really just Monopoly(tm) money after all?
The real loser was Time Warner, then, which traded shares in a valuable company for some of AOL's magic beans.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
The US has vast reserves of coal. We wouldn't have to rely on the Middle East. And it is easier to cut pollution from relatively few centralized sources than it is from hundreds of millions of cars. And if something better than coal comes along, it's easier to switch relatively few power plants than hundreds of millions of cars. Etc, etc.
I'm going to give you a pass on "nucular" because a dictionary guy I heard on the radio said it's a regionalism, not barbarism that is like nails on a chalkboard to educated people.
Wow, an AC posts completely unsubstantiated 'facts', condems a system that:
- made the US the sole world superpower - made the West's standard of living what it is
etc., etc.
This is silly. One of the most successful bits of propagandizing the US right wing has done over the past 50 years is to conflate capitalism with American patriotism, Freedom, Democracy, puppies, apple pie, gas-guzzling vehicles, and bunch of things it isn't.
What it boils down to is a sham. Capitalism does not equal Freedom. Are the people of Nigeria more free than the people of Norway because they have private companies drilling their oil, and sending the profits overseas, rather than a state-owned company that invests the profits locally?
What the demise of the Warsaw Pact showed is that corrupt, totalitarian, undemocratic regimes are less stable than ones that are accountable to their people. The right wing has tried to turn this into an argument for why, for instance, we shouldn't have a single-payer health care system like the one that seem to work fairly well in (capitalist) Germany, or for other things that go against the interests of a small number of very wealthy capitalists. It's a bit of stretch to say the least.
From the article: Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change.
What a weaselly way of putting it. Here's what 30 seconds of Googling says about Professor Robert Carter: He's a member of the Institute for Public Affairs, a corporate-funded think tank.
You see, he isn't working for the coal industry per se. He's working for a think tank that is funded by corporate donors that may or may not include the coal industry. See the difference?
In piling up scientist after scientist while failing to refute Gore's arguments, this article is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda pamphlet "100 Scientists Against Einstein." Einstein's response still applies: "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
Very interesting graph. But it mostly just says that VC's went to school and want to hang around California and Boston.
Hang around and throw the GDP of a typical African nation at Silicon Valley startups--startups, mind you, not established players like Apple and HP--every year. But that doesn't mean Silicon Valley is a significant engine of economic growth. Why, it's been at least 2 years since a Silicon Valley company had an IPO that made a billionaires of a couple of people in their 30s. Clearly, if this doesn't happen every month, the growth potential of the region is exhausted. Only second-stringers would choose to stay here rather than move to someplace that is up-and-coming, like Tucson or Orlando.
Silicon Valley startups still receive more VC funding than the next four largest regions combined. Why is this? Stanford and UC Berkeley nearby? The pretty scenery? The affordable housing? In part. But mostly, it's because tens of billions of dollars in VC money resides within a few blocks on Sand Hill Road. And for the most part, VCs don't have any reason to leave the area in search of investments. The Web browser was invented in Illinois, but when it came time to found Netscape, the founders moved West because this is where the VC money lives. That hasn't changed.
I got a Rio 500 as a replacement for my fried Rio 300, and it didn't play Audible.com files either until months after I purchased it, despite their advertising.
The Diamond Rio 300 could make the "best" list for being one of the first MP3 players on the market, but as a product it completely sucked.
First, the battery compartment. It was so shoddily constructed that only Duracell batteries would work. Have you ever heard of anything so absurd? But it was true. The manual even mentioned it. (Since they obviously knew about this quite serious defect, did it occur to them to fix it?) I had to return to the store because it would not work with the Energizer batteries I had on hand. You would think that AA batteries are pretty much standardized, but apparently there are slight differences among manufacturers and Diamond managed to screw it up.
Then, the false advertising. They hyped the hell out of the fact that you could use this thing to play files from Audible.com. The packaging had an Audible.com logo on it. It came with Audible.com software. But the player *did not* support Audible.com's file format! When I checked with tech support they promised support would be available with a firmware upgrade to be released, urm,... Real Soon Now. It took more than 6 months from the date I purchased the player. (Which, given the poor quality of its manufacturing was well beyond its life expectancy.)
Fortunately, the Rio 300 I purchased broke 2 days after I bought it and I was able to return it to Fry's for a refund. Oh, and this is how it broke: it got hot. Real hot. Like it was going to catch on fire. Ever seen the Star Trek episode where a phaser overheats, starts to glow, and Capt. Kirk has to throw it down a garbage chute before it explodes? That's what this was like.
All that said, Rio changed owners and management several times. By the time later versions of the Rio came out, it was made by effectively a different company. The Rio Cali I bought a few years ago was a decent player. But they continued their practice of hyping their relationship with Audible.com even though their players didn't support the file format until a firmware upgrade that came months or even years after the release of the player. To this date I've never listened to an Audible.com file on a Rio--the firmware releases always happen after I've bought a newer player.
$15 million over 10 years? That doesn't sound like much, given that San Francisco's general fund expenditures will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion over the same period.
As much as we love them, Google isn't doing this out of altruism. They expect this to be valuable. Why turn this important piece of infrastructure over to a private company so cheaply? Wouldn't it be better for the city to build it and control it? The city could run it without advertising, in rich and poor neighborhoods, without selling user information to private companies, charging just enough to maintain the system without jacking up fees to generate profits to ship off to Google's shareholders.
The private sector doesn't always do things better. The city runs the water system, for instance. It works so well I hardly ever think about it, and it's so cheap my landlord doesn't even bill me for it. That's not such a trivial thing, given how limited the supply of water is out here. Supplying fresh water to every building in the city is a great deal more complex than Wifi, and yet the city seems to handle it. Why not Wifi too?
I think about Kozmo.com, and how I used to have a sandwich, Razor scooter, and porn video delivered to my door in under 30 minutes, and a single tear rolls down my cheek.
Just kidding about the porn and the scooter. If a lot of people had actually done that, they might have stayed in business. I did order a lot of $5 sandwiches though. They lost money on every delivery, trying to build "mindshare" or some silly thing. I knew it couldn't last. Alas, I do miss them though.
Out of curiosity: Is anyone on Slashdot planning to see the Madonna concert? Post anonymously if you like.
Obviously she sells a lot of tickets. But I'm completely mystified: Who is Madonna's fanbase? Are teenage girls willing to shell out this much money to see her show? Middle-aged gay men?
I suspect that most of the tickets are bought by musically clueless people who are buying them for someone else. Corporations buy them to give them away for meeting sales quotas. Old dads buy them for their daughters because they think that's what the kids are listening to.
I could be wrong. I just don't know--I've never been to a Madonna concert, and find it hard to imagine a circumstance under which anyone I know would buy tickets.
Over the last few years I've seen companies fire employee's over their blogs, its not exactly a new idea. Ok in this instance the person used a online news site to 'get the information out'.
Apple has the right to fire this employee if they find out who he or she is. They don't have the right to force the publisher to reveal confidential information (the employee's name). This isn't a criminal investigation; they don't have a search warrant; Apple is not the FBI; they do not have the right to force the publisher to help them enforce an agreement the publisher was not a party to. Their right to control their PR strategy just isn't important enough to trump several amendments of the Bill of Rights.
They can only garnish, I think, 25 percent of your wages. It's hardly worth dropping out of MIT because of a 25 percent pay cut at your work-study job at the Sports & Rec center, and they know it.
The home page for my housemate's Web browser was set to Yahoo, so whenever she needed to enter a URL, she just entered it into the Yahoo search field. It worked... most of the time. I mean she'd get a list of Web pages and one of them would be the right one. But it makes my teeth itch just thinking about it. She didn't seem to understand what a URL was at all.
CNS is one of those fake news sites the GOP sets up to get their talking points past "the filter" of real reporters. I wouldn't put any more stock in this than I would in the reporting of that male prostitute they hired to ask softball question at W's press conferences.
It's ironic that this topic would get posted today...as it marks the 0-for-20 record for them in backing House candidates (they couldn't even get Cuellar [TX-28] into a stinking _runoff_!).
Actually they were backing his opponent, Ciro Rodriguez. Here is a link to the DailyKos post mortem:
To be fair Walmart may eat a BIT of the tax as the supply curve will not necessarily shift the full amount of the tax increase
I think Walmart will eat a LOT of the tax increase. Depends on the size of the increase. Any corporate tax likely to be passed in the US will likely to be small enough that Walmart will eat it.
But anyway, my original comment was about the Walmart heirs, not the corporation. My point was that high taxes don't seem to have taken away Sam Walton's incentive to achieve building the Walmart empire, nor his heirs incentive to achieve being heirs to the Walmart empire. It is possible to disincentivize achievement with a USSR-style confiscatory tax, but we're ridiculously far away from that in the US. So we have a little wiggle room.
Walmart as a corporation, just like every other large and small business in the US, simply passes on corporate taxes to the consumers in the price that is charged for a good or service.
Baloney. If profits are maximized when jeans sell for $30 a pair, Walmart isn't going to raise the price because their taxes went up. They're going to keep selling them for $30 and lobby to get their taxes reduced. To do otherwise would suggest that they were selling the jeans too cheaply before their taxes increased. In which case, they aren't really "passing costs along to consumers," they're repricing the jeans in order to maximize profit. Something they should have done regardless of how they were taxed.
And yet he has been doing this since before he was elected^H^H^H^H^H^H made president. Remember back to 2000, when the debate was about the budget surplus? The gist of his argument was "It's your money." If the government ran a budget surplus, it was like the clerk at a store overcharging you, and the government was morally obligated to give you your money back.
How asinine was this? Let me pause for a second. It still makes my jaw drop to think this is an actual argument made by someone running for president. It defies even rudimentary common sense.
The most depressing thing about watching Bush speak--and this has been the case for as long as he's been in the public eye--is that he doesn't even seem to understand the issues underlying the questions he is asked.
Asked about globalization, he comes back with some platitude about education being the solution to all that ails us. Well that was what they told the autoworkers 20 years ago: learn to program computers! And never mind the fact that even if education were the solution, we're doing nothing in this country to make it more accessible. Quite the opposite: We've shifted more of the risk of advanced education onto students at the same time that educational requirements for employment have increased. These past 30 years have been a complete clusterfuck for people who earn most of their living from a salary rather than through investments (Ie, the poorer 90 percent of us.)
Asked to address this, it's like he doesn't even understand the question.
She was like, "Well... Prince has been living in Prince World for quite some time now." She's like, "So Prince will come to us periodically and say things like: 'It's 3 in the morning in Minnesota. I really need a camel. Go get it.'
And then we try to explain to Prince, like: 'Prince, it's 3:00 in the morning in Minnesota, it's January... and you want a camel. That is not physically or psychologically possible.'
I'd do the best I could if money were truly no object. Like, give me a million dollars in petty cash + expenses. If that price is too high then, well... hello! Mr. Prince. Welcome to reality.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in 3rd grade, I learned critical professional skills such as Turtle Graphics and Vic 20 Basic.
Lord knows those came in handy when I entered the job market in 1995.
YouTube is nothing like America's Home Videos. What a stupid analogy.
You're crazy. Here's what Netscape had when they were bought by AOL for $4.2 billion:
By 1999, most people had a clear idea that these insane dotcom stock valuations couldn't continue. But the massively inflated price AOL paid for Netscape was a high-water mark for me.
I wonder about the $4.2 billion figure, though. Was most of that in AOL stock? Were they swapping massively inflated dotcom stock for massively inflated dotcom stock, so it was really just Monopoly(tm) money after all?
The real loser was Time Warner, then, which traded shares in a valuable company for some of AOL's magic beans.
Yes, I'm aware of Nucular, Hydro, Wind, Tidal, Natrual Gas. Doesn't matter. Coal is the most popular choice today.
The US has vast reserves of coal. We wouldn't have to rely on the Middle East. And it is easier to cut pollution from relatively few centralized sources than it is from hundreds of millions of cars. And if something better than coal comes along, it's easier to switch relatively few power plants than hundreds of millions of cars. Etc, etc.
I'm going to give you a pass on "nucular" because a dictionary guy I heard on the radio said it's a regionalism, not barbarism that is like nails on a chalkboard to educated people.
Wow, an AC posts completely unsubstantiated 'facts', condems a system that:
- made the US the sole world superpower
- made the West's standard of living what it is
etc., etc.
This is silly. One of the most successful bits of propagandizing the US right wing has done over the past 50 years is to conflate capitalism with American patriotism, Freedom, Democracy, puppies, apple pie, gas-guzzling vehicles, and bunch of things it isn't.
What it boils down to is a sham. Capitalism does not equal Freedom. Are the people of Nigeria more free than the people of Norway because they have private companies drilling their oil, and sending the profits overseas, rather than a state-owned company that invests the profits locally?
What the demise of the Warsaw Pact showed is that corrupt, totalitarian, undemocratic regimes are less stable than ones that are accountable to their people. The right wing has tried to turn this into an argument for why, for instance, we shouldn't have a single-payer health care system like the one that seem to work fairly well in (capitalist) Germany, or for other things that go against the interests of a small number of very wealthy capitalists. It's a bit of stretch to say the least.
From the article:
r ter
Carter is one of hundreds of highly qualified non-governmental, non-industry, non-lobby group climate experts who contest the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are causing significant global climate change.
What a weaselly way of putting it. Here's what 30 seconds of Googling says about Professor Robert Carter: He's a member of the Institute for Public Affairs, a corporate-funded think tank.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bob_Ca
You see, he isn't working for the coal industry per se. He's working for a think tank that is funded by corporate donors that may or may not include the coal industry. See the difference?
In piling up scientist after scientist while failing to refute Gore's arguments, this article is reminiscent of the Nazi propaganda pamphlet "100 Scientists Against Einstein." Einstein's response still applies: "If I were wrong, one would be enough."
Very interesting graph. But it mostly just says that VC's went to school and want to hang around California and Boston.
Hang around and throw the GDP of a typical African nation at Silicon Valley startups--startups, mind you, not established players like Apple and HP--every year. But that doesn't mean Silicon Valley is a significant engine of economic growth. Why, it's been at least 2 years since a Silicon Valley company had an IPO that made a billionaires of a couple of people in their 30s. Clearly, if this doesn't happen every month, the growth potential of the region is exhausted. Only second-stringers would choose to stay here rather than move to someplace that is up-and-coming, like Tucson or Orlando.
Silicon Valley ceased being an engine of significant economic growth after the dotcom bust.
Ahem?
VC Funding by region, Q1 2006
Silicon Valley startups still receive more VC funding than the next four largest regions combined. Why is this? Stanford and UC Berkeley nearby? The pretty scenery? The affordable housing? In part. But mostly, it's because tens of billions of dollars in VC money resides within a few blocks on Sand Hill Road. And for the most part, VCs don't have any reason to leave the area in search of investments. The Web browser was invented in Illinois, but when it came time to found Netscape, the founders moved West because this is where the VC money lives. That hasn't changed.
I got a Rio 500 as a replacement for my fried Rio 300, and it didn't play Audible.com files either until months after I purchased it, despite their advertising.
The Diamond Rio 300 could make the "best" list for being one of the first MP3 players on the market, but as a product it completely sucked.
... Real Soon Now. It took more than 6 months from the date I purchased the player. (Which, given the poor quality of its manufacturing was well beyond its life expectancy.)
First, the battery compartment. It was so shoddily constructed that only Duracell batteries would work. Have you ever heard of anything so absurd? But it was true. The manual even mentioned it. (Since they obviously knew about this quite serious defect, did it occur to them to fix it?) I had to return to the store because it would not work with the Energizer batteries I had on hand. You would think that AA batteries are pretty much standardized, but apparently there are slight differences among manufacturers and Diamond managed to screw it up.
Then, the false advertising. They hyped the hell out of the fact that you could use this thing to play files from Audible.com. The packaging had an Audible.com logo on it. It came with Audible.com software. But the player *did not* support Audible.com's file format! When I checked with tech support they promised support would be available with a firmware upgrade to be released, urm,
Fortunately, the Rio 300 I purchased broke 2 days after I bought it and I was able to return it to Fry's for a refund. Oh, and this is how it broke: it got hot. Real hot. Like it was going to catch on fire. Ever seen the Star Trek episode where a phaser overheats, starts to glow, and Capt. Kirk has to throw it down a garbage chute before it explodes? That's what this was like.
All that said, Rio changed owners and management several times. By the time later versions of the Rio came out, it was made by effectively a different company. The Rio Cali I bought a few years ago was a decent player. But they continued their practice of hyping their relationship with Audible.com even though their players didn't support the file format until a firmware upgrade that came months or even years after the release of the player. To this date I've never listened to an Audible.com file on a Rio--the firmware releases always happen after I've bought a newer player.
$15 million over 10 years? That doesn't sound like much, given that San Francisco's general fund expenditures will be somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion over the same period.
As much as we love them, Google isn't doing this out of altruism. They expect this to be valuable. Why turn this important piece of infrastructure over to a private company so cheaply? Wouldn't it be better for the city to build it and control it? The city could run it without advertising, in rich and poor neighborhoods, without selling user information to private companies, charging just enough to maintain the system without jacking up fees to generate profits to ship off to Google's shareholders.
The private sector doesn't always do things better. The city runs the water system, for instance. It works so well I hardly ever think about it, and it's so cheap my landlord doesn't even bill me for it. That's not such a trivial thing, given how limited the supply of water is out here. Supplying fresh water to every building in the city is a great deal more complex than Wifi, and yet the city seems to handle it. Why not Wifi too?
I think about Kozmo.com, and how I used to have a sandwich, Razor scooter, and porn video delivered to my door in under 30 minutes, and a single tear rolls down my cheek.
Just kidding about the porn and the scooter. If a lot of people had actually done that, they might have stayed in business. I did order a lot of $5 sandwiches though. They lost money on every delivery, trying to build "mindshare" or some silly thing. I knew it couldn't last. Alas, I do miss them though.
Out of curiosity: Is anyone on Slashdot planning to see the Madonna concert? Post anonymously if you like.
Obviously she sells a lot of tickets. But I'm completely mystified: Who is Madonna's fanbase? Are teenage girls willing to shell out this much money to see her show? Middle-aged gay men?
I suspect that most of the tickets are bought by musically clueless people who are buying them for someone else. Corporations buy them to give them away for meeting sales quotas. Old dads buy them for their daughters because they think that's what the kids are listening to.
I could be wrong. I just don't know--I've never been to a Madonna concert, and find it hard to imagine a circumstance under which anyone I know would buy tickets.
Over the last few years I've seen companies fire employee's over their blogs, its not exactly a new idea. Ok in this instance the person used a online news site to 'get the information out'.
Apple has the right to fire this employee if they find out who he or she is. They don't have the right to force the publisher to reveal confidential information (the employee's name). This isn't a criminal investigation; they don't have a search warrant; Apple is not the FBI; they do not have the right to force the publisher to help them enforce an agreement the publisher was not a party to. Their right to control their PR strategy just isn't important enough to trump several amendments of the Bill of Rights.
They can only garnish, I think, 25 percent of your wages. It's hardly worth dropping out of MIT because of a 25 percent pay cut at your work-study job at the Sports & Rec center, and they know it.
The home page for my housemate's Web browser was set to Yahoo, so whenever she needed to enter a URL, she just entered it into the Yahoo search field. It worked... most of the time. I mean she'd get a list of Web pages and one of them would be the right one. But it makes my teeth itch just thinking about it. She didn't seem to understand what a URL was at all.
In the US, we'd lose most of the good bittorrent sites.
Outside the US, they'd lose most of the Web, period.
Um, guys?
CNS is one of those fake news sites the GOP sets up to get their talking points past "the filter" of real reporters. I wouldn't put any more stock in this than I would in the reporting of that male prostitute they hired to ask softball question at W's press conferences.
It's ironic that this topic would get posted today...as it marks the 0-for-20 record for them in backing House candidates (they couldn't even get Cuellar [TX-28] into a stinking _runoff_!).
/ 7694
Actually they were backing his opponent, Ciro Rodriguez. Here is a link to the DailyKos post mortem:
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/8/125826
To be fair Walmart may eat a BIT of the tax as the supply curve will not necessarily shift the full amount of the tax increase
I think Walmart will eat a LOT of the tax increase. Depends on the size of the increase. Any corporate tax likely to be passed in the US will likely to be small enough that Walmart will eat it.
But anyway, my original comment was about the Walmart heirs, not the corporation. My point was that high taxes don't seem to have taken away Sam Walton's incentive to achieve building the Walmart empire, nor his heirs incentive to achieve being heirs to the Walmart empire. It is possible to disincentivize achievement with a USSR-style confiscatory tax, but we're ridiculously far away from that in the US. So we have a little wiggle room.
No, you really don't get it.
Walmart as a corporation, just like every other large and small business in the US, simply passes on corporate taxes to the consumers in the price that is charged for a good or service.
Baloney. If profits are maximized when jeans sell for $30 a pair, Walmart isn't going to raise the price because their taxes went up. They're going to keep selling them for $30 and lobby to get their taxes reduced. To do otherwise would suggest that they were selling the jeans too cheaply before their taxes increased. In which case, they aren't really "passing costs along to consumers," they're repricing the jeans in order to maximize profit. Something they should have done regardless of how they were taxed.
The US is kept at a significant disadvantage by our draconian tax system that punishes achievement.
The WalMart heirs almost gave up their dream of owning every last scrap of money in the world because then their taxes would be too high.
Thank God we passed tax reform so they will continue to have incentive to achieve.
And yet he has been doing this since before he was elected^H^H^H^H^H^H made president. Remember back to 2000, when the debate was about the budget surplus? The gist of his argument was "It's your money." If the government ran a budget surplus, it was like the clerk at a store overcharging you, and the government was morally obligated to give you your money back.
How asinine was this? Let me pause for a second. It still makes my jaw drop to think this is an actual argument made by someone running for president. It defies even rudimentary common sense.
The most depressing thing about watching Bush speak--and this has been the case for as long as he's been in the public eye--is that he doesn't even seem to understand the issues underlying the questions he is asked.
Asked about globalization, he comes back with some platitude about education being the solution to all that ails us. Well that was what they told the autoworkers 20 years ago: learn to program computers! And never mind the fact that even if education were the solution, we're doing nothing in this country to make it more accessible. Quite the opposite: We've shifted more of the risk of advanced education onto students at the same time that educational requirements for employment have increased. These past 30 years have been a complete clusterfuck for people who earn most of their living from a salary rather than through investments (Ie, the poorer 90 percent of us.)
Asked to address this, it's like he doesn't even understand the question.
We are SO SCREWED.
She was like, "Well ... Prince has been living in Prince World for quite some time now." She's like, "So Prince will come to us periodically and say things like: 'It's 3 in the morning in Minnesota. I really need a camel. Go get it.'
... and you want a camel. That is not physically or psychologically possible.'
And then we try to explain to Prince, like: 'Prince, it's 3:00 in the morning in Minnesota, it's January
I'd do the best I could if money were truly no object. Like, give me a million dollars in petty cash + expenses. If that price is too high then, well... hello! Mr. Prince. Welcome to reality.