In the tech market, P/E is not an entirely appropriate measure. What you're really hoping for is future earnings, and tech requires a high start-up cost but returns recurring profits. (Which is why companies so jealously guard their IP, to bring up another Slashdot flamewar.)
The trick to getting rich on the Street is to see technologies that have a high P/E (or, more often, negative or infinite P/E because they have no earnings or losses) but will "win" eventually. A nose for good technology and a strong stomach for loss are required.
That said, it doesn't apply to Microsoft, whose earnings can be roughly tracked; you know that they're never to expand by a factor of 1,000 again. That's why their P/E is a comparatively reasonable 25, and their numbers go more like a blue-chip than real high-tech.
It also doesn't apply to stocks that have already been bid up by speculators who don't really know the value of what they're buying, which was pretty much all of them during the dot-com boom.
There's a hell of a lot more going on than this (like when you buy a share of MSFT you're also buying $3.48 in cash). I'll cease to bore you with any more details; usually this is as far as I go and beyond that I just play my instincts. Additional numbers can make more fine-grained analysis but they tend to get into the "damned lies and statistics" category.
So for myself I count those rough numbers, my instinct for a products that don't suck, and the rising tide that lifts all ships. I've done pretty well, but never confuse genius for a bull market.
One last thing: there is a difference between earnings and dividends. Dividends end up in your pocket; earnings are invested in the company. But it's your money either way, so you don't lose much by not getting dividends. When a dividend is issued, the share price usually goes down to compensate. If you want your money in cash, you just sell your stock and get your cash from the next guy. But it's not a problem that tech companies don't issue dividends; you can think of it as automatically reinvesting your dividends in R&D for new products.
Sounds like an ill-trained cashier. They know they're not going to get 100% compliance, so "no" is usually a fine answer. I can't imagine why a minimum-wage clerk would be so persistent unless they were explicitly told that it was necessary.
You'd have done the store a favor to mention this to the manager. If one clerk was misinformed they might all be. Customer tracking info isn't nearly enough to risk losing a sale. Ask once and take "no" for an answer.
Telephones really are interstate commerce. Would you really want to have to bitch at Oregon from your home in Missouri if you were getting called from there?
I share your skepticism about the federal government's abilities, but since we move freely from state to state, and call freely from state to state, it really does seem that some things are far more simply handled by one body rather than 50 separate ones.
Or perhaps you'd prefer 3,000 separate county bodies? If local control is necessarily better, what makes states so fabulous?
No, the federal government doesn't handle all things well. Hell, it doesn't handle anything well, really. But I don't see that implying that the separate states can do it better when it's a nationwide problem.
I'd say that if all of the good parts of the film are in the trailer, it's more the film's fault than the trailer's. If the film only has three good jokes in it, and they're all in the trailer, I can usually tell, and then I've saved myself $10 and two hours.
(How can you tell? If there are three good jokes and six so-so jokes, the odds are that they're reaching for material just to fill three minutes. Occasionally a film is better than the trailer makes it out to be, but generally it's on the money.)
Ouch. I'll play with 120VAC house lines, and I've even done a little work with 220. But 480 is definitely the difference between "Ow! Hey, I'm not gonna do that again" and ++DJ%XH***NO CARRIER***
Perhaps. They were talking about seeking breakeven on the $7 yearly registration fee, so it sounds more like dollars per month rather than dollars per day.
This is why I get skeptical whenever Slashdot publishes news from something other than a major news source. Major engineering accomplishments don't usually appear first in the Salt Lake Tribune or Deseret News.
So between the domain name and faked keywords on the site trying to pump up the page rank, they're trying to get people to go to their site and then click on one of the pay-per-click links.
1. Put up a web page 2. Pray that just based on the domain name people will come 3. Profit
Yeah, I guess we know what step 2 is, but pay-per-click is pennies, and you have to do all that setup work coming up with names, hosting the site, etc. I suppose its profitable, but jeez, at what point is it just easier to get a job flipping burgers? Or maybe even a reputable IT job?
Google pay-per-click money is free only if your time is worth nothing.
Dude... it was a JOKE. Probes taking along an ice house and alcohol, like they do in Minnesota... get it?
At least bother to read the whole post before flaming on. No, it wasn't a particularly well told joke (he took too long to get to the punch line), but jeez, man: lighten up.
Many eyes, but not all of them friendly
on
The Future of Firefox
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Open source is a two-edged sword for security. Or more precisely, a two sided curve:
1. Open source means that finding holes is a lot easier 2. Open source means more eyes spotting and fixing them
So there's a curve: a small open-source product has as many holes as a small commercial product, but those holes are wide open in public. I'd be reluctant to run something from Sourceforge from a tiny community of programmers, because it doesn't actually have many eyes on it.
Your only saving grace is that no hackers are out there targeting you. You survive on security by obscurity.
The ratio of evil eyes to good ones is probably constant, but it takes only one malicious coder to spot an error in open source. So Firefox may be safe, but that doesn't mean that open source in general is safe.
And that's without even bringing up the nightmare that malicious contributors can do.
Why would you say that a sandbox model is overly restrictive? The Java sandbox model has many routes out; it means that you can specify what permissions an application has, not forbid all of them. The Java model comes with nearly all permissions set to "no", but they can be opened.
That said, I haven't seen a really good way to manage permissions. It's just not practical for an applet to say, "In order to run this, you need these 47 permissions" and expect you to fix that. With cleverness the modeler could create roles with aggregates of permissions, so that you can say, "This app needs access to your browser UI" (like Tabbrowser).
Still, that's asking the user to make a lot of security judgments based on trust. Some extensions/applets/ActiveX should be allowed to modify your hard disk; most shouldn't. How can the user tell?
It's a hard problem, one that I don't have a good answer to. I know Microsoft's solution (based purely on a yes/no trust decision) sucks. But I'd say the problem isn't the over-restrictiveness of the sandbox, but the difficulty of asking the user to manage his/her sandbox well.
The article claims that it's energy-negative no matter what your inputs are: nuclear, wind, etc. Fossil fuels just happen to be cheap and available (comparatively and temporarily, and missing a bunch of externalities). Between harvesting, fertilizing, fermenting, distilling, etc. you use a lot of energy, no matter what that source of energy is.
It doesn't have anything to do with money, a kilowatt-hour is a btu is a joule, no matter the energy source. If you burn 10 joules of solar electricity to make 9 joules of ethanol, you've wasted energy.
Now, you may have converted it into a more useful form (it's easier to power a car with ethanol than electricity; it refuels faster and goes farther). So we may need to do it anyway.
Also, there's serious question as to whether the article is right. The corn is obviously absorbing solar energy to make sugar and carbohydrates, and it feels weird to assert that it takes so much energy to convert those chemicals into a usable form. Even if there's only a slight gain (10 kwh of solar/nuke/wind/oil to make 11 kwh) it's still a win for us, since there's a loop:
1. Burn 10 kwh of oil 2. Make 11 kwh of ethanol 3. Use 1 kwh to power a computer to look at porn 4. Take the other 10 and repeat step 1, except substituting oil for ethanol.
But we're still arguing about whether the result is 9 or 11, and it's a huge difference.
Corporate welfare is a major factor. Sugar has a tariff designed to ensure that foreign sugar is expensive, and so American producers can set their price just below the foreign sugar price including tariff, rather than what the market will bear.
This is made more complicated by immense subsidies for corn (lest the corn farmers starve or have to switch to something else, unlike their daddies, and their daddies' daddies, and...) which means the replacement of corn syrup for sugar in many food products.
I'm just scratching the surface here, but basically, yeah: teasing out the true price of ethanol in the US is insanely complicated.
Because a Macdonald's uses perhaps a few dozen gallons of cooking grease a day. A restaurant could support maybe a dozen cars, and probably less. There are a lot of fast food restaurants, but not that many.
Right now used cooking grease is cheap only because so few people can actually use it. If the numbers become significant you'll find that there isn't enough grease to go around, not by orders of magnitude.
And, for the love of god, ethanol is a renewable resource that lessens any producing nation's dependence on crisis stricken countries full of religious fanatics and other nutcases.
Assuming, of course, that it's net energy positive, which is exactly the opposite of what TFA concluded. And TFA was written by reasonable scientists rather than industry-paid consultants.
The article may not be right. Even if ethanol is energy-negative it may still be useful as a fluid for fueling the small power plants in cars, and built using nuke/wind/solar/hydro.
But the gist is that
1. Invest in ethanol. 2. ??? 3. Profit
is still missing a critical step, one that may not happen. I'd love for it to be a slam-dunk, but there are still reasonable people who say it isn't, and the loudest voices who say that it is are funded by the industry that stands the most to benefit from Step 1.
Are you suggesting that farmers use nuclear combines or that distilleries use nuclear fission as a heat source.
Actually, yes, that's what he's suggesting. Except that he's talking about it indirectly: ethanol fueled tractors and trucks for shipping.
Trucks and tractors need small, mobile power plants, and liquids are a good way to fuel mobile power plants. It's hard to store pure electricity or heat. It's quick and easy to load a new batch of liquid. So the grandparent is proposing converting them into ethanol. He could as easily have proposed compressed hydrogen (a fluid if not a liquid), and we could debate that as well. But the gist is that even if ethanol is not in and of itself an energy win, improving technologies for ethanol production may still be worthwhile.
Slashdot Mirror
In the tech market, P/E is not an entirely appropriate measure. What you're really hoping for is future earnings, and tech requires a high start-up cost but returns recurring profits. (Which is why companies so jealously guard their IP, to bring up another Slashdot flamewar.)
The trick to getting rich on the Street is to see technologies that have a high P/E (or, more often, negative or infinite P/E because they have no earnings or losses) but will "win" eventually. A nose for good technology and a strong stomach for loss are required.
That said, it doesn't apply to Microsoft, whose earnings can be roughly tracked; you know that they're never to expand by a factor of 1,000 again. That's why their P/E is a comparatively reasonable 25, and their numbers go more like a blue-chip than real high-tech.
It also doesn't apply to stocks that have already been bid up by speculators who don't really know the value of what they're buying, which was pretty much all of them during the dot-com boom.
There's a hell of a lot more going on than this (like when you buy a share of MSFT you're also buying $3.48 in cash). I'll cease to bore you with any more details; usually this is as far as I go and beyond that I just play my instincts. Additional numbers can make more fine-grained analysis but they tend to get into the "damned lies and statistics" category.
So for myself I count those rough numbers, my instinct for a products that don't suck, and the rising tide that lifts all ships. I've done pretty well, but never confuse genius for a bull market.
One last thing: there is a difference between earnings and dividends. Dividends end up in your pocket; earnings are invested in the company. But it's your money either way, so you don't lose much by not getting dividends. When a dividend is issued, the share price usually goes down to compensate. If you want your money in cash, you just sell your stock and get your cash from the next guy. But it's not a problem that tech companies don't issue dividends; you can think of it as automatically reinvesting your dividends in R&D for new products.
But VOIP doesn't float.
There's a reason Toys R Us is perilously close to bankruptcy. Annoying their customers has got to be part of it.
Sounds like an ill-trained cashier. They know they're not going to get 100% compliance, so "no" is usually a fine answer. I can't imagine why a minimum-wage clerk would be so persistent unless they were explicitly told that it was necessary.
You'd have done the store a favor to mention this to the manager. If one clerk was misinformed they might all be. Customer tracking info isn't nearly enough to risk losing a sale. Ask once and take "no" for an answer.
Telephones really are interstate commerce. Would you really want to have to bitch at Oregon from your home in Missouri if you were getting called from there?
I share your skepticism about the federal government's abilities, but since we move freely from state to state, and call freely from state to state, it really does seem that some things are far more simply handled by one body rather than 50 separate ones.
Or perhaps you'd prefer 3,000 separate county bodies? If local control is necessarily better, what makes states so fabulous?
No, the federal government doesn't handle all things well. Hell, it doesn't handle anything well, really. But I don't see that implying that the separate states can do it better when it's a nationwide problem.
I'd say that if all of the good parts of the film are in the trailer, it's more the film's fault than the trailer's. If the film only has three good jokes in it, and they're all in the trailer, I can usually tell, and then I've saved myself $10 and two hours.
(How can you tell? If there are three good jokes and six so-so jokes, the odds are that they're reaching for material just to fill three minutes. Occasionally a film is better than the trailer makes it out to be, but generally it's on the money.)
Ouch. I'll play with 120VAC house lines, and I've even done a little work with 220. But 480 is definitely the difference between "Ow! Hey, I'm not gonna do that again" and ++DJ%XH***NO CARRIER***
Perhaps. They were talking about seeking breakeven on the $7 yearly registration fee, so it sounds more like dollars per month rather than dollars per day.
This is why I get skeptical whenever Slashdot publishes news from something other than a major news source. Major engineering accomplishments don't usually appear first in the Salt Lake Tribune or Deseret News.
So between the domain name and faked keywords on the site trying to pump up the page rank, they're trying to get people to go to their site and then click on one of the pay-per-click links.
1. Put up a web page
2. Pray that just based on the domain name people will come
3. Profit
Yeah, I guess we know what step 2 is, but pay-per-click is pennies, and you have to do all that setup work coming up with names, hosting the site, etc. I suppose its profitable, but jeez, at what point is it just easier to get a job flipping burgers? Or maybe even a reputable IT job?
Google pay-per-click money is free only if your time is worth nothing.
Now going to have more Daylight Savings Time than non-DST. I find that ironic.
The Undiscovered Country
from whose bourn no traveller returns
-- William Shakespeare
Dude... it was a JOKE. Probes taking along an ice house and alcohol, like they do in Minnesota... get it?
At least bother to read the whole post before flaming on. No, it wasn't a particularly well told joke (he took too long to get to the punch line), but jeez, man: lighten up.
Open source is a two-edged sword for security. Or more precisely, a two sided curve:
1. Open source means that finding holes is a lot easier
2. Open source means more eyes spotting and fixing them
So there's a curve: a small open-source product has as many holes as a small commercial product, but those holes are wide open in public. I'd be reluctant to run something from Sourceforge from a tiny community of programmers, because it doesn't actually have many eyes on it.
Your only saving grace is that no hackers are out there targeting you. You survive on security by obscurity.
The ratio of evil eyes to good ones is probably constant, but it takes only one malicious coder to spot an error in open source. So Firefox may be safe, but that doesn't mean that open source in general is safe.
And that's without even bringing up the nightmare that malicious contributors can do.
Why would you say that a sandbox model is overly restrictive? The Java sandbox model has many routes out; it means that you can specify what permissions an application has, not forbid all of them. The Java model comes with nearly all permissions set to "no", but they can be opened.
That said, I haven't seen a really good way to manage permissions. It's just not practical for an applet to say, "In order to run this, you need these 47 permissions" and expect you to fix that. With cleverness the modeler could create roles with aggregates of permissions, so that you can say, "This app needs access to your browser UI" (like Tabbrowser).
Still, that's asking the user to make a lot of security judgments based on trust. Some extensions/applets/ActiveX should be allowed to modify your hard disk; most shouldn't. How can the user tell?
It's a hard problem, one that I don't have a good answer to. I know Microsoft's solution (based purely on a yes/no trust decision) sucks. But I'd say the problem isn't the over-restrictiveness of the sandbox, but the difficulty of asking the user to manage his/her sandbox well.
Sadly, I gather that the number for oil may be as much as .33.
The article claimed the factor was more like 1.3 than 1.7, but others claim it's more like .75, so... well, it's certainly not settled.
But you're very right that if it weren't for the corn industry we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
The article claims that it's energy-negative no matter what your inputs are: nuclear, wind, etc. Fossil fuels just happen to be cheap and available (comparatively and temporarily, and missing a bunch of externalities). Between harvesting, fertilizing, fermenting, distilling, etc. you use a lot of energy, no matter what that source of energy is.
It doesn't have anything to do with money, a kilowatt-hour is a btu is a joule, no matter the energy source. If you burn 10 joules of solar electricity to make 9 joules of ethanol, you've wasted energy.
Now, you may have converted it into a more useful form (it's easier to power a car with ethanol than electricity; it refuels faster and goes farther). So we may need to do it anyway.
Also, there's serious question as to whether the article is right. The corn is obviously absorbing solar energy to make sugar and carbohydrates, and it feels weird to assert that it takes so much energy to convert those chemicals into a usable form. Even if there's only a slight gain (10 kwh of solar/nuke/wind/oil to make 11 kwh) it's still a win for us, since there's a loop:
1. Burn 10 kwh of oil
2. Make 11 kwh of ethanol
3. Use 1 kwh to power a computer to look at porn
4. Take the other 10 and repeat step 1, except substituting oil for ethanol.
But we're still arguing about whether the result is 9 or 11, and it's a huge difference.
Corporate welfare is a major factor. Sugar has a tariff designed to ensure that foreign sugar is expensive, and so American producers can set their price just below the foreign sugar price including tariff, rather than what the market will bear.
...) which means the replacement of corn syrup for sugar in many food products.
This is made more complicated by immense subsidies for corn (lest the corn farmers starve or have to switch to something else, unlike their daddies, and their daddies' daddies, and
I'm just scratching the surface here, but basically, yeah: teasing out the true price of ethanol in the US is insanely complicated.
Because a Macdonald's uses perhaps a few dozen gallons of cooking grease a day. A restaurant could support maybe a dozen cars, and probably less. There are a lot of fast food restaurants, but not that many.
Right now used cooking grease is cheap only because so few people can actually use it. If the numbers become significant you'll find that there isn't enough grease to go around, not by orders of magnitude.
And, for the love of god, ethanol is a renewable resource that lessens any producing nation's dependence on crisis stricken countries full of religious fanatics and other nutcases.
Assuming, of course, that it's net energy positive, which is exactly the opposite of what TFA concluded. And TFA was written by reasonable scientists rather than industry-paid consultants.
The article may not be right. Even if ethanol is energy-negative it may still be useful as a fluid for fueling the small power plants in cars, and built using nuke/wind/solar/hydro.
But the gist is that
1. Invest in ethanol.
2. ???
3. Profit
is still missing a critical step, one that may not happen. I'd love for it to be a slam-dunk, but there are still reasonable people who say it isn't, and the loudest voices who say that it is are funded by the industry that stands the most to benefit from Step 1.
Are you suggesting that farmers use nuclear combines or that distilleries use nuclear fission as a heat source.
Actually, yes, that's what he's suggesting. Except that he's talking about it indirectly: ethanol fueled tractors and trucks for shipping.
Trucks and tractors need small, mobile power plants, and liquids are a good way to fuel mobile power plants. It's hard to store pure electricity or heat. It's quick and easy to load a new batch of liquid. So the grandparent is proposing converting them into ethanol. He could as easily have proposed compressed hydrogen (a fluid if not a liquid), and we could debate that as well. But the gist is that even if ethanol is not in and of itself an energy win, improving technologies for ethanol production may still be worthwhile.
Canadian Coke is also corn-syrup free. A friend of mine moved near the border because he loves soda and has a corn-syrup allergy.
Mostly out of pork you get votes and money. And hot air, but it's hard to convert that to fuel.
So do porn sites prefer RSS or Atom?
They've probably been itching for another good format war to take sides on.