i can get it for 3000yen here. i saw it as low as 2000yen for that mouse. where do YOU shop?
Rakuten -- Japan's version of Amazon -- sells it for a discounted price of 5,000 yen. If you can get it for 2,000 yen, then go buy a truckload.:)
also, it's great that you provide translation of the insert but 3000yen for a translation is pretty steep.
It's silly to suggest we charge 3,000 yen for the translation. There are many other associated costs you are not taking into account, including but not limited to shipping, customs duty, insurance, warehousing, transaction processing, bandwidth, and a dozen other costs that go along with running a business.
how much insight into the mouse do you need?! if you're that crazy about the design, you'd want more than just than just a page describing it...
It is more than a page, actually. And just because you're not interested in Masamune Shirow's design philosophy doesn't mean that other people aren't. While part of human nature, it rarely makes sense to extrapolate one's individual views onto the rest of the planet's population.
To put an end to this thread... Our customers have made it very clear that we're providing a valuable service by coming back again and again. But you can't always please everybody.;)
Actually, it's not much cheaper than that in Japan. Besides, Shinza.com also provides an English translation of the Masamune Shirow interview insert, which you otherwise wouldn't receive.
Finally, keep in mind that other sources charge as much as $90 for the same mouse -- with no translated insert.
It only seems appropriate to provide a link to the limited edition Ghost in the Shell Mouse, just in case anime fans haven't heard of it. This mouse was designed by Masamune Shiro and is really quite a sight to behold. I love the ergonomics, light weight, and 800 count resolution, but I'm probably biased.;)
Don't be so sure. After all, most people wouldn't have believed that behemoths like Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot, and Inktomi could have been made almost irrelevant by an upstart nobody had ever heard of (Google).
I tend to agree that Google's current position is very strong, but to judge Amazon's attempt as futile is premature at best. At worst, it's shortsighted and ignore the lessons that history provides us.;)
The desktop Power Mac G5 already does processor cycling in order to keep the noise/temperature/performance balance at an optimal level. Clearly a similar function will be used in the PowerBook G5, just as nearly every Wintel notebook on the market today does.
I sold a Vaio R505 that would whine up and down loudly depending on whether you were scrolling through a web page or just sitting there reading it. I just couldn't take it anymore. When it comes to choosing performance or noise level, I usually choose to have a quieter machine. But hopefully Apple, unlike Sony, will allow an easy way to control which gets priority.
The article did. I know it runs contrary to the Slashdot custom, but I actually followed the link and read the article.
all lawyers and bankruptcy fees are paid
The payout is _after_ lawyers' fees, which is also mentioned in the article.
I used to work at an investment bank, so I realize full well how little shareholders normally receive in situations such as this one. It's not clear how much debt Be still has, but it's probably not much since they never really had enough assets to borrow against. Most of their capital came from equity investors, so they are likely to get at least a fraction of a cent per share. Whoopee!;)
It's great that Be's shareholders get a few dollars back for their pains, but they still certainly didn't come out ahead. But the real tragedy isn't the way about the investors -- it's about the millions of people who could have benefited from Be's amazing and innovative software, had Be been allowed to compete on anything remotely resembling a level playing field.
Hopefully more and more of Be's innovations will end up in Mac OS X and Linux. Then Be's achievements won't have been for naught.
Yahoo should have saved its pennies. Sure, buying Overture improves its position in the paid placement portion of the search market, but what Yahoo really needs is a search function that is on par with Google. People have been defecting from using Yahoo as their primary search engine for years, and they're not about to come back unless Yahoo can offer search results that are comparable to Google.
This acquisition isn't likely to help Yahoo do what it needs most: better searching. Until they achieve better search results, people are going to continue to defect to Google and its brethren.
Yes, I suggested that... about as much as I suggested that France is secretly governed by a cadre of rickets-ridden monkeys conspiring to develop an elixir that will transform navel lint into cotton candy.
Since the rest of your post predicates that I somehow suggested rampant copyright infringement is okay, which I certainly never even hinted at, there's really not much point responding to the rest of your message. Like many of the others, you offer criticism of points I never even made.
So, once again: re-read the original post. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary.
(sigh...) I am quite familiar with the way films are made. Moreover, at no point in any of my posts did I suggest that such up-front development costs are recouped by growing money on trees. Clearly the point of making a film, music album, or software package is to sell copies to people. I don't have my own "little world of E101," since economic laws are -- by and large -- immutable.
Whether you want to call the process of cranking out one more DVD production or reproduction is largely just semantics, but I still contend that people consume movies mostly by seeing them in theaters or buying/renting them on DVDs. Those are the products that are consumed, hence my point about the marginal cost of production still stands. By your logic, the cost of manufacturing a car should be called reproduction, while the production of the car would represent the design phase. While an entertaining notion, such conventions would be completely contrary to the way economists use these terms.
But, you may say, producing a movie is not the same as making a car, which is why the term "movie production" usually refers to the initial development cost instead of the manufacturing cost of cranking out the actual consumable products. I wholeheartedly agree: producing a movie is not the same as making a car, which was my original point in the first place.
(yawn...) Go re-read my original post. I simply said that the economic cost of physical product theft (a stereo, a shirt, etc.) is not the same as copyright infringement, since the latter's marginal cost of production approaches zero. That being the case, I pointed out, people should stop using misleading analogies that ignore this fact. While the tangential responses have been entertaining, I have yet to see anything that actually offers evidence contrary to my original assertion.
This post had me busting up from the very beginning, which I only came across because I was asked to meta-moderate it. I then went and read djNocturne's other posts, which were equally amusing. I wanted to drop him a note to encourage him to keep posting, but unfortunately there's no contact info in his profile. So djNocturne, if you're out there, keep posting! I only wish I could be notified via email when you do.
I'm seeing too many posts on Slashdot which are playing semantics games.
I infer from the above that you are grouping my post with those that are "playing semantics games." But yet you do not indicate what semantics game I am supposedly playing. In any case, I respectfully disagree with the implication, since my original point has nothing to do with semantics. I only expressed my frustration with those who would compare apples to oranges. If you're going to make an analogy, at least pick one that's accurate.
If you start freely distributing free copies of something you don't have the rights to, in competition with the sellers who *have* paid to own the rights to the music, of course you're depriving these sellers of the rights to their product.
I never claimed otherwise, and I'm perplexed as to how you could possibly think this statement is in contrast to my original point. It's not. Try reading it again.
Just because you're not threatening anybody with a knife, doesn't mean it's not true.
Um, okay. Not sure where that came from.
Many of the people here a [sic] software programmers, you'd have to work for a commercial program and then see it be entirely bootlegged, wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't. But I still fail to comprehend what this has to do with my original point.
Many of the arguments here are similarly self-serving, but make even less sense.
I agree that some arguments seem to function as little more than rationalization for illegal behavior, but once again, I am at a loss to explain what this has to do with my contention that many copyright:property analogies are irresponsibly drawn.
Okay, I'm not going to bother with the rest. You raise some good points, but nearly all are off-topic.
Now there's an analogy that makes sense! But it doesn't have the same impact as stealing a car, which is why the RIAA (and many other misguided netizens) keep using the same tired apples-and-oranges analogies. Thanks for providing one that actually depicts the behavior accurately!
Absolutely. The marginal cost of production for LoTR is indeed almost zero -- not $300 million. Why? Because they had to spend $300 million to show the film at all, whether they show it on one screen or 50,000 screens, and whether they sell one DVD or 30 million. The marginal cost of production for LoTR can be thought of as the cost of showing it on one additional screen or producing one additional DVD. Since the cost of producing one additional DVD is indeed a few pennies when mass-produced, the marginal cost of production does indeed approach zero. Try this with a car -- can you think of a way of manufacturing a car for almost nothing? I didn't think so, hence my original point: IP =! physical property.
The definition of "marginal cost of production," which clearly some people are not familiar with, is explained in nearly every Economics 101 course on this planet. So after careful thought, no -- it is indeed not I who should look into things before commenting. But thanks for coming out anyway.
You have a good point, in that there are costs involved when IP is copied rampantly instead of being paid for. But the people talking about car cloning are in many ways echoing my point, which is that IP copying is not the same thing as physical property theft, so quit trying to pretend it is.
Matt's "amen" was directed at the person asking the question. It seems that Oppenheim and Lessig's responses were made independently of one another, without responding to each other.
I am sick and tired of people comparing the sharing of music and movies as the same shoplifting or stealing a car. This is a ridiculous analogy on many levels, but my main gripe is with one level in particular: if you steal a shirt from a store, that store has suffered an actual financial loss. When someone downloads a music album from somebody else, the record company doesn't suffer direct financial loss to the same degree as if the product were physical merchandise that couldn't be digitally replicated. The record companies may suffer an "opportunity loss," if indeed that person would have purchased that album anyway (lots of people download music that they would never have spent $15/disc for), but that's not the same thing as losing the production cost and the opportunity cost.
The marginal cost of production for music, movies, software, and other intangible property is almost zero, and it's about time people took this into account before coming up with absurdly misleading analogies.
I'm glad XP is working so well for you guys. Perhaps all I need is yet another OS re-install. Which of course is the kind of non-productive work I would like to avoid...:p
I think you owe the pleasantness of your move to MacOS X more to stable hardware than you do stable software.
Perhaps. But my unhacked Dell system should fall under the rubric of "stable hardware," I should think. Moreover, I do think OS X is more stable software than XP. It has certainly proved so in my case, as well as in the experience of many of my colleagues.
I appreciate your frustration but I think the author is right. Your reboots could be caused by a number of problems, not necissarily [sic] the fault of Microsoft.
If I were running on unsupported hardware and had fun things like Gator's spyware installed, I might be more inclined to agree with you. But I don't, and XP just doesn't work all that well out of the box on my Dell machine. This just illustrates that many times it's too much work to get XP to operate as reliably as we've come to expect an OS to operate.
So yes, this is subjective. But certainly not blind MS bashing. Even Mac OS X, my preferred OS of choice, does not go without criticism. The latest version (10.2.6) has an intermittent memory leak that every once in a while slows everything to a crawl, which is driving me nuts and may force me to go back a couple of point releases.
A lot a variables in a working computer and its easy to blame Microsoft. But we don't really gain anything, especially if its unfounded.
I don't think it's unfounded. I think it's the responsibility of the OS to make sure uncooperative hardware/software is dealt with appropriately. I realize that doing so isn't easy, but it's certainly more important than spending engineering time on a new version of Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, or [insert favorite piece of MS fluff here].
What are you running under the hood? Lemme guess: Athlon-based system w/ ALi Magick chipset and a cloned ATI video card, overclocked to about 40% higher than the original CPU frequency;)
Actually, it's a Dell machine with a non-overclocked Pentium III processor, an ATI Radeon video card, and Crucial RAM. So this is not an issue of hardware compatibility.
But to be honest, I don't think that should matter. The end user experience is what's important, and if things don't work, then ultimately I believe it's the responsibility of the OS to effectively deal with uncooperative hardware/software/etc. XP doesn't handle this very well relative to other operating systems.
I've got a five year-old PC that is due for replacement around the time Half-Life 2 rolls around, and I'm pretty sure Mandrake will be the distro that's installed on the old box. Being a complete Linux newbie myself, it was nice to read a review of Mandrake by a (relatively) new Linux user.
The conclusions bring up some good points, echoing many of the frustrations that non-propellerheads have come across when using Linux as a desktop operating system. But I thought the enthusiastic praise for Windows XP was a bit overdone. WinXP has its strong points relative to Linux, but stability is not one of them. While the author may find XP stable enough, I've gotten it to spontaneously reboot itself more times than I care to count. With its bazillion lines of code, XP is butting up against one of the tenets of chaos theory (complex systems tend to break down easily), and it looks like it may get worse before it gets better.
I'm looking forward to installing Mandrake on the old machine so I can draw my own comparative conclusions, but I don't think I'll be missing XP much. Especially with the Mac OS X box nearby that is my primary system. =)
If this is tightly integrated with WebSphere, I can see how it would be a benefit to those who have already deployed or decided to deploy WebSphere. But without said tight integration, there's really not much benefit over using OpenOffice or some other freely available office suite. Having the apps served via the network may make it easier to deploy updates, but I still don't believe the suite is going to induce more people to buy Websphere unless it's tightly integrated and truly exceptional relative to other free alternatives.
As another poster mentioned, a company with negative earnings is said to have a P/E ratio that is "not meaningful." Given that Apple has had such negative earnings in some recent quarters, their P/E ratio could also be considered not particularly meaningful.
P/E ratios are just a guide. For companies in volatile markets such as computer manufacture, wild earnings swings are to be expected; the resulting P/E can paint a confusing, muddy picture of a company's value. That's why professionals usually use valuations based on projected earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) instead of P/E ratios.
Assuming the figures are right, your analysis is dead-on providing you make one very big assumption: that the assets are utilized in the best interests of shareholders. Wall Street values Apple as it does because they don't believe Apple will manage their assets in the best interests of shareholders.
Your analysis is correct if you were planning to buy Apple at its current valuation and sell off the liquid and intangible assets. You'd probably make a handsome return, for the reasons you point out. But Apple wouldn't sell for the prevailing valuation, because they know -- just as you and I do -- that they are worth more.
What most analysts expect is that Apple will continue to putter along and eventually squander their cash reserves. If they are right, then rushing out to buy the stock now doesn't look too bright.
As an Apple stockholder, I think using their cash reserves to buy into an industry with a less-than-rosy future is a potentially wonderful way to destroy shareholder value. In short, your analysis is correct provided there's an asset liquidation or if Apple spends its cash hoard wisely. Otherwise, it's not such a great investment.
Slashdot Mirror
To put an end to this thread... Our customers have made it very clear that we're providing a valuable service by coming back again and again. But you can't always please everybody.
Actually, it's not much cheaper than that in Japan. Besides, Shinza.com also provides an English translation of the Masamune Shirow interview insert, which you otherwise wouldn't receive.
Finally, keep in mind that other sources charge as much as $90 for the same mouse -- with no translated insert.
Just something to think about,
Shinzaburo
PS: Hey Andy -- your site URL appears to be dead.
It only seems appropriate to provide a link to the limited edition Ghost in the Shell Mouse, just in case anime fans haven't heard of it. This mouse was designed by Masamune Shiro and is really quite a sight to behold. I love the ergonomics, light weight, and 800 count resolution, but I'm probably biased. ;)
Don't be so sure. After all, most people wouldn't have believed that behemoths like Yahoo, AltaVista, HotBot, and Inktomi could have been made almost irrelevant by an upstart nobody had ever heard of (Google).
;)
I tend to agree that Google's current position is very strong, but to judge Amazon's attempt as futile is premature at best. At worst, it's shortsighted and ignore the lessons that history provides us.
The desktop Power Mac G5 already does processor cycling in order to keep the noise/temperature/performance balance at an optimal level. Clearly a similar function will be used in the PowerBook G5, just as nearly every Wintel notebook on the market today does.
I sold a Vaio R505 that would whine up and down loudly depending on whether you were scrolling through a web page or just sitting there reading it. I just couldn't take it anymore. When it comes to choosing performance or noise level, I usually choose to have a quieter machine. But hopefully Apple, unlike Sony, will allow an easy way to control which gets priority.
I used to work at an investment bank, so I realize full well how little shareholders normally receive in situations such as this one. It's not clear how much debt Be still has, but it's probably not much since they never really had enough assets to borrow against. Most of their capital came from equity investors, so they are likely to get at least a fraction of a cent per share. Whoopee!
It's great that Be's shareholders get a few dollars back for their pains, but they still certainly didn't come out ahead. But the real tragedy isn't the way about the investors -- it's about the millions of people who could have benefited from Be's amazing and innovative software, had Be been allowed to compete on anything remotely resembling a level playing field.
Hopefully more and more of Be's innovations will end up in Mac OS X and Linux. Then Be's achievements won't have been for naught.
Yahoo should have saved its pennies. Sure, buying Overture improves its position in the paid placement portion of the search market, but what Yahoo really needs is a search function that is on par with Google. People have been defecting from using Yahoo as their primary search engine for years, and they're not about to come back unless Yahoo can offer search results that are comparable to Google.
This acquisition isn't likely to help Yahoo do what it needs most: better searching. Until they achieve better search results, people are going to continue to defect to Google and its brethren.
If, as you suggest, copying is fine and dandy...
[Attempts to stifle uncontrollable laughter]
Yes, I suggested that... about as much as I suggested that France is secretly governed by a cadre of rickets-ridden monkeys conspiring to develop an elixir that will transform navel lint into cotton candy.
Since the rest of your post predicates that I somehow suggested rampant copyright infringement is okay, which I certainly never even hinted at, there's really not much point responding to the rest of your message. Like many of the others, you offer criticism of points I never even made.
So, once again: re-read the original post. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary.
(sigh...) I am quite familiar with the way films are made. Moreover, at no point in any of my posts did I suggest that such up-front development costs are recouped by growing money on trees. Clearly the point of making a film, music album, or software package is to sell copies to people. I don't have my own "little world of E101," since economic laws are -- by and large -- immutable.
Whether you want to call the process of cranking out one more DVD production or reproduction is largely just semantics, but I still contend that people consume movies mostly by seeing them in theaters or buying/renting them on DVDs. Those are the products that are consumed, hence my point about the marginal cost of production still stands. By your logic, the cost of manufacturing a car should be called reproduction, while the production of the car would represent the design phase. While an entertaining notion, such conventions would be completely contrary to the way economists use these terms.
But, you may say, producing a movie is not the same as making a car, which is why the term "movie production" usually refers to the initial development cost instead of the manufacturing cost of cranking out the actual consumable products. I wholeheartedly agree: producing a movie is not the same as making a car, which was my original point in the first place.
(yawn...) Go re-read my original post. I simply said that the economic cost of physical product theft (a stereo, a shirt, etc.) is not the same as copyright infringement, since the latter's marginal cost of production approaches zero. That being the case, I pointed out, people should stop using misleading analogies that ignore this fact. While the tangential responses have been entertaining, I have yet to see anything that actually offers evidence contrary to my original assertion.
This post had me busting up from the very beginning, which I only came across because I was asked to meta-moderate it. I then went and read djNocturne's other posts, which were equally amusing. I wanted to drop him a note to encourage him to keep posting, but unfortunately there's no contact info in his profile. So djNocturne, if you're out there, keep posting! I only wish I could be notified via email when you do.
One of your fans,
Shinzaburo
I'm seeing too many posts on Slashdot which are playing semantics games.
I infer from the above that you are grouping my post with those that are "playing semantics games." But yet you do not indicate what semantics game I am supposedly playing. In any case, I respectfully disagree with the implication, since my original point has nothing to do with semantics. I only expressed my frustration with those who would compare apples to oranges. If you're going to make an analogy, at least pick one that's accurate.
If you start freely distributing free copies of something you don't have the rights to, in competition with the sellers who *have* paid to own the rights to the music, of course you're depriving these sellers of the rights to their product.
I never claimed otherwise, and I'm perplexed as to how you could possibly think this statement is in contrast to my original point. It's not. Try reading it again.
Just because you're not threatening anybody with a knife, doesn't mean it's not true.
Um, okay. Not sure where that came from.
Many of the people here a [sic] software programmers, you'd have to work for a commercial program and then see it be entirely bootlegged, wouldn't you?
No, I wouldn't. But I still fail to comprehend what this has to do with my original point.
Many of the arguments here are similarly self-serving, but make even less sense.
I agree that some arguments seem to function as little more than rationalization for illegal behavior, but once again, I am at a loss to explain what this has to do with my contention that many copyright:property analogies are irresponsibly drawn.
Okay, I'm not going to bother with the rest. You raise some good points, but nearly all are off-topic.
Now there's an analogy that makes sense! But it doesn't have the same impact as stealing a car, which is why the RIAA (and many other misguided netizens) keep using the same tired apples-and-oranges analogies. Thanks for providing one that actually depicts the behavior accurately!
Absolutely. The marginal cost of production for LoTR is indeed almost zero -- not $300 million. Why? Because they had to spend $300 million to show the film at all, whether they show it on one screen or 50,000 screens, and whether they sell one DVD or 30 million. The marginal cost of production for LoTR can be thought of as the cost of showing it on one additional screen or producing one additional DVD. Since the cost of producing one additional DVD is indeed a few pennies when mass-produced, the marginal cost of production does indeed approach zero. Try this with a car -- can you think of a way of manufacturing a car for almost nothing? I didn't think so, hence my original point: IP =! physical property.
The definition of "marginal cost of production," which clearly some people are not familiar with, is explained in nearly every Economics 101 course on this planet. So after careful thought, no -- it is indeed not I who should look into things before commenting. But thanks for coming out anyway.
You have a good point, in that there are costs involved when IP is copied rampantly instead of being paid for. But the people talking about car cloning are in many ways echoing my point, which is that IP copying is not the same thing as physical property theft, so quit trying to pretend it is.
Matt's "amen" was directed at the person asking the question. It seems that Oppenheim and Lessig's responses were made independently of one another, without responding to each other.
I am sick and tired of people comparing the sharing of music and movies as the same shoplifting or stealing a car. This is a ridiculous analogy on many levels, but my main gripe is with one level in particular: if you steal a shirt from a store, that store has suffered an actual financial loss. When someone downloads a music album from somebody else, the record company doesn't suffer direct financial loss to the same degree as if the product were physical merchandise that couldn't be digitally replicated. The record companies may suffer an "opportunity loss," if indeed that person would have purchased that album anyway (lots of people download music that they would never have spent $15/disc for), but that's not the same thing as losing the production cost and the opportunity cost.
The marginal cost of production for music, movies, software, and other intangible property is almost zero, and it's about time people took this into account before coming up with absurdly misleading analogies.
I'm glad XP is working so well for you guys. Perhaps all I need is yet another OS re-install. Which of course is the kind of non-productive work I would like to avoid... :p
I think you owe the pleasantness of your move to MacOS X more to stable hardware than you do stable software.
Perhaps. But my unhacked Dell system should fall under the rubric of "stable hardware," I should think. Moreover, I do think OS X is more stable software than XP. It has certainly proved so in my case, as well as in the experience of many of my colleagues.
I appreciate your frustration but I think the author is right. Your reboots could be caused by a number of problems, not necissarily [sic] the fault of Microsoft.
If I were running on unsupported hardware and had fun things like Gator's spyware installed, I might be more inclined to agree with you. But I don't, and XP just doesn't work all that well out of the box on my Dell machine. This just illustrates that many times it's too much work to get XP to operate as reliably as we've come to expect an OS to operate.
So yes, this is subjective. But certainly not blind MS bashing. Even Mac OS X, my preferred OS of choice, does not go without criticism. The latest version (10.2.6) has an intermittent memory leak that every once in a while slows everything to a crawl, which is driving me nuts and may force me to go back a couple of point releases.
A lot a variables in a working computer and its easy to blame Microsoft. But we don't really gain anything, especially if its unfounded.
I don't think it's unfounded. I think it's the responsibility of the OS to make sure uncooperative hardware/software is dealt with appropriately. I realize that doing so isn't easy, but it's certainly more important than spending engineering time on a new version of Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, or [insert favorite piece of MS fluff here].
What are you running under the hood? Lemme guess: Athlon-based system w/ ALi Magick chipset and a cloned ATI video card, overclocked to about 40% higher than the original CPU frequency ;)
Actually, it's a Dell machine with a non-overclocked Pentium III processor, an ATI Radeon video card, and Crucial RAM. So this is not an issue of hardware compatibility.
But to be honest, I don't think that should matter. The end user experience is what's important, and if things don't work, then ultimately I believe it's the responsibility of the OS to effectively deal with uncooperative hardware/software/etc. XP doesn't handle this very well relative to other operating systems.
I've got a five year-old PC that is due for replacement around the time Half-Life 2 rolls around, and I'm pretty sure Mandrake will be the distro that's installed on the old box. Being a complete Linux newbie myself, it was nice to read a review of Mandrake by a (relatively) new Linux user.
The conclusions bring up some good points, echoing many of the frustrations that non-propellerheads have come across when using Linux as a desktop operating system. But I thought the enthusiastic praise for Windows XP was a bit overdone. WinXP has its strong points relative to Linux, but stability is not one of them. While the author may find XP stable enough, I've gotten it to spontaneously reboot itself more times than I care to count. With its bazillion lines of code, XP is butting up against one of the tenets of chaos theory (complex systems tend to break down easily), and it looks like it may get worse before it gets better.
I'm looking forward to installing Mandrake on the old machine so I can draw my own comparative conclusions, but I don't think I'll be missing XP much. Especially with the Mac OS X box nearby that is my primary system. =)
Some quick translations of the headings on the second link:
ERN001-PC: "Ellen"
This is probably the world's first life-size "woman PC."
RX-78 PC
The world's first human-sized robot PC at 185cm (just over six feet).
The Great Nagoya Kin-Shachi ("Gold Dolphin")
Doesn't it look like a Shachi?
If this is tightly integrated with WebSphere, I can see how it would be a benefit to those who have already deployed or decided to deploy WebSphere. But without said tight integration, there's really not much benefit over using OpenOffice or some other freely available office suite. Having the apps served via the network may make it easier to deploy updates, but I still don't believe the suite is going to induce more people to buy Websphere unless it's tightly integrated and truly exceptional relative to other free alternatives.
As another poster mentioned, a company with negative earnings is said to have a P/E ratio that is "not meaningful." Given that Apple has had such negative earnings in some recent quarters, their P/E ratio could also be considered not particularly meaningful.
P/E ratios are just a guide. For companies in volatile markets such as computer manufacture, wild earnings swings are to be expected; the resulting P/E can paint a confusing, muddy picture of a company's value. That's why professionals usually use valuations based on projected earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) instead of P/E ratios.
Assuming the figures are right, your analysis is dead-on providing you make one very big assumption: that the assets are utilized in the best interests of shareholders. Wall Street values Apple as it does because they don't believe Apple will manage their assets in the best interests of shareholders.
Your analysis is correct if you were planning to buy Apple at its current valuation and sell off the liquid and intangible assets. You'd probably make a handsome return, for the reasons you point out. But Apple wouldn't sell for the prevailing valuation, because they know -- just as you and I do -- that they are worth more.
What most analysts expect is that Apple will continue to putter along and eventually squander their cash reserves. If they are right, then rushing out to buy the stock now doesn't look too bright.
As an Apple stockholder, I think using their cash reserves to buy into an industry with a less-than-rosy future is a potentially wonderful way to destroy shareholder value. In short, your analysis is correct provided there's an asset liquidation or if Apple spends its cash hoard wisely. Otherwise, it's not such a great investment.