I don't speak binary, but I speak German, and I can tell that "Ich denke sein vermutlich einen" are German words, but not a German sentence.
"I probably think its one" would be "Vermutlich denke ich, es ist einer"
The P/E ratio ist usually not expressed in percent, but as a number. So "16" means the value of the company is 16 times the earnings, which is quite high for my taste
Another ratio is PEG (Price/Earnings/Growth), where the P/E/Ration is divided by the long-term Growth rate. Values below 1.0 are good.
Furthermore, you should not forget dividend yield - while dividend where extremely unpopular in the US for a long time, even Microsoft pays dividend now.
It's only contradictory on first sight. Actually, investors in publicly traded companies are quite nearsighted, because they can sell their shares every time they want. What they are looking for is an abrupt raise of the share price, no matter what comes after this, because they will sell their shares at the maximum price anyway.
Investors in private companies can't act this way. They know it will probably take years to sell their shares, or probably they will never sell their share but get their return from the earnings of the company. Therefore they have to be much more farsighted.
With an IPO, you simply get the ability to pay in promises instead of cash. If you promise to grow X per cent during the next y years, this will raise the share price and capital increase will exchange that share price for cash.
Same with the employees - instead of giving them more cash, you give them promises (called "stock options").
Sounds nice, the only question is wether people believe you or not. I've myself owned promises (stock options) worth several millions some time ago (worthless now, of course), so I prefer cash instead.
Furthermore: You don't need an IPO to give shares to your employees. Shares entitle their owners to get parts of the earnings, so if the company performs well, the employees will participate in this, even if the company is not public.
It actually depends on the expectations of the shareholders, if an IPO leads to the death of a company.
Normally a company is expected to be worth a certain multiple of its earnings (or better, the cashflow, because cashflow is difficult to forge). A normal multiple would be 10, which gives me a 10% return rate (I buy the company for 100 and get 10 out of it every year).
If google has USD 100 Mio of earnings, it's worth would be USD 1000 Mio, if valued this way. This of course would be a fair value, because it enables them to pay their investors an annual dividend of 10% of the stock price, even without any growth. In this scenario, they could stay in their search-engine-business, something they can (obviously) handle successful.
The problem is, google will not aim at a valuation of one billion, they will aim at a valuation that is about ten times higher. And that means, they will have to grow a lot in a short time, something that will propably kill them.
Yes, there is a European Patent Office, but there is still no European Patent.
Despite there have been vast efforts for more than 20 years, an "European Patent" is still nothing else than a bundle of national patents. Therefore you have to pay fees and - more important - translation costs for every country (of course several countries share the same language, and in some countries patents may not be enforcable very well).
Anyway, if you want a valid patent in most of the european countries, 50.000 Euro is not a bad guess.
On the other hand: If you look at the long and unpleasant history of the "European Patent", a world patent doesn't seem very likely during the next 50 years or so.
Probably not. The German "law for the protection of minors" (both the existing law and the new law, which will be in force from next month on) forbids not only selling the restricted media to minors, but also advertising or even mail order selling (no matter to whom). Furthermore shops who offer restricted media have to do this in a special adult-only area.
While advertising will not be the main problem (the webservers of the company are out of reach of the German government anyway), the lack of specialized distribution channels will be a problem.
The porn industrie has such channels (sex shops, cinemas, video stores), but they are not really useable for computer games, I would think.
It's a matter of philosophy. UNIX traditionally had a "do one thing very well" approach. So a compiler should compile, an editor should be used for editing and so on.
This led to the development of a lot of excellent tools, e.g. emacs, the GCC, CVS and hundreds of little helpers like grep or diff. grep actually is good example for a very specialized software.
So, with Linux, you usually have an excellent tool for every task. As most of this tools are free software, no one is trying to lock you in, and you can configure (or simply change) every tool until it matches your need.
The typical Windows-IDE follows a totally different philosophy: "Do all with one software". Normally it's configurable to some extend, and normally it tries to lock you in and to force you to buy further software from the same company (e.g. for version management).
So developing on Windows usually drives UNIX/Linux-Developers mad and the other way round.
While a Linux-developer will miss many tools on a Windows system and, of course, the possibility to change everything (even in the source code, if necessary), a Windows user with a Linux box will miss integration.
The problem is that the definition about what is "unjust" can change quite fast. At the times of slavery, only few people considered it unjust to hold slaves.
Another, more recent example: After the reunification of Germany, many people (e.g. members of the secret services of the GDR) found themselves punished for things they didn't believe to be unjust before.
If you think about it, most people have a relatively simple system of ethics:
1. Very important: Rules that protect people (like themselves). Most people don't kill other people, as they don't want to be killed. Even if there is no enforcement, most people follow this rules.
2. Less important: Rules which are important to keep the society running. Most people accept the statement that the government needs taxes, but they pay taxes only if they are forced to do so.
3. Least important: Rules, where people cannot see that anybody is harmed if the rule is broken.
Drinking alcohol and filesharing fall in the third class.
But he is right - I think it's the key point that filesharing is "victimless". Most people don't care much about rather abstract issues like "free speech" or "fair use", but they care about victims.
So "normal" people tend to obey laws that protect people (including themselves) from other people.
For example, shoplifting is considered to "less bad" for most people than breaking into a neighbour's house and taking his money, because sympathies for the victim (Wal Mart) are quite low.
Most people can't see how filesharing hurts anybody (Britney Spears? She is of course "rich enough" to care for herself), and that's why they do it.
Other than IBM, which has hundreds of products in totally different sectors (services, mainframes, hardware, software, T-shirts), Microsoft has only two profitable products (Office and Windows) that strongly depend on each other.
So if IBM looses earnings from, let's say, Websphere because of Tomcat, their overall margin will hardly be affected.
If Microsoft looses earnings from Office because of Staroffice, they are in severe trouble (especially because most people only buy Windows to run MS-Office on it).
Actually, for all who are not familiar with the case, the history and a short introduction to german laws in short:
In autumn 2001 the publisher of asterix filed a suit at the "Landgericht", LG ("county court", a court of the first instance) and lost. The LG pointed out that there is no risk of a mix-up.
After this, the publisher went to the next instance, the Oberlandesgericht (court of appeals), wich decided 100% different and against mobilix.
The problem is, that Mobilix now has no further legal possibilities, as the case may not be retried at the Bundesgerichtshof (federal court) itself.
Their only chance is that this fact (that no appeal is allowed) can be a subject of a new case at a federal court. But the chance to win this case is quite small, and it would only give them the chance to bring the original case (Asterix v. Mobilix) to a federal court.
Patent claims have to be carefully analyzed, often they don't mean what they seem to mean at first sight, and one has to be extremely petty-minded.
You have to break up the claim into single features. In this claim, features are:
1. a browser for navigating a document
1.1. comprising a plurality of sections
2. The browser comprising
2.1. a display window...
And so on. To infringe this claim, your "device" has to have ALL the features, if it lacks a single feature, it is no infringing the patent.
On the other hand, something that is "prior art" needs to have all this features, too. The only exemption from this: If the additional feature is "obvious", whatever this means.
The Truth: Wrong Patent Strategy
on
Why VHS Was Better
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
While his considerations might be partially true, in fact Betamax is a good example for a wrong patent strategy. Sony tried to establish a monopoly by not licensing the patents to competitors.
As a result, the competitors successfully "invented around" and produced VHS. The VHS-patents were licensed at reasonable rates, and so a lot of companies entered the market with own VCRs, tapes and "infrastructure". Their competition made prices lower, and their combined salesforce did the rest to kick Sony out of the market.
Years later, when Sony's researchers invented the compact disks (for the younger readers: devices used to store music before MP3 was invented), Sony and Philips decided to license the technology to everyone at reasonable prices - and the few cents per disks later added up to billions of dollars.
In fact, "Apple and IBM" was the same story - Apple tried to dominate the world with a proprietary system and failed, while IBM "only" took a few dollars for every PC build...
Did you ever read the book "Smilla's Sense of Snow"? It tells you that a large piece of meat filled with tranquilizers is quite usefull in such a case...
Actually, the rottweilers deny any kind of service afterwards.
Copyright is probably not as far reaching as you believe - there are two causes why his scripts might not even be protected by copyright, which is the base of any special licence agreement.
In fact there are two causes why it is probably not protected by copyright:
- To simple: In most countries, copyright requires a certain amount of "creativity". A simple firewall script as it is shown in hundreds of tutorials may not fulfil this requirement.
- You won't copy it: Copyright protects not an idea (as patents do) but a concrete piece of code. If you catch the "idea" from his example code and do your own script (you should do this anyway), there's no problem with copyrights or licences.
Of course you are right about the overvaluation - the current market cap is in no ways appropiate.
But I disagree about the low profit margin - to judge about this, you need to know, which amount of revenues comes from products and which from services.
Products in the software industry tend to have fixed (development) costs, while production costs are marginal. That means, if you sell more, your profit may rocket as costs stay at the same level.
Services tend to have mostly variable costs (workforce), so higher revenues from services produce higher costs, too. So the profit margin may not rise if revenues from services grow.
A problem with the known-good-database is that it may not contain the distribution you actually use (e.g. if you use an updated SuSE 6.4, you will never know if your/bin/ls is that of SuSE 7.2).
If you have two boxes with the same distribution, and you are quite sure, that they have not been hacked the same way, you can easily compare the md5sums of those two.
In trademark law, it's not important if it is a common word - it's important if it is a common word for a certain groups of things.
"Windows" is registered trademark for Class 9 of the Nice classification: "Computers; computer software programs; computer components; computer peripherals; holograms.", of course it is not a trademark for parts of houses.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that "windows" was a common term for something GUI-like before (X-Windows, Openwindows...).
1. It's older (in trademark law, that's not as important as in patent law, but it is an issue)
2. "Windows" is not really distinctive (less than "X" is). Actually, that's the problem Microsoft has all the time: "Windows" is a normal english word, a search in the trademark-database of the EU lists 20 trademarks containing windows.
One could even say, that "X-Windows" (BTW: What does the X stand for? uniX? Xor?) is a clear sign that "windows" was a commonly used word for a graphical user interface for computers long before MS registered the trademark. This would mean, that the trademark was erroneously registered and has to be deleted.
To give another example: You cannot register "car" as a trademark for automobiles, because it's already a common word.
I don't know the details of US copyright law, but I can say that in Germany most spam is not copyrighted.
Anything to be copyrighted needs to be "persönliche geistige Schöpfung" (an english translation would be something like "personal intellectual creation"). That requires that it cannot be produced by everyone, but needs at least a certain amount of skills that an average person doesn't have.
So some spam may be copyrighted in Germany, but the fifth hundred "get-rich-quick"-mail is certainly not.
Oh, I'm talking to myself...
Anyway, as radiation intensity quickly declines if you depart from the source (to the power of two, if I remember correctly), it shouldn't be an important problem on interstellar journeys, where the bacteria are far away from any source of radiation.
Actually, UV radiation isn't an effective antibacterial measure at all. Unfortunately, UV radiation can easily be shielded - if the germs are hidden behind a barrier (ice, stone) which is thick enough to shield the radiation, they won't care.
That's why UV is seldom used for desinfection - if you have germs inside a tool (e.g. an endoscope) or in larger clumps, desinfection will fail.
Much better is radioactivity (gamma rays) or gases that are able to permeate plastics (e.g. ethylene oxide).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't speak binary, but I speak German, and I can tell that "Ich denke sein vermutlich einen" are German words, but not a German sentence. "I probably think its one" would be "Vermutlich denke ich, es ist einer"
It's only contradictory on first sight. Actually, investors in publicly traded companies are quite nearsighted, because they can sell their shares every time they want. What they are looking for is an abrupt raise of the share price, no matter what comes after this, because they will sell their shares at the maximum price anyway.
Investors in private companies can't act this way. They know it will probably take years to sell their shares, or probably they will never sell their share but get their return from the earnings of the company. Therefore they have to be much more farsighted.
With an IPO, you simply get the ability to pay in promises instead of cash. If you promise to grow X per cent during the next y years, this will raise the share price and capital increase will exchange that share price for cash.
Same with the employees - instead of giving them more cash, you give them promises (called "stock options").
Sounds nice, the only question is wether people believe you or not. I've myself owned promises (stock options) worth several millions some time ago (worthless now, of course), so I prefer cash instead.
Furthermore: You don't need an IPO to give shares to your employees. Shares entitle their owners to get parts of the earnings, so if the company performs well, the employees will participate in this, even if the company is not public.
It actually depends on the expectations of the shareholders, if an IPO leads to the death of a company. Normally a company is expected to be worth a certain multiple of its earnings (or better, the cashflow, because cashflow is difficult to forge). A normal multiple would be 10, which gives me a 10% return rate (I buy the company for 100 and get 10 out of it every year). If google has USD 100 Mio of earnings, it's worth would be USD 1000 Mio, if valued this way. This of course would be a fair value, because it enables them to pay their investors an annual dividend of 10% of the stock price, even without any growth. In this scenario, they could stay in their search-engine-business, something they can (obviously) handle successful. The problem is, google will not aim at a valuation of one billion, they will aim at a valuation that is about ten times higher. And that means, they will have to grow a lot in a short time, something that will propably kill them.
Yes, there is a European Patent Office, but there is still no European Patent.
Despite there have been vast efforts for more than 20 years, an "European Patent" is still nothing else than a bundle of national patents. Therefore you have to pay fees and - more important - translation costs for every country (of course several countries share the same language, and in some countries patents may not be enforcable very well).
Anyway, if you want a valid patent in most of the european countries, 50.000 Euro is not a bad guess.
On the other hand: If you look at the long and unpleasant history of the "European Patent", a world patent doesn't seem very likely during the next 50 years or so.
Probably not. The German "law for the protection of minors" (both the existing law and the new law, which will be in force from next month on) forbids not only selling the restricted media to minors, but also advertising or even mail order selling (no matter to whom). Furthermore shops who offer restricted media have to do this in a special adult-only area.
While advertising will not be the main problem (the webservers of the company are out of reach of the German government anyway), the lack of specialized distribution channels will be a problem.
The porn industrie has such channels (sex shops, cinemas, video stores), but they are not really useable for computer games, I would think.
It's a matter of philosophy. UNIX traditionally had a "do one thing very well" approach. So a compiler should compile, an editor should be used for editing and so on.
This led to the development of a lot of excellent tools, e.g. emacs, the GCC, CVS and hundreds of little helpers like grep or diff. grep actually is good example for a very specialized software.
So, with Linux, you usually have an excellent tool for every task. As most of this tools are free software, no one is trying to lock you in, and you can configure (or simply change) every tool until it matches your need.
The typical Windows-IDE follows a totally different philosophy: "Do all with one software". Normally it's configurable to some extend, and normally it tries to lock you in and to force you to buy further software from the same company (e.g. for version management).
So developing on Windows usually drives UNIX/Linux-Developers mad and the other way round.
While a Linux-developer will miss many tools on a Windows system and, of course, the possibility to change everything (even in the source code, if necessary), a Windows user with a Linux box will miss integration.
The problem is that the definition about what is "unjust" can change quite fast. At the times of slavery, only few people considered it unjust to hold slaves.
Another, more recent example: After the reunification of Germany, many people (e.g. members of the secret services of the GDR) found themselves punished for things they didn't believe to be unjust before.
If you think about it, most people have a relatively simple system of ethics:
1. Very important: Rules that protect people (like themselves). Most people don't kill other people, as they don't want to be killed. Even if there is no enforcement, most people follow this rules.
2. Less important: Rules which are important to keep the society running. Most people accept the statement that the government needs taxes, but they pay taxes only if they are forced to do so.
3. Least important: Rules, where people cannot see that anybody is harmed if the rule is broken.
Drinking alcohol and filesharing fall in the third class.
But he is right - I think it's the key point that filesharing is "victimless". Most people don't care much about rather abstract issues like "free speech" or "fair use", but they care about victims.
So "normal" people tend to obey laws that protect people (including themselves) from other people.
For example, shoplifting is considered to "less bad" for most people than breaking into a neighbour's house and taking his money, because sympathies for the victim (Wal Mart) are quite low.
Most people can't see how filesharing hurts anybody (Britney Spears? She is of course "rich enough" to care for herself), and that's why they do it.
...because it's the only way to finish the Website before the .com-Startup goes bancrupt.
This is not a joke.
Other than IBM, which has hundreds of products in totally different sectors (services, mainframes, hardware, software, T-shirts), Microsoft has only two profitable products (Office and Windows) that strongly depend on each other.
So if IBM looses earnings from, let's say, Websphere because of Tomcat, their overall margin will hardly be affected.
If Microsoft looses earnings from Office because of Staroffice, they are in severe trouble (especially because most people only buy Windows to run MS-Office on it).
> For Americans: Asterix and Obelix are well-known French cartoon characters
In the next step, they will sue everyone who uses asterisks... C-programmers, delete your comments!
On the other hand, my Microsoft keyboard has an asterisk, too. Sue them!
Actually, for all who are not familiar with the case, the history and a short introduction to german laws in short:
In autumn 2001 the publisher of asterix filed a suit at the "Landgericht", LG ("county court", a court of the first instance) and lost. The LG pointed out that there is no risk of a mix-up.
After this, the publisher went to the next instance, the Oberlandesgericht (court of appeals), wich decided 100% different and against mobilix.
The problem is, that Mobilix now has no further legal possibilities, as the case may not be retried at the Bundesgerichtshof (federal court) itself.
Their only chance is that this fact (that no appeal is allowed) can be a subject of a new case at a federal court. But the chance to win this case is quite small, and it would only give them the chance to bring the original case (Asterix v. Mobilix) to a federal court.
Patent claims have to be carefully analyzed, often they don't mean what they seem to mean at first sight, and one has to be extremely petty-minded. ...
You have to break up the claim into single features. In this claim, features are:
1. a browser for navigating a document
1.1. comprising a plurality of sections
2. The browser comprising
2.1. a display window
And so on. To infringe this claim, your "device" has to have ALL the features, if it lacks a single feature, it is no infringing the patent.
On the other hand, something that is "prior art" needs to have all this features, too. The only exemption from this: If the additional feature is "obvious", whatever this means.
While his considerations might be partially true, in fact Betamax is a good example for a wrong patent strategy. Sony tried to establish a monopoly by not licensing the patents to competitors.
As a result, the competitors successfully "invented around" and produced VHS. The VHS-patents were licensed at reasonable rates, and so a lot of companies entered the market with own VCRs, tapes and "infrastructure". Their competition made prices lower, and their combined salesforce did the rest to kick Sony out of the market.
Years later, when Sony's researchers invented the compact disks (for the younger readers: devices used to store music before MP3 was invented), Sony and Philips decided to license the technology to everyone at reasonable prices - and the few cents per disks later added up to billions of dollars.
In fact, "Apple and IBM" was the same story - Apple tried to dominate the world with a proprietary system and failed, while IBM "only" took a few dollars for every PC build...
Did you ever read the book "Smilla's Sense of Snow"? It tells you that a large piece of meat filled with tranquilizers is quite usefull in such a case...
Actually, the rottweilers deny any kind of service afterwards.
Copyright is probably not as far reaching as you believe - there are two causes why his scripts might not even be protected by copyright, which is the base of any special licence agreement.
In fact there are two causes why it is probably not protected by copyright:
- To simple: In most countries, copyright requires a certain amount of "creativity". A simple firewall script as it is shown in hundreds of tutorials may not fulfil this requirement.
- You won't copy it: Copyright protects not an idea (as patents do) but a concrete piece of code. If you catch the "idea" from his example code and do your own script (you should do this anyway), there's no problem with copyrights or licences.
Of course you are right about the overvaluation - the current market cap is in no ways appropiate.
But I disagree about the low profit margin - to judge about this, you need to know, which amount of revenues comes from products and which from services.
Products in the software industry tend to have fixed (development) costs, while production costs are marginal. That means, if you sell more, your profit may rocket as costs stay at the same level.
Services tend to have mostly variable costs (workforce), so higher revenues from services produce higher costs, too. So the profit margin may not rise if revenues from services grow.
A problem with the known-good-database is that it may not contain the distribution you actually use (e.g. if you use an updated SuSE 6.4, you will never know if your /bin/ls is that of SuSE 7.2).
If you have two boxes with the same distribution, and you are quite sure, that they have not been hacked the same way, you can easily compare the md5sums of those two.
In trademark law, it's not important if it is a common word - it's important if it is a common word for a certain groups of things.
"Windows" is registered trademark for Class 9 of the Nice classification: "Computers; computer software programs; computer components; computer peripherals; holograms.", of course it is not a trademark for parts of houses.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that "windows" was a common term for something GUI-like before (X-Windows, Openwindows...).
1. It's older (in trademark law, that's not as important as in patent law, but it is an issue) 2. "Windows" is not really distinctive (less than "X" is). Actually, that's the problem Microsoft has all the time: "Windows" is a normal english word, a search in the trademark-database of the EU lists 20 trademarks containing windows. One could even say, that "X-Windows" (BTW: What does the X stand for? uniX? Xor?) is a clear sign that "windows" was a commonly used word for a graphical user interface for computers long before MS registered the trademark. This would mean, that the trademark was erroneously registered and has to be deleted. To give another example: You cannot register "car" as a trademark for automobiles, because it's already a common word.
I don't know the details of US copyright law, but I can say that in Germany most spam is not copyrighted. Anything to be copyrighted needs to be "persönliche geistige Schöpfung" (an english translation would be something like "personal intellectual creation"). That requires that it cannot be produced by everyone, but needs at least a certain amount of skills that an average person doesn't have. So some spam may be copyrighted in Germany, but the fifth hundred "get-rich-quick"-mail is certainly not.
Oh, I'm talking to myself... Anyway, as radiation intensity quickly declines if you depart from the source (to the power of two, if I remember correctly), it shouldn't be an important problem on interstellar journeys, where the bacteria are far away from any source of radiation.
Actually, UV radiation isn't an effective antibacterial measure at all. Unfortunately, UV radiation can easily be shielded - if the germs are hidden behind a barrier (ice, stone) which is thick enough to shield the radiation, they won't care. That's why UV is seldom used for desinfection - if you have germs inside a tool (e.g. an endoscope) or in larger clumps, desinfection will fail. Much better is radioactivity (gamma rays) or gases that are able to permeate plastics (e.g. ethylene oxide).