This sounds like one of the best ideas I've heard to take market dynamics out of music distribution.
Let me put it another way: Do any of you remember banalty tax from History of Western Civ 1?
Simply put, these are royalties due to an entity in exchange for a service, even if you don't use it. How do you "vote with your dollars" when you can't choose what your dollars go towards, or if your dollars can go at all?
On the flip side, this is a great deal for the music industry: They get a garunteed revenue stream for doing nothing. Hell, they can completely quit producing new or interesting works and continue getting paid for 95 years, with that back-library of theirs.
This also sets a great example for the economics students. Who needs all those complicated supply/demand and market dynamics theories? All you have to do to get rich is convince someone you deserve a tax revenue. This can be a private institution (Universities, in this case) or the Federal government (place a media tax on something and funnel the money back to you). Why work for hard-core capitalism when you can have the much simpler capitalistic socialism?
Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner.
This is exactly the sort of book you're looking for, in the subject of Calculus. To quote from the preface, on the subject of modern math textbooks: Their exercises have, as one mathematician recently put it, "the dignity of solving crossword puzzles."
The purpose of this book is to explain the philosophy of Calculus, and teach you how to differentiate and integrate simple functions. I recommend reading the Preface in a bookstore, skimming the first few chapters. I think you'll like it.
Niggers always want credit for some shit they're supposed to do. They'll brag about stuff a normal man just does. They'll say something like, "Yeah, well I take care of my kids." You're
supposed to, you dumb motherfucker. "I ain't never been to jail." Whaddya want? A cookie? You're not supposed to go to jail, you low-expectation-having motherfucker!
They know how to play dirty and leverage one monopoly to make a new one, so they keep making windows clients only work well with windows servers.
Everyone keeps saying that, but I haven't seen it, or read about it. They're very dangerous, and they can use their existing monopoly and funds to tackle other markets. They haven't done a very good job of that, generally speaking.
They've done it once: MS Office. In that case, they bought, broke, and stole competitors. In that case, they owned the platform, and they rode the wave of personal computers into businesses and homes. They happend to hold onto the wave tighter and bit and scratched at their neighbors a bit extra, so they're the ones that made it farthest ashore.
Then they tried to break into hardware, and they made some good products (because they bought some good hardware companies). There were a lot of keyboards and mice, and MS bought lots of them, and they cut deals with OEMs and such. They don't have a monopoly on peripherals though. Far from it, really, despite the quality of them. They didn't take over this market, but they play it well, and unusually fairly.
They tried to leverage their desktop monopoly by creating the servers for the clients. A decade and a half later, and Microsoft still doesn't understand this market, why they can't control it and grow it at the same time. They made Exchange, their only valuable offer, to lock the client to the server. It's horribly designed, but it brings together a lot of ancient Unix technologies in a useful way. It has kept them alive in this market, where they would have lost money in any other circumstance. They're failing this market rapidly, today.
They tried to take over embeded devices with WindowsCE. This was, and still is, an abysmal failure. Quite simply, they fucking suck at this. They're one of the biggest contributors to the failure of handhelds growth--them and Palm, trying to control the market, lock out competitors, and intentionally causing interoperability problems. Neither company wants Open Standards, and this market isn't going anywhere until their wares learn to speak fluently with the world. Near-success stories: Dreamcast, and PocketPC. Feel free to read up on those.
Consoles. This one's still cooking, but they're not a smashing success, as yet. Xbox is a failure in Japan, the hottest console market. They're a failure in Europe. They're not too hot in North or South America either, except in the US, where they're second place to Sony. The Japan and US markets are highly influenced by nationalism. The Xbox's biggest strength is in delivering PC games without the hassles of Microsoft's other product, Windows. Kind of funny, really.
If anyone has anything to add, please do. It seems to me that Microsoft hasn't done too good of a job at leveraging their assets. They built two monopolies on one market's appearance, but they've only had mild to middling success (Win Server, Hardware), or lost a lot of money (XBox) since then.
Right now, MS is betting the company on.NET. It seems to me that this is likely to break MS, in the way Sega was broken. Without a visible growing market, MS is just fragmenting their software platform. Their saftey net, the one Sega didn't have, is the PC platform's normal openness, but MS' historical and current tactic, lockout, eliminates that. MS' hardware division (excepting XBox) is the only one without a monopoly that's demonstrated an ability to profit in a sideways market. Microsoft's likely to break one of their own monopolies in this endeavor.
...he will be probably sending in a patch within the next couple of weeks to be included in the 2.6/2.5 kernel.
The first thing that popped into my head when I read that was "uh... feature freeze two weeks ago." I'm sure Reiser's going to have another of his babyish hissy fits. I see another slashdot story in the near future.
<Reiser> Oh, what about my sponsors! Why are you all playa hat'n on me?
<EveryoneNotOnTheReiserCheerleadingSquad> You don't get special treatment. You waited too long, and we're not putting your untested code into a frozen code base.
<Reiser> You're oppressing me! The GPLv3 will fix you all!
<SomeoneFromFSF> Please shut up, Reiser. You still don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
<Reiser> Wahh!! My sponsors!
<Everyone> SHUT UP REISER.
Re:Which to choose for DBs?
on
Reiser4 Benchmarks
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd go with XFS. I've never heard of corruption from regular use, while I've heard far too many horror stories about ReiserFS. Aside from the ineptitude at reliability, Reiser's one of the most unpleasant characters I've ever run into in Free/Open software. Stallman at least has reason for what he does. Reiser sends off flames to dev mailing lists (sometimes legally) threatening people for removing the kernel message and command line commercials from his code. Usually, he fires off fiction about "the next version of GPL" that someone from the FSF invariable shoots down. Bleh.
If you ever get a soap commercial in the output of dmesg, you'll know who to blame.
The one that Clinton nuked and then handed off to Bush as he left office?
You mean I just imagined the National Debt Clock being taken down in 2000 because it started running the wrong way? The clock was put up to dramatize government spending, so it started sending mixed messages in 2000.
Of course, it was actually a reduction in spending, with only intermitent surpluses. I'm sure Bush II has done an excellent job cutting the sur^Wdebt.
While I agree that a government should listen to its people, that is largely done at the ballot box.
This form of "voice" has a high tendancy to polarize issues. This is especially bad when an issue doesn't make sense polarized. For example, a candidate is either for or against media, uh, "consolidation". Regulation reform or Open Spectrum don't fit into this. A "pro-business" perspective has no place in a boolean "Consolidate: 0/1" poll.
How do we talk to people who prefer knee-jerk for/against positions instead of thinking up the positions in the first place? That's why the Bush Administration is in control: they define the language, define what the issues are, and define them in such a way that it doesn't make sense to be against the position, even if the real issue is the inverse. Patriot Act, Clean Air Act. They didn't ask for Congress' approval to go to war, but they called a vote to "support our troops". They take the issue of the war out of the vote. Instead of "send our people off to die" the vote becomes "let our people die where we sent them off to".
Can you undo the damage? How do you talk to people who won't talk about the past, won't talk about the future, and won't talk about the present except in 1-bit binary?
As an early Quake movie maker, I have to say, I really hate the word "Machinema". I mean, I really hate that word. It's such a lame word, I won't touch game-engine movies because my work would be classified as "Machinema".
To put it another way, would Steven Speilburg make movies if they were called dingleberries? He can get a Grammy for Best Drama Dingleberry. He'll be featured in documentaries called Dingleberry Magic.
This is going off an an angle from the poster's question, but I think it's interesting.
For example, they could increase customer acceptance by acting under the umbrella of a well known company.
They could act under the umbrella of a well known company without losing their company, also. It's a product (plus development) the prospective parent wants, it seems. The product doesn't have to mean the entire company. (On the other hand, with OSS development quickly becoming the only way to develop large/complicated systems, buying the expertise is the only way to maintain a semi-exclusive software advantage.) I'm perfectly willing to believe the contracts are tasty and I'll even go under the assumption that the parent will be a great employer. My question is still: why merge? So far, it doesn't seem like they're going to gain anything that they couldn't have without the merger. In fact, they'd be losing the power to pursue other clients with related needs. What's the gain? "Security" and benefits?
Hear me out. Why do you want to be aquired? Here's what I see: You've developed a small and successful software company, and a larger company wants controlling interest in your company to improve its profits. You can give them that interest without sacrificing your independence, or your profit.
If you're aquired, you become employees of the larger company and will not share in the financial gain the larger company will aquire. Obviously, they see a potential for profit which outweighs cost of aquiring your company and yourselves. Most likely, by aquiring you they'll get something you would NOT give them if you gave them interest in the company and a royalty contract. Exclusive rights to your software and related expertise, most likely.
You can give them stock in your company without giving them your whole company. You can give them voting or non-voting stock, if you want. You can grant exclusive licenses to projects. So, my question is, why do you want to be aquired? Do you want a check with lots of zeros up front? Would you rather administration be handled by division manager instead of someone you have to hire and pay a salary? What are you gaining by merging? You really have to know what you want to gain to know how you should prepare.
My recommendation is to consult (read: pay) a corporate lawyer and corporate accountant (or two) over dinner. If it's administration and book keeping you're after, you can hire administration staff: as stockholders, you're in charge, they do the paperwork, give advice, and ask for direction. If it's a merger you're after, paid counsel is usually the best advice you can get, and they'll teach you how to maximize your returns and maintain control.
Actually, that's a very good summary of why MS has been a good business. They let other people shoulder the venture risk, often with MS' funding, then they take the (prospected and analyzed) risk of a full deployment of that technology. If their product is often inferior, it's inconsiquential to the Gee-Wiz factor and the confidence people have[/had] that the company would improve it. In the past, MS was usually the first one to show people new tech.
...which brings us to today (and reality). You'll be hard pressed to find anyone in the tech sector that has confidence in MS' responsibility to deliver good code. MS has to rely on managing bureaucracy's confidence in MS, which still exists because MS is a successful business. Thanks to the Internet, and MS' demonstrated incompetence at using it as a tech showroom, MS is no longer the first company to show tech to most people. Now the companies that actually shouldered the initial risk can show the tech off. MS can still offload initial risk, minimizing their liabilities, but it's harder to yank the rug out from their "partners" now. Recently, they've tried patenting ideas their partners are developing that they're funding. Half the time, they've got a contract that permits it, and the other half of the time it's illegal but the patent department thinks they have the right contract.
Anyhow, MS can still fund innovation, but the other two leverages are gone. That leaves us with the business practice of funding innovative and/or useful projects and selling the results with a service plan. Oddly enough, that's what OSS-interest companies are learning how to do.
Segueing back to the first paragraph, I've some political speculation. In the USA there's a tendancy to try to team up and pick a winner, which is why people tend to try to stick with the popular choice, even if it's inferior. This is probably because of the mindset of strategic voting required for multi-candidate plurality voting to function in a reasonable way. That is, everyone decides to buy MS because that'll give MS more money (resource) to work with to improve their product, as opposed to giving a lot of candidate companies a little money. This may explain why countries with wiser voting systems (like Borda Count, Instant Runnoff, or {my favorite} Condorcet's Method) more readily adopt Linux, BSD, or adopted BeOS.
I don't know what it is, but it isn't Christian. Baptists are the only Christian group I can think of which seems to have this fixation, but even they don't have this insanity. I'm certain the people who think this game is a good idea do not read the bible, except for the "safe" sections. I bet they stick little post-it notes everywhere with the "happy" lines, neatly cropped from betwixt two "nasty" lines.
The message in the Bible is written within a world of disease, common prostitution, gorey punishments, and rationalized cruelty. Christ, within this world, sees everything, and learns from it. He makes a choice to counter the cruelty, and teaches others to help. He teaches that the evils pass if you don't reciprocate, or evils will become stronger with vengeful acts. A Christian who understands this message can take enlightened meaning and understanding from any situation, especially when things go wrong. A Christian wants to increase common well-being, decrease common suffering, and teach others to enjoy life and let transient suffering pass on and die.
Under no circumstances does this allow a Christian to insulate themselves with illusions and ignorance. Protecting yourself with magick illusions is a mighty sin.
For example, I had an interesting experience with GTA: Vice City. I was nearly through the book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" when I started playing it. The game was nearly painful because I had no options to do anything except the way the story required. From reading the book, every situation I entered I could think of ways to improve the situation, but the character always took the violent route. The characters in Vice City were fleshed out, and the world seemed real. So, when I was or wasn't playing the game, I was thinking of ways to improve my character's situation by improving the situations around him. Your character in VC is such a brilliant and driven fuckup, it's hard not to think of better ways to go about everything. And, if nothing else, you're slightly more mentally and emotionally prepared to encounter such backwards situations, even if they don't involve gunfire.
Whatever these "Christians" are, they want to pretend bad things don't happen. That marks them as distinctly un-Christ-like.
Hmm, seems like Vietnam-based combat games are a rather crowded genre suddenly - why now?
A large portion of the gaming studios are governed by investors looking to profit from a booming industry. These fuckwits have no idea why the industry was booming in the first place, so they throttle it in the crib with backwards-ass ideas of "product direction". If one of you dipshits is reading: games are not "trendy" or "hip", and every gaming venue DIES when you dipshits try to treat it that way. PC games have thrived because people, not "consumers", can develop whatever they want along whatever inane or inspired direction they want to take their pet projects. These "trendy" releases we get, counter-terrorism, WW1/WW2, Vietnam... they suck. There's a very good reason that all the innovation, all the "block-buster hits", come from privately owned and run studios, like id software and Relic. They're not stupid enough to scrap their dreams to develop along "market trends".
However, it's important to remember that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi were designed for different reasons.
Which is why Bluetooth was (not) designed against interfering with WiFi? Unless you've got one of those dandy combo Bluetooth/WiFi chipsets, putting a bluetooth device next to a WiFi device or access point is a great way to jam individual WiFi device.
I know 2.4Ghz is that tiny unregulated low-power space that everyone has to put their happy device in, and we can point blamey fingers at the guv'ment for that. But, seriously, it doesn't have to be so abusive. It doesn't have to cause interference at all, but WiFi and Bluetooth are both dumb-at-the-nodes, and Bluetooth is the radio bully. As it is, you have to choose LAN/Internet, or wireless headset.
I don't see the need for Bluetooth, personally. Low powered, short range WiFi, IPv6, and zeroconf, could make a fucking beautiful marriage for wireless devices. You can encrypt the traffic, if you want to pay the battery time--but the cost/effectiveness there is equal with Bluetooth. There's a tiny overhead in metadata, but you're using existing technology in innovative ways (capitalizing on established growth industries), and your hardware is WAY more versatile (read: useful, servicable) by being able to connect to any network for any purpose it can serve--without a bluetooth technology license.
I find this branch of research and publication somewhat disturbing. As legitimate, morally appealing, uses for this technology appear, the opposition should become less vehemently opposed to the technology. It's the rational reaction for rational people. If you still oppose it, you're probably irrational.
We're capitalists, however. Civil liberties have not been terribly profitable products in the past. The old-world investors will not invest in end-point civil liberties protection technologies, and will continue to put on blinders to the true value in information networks--their end-points.
However, perhaps one or two capitalists out there has realized that (1) networks have no inherent value or use on their own, and (2) people are terrified of being ruled by any network. There's a fucking market for civil liberty weapons: tools to defend end-points, tools to protect individual's rights to connect and communicate with any other end-points, tools to insure security and authenticity between any two or more individuals. Justin Frankel's "Waste" is a beautiful start.
On a related, but off-topic tangent, I've got a new buzz-word: Intellectual Macro-Economics, a way to increase the value of the US dollar.
Here's how it works, in magic-bullet glory: Article 1, Section 8, of the US Constitution provides Congress with the power to increase the artists and scientific wealth of the US, providing a mechanism for doing so (limited terms). The concept is to increase the unlimited common wealth of the US (and probably Humanity), by encouraging the creation of new works. For the last 20 years our cultural wealth has been depleted by private interests, looting the cultural commons, robbing us of the creative wealth to build with. In this, the copyright law is our asset which has been mis-managed, and stopped delivering our wealth. To increase our national cultural wealth, require the creation of new works, and consequently increase foreign confidence in the US dollar, increasing its exchange value, we must repair copyright, patent, and trademark law so that the commons will resume growing, and an immediate idea-influx (through a retro-active term truncation) would have massive midterm-longterm beneficial effects.
Another aside. One side of the IP arguement sees the limited terms as the promotion of progress. The other side (ours, and the one that wrote the damned Constitution) sees the progress as the effect of limited terms: an increase in common intellectual wealth, with a "necessary evil" to promote the production of those works. Bleh. Communications barriers. And you thought it was so fucking obvious, didn't you?
The shuttle accelerates the entire time it is in the lower atmosphere. Even if the event had taken place in a vaccum, the shuttle would still be exerting a fixed forced, and increasing speed at the square of that force. One second after the foam detatches, in a vaccum, the shuttle is traveling much faster than the foam.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like one of the best ideas I've heard to take market dynamics out of music distribution.
Let me put it another way: Do any of you remember banalty tax from History of Western Civ 1?
Simply put, these are royalties due to an entity in exchange for a service, even if you don't use it. How do you "vote with your dollars" when you can't choose what your dollars go towards, or if your dollars can go at all?
On the flip side, this is a great deal for the music industry: They get a garunteed revenue stream for doing nothing. Hell, they can completely quit producing new or interesting works and continue getting paid for 95 years, with that back-library of theirs.
This also sets a great example for the economics students. Who needs all those complicated supply/demand and market dynamics theories? All you have to do to get rich is convince someone you deserve a tax revenue. This can be a private institution (Universities, in this case) or the Federal government (place a media tax on something and funnel the money back to you). Why work for hard-core capitalism when you can have the much simpler capitalistic socialism?
Cue the banalty song.
Calculus Made Easy by Silvanus P. Thompson and Martin Gardner. This is exactly the sort of book you're looking for, in the subject of Calculus. To quote from the preface, on the subject of modern math textbooks: Their exercises have, as one mathematician recently put it, "the dignity of solving crossword puzzles." The purpose of this book is to explain the philosophy of Calculus, and teach you how to differentiate and integrate simple functions. I recommend reading the Preface in a bookstore, skimming the first few chapters. I think you'll like it.
You can do that already.
Chris Rock's Bring the Pain comes to mind:
Everyone keeps saying that, but I haven't seen it, or read about it. They're very dangerous, and they can use their existing monopoly and funds to tackle other markets. They haven't done a very good job of that, generally speaking.
They've done it once: MS Office. In that case, they bought, broke, and stole competitors. In that case, they owned the platform, and they rode the wave of personal computers into businesses and homes. They happend to hold onto the wave tighter and bit and scratched at their neighbors a bit extra, so they're the ones that made it farthest ashore.
Then they tried to break into hardware, and they made some good products (because they bought some good hardware companies). There were a lot of keyboards and mice, and MS bought lots of them, and they cut deals with OEMs and such. They don't have a monopoly on peripherals though. Far from it, really, despite the quality of them. They didn't take over this market, but they play it well, and unusually fairly.
They tried to leverage their desktop monopoly by creating the servers for the clients. A decade and a half later, and Microsoft still doesn't understand this market, why they can't control it and grow it at the same time. They made Exchange, their only valuable offer, to lock the client to the server. It's horribly designed, but it brings together a lot of ancient Unix technologies in a useful way. It has kept them alive in this market, where they would have lost money in any other circumstance. They're failing this market rapidly, today.
They tried to take over embeded devices with WindowsCE. This was, and still is, an abysmal failure. Quite simply, they fucking suck at this. They're one of the biggest contributors to the failure of handhelds growth--them and Palm, trying to control the market, lock out competitors, and intentionally causing interoperability problems. Neither company wants Open Standards, and this market isn't going anywhere until their wares learn to speak fluently with the world. Near-success stories: Dreamcast, and PocketPC. Feel free to read up on those.
Consoles. This one's still cooking, but they're not a smashing success, as yet. Xbox is a failure in Japan, the hottest console market. They're a failure in Europe. They're not too hot in North or South America either, except in the US, where they're second place to Sony. The Japan and US markets are highly influenced by nationalism. The Xbox's biggest strength is in delivering PC games without the hassles of Microsoft's other product, Windows. Kind of funny, really.
If anyone has anything to add, please do. It seems to me that Microsoft hasn't done too good of a job at leveraging their assets. They built two monopolies on one market's appearance, but they've only had mild to middling success (Win Server, Hardware), or lost a lot of money (XBox) since then.
Right now, MS is betting the company on .NET. It seems to me that this is likely to break MS, in the way Sega was broken. Without a visible growing market, MS is just fragmenting their software platform. Their saftey net, the one Sega didn't have, is the PC platform's normal openness, but MS' historical and current tactic, lockout, eliminates that. MS' hardware division (excepting XBox) is the only one without a monopoly that's demonstrated an ability to profit in a sideways market. Microsoft's likely to break one of their own monopolies in this endeavor.
And it is.
The first thing that popped into my head when I read that was "uh... feature freeze two weeks ago." I'm sure Reiser's going to have another of his babyish hissy fits. I see another slashdot story in the near future.
<Reiser> Oh, what about my sponsors! Why are you all playa hat'n on me?
<EveryoneNotOnTheReiserCheerleadingSquad> You don't get special treatment. You waited too long, and we're not putting your untested code into a frozen code base.
<Reiser> You're oppressing me! The GPLv3 will fix you all!
<SomeoneFromFSF> Please shut up, Reiser. You still don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
<Reiser> Wahh!! My sponsors!
<Everyone> SHUT UP REISER.
I'd go with XFS. I've never heard of corruption from regular use, while I've heard far too many horror stories about ReiserFS. Aside from the ineptitude at reliability, Reiser's one of the most unpleasant characters I've ever run into in Free/Open software. Stallman at least has reason for what he does. Reiser sends off flames to dev mailing lists (sometimes legally) threatening people for removing the kernel message and command line commercials from his code. Usually, he fires off fiction about "the next version of GPL" that someone from the FSF invariable shoots down. Bleh.
If you ever get a soap commercial in the output of dmesg, you'll know who to blame.
Why do companies even try to region lock? What are they trying to do? They only seem to create a useless business niche dedicated to bypassing it.
Gelatin makes me squeaky.
You mean I just imagined the National Debt Clock being taken down in 2000 because it started running the wrong way? The clock was put up to dramatize government spending, so it started sending mixed messages in 2000.
Of course, it was actually a reduction in spending, with only intermitent surpluses. I'm sure Bush II has done an excellent job cutting the sur^Wdebt.
This form of "voice" has a high tendancy to polarize issues. This is especially bad when an issue doesn't make sense polarized. For example, a candidate is either for or against media, uh, "consolidation". Regulation reform or Open Spectrum don't fit into this. A "pro-business" perspective has no place in a boolean "Consolidate: 0/1" poll.
How do we talk to people who prefer knee-jerk for/against positions instead of thinking up the positions in the first place? That's why the Bush Administration is in control: they define the language, define what the issues are, and define them in such a way that it doesn't make sense to be against the position, even if the real issue is the inverse. Patriot Act, Clean Air Act. They didn't ask for Congress' approval to go to war, but they called a vote to "support our troops". They take the issue of the war out of the vote. Instead of "send our people off to die" the vote becomes "let our people die where we sent them off to".
Can you undo the damage? How do you talk to people who won't talk about the past, won't talk about the future, and won't talk about the present except in 1-bit binary?
Says you.
As an early Quake movie maker, I have to say, I really hate the word "Machinema". I mean, I really hate that word. It's such a lame word, I won't touch game-engine movies because my work would be classified as "Machinema".
To put it another way, would Steven Speilburg make movies if they were called dingleberries? He can get a Grammy for Best Drama Dingleberry. He'll be featured in documentaries called Dingleberry Magic.
I really hate that word.
Maybe this is crazy, but what about awarding voting-class stock in the company based on a person's meritocratic worth?
This is going off an an angle from the poster's question, but I think it's interesting.
They could act under the umbrella of a well known company without losing their company, also. It's a product (plus development) the prospective parent wants, it seems. The product doesn't have to mean the entire company. (On the other hand, with OSS development quickly becoming the only way to develop large/complicated systems, buying the expertise is the only way to maintain a semi-exclusive software advantage.) I'm perfectly willing to believe the contracts are tasty and I'll even go under the assumption that the parent will be a great employer. My question is still: why merge? So far, it doesn't seem like they're going to gain anything that they couldn't have without the merger. In fact, they'd be losing the power to pursue other clients with related needs. What's the gain? "Security" and benefits?
Hear me out. Why do you want to be aquired? Here's what I see: You've developed a small and successful software company, and a larger company wants controlling interest in your company to improve its profits. You can give them that interest without sacrificing your independence, or your profit.
If you're aquired, you become employees of the larger company and will not share in the financial gain the larger company will aquire. Obviously, they see a potential for profit which outweighs cost of aquiring your company and yourselves. Most likely, by aquiring you they'll get something you would NOT give them if you gave them interest in the company and a royalty contract. Exclusive rights to your software and related expertise, most likely.
You can give them stock in your company without giving them your whole company. You can give them voting or non-voting stock, if you want. You can grant exclusive licenses to projects. So, my question is, why do you want to be aquired? Do you want a check with lots of zeros up front? Would you rather administration be handled by division manager instead of someone you have to hire and pay a salary? What are you gaining by merging? You really have to know what you want to gain to know how you should prepare.
My recommendation is to consult (read: pay) a corporate lawyer and corporate accountant (or two) over dinner. If it's administration and book keeping you're after, you can hire administration staff: as stockholders, you're in charge, they do the paperwork, give advice, and ask for direction. If it's a merger you're after, paid counsel is usually the best advice you can get, and they'll teach you how to maximize your returns and maintain control.
Actually, that's a very good summary of why MS has been a good business. They let other people shoulder the venture risk, often with MS' funding, then they take the (prospected and analyzed) risk of a full deployment of that technology. If their product is often inferior, it's inconsiquential to the Gee-Wiz factor and the confidence people have[/had] that the company would improve it. In the past, MS was usually the first one to show people new tech.
...which brings us to today (and reality). You'll be hard pressed to find anyone in the tech sector that has confidence in MS' responsibility to deliver good code. MS has to rely on managing bureaucracy's confidence in MS, which still exists because MS is a successful business. Thanks to the Internet, and MS' demonstrated incompetence at using it as a tech showroom, MS is no longer the first company to show tech to most people. Now the companies that actually shouldered the initial risk can show the tech off. MS can still offload initial risk, minimizing their liabilities, but it's harder to yank the rug out from their "partners" now. Recently, they've tried patenting ideas their partners are developing that they're funding. Half the time, they've got a contract that permits it, and the other half of the time it's illegal but the patent department thinks they have the right contract.
Anyhow, MS can still fund innovation, but the other two leverages are gone. That leaves us with the business practice of funding innovative and/or useful projects and selling the results with a service plan. Oddly enough, that's what OSS-interest companies are learning how to do.
Segueing back to the first paragraph, I've some political speculation. In the USA there's a tendancy to try to team up and pick a winner, which is why people tend to try to stick with the popular choice, even if it's inferior. This is probably because of the mindset of strategic voting required for multi-candidate plurality voting to function in a reasonable way. That is, everyone decides to buy MS because that'll give MS more money (resource) to work with to improve their product, as opposed to giving a lot of candidate companies a little money. This may explain why countries with wiser voting systems (like Borda Count, Instant Runnoff, or {my favorite} Condorcet's Method) more readily adopt Linux, BSD, or adopted BeOS.
I don't know what it is, but it isn't Christian. Baptists are the only Christian group I can think of which seems to have this fixation, but even they don't have this insanity. I'm certain the people who think this game is a good idea do not read the bible, except for the "safe" sections. I bet they stick little post-it notes everywhere with the "happy" lines, neatly cropped from betwixt two "nasty" lines.
The message in the Bible is written within a world of disease, common prostitution, gorey punishments, and rationalized cruelty. Christ, within this world, sees everything, and learns from it. He makes a choice to counter the cruelty, and teaches others to help. He teaches that the evils pass if you don't reciprocate, or evils will become stronger with vengeful acts. A Christian who understands this message can take enlightened meaning and understanding from any situation, especially when things go wrong. A Christian wants to increase common well-being, decrease common suffering, and teach others to enjoy life and let transient suffering pass on and die.
Under no circumstances does this allow a Christian to insulate themselves with illusions and ignorance. Protecting yourself with magick illusions is a mighty sin.
For example, I had an interesting experience with GTA: Vice City. I was nearly through the book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" when I started playing it. The game was nearly painful because I had no options to do anything except the way the story required. From reading the book, every situation I entered I could think of ways to improve the situation, but the character always took the violent route. The characters in Vice City were fleshed out, and the world seemed real. So, when I was or wasn't playing the game, I was thinking of ways to improve my character's situation by improving the situations around him. Your character in VC is such a brilliant and driven fuckup, it's hard not to think of better ways to go about everything. And, if nothing else, you're slightly more mentally and emotionally prepared to encounter such backwards situations, even if they don't involve gunfire.
Whatever these "Christians" are, they want to pretend bad things don't happen. That marks them as distinctly un-Christ-like.
A large portion of the gaming studios are governed by investors looking to profit from a booming industry. These fuckwits have no idea why the industry was booming in the first place, so they throttle it in the crib with backwards-ass ideas of "product direction". If one of you dipshits is reading: games are not "trendy" or "hip", and every gaming venue DIES when you dipshits try to treat it that way. PC games have thrived because people, not "consumers", can develop whatever they want along whatever inane or inspired direction they want to take their pet projects. These "trendy" releases we get, counter-terrorism, WW1/WW2, Vietnam... they suck. There's a very good reason that all the innovation, all the "block-buster hits", come from privately owned and run studios, like id software and Relic. They're not stupid enough to scrap their dreams to develop along "market trends".
Most likely, you saw his sponsors mentioned in the kernel logs.
Shades of pokemon...
Which is why Bluetooth was (not) designed against interfering with WiFi? Unless you've got one of those dandy combo Bluetooth/WiFi chipsets, putting a bluetooth device next to a WiFi device or access point is a great way to jam individual WiFi device.
I know 2.4Ghz is that tiny unregulated low-power space that everyone has to put their happy device in, and we can point blamey fingers at the guv'ment for that. But, seriously, it doesn't have to be so abusive. It doesn't have to cause interference at all, but WiFi and Bluetooth are both dumb-at-the-nodes, and Bluetooth is the radio bully. As it is, you have to choose LAN/Internet, or wireless headset.
I don't see the need for Bluetooth, personally. Low powered, short range WiFi, IPv6, and zeroconf, could make a fucking beautiful marriage for wireless devices. You can encrypt the traffic, if you want to pay the battery time--but the cost/effectiveness there is equal with Bluetooth. There's a tiny overhead in metadata, but you're using existing technology in innovative ways (capitalizing on established growth industries), and your hardware is WAY more versatile (read: useful, servicable) by being able to connect to any network for any purpose it can serve--without a bluetooth technology license.
Bah.
I find this branch of research and publication somewhat disturbing. As legitimate, morally appealing, uses for this technology appear, the opposition should become less vehemently opposed to the technology. It's the rational reaction for rational people. If you still oppose it, you're probably irrational.
We're capitalists, however. Civil liberties have not been terribly profitable products in the past. The old-world investors will not invest in end-point civil liberties protection technologies, and will continue to put on blinders to the true value in information networks--their end-points.
However, perhaps one or two capitalists out there has realized that (1) networks have no inherent value or use on their own, and (2) people are terrified of being ruled by any network. There's a fucking market for civil liberty weapons: tools to defend end-points, tools to protect individual's rights to connect and communicate with any other end-points, tools to insure security and authenticity between any two or more individuals. Justin Frankel's "Waste" is a beautiful start.
On a related, but off-topic tangent, I've got a new buzz-word: Intellectual Macro-Economics, a way to increase the value of the US dollar.
Here's how it works, in magic-bullet glory: Article 1, Section 8, of the US Constitution provides Congress with the power to increase the artists and scientific wealth of the US, providing a mechanism for doing so (limited terms). The concept is to increase the unlimited common wealth of the US (and probably Humanity), by encouraging the creation of new works. For the last 20 years our cultural wealth has been depleted by private interests, looting the cultural commons, robbing us of the creative wealth to build with. In this, the copyright law is our asset which has been mis-managed, and stopped delivering our wealth. To increase our national cultural wealth, require the creation of new works, and consequently increase foreign confidence in the US dollar, increasing its exchange value, we must repair copyright, patent, and trademark law so that the commons will resume growing, and an immediate idea-influx (through a retro-active term truncation) would have massive midterm-longterm beneficial effects.
Another aside. One side of the IP arguement sees the limited terms as the promotion of progress. The other side (ours, and the one that wrote the damned Constitution) sees the progress as the effect of limited terms: an increase in common intellectual wealth, with a "necessary evil" to promote the production of those works. Bleh. Communications barriers. And you thought it was so fucking obvious, didn't you?
The rockets did not stop when the foam detatched.
The shuttle accelerates the entire time it is in the lower atmosphere. Even if the event had taken place in a vaccum, the shuttle would still be exerting a fixed forced, and increasing speed at the square of that force. One second after the foam detatches, in a vaccum, the shuttle is traveling much faster than the foam.