The marines have been using custom maps (of things like Embassies that are likely areas of operation since DOOM or DOOM II, to learn layouts and other stuff.
I'd use WMP if clippy danced around and played air guitar. Just so he doesn't constantly interupt by taping on the inside of the monitor with things like "It looks like you've played several romantic songs, would you like to shop for candles." or "You have played several speed metal songs, would you like me to summon an ambulance?" or something like that.
So, people like the popular stuff, the more obscure things are available, it would be significantly cheaper for Apple to only offer the 20% of the songs that generate the majority of downloads, we should be happy that they are offering all the other songs for those who prefer the 1-2% of downloads that will probably never justify their storage space (in cost terms).
Every estimate I've seen has put the licensing cost at about 65% figure they have to cover their otehr costs (servers, bandwidth, coding, etc) with something between $0.30 and $0.40 per song, their gross profit from this business is probably just below $5 million so far (since they have some start up costs (like extra advertising and the recent Windows Port that won't be there again) so they probably haven't made a profit yet, but likely will next year. I didn't hear about any specifics last quarter, through Sept.
Sure, its gonna be a great business for them, but not for a few years, I've seen too much research (brokerage research) that only mentions iTunes, as a driver for earnings in the 1-2 year timeframe. While the company is doing a great job, and adding windows clients will certainly have a material change on the business, it's likely that the earnings of that timeframe will by 75% or more hardware, as music ramps up. Go out 3-5 years and they will probably be one of the biggest music delivery companies.
Apple was in pretty similar straits about 5 years ago, they brought Steve back, got Office for the Mac, and released the iMac line, which probably saved the company. Even so they weren't valued above the cash they had in the bank until only a few months ago. The music store (while successful is probably being overvalued by wall street), and the G5 have been the reason for their new premium to cash value, and if last quarter was any indication operational success.
That's what I get for struggling through on the regular mode, you have no idea how many of those worm nests I just missed. How do you enable it? I finally started playing as the eco types so they would at least join me when I let them attack.
Accounting rules are goofy sometimes, but it's the language of business and it does bear learning. They aren't inconsistent, but there are occasionally loopholes, they're fairly logical (once you grasp the basic logic) and were one of the first applications of computers in business. In this case, the change dealt with a tax rebate that the US government (it could be a foreign gov't but let's keep it simple) worth something between $1 an $2 billion in taxes that SUN won't have to pay due to losses they already recorded (the government lets you swing losses around a short year period as a benefit to highly cyclical businesses). Think of it like catch up deductions. The rules of accounting require that management estimate the likelihood of actually earning what would be required to meet the tax write off and then apply that discount to the value of the tax benefit. SUN's mangment decided that the likelihood of reaching that level of profitability in the required period of time was less than 50% and has to reduce the value of that potential benefit to $0. They still have the benefit, but the value of it that they report to their owners was lowered. This is a pretty arcane subject and probably still confuses many of the investment professionals that are supposed to understand how it works (The accountant's, of course, will call this child's play. They save their anger for things like pensions or derivatives). If something wasn't clear, I'd be happy to try again with more numbers or a diagram.
BMW isn't exactly a paragon of naming consistancy, thier coupes used to be iS (for sport I think) and the newer 323i's now have a 2.5l displacment depending on the year. I'd guess BMW decided that people wouldn't pay up for only.3 liters if they labeled them properly. M-B has been closer (they may have both done some funny things with forced induction engines especially in Europe) but their letter combos names don't make as much sense to me. It is certainly better than Porsche and most of the others, but you still have to look closely sometimes. Used Hondas are the worst, since the most common model had interchangable engines with vastly different characteristics.
distributed.net? OGRs were particularly Mac (altivec engine) friendly as I recall, a friend's 300Mhz ish imac would regularly post equivelent scores to up to 1 ghz k7 and P3s. I would assume that the 64 bit processor would be better at these too, the engine might need some optimization work done first though.
There are a few wall street types who catch the alternative media outlets. I think/. was the only place that had the MS settlement before the market closed, and MS started moving up quite a bit at the end of the trading period. It picked up a few minutes after the story was posted, so someone is looking. It is likely that the relativly few investors who bought SCO on this news would never have heard of/. so that stock doesn't move.
I've never heard of a card counting scheme for baccarat, unless you count playing the bank in Europe, I always thought it was interesting, that you go in to the big fancy room and play a game with pretty decent odds, I think the house take is below 5%. A little bit worse the pass/no pass line bet (without odds) or a decent blackjack strategy (no counting). I think the grandparent post's point was that a machine could be set to make most of that 97% payout in one or two big wins (with more like an 80% payout excluding those wins), which might not happen during the installed life of the machine.
Technically, it's only arb if you have no element of time invovled. You have to be as close to instant as possible, if you have to hold one leg of the arb for any length of time you're just speculating. Not that you can't make good money speculating.
Yeah, It looked like you had an excellent grasp of the banking system. I was hoping that the grandparent would benefit from a good lesson in how the whole system works. There are a ton of conspiracy theories about banking, and while a bit tricky the whole industry is generally built on some solid fundamental principles, at times it can be run by some sketchy characters.
There is a multiplier, and the Fed only acts as a regulator of how much money a bank can create. It isn't new and it's based on the fact that most depositors don't need access to all their funds right away. Goldsmiths in Europe figured all of this out during the middle ages. It's easier to explain if we assume all the accounts are at one bank, but they still work with many banks. The trick works like this, if you deposit $100 into a savings account, the bank is allowed to make a loan of $90 with that money. They are required by the fed to keep 10% of their deposits in liquid form (cash in the vault is only a small part of this they buy short term treasuries, federal deposits, and loan it to other banks in what is known as the fed funds market. However when they make the loan, it usually not given to the borrower in a suitcase, it's credited to an account. (Here's the first major simplification. If the borrower spends it the person who sold something to the borrower will end up depositing the funds in their account. We'll assume that they don't right away.) $81 of the $90 deposit can be reloaned to another borrower, if you repeat this you will eventually get $1000 of loans made, $900 of debt created, and $100 in the original savings account. Money was created, but no one was made better or worse off. This is known as the money multiplier, and it's the inverse of the 10% reserve requirement. If you wanted to harness it you could start your own bank, or credit union, it really isn't that hard, but realize that banks average a tiny return (usually less than 1%) on their loans, after just paying the interest on their own borrowings. That is before they cover the cost of branches, ATM's, tellers, bad loans, accountants, computers, and whatever other expenses they have. They don't create treasury notes, but they do create money.
Actually it's fairly rare for a company to maintain dominance for any long period of time. Most of the big companies of the 1900 stock market aren't around anylonger. The big railroads have all been bought out, and the remaining ones are no divers of growth. In the 1920's bubble, an similar company to Amazon or Netscape was RCA, it's now part of a European conglomerate. Great A&P Tea and American Tobacco were once so big they got hit by anti-trust suits. Now both are also rans. GE might remain, but it's more bank now than anything else. The only company that has been remotely dominant for nearly that long is the child companies of Standard Oil, which still account for most of the US oil industry, but where will they be in 50 years or so when gas isn't the major force behind transportation.
Most importantly they aren't spending their cash. This year would have generated additional cash, but last fall when things were looking like they would pick up SUN repurchased about a half billion worth of shares. They still only reduced their cash balances by about $100 million. They aren't dead, and aren't even close to life support.
I've been thinking this too. The one reason Intel beats them is that they have a huge advantage in CPU units. Intel and SUN have the two largest CPU development staffs that I know of, IBM is probably close, but Intel can spread that cost over a whole lot more processors than SUN can. Buying AMD would let SUN spread most of their processor development costs over a huge increase in processors shipped, and might be an aid in lowering prices of consumer processors and reducing Intel's margins.
Wear a suit and buy a briefcase, you will be the shizznit! And don't try to go all ultramodern with an aluminum one!
This message brought to you by the American cattleman's association. Actually there are some really cool sachel's if you're willing to lay out the big bucks. Somewhat related to this, I have a portfolio I picked up at our last free stuff raffle last Christmas.
JSRF is a blast, it can't be anymore harmful for the kids than GTA or something similar. I enjoyed the smooth sounds of DJ Professa K, and they way everyone would be dancing while they talked to you.
It isn't if you add any time to your economy, and you have any incentives for progress. Look at the cars of 20 or more years ago, they were large and used a ton of resources (in production). Todays smaller autos are lighter and more accessable to a much larger subset of the population then they ever were, someone developed new engines and chassis and body panels that reduced the car's resource intensiveness and reaped the reward (additional profits) of selling cheaper cars to a larger market. Take trees for example, 200 years ago, trees were required for heat and light, today they are used in the developed world for many other products but pretty rarely for heat or light, we have developed less tree intense methods of providing heat and light, and made this standard of living that much closer for the rest of the world. The history of the world is a pretty long trend of reducing the resources required to make almost every product. Yes, there is still a ton of inequality out there, and that probably won't be perfected in our lifetimes, but every single innovation brings the world that much closer to our "developed standard of living" with the resources we have available on the earth. One of the biggest problems is that you have people born every year globally who might well have developed a treatment for cancer, better processor, or something truely innovative that migth have changed the world for at least a small group who is stuck in a life of subsitance farming by the screwed up policies of wherever they had the poor luck of being born. That doesn't mean that we should give up our rewards for being more productive than others, it means that we should work to allow the others to reach their full potential.
One of the big reasons is portion control. That and finding the right balance of what to make from scratch and what to buy prepared. Can you tell by looking what 4 oz (or 150 g) of aspaugus looks like? Neither can I, new resturants should invest in a kitchen scale until they really nail portion control. All those things starup costs are high, but you only have to buy them occasionally, the food goes out on each plate. If you don't make enough per plate, either prices too low or cost too high, you will go broke quickly. Another important one is what you mentioned train your staff to turn the tables over quickly. Get people in and out as soon as possible, (without the customer feeling rushed) and the resturant has a good chance of survival. The software can show you which dishes you make money on, and which you don't or which server gets 4 tops a night vs 2-3. This sort of informaiton would be quite useful to a failing resturant that's owner has no idea why it doesn't make any money, even though it's always booked solid. Most small businesses would benefit from better informaiton systems. This would also be a place that could provide a ton of work for all the people customizing and integrating the software package for each small business.
Unbelievably talented and generous man, who died after he believed he was a miserable failure. He originally wanted to be a mission leader, and run something like a modern homeless shelter, but after giving all his possessions, and most of his meager stipend to those less fortunate than him, his higher up decided he was mad and had him tossed out. He tried painting and he thought failed at that too. Odd that he is certainly one of the most famous old masters today.
Slashdot Mirror
The marines have been using custom maps (of things like Embassies that are likely areas of operation since DOOM or DOOM II, to learn layouts and other stuff.
I'd use WMP if clippy danced around and played air guitar. Just so he doesn't constantly interupt by taping on the inside of the monitor with things like "It looks like you've played several romantic songs, would you like to shop for candles." or "You have played several speed metal songs, would you like me to summon an ambulance?" or something like that.
So, people like the popular stuff, the more obscure things are available, it would be significantly cheaper for Apple to only offer the 20% of the songs that generate the majority of downloads, we should be happy that they are offering all the other songs for those who prefer the 1-2% of downloads that will probably never justify their storage space (in cost terms).
Every estimate I've seen has put the licensing cost at about 65% figure they have to cover their otehr costs (servers, bandwidth, coding, etc) with something between $0.30 and $0.40 per song, their gross profit from this business is probably just below $5 million so far (since they have some start up costs (like extra advertising and the recent Windows Port that won't be there again) so they probably haven't made a profit yet, but likely will next year. I didn't hear about any specifics last quarter, through Sept.
Sure, its gonna be a great business for them, but not for a few years, I've seen too much research (brokerage research) that only mentions iTunes, as a driver for earnings in the 1-2 year timeframe. While the company is doing a great job, and adding windows clients will certainly have a material change on the business, it's likely that the earnings of that timeframe will by 75% or more hardware, as music ramps up. Go out 3-5 years and they will probably be one of the biggest music delivery companies.
Apple was in pretty similar straits about 5 years ago, they brought Steve back, got Office for the Mac, and released the iMac line, which probably saved the company. Even so they weren't valued above the cash they had in the bank until only a few months ago. The music store (while successful is probably being overvalued by wall street), and the G5 have been the reason for their new premium to cash value, and if last quarter was any indication operational success.
Whadda mean, nethack works just fine on both systems, who cares about other games. Desktop computers, I proclaim.
That's what I get for struggling through on the regular mode, you have no idea how many of those worm nests I just missed. How do you enable it? I finally started playing as the eco types so they would at least join me when I let them attack.
Accounting rules are goofy sometimes, but it's the language of business and it does bear learning. They aren't inconsistent, but there are occasionally loopholes, they're fairly logical (once you grasp the basic logic) and were one of the first applications of computers in business. In this case, the change dealt with a tax rebate that the US government (it could be a foreign gov't but let's keep it simple) worth something between $1 an $2 billion in taxes that SUN won't have to pay due to losses they already recorded (the government lets you swing losses around a short year period as a benefit to highly cyclical businesses). Think of it like catch up deductions. The rules of accounting require that management estimate the likelihood of actually earning what would be required to meet the tax write off and then apply that discount to the value of the tax benefit. SUN's mangment decided that the likelihood of reaching that level of profitability in the required period of time was less than 50% and has to reduce the value of that potential benefit to $0. They still have the benefit, but the value of it that they report to their owners was lowered. This is a pretty arcane subject and probably still confuses many of the investment professionals that are supposed to understand how it works (The accountant's, of course, will call this child's play. They save their anger for things like pensions or derivatives). If something wasn't clear, I'd be happy to try again with more numbers or a diagram.
BMW isn't exactly a paragon of naming consistancy, thier coupes used to be iS (for sport I think) and the newer 323i's now have a 2.5l displacment depending on the year. I'd guess BMW decided that people wouldn't pay up for only .3 liters if they labeled them properly. M-B has been closer (they may have both done some funny things with forced induction engines especially in Europe) but their letter combos names don't make as much sense to me. It is certainly better than Porsche and most of the others, but you still have to look closely sometimes. Used Hondas are the worst, since the most common model had interchangable engines with vastly different characteristics.
distributed.net? OGRs were particularly Mac (altivec engine) friendly as I recall, a friend's 300Mhz ish imac would regularly post equivelent scores to up to 1 ghz k7 and P3s. I would assume that the 64 bit processor would be better at these too, the engine might need some optimization work done first though.
The stereotypically skinny ones did not heed this advice and now cannot afford food.
There are a few wall street types who catch the alternative media outlets. I think /. was the only place that had the MS settlement before the market closed, and MS started moving up quite a bit at the end of the trading period. It picked up a few minutes after the story was posted, so someone is looking. It is likely that the relativly few investors who bought SCO on this news would never have heard of /. so that stock doesn't move.
I've never heard of a card counting scheme for baccarat, unless you count playing the bank in Europe, I always thought it was interesting, that you go in to the big fancy room and play a game with pretty decent odds, I think the house take is below 5%. A little bit worse the pass/no pass line bet (without odds) or a decent blackjack strategy (no counting). I think the grandparent post's point was that a machine could be set to make most of that 97% payout in one or two big wins (with more like an 80% payout excluding those wins), which might not happen during the installed life of the machine.
Technically, it's only arb if you have no element of time invovled. You have to be as close to instant as possible, if you have to hold one leg of the arb for any length of time you're just speculating. Not that you can't make good money speculating.
Yeah, It looked like you had an excellent grasp of the banking system. I was hoping that the grandparent would benefit from a good lesson in how the whole system works. There are a ton of conspiracy theories about banking, and while a bit tricky the whole industry is generally built on some solid fundamental principles, at times it can be run by some sketchy characters.
There is a multiplier, and the Fed only acts as a regulator of how much money a bank can create. It isn't new and it's based on the fact that most depositors don't need access to all their funds right away. Goldsmiths in Europe figured all of this out during the middle ages. It's easier to explain if we assume all the accounts are at one bank, but they still work with many banks. The trick works like this, if you deposit $100 into a savings account, the bank is allowed to make a loan of $90 with that money. They are required by the fed to keep 10% of their deposits in liquid form (cash in the vault is only a small part of this they buy short term treasuries, federal deposits, and loan it to other banks in what is known as the fed funds market. However when they make the loan, it usually not given to the borrower in a suitcase, it's credited to an account.
(Here's the first major simplification. If the borrower spends it the person who sold something to the borrower will end up depositing the funds in their account. We'll assume that they don't right away.) $81 of the $90 deposit can be reloaned to another borrower, if you repeat this you will eventually get $1000 of loans made, $900 of debt created, and $100 in the original savings account. Money was created, but no one was made better or worse off. This is known as the money multiplier, and it's the inverse of the 10% reserve requirement. If you wanted to harness it you could start your own bank, or credit union, it really isn't that hard, but realize that banks average a tiny return (usually less than 1%) on their loans, after just paying the interest on their own borrowings. That is before they cover the cost of branches, ATM's, tellers, bad loans, accountants, computers, and whatever other expenses they have. They don't create treasury notes, but they do create money.
Actually it's fairly rare for a company to maintain dominance for any long period of time. Most of the big companies of the 1900 stock market aren't around anylonger. The big railroads have all been bought out, and the remaining ones are no divers of growth. In the 1920's bubble, an similar company to Amazon or Netscape was RCA, it's now part of a European conglomerate. Great A&P Tea and American Tobacco were once so big they got hit by anti-trust suits. Now both are also rans. GE might remain, but it's more bank now than anything else. The only company that has been remotely dominant for nearly that long is the child companies of Standard Oil, which still account for most of the US oil industry, but where will they be in 50 years or so when gas isn't the major force behind transportation.
Most importantly they aren't spending their cash. This year would have generated additional cash, but last fall when things were looking like they would pick up SUN repurchased about a half billion worth of shares. They still only reduced their cash balances by about $100 million. They aren't dead, and aren't even close to life support.
I've been thinking this too. The one reason Intel beats them is that they have a huge advantage in CPU units. Intel and SUN have the two largest CPU development staffs that I know of, IBM is probably close, but Intel can spread that cost over a whole lot more processors than SUN can. Buying AMD would let SUN spread most of their processor development costs over a huge increase in processors shipped, and might be an aid in lowering prices of consumer processors and reducing Intel's margins.
Wear a suit and buy a briefcase, you will be the shizznit! And don't try to go all ultramodern with an aluminum one!
This message brought to you by the American cattleman's association.
Actually there are some really cool sachel's if you're willing to lay out the big bucks. Somewhat related to this, I have a portfolio I picked up at our last free stuff raffle last Christmas.
JSRF is a blast, it can't be anymore harmful for the kids than GTA or something similar. I enjoyed the smooth sounds of DJ Professa K, and they way everyone would be dancing while they talked to you.
It isn't if you add any time to your economy, and you have any incentives for progress. Look at the cars of 20 or more years ago, they were large and used a ton of resources (in production). Todays smaller autos are lighter and more accessable to a much larger subset of the population then they ever were, someone developed new engines and chassis and body panels that reduced the car's resource intensiveness and reaped the reward (additional profits) of selling cheaper cars to a larger market. Take trees for example, 200 years ago, trees were required for heat and light, today they are used in the developed world for many other products but pretty rarely for heat or light, we have developed less tree intense methods of providing heat and light, and made this standard of living that much closer for the rest of the world. The history of the world is a pretty long trend of reducing the resources required to make almost every product. Yes, there is still a ton of inequality out there, and that probably won't be perfected in our lifetimes, but every single innovation brings the world that much closer to our "developed standard of living" with the resources we have available on the earth. One of the biggest problems is that you have people born every year globally who might well have developed a treatment for cancer, better processor, or something truely innovative that migth have changed the world for at least a small group who is stuck in a life of subsitance farming by the screwed up policies of wherever they had the poor luck of being born. That doesn't mean that we should give up our rewards for being more productive than others, it means that we should work to allow the others to reach their full potential.
One of the big reasons is portion control. That and finding the right balance of what to make from scratch and what to buy prepared. Can you tell by looking what 4 oz (or 150 g) of aspaugus looks like? Neither can I, new resturants should invest in a kitchen scale until they really nail portion control. All those things starup costs are high, but you only have to buy them occasionally, the food goes out on each plate. If you don't make enough per plate, either prices too low or cost too high, you will go broke quickly. Another important one is what you mentioned train your staff to turn the tables over quickly. Get people in and out as soon as possible, (without the customer feeling rushed) and the resturant has a good chance of survival. The software can show you which dishes you make money on, and which you don't or which server gets 4 tops a night vs 2-3. This sort of informaiton would be quite useful to a failing resturant that's owner has no idea why it doesn't make any money, even though it's always booked solid. Most small businesses would benefit from better informaiton systems. This would also be a place that could provide a ton of work for all the people customizing and integrating the software package for each small business.
Unbelievably talented and generous man, who died after he believed he was a miserable failure. He originally wanted to be a mission leader, and run something like a modern homeless shelter, but after giving all his possessions, and most of his meager stipend to those less fortunate than him, his higher up decided he was mad and had him tossed out. He tried painting and he thought failed at that too. Odd that he is certainly one of the most famous old masters today.