I hadn't thought of it until I watched Chain Reation, but I now don't doubt that there would likely be nuclear war in the Middle East, between Israel and the Arabic Nations. I will let you speculate on who strikes first but there would be no reason to hold back war, especially when we drop all our support of the regimes that we currently support. They'd have to fight to keep their populaces under control.
In the US cellular market there are 6 or so reasonably large carriers (VZ, Cingular, AT&T, PCS, TMobile, Nextel and AllTel is still pretty regional but just about big enough to be a big player). Verizon and Cingular are the biggest (by subscribers) but Cingular is struggling to hold on to subs, while Verizon adds them at least in proportion to their total share (roughly 30% of both total and new subs). AT&T Nextel and T Mobile all adding subscribers at a higher rate than they have total subs, (TMobile is in the lead getting about a quarter of the new subscribers with only about 10% of total subscribers), but none of them are large enough to survive alone, Nextel could have ekked out a living on their high spending business customers, through things like direct connect, but now that all the other companies are introducing those features, they have some struggles ahead of them. I wouldn't be surprised by some mergers in the next few years, AT&T and cingular would like to combine if the anti-trust authorities would allow it. If T mobile keeps adding subscribers they will allow DeutscheTel to sell it for a handsome price in a year or two, or if the parent feels better about its balance sheet, it could pick up one or two of the smaller majors (or even a long shot on Cingular) and be the second or third competitor. I would be surprised if the regulators allow the market to contract to two companies, but three is pretty likely.
Exhibit A--The happy tree friendsGo look at the home page quickly, then watch a few of the episodes (I think they use flash, sorry). A little different from what you expected. What most of us have to realize is that these ratings aren't there to help the parents that actually take some time out of their day to help make good entertainment decisions, they are there for the parent who spends 5 sec deciding which game to buy Johnny before Jenny starts screaming, and Jordan has left the aisle following a bug on the floor. Besides usually you can't exchange video games after opening them, I'm all for anything that gives me more info on what might be inside the game.
I think it was (formerly?) SUN's software architect, Bill Joy. Ellison is fine with this technology so long as an Oracle Database is used to store all the data, if they try to use DB2 he is bitterly opposed to any RFID tagery.
It works for microsoft too, just not in the windows and office markets, in those it's:
1. Profit.
2. Competitors enter economically profitable market.
3. Competitors fail to unseat the monopolist (operating systems being a natural monopoly.
4. Profit.
This economist will be watching Linux (and more generally open source software) closely, because it just might be the first thing that will bring software to pricing at marginal cost.
I have sympathy for the people who are outraged about this than for the people who were outraged about the Citadel and VMI being "forced" to accept women in their ranks or lose their federal funding. If the federal goverment gives you money they will always have the option of saying, "We don't like how you are running things and are going to take our money away if you don't change." If something depends on outside funding, they better be quite careful in how they manage the risk that the sponsor will change their view of the policies, thats the price you pay for funding of any kind. The libraries can then go private, as both colleges tried to do, and failed, I believe, and run their operation any way they please, assuming the new sponsors are content. Why should anyone expect a handout without any strings.
I think the authorities assume that anyone who is willing to expend all the cash requireed for a rental or purchased plane is probably willing to spend a little time and money to earn a license. You are right they are pretty rediculously easy to forge, Larry Ellison brought this up when he was pusing for that big government database back in 2001.
Biggest reason for the price difference is location. Mall rent is expensive, while big box store land is usually converted from farmland or other open ground and quite inexpensive. Sam Goody might still be owned by Best Buy but they are looking to get rid of the big money pit.
Finance is really just trafficing in information, and the brokerages have the most information, and are in a great position to profit from that information. They are regulated in several ways to prevent them from doing this. This archive is likely to be similar to the email that the NY Attorney General uncovered so many humorously frank opinions about the.com companies from the analysts who were touting them so highly externally. The NASD largely regulates retail customer brokerage firms, the big institutions are expected fend for themselves to a larger extent as they should have nearly the same access to information as the brokerage houses, unless something like fraud happens.
The article he linked to mentioned $20 million for enter the matrix, not quite to Waterworld levels, but above quite a few movies. That's a bit of a bad example, since they paid about $10 million for the name rights, and more for an extra large ad campaign, and actors time from the movie. But just the coding and other development costs probably cost above $5 million, and that was for a pretty rushed game.
That was one of about two games that I purchased on or near release day. MOO3 is the other one. I bought diablo at the first store I saw it at, after playing the alpha release about a year before it actually came out. It was pretty funny how far people would get with just a single (or was it two) level(s). I think you could make level 6 or so before you stopped accumulating experience from all the monsters except the butcher. That demo and game rocked.
Actually the free market economists are still coming up with theories as to why advertising works, under their assumptions consumers should already know everything about all the products that are available. We use these assumptions because they work better than other assumption sets at predicting most consumer behavior. Companies with crap products and infinate marketing budgets should not have any sales under perfectly rational consumer behavior. Most economics research is focused on improving the models and assumptions that better explain irrational behavior. Nash was one way of explaining how rational beings could reach less than optimal outcomes while acting rationally.
You and I both, but no one seemed to agree with us when Monkeyboy was selling stock two weeks ago. I think I saw one commentary that his selling stock was an indication of a good prospects for the company.
Almost all brokers record phone calls so they have evidence if you sue them for buying HP when you said buy Hewlet-Packard HPQ. Also insider trades are allowed, you just have to register with the SEC when you plan to do one. If you know news flow will be coming out about the company, its best to file a purchase or more likely sales plan (meaning regularly recurring trades assuming certain conditions are met) so that your decisions are not influenced by the news flow. No hidden island accounts, no secret calls to brokers, just legal trades.
If you think we sue people for anything and everything today, you should read some of the old case law that has been instrumental in creating the legal system we have today. From my education in common law, I remember quite a few cases that were based on little more than two wealthy guys fighting over hunting ducks on each other's property (or a building that was designed to block the sun on the neighbor's property), that had damages of a dollar or two and some other pretty funny cases from 17th and 18th century English and American courts.
Aren't those the VIA C3 (Winchip) 1GHz. I didn't remember seeing it in the review, but those do struggle with any task more intensive than word processing and MP3 decoding. From what I've seen they are about equal to a Celeron 400-500 MHz at most tasks. You can do more with them, but you will want a very optimized system. Until last summer I was using a PII for my main computer and it performed admirably, of course it had a ton of ram, upgraded video card, no startup crap, and a few other tweaks.
Get in and learn the skills, most homeowners would like to change something about their house, but don't have the time or skill to do it themselves. You can make a nice suppliment to your income of you get a contractor's license, and do a little work on the side of what ever else you are doing. Stuff like tiling a floor, changing a kitchen counter, laying wood floors, sheetrock, and others, none of it should be too dificult for any of us to learn and the excersise and knowledge that you can point to something you built are both pretty nice.
Like most things that affect an economy as large as ours, it helps some people and hurts others. It helps anyone who competes against foreign made products, or sells primarily to foreigners. It hurst those who buy foreign made products, or uses foreign made products as a major input. Consumers will be made worse off, as most consumer goods are imported, however, many consumers are employeed in industries that have pretty singnificant exposure to the rest of the world (automotive, technology, finance, and industrial) and that should benefit those folks. Oddly enough, consumers might not be hurt too badly, since the Chinese, Yuan is either explicitly or implictly tied to the dollar, and hasn't shown nearly as much strenght as the Euro.
At that point the high value users start to bid up the price of fossil fuels, and the rest of us use coal, hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear generated electricity to power our lower value transportation and other less valuable uses of fossil fuels. What about switching turbine engines and other high value products to alcohol or another produceable, if less efficient, fuel?
Re:Wall Street as a measurement
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 1
Wall street analysts are still pretty bullish, most firms have an average of about 35%-50% buy ratings on all equities, and another 35% hold ratings, with the remaining 20%-30% sell, so there isn't a sell the market attitude, the ratings are really designed for institutions who aren't supposed to be out of the market, just moving from issue to issue, but that's another story. Only one buy is pretty low, but analysts are especially prone to groupthink, and they see Apple and SGI all over again everytime they look at SUN.
Re:Ugh...Fry's hax0r3d by Ch1n353 $199 specials...
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 1
I think a beat up '67 Cobra might cost more than a new viper.
Sometimes they can, I think most 1U servers are built by ODMs in Taiwan, and for those products SUN can be pretty competitive. On things that are built themselves, or things that their competitors build themselves, SUN wouldn't start out with the same scale as their competors. Dell sells about 20 million systems a year, SUN would be lucky to sell more than 1 million units especially the first year. Component pricing gets better with scale, so Dell starts with an advantage there, HP also gets cost breaks that SUN would not. Advertising costs are somewhat fixed, and Dell and HP can spread them over many times as many systems. Also fixed testing costs, which are small, but when the operating margin on a desktop is less than $50 these days even the small costs add up. Also unless SUN wants to build a plant, they would have to pay an outsourcer to assemble these systems, and they won't work for free either, they help spread some of the fixed costs out over several producers, but no one is quite as good at cost control and inventory managment as Dell.
Cash rich companies with managment that is viewed as removing value, are ripe takeover targets. The cash gives the take over artist either a quick payoff, or time to turn the company around. Sun would be an ideal takeover target if it were priced at around 8-9 billion or so (about half of current valuation). The buyout team could finance the $3-$4 billion and make a nice profit on the company's free cash flow, after paying the interest on the debt. Technology takeovers are especially risky, so they might want to wait for the value to drop to $7 billion to increase the odds of success, or the room for failure.
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I hadn't thought of it until I watched Chain Reation, but I now don't doubt that there would likely be nuclear war in the Middle East, between Israel and the Arabic Nations. I will let you speculate on who strikes first but there would be no reason to hold back war, especially when we drop all our support of the regimes that we currently support. They'd have to fight to keep their populaces under control.
In the US cellular market there are 6 or so reasonably large carriers (VZ, Cingular, AT&T, PCS, TMobile, Nextel and AllTel is still pretty regional but just about big enough to be a big player). Verizon and Cingular are the biggest (by subscribers) but Cingular is struggling to hold on to subs, while Verizon adds them at least in proportion to their total share (roughly 30% of both total and new subs). AT&T Nextel and T Mobile all adding subscribers at a higher rate than they have total subs, (TMobile is in the lead getting about a quarter of the new subscribers with only about 10% of total subscribers), but none of them are large enough to survive alone, Nextel could have ekked out a living on their high spending business customers, through things like direct connect, but now that all the other companies are introducing those features, they have some struggles ahead of them. I wouldn't be surprised by some mergers in the next few years, AT&T and cingular would like to combine if the anti-trust authorities would allow it. If T mobile keeps adding subscribers they will allow DeutscheTel to sell it for a handsome price in a year or two, or if the parent feels better about its balance sheet, it could pick up one or two of the smaller majors (or even a long shot on Cingular) and be the second or third competitor. I would be surprised if the regulators allow the market to contract to two companies, but three is pretty likely.
Exhibit A--The happy tree friendsGo look at the home page quickly, then watch a few of the episodes (I think they use flash, sorry). A little different from what you expected. What most of us have to realize is that these ratings aren't there to help the parents that actually take some time out of their day to help make good entertainment decisions, they are there for the parent who spends 5 sec deciding which game to buy Johnny before Jenny starts screaming, and Jordan has left the aisle following a bug on the floor. Besides usually you can't exchange video games after opening them, I'm all for anything that gives me more info on what might be inside the game.
I think it was (formerly?) SUN's software architect, Bill Joy. Ellison is fine with this technology so long as an Oracle Database is used to store all the data, if they try to use DB2 he is bitterly opposed to any RFID tagery.
It works for microsoft too, just not in the windows and office markets, in those it's:
1. Profit.
2. Competitors enter economically profitable market.
3. Competitors fail to unseat the monopolist (operating systems being a natural monopoly.
4. Profit.
This economist will be watching Linux (and more generally open source software) closely, because it just might be the first thing that will bring software to pricing at marginal cost.
I have sympathy for the people who are outraged about this than for the people who were outraged about the Citadel and VMI being "forced" to accept women in their ranks or lose their federal funding. If the federal goverment gives you money they will always have the option of saying, "We don't like how you are running things and are going to take our money away if you don't change." If something depends on outside funding, they better be quite careful in how they manage the risk that the sponsor will change their view of the policies, thats the price you pay for funding of any kind. The libraries can then go private, as both colleges tried to do, and failed, I believe, and run their operation any way they please, assuming the new sponsors are content. Why should anyone expect a handout without any strings.
I think the authorities assume that anyone who is willing to expend all the cash requireed for a rental or purchased plane is probably willing to spend a little time and money to earn a license. You are right they are pretty rediculously easy to forge, Larry Ellison brought this up when he was pusing for that big government database back in 2001.
Biggest reason for the price difference is location. Mall rent is expensive, while big box store land is usually converted from farmland or other open ground and quite inexpensive. Sam Goody might still be owned by Best Buy but they are looking to get rid of the big money pit.
Finance is really just trafficing in information, and the brokerages have the most information, and are in a great position to profit from that information. They are regulated in several ways to prevent them from doing this. This archive is likely to be similar to the email that the NY Attorney General uncovered so many humorously frank opinions about the .com companies from the analysts who were touting them so highly externally. The NASD largely regulates retail customer brokerage firms, the big institutions are expected fend for themselves to a larger extent as they should have nearly the same access to information as the brokerage houses, unless something like fraud happens.
The article he linked to mentioned $20 million for enter the matrix, not quite to Waterworld levels, but above quite a few movies. That's a bit of a bad example, since they paid about $10 million for the name rights, and more for an extra large ad campaign, and actors time from the movie. But just the coding and other development costs probably cost above $5 million, and that was for a pretty rushed game.
That was one of about two games that I purchased on or near release day. MOO3 is the other one. I bought diablo at the first store I saw it at, after playing the alpha release about a year before it actually came out. It was pretty funny how far people would get with just a single (or was it two) level(s). I think you could make level 6 or so before you stopped accumulating experience from all the monsters except the butcher. That demo and game rocked.
Actually the free market economists are still coming up with theories as to why advertising works, under their assumptions consumers should already know everything about all the products that are available. We use these assumptions because they work better than other assumption sets at predicting most consumer behavior. Companies with crap products and infinate marketing budgets should not have any sales under perfectly rational consumer behavior. Most economics research is focused on improving the models and assumptions that better explain irrational behavior. Nash was one way of explaining how rational beings could reach less than optimal outcomes while acting rationally.
You and I both, but no one seemed to agree with us when Monkeyboy was selling stock two weeks ago. I think I saw one commentary that his selling stock was an indication of a good prospects for the company.
Too technical is a good thing, thanks for the info.
No more rhymes and I mean it!
Almost all brokers record phone calls so they have evidence if you sue them for buying HP when you said buy Hewlet-Packard HPQ. Also insider trades are allowed, you just have to register with the SEC when you plan to do one. If you know news flow will be coming out about the company, its best to file a purchase or more likely sales plan (meaning regularly recurring trades assuming certain conditions are met) so that your decisions are not influenced by the news flow. No hidden island accounts, no secret calls to brokers, just legal trades.
If you think we sue people for anything and everything today, you should read some of the old case law that has been instrumental in creating the legal system we have today. From my education in common law, I remember quite a few cases that were based on little more than two wealthy guys fighting over hunting ducks on each other's property (or a building that was designed to block the sun on the neighbor's property), that had damages of a dollar or two and some other pretty funny cases from 17th and 18th century English and American courts.
Aren't those the VIA C3 (Winchip) 1GHz. I didn't remember seeing it in the review, but those do struggle with any task more intensive than word processing and MP3 decoding. From what I've seen they are about equal to a Celeron 400-500 MHz at most tasks. You can do more with them, but you will want a very optimized system. Until last summer I was using a PII for my main computer and it performed admirably, of course it had a ton of ram, upgraded video card, no startup crap, and a few other tweaks.
Get in and learn the skills, most homeowners would like to change something about their house, but don't have the time or skill to do it themselves. You can make a nice suppliment to your income of you get a contractor's license, and do a little work on the side of what ever else you are doing. Stuff like tiling a floor, changing a kitchen counter, laying wood floors, sheetrock, and others, none of it should be too dificult for any of us to learn and the excersise and knowledge that you can point to something you built are both pretty nice.
Like most things that affect an economy as large as ours, it helps some people and hurts others. It helps anyone who competes against foreign made products, or sells primarily to foreigners. It hurst those who buy foreign made products, or uses foreign made products as a major input. Consumers will be made worse off, as most consumer goods are imported, however, many consumers are employeed in industries that have pretty singnificant exposure to the rest of the world (automotive, technology, finance, and industrial) and that should benefit those folks. Oddly enough, consumers might not be hurt too badly, since the Chinese, Yuan is either explicitly or implictly tied to the dollar, and hasn't shown nearly as much strenght as the Euro.
At that point the high value users start to bid up the price of fossil fuels, and the rest of us use coal, hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear generated electricity to power our lower value transportation and other less valuable uses of fossil fuels. What about switching turbine engines and other high value products to alcohol or another produceable, if less efficient, fuel?
Wall street analysts are still pretty bullish, most firms have an average of about 35%-50% buy ratings on all equities, and another 35% hold ratings, with the remaining 20%-30% sell, so there isn't a sell the market attitude, the ratings are really designed for institutions who aren't supposed to be out of the market, just moving from issue to issue, but that's another story. Only one buy is pretty low, but analysts are especially prone to groupthink, and they see Apple and SGI all over again everytime they look at SUN.
I think a beat up '67 Cobra might cost more than a new viper.
Sometimes they can, I think most 1U servers are built by ODMs in Taiwan, and for those products SUN can be pretty competitive. On things that are built themselves, or things that their competitors build themselves, SUN wouldn't start out with the same scale as their competors. Dell sells about 20 million systems a year, SUN would be lucky to sell more than 1 million units especially the first year. Component pricing gets better with scale, so Dell starts with an advantage there, HP also gets cost breaks that SUN would not. Advertising costs are somewhat fixed, and Dell and HP can spread them over many times as many systems. Also fixed testing costs, which are small, but when the operating margin on a desktop is less than $50 these days even the small costs add up. Also unless SUN wants to build a plant, they would have to pay an outsourcer to assemble these systems, and they won't work for free either, they help spread some of the fixed costs out over several producers, but no one is quite as good at cost control and inventory managment as Dell.
Cash rich companies with managment that is viewed as removing value, are ripe takeover targets. The cash gives the take over artist either a quick payoff, or time to turn the company around. Sun would be an ideal takeover target if it were priced at around 8-9 billion or so (about half of current valuation). The buyout team could finance the $3-$4 billion and make a nice profit on the company's free cash flow, after paying the interest on the debt. Technology takeovers are especially risky, so they might want to wait for the value to drop to $7 billion to increase the odds of success, or the room for failure.