Buy your own network now and save. (I'm joking about the Buffett part, he only partially bought Level 3, and it was to help a friend). There are plenty of long haul carriers that can be purchased for nearly nothing, I think touch america could be had for about $75 million, Global crossing is likely to go for less than a billion, there are many others, that have been destroyed by the crash, and are now quite cheap. All you would need is a decent sized group of like minded friends willing to kick in a few thousand, and you would have your long haul problems solved, for pennies on the dollar.
Two ways that Microsoft wins, they make more money (9.6 billion vs 8.2 billion )last year, and have a higher market value (260 vs 240 billion). At the end of the day its about what you get to keep, not just what you take in that counts. That being said, I think Wal-mart would pass Microsoft, if you count options.
FYI, MIcrosoft discloses costs by business line Windows and Office have total costs in the 20% range, variable costs are probably about 50%-75% of those total costs. Anti-trust dumping is considered selling below marginal or variable costs (since no business person acting rationally would continue to operate if they were unable to meet variable costs, unless they were acting anti-competitively), but the courts often use average cost because it's easier to measure. Anti-trust dumping is usually only used in a specific market, but I don't think there have been many cases that had dumping at the focus after Standard Oil. Most modern anti-trust cases deal with tying or other more subtle methods of monopolizing an industry.
Traditional economic theory fits quite well thank you, see natural monopoly, or returns to scale. (You could argue that traditional economic theory doesn't fit any business very well, and you could make some good points, but software isn't much worse than anything else) Software is the best example of a product where the initial costs are very high, but the marginal costs of production are very low, so the average cost is always falling. In those cases, there is almost always a single company that gets a monopoly, because the single producer is much cheaper than two or more competitive producers, even after the single producer gets their monopoly rents. What this economist finds positivly facinating about software is that there is now a producer who is pricing at marginal cost, software should be very interesting to watch for the next decade or so, and the first economist to figure out the market and write it up in an article, will cement a pretty solid reputation.
Newegg sells a hard drive power cable extention for a buck that is reduced to free with the pruchase of any Microsoft OEM software, and it still counts as buying hardware.
If Oracle treats it's salesforce badly, over the long run, with competition, they will lose their good sales people and faulter.cough..Tom Siebel..cough
There was an old game called Wall Street Raider that let you do all the things that were so popular in the 80s. It was pretty fun, but too easy to beat the computer if you fudged a little on the ethics and traded on your inside knowledge. I think Greenmail refers only to the payoffs companys make to the potential takeover artist, to basically go away. The above market price offer is called a Tender offer. Oracle's offer is exceedingly low for a hostile bid, most of these require at least a 25% premium, since the entrenched management has several advantages in getting the shareholders to approve the merger. The hosile bid, usually only has a high price. This seems like a way to screw with Peoplesoft's recently announced non-hostile takeover offer for JD Edwards.
No the class action system is broken because you have inordinately large payouts going to a few very wealthy law firms, I respect the risk they take, and think they should get fat fees, but this seems beyond excessive. At the same time the parties that were actually injured recieve tokens of defraudment, which usually must be partially applied to future purchases. Is microsoft really hurt by donating a few Windows licenses to some needy schools? Adding the retail value of the coupons, vouchers, and discounts, to the lawyer fees gives a pretty impressive total, but given that most of the injured parties are likely not to try the company's products again, was it really anything other than some real payoffs to the annoying lawyers, and a large sounding token to those who were really injured?
Most class action lawsuits are settled in this manner. It beats a kick in the head, but is still pretty insulting. The law firm's part of the settlement is paid in cash. The legal system is pretty broken, I realize the motives of the businessmen who write about it almost weekly on the WSJ's editorial page, are less than pure, but they make a pretty good point, the system is broken and should be fixed. The last big settlement that I can remember that paid cash or other items of value to the defrauded was Lucent's shareholder settlement. I think the terms would still pretty much be a drop in the bucket, it was something like a few hundred million mostly in warrents (long term options), and investors in the class probably lost an order of magnitude more than that. I don't know, the class was limited to people who bought pretty late in the bubble, so it could have been relativly small.
Most libraries I've used in the past 5 years or so, have moved the card catalog online and they buy the worst search engine I've ever seen. It took me an hour to find a copy of the last book I was looking for, at our local library. The college library card catalog did have a good search engine, but for most of the public libraries I've used I whish they'd stick to the old index cards.
I think the problem is too many national parks get too many visitors to allow random exploration. I could be a biased sample because I live between Glacier and Yellowstone, but it seems like there are much less restrictive, because they are larger and get fewer visitors, national forests, wilderness areas, and state parks to visit if you want a less structured visit to the outdoors.
The only orienteering competition I've seen was in Science Olympiad. They had to navigate a modest course that had clusters of several numbered flags at each locale, and write the numbers of the correct flag on a card which was turned in at the end. Time and accuracy were the criteria. It looked like fun, but really hard, and we had too many people on our team to pick events by desire.
I often wonder how many people live and work in Vancouver and do 90% or more of their shopping in Portland, and if salaries have adjusted to take advantage of the arbitrage that is available there.
A desktop system, probably built yourself.
HP 48G.
Those keyboard based PDAs are kinda handy, I wrote the first draft of a final paper on one while riding up to put a deposit on my post college apartment during finals week, but other than that they are a little pricy for their use.
If you don't lose things, a drafting pencil and white eraser.
A loud alarm clock, don't try to get away with a cheapo one, get a loud and tough one, it's likely to be the most abused thing in the room.
Yeah but you only have to transfer each message once, p2p has many transfers for each message to many users, in addition to the search overheads, that are falling but are still significant.
I think the US Coast Guard still runs LORAN which uses three ground transmitters to give locations to ships and (planes, are there any that still use this?) Also, the air system still uses legacy ground based tranmittors to provide location information, I don't know the system name but pilots refer to it as VOR. I don't know if either is global, but they cover the US.
I'm curious and didn't see anything in the malaria story above, I know the foundation has been active in seeking a treatment for malaria, were they associated with the discovery?
1. Forex is short for foreign exchange.
2. There are three major global currancies now that the Euro group got behind the Euro. The Dollar, Euro and Yen. The British Pound is a smaller but still important global currency. The dollar is still has the largest foreign holdings, mostly thanks to oil trade being dollar denominated, asian currency holders, things like Euro-dollar accounts, and criminal activity (which still usually takes place in dollars. For a currency to be weakening it should depreciate against all three, however, most of the smaller currencies are directly or inderectly linked to one of those three currencies (mostly the Dollar or Euro).
3. Following the removal of the gold standard worldwide, most currencies trade on a floating market, meaing that unless the government takes careful action to prevent swings in the currency, its value is determined by market transations. While it used to be that speculators drove trading (George Soros made his early billions by breaking the London central bank) today the vast majority of transactions is related to either foreign investment or imports and exports. Complete speculation: The increase of the Euro is likely the result of large foreign investment portfolios moving into Europe and out of the US. Some of this is Saudi Arabian, and driven partly by politics, and some of the trading is driven by Eropeans who are chasing yields. Our large trade deficits are typically made up with foreign investments in the US, which was one of the main reasons the dollar remained so strong throughout the 1990s while trade deficits remained at very hight levels. Now that foreign investors are realizing that they might not get outsised returns from their US investments, they are beginning to look for investments in other regions. Economics is pretty self regulating, the weaker dollar will make imports more expensive, and exports cheaper which should reduce the trade deficit, assuming the investment change is not temporary.
4. A falling currency benefits people who borrow from foreigners (if the fall is unexpected) and exporters. A rising currency benefits those who loan to foreigners (if the rise is unexpected) and importers or tourists, who travel to the foreign country, but are effectivly importers. Exporters benefit from falling currency in the following way: Lets use Ford and Nissan as the example companies, when the dollar falls relative to the yen, Ford, who still pays most of its employees in dollars, can now sell a car in Japan for the same Yen price and reap more dollars after the currency transactions. However, when the dollar is rising, Ford's dollar value of a Japanese sale, is lower and they still have to pay their employees in dollars.
There is a small, but loud, group of American geeks who use a fair number of British terms (arse, boxen, bollocks). They ususally sound like pretentious a-holes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to see McNealy show up to the next linux world with a penguin suit, and several very bling bling gold chains.
Buy your own network now and save. (I'm joking about the Buffett part, he only partially bought Level 3, and it was to help a friend). There are plenty of long haul carriers that can be purchased for nearly nothing, I think touch america could be had for about $75 million, Global crossing is likely to go for less than a billion, there are many others, that have been destroyed by the crash, and are now quite cheap. All you would need is a decent sized group of like minded friends willing to kick in a few thousand, and you would have your long haul problems solved, for pennies on the dollar.
Two ways that Microsoft wins, they make more money (9.6 billion vs 8.2 billion )last year, and have a higher market value (260 vs 240 billion). At the end of the day its about what you get to keep, not just what you take in that counts. That being said, I think Wal-mart would pass Microsoft, if you count options.
FYI, MIcrosoft discloses costs by business line Windows and Office have total costs in the 20% range, variable costs are probably about 50%-75% of those total costs. Anti-trust dumping is considered selling below marginal or variable costs (since no business person acting rationally would continue to operate if they were unable to meet variable costs, unless they were acting anti-competitively), but the courts often use average cost because it's easier to measure. Anti-trust dumping is usually only used in a specific market, but I don't think there have been many cases that had dumping at the focus after Standard Oil. Most modern anti-trust cases deal with tying or other more subtle methods of monopolizing an industry.
Traditional economic theory fits quite well thank you, see natural monopoly, or returns to scale. (You could argue that traditional economic theory doesn't fit any business very well, and you could make some good points, but software isn't much worse than anything else) Software is the best example of a product where the initial costs are very high, but the marginal costs of production are very low, so the average cost is always falling. In those cases, there is almost always a single company that gets a monopoly, because the single producer is much cheaper than two or more competitive producers, even after the single producer gets their monopoly rents.
What this economist finds positivly facinating about software is that there is now a producer who is pricing at marginal cost, software should be very interesting to watch for the next decade or so, and the first economist to figure out the market and write it up in an article, will cement a pretty solid reputation.
Newegg sells a hard drive power cable extention for a buck that is reduced to free with the pruchase of any Microsoft OEM software, and it still counts as buying hardware.
If Oracle treats it's salesforce badly, over the long run, with competition, they will lose their good sales people and faulter.cough..Tom Siebel..cough
There was an old game called Wall Street Raider that let you do all the things that were so popular in the 80s. It was pretty fun, but too easy to beat the computer if you fudged a little on the ethics and traded on your inside knowledge. I think Greenmail refers only to the payoffs companys make to the potential takeover artist, to basically go away. The above market price offer is called a Tender offer. Oracle's offer is exceedingly low for a hostile bid, most of these require at least a 25% premium, since the entrenched management has several advantages in getting the shareholders to approve the merger. The hosile bid, usually only has a high price. This seems like a way to screw with Peoplesoft's recently announced non-hostile takeover offer for JD Edwards.
No the class action system is broken because you have inordinately large payouts going to a few very wealthy law firms, I respect the risk they take, and think they should get fat fees, but this seems beyond excessive. At the same time the parties that were actually injured recieve tokens of defraudment, which usually must be partially applied to future purchases. Is microsoft really hurt by donating a few Windows licenses to some needy schools? Adding the retail value of the coupons, vouchers, and discounts, to the lawyer fees gives a pretty impressive total, but given that most of the injured parties are likely not to try the company's products again, was it really anything other than some real payoffs to the annoying lawyers, and a large sounding token to those who were really injured?
Most class action lawsuits are settled in this manner. It beats a kick in the head, but is still pretty insulting. The law firm's part of the settlement is paid in cash. The legal system is pretty broken, I realize the motives of the businessmen who write about it almost weekly on the WSJ's editorial page, are less than pure, but they make a pretty good point, the system is broken and should be fixed. The last big settlement that I can remember that paid cash or other items of value to the defrauded was Lucent's shareholder settlement. I think the terms would still pretty much be a drop in the bucket, it was something like a few hundred million mostly in warrents (long term options), and investors in the class probably lost an order of magnitude more than that. I don't know, the class was limited to people who bought pretty late in the bubble, so it could have been relativly small.
Most libraries I've used in the past 5 years or so, have moved the card catalog online and they buy the worst search engine I've ever seen. It took me an hour to find a copy of the last book I was looking for, at our local library. The college library card catalog did have a good search engine, but for most of the public libraries I've used I whish they'd stick to the old index cards.
I think the problem is too many national parks get too many visitors to allow random exploration. I could be a biased sample because I live between Glacier and Yellowstone, but it seems like there are much less restrictive, because they are larger and get fewer visitors, national forests, wilderness areas, and state parks to visit if you want a less structured visit to the outdoors.
The only orienteering competition I've seen was in Science Olympiad. They had to navigate a modest course that had clusters of several numbered flags at each locale, and write the numbers of the correct flag on a card which was turned in at the end. Time and accuracy were the criteria. It looked like fun, but really hard, and we had too many people on our team to pick events by desire.
I often wonder how many people live and work in Vancouver and do 90% or more of their shopping in Portland, and if salaries have adjusted to take advantage of the arbitrage that is available there.
Out of the frying pan into the fire, eh. Aren't you happy Accenture split and changed names prior to the whole Enron/Worldcom debacle.
Wish I had mod points, I let a few expire last time, yours was definitly worth one.
A desktop system, probably built yourself.
HP 48G.
Those keyboard based PDAs are kinda handy, I wrote the first draft of a final paper on one while riding up to put a deposit on my post college apartment during finals week, but other than that they are a little pricy for their use.
If you don't lose things, a drafting pencil and white eraser.
A loud alarm clock, don't try to get away with a cheapo one, get a loud and tough one, it's likely to be the most abused thing in the room.
Sound's like their simulation needed IBM's computing on demand.
Yeah but you only have to transfer each message once, p2p has many transfers for each message to many users, in addition to the search overheads, that are falling but are still significant.
If you leave the heat on or water running for the week while you are on vacation do you expect the power or water company to just eat the bill?
A few weeks ago there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that was shocked to announce just that.
I think the US Coast Guard still runs LORAN which uses three ground transmitters to give locations to ships and (planes, are there any that still use this?) Also, the air system still uses legacy ground based tranmittors to provide location information, I don't know the system name but pilots refer to it as VOR. I don't know if either is global, but they cover the US.
I'm curious and didn't see anything in the malaria story above, I know the foundation has been active in seeking a treatment for malaria, were they associated with the discovery?
1. Forex is short for foreign exchange.
2. There are three major global currancies now that the Euro group got behind the Euro. The Dollar, Euro and Yen. The British Pound is a smaller but still important global currency. The dollar is still has the largest foreign holdings, mostly thanks to oil trade being dollar denominated, asian currency holders, things like Euro-dollar accounts, and criminal activity (which still usually takes place in dollars. For a currency to be weakening it should depreciate against all three, however, most of the smaller currencies are directly or inderectly linked to one of those three currencies (mostly the Dollar or Euro).
3. Following the removal of the gold standard worldwide, most currencies trade on a floating market, meaing that unless the government takes careful action to prevent swings in the currency, its value is determined by market transations. While it used to be that speculators drove trading (George Soros made his early billions by breaking the London central bank) today the vast majority of transactions is related to either foreign investment or imports and exports. Complete speculation: The increase of the Euro is likely the result of large foreign investment portfolios moving into Europe and out of the US. Some of this is Saudi Arabian, and driven partly by politics, and some of the trading is driven by Eropeans who are chasing yields. Our large trade deficits are typically made up with foreign investments in the US, which was one of the main reasons the dollar remained so strong throughout the 1990s while trade deficits remained at very hight levels. Now that foreign investors are realizing that they might not get outsised returns from their US investments, they are beginning to look for investments in other regions. Economics is pretty self regulating, the weaker dollar will make imports more expensive, and exports cheaper which should reduce the trade deficit, assuming the investment change is not temporary.
4. A falling currency benefits people who borrow from foreigners (if the fall is unexpected) and exporters. A rising currency benefits those who loan to foreigners (if the rise is unexpected) and importers or tourists, who travel to the foreign country, but are effectivly importers. Exporters benefit from falling currency in the following way: Lets use Ford and Nissan as the example companies, when the dollar falls relative to the yen, Ford, who still pays most of its employees in dollars, can now sell a car in Japan for the same Yen price and reap more dollars after the currency transactions. However, when the dollar is rising, Ford's dollar value of a Japanese sale, is lower and they still have to pay their employees in dollars.
There is a small, but loud, group of American geeks who use a fair number of British terms (arse, boxen, bollocks). They ususally sound like pretentious a-holes.