They came a few million short on a projection. Excatly how do you prove that Microsoft's stock is stagnating?
Companies usually use accounting tricks to smooth their earnings and revenues. When a company comes in a cent below the expectations to which they guided their tame analysts, that means that they've scraped the bottom of their earnings barrel and are quite possibly headed into the toilet.
By this very realistic logic, a tiny miss can be an indicator of a huge problem, since if things hadn't gone far worse than expected, the smoothing would have been adequate. That's why company stocks often fall drastically after missing expectations.
MSFT didn't fall on today's news. That suggests that everyone knows that Microsoft doesn't smooth, or that everyone thinks MS is going to boom next quarter, or... what? I don't think that either of the first two look very plausible, so the answer must be ``what?''
When I hear people whining, hopelessly, about how MS is abusing them, I tell them that I never have that sort of problem. If they want to know why, I tellthem. I don't know if it's schadenfreude or an honest desire to be helpful. Maybe the former, since experience tells me that however badly MS's products may serve them, most people would rather curse the darkness than light a candle.
I'm not sure if I'm annoying my cow orkers, but if so, the pumpkin pie I brought in today went a long way to make up for it. Several have adopted Firefox or Mozilla at home and at work, so maybe I've done a little bit of good.
There was the fellow who was sent for a bucket of steam, and came back with a bucket of water and a blowtorch. I keep a left-handed money wrench in my tool box, just to show people who think there aren't any.
... if you plant a patch of GM corn, you cannot use the seeds of the plants to grow new corn.
That is a huge problem. I'd advise subsistance farmers to stay away from store-bought seeds.
They just don't grow.
You'd better hope they don't grow, because if they do grow, you have even worse problems. Just ask the Canadian farmerssued by Monsanto.
On Sept. 11 2001 about 3500 people died in New York. On that same day 44000 children died in Africa of hunger. Is there a war on hunger? NO.
If you folks would like us to invade, overthrow your dictators for you, colonize and Americanise you, just say the word and we'll put you on our list. The whole process might take 100 years or more, and if you don't whole-heartedly embrace the Americanisation part, it just won't work (e.g., the Phillipines). Be aware that the list is already very long, and there is just no way that you're going to get ahead of Iran and North Korea, who have already signed up for the ``get civilized or get dead'' package.
It might be quicker and easier for you to get rid of your Mugabes yourself.
If it will 'just work' in the future, we would see some of the 'just working' in Windows XP.
Oh, but we do see ``it'' working in XP!
You'll notice that they didn't specify what the ``it'' is that's going to work. ``It'' is revenue generation, and ``it's'' working like a charm right now. ``It's'' going to work even better in the next version.
Surely you didn't think that they meant to software would work for the user, did you? You must be new here.
Ahhh the benefits of centralizing power. Now Microsoft only has to buy off a few flunkies in the EU as opposed to each former European country. Much better for business.
and you replied:
The business community of Europe was the driving force behind the EU, the currency change, and the new demands for change in corporate merging laws between member states.
Which pretty well proves his point: it's a lot easier for a big business to do ``business'' in the restraint-of-trade, suborning-officials, wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense if there's only one set of officials to deal with. That the European big businesses figured that out and laid the groundwork many years ago doesn't mean that Microsoft can't benefit by it now.
I want to know... how I can afford a wedding for 5k or less:)
Here's a serious answer to your semi-serious question: spend $50 on a justice of the peace.
For us, the cost of the marriage license included having a judge perform the marriage (I think: it was 14 years ago, now, and some of those trivial details are starting to fade.). We went out to a nice restaurant with my parents and friends, afterwards. Total cost was under $200.
If you do it right, this will be your first and last marriage, so you want to do it right. Just remember that spending money, having a big party, having fancy clothes, and all that expensive jazz, has nothing to do with ``doing it right.''
Your wedding celebration may be the last wedding you'll ever have, but it's just the first of many celebrations you and your wife will have together.
Large transactions throw up a red flag to government officials. I believe banks are required to report these to the government. I'm not sure what the trigger amount is.
$10,000, OR a series of smaller transactions which a bank thinks a regulator MIGHT think could eventually add up to $10,000. In other words, any two transactions that make the teller think: ``Ooh, that's a lot of cash.''
That sounds like a hardware problem to me. Therefore, most computer scientists will ignore it.
Since most computer scientists are mathematicians at heart, they'll solve the problem by saying: ``Assume a network of super-luminal communications devices.''
>>Why not ask your distribution to add these packages?
>Why not ask your distribution to get LSB-certified instead?
Maybe because LSB calls for RPMs, and that doesn't fit the Debian/Knoppix/Ubuntu/DSL/et cetera way of doing things?
Maybe if LSB hadn't mandated rpms they'd be getting some grass-roots support from distributions like Gentoo, and Debian and its derivitives. As it is, they look a bit like a Redhat/Suse shill.
Standards "can" come about through grass roots adoption.
You bet! I think it's very appropriate that you used the plural of ``standard'', since standards are what seem to be emerging.
The commercially-oriented distributions, such as RedHat and Suse, seem to have settled on RPMs. Most of the hot non-commercially-oriented distributions (e.g., Ubuntu, Knoppix, DLS, Debian) seem to be based on Debian, and use debs. Looks like two perfectly good standards are growing from the grass-roots.
If you are a proprietary software vendor, you can compile your Linux application with static linkages, and be pretty sure that it will run everywhere with minimal dependancy problems. Make a deb and an rpm, and your problems are pretty much over. I suspect that's what Adobe does, though I've never bothered to check.
If you want dynamic linkage, you can either try to keep up with one or more distributions, or you can try to let the distributions do the compilation and packaging themselves, as NVIDIA does.
Right now, installing a new application which is available as a deb is trivially simple, and it makes the hoops the poor windows users have to jump through seem positively primitive.
I just tried to get the software (from PalmOne) to sync my handspring installed on Windows XP at work. I had our office Windows expert sitting at my desk for half the morning, and he got the software intalled, finally, but it still hasn't actually sync'ed my Palm to the work machine. Making it work will be another mess entirely, I guess.
On my Debian Sarge machine at home (which supposedly isn't ready for the desk top), I googled for some search term like ``hotsync debian'', found out that I should be using something called jpilot, typed apt-get install jpilot and was hotsynced in minutes. Ease of software installation is no longer an area where Windows has a edge: quite the opposite, in my experience.
... there's a trade off to be made between security and ease of use...
Yes, indeed. Still, most of the things that really matter on a desktop system aren't part of that tradeoff.
My first linux install was RH6.0, and it had any number of servers running, right out of the box. Every server in the distribution was on and listening on the web, on the default install. For a great desktop experience, I didn't need NFS, bind, postfix, or any of a dozen other services that I eventually learned to shut down. What I did need was to be able to do what Win95 did, and RH6.0 with the red-hot, new 2.2 kernel did all that and more.
Automounting isn't a security risk on the typical home desktop, though it is a blasted nuisance, and should be easy to turn off. Open ports for things like X are a huge risk, and most distributions do a far better job of closing that sort of hole than RH6.0 did.
I'm a bit less happy to share with someone who just sees my uncompensated work as a way for him to parasite off it.
The thing to remember is that it costs us nothing to give an infinite number of parasites a free ride. If even one of them turns into an IBM, making contributions to the community, the benefit cost ratio looks like this: benefit/cost=\frac{finite number}{zero}=\infty.
The articles are very well written... and always very careful about their bias...
What does ``always very careful about their bias'' mean to you?
I read the CSM's web edition daily: it keeps me posted on what's happening in the middle of the political left. They have a very definite bias, and I wouldn't say they're ``careful'' about it; it affects the things they write about and how they write about them.
The bias seems fairly clear, so it's easy to keep it in mind, and form my own conclusions from the subset of facts they choose to present. That's a very good thing: bias is unavoidable, and the best thing you can do is show your bias clearly, so we all know what it is, and how it might affect your reporting. The worst thing you can do is try to hide your bias behind a false ``balance''.
LaTeX markup is trivially, stupidly simple. I'm the author, so I put my name in \author{my.name.here}. I want a title, so I say \maketitle. I've written an abstract, so I put it in an abstract command: \abstract{my.abstract.here}. I want to title the first section ``Introduction'', so I write \section{Introduction}. Remember to put two carriage returns between paragraphs.
Grad students usually pick up all that, and more, in a weekend. Are you telling us that MDs and Biology Ph.Ds are too stupid to invest six or eight hours once to save many hours per paper ever after? I find it hard to believe.
Shocking as it may sound, I had an advisor once (a new professor, obviously) who had never used LaTeX. He had to learn, because reputable journals take _only_ LaTeX which works with their style files. It took him longer to install MikTeX than it did to get his paper marked up and beautiful.
One of the big reasons that I use LaTeX is that it is so much simpler than a word processor. Another big reason is that the output is so much better than a word processor's, for less effort.
"Torvalds launched a blast against OpenOffice.org, and defended Microsoft's right to keep its binary Office formats proprietary. 'I'm happy with somebody writing a free replacement for Microsoft Office. But I'm not fine with them writing a free replacement just by reverse engineering the proprietary formats,' said the Linux founder. '
This would have made a great April Fools joke. What a pity it's not 1 April.
I've always said that when brilliant experts pontificate outside their fields of expertise, they make bigger fools of themselves than an ordinary fool could ever manage, and I think that Linus just proved me right.
This is totally off-topic, I suppose, but it's interesting, so why let that stop us?
By the way, I assume your account name is pronounced "fish".
Ghoti probably assumed that, too. He's in good company: this mistake is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though he seems not to have been directly responsible.
The problem is that ``ghoti'' violates several rules of English orthography. The explanation for ghoti is: "gh" as in "cough", "o" as in "women", "ti" as in "nation". Unfortunately for the ``ghoti spells fish'' theory, gh==f works at the end of a word, but never[1] at the beginning, o==i is unique[1] to the spelling of women, and while ti==sh works near the end of a word, it is always[1] followed by ``on'', to make tion==shun.
English spelling isn't nearly the mess it's made out to be. It's complicated by the fact that there are two sets of rules (one for the words with Anglo-Saxon/Scadinavian roots, another for the words with Latin/romance roots), and by the fact that many words which we think of as English are actually foreign words which retain their foreign spellings[2]. Still, there are rules, and they _are_ generally followed. Yes, every rule has exceptions, but they are usually few in number, relative to the number of words which follow the rule. More importantly, the exceptions are usually common words, whose spelling you will memorize quite naturally, because you write them so often.
There is a book called The ABC's and All Their Tricks by M. Bishop which does a wonderful job of laying out and explaining the rules and exceptions of English spelling. You can read my brief review of it at my homeschooling books page.
[1] Exceptions to ``never'', ``unique'' and ``always'' are welcomed.
[2] Retaining the foreign spellings of the foreign words is a blasted nuisance, but it does seem a little more cosmopolitan and accommodating and tolerant than the German habit of changing the spelling to match their conventions (but I admire the ease of spelling German), or the French habit of coining neologisms to avoid loan-words.
... we can't even make a machine as intelligent as a honey bee (only about 1 million neurons), what good would a system with a hundred billion neurons be other than to sit and vegetate?
But think how fast it could vegetate!
The real strength of computers is that they can make mistakes so much faster than we puny, limited humans. A vegetative system system with a hundred billion neurons would obviously be superior to us puny humans because it could make human-scale mistakes unimaginably quickly, as it sat there, quietly vegetating... inert.
Right! A vegetative system system with a hundred billion neurons would obviously be superior to us puny humans because it could sit there and do nothing, and do it very fast indeed.
It is my understanding that all of the 9/11 terrorists had valid U.S. IDs (drivers licenses, mostly) and/or valid passports which had been scrutinized at the border. These IDs were all in their own names (though perhaps not in the name under which they were wanted). So far as I know, no one has suggested that they had obtained these IDs fraudulently: they all could have gotten the new biometric IDs that so many seem to want.
We knew who they were, and some of them were on ``wanted'' or ``watch'' lists under the names on their legitimate IDs, the IDs which they used to board their planes. Identity was never a factor in the 9/11 hijackings. Therefore, obviously, what we need to make sure it never happens again is a new, improvedNational ID system which will further tighten the government's control over us. Yes, indeed. It kept the Jews safe in the 1930s, after all. We'll try not to think about what happened to them in the 1940s.
All this isn't to quibble with what the parent post said, but to reinforce it.
I hypothesize that the photo driver's license was essentially a way of photograph companies to sell expensive instant color photographic equipment. (Those interested in my reasoning can ask.)
Ok, I'm asking: what supports that suggestion besides mere cynicism? Not that a cynical worldview is often wrong, but I'm guessing that you wouldn't have thrown out that broad hint if you hadn't had something to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
Is ``loby'' short for ``lobotomy''? That would explain a lot about some of our politicians.
Companies usually use accounting tricks to smooth their earnings and revenues. When a company comes in a cent below the expectations to which they guided their tame analysts, that means that they've scraped the bottom of their earnings barrel and are quite possibly headed into the toilet.
By this very realistic logic, a tiny miss can be an indicator of a huge problem, since if things hadn't gone far worse than expected, the smoothing would have been adequate. That's why company stocks often fall drastically after missing expectations.
MSFT didn't fall on today's news. That suggests that everyone knows that Microsoft doesn't smooth, or that everyone thinks MS is going to boom next quarter, or ... what? I don't think that either of the first two look very plausible, so the answer must be ``what?''
``Excel'' and ``professional'' still don't go together, though it's getting better.
I'm not sure if I'm annoying my cow orkers, but if so, the pumpkin pie I brought in today went a long way to make up for it. Several have adopted Firefox or Mozilla at home and at work, so maybe I've done a little bit of good.
There was the fellow who was sent for a bucket of steam, and came back with a bucket of water and a blowtorch. I keep a left-handed money wrench in my tool box, just to show people who think there aren't any.
That is a huge problem. I'd advise subsistance farmers to stay away from store-bought seeds.
They just don't grow.
You'd better hope they don't grow, because if they do grow, you have even worse problems. Just ask the Canadian farmers sued by Monsanto.
On Sept. 11 2001 about 3500 people died in New York. On that same day 44000 children died in Africa of hunger. Is there a war on hunger? NO.
If you folks would like us to invade, overthrow your dictators for you, colonize and Americanise you, just say the word and we'll put you on our list. The whole process might take 100 years or more, and if you don't whole-heartedly embrace the Americanisation part, it just won't work (e.g., the Phillipines). Be aware that the list is already very long, and there is just no way that you're going to get ahead of Iran and North Korea, who have already signed up for the ``get civilized or get dead'' package.
It might be quicker and easier for you to get rid of your Mugabes yourself.
Oh, but we do see ``it'' working in XP!
You'll notice that they didn't specify what the ``it'' is that's going to work. ``It'' is revenue generation, and ``it's'' working like a charm right now. ``It's'' going to work even better in the next version.
Surely you didn't think that they meant to software would work for the user, did you? You must be new here.
Ahhh the benefits of centralizing power. Now Microsoft only has to buy off a few flunkies in the EU as opposed to each former European country. Much better for business.
and you replied:
The business community of Europe was the driving force behind the EU, the currency change, and the new demands for change in corporate merging laws between member states.
Which pretty well proves his point: it's a lot easier for a big business to do ``business'' in the restraint-of-trade, suborning-officials, wink-wink-nudge-nudge sense if there's only one set of officials to deal with. That the European big businesses figured that out and laid the groundwork many years ago doesn't mean that Microsoft can't benefit by it now.
Here's a serious answer to your semi-serious question: spend $50 on a justice of the peace.
For us, the cost of the marriage license included having a judge perform the marriage (I think: it was 14 years ago, now, and some of those trivial details are starting to fade.). We went out to a nice restaurant with my parents and friends, afterwards. Total cost was under $200.
If you do it right, this will be your first and last marriage, so you want to do it right. Just remember that spending money, having a big party, having fancy clothes, and all that expensive jazz, has nothing to do with ``doing it right.''
Your wedding celebration may be the last wedding you'll ever have, but it's just the first of many celebrations you and your wife will have together.
$10,000, OR a series of smaller transactions which a bank thinks a regulator MIGHT think could eventually add up to $10,000. In other words, any two transactions that make the teller think: ``Ooh, that's a lot of cash.''
Since most computer scientists are mathematicians at heart, they'll solve the problem by saying: ``Assume a network of super-luminal communications devices.''
>Why not ask your distribution to get LSB-certified instead?
Maybe because LSB calls for RPMs, and that doesn't fit the Debian/Knoppix/Ubuntu/DSL/et cetera way of doing things?
Maybe if LSB hadn't mandated rpms they'd be getting some grass-roots support from distributions like Gentoo, and Debian and its derivitives. As it is, they look a bit like a Redhat/Suse shill.
You bet! I think it's very appropriate that you used the plural of ``standard'', since standards are what seem to be emerging.
The commercially-oriented distributions, such as RedHat and Suse, seem to have settled on RPMs. Most of the hot non-commercially-oriented distributions (e.g., Ubuntu, Knoppix, DLS, Debian) seem to be based on Debian, and use debs. Looks like two perfectly good standards are growing from the grass-roots.
If you are a proprietary software vendor, you can compile your Linux application with static linkages, and be pretty sure that it will run everywhere with minimal dependancy problems. Make a deb and an rpm, and your problems are pretty much over. I suspect that's what Adobe does, though I've never bothered to check.
If you want dynamic linkage, you can either try to keep up with one or more distributions, or you can try to let the distributions do the compilation and packaging themselves, as NVIDIA does.
Right now, installing a new application which is available as a deb is trivially simple, and it makes the hoops the poor windows users have to jump through seem positively primitive.
I just tried to get the software (from PalmOne) to sync my handspring installed on Windows XP at work. I had our office Windows expert sitting at my desk for half the morning, and he got the software intalled, finally, but it still hasn't actually sync'ed my Palm to the work machine. Making it work will be another mess entirely, I guess.
On my Debian Sarge machine at home (which supposedly isn't ready for the desk top), I googled for some search term like ``hotsync debian'', found out that I should be using something called jpilot, typed apt-get install jpilot and was hotsynced in minutes. Ease of software installation is no longer an area where Windows has a edge: quite the opposite, in my experience.
>This is illegal where I live. Here, we have to give money to a store ...
Actually, you can pick up an ipod mini in a store where you live. But, buddy, if you don't have the bucks, you'd better put it right back down.
Well, yes, actually. Pen and paper, and a slide rule.
Yes, indeed. Still, most of the things that really matter on a desktop system aren't part of that tradeoff.
My first linux install was RH6.0, and it had any number of servers running, right out of the box. Every server in the distribution was on and listening on the web, on the default install. For a great desktop experience, I didn't need NFS, bind, postfix, or any of a dozen other services that I eventually learned to shut down. What I did need was to be able to do what Win95 did, and RH6.0 with the red-hot, new 2.2 kernel did all that and more.
Automounting isn't a security risk on the typical home desktop, though it is a blasted nuisance, and should be easy to turn off. Open ports for things like X are a huge risk, and most distributions do a far better job of closing that sort of hole than RH6.0 did.
The thing to remember is that it costs us nothing to give an infinite number of parasites a free ride. If even one of them turns into an IBM, making contributions to the community, the benefit cost ratio looks like this: benefit/cost=\frac{finite number}{zero}=\infty.
What does ``always very careful about their bias'' mean to you?
I read the CSM's web edition daily: it keeps me posted on what's happening in the middle of the political left. They have a very definite bias, and I wouldn't say they're ``careful'' about it; it affects the things they write about and how they write about them.
The bias seems fairly clear, so it's easy to keep it in mind, and form my own conclusions from the subset of facts they choose to present. That's a very good thing: bias is unavoidable, and the best thing you can do is show your bias clearly, so we all know what it is, and how it might affect your reporting. The worst thing you can do is try to hide your bias behind a false ``balance''.
Grad students usually pick up all that, and more, in a weekend. Are you telling us that MDs and Biology Ph.Ds are too stupid to invest six or eight hours once to save many hours per paper ever after? I find it hard to believe.
Shocking as it may sound, I had an advisor once (a new professor, obviously) who had never used LaTeX. He had to learn, because reputable journals take _only_ LaTeX which works with their style files. It took him longer to install MikTeX than it did to get his paper marked up and beautiful.
One of the big reasons that I use LaTeX is that it is so much simpler than a word processor. Another big reason is that the output is so much better than a word processor's, for less effort.
When I followed the link, I realized why that quote sounded so familiar: it's the false quote from the Reg article that I read yesterday.
So, not only is Linus no ordinary fool, but we can strike the ordinary: Linus is no fool.
This would have made a great April Fools joke. What a pity it's not 1 April.
I've always said that when brilliant experts pontificate outside their fields of expertise, they make bigger fools of themselves than an ordinary fool could ever manage, and I think that Linus just proved me right.
By the way, I assume your account name is pronounced "fish".
Ghoti probably assumed that, too. He's in good company: this mistake is usually attributed to George Bernard Shaw, though he seems not to have been directly responsible.
The problem is that ``ghoti'' violates several rules of English orthography. The explanation for ghoti is: "gh" as in "cough", "o" as in "women", "ti" as in "nation". Unfortunately for the ``ghoti spells fish'' theory, gh==f works at the end of a word, but never[1] at the beginning, o==i is unique[1] to the spelling of women, and while ti==sh works near the end of a word, it is always[1] followed by ``on'', to make tion==shun.
English spelling isn't nearly the mess it's made out to be. It's complicated by the fact that there are two sets of rules (one for the words with Anglo-Saxon/Scadinavian roots, another for the words with Latin/romance roots), and by the fact that many words which we think of as English are actually foreign words which retain their foreign spellings[2]. Still, there are rules, and they _are_ generally followed. Yes, every rule has exceptions, but they are usually few in number, relative to the number of words which follow the rule. More importantly, the exceptions are usually common words, whose spelling you will memorize quite naturally, because you write them so often.
There is a book called The ABC's and All Their Tricks by M. Bishop which does a wonderful job of laying out and explaining the rules and exceptions of English spelling. You can read my brief review of it at my homeschooling books page.
[1] Exceptions to ``never'', ``unique'' and ``always'' are welcomed.
[2] Retaining the foreign spellings of the foreign words is a blasted nuisance, but it does seem a little more cosmopolitan and accommodating and tolerant than the German habit of changing the spelling to match their conventions (but I admire the ease of spelling German), or the French habit of coining neologisms to avoid loan-words.
But think how fast it could vegetate!
The real strength of computers is that they can make mistakes so much faster than we puny, limited humans. A vegetative system system with a hundred billion neurons would obviously be superior to us puny humans because it could make human-scale mistakes unimaginably quickly, as it sat there, quietly vegetating ... inert.
Right! A vegetative system system with a hundred billion neurons would obviously be superior to us puny humans because it could sit there and do nothing, and do it very fast indeed.
It is my understanding that all of the 9/11 terrorists had valid U.S. IDs (drivers licenses, mostly) and/or valid passports which had been scrutinized at the border. These IDs were all in their own names (though perhaps not in the name under which they were wanted). So far as I know, no one has suggested that they had obtained these IDs fraudulently: they all could have gotten the new biometric IDs that so many seem to want.
We knew who they were, and some of them were on ``wanted'' or ``watch'' lists under the names on their legitimate IDs, the IDs which they used to board their planes. Identity was never a factor in the 9/11 hijackings. Therefore, obviously, what we need to make sure it never happens again is a new, improved National ID system which will further tighten the government's control over us. Yes, indeed. It kept the Jews safe in the 1930s, after all. We'll try not to think about what happened to them in the 1940s.
All this isn't to quibble with what the parent post said, but to reinforce it.
Ok, I'm asking: what supports that suggestion besides mere cynicism? Not that a cynical worldview is often wrong, but I'm guessing that you wouldn't have thrown out that broad hint if you hadn't had something to offer.