I just watched Wall Street with Mike Douglas and Charlie Sheen and I finally have a clear idea of what these takeovers are about and how they are executed.
Basically, the target has some sort of attractive feature which can be achieved by the clever cutting off of unnecessary features. The entity that is attempting to take over the target is trying to get enough control over it that it can dictate the elimination of those unnecessary features. Typically the top tier of management of the target is completely replaced by the takeover entity's management appointments.
Takeover's aren't attempted because of any altruistic motive on the entity's part. Comcast wasn't interested in making Disney a stronger company, only to milk the Disney company of it's properties and eventually spin it off once it becomes unprofitable again.
As much as I hate the Mouse, I have to applaud them for sticking up for themselves and successfully resisting this hostile takeover.
The heart of the problem is that the legal tender is easily replicable. Coins are harder to reproduce and the payoff is much lower than paper money. Paper money, because it must be printed is susceptible to counterfeiting.
The counterfeiters who are truly making a dent in the money supply don't use Photoshop, though. For the most part, they have real drum printers and very sophisticated printing plates. They are printing money onto real fiber paper. They certainly aren't printing bills out on their Epson Deskjet onto White Shark recycled office paper.
At the extremely low level of low-cost counterfeiting which these software controls attempt to prevent, there simply isn't enough money being produced to worry about. The guy in his basement printing maybe a hundred thousand dollars a day out of his inkjet printer can only use so much of that before getting red flagged by some clerk who notices that his $100 bill isn't quite right (usually because the paper is different).
These software controls don't do anything to attack the real problem of counterfeiters who are doing the real damage printing millions of dollars which are indistinguishable from real money.
Early on in the Democratic nominee race Howard Dean did exactly this same type of constituent spamming.
Now he's just about out of the race, despite his being the front-runner for so long.
Spam doesn't get you nowhere, idiots.
YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!
You can't compete if you're bleeding
on
AMD Back in the Black
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'm glad to hear this kind of recovery by AMD. Not only for the employees of AMD who won't have their lives disrupted by layoffs, but also for the stockholders who can reap the benefits of a company that is now making money.
What's more, it forces Intel to compete against a competitor that can actually put extra top line money towards research and development. Everyone wins when companies can compete.
I've wondered for a while now, is one Unix like another Unix? I've used Linux in the past and am trying out FreeBSD now. Frankly, I don't notice the difference from an end-user perspective.
Linux has SMP support, so does FreeBSD, and so does Solaris. They all have process management functionality (which is what Solaris is introducing with N1 Containers in this release). What would possess me to use Solaris (which costs) instead of Linux or FreeBSD (which are free)?
Krypton had to explode. If it did not, there would have been no incentive for Kal'el to send his son to Earth. Without Clark landing on Earth, the whole Superman series wouldn't have made much sense.
That said, has anyone noticed that the names of the Krypton citizens were all slightly Jewish? Jor'el, Kal'el, and the others all sound like townships in Israel.
Maybe it's just me.
Cemeteries are landfills
on
Space Burial
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Take a look around a cemetery some time and just try to absorb how much human garbage is buried there. From alcoholics to wife-beaters, these people are giving us the finger by taking up precious land into perpetuity.
Cultures which practice cremation have a much better idea. Just burn everyone to a crisp and reduce their mass to a couple ounces of dust instead of taking up several cubic yards of space.
What a sad state of affairs that this is one of the main topics that the GPL community has to discuss.
More than the progress of the GNU project, more than software engineering breakthroughs, more than new ideas in user interface design, software patents seems to have eclipsed all that.
I used to be excited about computers and sharing ideas, but when the community dedicated to sharing has become a one note wonder, I find myself dulled by such harping on technicalities rather than technologies.
Somehow I'm not surprised that such a harebrained idea as bringing back this television travesty came from BC. I can easily imagine the haze-filled board room and some junior exec taking a big toke and proclaiming how cool it would be if Battlestar Galactica came back.
It all started with a bunch of nerdy kids sitting around the playground thinking about how cool it could be if they were strong and cool. One of them started telling them stories and the others quickly joined in describing how they would fight if their asthma wasn't so bad and they weren't small for their size. Thus was born Dungeons & Dragons.
30 years later, it's pretty much the same thing except that those kids are now adults in their 40s. They still live at home with their parents and still imagine what it would be like to touch boobies like the ones drawn on the cover of their D&D manuals.
I have to believe that the business market for Palm devices is many times larger than the hobbyist ('hobbiest' for illiterate slashbots) market. And what are those businessmen running?
Windows.
So this may not be as short-sighted as you think. Let's say that they have 6 engineers responsible for the Mac sync software, each making 50,000 dollars. That works out to 300,000 dollars a year in savings if they don't have to hire those engineers. It actually works out to more than that when you take into consideration all the hidden costs that come with each employee (insurance, unemployment, etc.)
Palm can save maybe half a million dollars a year by stopping development for Mac. They only make about 80 million dollars a year in sales. They certainly aren't profitable.
Add to this that they only have about 34 million in the bank, and their burn rate will bankrupt them within the next 6 months, Now is exactly the time to stop supporting areas of business which provide insignficant upside and significant loss potential.
We are always decrying the dearth of technology jobs, but then we laud things like this which make such jobs obsolete. VoIP is a really cool technology which makes telcos (and subsequently jobs at those telcos) obsolete.
I'm trying hard not to become a Luddite here, but how can we save jobs if technology's main goal is to eliminate those jobs? There is always the argument that by eliminating these jobs we can create a new class of higher-level jobs, but as we see demonstrated by VoIP and other things like OSS, mostly we are destroying corporations which are the primary provider of jobs in this country. It's like we've got all these great ideas, but no morality that forces us to step back and evaluate the negative impact that those ideas have.
If it is true that the locations of military deployments can be traced using a search engine like Google, the possibility exists that terrorists are using this information to plot further attacks. The USS Cole, which was blown up in the Port of Aden, was tracked in a similar manner by Al Queda bombers.
Likewise, sites like Mapblast now provide aerial photographs of the entire United States and parts of Mexico and Canada, all available with the click of a button. How can we not hold Mapblast (how's that name for irony!) partially responsible for the Two Towers tragedy when several aerial photographs from the site were found in Atta's car?
Search engines have an important part to play. I use Google every day to find information related to my job and for my own personal amusement. However, my job isn't to find ways to circumvent and undermine the U.S. government, so I'm a safe customer. How many people out there aren't as safe as I? Shouldn't Google take precautions to make sure that sensitive data doesn't fall into the wrong hands?
Why wouldn't math be known across the universe?
on
The Golden Ratio
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What reasons would there be for an alien to not understand or accept that one plus one equals two. Any being capable of human-equivalent level of thought would be able to count objects. Whether they did in this in base-2 or base-3 or base-10 or base-12, it doesn't matter because all these bases can be reconciled to each other.
Could there be some areas of mathematics that humans have discovered that has not been discovered by an alien race? Sure. Prior to Newton there was no calculus and so Kepler had to discover the period of planetary orbits using geometry and algebra. But this does not mean that Kepler would not have used calculus if it had been available to him, only that such a concept had not yet been thought of.
But counting and simple addition and subtraction are mathematical operations that are mastered even by animals. It is fairly condescending to assume that aliens could not even fathom those levels of mathematics.
With the North Korean situation the Japan and indeed the entire Asian penninsula faces, it would probably be wise of them to forego a true space program for the timebeing. It's bad enough that North Korea is already nervous about every flinch of the peace negotiators, how much more willing would they be to simply shut down the talks if Japan decided to launch a inter-planetary missile not 500 miles away from Pyongyang?
Leave launches to the Indians and Russians for now. When North Korea finally comes around to join the rest of us in the modern, civilized world there will be plenty of time for space exploration.
Slashdot Mirror
I just watched Wall Street with Mike Douglas and Charlie Sheen and I finally have a clear idea of what these takeovers are about and how they are executed.
Basically, the target has some sort of attractive feature which can be achieved by the clever cutting off of unnecessary features. The entity that is attempting to take over the target is trying to get enough control over it that it can dictate the elimination of those unnecessary features. Typically the top tier of management of the target is completely replaced by the takeover entity's management appointments.
Takeover's aren't attempted because of any altruistic motive on the entity's part. Comcast wasn't interested in making Disney a stronger company, only to milk the Disney company of it's properties and eventually spin it off once it becomes unprofitable again.
As much as I hate the Mouse, I have to applaud them for sticking up for themselves and successfully resisting this hostile takeover.
The heart of the problem is that the legal tender is easily replicable. Coins are harder to reproduce and the payoff is much lower than paper money. Paper money, because it must be printed is susceptible to counterfeiting.
The counterfeiters who are truly making a dent in the money supply don't use Photoshop, though. For the most part, they have real drum printers and very sophisticated printing plates. They are printing money onto real fiber paper. They certainly aren't printing bills out on their Epson Deskjet onto White Shark recycled office paper.
At the extremely low level of low-cost counterfeiting which these software controls attempt to prevent, there simply isn't enough money being produced to worry about. The guy in his basement printing maybe a hundred thousand dollars a day out of his inkjet printer can only use so much of that before getting red flagged by some clerk who notices that his $100 bill isn't quite right (usually because the paper is different).
These software controls don't do anything to attack the real problem of counterfeiters who are doing the real damage printing millions of dollars which are indistinguishable from real money.
Dean Campaign Says It Spammed
Early on in the Democratic nominee race Howard Dean did exactly this same type of constituent spamming.
Now he's just about out of the race, despite his being the front-runner for so long.
Spam doesn't get you nowhere, idiots.
YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!111!!1!
I'm glad to hear this kind of recovery by AMD. Not only for the employees of AMD who won't have their lives disrupted by layoffs, but also for the stockholders who can reap the benefits of a company that is now making money.
What's more, it forces Intel to compete against a competitor that can actually put extra top line money towards research and development. Everyone wins when companies can compete.
I've wondered for a while now, is one Unix like another Unix? I've used Linux in the past and am trying out FreeBSD now. Frankly, I don't notice the difference from an end-user perspective.
Linux has SMP support, so does FreeBSD, and so does Solaris. They all have process management functionality (which is what Solaris is introducing with N1 Containers in this release). What would possess me to use Solaris (which costs) instead of Linux or FreeBSD (which are free)?
Is any one of them more robust than another?
Maybe we can reach those dunces in Ohio, Georgia, and Kansas if there was Darwinman, champion of change.
Krypton had to explode. If it did not, there would have been no incentive for Kal'el to send his son to Earth. Without Clark landing on Earth, the whole Superman series wouldn't have made much sense.
That said, has anyone noticed that the names of the Krypton citizens were all slightly Jewish? Jor'el, Kal'el, and the others all sound like townships in Israel.
Maybe it's just me.
Take a look around a cemetery some time and just try to absorb how much human garbage is buried there. From alcoholics to wife-beaters, these people are giving us the finger by taking up precious land into perpetuity.
Cultures which practice cremation have a much better idea. Just burn everyone to a crisp and reduce their mass to a couple ounces of dust instead of taking up several cubic yards of space.
Sending your dead ash into space sounds great.
What a sad state of affairs that this is one of the main topics that the GPL community has to discuss.
More than the progress of the GNU project, more than software engineering breakthroughs, more than new ideas in user interface design, software patents seems to have eclipsed all that.
I used to be excited about computers and sharing ideas, but when the community dedicated to sharing has become a one note wonder, I find myself dulled by such harping on technicalities rather than technologies.
Somehow I'm not surprised that such a harebrained idea as bringing back this television travesty came from BC. I can easily imagine the haze-filled board room and some junior exec taking a big toke and proclaiming how cool it would be if Battlestar Galactica came back.
Are we really so out of ideas?
It all started with a bunch of nerdy kids sitting around the playground thinking about how cool it could be if they were strong and cool. One of them started telling them stories and the others quickly joined in describing how they would fight if their asthma wasn't so bad and they weren't small for their size. Thus was born Dungeons & Dragons.
30 years later, it's pretty much the same thing except that those kids are now adults in their 40s. They still live at home with their parents and still imagine what it would be like to touch boobies like the ones drawn on the cover of their D&D manuals.
Microsoft usually just releases software half-done and lets the market kill it. Bob, anyone?
So you are buying a portable computer, so you need the following:
Battery
Battery charger
That's about it. Who knows or cares what YOU need on a laptop. Only you know that.
The BSD license keeps the licensed code open. The GPL wrests any code intermingled with the licensed code into the open.
There's no need for that kind of anti-proprietary bullying, is there?
It's sad that NASA won't simply release the code into the public domain.
They are typically the target of dubious patent lawsuits, actually.
If anything, I'd imagine that this was more defensive than anything else.
I have to believe that the business market for Palm devices is many times larger than the hobbyist ('hobbiest' for illiterate slashbots) market. And what are those businessmen running?
Windows.
So this may not be as short-sighted as you think. Let's say that they have 6 engineers responsible for the Mac sync software, each making 50,000 dollars. That works out to 300,000 dollars a year in savings if they don't have to hire those engineers. It actually works out to more than that when you take into consideration all the hidden costs that come with each employee (insurance, unemployment, etc.)
Palm can save maybe half a million dollars a year by stopping development for Mac. They only make about 80 million dollars a year in sales. They certainly aren't profitable.
Add to this that they only have about 34 million in the bank, and their burn rate will bankrupt them within the next 6 months, Now is exactly the time to stop supporting areas of business which provide insignficant upside and significant loss potential.
Darwin, the core of Mac OS X is based on a BSD kernel.
We all know about BSD.
Add to that that they need to dedicate developers to supporting a platform that less than 5% of customers use.
It doesn't make business sense to support Mac users.
But we will be able to set up a giant balloon with a big-ass wing suspended by miles of cable flying over the Martian surface.
Color me skeptical.
Not when they force you to put an ass-ugly watermark on every single frame of your movie unless you pay them for the retail version.
I'd rather some "private investment firm" put the whole thing under a straightforward license instead of pussyfooting around the whole OSS issue.
We are always decrying the dearth of technology jobs, but then we laud things like this which make such jobs obsolete. VoIP is a really cool technology which makes telcos (and subsequently jobs at those telcos) obsolete.
I'm trying hard not to become a Luddite here, but how can we save jobs if technology's main goal is to eliminate those jobs? There is always the argument that by eliminating these jobs we can create a new class of higher-level jobs, but as we see demonstrated by VoIP and other things like OSS, mostly we are destroying corporations which are the primary provider of jobs in this country. It's like we've got all these great ideas, but no morality that forces us to step back and evaluate the negative impact that those ideas have.
If it is true that the locations of military deployments can be traced using a search engine like Google, the possibility exists that terrorists are using this information to plot further attacks. The USS Cole, which was blown up in the Port of Aden, was tracked in a similar manner by Al Queda bombers.
Likewise, sites like Mapblast now provide aerial photographs of the entire United States and parts of Mexico and Canada, all available with the click of a button. How can we not hold Mapblast (how's that name for irony!) partially responsible for the Two Towers tragedy when several aerial photographs from the site were found in Atta's car?
Search engines have an important part to play. I use Google every day to find information related to my job and for my own personal amusement. However, my job isn't to find ways to circumvent and undermine the U.S. government, so I'm a safe customer. How many people out there aren't as safe as I? Shouldn't Google take precautions to make sure that sensitive data doesn't fall into the wrong hands?
What reasons would there be for an alien to not understand or accept that one plus one equals two. Any being capable of human-equivalent level of thought would be able to count objects. Whether they did in this in base-2 or base-3 or base-10 or base-12, it doesn't matter because all these bases can be reconciled to each other.
Could there be some areas of mathematics that humans have discovered that has not been discovered by an alien race? Sure. Prior to Newton there was no calculus and so Kepler had to discover the period of planetary orbits using geometry and algebra. But this does not mean that Kepler would not have used calculus if it had been available to him, only that such a concept had not yet been thought of.
But counting and simple addition and subtraction are mathematical operations that are mastered even by animals. It is fairly condescending to assume that aliens could not even fathom those levels of mathematics.
With the North Korean situation the Japan and indeed the entire Asian penninsula faces, it would probably be wise of them to forego a true space program for the timebeing. It's bad enough that North Korea is already nervous about every flinch of the peace negotiators, how much more willing would they be to simply shut down the talks if Japan decided to launch a inter-planetary missile not 500 miles away from Pyongyang?
Leave launches to the Indians and Russians for now. When North Korea finally comes around to join the rest of us in the modern, civilized world there will be plenty of time for space exploration.