GDP is the sum of the value added of all firms in a country. Therefore you should compare it to Microsoft's value added (e.g. profits + tax paid + salaries + interest paid). As MS has a big cash pile the last is probably negative.
It needs a modification to 'loser pays opponents legal fees up to the cost of his own legal fees'.
That happens to an extent in the UK. The loser can ask for the winner's legal fees to be assesed by the court and only pays what the court thinks are reasonable expenses.
Of course in a major case that can be a lot but it prevents a lot of obvious abuses.
Before Apple move the x86:
generic x86 hardware will run Windows, Linux or a few other (mostly open source OSes)
Apple hardware will run MacOS, Linux or some other (mostly open source) OSes. The The overwhelming majority of Apple hardware actually runs MacOS.
After the move:
Generic x86 hardware will run Windows, Linux or a few other (mostly opensource OSes)
Apple hardware will run MacOS, Linux or some other (mostly open source) OSes. The The overwhelming majority of Apple hardware will actually run MacOS.
The only extra competition that Linux faces is that it will compete with Windows on Apple hardware. Some of the people who currently install Linux on Macs might go for Windows, this is hardly a huge part of the Linux user base.
In addition, IF Apple hardware become cheaper as a result of this, then both Windows and Linux might lose ground to Apple. Unless Apple is going to take a lot of extra market share in the PC market as a whole, this will not have much impact.
It is unlikely Apple are planning cheaper hardware, as that would lower their margins on hardware and there would be no reason to restrict MacOS to their own hardware - a strategy that swaps (high margin) software revenues for hardware revenues.
1) Canon law can be changed 2) The Vatican must also have lots of working documents, drafts, personal notes etc. being moved about.
However important documents are likely to remain in paper form, or, at the very least have signed hard copies taken for storage. The church think on a very long timescale and digital documents may create archiving problems, furthermore they will not be usable in circumstances in which paper is (such as a collapse of civilisation, something the church has already survived once).
Do not want to drag this out too much, but E-trade is out of date (as at the end of the last financial year).
Latest financials show the monopolists cash pile as $3.7bn, but you need to add another $33.8bn in short term investments to this - whether money is held as cash or short term investments refelcts their treasure management rather than how much money they have.
They are unlikely to do anything this big, but they easily have the ability to do it.
What about an example of what would have happened if software patents had been introduced earlier?
For example, spreadsheet software has improved enormously because of intense competition between MS, Lotus, Wordperfect etc. over the years. If the originator (Visicalc ?) had a patent, there would not have been such a strong incetive to improve the original product.
It is also worth pointing out that there was no discernable increase in the software industry's R & D following the court ruling that software was patentable.
Re:i think i speak for more than myself when i say
on
Who Will Google Buy Next?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Microsoft has a market cap of $274bn
They also have close to $40bn in cash.
They could easily put together a half cash, half shares offer for Google at a very good price.
You are not comparing like with like - shareholders equity and market cap are altogether different things. In any case smaller companies can buyout bigger ones, by paying with shares in the combined business - however that is not necessary here.
Where you may be right is that Google is too closely held to be easy to buy - a few big shareholders could block any bid. Incidentally you mean free float where you say outstanding shares.
The same thing is happening in other countries too.
The British government is keen on increasing the number of graduates, but not on providing more money to universities - so guess what is happening to quality?
I know the same thing is happening in at least some of South Asia.
I think the root cause is that people regard education as a means to getting a job, not as an end in itself, so what matters is the certificate, not what you leant.
I dropped out myself, unfortunately I am not a billionaire! I do now have two post grad degrees, and I am still happy to study more about what interest me.
I use the KDE window manager because it is configurable, works well, and has some useful little applets (Klipper, Kfm, Knote etc.), a great file manager, and the ability to open files off an ftp server in a text editor and save them back.
On the other hand most of the apps I use heavily, use Gtk (Thunderbird, Firefox, Gnumeric, Realplayer)
This does not cause any major issues, but it is far from ideas
Obviously apps look inconsistent.
Feel is inconsistent - different file selectors, for example (and one of them crap anyway)
I have to set file associations twice - once for KDE, once for Gnome - this is really annoying.
Then there are some apps that use neither KDE or Gnome (Lyx, for example), same problems all over again for each such app.
Are you implying that those who can not fix problems can criticise commercial products (and therefore can hope to have problems solved) but can not criticise free products (and therefore can not have problems solved)?
If someone is releasing software publicly they either
1) Did it for their own use/amusement, do not care if others use it so they can ignore criticise
2) Did it because they want it to be used, so they need to listen to criticism.
The second is obviously true of commercially developed free software (quite a lot nowadays) or of anyone who wants financial backing from others (quite a lot more).
It is definitely more complicated than one end being good for some sites and the other end for others.
A search for "EV/EBITDA" brought the page on EV/EBITDA on my.co.uk site up as the first result.
Shifting the slider to "research" pushed it down to sixth place but my page on EBITDA (obviously a less good match) was the third result.
Shifting the slider to shopping lost both my pages from the front page.
The normal Yahoo search brought up the same page at a different (old, now redirected) URL as the first result, as did some intermediate settings of the slider.
Remember during the dotcom boom the record companies' shares where talked on the grounds that they were originators of content who would benefit from new distribution channels? it looks auite amusing now but at the time it was very hard to persuade investors otherwise.
That said I do not think they can stop the change, unless legislators are even more stupid/venal than I thought. What they can do is slow it down to give themselves a few more years of profits.
This is not true at all. Children actually do better when raised in extended families: families that include the active participation of grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc... living in close proximity.
Strong extended families were, and are, most common those societies where
women stayed(stay) at home and homos stayed(stay) in the closet
both in the West in the past the today in Asia (and possibly other places like Africa)
If you make a joke, however obvious it maybe that it is a joke, you must say that it is a joke. For example could surround it with tages like , or (if it is at the expense of a group you end it with the word "ducks".
The preferred approach used to be to make a joke that follows one of the acceptable Slashdot templates such as "in Soviet Russia...". However as these have fallen out of use and Slashdot's users have expanded outward and downward even these may be moderated troll.
In short if it is not clearly marked as a joke, how do you expect moderators to recognise it as such? For example, if it was TV there would be some canned laughter to indicate when you should laugh therefore you should use a suitable substitute here.
What do you expect? Intelligence? Literacy?
Do you also realise that by suggesting that not everything was invented in the US in the last few decades, you have probably ensured that a significant number of Slashdotters will have decided you are anti-American, if a few of them have mod points you will get modded down again.
I recently tried doing a smallish (few hundred page) site using static HTML + includes + a few fragments of PHP to try something out. It did not take me long to find out that this was ludicrously high maintainance.
So:
A small site without much traffic needs a CMS (and therefore dynamically generated pages) because its easy and as a small site is unlikely to be that busy the performance hit is not important - that is why blog tools are popular.
On the other hand a site that is anything other than very very small will be unwieldy to maintain as a static site.
A small (in number of pages) site that is high traffic would make sense as a static site - but that is hardly likely to be common.
A site that is likely to be rarely changed may also be OK with static HTML, however the last time I tried this it turned out it needed updating more often than I expected, so it did not work out too well.
Now there is a good argument for serving static (cached)
An approach which seems to becoming easier. I was quite surprised to discover that even some blogging software can cache (Wordpress with a plugin).
Really? then why are they spending so much time on usability?
What about OSS developers who do not work for free?
If that attitude was really as prevalant as you claim no one other than a few geeks would use OSS and Linux would be about as widely used as BSD on the desktop. (Yes I know BSD is widely used on serves but thats a different market).
All they have to do is claim that they got an "anonymous tip" and they can shut down your business for as long as it takes to go through all the computers looking for pirated software.
I do not understand: under what authority?
A private organisations (surely) can not just walk into your office and pulling computers apart. To get a court to authorise them would require some real evidence. I assume corporate license agreements sometimes give them authority to condust audits, so you just never sign something like that.
You a choice of not taking a bounty and doing what you like, or taking the bounty and doing what you are being paid to do.
Even in the latter case you have a lot more freedom than you would have working for someone else - you decide, feature by feature, what you are willing to do free, what you are willing to do for a bounty and what you are not willing to do at all.
If you are not interested in bounty system no one ould force you to join, so whats the problem. I suspect there are people with the skills who like being paid for their work or all we would not have people who are someone's full time employees working on OSS.
Last time a democrat tried to object to provisions of an Iraq spending bill, the republicans screamed "voted against the war before he voted against it"
If that sort of argument can win an election, it sounds like the people got the quality of representation they deserve.
Re:First use of the word spam on the internet - 19
on
Broadway Awards Spam
·
· Score: 1
How come there is so little about you on the internet?
How come you are posting this on slashdot when you should be to busy being a media pundit. You should be marketed as "the man who invested spam" (the only drawback being you would probably be shot by someone who thought you invented the idea rather than the label).
Slashdot Mirror
You can not compare GDP to revenues either.
GDP is the sum of the value added of all firms in a country. Therefore you should compare it to Microsoft's value added (e.g. profits + tax paid + salaries + interest paid). As MS has a big cash pile the last is probably negative.
Decriminalise private copying. If the corporations want to they can sue in he civil courts.
He says "it should not be a crime" not "abolish copyright".
The answer is, decriminalise private copying. If the corporations want to they can sue in he civil courts.
As for economic consequences, negative for the current oligopsonists, positive for consumers and the economy as a whole.
Why are defenders of the current laws so muddle headed?
That happens to an extent in the UK. The loser can ask for the winner's legal fees to be assesed by the court and only pays what the court thinks are reasonable expenses. Of course in a major case that can be a lot but it prevents a lot of obvious abuses.
Before Apple move the x86: generic x86 hardware will run Windows, Linux or a few other (mostly open source OSes) Apple hardware will run MacOS, Linux or some other (mostly open source) OSes. The The overwhelming majority of Apple hardware actually runs MacOS. After the move: Generic x86 hardware will run Windows, Linux or a few other (mostly opensource OSes) Apple hardware will run MacOS, Linux or some other (mostly open source) OSes. The The overwhelming majority of Apple hardware will actually run MacOS. The only extra competition that Linux faces is that it will compete with Windows on Apple hardware. Some of the people who currently install Linux on Macs might go for Windows, this is hardly a huge part of the Linux user base. In addition, IF Apple hardware become cheaper as a result of this, then both Windows and Linux might lose ground to Apple. Unless Apple is going to take a lot of extra market share in the PC market as a whole, this will not have much impact. It is unlikely Apple are planning cheaper hardware, as that would lower their margins on hardware and there would be no reason to restrict MacOS to their own hardware - a strategy that swaps (high margin) software revenues for hardware revenues.
1) Canon law can be changed
2) The Vatican must also have lots of working documents, drafts, personal notes etc. being moved about.
However important documents are likely to remain in paper form, or, at the very least have signed hard copies taken for storage. The church think on a very long timescale and digital documents may create archiving problems, furthermore they will not be usable in circumstances in which paper is (such as a collapse of civilisation, something the church has already survived once).
Latest financials show the monopolists cash pile as $3.7bn, but you need to add another $33.8bn in short term investments to this - whether money is held as cash or short term investments refelcts their treasure management rather than how much money they have.
They are unlikely to do anything this big, but they easily have the ability to do it.
What about an example of what would have happened if software patents had been introduced earlier? For example, spreadsheet software has improved enormously because of intense competition between MS, Lotus, Wordperfect etc. over the years. If the originator (Visicalc ?) had a patent, there would not have been such a strong incetive to improve the original product. It is also worth pointing out that there was no discernable increase in the software industry's R & D following the court ruling that software was patentable.
Microsoft has a market cap of $274bn
They also have close to $40bn in cash.
They could easily put together a half cash, half shares offer for Google at a very good price.
You are not comparing like with like - shareholders equity and market cap are altogether different things. In any case smaller companies can buyout bigger ones, by paying with shares in the combined business - however that is not necessary here.
Where you may be right is that Google is too closely held to be easy to buy - a few big shareholders could block any bid. Incidentally you mean free float where you say outstanding shares.
The same thing is happening in other countries too.
The British government is keen on increasing the number of graduates, but not on providing more money to universities - so guess what is happening to quality?
I know the same thing is happening in at least some of South Asia.
I think the root cause is that people regard education as a means to getting a job, not as an end in itself, so what matters is the certificate, not what you leant.
I dropped out myself, unfortunately I am not a billionaire! I do now have two post grad degrees, and I am still happy to study more about what interest me.
the problem is that there are too many.
I use the KDE window manager because it is configurable, works well, and has some useful little applets (Klipper, Kfm, Knote etc.), a great file manager, and the ability to open files off an ftp server in a text editor and save them back.
On the other hand most of the apps I use heavily, use Gtk (Thunderbird, Firefox, Gnumeric, Realplayer)
This does not cause any major issues, but it is far from ideas
Obviously it is a vital news source for monitoring industry trends and developments - that was my story anyway.
Are you implying that those who can not fix problems can criticise commercial products (and therefore can hope to have problems solved) but can not criticise free products (and therefore can not have problems solved)?
If someone is releasing software publicly they either
1) Did it for their own use/amusement, do not care if others use it so they can ignore criticise
2) Did it because they want it to be used, so they need to listen to criticism.
The second is obviously true of commercially developed free software (quite a lot nowadays) or of anyone who wants financial backing from others (quite a lot more).
A search for "EV/EBITDA" brought the page on EV/EBITDA on my .co.uk site up as the first result.
Shifting the slider to "research" pushed it down to sixth place but my page on EBITDA (obviously a less good match) was the third result.
Shifting the slider to shopping lost both my pages from the front page.
The normal Yahoo search brought up the same page at a different (old, now redirected) URL as the first result, as did some intermediate settings of the slider.
Remember during the dotcom boom the record companies' shares where talked on the grounds that they were originators of content who would benefit from new distribution channels? it looks auite amusing now but at the time it was very hard to persuade investors otherwise.
That said I do not think they can stop the change, unless legislators are even more stupid/venal than I thought. What they can do is slow it down to give themselves a few more years of profits.
Strong extended families were, and are, most common those societies where
women stayed(stay) at home and homos stayed(stay) in the closet
both in the West in the past the today in Asia (and possibly other places like Africa)
This is Slashdot.
If you make a joke, however obvious it maybe that it is a joke, you must say that it is a joke. For example could surround it with tages like , or (if it is at the expense of a group you end it with the word "ducks".
The preferred approach used to be to make a joke that follows one of the acceptable Slashdot templates such as "in Soviet Russia...". However as these have fallen out of use and Slashdot's users have expanded outward and downward even these may be moderated troll.
In short if it is not clearly marked as a joke, how do you expect moderators to recognise it as such? For example, if it was TV there would be some canned laughter to indicate when you should laugh therefore you should use a suitable substitute here.
What do you expect? Intelligence? Literacy?
Do you also realise that by suggesting that not everything was invented in the US in the last few decades, you have probably ensured that a significant number of Slashdotters will have decided you are anti-American, if a few of them have mod points you will get modded down again.
So:
A small site without much traffic needs a CMS (and therefore dynamically generated pages) because its easy and as a small site is unlikely to be that busy the performance hit is not important - that is why blog tools are popular.
On the other hand a site that is anything other than very very small will be unwieldy to maintain as a static site.
A small (in number of pages) site that is high traffic would make sense as a static site - but that is hardly likely to be common.
A site that is likely to be rarely changed may also be OK with static HTML, however the last time I tried this it turned out it needed updating more often than I expected, so it did not work out too well.
Now there is a good argument for serving static (cached)
An approach which seems to becoming easier. I was quite surprised to discover that even some blogging software can cache (Wordpress with a plugin).
The first time nothing much happened.
The second time it managed to do something to scramble my hard drive.
Your problem is the lack of instructions on how to turn on cookies? So what? The site works fine with Firefox, that is what matters.
Really? then why are they spending so much time on usability? What about OSS developers who do not work for free? If that attitude was really as prevalant as you claim no one other than a few geeks would use OSS and Linux would be about as widely used as BSD on the desktop. (Yes I know BSD is widely used on serves but thats a different market).
I do not understand: under what authority?
A private organisations (surely) can not just walk into your office and pulling computers apart. To get a court to authorise them would require some real evidence. I assume corporate license agreements sometimes give them authority to condust audits, so you just never sign something like that.
IANAL so please explain to me how the BSA works.
What did you find easy to find Linux alternatives for and what Windows apps do you need? Do you use any proprietary Linux apps?
You a choice of not taking a bounty and doing what you like, or taking the bounty and doing what you are being paid to do. Even in the latter case you have a lot more freedom than you would have working for someone else - you decide, feature by feature, what you are willing to do free, what you are willing to do for a bounty and what you are not willing to do at all. If you are not interested in bounty system no one ould force you to join, so whats the problem. I suspect there are people with the skills who like being paid for their work or all we would not have people who are someone's full time employees working on OSS.
If that sort of argument can win an election, it sounds like the people got the quality of representation they deserve.
How come there is so little about you on the internet? How come you are posting this on slashdot when you should be to busy being a media pundit. You should be marketed as "the man who invested spam" (the only drawback being you would probably be shot by someone who thought you invented the idea rather than the label).