Want to know which is the dominant side? here's the test:
- both eyes open, extend both arms and join hands so that you can view in front of you in a small hole inside them, about two inches' diameter;
- take aim at a fixed and outstanding point on the wall, a picture could be fine;
- alternatively close one eye and the other: your dominant side is the one whose eye is exactly aiming at the target. the other eye will be off center, or even off target altogether.
Funny. my Sygate personal firewall thinks otherwise.
When I installed Firefox on my Father's PC, he wanted to continue using outlook; so I only enabled Firefox, Outlook and tha antivirus to freely talk to the outside world, blocking the Kernel from accessing the internet. lo and behold, it doesn't work.
"Air Force CIO John Gilligan said the department wants to use a single version of Microsoft products, built with extra security, on its desktops and servers to help it reduce the problems it faces in applying software patches whenever Microsoft announces new vulnerabilities."
...Apart from the fact that the very concept of extra security in MS is an oxymoron , I think that that contract is basically a giant Help desk contract. If MS had been able, within the self-imposed architectural constraints, needed to lock customers into their apps, to produce a secure windows XP, they would already have done so.
Lots of interesting aspects here: will they build a kernel without integration of outlook, IE, and WMP, just to appease the security needs of the Mils? and if so, with half a million PCs, how long before this gets told in the open?
Moreover, one of the apps specified is windows server 2003. I fully expect pagan rites to be done in tech offices of military bases all over the world to ward off this evil....."Oh , Lord ; I will sacrifice this goat if Thou will not take my Apache server away from me...."
"The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale."
....So, we can safely guess that there were too few qualified tecnicians for the task at hand going into the final phase, and you were paid accordingly. I think that's the ONLY instance in which is reasonable for a PHB to ask.
On the other hand, in the business I'm in, it makes absolutely no sense to look at working Hours ( I manage money for a living). If a guy can beat the index working four hours a day, it's debatable that he will beat it twice as much if he works eight. Worse than that, a schmuck that gets beaten up and destroys value will tend to work long hours to compensate, and to impress on people that he is a dedicated worker. Chances are that he was the cause of his own undoing, because while it is difficult to be better when you are good, it is relatively easy to be worse if you are bad. That's why I tend to knock wood when I hear PHBs saying things like: " We have to redouble our effort!" Well, I do not want dedicated workers: give me a pro any day.
One of the worst nightmares of the cold war was the possibility of building a fusion bomb without a fission bomb to act as a primer for the fusion element, because such a bomb would have been virtually undetectable. Think "diplomatic luggage " here. We're talking about the possible decapitation of a government, simply by detonating such a device in the capital city. Luckily it seems that such a device was never proofed.
"Now I ask you, what use is a ballistic missle defense shield when the threat to human life comes from inside that shield? If your answer is none, why should we invest billions in something that is not likely to be used?"
....I think this might be a reasonable answer. And while what you say about finding bomb material within the target is valid, smuggling a nuke is not as easy as it may seem.
"With closed source it is harder to know if someone is violating a patent or not. Much closed source *does* violate patents, but the source is not visible and it is therefore harder to prosecute. With open source, any infringing patents are more obvious and more provable which opens up risk."
....or is it? IANAL, but what if a judge subpoenaed the source code?
I think that, going forward, it much more likely that customers will pay up through their noses for copied Open Source code, obfuscated in proprietary apps, than the other way around. The real Legal test (it might have already happened, I am no Legal) will be enforcing GPL against someone emmbedding open source in closed source apps.
"If Sun had "embraced Linux", as the parent suggests, it presumably would have developed them there instead. Not that I'm entirely clear on why it would have been in their best interests to do that.
I can think of a few reasons:[..]"
I can also think of another one, related to hardware:
-they could have concentrated on providing a "hassle free" way into their hardware. A badass compiler. add-ins for the features present in their hardware alone. better clustering features. their model could have been "10% of 10 billions is better that 85% of 500 millions.", because they would have appeared on the radar screens of many more people, if only for high-end.
"I couldn't see this doing much for manned flight, but most of what we send up isn't manned anyway. It could also have some pretty kick ass millitary application, say for dramatically increasing the payload of current rocket propelled artillery rounds."
Funnily enough, studies about that
go back a long way, circa 1930. dr.Sanger eventually studied a Ramjet powered design, a model of which is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. It would have been a cheaper alternative to the Space Shuttle, with a mother vehicle starting from a plain aerodrome and an orbital vehicle piggybacking on it. Basically the mother vehicle is the same concept inferred for the mysterious project Aurore Recce aircraft.
The military have always been attracted to these concepts, witness the Dynasoar in the late fifties, but the rationale is the same for civilian uses; higher efficiency and flexibility in bringing payloads in low earth orbit or suborbital flight.
"So perhaps this Pentium 4 architecture with its ridiculously deep pipeline wasn't such a great idea after all?"
It is not that deep pipeline is bad in itself; the point is, the decision to build the pIV that way was slaved to the use of MHZ as a marketing tool. That, in itself, drove the chip design in a way that essentially banned it from the laptop market, which in turn drove the design of the pentium-m , a.k.a. Centrino.
Now Intel itself is at a fork in the road, because Prescott is also geared towards higher frequencies, which means it will probably be hotter still. Now, I do not know how much money Intel sunk in the prescott design, but if it is serious in building this new Centrino derivative processor, all this money will be washed away; and if Intel tries to keep this processor one step behind Prescott in performance, it risks a royal Chewing up by AMD.
"Other than that: yeah, it's just more Microsoft marketing mumbo-jumbo, designed to furthur the "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" line. In a way it's kind of flattering that this 300 billion USD gorilla seems so threatened by linux. On the other hand... marketing is what commercial companies do.
I have a queasy feeling that there's more to it than that. Think about this: did someone in the antitrust case get access to windows source code? Two can play that game, so I wouldn't stake my life on the fact that NO GPL'd code make its way into MS products. So the whole scheme could be a misleading smokescreen, as in:"...You see, we care that none of our IP gets customer into trouble!" This way, they get two good things:
1. harebrained customers think that , truly, someone in open source is interested in building a SCO like scenario against MS, instead of the opposite; 2.Smart customers get protections against GPL'd code eventually built into MS products; sensing that it might happen, they draw a collective breath of relief about the quality of upcoming products.
"No one said that it was a black and white divide where programs above a certain circulation are targetted and those below are not. One counter-example does not mean that it's "wrong". It's merely a generalization.
As you will recall, no generalization is true. Not even this;-)
"With something that has as many lines of code as Windows and IE, it's impossible not to miss at least one bug."
....a bug in which program, windows or IE?
The absolute insistence on the part of MS on integrating the browser (and shortly, the media player) into the operating system has bred this kind of exploits and vulnerabilities. I expect that it would be much easier to debug them if they were separate, an aspect that helps Firefox perhaps more than being Open Source. One more thing about the article: his "darwinian" approach, by which the most popular program get the most vulnerabilites because they attract the most attacks, has two fallacies:
1.If it were true, Apache would be the most "vulnerable" server;
2. All programs below a certain circulation would be immune.
I have no insight on point 2, but strangely enough the more attacks are reported the more Apache market share grows. and when people are voting with their feet and money....
"As the people of the Ukraine know, an accident at a nuclear power plant affects a lot more people than a car accident."
A single one, yes. On the same time frame between nuclear incidents causing next to a runaway core? I don't think so. at 47 grand per year, US only, it is a bit steep.
In fact, when someone in good faith talks to me about OGM, nuclear energy risks, pollution etc, I only ask one question: "And just HOW you came to be here?"
"There is a thermonuclear fusion reactor operating 24/7 about 93 million miles from here. Why don't we just use that? If the solar energy that falls on the Shara Desert or many other deserts of the world could be harvested, stored and transported, the world's energy needs would be met for as long as anyone alive today could even imagine."
...It so reminds me of the "water is scarce" argument. No, turning off my shower after 3 mins doesn't do dick about water elsewhere, because the combined cost of transport/storage/safety/distribution would be too much. Same goes for solar energy, but in the reverse direction: building solar cells in the whole desert (and mantain them: the weather can be forbidding at times over there) would probably not be a practical proposition.
....Unless, of course, we're talking about ambient temperature superconductors. Better yet, water-cooled...water going in, energy going out...can I patent that?;-)
"In reading the book it is apparent that the reason that we have not had more nuclear accidents is more a matter of luck, than actual safety. In one case the core happened to cool down on its own when it should have gone critical."
....an act of God, maybe?
Let's clear the air somewhat: "it should have gone critical and it didn't" is as likely as " I should be flying by flapping my hands but can't": pure nonsense. The physics of the beast have been well investigated. Then again, there's something to be said about luck: in all fields of human endeavour, if you think you need luck, go back to the drawing board and buy some more. It may as well be that it is the same luck by which Tiger Woods beats me at golf: he makes sure he's done everything to be the best.
"1) What will we do with the waste?
It should be reused for fuel. This allows a reactor to get more energy out of less nuclear material, resulting in both reduced cost and waste. The only reason why the US doesn't do this, is the concern over terrorists or spies obtaining bomb-grade materials.
You still end up with waste. See: thermodinamics"
Yes, but LESS waste than otherwise. Moreover, it would produce more usable fuel than it would consume, making the " If it took 30 years to do a transiton you would only have 30 years before you would need to do the next one." argument a moot point.
Apart from that, it does not take a "nuclear" economy to prduce radioactive wastes, hospitals being one of the better producers of radioactive waste. In addition to that, remember that between the US and Russia, there are between 3000 and 4000 nukes to be dismantled.
would you prefer that nuclear material to pay for itself producing energy, or simply stored somewhere? and where?
"they said they had sold "a good 4-5 Socket 939 processors" after a couple weeks as compared to dozens of other types of processors every day."
Not all athlon 64 procs are built for socket 939. the value option is socket 754.
If there are other people like me out there, tough, they will be waiting for PCI express compatible motherboards. There's no point in buying a new rig and getting stuck with AGP five years down the line.
"[microsoft]And they're generating at least $8B cash a year. I just can't see how the stock can fall very far (more than, say, half) with that much cash propping it up - unless the cash flow dries up first."
"Cash in hand" is a bad predictor of share price, for various reason. If a company "adds value", it should not generally fall below net tangible assets. but if it burns cash at the operating level,it is not unreasonable to see it trade below net cash per share.
Now things get interesting. Let's get MS as an example: if a company generates cash at the operating level at a 7BN $ yearly rate, and burns 2 BN $ in business ventures it rates as "Investments" (XBOX etc.), what's the net cash generated? for financial analysts, it's 7 BN $ (the 2 bn $ is considered investment). Now let's go back in time somewhat:
BILL: gentlemen, things are not going well. we're trying to get people to pay us an yearly fee for our software, but people are not taking it up. Remember, for Wall Street recurring revenue is worth a s*&%load more than a sale a year. We are making a huge amount of money, but investor now are seeing the end of it, and are getting positively antsy. What can we do about that? STEVE: For one, cash should not lay still in our balance sheet. Cash kills, gentlemen. Even Wall Street analyst know that a buck is not worth more than a buck, and this is a big problem. I propose a grandiose investment program and by grandiose I mean B-I-G.
BILL: WHAT?!? It is MY money you're talking about, you...
STEVE: stop, and listen: if we just continue to go like this, the stock will be valued at a small multiple of net cash , so why worry? YOU know we will not make half the money we're doing now, in five years' time. And some people have sniffed that. So if we invest the money now, we can dupe analyst into thinking that some of the investments we do will generate gazillions in the future. The trick is to do A LOT of them. Heck, we might just get lucky and have that actually happen. In the meantime, no one of the soothsayers will risk his neck by telling we're finished.
""The use of FOSS by financial institutions does not pose risks that are fundamentally different from those presented by the use of proprietary or self-developed software.However, FOSS adoption and usage necessitates some distinctive risk management practices with which institutions must be familiar."
Yep, that's exaclty what Ballmer is trying to convince you isn't so... so who do we trust on risk assessment, federal bank insurers or Microsoft? Heh."
Ballmer's strategy has some much more ominous undertones. I think that most of the/.tting crowd agrees that the days of useful computing coming out of Redmond are past. Given the number of people employed and the spending capability, i would expect Excel to make my coffe in the morning, let alone providing me with a decent financial calculus add-in.
The point is that there is a measure of "vicious circle" at work here. Think about this:
.the end users, the masses, have as of now no need for new apps, becausee what they basically do is word processing, data entry, and some rudimentary form of calculus(try asking around what the VLOOKUP() function does in excel);
.To protect the franchise, MS must "gobble" all possible new apps, see media player, browser, etc;
.once gobbled, this "features must be integrated INTO the operating system itself: you can't simply produce a standalone program, because most of those are cheap or free and work also on competing operating systems, some of which work better on the basic intel-compatible architecture;
.once you do that, trying to keep stability and backward - compatibility is a PITA, and you're using most of your brainpower keeping it all from going to the dogs.
.your developers know that they are doing a lousy job, and their effort adjusts accordingly;
.Rinse.lather.repeat.
Since MS know s that programming is not the way out of its predicament, it hires semicommercial people like Ballmer,and given the choice between a Sierra Hotel Chief technology officer and a super lobbyist, it prefers the second. Apart from that, the 800 lb gorilla has developed an experience in legal matters that few firms have, and, lo and behold, that's what MS is now: a conglomerate that is
a)a closed end technology investment fund that consistently shuns money making as a goal; b)a producer of wishy washy software that most people would be happy to get rid off; c)the biggest and baddest lobby-media-litigation fund.
Slashdot Mirror
Want to know which is the dominant side? here's the test:
- both eyes open, extend both arms and join hands so that you can view in front of you in a small hole inside them, about two inches' diameter;
- take aim at a fixed and outstanding point on the wall, a picture could be fine;
- alternatively close one eye and the other: your dominant side is the one whose eye is exactly aiming at the target. the other eye will be off center, or even off target altogether.
Boy, I recall a Nun throwing my papers out of the window, when I was 7!
...how about going back to the topic? I know lots of good political forums , and slashdot is not among them.
Funny. my Sygate personal firewall thinks otherwise.
When I installed Firefox on my Father's PC, he wanted to continue using outlook; so I only enabled Firefox, Outlook and tha antivirus to freely talk to the outside world, blocking the Kernel from accessing the internet. lo and behold, it doesn't work.
" I am from Northen Europe, and I just have to look out the window, to see a better place that America."
It's not technically known as "window": it is called "television".
Now quit looking at "CSI Miami", I want to see the evening news.
from the article:
...Apart from the fact that the very concept of extra security in MS is an oxymoron , I think that that contract is basically a giant Help desk contract. If MS had been able, within the self-imposed architectural constraints, needed to lock customers into their apps, to produce a secure windows XP, they would already have done so.
"Air Force CIO John Gilligan said the department wants to use a single version of Microsoft products, built with extra security, on its desktops and servers to help it reduce the problems it faces in applying software patches whenever Microsoft announces new vulnerabilities."
Lots of interesting aspects here: will they build a kernel without integration of outlook, IE, and WMP, just to appease the security needs of the Mils? and if so, with half a million PCs, how long before this gets told in the open?
Moreover, one of the apps specified is windows server 2003. I fully expect pagan rites to be done in tech offices of military bases all over the world to ward off this evil....."Oh , Lord ; I will sacrifice this goat if Thou will not take my Apache server away from me...."
"The only good part was getting paid triple-time at union scale."
....So, we can safely guess that there were too few qualified tecnicians for the task at hand going into the final phase, and you were paid accordingly. I think that's the ONLY instance in which is reasonable for a PHB to ask.
On the other hand, in the business I'm in, it makes absolutely no sense to look at working Hours ( I manage money for a living). If a guy can beat the index working four hours a day, it's debatable that he will beat it twice as much if he works eight.
Worse than that, a schmuck that gets beaten up and destroys value will tend to work long hours to compensate, and to impress on people that he is a dedicated worker. Chances are that he was the cause of his own undoing, because while it is difficult to be better when you are good, it is relatively easy to be worse if you are bad. That's why I tend to knock wood when I hear PHBs saying things like: " We have to redouble our effort!"
Well, I do not want dedicated workers: give me a pro any day.
...unless they invite them over... THAT would give "one day international" a wholly new meaning!!
the radioactive elements within the nuke can be detected via non invasive tests.
One of the worst nightmares of the cold war was the possibility of building a fusion bomb without a fission bomb to act as a primer for the fusion element, because such a bomb would have been virtually undetectable.
Think "diplomatic luggage " here. We're talking about the possible decapitation of a government, simply by detonating such a device in the capital city. Luckily it seems that such a device was never proofed.
Going back to the main topic, I always thought that Fractional Orbit Bombing system had been outlawed by the SALT treaties.
"Now I ask you, what use is a ballistic missle defense shield when the threat to human life comes from inside that shield? If your answer is none, why should we invest billions in something that is not likely to be used?"
....I think this might be a reasonable answer. And while what you say about finding bomb material within the target is valid, smuggling a nuke is not as easy as it may seem.
"With closed source it is harder to know if someone is violating a patent or not. Much closed source *does* violate patents, but the source is not visible and it is therefore harder to prosecute. With open source, any infringing patents are more obvious and more provable which opens up risk."
....or is it? IANAL, but what if a judge subpoenaed the source code?
I think that, going forward, it much more likely that customers will pay up through their noses for copied Open Source code, obfuscated in proprietary apps, than the other way around. The real Legal test (it might have already happened, I am no Legal) will be enforcing GPL against someone emmbedding open source in closed source apps.
"If Sun had "embraced Linux", as the parent suggests, it presumably would have developed them there instead. Not that I'm entirely clear on why it would have been in their best interests to do that. I can think of a few reasons:[..]"
I can also think of another one, related to hardware:
-they could have concentrated on providing a "hassle free" way into their hardware. A badass compiler. add-ins for the features present in their hardware alone. better clustering features. their model could have been "10% of 10 billions is better that 85% of 500 millions.", because they would have appeared on the radar screens of many more people, if only for high-end.
"I couldn't see this doing much for manned flight, but most of what we send up isn't manned anyway. It could also have some pretty kick ass millitary application, say for dramatically increasing the payload of current rocket propelled artillery rounds."
Funnily enough, studies about that go back a long way, circa 1930. dr.Sanger eventually studied a Ramjet powered design, a model of which is in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany. It would have been a cheaper alternative to the Space Shuttle, with a mother vehicle starting from a plain aerodrome and an orbital vehicle piggybacking on it. Basically the mother vehicle is the same concept inferred for the mysterious project Aurore Recce aircraft.
The military have always been attracted to these concepts, witness the Dynasoar in the late fifties, but the rationale is the same for civilian uses; higher efficiency and flexibility in bringing payloads in low earth orbit or suborbital flight.
In practice, it may work for Satellite - to satellite comms, but weather problems would impede its continous use in wide tracts of the earth.
"So perhaps this Pentium 4 architecture with its ridiculously deep pipeline wasn't such a great idea after all?"
It is not that deep pipeline is bad in itself; the point is, the decision to build the pIV that way was slaved to the use of MHZ as a marketing tool. That, in itself, drove the chip design in a way that essentially banned it from the laptop market, which in turn drove the design of the pentium-m , a.k.a. Centrino.
Now Intel itself is at a fork in the road, because Prescott is also geared towards higher frequencies, which means it will probably be hotter still.
Now, I do not know how much money Intel sunk in the prescott design, but if it is serious in building this new Centrino derivative processor, all this money will be washed away; and if Intel tries to keep this processor one step behind Prescott in performance, it risks a royal Chewing up by AMD.
"Other than that: yeah, it's just more Microsoft marketing mumbo-jumbo, designed to furthur the "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" line. In a way it's kind of flattering that this 300 billion USD gorilla seems so threatened by linux. On the other hand... marketing is what commercial companies do.
I have a queasy feeling that there's more to it than that.
Think about this: did someone in the antitrust case get access to windows source code? Two can play that game, so I wouldn't stake my life on the fact that NO GPL'd code make its way into MS products.
So the whole scheme could be a misleading smokescreen, as in:"...You see, we care that none of our IP gets customer into trouble!"
This way, they get two good things:
1. harebrained customers think that , truly, someone in open source is interested in building a SCO like scenario against MS, instead of the opposite;
2.Smart customers get protections against GPL'd code eventually built into MS products; sensing that it might happen, they draw a collective breath of relief about the quality of upcoming products.
"No one said that it was a black and white divide where programs above a certain circulation are targetted and those below are not. One counter-example does not mean that it's "wrong". It's merely a generalization.
As you will recall, no generalization is true. Not even this;-)
"With something that has as many lines of code as Windows and IE, it's impossible not to miss at least one bug."
....a bug in which program, windows or IE?
The absolute insistence on the part of MS on integrating the browser (and shortly, the media player) into the operating system has bred this kind of exploits and vulnerabilities. I expect that it would be much easier to debug them if they were separate, an aspect that helps Firefox perhaps more than being Open Source.
One more thing about the article: his "darwinian" approach, by which the most popular program get the most vulnerabilites because they attract the most attacks, has two fallacies:
1.If it were true, Apache would be the most "vulnerable" server;
2. All programs below a certain circulation would be immune.
I have no insight on point 2, but strangely enough the more attacks are reported the more Apache market share grows. and when people are voting with their feet and money....
"As the people of the Ukraine know, an accident at a nuclear power plant affects a lot more people than a car accident."
A single one, yes. On the same time frame between nuclear incidents causing next to a runaway core? I don't think so. at 47 grand per year, US only, it is a bit steep.
In fact, when someone in good faith talks to me about OGM, nuclear energy risks, pollution etc, I only ask one question: "And just HOW you came to be here?"
"There is a thermonuclear fusion reactor operating 24/7 about 93 million miles from here. Why don't we just use that? If the solar energy that falls on the Shara Desert or many other deserts of the world could be harvested, stored and transported, the world's energy needs would be met for as long as anyone alive today could even imagine."
;-)
...It so reminds me of the "water is scarce" argument. No, turning off my shower after 3 mins doesn't do dick about water elsewhere, because the combined cost of transport/storage/safety/distribution would be too much. Same goes for solar energy, but in the reverse direction: building solar cells in the whole desert (and mantain them: the weather can be forbidding at times over there) would probably not be a practical proposition.
....Unless, of course, we're talking about ambient temperature superconductors. Better yet, water-cooled...water going in, energy going out...can I patent that?
"In reading the book it is apparent that the reason that we have not had more nuclear accidents is more a matter of luck, than actual safety. In one case the core happened to cool down on its own when it should have gone critical."
....an act of God, maybe?
Let's clear the air somewhat: "it should have gone critical and it didn't" is as likely as " I should be flying by flapping my hands but can't": pure nonsense. The physics of the beast have been well investigated.
Then again, there's something to be said about luck: in all fields of human endeavour, if you think you need luck, go back to the drawing board and buy some more. It may as well be that it is the same luck by which Tiger Woods beats me at golf: he makes sure he's done everything to be the best.
"1) What will we do with the waste? It should be reused for fuel. This allows a reactor to get more energy out of less nuclear material, resulting in both reduced cost and waste. The only reason why the US doesn't do this, is the concern over terrorists or spies obtaining bomb-grade materials. You still end up with waste. See: thermodinamics"
Yes, but LESS waste than otherwise. Moreover, it would produce more usable fuel than it would consume, making the " If it took 30 years to do a transiton you would only have 30 years before you would need to do the next one." argument a moot point.
Apart from that, it does not take a "nuclear" economy to prduce radioactive wastes, hospitals being one of the better producers of radioactive waste. In addition to that, remember that between the US and Russia, there are between 3000 and 4000 nukes to be dismantled.
would you prefer that nuclear material to pay for itself producing energy, or simply stored somewhere? and where?
"they said they had sold "a good 4-5 Socket 939 processors" after a couple weeks as compared to dozens of other types of processors every day."
Not all athlon 64 procs are built for socket 939. the value option is socket 754.
If there are other people like me out there, tough, they will be waiting for PCI express compatible motherboards. There's no point in buying a new rig and getting stuck with AGP five years down the line.
"[microsoft]And they're generating at least $8B cash a year. I just can't see how the stock can fall very far (more than, say, half) with that much cash propping it up - unless the cash flow dries up first."
,it is not unreasonable to see it trade below net cash per share.
"Cash in hand" is a bad predictor of share price, for various reason. If a company "adds value", it should not generally fall below net tangible assets. but if it burns cash at the operating level
Now things get interesting. Let's get MS as an example:
if a company generates cash at the operating level at a 7BN $ yearly rate, and burns 2 BN $ in business ventures it rates as "Investments" (XBOX etc.), what's the net cash generated? for financial analysts, it's 7 BN $ (the 2 bn $ is considered investment).
Now let's go back in time somewhat:
BILL: gentlemen, things are not going well. we're trying to get people to pay us an yearly fee for our software, but people are not taking it up. Remember, for Wall Street recurring revenue is worth a s*&%load more than a sale a year. We are making a huge amount of money, but investor now are seeing the end of it, and are getting positively antsy. What can we do about that?
STEVE: For one, cash should not lay still in our balance sheet. Cash kills, gentlemen. Even Wall Street analyst know that a buck is not worth more than a buck, and this is a big problem. I propose a grandiose investment program and by grandiose I mean B-I-G.
BILL: WHAT?!? It is MY money you're talking about, you...
STEVE: stop, and listen: if we just continue to go like this, the stock will be valued at a small multiple of net cash , so why worry? YOU know we will not make half the money we're doing now, in five years' time. And some people have sniffed that. So if we invest the money now, we can dupe analyst into thinking that some of the investments we do will generate gazillions in the future. The trick is to do A LOT of them. Heck, we might just get lucky and have that actually happen. In the meantime, no one of the soothsayers will risk his neck by telling we're finished.
BILL: Brilliant! Let's go ahead!!
CROWD: HARRUMPH!HARRUMPH HARRUMPH!!
""The use of FOSS by financial institutions does not pose risks that are fundamentally different from those presented by the use of proprietary or self-developed software.However, FOSS adoption and usage necessitates some distinctive risk management practices with which institutions must be familiar." Yep, that's exaclty what Ballmer is trying to convince you isn't so... so who do we trust on risk assessment, federal bank insurers or Microsoft? Heh."
/.tting crowd agrees that the days of useful computing coming out of Redmond are past. Given the number of people employed and the spending capability, i would expect Excel to make my coffe in the morning, let alone providing me with a decent financial calculus add-in.
Ballmer's strategy has some much more ominous undertones.
I think that most of the
The point is that there is a measure of "vicious circle" at work here. Think about this:
.the end users, the masses, have as of now no need for new apps, becausee what they basically do is word processing, data entry, and some rudimentary form of calculus(try asking around what the VLOOKUP() function does in excel);
.To protect the franchise, MS must "gobble" all possible new apps, see media player, browser, etc;
.once gobbled, this "features must be integrated INTO the operating system itself: you can't simply produce a standalone program, because most of those are cheap or free and work also on competing operating systems, some of which work better on the basic intel-compatible architecture;
.once you do that, trying to keep stability and backward - compatibility is a PITA, and you're using most of your brainpower keeping it all from going to the dogs.
.your developers know that they are doing a lousy job, and their effort adjusts accordingly;
.Rinse.lather.repeat.
Since MS know s that programming is not the way out of its predicament, it hires semicommercial people like Ballmer,and given the choice between a Sierra Hotel Chief technology officer and a super lobbyist, it prefers the second.
Apart from that, the 800 lb gorilla has developed an experience in legal matters that few firms have, and, lo and behold, that's what MS is now: a conglomerate that is
a)a closed end technology investment fund that consistently shuns money making as a goal;
b)a producer of wishy washy software that most people would be happy to get rid off;
c)the biggest and baddest lobby-media-litigation fund.