We should be glad they've set themselves on a trail of tears. Else they might have been a nuisance. Bon voyage, AP! May you seek until the end of time the thing you cannot have.
Second reply, sorry. Companies and people hoard their cash for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is to take advantage of opportunities when things are on sale. Like now, when Nokia is on sale for 90% off.
I have a wife and five kids - and we're starting on grandkids now. I live in my own house that I almost own free and clear, and am not posting from my mom's basement subsisting on Hot Pockets so your insult falls flat. This is my hobby. Maybe I'm too much into it but everybody's got their thing and this is mine. What you enjoy doing with your idle time isn't my business, and what I do with mine isn't yours. To me this is more fun than World of Warcraft or Star Trek Online, or whatever it is that trips your trigger.
The market is a volatile place, full of uncertainties. You can find a broker who might assure you he can find you regular growth after dividends, maybe 3-4%. Some will go five, but they won't put in writing. More than that and you're probably dealing with Bernie Madoff or somebody like him. Many 401K funds actually lose money as the brokers in charge of them churn investments to garner transaction revenues. If you work your own money and keep an eye out you can do better usually - in fact, a monkey with a dartboard can because the monkey doesn't have a motive at odds with your goals.
Other companies accrue cash, it's true. To accrue cash that's 80% of your market capitalization though, that's an exceptional achievement and worthy of notice. Apple, a company much criticized for hoarding cash, had $81B in cash and marketable securities at 9/11, or something like 24% of their market capitalization at that time. 24% is not a threat because you can't do a leveraged buyout with 24% down. 80% though? That's a whole other story. Can you think of anything your bank wouldn't give you a loan for with 80% down?
You can't sue everybody. There are only so many courts to hear your plea, and trial by jury is a right. When your cause is legally valid but socially unjust juries have a tendency to find for the defendant regardless of the facts and the law, because they have in their mind their own selves on trial for the same thing. This is their right and responsibility.
You're not going to win this one.
Refreshing periodically with a clean image has been best practice on Windows for over a decade and is well known to be standard practice internally at Microsoft. It's such a regular practice at my house that I set up a DRBL server with Clonezilla to automate it (for the wife and kids of course. I don't use Windows myself unless I'm getting paid and never have - but I do use the same setup to back up whatever I'm running that day - it's OS agnostic.) It's the next-best thing to only running Windows in a VM from a daily copy of a golden image.
Users are what they are. Users will rebel against excessive lockdowns and put you out of a job for trying to help them secure the enterprise data. Malware authors are who they are, and will subvert your best efforts and the best users periodically, and once they pwn the box they pwn it until it's refreshed. Windows is a complex environment with many third party apps - each of which could have vulnerabilities of its own that allow a machine to be compromised. Setting an outer limit on the duration of pwnership that's less than the span between major OS refreshes is a Smart Thing. Better still would be to make the base OS read-only while users are active. It's really, really hard to make something that will compromise a Knoppix boot-from-DVD environment for more than one day. Some VDI environments are leveraging this advantage by giving the end-user a clean OS image cloned from a golden source with every logon, which is like a daily refreshed PC. This makes the malware authors fit their noxious nonsense into something that fits into the user's AD profile, because they literally can't compromise the OS image for more than a day. That's a much more difficult target and makes scanning for that junk a lot easier because it can be done from a known-good system.
Refreshing periodically doesn't prevent compromise but it does establish a maximum lifespan of a specific compromised PC incident. Therefore it's a good and useful thing, and best practice. It's part of risk mitigation.
Some users will respond to this by bookmarking a compromise vending Internet website and loading it first thing every day. Those are good targets for termination with extreme prejudice. There are limits to plausible accidental stupidity.
I don't compliment Microsoft very often here on slashdot but this thing TFA says they plan to do is a good thing, and the auto-refresh idea of the grandparent post - while funny - is still a good idea. I feel dirty saying that, so I'll finish by saying that Microsoft suing a PC vendor for providing their properly licensed Windows customers with a disc to do the same thing is a travesty and just plain stupid. I think there's a nefarious plan for a puppet's takeover of a major retail vendor in play there.
Microsoft needs Nokia more than Nokia needs Microsoft.
This is not true. Microsoft spins off many billions of profit each year, mainly from Windows and Office. They could dump 5 billion a year into mobile just to keep the dream alive. They pour something like 2 billion a year just into Bing and their other online efforts. They could keep this up forever. I don't think doing so is going to do them any good, but they can.
While doing research for this comment (sad but true, I do research for/. comments as if I were an actual credible analyst) I went to look at Nokia's financial statements to see how long they could hold out with a failing smartphone business. What I found is a grand surprise: I find that Nokia has been hugely bulking up the cash portion of their balance sheet. They now have $16B cash and equivalents - a level they haven't seen since 2008 when their market cap was 3x what it is now (Currently $20B), and $4B more cash than they had a year ago. The annual run rate on last quarter's profits is $10B. That means less cash you could buy the Nokia business for $4B net of cash - patents, employees, hardware, manufacturing, real estate, the whole magilla. This brings the price of Nokia's earnings as a business (about $10B/year) less cash to about 40 cents. For 40 cents a buyer could buy $1/yr of profits. $1 buys what the company is accumulating in cash each year. That's a screaming deal - and with that much cash to leverage lots of the '80's LBO kings could get financing on that deal. It's a hell of a lot better deal than $8B for Skype, who never made any profits ever.
After reflecting on the above paragraph, TFA becomes plausible. Somebody's probably buying Nokia because at this price it's like buying a money tree at the price of five months' harvest. I see that you can buy a call option with a 7/21/2012 strike price of $6 for $.71, or the in-the-money $5 call for $1.14. Both of these look like a good deal to me, and I'd probably take the in-the-money one in case there was no bidding war. Naturally takeovers usually buy a company at a premium over the day's stock price.
I am not an investment advisor - especially not yours. I don't hold a position in any of these companies. This is just for fun.
If Google can buy Moto Mobi and get away with it, why can't Microsoft buy Nokia - especially when it's such a screaming deal?
Despite what the market thinks of Elop's plans (and my own prognostications) his austerity program does seem to be bearing fruit even if his strategic choices seem to be lacking.
The predictable return on assets it also not worth the cost of all our history, art and culture - especially for those don't participate in the benefits who also must pay.
Disney has given some good art. Nobody's disputing that. But not so good it's worth paying all of our history, art and culture for. They demand too much, which is fine if the counter is to refuse their art. When they go so far as to enforce their demands without our consent through force of law whether we take their art or no, they find they lack that power. Now they will get less and less.
The author of those speeches, Thomas Macaulay, was also an author of such works as "The History of England". He stood to lose a lot if copyright were extended so much that the people refused to cooperate with such unfair terms.
The fault for the demise of copyright as a cultural imperative lies not with the pirates, but with Sonny Bono and Disney.
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
You'll find a commentary on the first speech with references on Kuro5hin.
And in a final bit of irony you can buy these 160 year old public-domain speeches printed in a paperback book for $21.24 from Amazon.com. So there is even no need for long onerous copyright if there's profit to be made in public domain works.
By the time you have to get off XP you'll probably virtualize it anyway. Then the client device can be a tablet with wireless display tech and something magical happens.
Everything gets bashed here. Frankly I find the quality of bashing inferior at least - a long-dead issue about a deprecated google app engine that was cute but impractical and unpopular, and a non-newsworthy page redesign issue with non sequitur low-risk and very old regulatory FUD just tagged onto the end without any rhyme or reason. If you're going to bash Google, at least put some effort into quality bashing and not bring this weak sauce. And hey, does it have to be twice an hour on the same target? Can you at least space it out a little?
I didn't suggest filtering submissions. I suggested putting something else into the submission queue. And who could have a problem with that?
Illegal is for the courts to decide. In the US at least they seem to be leaning in favor of the first amendment. In the US the content of a US website is a freedom of speech issue beyond the power of the government to regulate. At least for now.
No, that era isn't over. This is what it's like when you run bunch of beta projects. Some live and some die to make room for new things. With 60M+ users I don't thing Google+ is going anywhere any time soon.
This is actually a very good point for an AC - the Roddenberry Prime Directive. These humans suffer and die impoverished within arm's reach of the resources that could save them if only they knew how to exploit them. We can alleviate their suffering and prevent their deaths by giving them knowledge, at the risk of destroying their unique culture. Absent such a universal law, for moral people this is a painful choice and so some will choose one way and some the other on the balance. In sum this does mean the people will be assimilated so it's best to preserve their culture as best we can. Of course we'll lose some things, but if the people die their culture is still lost. It's of course morally wrong to use these people as our cultural diversity laboratory, but what choice is there?
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We should be glad they've set themselves on a trail of tears. Else they might have been a nuisance. Bon voyage, AP! May you seek until the end of time the thing you cannot have.
Second reply, sorry. Companies and people hoard their cash for a number of reasons. One of those reasons is to take advantage of opportunities when things are on sale. Like now, when Nokia is on sale for 90% off.
Behold: the power of Google to fish out from the dross the gems if you know how to ask.
Stealing Symantec's source code is like stealing Typhoid Mary's soup.
I have a wife and five kids - and we're starting on grandkids now. I live in my own house that I almost own free and clear, and am not posting from my mom's basement subsisting on Hot Pockets so your insult falls flat. This is my hobby. Maybe I'm too much into it but everybody's got their thing and this is mine. What you enjoy doing with your idle time isn't my business, and what I do with mine isn't yours. To me this is more fun than World of Warcraft or Star Trek Online, or whatever it is that trips your trigger.
The market is a volatile place, full of uncertainties. You can find a broker who might assure you he can find you regular growth after dividends, maybe 3-4%. Some will go five, but they won't put in writing. More than that and you're probably dealing with Bernie Madoff or somebody like him. Many 401K funds actually lose money as the brokers in charge of them churn investments to garner transaction revenues. If you work your own money and keep an eye out you can do better usually - in fact, a monkey with a dartboard can because the monkey doesn't have a motive at odds with your goals.
Other companies accrue cash, it's true. To accrue cash that's 80% of your market capitalization though, that's an exceptional achievement and worthy of notice. Apple, a company much criticized for hoarding cash, had $81B in cash and marketable securities at 9/11, or something like 24% of their market capitalization at that time. 24% is not a threat because you can't do a leveraged buyout with 24% down. 80% though? That's a whole other story. Can you think of anything your bank wouldn't give you a loan for with 80% down?
You can't sue everybody. There are only so many courts to hear your plea, and trial by jury is a right. When your cause is legally valid but socially unjust juries have a tendency to find for the defendant regardless of the facts and the law, because they have in their mind their own selves on trial for the same thing. This is their right and responsibility. You're not going to win this one.
Refreshing periodically with a clean image has been best practice on Windows for over a decade and is well known to be standard practice internally at Microsoft. It's such a regular practice at my house that I set up a DRBL server with Clonezilla to automate it (for the wife and kids of course. I don't use Windows myself unless I'm getting paid and never have - but I do use the same setup to back up whatever I'm running that day - it's OS agnostic.) It's the next-best thing to only running Windows in a VM from a daily copy of a golden image.
Users are what they are. Users will rebel against excessive lockdowns and put you out of a job for trying to help them secure the enterprise data. Malware authors are who they are, and will subvert your best efforts and the best users periodically, and once they pwn the box they pwn it until it's refreshed. Windows is a complex environment with many third party apps - each of which could have vulnerabilities of its own that allow a machine to be compromised. Setting an outer limit on the duration of pwnership that's less than the span between major OS refreshes is a Smart Thing. Better still would be to make the base OS read-only while users are active. It's really, really hard to make something that will compromise a Knoppix boot-from-DVD environment for more than one day. Some VDI environments are leveraging this advantage by giving the end-user a clean OS image cloned from a golden source with every logon, which is like a daily refreshed PC. This makes the malware authors fit their noxious nonsense into something that fits into the user's AD profile, because they literally can't compromise the OS image for more than a day. That's a much more difficult target and makes scanning for that junk a lot easier because it can be done from a known-good system.
Refreshing periodically doesn't prevent compromise but it does establish a maximum lifespan of a specific compromised PC incident. Therefore it's a good and useful thing, and best practice. It's part of risk mitigation.
Some users will respond to this by bookmarking a compromise vending Internet website and loading it first thing every day. Those are good targets for termination with extreme prejudice. There are limits to plausible accidental stupidity.
I don't compliment Microsoft very often here on slashdot but this thing TFA says they plan to do is a good thing, and the auto-refresh idea of the grandparent post - while funny - is still a good idea. I feel dirty saying that, so I'll finish by saying that Microsoft suing a PC vendor for providing their properly licensed Windows customers with a disc to do the same thing is a travesty and just plain stupid. I think there's a nefarious plan for a puppet's takeover of a major retail vendor in play there.
Microsoft needs Nokia more than Nokia needs Microsoft.
This is not true. Microsoft spins off many billions of profit each year, mainly from Windows and Office. They could dump 5 billion a year into mobile just to keep the dream alive. They pour something like 2 billion a year just into Bing and their other online efforts. They could keep this up forever. I don't think doing so is going to do them any good, but they can.
Sendo had the same problem. It didn't work out well for them.
While doing research for this comment (sad but true, I do research for /. comments as if I were an actual credible analyst) I went to look at Nokia's financial statements to see how long they could hold out with a failing smartphone business. What I found is a grand surprise: I find that Nokia has been hugely bulking up the cash portion of their balance sheet. They now have $16B cash and equivalents - a level they haven't seen since 2008 when their market cap was 3x what it is now (Currently $20B), and $4B more cash than they had a year ago. The annual run rate on last quarter's profits is $10B. That means less cash you could buy the Nokia business for $4B net of cash - patents, employees, hardware, manufacturing, real estate, the whole magilla. This brings the price of Nokia's earnings as a business (about $10B/year) less cash to about 40 cents. For 40 cents a buyer could buy $1/yr of profits. $1 buys what the company is accumulating in cash each year. That's a screaming deal - and with that much cash to leverage lots of the '80's LBO kings could get financing on that deal. It's a hell of a lot better deal than $8B for Skype, who never made any profits ever.
After reflecting on the above paragraph, TFA becomes plausible. Somebody's probably buying Nokia because at this price it's like buying a money tree at the price of five months' harvest. I see that you can buy a call option with a 7/21/2012 strike price of $6 for $.71, or the in-the-money $5 call for $1.14. Both of these look like a good deal to me, and I'd probably take the in-the-money one in case there was no bidding war. Naturally takeovers usually buy a company at a premium over the day's stock price.
I am not an investment advisor - especially not yours. I don't hold a position in any of these companies. This is just for fun.
If Google can buy Moto Mobi and get away with it, why can't Microsoft buy Nokia - especially when it's such a screaming deal?
Despite what the market thinks of Elop's plans (and my own prognostications) his austerity program does seem to be bearing fruit even if his strategic choices seem to be lacking.
Andy Lees isn't busy this year, and they're dumb enough to take a Microsoft executive as their CEO.
The predictable return on assets it also not worth the cost of all our history, art and culture - especially for those don't participate in the benefits who also must pay.
Ignoring stupid law is an intentional part of the system
Disney has given some good art. Nobody's disputing that. But not so good it's worth paying all of our history, art and culture for. They demand too much, which is fine if the counter is to refuse their art. When they go so far as to enforce their demands without our consent through force of law whether we take their art or no, they find they lack that power. Now they will get less and less.
Get the Dual Battery Widget. It's free.
The author of those speeches, Thomas Macaulay, was also an author of such works as "The History of England". He stood to lose a lot if copyright were extended so much that the people refused to cooperate with such unfair terms.
The fault for the demise of copyright as a cultural imperative lies not with the pirates, but with Sonny Bono and Disney.
Or just ignore the stupid law, which is what we usually do when faced with an impossibly stupid law.
If it's OK for the media lobbies to steal our public domain works from us in perpetuity, then by all means let's even the score.
Once more into the breach for Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1841 & 1842:
I will only say this, that if the measure before us should pass, and should produce one-tenth part of the evil which it is calculated to produce, and which I fully expect it to produce, there will soon be a remedy, though of a very objectionable kind. Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
You'll find a commentary on the first speech with references on Kuro5hin.
And in a final bit of irony you can buy these 160 year old public-domain speeches printed in a paperback book for $21.24 from Amazon.com. So there is even no need for long onerous copyright if there's profit to be made in public domain works.
By the time you have to get off XP you'll probably virtualize it anyway. Then the client device can be a tablet with wireless display tech and something magical happens.
Everything gets bashed here. Frankly I find the quality of bashing inferior at least - a long-dead issue about a deprecated google app engine that was cute but impractical and unpopular, and a non-newsworthy page redesign issue with non sequitur low-risk and very old regulatory FUD just tagged onto the end without any rhyme or reason. If you're going to bash Google, at least put some effort into quality bashing and not bring this weak sauce. And hey, does it have to be twice an hour on the same target? Can you at least space it out a little?
I didn't suggest filtering submissions. I suggested putting something else into the submission queue. And who could have a problem with that?
Illegal is for the courts to decide. In the US at least they seem to be leaning in favor of the first amendment. In the US the content of a US website is a freedom of speech issue beyond the power of the government to regulate. At least for now.
That's one vote for Bing: the Decider engine. Anybody else looking to bing their own Internet?
Getting desperate much? Is this a new year project? Submitter is almost exclusively a Googlebashing troll.
And the Googlebashing has no connection to the rest of the fine summary.
Slow news cycle I guess. Let's put something else in the queue.
No, that era isn't over. This is what it's like when you run bunch of beta projects. Some live and some die to make room for new things. With 60M+ users I don't thing Google+ is going anywhere any time soon.
So how much warning did we get about the end of Windows Mobile again? Plays For Now? Zune? Kin?
I had hoped being owned by Intel would class up their act. Apparently not. Doubtless they sell a cure for this "threat".
This is actually a very good point for an AC - the Roddenberry Prime Directive. These humans suffer and die impoverished within arm's reach of the resources that could save them if only they knew how to exploit them. We can alleviate their suffering and prevent their deaths by giving them knowledge, at the risk of destroying their unique culture. Absent such a universal law, for moral people this is a painful choice and so some will choose one way and some the other on the balance. In sum this does mean the people will be assimilated so it's best to preserve their culture as best we can. Of course we'll lose some things, but if the people die their culture is still lost. It's of course morally wrong to use these people as our cultural diversity laboratory, but what choice is there?
A difficult question. Thanks, AC.