Oh, I'm sure Moto phones are selling better and at better prices already, and Google doesn't even own them yet. Vendors are probably bumping their motos to the front shelf, sales folk talking up the merger as a way to walk easy to the close. People love them some Google stuff. Easy money.
It's being reported as exactly the same price as the Novell patents. They get 6% of the global smartphone hardware business thrown in for free, and a bunch of other stuff. That looks like a good deal. I'm sure some would prefer that Android surrendered instead, but that seems like it is not going to happen.
It's good for me because I like my Android tablets and phones. I like the amazing pace of progress we've had these last few years. What comes next becomes a lot more interesting in a future that has Android in it as well as the other options.
They're on a roll. Don't distract them with facts.
The fact that Google is buying Motorola Mobility is interesting itself of course, but the reportage is interesting too. It's getting a ton of press, almost all of it gloom and doom. BusinessInsider goes on about some of the major properties in the deal, but misses some major ones like factories around the world, an ARM Architectural license, and other things.
I don't think this is a bad deal for anybody involved. Sure, MMI isn't an earnings star right now - but they just finished a painful reorg and are on track to do very well now that it's over. Even at their worst they weren't burning WP7 marketing kinds of money. Their share has been declining, but they still have more of the market than WP7 does. Google gets some more patents for their growing defensive arsenal, which means the rest of us get to keep getting ever-better shiny Android widgets. Google's Android partners get a tough defender - and now it looks likely they'll be able to assemble a patent pool terrifying in extent. Moto might even stop with that Blur and locked bootloader nonsense. Moto doesn't get carved up and eaten by another phone vendor. The US factories don't close. There's lots to be happy about.
As you note, it's barely a dent for google. Google will make almost as much income in the time it takes for the deal to close, or half as much at least. People were already complaining Google was hoarding cash. MMI will probably spin off some money too.
So why the panic? I suppose it's disruptive. On Friday a lot of folks thought they had a plan to kill Android. Now they're going to have to go back to the drawing board. People don't like too much change.
It's 2011 now. The maximum observation of CO2 at Mauna Loa observatory (the definitive reference) hasn't been less than 350 ppm since 1987, and the average since 1998. The trend for minima, maxima and mean increase by about 2.5 ppm per year and the trend is fairly constant. How does Hansen define "brief"? I think we're over that already. If Hansen is right we're already well and truly hosed and were when he made his "prediction".
We're hitting 400 ppm CO2 maximum observation next April, and I intend to hold a party on 400 day to raise global awareness of the issue. There's nothing we can do to prevent 400 ppm CO2, even if there were a global tyranny to shut down every POV and coal-fired electricity plant. It's going to happen. There's no way we're bringing global CO2 to 350 ppm in the next century. It cannot happen. So how brief is "brief"? If its less than a hundred years, we're hosed in Hansen's theory - which is not quite the same thing as being hosed in actual practice.
There's a mantra available to help you over this bump:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can,
And wisdom to know the difference.
Firewood is a renewable resource. It just takes a lot of land to grow enough trees to heat a house, and there are more economical ways to use the fuel.
Geothermal should be good for some of the energy. Accelerating transfer of heat from the planet's core to the atmosphere will help radiate off that heat. If we need to, we can paint the planet white with airdrops of aluminum oxide. Algae fuels trap carbon temporarily. There are some other things we can do. Not that it matters.
There are almost 7 billion of us now (according to this 6,955,578,309 at this writing, 7 billion this year). 43 years ago it was half as many, and 55 years prior it was half of that. Continuing this trend, it was it was 1780 - about 230 years ago, or 120 years for another halving. Do you see where the steps get longer the further you go back? Some of the acceleration in growth rate is medicine, some is energy science, some is transportation. Science is killing us by allowing a yeast-growth law. If we had universal free power with perfect conversion, we'd find a way to get to 14 billion in 35 years and 28 billion in 60. Imagine that... 2071: some of my children are still alive and the world has 28 billion people in it. Yes, I know - the UN expects the accelerating growth trend of the last thousand years to suddenly reverse direction, much like the WP7 team expects their fortunes to turn around - for no discernable reason. I believe the UN estimates wrongly include many bilions of people starving to death, and I think we'll prevent that for the most part with humanitarian efforts, though of course many will die by famine where inserting food by force isn't feasible due to determined armed opposition.
By 2071 we'll be out of oil of course, having even tapped the arctic and antarctic reserves. We'll be digging out the last of the coal having doubled, redoubled and re-redoubled those efforts, and global climate will be at least 3C above present - which means British summers will be pleasant but the winters still intolerable, larger swaths of Africa and southern India will be uninhabitable but Frazier Island will be a destination resort. (Nonseq: that bay looks like a crater to me.) We'll have surrendered to gene mod crops and nuclear power, so vast swaths of the Earth will be unihabitable due to grey goo and nuclear meltdowns. Thermodynamics being what they are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be irreversibly melting, but it will still be a long time before they do melt and raise the level of the sea and vanishing Florida beneath the waves. Ice is not a great thermoconductor, so outer layers of ice delay the eventual flood that will come. Plenty of time for folks to move inland. Of course if you do the math by then the US National Debt is $4 quadrillion at least, and some models escape to infinity which obviously can't happen (can it?)
The world had 1.5 billion people when my great-grandmother was born, and I knew her. My eldest grandson is two years old. If the current trend continues my youngest great-grandson will die amongst a crowd of over 200 billion humans. Assuming: my youngest daughter is 5 now, and will have a child at 35 as her mother did (2041), and that youngest grandchild will have a child at 35 (2076) also that brings us to 65 years hence, or 2076 born and 84 years of life (assumes a lack of medical advances) gives the year 2161 to naturally pass on. It would take several medical miracles to allow me to meet this great-grandchild, but those are expected. On the current trend 200 billion world population is a fairly conservative estimate for 2161. But of course the current trend can't continue unless the future brings something I don't know about.
I used to worry a lot about this stuff - but you know what? In the longer view these problems solve themselves. We're fortunate
According to the Mauna Loa Observatory we passed 350 ppm annual average CO2 in 1990. Next April we're scheduled for our first 400 ppm observation and five years later our last under 400 ppm observation if trends continue. Since there's no way anybody's going to reverse the trend before then, 400 ppm is not an achievable target. 450 ppm isn't even an achievable goal. 500 might be doable - that's a 60 year target.
I saw a documentary stating, from observations of the past, that high temperatures may be triggered by a certain threshold, below which things are manageable and above which the heat increases a lot faster than we can adapt to it.
The problem with that idea, besides believing everything you watch on TV, is that both atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures have been far higher than present - and that didn't happen.
Look at it this way: both coal and crude oil were once plants. Plants that grew in a verdant earthly Paradise for hundreds of millions of years until they'd trapped enough CO2 from the atmosphere to ruin their habitat and turn the Earth into a frigid wasteland covered with ice from pole to pole. But for an odd fluke of orbital dynamics we might not have survived to put things back on their former course.
There are many corportations that are not publicly held. Some of them are considered to be quite a bit larger than Apple in terms of assets, revenues and so on. For the most part they're sovereign wealth funds, national energy corporations and such like. But they don't have to report their business, so we don't know too much about them.
When a company has a huge holding of treasury stock it can use that as power in the market to pay for mergers in stock at approximately the current market value. The bigger the market cap, the less the dilution and the bigger the entity that can be acquired. So yes, size does matter. This is how AOL "acquired" Time-Warner, becoming the minnow that swallowed the whale.
I don't think there is an overriding means of detecting book cooking in the short term. Auditors can be - and prominently have been - compromised. Accountants can pretty much manipulate the results any way they want. That may be what accountants are for. In the longer term - say, a decade or more - if a company reports year after year that they had vast profits and cash flows and don't still have the cash but didn't pay it out as dividends and stock buybacks it might be appropriate to ask "where did it go?" Apple appears to be pretty square on this measure, but at least one major tech company makes me curious on this metric.
Otherwise, like this, they get distracted by their PHBs into avenues that generate revenue or consolidate market position, but do nothing to drive progress.
That the construction of this "analysis" is without merit in terms of its conclusion "Bing more effective than Google" goes directly to the point. It means that the analysis is flawed in its premise, misleading, and probably deliberately so. Which then leads one to examine the motive for misleading research. For this, we usually don't have to go further than this lengthy treatise on the subject.
Actually I'm interested in the bing link to softonic.com. Is this a legitimate file dump, or is it one of those sites that bundles crudware with genuine free software? Anybody with experience on this one here?
It makes the tax more fair to charge road-users by the mile and the ton over the road, and how would you measure that without a GPS odometer in every car?. Don't look at the idea that the state associates your tax ID with your vehicle and tracks your every move. That's just the fairest way to collect the tax. There's no other motive here. Take off your tinfoil hat. There is no ulterior motive. Trust us.
Walt Mossberg is a relic to a byegone era. He doesn't lie. It's not in him. He doesn't warp the truth the slightest bit. He's quite careful to avoid the lingo of astroturfers and shills, which makes his job considerably harder. He tells the truth as he sees it. I don't always agree with him, but I always respect his opinion even when I disagree with his conclusions. His job is getting easier these days.
In an environment where every press agent, reporter and editor is a wholly owned agent of somebody, a reporter like Walt Mossberg who can't be bought is a precious gem. This environment brings us a whirlwind of ephemeral technologies, just for Walt to say "waitaminit".
Walt's not down here in the trenches with me, defending the choice of this vendor's 10GbE NIC over the other one's two years later, or calling the ball on the exact moment that we move from interested in FCoE to recommending it. But I respect his opinion enough to subscribe to his blog. If he says something's going to happen sometime in the future, I'll look at it as a prospect and investigate and make up my own mind. That's going to happen until he's wronger than he's right, which looks to be quite a while out. I don't give most prophets that much respect.
I wasn't complaining that this author isn't artful. He is. Nor was I complaining about the quality of the summary, which was moderately done. I was just giving my opinion about what TFA meant. I know what faint praise is - I use it often. The author of the article is well known to have biases, but to also be most often correct even when that seems improbable. He has a rich and respectable history. I have a long history and a deep reservoir of knowledge in the field too, but when I enter his domain I respect his local knowledge and experience because he is most often right. He is the lighthouse there.
I'm typing this now wondering what your point is if you have one.
Marc Andreesen would have exploited the environment provided, as he did.
Jim Clark would have disappeared from view after an unfortunate Las Vegas incident with a transgender prostitute.
All of our astronauts came back from their missions strangely... different. Having been there makes you different. As we are defined by our experiences, exceptional experiences make us different. They change us.
Slashdot Mirror
That word "evil". I don't think it means what you think it means. This is evil: Plamondon. Do you see the difference?
Oh, I'm sure Moto phones are selling better and at better prices already, and Google doesn't even own them yet. Vendors are probably bumping their motos to the front shelf, sales folk talking up the merger as a way to walk easy to the close. People love them some Google stuff. Easy money.
It's being reported as exactly the same price as the Novell patents. They get 6% of the global smartphone hardware business thrown in for free, and a bunch of other stuff. That looks like a good deal. I'm sure some would prefer that Android surrendered instead, but that seems like it is not going to happen.
It's good for me because I like my Android tablets and phones. I like the amazing pace of progress we've had these last few years. What comes next becomes a lot more interesting in a future that has Android in it as well as the other options.
What's the point of saving your pennies if you can't buy cool stuff when it's on sale?
They're on a roll. Don't distract them with facts.
The fact that Google is buying Motorola Mobility is interesting itself of course, but the reportage is interesting too. It's getting a ton of press, almost all of it gloom and doom. BusinessInsider goes on about some of the major properties in the deal, but misses some major ones like factories around the world, an ARM Architectural license, and other things.
I don't think this is a bad deal for anybody involved. Sure, MMI isn't an earnings star right now - but they just finished a painful reorg and are on track to do very well now that it's over. Even at their worst they weren't burning WP7 marketing kinds of money. Their share has been declining, but they still have more of the market than WP7 does. Google gets some more patents for their growing defensive arsenal, which means the rest of us get to keep getting ever-better shiny Android widgets. Google's Android partners get a tough defender - and now it looks likely they'll be able to assemble a patent pool terrifying in extent. Moto might even stop with that Blur and locked bootloader nonsense. Moto doesn't get carved up and eaten by another phone vendor. The US factories don't close. There's lots to be happy about.
As you note, it's barely a dent for google. Google will make almost as much income in the time it takes for the deal to close, or half as much at least. People were already complaining Google was hoarding cash. MMI will probably spin off some money too.
So why the panic? I suppose it's disruptive. On Friday a lot of folks thought they had a plan to kill Android. Now they're going to have to go back to the drawing board. People don't like too much change.
It's 2011 now. The maximum observation of CO2 at Mauna Loa observatory (the definitive reference) hasn't been less than 350 ppm since 1987, and the average since 1998. The trend for minima, maxima and mean increase by about 2.5 ppm per year and the trend is fairly constant. How does Hansen define "brief"? I think we're over that already. If Hansen is right we're already well and truly hosed and were when he made his "prediction".
We're hitting 400 ppm CO2 maximum observation next April, and I intend to hold a party on 400 day to raise global awareness of the issue. There's nothing we can do to prevent 400 ppm CO2, even if there were a global tyranny to shut down every POV and coal-fired electricity plant. It's going to happen. There's no way we're bringing global CO2 to 350 ppm in the next century. It cannot happen. So how brief is "brief"? If its less than a hundred years, we're hosed in Hansen's theory - which is not quite the same thing as being hosed in actual practice.
There's a mantra available to help you over this bump:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
Firewood is a renewable resource. It just takes a lot of land to grow enough trees to heat a house, and there are more economical ways to use the fuel.
Geothermal should be good for some of the energy. Accelerating transfer of heat from the planet's core to the atmosphere will help radiate off that heat. If we need to, we can paint the planet white with airdrops of aluminum oxide. Algae fuels trap carbon temporarily. There are some other things we can do. Not that it matters.
There are almost 7 billion of us now (according to this 6,955,578,309 at this writing, 7 billion this year). 43 years ago it was half as many, and 55 years prior it was half of that. Continuing this trend, it was it was 1780 - about 230 years ago, or 120 years for another halving. Do you see where the steps get longer the further you go back? Some of the acceleration in growth rate is medicine, some is energy science, some is transportation. Science is killing us by allowing a yeast-growth law. If we had universal free power with perfect conversion, we'd find a way to get to 14 billion in 35 years and 28 billion in 60. Imagine that... 2071: some of my children are still alive and the world has 28 billion people in it. Yes, I know - the UN expects the accelerating growth trend of the last thousand years to suddenly reverse direction, much like the WP7 team expects their fortunes to turn around - for no discernable reason. I believe the UN estimates wrongly include many bilions of people starving to death, and I think we'll prevent that for the most part with humanitarian efforts, though of course many will die by famine where inserting food by force isn't feasible due to determined armed opposition.
By 2071 we'll be out of oil of course, having even tapped the arctic and antarctic reserves. We'll be digging out the last of the coal having doubled, redoubled and re-redoubled those efforts, and global climate will be at least 3C above present - which means British summers will be pleasant but the winters still intolerable, larger swaths of Africa and southern India will be uninhabitable but Frazier Island will be a destination resort. (Nonseq: that bay looks like a crater to me.) We'll have surrendered to gene mod crops and nuclear power, so vast swaths of the Earth will be unihabitable due to grey goo and nuclear meltdowns. Thermodynamics being what they are the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will be irreversibly melting, but it will still be a long time before they do melt and raise the level of the sea and vanishing Florida beneath the waves. Ice is not a great thermoconductor, so outer layers of ice delay the eventual flood that will come. Plenty of time for folks to move inland. Of course if you do the math by then the US National Debt is $4 quadrillion at least, and some models escape to infinity which obviously can't happen (can it?)
The world had 1.5 billion people when my great-grandmother was born, and I knew her. My eldest grandson is two years old. If the current trend continues my youngest great-grandson will die amongst a crowd of over 200 billion humans. Assuming: my youngest daughter is 5 now, and will have a child at 35 as her mother did (2041), and that youngest grandchild will have a child at 35 (2076) also that brings us to 65 years hence, or 2076 born and 84 years of life (assumes a lack of medical advances) gives the year 2161 to naturally pass on. It would take several medical miracles to allow me to meet this great-grandchild, but those are expected. On the current trend 200 billion world population is a fairly conservative estimate for 2161. But of course the current trend can't continue unless the future brings something I don't know about.
I used to worry a lot about this stuff - but you know what? In the longer view these problems solve themselves. We're fortunate
According to the Mauna Loa Observatory we passed 350 ppm annual average CO2 in 1990. Next April we're scheduled for our first 400 ppm observation and five years later our last under 400 ppm observation if trends continue. Since there's no way anybody's going to reverse the trend before then, 400 ppm is not an achievable target. 450 ppm isn't even an achievable goal. 500 might be doable - that's a 60 year target.
I saw a documentary stating, from observations of the past, that high temperatures may be triggered by a certain threshold, below which things are manageable and above which the heat increases a lot faster than we can adapt to it.
The problem with that idea, besides believing everything you watch on TV, is that both atmospheric CO2 and global temperatures have been far higher than present - and that didn't happen.
Look at it this way: both coal and crude oil were once plants. Plants that grew in a verdant earthly Paradise for hundreds of millions of years until they'd trapped enough CO2 from the atmosphere to ruin their habitat and turn the Earth into a frigid wasteland covered with ice from pole to pole. But for an odd fluke of orbital dynamics we might not have survived to put things back on their former course.
There are many corportations that are not publicly held. Some of them are considered to be quite a bit larger than Apple in terms of assets, revenues and so on. For the most part they're sovereign wealth funds, national energy corporations and such like. But they don't have to report their business, so we don't know too much about them.
1 Ceres is pretty much made of rocket fuel, so you can skip those other steps.
And the annual return rate in dividends doesn't even start to make up for the loss in share price.
When a company has a huge holding of treasury stock it can use that as power in the market to pay for mergers in stock at approximately the current market value. The bigger the market cap, the less the dilution and the bigger the entity that can be acquired. So yes, size does matter. This is how AOL "acquired" Time-Warner, becoming the minnow that swallowed the whale.
I don't think there is an overriding means of detecting book cooking in the short term. Auditors can be - and prominently have been - compromised. Accountants can pretty much manipulate the results any way they want. That may be what accountants are for. In the longer term - say, a decade or more - if a company reports year after year that they had vast profits and cash flows and don't still have the cash but didn't pay it out as dividends and stock buybacks it might be appropriate to ask "where did it go?" Apple appears to be pretty square on this measure, but at least one major tech company makes me curious on this metric.
Otherwise, like this, they get distracted by their PHBs into avenues that generate revenue or consolidate market position, but do nothing to drive progress.
This feature is enabled with the purchase of an optional license.
Then I would pay for Google. But not Bing. Asking around I get a pretty uniform consensus on this. Google is worth paying for.
That the construction of this "analysis" is without merit in terms of its conclusion "Bing more effective than Google" goes directly to the point. It means that the analysis is flawed in its premise, misleading, and probably deliberately so. Which then leads one to examine the motive for misleading research. For this, we usually don't have to go further than this lengthy treatise on the subject.
This is not a legitimate excuse for cheating.
Actually I'm interested in the bing link to softonic.com. Is this a legitimate file dump, or is it one of those sites that bundles crudware with genuine free software? Anybody with experience on this one here?
Sorry.
It makes the tax more fair to charge road-users by the mile and the ton over the road, and how would you measure that without a GPS odometer in every car?. Don't look at the idea that the state associates your tax ID with your vehicle and tracks your every move. That's just the fairest way to collect the tax. There's no other motive here. Take off your tinfoil hat. There is no ulterior motive. Trust us.
Walt Mossberg is a relic to a byegone era. He doesn't lie. It's not in him. He doesn't warp the truth the slightest bit. He's quite careful to avoid the lingo of astroturfers and shills, which makes his job considerably harder. He tells the truth as he sees it. I don't always agree with him, but I always respect his opinion even when I disagree with his conclusions. His job is getting easier these days.
In an environment where every press agent, reporter and editor is a wholly owned agent of somebody, a reporter like Walt Mossberg who can't be bought is a precious gem. This environment brings us a whirlwind of ephemeral technologies, just for Walt to say "waitaminit".
Walt's not down here in the trenches with me, defending the choice of this vendor's 10GbE NIC over the other one's two years later, or calling the ball on the exact moment that we move from interested in FCoE to recommending it. But I respect his opinion enough to subscribe to his blog. If he says something's going to happen sometime in the future, I'll look at it as a prospect and investigate and make up my own mind. That's going to happen until he's wronger than he's right, which looks to be quite a while out. I don't give most prophets that much respect.
I wasn't complaining that this author isn't artful. He is. Nor was I complaining about the quality of the summary, which was moderately done. I was just giving my opinion about what TFA meant. I know what faint praise is - I use it often. The author of the article is well known to have biases, but to also be most often correct even when that seems improbable. He has a rich and respectable history. I have a long history and a deep reservoir of knowledge in the field too, but when I enter his domain I respect his local knowledge and experience because he is most often right. He is the lighthouse there.
I'm typing this now wondering what your point is if you have one.
Marc Andreesen would have exploited the environment provided, as he did.
Jim Clark would have disappeared from view after an unfortunate Las Vegas incident with a transgender prostitute.
All of our astronauts came back from their missions strangely... different. Having been there makes you different. As we are defined by our experiences, exceptional experiences make us different. They change us.