Agilent's stock looks very stable to me, and has a low P/E. Why is that a problem?
Because Carly Fiorina's duty to the shareholders was not to preside over just another player in a stagnant cottage industry.
Look, I will readily admit that 100 GHz digital-sampling oscilloscopes are really, really, really "neat", but, sadly, that's about all they are - there just isn't any money to be made in the business of selling them.
As I said above, the geeks on Slashdot might not like to hear it, you can't get rich selling "neat" stuff - the big bucks are made in selling incredibly boring, run-of-the-mill, prosaic crap, like servers, storage networks, and support contracts.
And since the HP-Compaq merger was announced, on Sept. 4, 2001, HPQ's stock [and gross revenues] have soared, whereas IBM & Agilent's stocks [and gross revenues] have been completely stagnant.
Actually I'm being charitable when I say that - the truth of the matter is that both IBM & Agilent's gross revenues have collapsed:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=IBM&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-04
Total Revenue: 96,293,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-05
Total Revenue: 91,134,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-06
Total Revenue: 91,424,000
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=A&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-04
Total Revenue 7,181,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-05
Total Revenue 5,139,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-06
Total Revenue 4,973,000
Most of the new Doctor Who has been just a steaming pile of effete, metrosexual, politically correct bullsh*t [what else would you expect from the BBC these days?], but I caught that episode the other night, and it was actually pretty darned good.
Easily the best episode of any that I've seen of this current revival of The Doctor, and proof that good story-telling can overcome a big deficiency in the special-effects budget.
Maybe you could argue that she was just a stupid, bleached-blond bimbo who randomly stumbled upon the correct course of action, but in fairness to Carly, her vision was correct: Only the large [really the massively, monstrously gi-normous] will survive.
HP's choices were to continue to grow [with the acquisition of Compaq] or to die.
[Cf Tuesday's Register article about Gateway: Gateway failed to grow, and now Gateway is dead.]
1) Everyone is in the business of selling commodity computers these days, and only the largest will survive at that game [in particular, HP needed the higher-margin server business which distinguished Compaq from the rest of the competition], and
2) Like it or not [and most Slashdotters aren't going to like it very much], there just isn't any money to be made in the sale of scientific equipment, as the history of Agilent's stock proves.
Now you can argue that it would be really "nice" if a big company like HP could subsidize a bunch of really "neat", cutting-edge research [the way that AT&T used to do with Bell Labs, back when AT&T was a monopoly, or the way that Xerox used to do with PARC, back when Xerox was a monopoly, or, to a lesser extent, the way that Microsoft & Google appear to be doing now, while they are still monopolies], but Carly's duty was not to the scientific community: Carly's duty was to her shareholders, and her vision proved to be correct.
Heck, just compare the results of her vision with the current state of affairs at IBM, whose stock has been absolutely stagnant for the last eight years:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=IBM&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-04
Total Revenue: 96,293,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-05
Total Revenue: 91,134,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Dec-06
Total Revenue: 91,424,000
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=HPQ&annual
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-04
Total Revenue: 79,905,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-05
Total Revenue: 86,696,000
PERIOD ENDING 31-Oct-06
Total Revenue: 91,658,000
So the reason it didn't instantaneously move on to the presidential candidates article is because my Javascript debugger threw up a couple of errors, which held it back briefly.
So no, there is no solution, unless your browser supports turning off the META refresh [or else someone at 10zenmonkeys.com gets a clue, and removes that line from the file].
Presumably these clusters are for really hard problems - folding proteins, or simulating nuke explosions, or searching for exotic primes, or classifying Lie Groups, or proving Four Color theorems, or whatever - i.e. presumably these programs are expected to run for a long, long time before they terminate.
On the other hand, a fellow named Alan Turing once proved that we can't know whether an arbitrary program will ever terminate.
Now here's the question: If you allow a student onto one of these clusters, and if his program keeps running and running and running and running, with no apparent end in sight, then how do you know whether there's actually an infinite loop within his program, or whether it's just a very, very, very hard problem he's trying to model?
So if you are one of the lucky few who gets chosen [or at least pre-selected] for this sort of thing, then will you have to submit a "proof" of the finiteness of your program before you're given the green light?
And will they provide any formal "template" within which the student could "prove" finiteness, or at least offer an outline of [a hope for] a proof?
And might there be some set of "mileposts" which the program is required to meet in a given time, and if, as it runs, the program fails to meet a milepost in time, then it's given the heave ho?
In a similar vein, are the lucky few required to "prove" that they have used all of the fastest known algorithms for each of their calculations?
Just as an example, have you ever timed the computation of "n choose k" using the actual multiplication & division of the factorials, and then compared it to the speed of Pascal's triangle?
Or tried anything in signal analysis without the benefit of O(nlog(n)) algorithms?
Originally the IBM machines were strictly lease-only [little money upfront, big money down the road].
Then sometime later they moved to the sales model [big money upfront, but little money down the road], and Thomas Watson Jr always felt that that was a disastrous mistake.
In fact, the entire industry [M$FT, Oracle, IBM, Sun, HPQ, Unisys, Google, pretty much everybody] has been working desperately for the last ten or fifteen years to get away from the sales model, and back into the rental/services model - everyone seems to agree that that's where the big $$$s lie.
In addition to all the other frustrations which writers are forced to endure, if you click on the "Print-friendly" link to this article [in tiny little fonts, wwwaaaaayyyyyyy down at the bottom of the page]:
then, after enduring a couple of Javascript errors, you are automatically re-directed to an entirely different article, about the 2008 presidential candidates.
WinNT *always* had a GUI shell. For versions 3.1-3.51 it was Progman/Fileman, and from 4.0 on it was Explorer. Server 2008 is the first version of Windows that can be installed without a GUI shell.
But you could kill the GUI in NT 3.51, and just run stuff from the shell prompt.
Back in the day [about 11 or 12 years ago], you could run Windows NT 3.51 as a shell - it looked just like DOS, except that there was a true multi-user, multi-tasking kernel underneath.
To go into Windows, you typed "WIN" [or "WIN.EXE"], just like you would in Windows 3.10/3.11.
It wasn't until NT 4.0 [circa 1996] that you were required to run Windows.
NT 3.51 was a really cool operating system - e.g. everything had to go through the client/server model, which meant that video was really slow, so video was brought into the kernel in NT 4.0, resulting in myriad BSODs until the video card manufacturers were capable of producing "6-Sigma" [or "7-Sigma" or "Whatever-Sigma"] drivers.
Which actually took a surprisingly long time - several years of driver improvements & Service Packs were required before you could boot NT 4.0 reliably [without the omnipresent threat of a BSOD], by which time Windows 2000 was here.
Writing code that can parse for any given syntax is, well, pretty much as difficult as writing a parsing front-end to a compiler.
I.e. it is not trivial and it is fraught with danger.
Any time you allow the user to submit arbitrary, un-screened, un-filtered data, you're just asking for trouble.
Of course, I guess you could argue that the job of a RegEx parser is precisely to do the screening & the filtering for you, but it is not a trivial business, and anyone who approaches the problem as though it were a mere triviality is a fool.
I.e. from the security point of view, the RegEx parser is a firewall [and, in all likelihood, is the only firewall], hence anyone writing a RegEx parser has to assume that the user submitting the input is a blackhat, not a whitehat.
PS: And the problem undergoes manifold [if not infinite] complexification when you're dealing with languages [or "environments"] like HTML, Javascript, and XML, which can re-write themselves on the fly.
Grandparent: my boss recently asked me how she could reasonably keep her teenage son from using the family computer to 'access inappropriate sites... Sadly, she was dissatisfied with this answer...
Parent:God forbid you actually raise your own child.
The latest theory is that Madeleine McCann was being drugged by her physician parents to make her more pliant [so that Mommy and Daddy could run off and party down with the beautiful people], but that Mommy overdosed her and killed her [presumably by accident, although that might not be such a good presumption].
Anyway, telling a career woman to raise her own children is like telling a fish to get a bicycle.
You know, that movie is not exactly bleeding edge these days - it's entirely conceivable that there are some child prodigy geeks on Slashdot who were born after it was released.
When I was a teenager, I don't think there were very many movie dialogues, from movies made before I was born [or even made when I was a young child], which I would have recognized. Maybe "The Wizard of Oz", but that's about it. Didn't really get exposed to things like "Casablanca" or "Citizen Kane" until college [or even graduate school], and I only learned e.g. "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" much more recently.
Heck, I don't think I saw "The Godfather" until a few years ago.
Jules: We should have shotguns for this kind of deal. Vincent: How many up there? Jules: Three or four. Vincent: That's countin' our guy? Jules: Not sure. Vincent: So that means there could be up to five guys up there? Jules: It's possible. Vincent: We should have fuckin' shotguns.
Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system... It basically made ActiveX irrelevent, and Microsoft is still a little peeved... Once Silverlight takes off and displaces Flash as the delivery system of choice for shitty-assed content, Microsoft will be free to extend Silverlight in any way they desire, without passing those changes on to the Mac or to Mono... This is just like their bid with ActiveX.
Uhh, "Flash" is delivered as an ActiveX control.
If you go into your "Tools | Internet Options | Security | Custom Level", and turn off all the ActiveX stuff [controls, scripting, etc], then you'll never see another Flash display on a web page [dittoes that dreadful Acrobat Reader, or the Gosh-awful Quicktime/iTunes client].
Microsoft's problem is that ActiveX controls were a little TOO powerful - they enabled competitors' products, like Flash, Acrobat, and Quicktime/iTunes, to be run straight from the browser.
Slashdot Mirror
But given the choice, I would opt for the iPhone over OS X just like they did.
The iPhone is OSX Leopard.
Netcraft - er, Steve Jobs - confirms it.
Hillary Clinton's Yellow Teeth
http://www.photocolorcorrection.com/whiteteeth/hillaryclinton.html
Your nation is counting on you, Rudy.
Agilent's stock looks very stable to me, and has a low P/E. Why is that a problem?
Because Carly Fiorina's duty to the shareholders was not to preside over just another player in a stagnant cottage industry.
Look, I will readily admit that 100 GHz digital-sampling oscilloscopes are really, really, really "neat", but, sadly, that's about all they are - there just isn't any money to be made in the business of selling them.
As I said above, the geeks on Slashdot might not like to hear it, you can't get rich selling "neat" stuff - the big bucks are made in selling incredibly boring, run-of-the-mill, prosaic crap, like servers, storage networks, and support contracts.
And since the HP-Compaq merger was announced, on Sept. 4, 2001, HPQ's stock [and gross revenues] have soared, whereas IBM & Agilent's stocks [and gross revenues] have been completely stagnant.
Actually I'm being charitable when I say that - the truth of the matter is that both IBM & Agilent's gross revenues have collapsed:
Most of the new Doctor Who has been just a steaming pile of effete, metrosexual, politically correct bullsh*t [what else would you expect from the BBC these days?], but I caught that episode the other night, and it was actually pretty darned good.
Easily the best episode of any that I've seen of this current revival of The Doctor, and proof that good story-telling can overcome a big deficiency in the special-effects budget.
Maybe you could argue that she was just a stupid, bleached-blond bimbo who randomly stumbled upon the correct course of action, but in fairness to Carly, her vision was correct: Only the large [really the massively, monstrously gi-normous] will survive.
HP's choices were to continue to grow [with the acquisition of Compaq] or to die.
[Cf Tuesday's Register article about Gateway: Gateway failed to grow, and now Gateway is dead.]
And the stocks have proven that she was correct:
At HP, Carly faced two dilemmas:
1) Everyone is in the business of selling commodity computers these days, and only the largest will survive at that game [in particular, HP needed the higher-margin server business which distinguished Compaq from the rest of the competition], and
2) Like it or not [and most Slashdotters aren't going to like it very much], there just isn't any money to be made in the sale of scientific equipment, as the history of Agilent's stock proves.
Now you can argue that it would be really "nice" if a big company like HP could subsidize a bunch of really "neat", cutting-edge research [the way that AT&T used to do with Bell Labs, back when AT&T was a monopoly, or the way that Xerox used to do with PARC, back when Xerox was a monopoly, or, to a lesser extent, the way that Microsoft & Google appear to be doing now, while they are still monopolies], but Carly's duty was not to the scientific community: Carly's duty was to her shareholders, and her vision proved to be correct.
Heck, just compare the results of her vision with the current state of affairs at IBM, whose stock has been absolutely stagnant for the last eight years:
QED.
What, no solution?
Okay, okay, okay.
I saved the damned thing to the hard-drive, and looked at the code, and there it is, right there in the META tag:
So the reason it didn't instantaneously move on to the presidential candidates article is because my Javascript debugger threw up a couple of errors, which held it back briefly.
So no, there is no solution, unless your browser supports turning off the META refresh [or else someone at 10zenmonkeys.com gets a clue, and removes that line from the file].
Idiots.
God in heaven, I hate bad code.
Presumably these clusters are for really hard problems - folding proteins, or simulating nuke explosions, or searching for exotic primes, or classifying Lie Groups, or proving Four Color theorems, or whatever - i.e. presumably these programs are expected to run for a long, long time before they terminate.
On the other hand, a fellow named Alan Turing once proved that we can't know whether an arbitrary program will ever terminate.
Now here's the question: If you allow a student onto one of these clusters, and if his program keeps running and running and running and running, with no apparent end in sight, then how do you know whether there's actually an infinite loop within his program, or whether it's just a very, very, very hard problem he's trying to model?
So if you are one of the lucky few who gets chosen [or at least pre-selected] for this sort of thing, then will you have to submit a "proof" of the finiteness of your program before you're given the green light?
And will they provide any formal "template" within which the student could "prove" finiteness, or at least offer an outline of [a hope for] a proof?
And might there be some set of "mileposts" which the program is required to meet in a given time, and if, as it runs, the program fails to meet a milepost in time, then it's given the heave ho?
In a similar vein, are the lucky few required to "prove" that they have used all of the fastest known algorithms for each of their calculations?
Just as an example, have you ever timed the computation of "n choose k" using the actual multiplication & division of the factorials, and then compared it to the speed of Pascal's triangle?
Or tried anything in signal analysis without the benefit of O(nlog(n)) algorithms?
Originally the IBM machines were strictly lease-only [little money upfront, big money down the road].
Then sometime later they moved to the sales model [big money upfront, but little money down the road], and Thomas Watson Jr always felt that that was a disastrous mistake.
In fact, the entire industry [M$FT, Oracle, IBM, Sun, HPQ, Unisys, Google, pretty much everybody] has been working desperately for the last ten or fifteen years to get away from the sales model, and back into the rental/services model - everyone seems to agree that that's where the big $$$s lie.
In addition to all the other frustrations which writers are forced to endure, if you click on the "Print-friendly" link to this article [in tiny little fonts, wwwaaaaayyyyyyy down at the bottom of the page]: then, after enduring a couple of Javascript errors, you are automatically re-directed to an entirely different article, about the 2008 presidential candidates.
God in heaven, I hate bad code.
WinNT *always* had a GUI shell. For versions 3.1-3.51 it was Progman/Fileman, and from 4.0 on it was Explorer. Server 2008 is the first version of Windows that can be installed without a GUI shell.
But you could kill the GUI in NT 3.51, and just run stuff from the shell prompt.
Back in the day [about 11 or 12 years ago], you could run Windows NT 3.51 as a shell - it looked just like DOS, except that there was a true multi-user, multi-tasking kernel underneath.
To go into Windows, you typed "WIN" [or "WIN.EXE"], just like you would in Windows 3.10/3.11.
It wasn't until NT 4.0 [circa 1996] that you were required to run Windows.
NT 3.51 was a really cool operating system - e.g. everything had to go through the client/server model, which meant that video was really slow, so video was brought into the kernel in NT 4.0, resulting in myriad BSODs until the video card manufacturers were capable of producing "6-Sigma" [or "7-Sigma" or "Whatever-Sigma"] drivers.
Which actually took a surprisingly long time - several years of driver improvements & Service Packs were required before you could boot NT 4.0 reliably [without the omnipresent threat of a BSOD], by which time Windows 2000 was here.
Who, what, when, where, why?
Price would seem to be a pretty important detail...
Math can prove that a mathematical system is consistent, and within that system can prove properties that result in that system.
Oh really ?
It also includes infrared cameras that capture license plate images to match them in milliseconds to police records.
The CAPTCHA's are getting so damned difficult to decipher that I can hardly even sign up for anonymous email accounts or download pr0n anymore.
Being male or female neither enables nor disables the ability to create harmonious systems.
La Griffe du Lion & Camille Paglia would beg to differ.
You know, the little things, like always remembering your </i>, and never forgetting to preview your work.
Glass houses.
Projectile stones.
Whatever.
Your billions are my God now!
- for the clueless
Writing code that can parse for any given syntax is, well, pretty much as difficult as writing a parsing front-end to a compiler.
I.e. it is not trivial and it is fraught with danger.
Any time you allow the user to submit arbitrary, un-screened, un-filtered data, you're just asking for trouble.
Of course, I guess you could argue that the job of a RegEx parser is precisely to do the screening & the filtering for you, but it is not a trivial business, and anyone who approaches the problem as though it were a mere triviality is a fool.
I.e. from the security point of view, the RegEx parser is a firewall [and, in all likelihood, is the only firewall], hence anyone writing a RegEx parser has to assume that the user submitting the input is a blackhat, not a whitehat.
PS: And the problem undergoes manifold [if not infinite] complexification when you're dealing with languages [or "environments"] like HTML, Javascript, and XML, which can re-write themselves on the fly.
Grandparent: my boss recently asked me how she could reasonably keep her teenage son from using the family computer to 'access inappropriate sites... Sadly, she was dissatisfied with this answer...
Parent: God forbid you actually raise your own child.
The latest theory is that Madeleine McCann was being drugged by her physician parents to make her more pliant [so that Mommy and Daddy could run off and party down with the beautiful people], but that Mommy overdosed her and killed her [presumably by accident, although that might not be such a good presumption].
Anyway, telling a career woman to raise her own children is like telling a fish to get a bicycle.
You're wasting your breath.
You know, that movie is not exactly bleeding edge these days - it's entirely conceivable that there are some child prodigy geeks on Slashdot who were born after it was released.
When I was a teenager, I don't think there were very many movie dialogues, from movies made before I was born [or even made when I was a young child], which I would have recognized. Maybe "The Wizard of Oz", but that's about it. Didn't really get exposed to things like "Casablanca" or "Citizen Kane" until college [or even graduate school], and I only learned e.g. "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" much more recently.
Heck, I don't think I saw "The Godfather" until a few years ago.
Jules: We should have shotguns for this kind of deal.
Vincent: How many up there?
Jules: Three or four.
Vincent: That's countin' our guy?
Jules: Not sure.
Vincent: So that means there could be up to five guys up there?
Jules: It's possible.
Vincent: We should have fuckin' shotguns.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/quotes#qt0255
But I have no idea what I'm doing with my kids in a few years when they enter school...
Two words: Home School.
'Nuff said.
Right now, Flash is a cross-platform delivery system... It basically made ActiveX irrelevent, and Microsoft is still a little peeved... Once Silverlight takes off and displaces Flash as the delivery system of choice for shitty-assed content, Microsoft will be free to extend Silverlight in any way they desire, without passing those changes on to the Mac or to Mono... This is just like their bid with ActiveX.
Uhh, "Flash" is delivered as an ActiveX control.
If you go into your "Tools | Internet Options | Security | Custom Level", and turn off all the ActiveX stuff [controls, scripting, etc], then you'll never see another Flash display on a web page [dittoes that dreadful Acrobat Reader, or the Gosh-awful Quicktime/iTunes client].
Microsoft's problem is that ActiveX controls were a little TOO powerful - they enabled competitors' products, like Flash, Acrobat, and Quicktime/iTunes, to be run straight from the browser.
GP: A thousand workers, each exchanging 100 batteries a day, in five day work weeks, for 86 consecutive weeks?
P: I'd guess nokia will simply have all their dealers as collection sites
Dude, substitute "dealerships" for "workers":
A thousand dealerships, each exchanging 100 batteries a day, in five day work weeks, for 86 consecutive weeks?
AIN'T. GONNA. HAPPEN.
That is one f'ing lotta batteries.
A thousand workers, each exchanging 100 batteries a day, in five day work weeks, for 86 consecutive weeks?
Ain't gonna happen.
PS: Can you say mother of all toxic waste dumps?