Except in this case, some of the analysts were revising down their numbers just before the IPO, and there is some suspicion that the institutional investors got told one thing, and the rest of the plebes got told something else.
Sorry, but that's a violation of SEC laws, and possibly fraud. This is a little more than caveat emptor, this is failing to live up to the legal responsibilities imposed by the SEC.
I'd agree with this when it comes to the bank, but how is this Facebook's or Mark Zuckerberg's fault?
The guy was making a lot of money off of his theft. Kleptomaniacs typically don't sell stuff on Ebay at high mark-up, they keep, give away, or even donate the stuff the take. Precisely because profit isn't the motive of kleptomaniacs, I believe this guy was just doing it for the cash. Sad, given his apparently position and likely social stature, but he needs to go to jail, not a mental hospital.
I'm leaning towards believing that this wasn't just a mental illness or thrill-seeking. The reason why is because he was selling the stuff on Ebay for a significant profit.
Had it just been thrill-seeking or an illness, the money wouldn't matter, and most people for whom this is a motive don't want to be caught selling "hot" merchandise. (I know, a bit ironic that they're willing to risk stealing it to begin with, but such is the nature of these things.) He likely would have just given the stuff away to friends, relatives, or even charity.
The fact that he was selling it for such a profit pretty much says to me that it was purely about money. I don't know (and I don't care) how much the guy makes, apparently he wanted more.
P.S. This is why I have such high hopes for Google. They do tend to be quite open with their products, arguably too open in some respects. Still, if they get to the level of design expertise, polish, and outright raw power in small form factors that Apple has gotten to, all the while keeping their thriving corporate culture intact, there's no telling how much it can achieve, changing the industry in ways we (or they, for that matter) haven't even dreamed of yet.
It's a shame that Apple and Google seem to be such mortal enemies. If they could learn from each other and take the best aspects of each other, that would be pretty much an ideal company.
Not really, look for example at apple. With an outstanding marketing department you can get people to want barely working tech encapsuled in what is pretty much a black brick.
Lord knows I'm not a fan of Apple, and there is much to criticize the company for--setting up walled gardens, trying to lock consumers into their product lines, patent shenanigans, etc. Say what you want, though, but criticisms that their "black brick" is "barely working" are way off-base. Two things I do admire Apple for are 1) the aesthetic design of their products, and 2) the out-of-the-box tech polish they give everything, including brand newly launched products.
As fun as it is to make fun of the "cult of Apple," there are nuggets of truth to what their consumers espouse. Their stuff does work well and their products are good products. If only they would adopt a more open philosophy, they really could be the best tech company out there.
Which part of "selling the same bus tickets" did you not understand? We're not talking about Amazon buying a bus pass and some other company just riding once a week. If Amazon rents some space, the city charges them $X. If some other company rents it, the city charges them $Y. Same space, different rents based on company. That should be illegal.
As it is now, if City A foregoes the sweetheart deal and Amazon picks City B instead, the net effect is that all that stuff you just mentioned will still happen, except that now, instead of City A either slicing money spent on infrastructure or directly taxing its citizens, City B is actually getting a fair and reasonable deal for the rent. In other words, City B will have more money to spend on infrastructure services than City A.
Now imagine what would happen if every city were prohibited by law from offering these kinds of sweetheart deals to companies? Two things: 1) it doesn't matter where Amazon goes, they're not going to get out of paying rent or taxes, thus making City A able to compete fairly for companies without having to sell its soul, and 2) if I'm a competitor to Amazon, I don't have to worry about them being able to undercut me on price because government is cherry picking them to receive these discounts that it won't offer me.
It's not a cost on the cities/towns that take the deal. They got to negotiate (with the entire state's tax revenue) how much they'll need to make it worth their while. Plus the jobs are always a big plus these days. I highly doubt the little costs you mentioned are going to cause it to be a loss for them.
I don't agree. Most towns these days are pretty strapped for cash and are cutting WAY back on basic infrastructure services. In my city, we've had budget shortfalls in the millions for years, and debacle after debacle of basic infrastructure failures because there's just not enough money to go around. Yet when I turn on the news, I'm hearing about yet another sweetheart deal that the city officials have made with some business to get them to come here. I can't help but think that we're just a few more sweetheart deals away from being completely bankrupt. (And indeed, many cities and counties around the country really are literally bankrupt.)
This also neglects an issue that the OP mentioned above: corruption. I also can't help but think--and this has been proven in a court of law in a few cases--that the city officials who are making these sweetheart deals are getting kickbacks for them. In those cases, it's not just entirely possible, but I'd argue that it's probable that they're not negotiating in good faith for the city's best interest, that the costs I mentioned really will result in a net loss for the city.
Nope, I'm as artistic as a two-by-four. Most of the UIs that I've designed have been pretty plain vanilla out-of-the-box stuff.
And the reason I used U instead of the word "user" is to emphasize that a USER interface should, by design, be USER-friendly. It's right there in the name. If I want to have a good USER interface, I don't go to someone like me, a technical goob who knows what he or she wants but is miserable at designing things for the public at large. Instead, I go to someone who specializes in designing USER interfaces, who is an artistic type who is not only clever enough to "think outside the box" to look at things with a fresh eye to come up with new ideas, but who is also competent at conducting studies and focus groups and whatnot to determine the best way for people to get things done.
But then, given that you're so pretentious that you use the word "kewl" instead of cool, it doesn't surprise me that you wouldn't make that connection.
Non-lawyers who think they understand law are worse than non-techies who think they understand computers.
Lawyers who think they have a monopoly on good legal ideas are worse than techies who think they are the only ones who should be allowed to use computers.
In cases like that, the courts would have to step in and strike such laws down, kind of like how they do now when a state tries passing some law that is unconstitutional. Someone would have to say, "Hey, that law is obviously designed to give a sweetheart deal to Google," and sue.
Yeah, it sounds like a good deal except that a lot of towns are ignoring the hidden costs of these deals. That huge company is going to require a lot of extra government services in the forms of things like electricity, water and sewer, roads, etc. Plus with the extra people, it's going to require more of things like fire nad police services, welfare benefits, unemployment benefits, public parks, postal services, yadda yadda yadda. What looks like a $5,000,000 bonanza, when all is said and done, ends up costing the taxpayers a crapton of money.
These deals ought to be illegal, period. Government at all levels, from federal all the way down to local, should be prohibited from making sweetheart deals to one company without making them for all companies. It would have to be a federal law, since there's no way in hell that cities or states would make such laws on their own. That's the only way that the playing field could be leveled for everyone. Maybe now that corporations are "people," some small companies should get together and sue using the Equal Protection Clause, under the theory that government is prohibited from offering Company X a sweetheart deal that Company Y, Company Z, and every other company doesn't have access to. It's a little like selling bus tickets to the Smiths for $2 each and selling the same bus tickets to the Johnsons for $8.
There is no telling how many trillions of dollars aren't being collected from companies because of deals like this, how much money is being sucked out of local municipalities' and states' coffers and being paid by people who live nowhere near where the money eventually ends up.
It's not UX design, it's fashion design. Bunch of artistes wanking away on Photoshop trying to out-trendify each other. It's an utter waste of computing resources, and I'm sick of it.
Yet I constantly see people ruing how so many things are clunky and unusable because they're "designed by engineers." The fact is that Microsoft isn't trying to capture the command line guru market, they're trying to capture the 99.9% of everyone else market. So if you're sick of companies and organizations using professional designers who specialize in making UIs more U-friendly and pretty, that's too damn bad and you've got a really hard life ahead of you.
But hey, there are always still command-line installations of Linux you can use to soothe your pain. Or you can suck it up and get used to the fact that things change to make people's lives easier and better and be happy. After all, that awesome command line interface was a UI improvement over teletype terminals and punch cards, but I don't see you whining over how you're sick of it want to return to those days, yet 40 or 50 years ago, there probably were some people doing exactly that.
When it comes to designing UIs for the general public, especially when it comes to my bottom line, a bunch of artistes is exactly who I want.
Washington doesn't work, that's the point. When the most promising opportunity for actual change in an entire generation comes along, and it's utterly pissed away like this, it's time to give up on working through the system. It's completely broken, and cannot be repaired.
The only chance of this getting better is for the people to take the streets, and not give them back until our Constitutional rights are restored.
Either 1) it's irreparably broken and you need to stop blaming Obama for things that apparently are out of his control, or 2) instead of griping about how awful the system is, run for office and fix it yourself, or start your own PAC for change, or otherwise try to make things better.
You can't have it both ways; sit here whining about a system that doesn't work, and then whining about someone else who is doing the best job they can to work within the imperfect system to keep everything from falling apart. Well, I suppose technically you can, but it's completely unproductive and you come off as a tool.
If he wanted to reject those provisions, he should have vetoed it. Actually, if he wanted to adhere to his oath to uphold the Constitution, he is required to veto it. But he didn't, so we know how much an oath is worth to Barack Obama.
That's BS and you know it. This was a military funding bill, and had he vetoed it, instead of talking about this, we'd be talking about how the U.S. military disbanded due to no one being paid. Stop pretending like this isn't how Washington works.
The last president to fight this crap, IIRC, was Bill Clinton, who fought to have line item veto power. The Republicans fought him tooth and nail because as the party that wasn't in charge, they wanted it this way so that they could put crap like this into bills and plaster it all over the next election cycle.
I'm from America, where big corporations aren't just free, but actually expected to the point of being obligated to rake in obscene profits. There's no such thing as consumer rights here, it's all about the bottom line. They make you pay to get television, then they make advertisers pay to present it to you. Don't forget having companies pay to place their products subtly (or not-so-subtly, many times) in the shows themselves. Then you have to pay yet again if you ever want to watch it on another device or in another format, and there's a pretty durn good chance that they've sold yet more advertising, such as on Hulu, or in the form of non-skippable ads on DVDs, etc.
America used to be the land of the free. Now it's the land of the rape-everyone-for-as-much-money-as-you-can.
True, but I've noticed that over time, the ads have gotten longer and longer. When I started watching Hulu way back when, most ads were only 15 seconds long. Now, it's quite common to get 1:00 ad breaks, and I've had some go as long as 2:00 (and I'm not talking about the ones that sometimes pop up at the beginning of shows that let you watch the rest ad-free, these are in mid-show). Plus, they've started playing around with stuff that requires you to interact with the ad, such as the "Which ad experience would you prefer?" (I don't CARE, it's all just noise to me.) Or the "Which of these movies have you seen in the past seven days?" interstitials.
It's not surprising, since Hulu is owned by the broadcasters. Still, I was hoping that they would keep the ads short and really be revolutionary. When they were, I actually diligently tuned in to all of them because 1) I felt kind of obligated to since they were providing a valuable service, 2) they were MUCH less obtrusive, and 3) with a 15-second ad, you really don't have much time to do anything else. Now, though, I regularly walk away from the computer for a few minutes, then backtrack to where the show picks back up, kind of like how when ads come on "regular" television (which I hardly ever watch), I would get up and get a drink or go to the bathroom.
Oh well, just goes to prove yet again that there is little that is cool that Hollywood can't screw up royally.
I mostly agree, though they can go overboard with product placement ads, too. The best ones are the ones that naturally blend into scenes. However, when two guys get into a car and one says something like, "I'll use my Microsoft Sync to figure out how to get there..." and there's a few seconds of him fiddling with his GPS navigation system and such, it's distracting.
And then there are product placements that are so over-the-top that they're kind of funny. Subway's advertising in Community and Chuck come to mind.
I scratched my head over it for a minute, too. I was thinking, "Geez, this is the third time he's fallen? They've started numbering them? It's the sequel to the critically acclaimed Richard Stallman Falls II: New York?"
On a more serious note, I hope the guy is okay. RMS rocks.
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." - June 2006
That was just a big misunderstanding. He thought he was talking about people who really like feet.
Slashdot Mirror
Except in this case, some of the analysts were revising down their numbers just before the IPO, and there is some suspicion that the institutional investors got told one thing, and the rest of the plebes got told something else.
Sorry, but that's a violation of SEC laws, and possibly fraud. This is a little more than caveat emptor, this is failing to live up to the legal responsibilities imposed by the SEC.
I'd agree with this when it comes to the bank, but how is this Facebook's or Mark Zuckerberg's fault?
The guy was making a lot of money off of his theft. Kleptomaniacs typically don't sell stuff on Ebay at high mark-up, they keep, give away, or even donate the stuff the take. Precisely because profit isn't the motive of kleptomaniacs, I believe this guy was just doing it for the cash. Sad, given his apparently position and likely social stature, but he needs to go to jail, not a mental hospital.
I'm leaning towards believing that this wasn't just a mental illness or thrill-seeking. The reason why is because he was selling the stuff on Ebay for a significant profit.
Had it just been thrill-seeking or an illness, the money wouldn't matter, and most people for whom this is a motive don't want to be caught selling "hot" merchandise. (I know, a bit ironic that they're willing to risk stealing it to begin with, but such is the nature of these things.) He likely would have just given the stuff away to friends, relatives, or even charity.
The fact that he was selling it for such a profit pretty much says to me that it was purely about money. I don't know (and I don't care) how much the guy makes, apparently he wanted more.
P.S. This is why I have such high hopes for Google. They do tend to be quite open with their products, arguably too open in some respects. Still, if they get to the level of design expertise, polish, and outright raw power in small form factors that Apple has gotten to, all the while keeping their thriving corporate culture intact, there's no telling how much it can achieve, changing the industry in ways we (or they, for that matter) haven't even dreamed of yet.
It's a shame that Apple and Google seem to be such mortal enemies. If they could learn from each other and take the best aspects of each other, that would be pretty much an ideal company.
Not really, look for example at apple. With an outstanding marketing department you can get people to want barely working tech encapsuled in what is pretty much a black brick.
Lord knows I'm not a fan of Apple, and there is much to criticize the company for--setting up walled gardens, trying to lock consumers into their product lines, patent shenanigans, etc. Say what you want, though, but criticisms that their "black brick" is "barely working" are way off-base. Two things I do admire Apple for are 1) the aesthetic design of their products, and 2) the out-of-the-box tech polish they give everything, including brand newly launched products.
As fun as it is to make fun of the "cult of Apple," there are nuggets of truth to what their consumers espouse. Their stuff does work well and their products are good products. If only they would adopt a more open philosophy, they really could be the best tech company out there.
Which part of "selling the same bus tickets" did you not understand? We're not talking about Amazon buying a bus pass and some other company just riding once a week. If Amazon rents some space, the city charges them $X. If some other company rents it, the city charges them $Y. Same space, different rents based on company. That should be illegal.
The system is rigged to prevent any change by average people and you know it. Money buys you access, access buys you laws. Period.
It is rigged. How do you think it got that way? Because people didn't care.
Is it beyond all hope? Depends. What are you going to do to change it?
Oh, right. Nothing.
As it is now, if City A foregoes the sweetheart deal and Amazon picks City B instead, the net effect is that all that stuff you just mentioned will still happen, except that now, instead of City A either slicing money spent on infrastructure or directly taxing its citizens, City B is actually getting a fair and reasonable deal for the rent. In other words, City B will have more money to spend on infrastructure services than City A.
Now imagine what would happen if every city were prohibited by law from offering these kinds of sweetheart deals to companies? Two things: 1) it doesn't matter where Amazon goes, they're not going to get out of paying rent or taxes, thus making City A able to compete fairly for companies without having to sell its soul, and 2) if I'm a competitor to Amazon, I don't have to worry about them being able to undercut me on price because government is cherry picking them to receive these discounts that it won't offer me.
It's not a cost on the cities/towns that take the deal. They got to negotiate (with the entire state's tax revenue) how much they'll need to make it worth their while. Plus the jobs are always a big plus these days. I highly doubt the little costs you mentioned are going to cause it to be a loss for them.
I don't agree. Most towns these days are pretty strapped for cash and are cutting WAY back on basic infrastructure services. In my city, we've had budget shortfalls in the millions for years, and debacle after debacle of basic infrastructure failures because there's just not enough money to go around. Yet when I turn on the news, I'm hearing about yet another sweetheart deal that the city officials have made with some business to get them to come here. I can't help but think that we're just a few more sweetheart deals away from being completely bankrupt. (And indeed, many cities and counties around the country really are literally bankrupt.)
This also neglects an issue that the OP mentioned above: corruption. I also can't help but think--and this has been proven in a court of law in a few cases--that the city officials who are making these sweetheart deals are getting kickbacks for them. In those cases, it's not just entirely possible, but I'd argue that it's probable that they're not negotiating in good faith for the city's best interest, that the costs I mentioned really will result in a net loss for the city.
Nope, I'm as artistic as a two-by-four. Most of the UIs that I've designed have been pretty plain vanilla out-of-the-box stuff.
And the reason I used U instead of the word "user" is to emphasize that a USER interface should, by design, be USER-friendly. It's right there in the name. If I want to have a good USER interface, I don't go to someone like me, a technical goob who knows what he or she wants but is miserable at designing things for the public at large. Instead, I go to someone who specializes in designing USER interfaces, who is an artistic type who is not only clever enough to "think outside the box" to look at things with a fresh eye to come up with new ideas, but who is also competent at conducting studies and focus groups and whatnot to determine the best way for people to get things done.
But then, given that you're so pretentious that you use the word "kewl" instead of cool, it doesn't surprise me that you wouldn't make that connection.
Non-lawyers who think they understand law are worse than non-techies who think they understand computers.
Lawyers who think they have a monopoly on good legal ideas are worse than techies who think they are the only ones who should be allowed to use computers.
In cases like that, the courts would have to step in and strike such laws down, kind of like how they do now when a state tries passing some law that is unconstitutional. Someone would have to say, "Hey, that law is obviously designed to give a sweetheart deal to Google," and sue.
Yeah, it sounds like a good deal except that a lot of towns are ignoring the hidden costs of these deals. That huge company is going to require a lot of extra government services in the forms of things like electricity, water and sewer, roads, etc. Plus with the extra people, it's going to require more of things like fire nad police services, welfare benefits, unemployment benefits, public parks, postal services, yadda yadda yadda. What looks like a $5,000,000 bonanza, when all is said and done, ends up costing the taxpayers a crapton of money.
These deals ought to be illegal, period. Government at all levels, from federal all the way down to local, should be prohibited from making sweetheart deals to one company without making them for all companies. It would have to be a federal law, since there's no way in hell that cities or states would make such laws on their own. That's the only way that the playing field could be leveled for everyone. Maybe now that corporations are "people," some small companies should get together and sue using the Equal Protection Clause, under the theory that government is prohibited from offering Company X a sweetheart deal that Company Y, Company Z, and every other company doesn't have access to. It's a little like selling bus tickets to the Smiths for $2 each and selling the same bus tickets to the Johnsons for $8.
There is no telling how many trillions of dollars aren't being collected from companies because of deals like this, how much money is being sucked out of local municipalities' and states' coffers and being paid by people who live nowhere near where the money eventually ends up.
It's not UX design, it's fashion design. Bunch of artistes wanking away on Photoshop trying to out-trendify each other. It's an utter waste of computing resources, and I'm sick of it.
Yet I constantly see people ruing how so many things are clunky and unusable because they're "designed by engineers." The fact is that Microsoft isn't trying to capture the command line guru market, they're trying to capture the 99.9% of everyone else market. So if you're sick of companies and organizations using professional designers who specialize in making UIs more U-friendly and pretty, that's too damn bad and you've got a really hard life ahead of you.
But hey, there are always still command-line installations of Linux you can use to soothe your pain. Or you can suck it up and get used to the fact that things change to make people's lives easier and better and be happy. After all, that awesome command line interface was a UI improvement over teletype terminals and punch cards, but I don't see you whining over how you're sick of it want to return to those days, yet 40 or 50 years ago, there probably were some people doing exactly that.
When it comes to designing UIs for the general public, especially when it comes to my bottom line, a bunch of artistes is exactly who I want.
Washington doesn't work, that's the point. When the most promising opportunity for actual change in an entire generation comes along, and it's utterly pissed away like this, it's time to give up on working through the system. It's completely broken, and cannot be repaired.
The only chance of this getting better is for the people to take the streets, and not give them back until our Constitutional rights are restored.
Either 1) it's irreparably broken and you need to stop blaming Obama for things that apparently are out of his control, or 2) instead of griping about how awful the system is, run for office and fix it yourself, or start your own PAC for change, or otherwise try to make things better.
You can't have it both ways; sit here whining about a system that doesn't work, and then whining about someone else who is doing the best job they can to work within the imperfect system to keep everything from falling apart. Well, I suppose technically you can, but it's completely unproductive and you come off as a tool.
I intend to live forever. So far so good. --Stephen Wright
If he wanted to reject those provisions, he should have vetoed it. Actually, if he wanted to adhere to his oath to uphold the Constitution, he is required to veto it. But he didn't, so we know how much an oath is worth to Barack Obama.
That's BS and you know it. This was a military funding bill, and had he vetoed it, instead of talking about this, we'd be talking about how the U.S. military disbanded due to no one being paid. Stop pretending like this isn't how Washington works.
The last president to fight this crap, IIRC, was Bill Clinton, who fought to have line item veto power. The Republicans fought him tooth and nail because as the party that wasn't in charge, they wanted it this way so that they could put crap like this into bills and plaster it all over the next election cycle.
He swore an oath to uphold the law even if he doesn't agree with it.
God forbid there be a happy medium.
I'm from Europe...
I'm from America, where big corporations aren't just free, but actually expected to the point of being obligated to rake in obscene profits. There's no such thing as consumer rights here, it's all about the bottom line. They make you pay to get television, then they make advertisers pay to present it to you. Don't forget having companies pay to place their products subtly (or not-so-subtly, many times) in the shows themselves. Then you have to pay yet again if you ever want to watch it on another device or in another format, and there's a pretty durn good chance that they've sold yet more advertising, such as on Hulu, or in the form of non-skippable ads on DVDs, etc.
America used to be the land of the free. Now it's the land of the rape-everyone-for-as-much-money-as-you-can.
True, but I've noticed that over time, the ads have gotten longer and longer. When I started watching Hulu way back when, most ads were only 15 seconds long. Now, it's quite common to get 1:00 ad breaks, and I've had some go as long as 2:00 (and I'm not talking about the ones that sometimes pop up at the beginning of shows that let you watch the rest ad-free, these are in mid-show). Plus, they've started playing around with stuff that requires you to interact with the ad, such as the "Which ad experience would you prefer?" (I don't CARE, it's all just noise to me.) Or the "Which of these movies have you seen in the past seven days?" interstitials.
It's not surprising, since Hulu is owned by the broadcasters. Still, I was hoping that they would keep the ads short and really be revolutionary. When they were, I actually diligently tuned in to all of them because 1) I felt kind of obligated to since they were providing a valuable service, 2) they were MUCH less obtrusive, and 3) with a 15-second ad, you really don't have much time to do anything else. Now, though, I regularly walk away from the computer for a few minutes, then backtrack to where the show picks back up, kind of like how when ads come on "regular" television (which I hardly ever watch), I would get up and get a drink or go to the bathroom.
Oh well, just goes to prove yet again that there is little that is cool that Hollywood can't screw up royally.
All this time, I thought the Russians just used a pencil.
I mostly agree, though they can go overboard with product placement ads, too. The best ones are the ones that naturally blend into scenes. However, when two guys get into a car and one says something like, "I'll use my Microsoft Sync to figure out how to get there..." and there's a few seconds of him fiddling with his GPS navigation system and such, it's distracting.
And then there are product placements that are so over-the-top that they're kind of funny. Subway's advertising in Community and Chuck come to mind.
I scratched my head over it for a minute, too. I was thinking, "Geez, this is the third time he's fallen? They've started numbering them? It's the sequel to the critically acclaimed Richard Stallman Falls II: New York?"
On a more serious note, I hope the guy is okay. RMS rocks.
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing." - June 2006
That was just a big misunderstanding. He thought he was talking about people who really like feet.