Their shares aren't diluted if, while they hold the same number of shares, there are more shares total now in a larger and more valuable company. They own less, true, but of a proportionately more valuable entity (Apple + Adobe) overall. That should be a wash, unless Apple overpays for Adobe, in which case Apple management should be tossed out of the airplane with an anvil instead of a parachute.
There is no way Apple would be able to buy Adobe without it being dilutive to earnings. Apple only has a market cap of around $60 billion. I doubt they would get Adobe for less than $30 billion dollars. Now, Apple could use most of their $8 billion warchest, issue some long term debt, and do the remainder in stock, but the deal would still be dilutive.
If Adobe stock were converted to new Apple shares that properly reflect the increased value of Apple + Adobe, it would cost them the amount of printing the new certificates and mailing them, which is essentially nothing. That assumes a friendly takeover/merger.
This isn't how transactions work in public financial markets. It would cost Apple BILLIONS of dollars in stock and cash and/or debt in some combination to acquire Adobe friendly takeover or not. Adobe is a publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders. The board has a LEGAL obligation to the shareholders. They can't just hand over the company to Apple and print new certificates even if for some INSANE reason they wanted to in the interest of a "friendly" merger.
The only way shareholders would approve a buyout is if it was at a significantly higher price than where Adobe currently trades (which as mentioned is $23.65 billion). Unless the fortunes of the overall stock market, or Adobe change dramatically, it will cost Apple a hell of a lot to acquire Adobe, friendly takeover or not.
Even in an all stock transaction, existing Apple shareholders would pay for the transaction, as the value of their shares would be heavily diluted (new shares would be issued, making each existing share worth less).
Seriously, though, how does one value these things? For that matter, what intellectual property is this? The article is rather vague.
It's IP based off an acquistion of a company called Veritas that the public financial market valued at over $10 billion in total. What appears to have happened here is that Symantec doesn't believe that something they bought in the deal is worth anything near what the IRS is claiming it is worth. I'm no CPA but I'm guessing it's related to how Symantec is calculating the goodwill involved in the acquistion.
I am so tired of people saying: I love apple OS, but i will never pay for it until they sell it for my shitty dell hardware! Well, then it wouldn't be the Apple that is able to be so high quality, and you wouldn't want it anyway!
You're tired of hearing this...Many of us are tired of hearing about how GREAT Apple's desktop hardware is from fanbois. The argument about how hard it would be for Apple to maintain quality on a beige box modern day PC system is a flawed one. Anyone who has a relatively new PC with normal components is not going to have major driver issues these days. Welcome to 2006. There are two unified graphics drivers to support, ATI and Nvidia. Most integrated components are based off a limited number of chipsets, and there are a small number of major manufacturers of expansion cards.
There will always be a few exceptions for the more exotic configurations on the bleeding edge (who should be able to troubleshoot driver issues on their own anyways), and people should know better than to expect support for an ISA card.
Apple's hardware is nothing special that can't be replicated by another builder, and the quality control argument is a weak one on the hardware front.
I know police who catch these bastards. Either you're so distant from reality that you think people don't really do evil things and it's all just "Big Brother"'s fault, or you just don't want the police to find your underage porn collection.
So... which is it?
You're missing the point. I think people do evil things all the time. I also think the police should do their best to catch criminals within a legal system that balances the rights and freedoms of an individual against being given carte blanche. The authorities are perfectly capable of pursuing online sex offenders without mandatory data retention laws.
The US government is already abusing the Patriot Act, and AT&T apparently has plugged a pipe directly into the NSA, so you'll have to excuse me for blaming "Big Brother" and being somewhat hesitant to hand over yet another power to the state.
This law has nothing to do with catching child porn offenders and everything to do with the government finding another way to exert more control over the general populace. You must be "distant from reality" if you think otherwise.
But really, it's a very large problem. My hometown (pop 30,000) has caught something like 7 online preditors in the past 2 years
I would say that the inability of many slashdotters to spell correctly is a much more serious problem to worry about. I won't even go into the issue of incorrectly extrapolating statistics based on your little slice of heaven on earth, or the morality of using said statistics to justify a police state in the name of saving the children.
The iPod is a device for playing your music. It excels at this.
It is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a device for sharing music. The vast majority of sharing music is not done legally. If iPod had taken 'sharing music' as one of its goals, if Apple had made it easy to use it to give people copies of your music and take copies of their music, then the music industry would have long since sued Apple and won - and laws would have been passed to restrict what mp3 players are allowed to do.
There are plenty of other mp3 players out there that make adding music to them as simple as dragging a song from your PC to the player. There is such a thing (at least for the time being) as fair use here. These other players operate within the current laws. People should not be forced to be tied to Itunes to enjoy the full functionality of the player.
While this type of functionality may make sharing easier, honest consumers who don't want to be tied down to Apple's lousy interface on the PC (or who just prefer a different way of managing their library) shouldn't have their choice restricted.
To argue that this is some kind of benefit as the parent poster did is nonsense.
Are you complaining that there's no GUI way to copy sound clips directly out of the iPod's music repository? That's like complaining there's no easy way to get at your toaster's heating coils. You're taking an appliance that does a specific job very well, and complaining that it doesn't give you a lot of options for doing something it's not intended to do. iPod is designed to sync up with the iTunes library, and I like that degree of simplicity. It's not designed to let you copy music in and out of its library by hand.
How does this parent get modded informative? Suddenly Apple's DRM is a "design" choice to make things simpler for the user. I'm fine with my Ipod interfacing easily with Itunes, but there's no reason other than DRM to make it a royal pain in the ass to work with your music collection using the normal explorer or another application.
Some of us don't want to use Itunes on a PC to manage our music collection. Expecting to be able to see filenames that make sense with metadata in plain site and easy transfers between the Ipod and PC shouldn't be asking for the moon.
This isn't anything like trying to get at a toaster's heating coils. It's like wanting to make your toast light, but being unable to because the toaster manufacturer has decided that everyone should have their toast dark, and extra dry to sell more butter for the butter lobby.
That explanation for the 100 song limit is flawed. All the device has to do is check the available amount of flash space to determine how many songs can fit on it. It makes absolutely no difference if it is a 512 meg or a 4 Gig drive.
The limit doesn't make "perfect since"; it makes no sense whatsoever.
You're wrong about me not getting it...It is entirely reasonable to expect that Apple is capable of releasing an OS that runs on MOST current hardware on the Intel/AMD side.
There are a limited number of MB chipsets to support to cover the majority of newer PCs. There are only two main graphics vendors to get on board, ATI and Nvidia (one already is).
Of course there is other hardware that would need to be supported, and there would be some growing pains, but the Intel/AMD platform is in a transition state anyways moving to PCI-e peripherals.
Apple could easily avoid confusion by stating a minimum spec that is fairly cutting edge (pci-e, etc.).
Apple itself has had some of the same growing pains in past internal transitions between hardware generations and large scale OS upgrades.
People who don't want to worry about compatibility issues, and don't mind burning dollar bills can continue to purchase Apple produced hardware with is also aesthetically pleasing. The rest of us who would like to run OS X without being locked into Apple's proprietary hardware scheme would have an option other than piracy.
Apple's number one priority is growing earnings; they are cutting themselves out of a potentially enormous stream of them by keeping the Intel platform closed.
If Apple had a bit more vision, they would allow OS X to run across any Intel platform that met the minimum requirements ala M$.
They would be in a position to make much more money off of straight licensing of the OS which is a much higher margin product than hardware (even with their artificially high prices).
Piracy is always an issue, but it doesn't stop M$ from making a fortune off of their software.
It would also give Apple inroads into the corporate desktop if they were aggressive enough. They could pursue partnerships with companies like Dell, etc.
Instead, by keeping the hardware proprietary even in an Intel environment, they are severely limiting their ability to grow marketshare. Corporate IT won't even glance at desktops in bulk at Apple's prices.
Apple has a golden opportunity here (which due to Jobs will never happen). They should spinoff the hardware division of Apple as a separate company, and have the parent focus on software.
In the end, OS X will still be cracked to run on plain vanilla hardware.
Tivo will let you do this, at least the older version I have will. You can set it to record manually for a given amount of time on a given channel without paying any subscription fee. If that's all you want it for, just pick up an old one used on ebay or something. I'm sure you could get one incredibly cheap.
The type of blogging you're referring to is just one of many possibilities. Those blogs are often egotistic, tired windows into an uninteresting life.
The blogosphere is a big place. There are a ton of high quality blogs written by subject matter experts that are updated on a regular basis for a wide variety of topics. Some of these are both well written and often incredibly informative.
I often scan a list of ones related to technology, investing/trading, books/publishing, wine, etc.
The signal to noise ratio may tend toward the low side, but there are many interesting areas to explore in blogs.
The idea of a blog as a personal diary of life's travails is one tiny piece of what they actually are.
He probably downloaded it because in cases where activation is required, that code is stripped out by the pirate release group, so it's not always as simple as just getting a keygen.
Spoken like a true Apple fanboy... Why should a consumer have to buy additional products to ensure that an item operates like it should in the first place?!
The Nanos are marketed as being pocket sized, and appear to scratch horribly under very typical everyday conditions.
Apple should have used a better material for the face.
Personally, I was looking forward to picking one of these up, but am not going to consider it until Apple steps up and fixes this issue. It's not like these are cheap throwaway style items.
I don't think it's too much to ask for a scratch resistant screen on a $200+ item.
Anyone want to explain the real world applications of this to someone who is considering turning in his nerd credentials after being unable to get the gist of this from the write up...and please don't tell me to RTFA, this is after all/.!
"Saying that P2P is an important network standard and therefore grokster cannot be held liable for what it enables with its software is the equivalent of saying that, since libraries are essential to the transmission of information, the government cannot request that the book "Practical Guide to Terrorist Attacks" be taken off library shelves."
Your analogy inadvertently argues for the opposite of what you and MGM are proposing. Many of us still believe that people have the right to publish books without government censorship or interference.
Can we now expect the same lack of effort on/. from the moderators that we get from the editors?
The parent was a joke employing wordplay regarding the fact that Adobe has named its open source releases Adam and Eve. The Apple comment is referencing the Downfall of mankind via Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, not an attack on the Apple corporation trolling for trouble.
Hmmm, the jokes aren't as funny when they have to be explained in detail to triggerhappy mods...
It looks like the industry are willing to do their best to kill the golden goose as a gosling. 99 cents is a very powerful psychological pricepoint with consumers. I would guess raising prices above it at this early stage in the online legal music game would make many people think twice about downloading and paying for it.
It seems the music industry is determined to continue to gouge customers. They never let CD prices fall significantly as production costs fell, and it looks like they are going to be just as thick headed with a nascent industry that needs support to continue to grow.
Great job guys!
Re:This is actually pretty interesting...
on
MP3beamer Released
·
· Score: 1
Thanks for the reply. I hesitate to admit this on/. but I'm not up on all the Linux solutions since I have fallen to the XP darkside (for gaming first and foremost).
Slashdot Mirror
Their shares aren't diluted if, while they hold the same number of shares, there are more shares total now in a larger and more valuable company. They own less, true, but of a proportionately more valuable entity (Apple + Adobe) overall. That should be a wash, unless Apple overpays for Adobe, in which case Apple management should be tossed out of the airplane with an anvil instead of a parachute. There is no way Apple would be able to buy Adobe without it being dilutive to earnings. Apple only has a market cap of around $60 billion. I doubt they would get Adobe for less than $30 billion dollars. Now, Apple could use most of their $8 billion warchest, issue some long term debt, and do the remainder in stock, but the deal would still be dilutive.
This isn't how transactions work in public financial markets. It would cost Apple BILLIONS of dollars in stock and cash and/or debt in some combination to acquire Adobe friendly takeover or not. Adobe is a publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders. The board has a LEGAL obligation to the shareholders. They can't just hand over the company to Apple and print new certificates even if for some INSANE reason they wanted to in the interest of a "friendly" merger.
The only way shareholders would approve a buyout is if it was at a significantly higher price than where Adobe currently trades (which as mentioned is $23.65 billion). Unless the fortunes of the overall stock market, or Adobe change dramatically, it will cost Apple a hell of a lot to acquire Adobe, friendly takeover or not.
Even in an all stock transaction, existing Apple shareholders would pay for the transaction, as the value of their shares would be heavily diluted (new shares would be issued, making each existing share worth less).
It's IP based off an acquistion of a company called Veritas that the public financial market valued at over $10 billion in total. What appears to have happened here is that Symantec doesn't believe that something they bought in the deal is worth anything near what the IRS is claiming it is worth. I'm no CPA but I'm guessing it's related to how Symantec is calculating the goodwill involved in the acquistion.
You're tired of hearing this...Many of us are tired of hearing about how GREAT Apple's desktop hardware is from fanbois. The argument about how hard it would be for Apple to maintain quality on a beige box modern day PC system is a flawed one. Anyone who has a relatively new PC with normal components is not going to have major driver issues these days. Welcome to 2006. There are two unified graphics drivers to support, ATI and Nvidia. Most integrated components are based off a limited number of chipsets, and there are a small number of major manufacturers of expansion cards.
There will always be a few exceptions for the more exotic configurations on the bleeding edge (who should be able to troubleshoot driver issues on their own anyways), and people should know better than to expect support for an ISA card. Apple's hardware is nothing special that can't be replicated by another builder, and the quality control argument is a weak one on the hardware front.
I know police who catch these bastards. Either you're so distant from reality that you think people don't really do evil things and it's all just "Big Brother"'s fault, or you just don't want the police to find your underage porn collection.
So... which is it?
You're missing the point. I think people do evil things all the time. I also think the police should do their best to catch criminals within a legal system that balances the rights and freedoms of an individual against being given carte blanche. The authorities are perfectly capable of pursuing online sex offenders without mandatory data retention laws. The US government is already abusing the Patriot Act, and AT&T apparently has plugged a pipe directly into the NSA, so you'll have to excuse me for blaming "Big Brother" and being somewhat hesitant to hand over yet another power to the state. This law has nothing to do with catching child porn offenders and everything to do with the government finding another way to exert more control over the general populace. You must be "distant from reality" if you think otherwise.I would say that the inability of many slashdotters to spell correctly is a much more serious problem to worry about. I won't even go into the issue of incorrectly extrapolating statistics based on your little slice of heaven on earth, or the morality of using said statistics to justify a police state in the name of saving the children.
There are plenty of other mp3 players out there that make adding music to them as simple as dragging a song from your PC to the player. There is such a thing (at least for the time being) as fair use here. These other players operate within the current laws. People should not be forced to be tied to Itunes to enjoy the full functionality of the player.
While this type of functionality may make sharing easier, honest consumers who don't want to be tied down to Apple's lousy interface on the PC (or who just prefer a different way of managing their library) shouldn't have their choice restricted.
To argue that this is some kind of benefit as the parent poster did is nonsense.
How does this parent get modded informative? Suddenly Apple's DRM is a "design" choice to make things simpler for the user. I'm fine with my Ipod interfacing easily with Itunes, but there's no reason other than DRM to make it a royal pain in the ass to work with your music collection using the normal explorer or another application. Some of us don't want to use Itunes on a PC to manage our music collection. Expecting to be able to see filenames that make sense with metadata in plain site and easy transfers between the Ipod and PC shouldn't be asking for the moon. This isn't anything like trying to get at a toaster's heating coils. It's like wanting to make your toast light, but being unable to because the toaster manufacturer has decided that everyone should have their toast dark, and extra dry to sell more butter for the butter lobby.
That explanation for the 100 song limit is flawed. All the device has to do is check the available amount of flash space to determine how many songs can fit on it. It makes absolutely no difference if it is a 512 meg or a 4 Gig drive.
The limit doesn't make "perfect since"; it makes no sense whatsoever.
I'd say you're wrong...
The RAZR has been a tremendous success; the ROKR has been a tremendous flop.
The 100 song limitation is one of the many flaws that has led to the ROKR's lack of success.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-1035_22-5900320.html
You're wrong about me not getting it...It is entirely reasonable to expect that Apple is capable of releasing an OS that runs on MOST current hardware on the Intel/AMD side.
There are a limited number of MB chipsets to support to cover the majority of newer PCs. There are only two main graphics vendors to get on board, ATI and Nvidia (one already is).
Of course there is other hardware that would need to be supported, and there would be some growing pains, but the Intel/AMD platform is in a transition state anyways moving to PCI-e peripherals.
Apple could easily avoid confusion by stating a minimum spec that is fairly cutting edge (pci-e, etc.).
Apple itself has had some of the same growing pains in past internal transitions between hardware generations and large scale OS upgrades.
People who don't want to worry about compatibility issues, and don't mind burning dollar bills can continue to purchase Apple produced hardware with is also aesthetically pleasing. The rest of us who would like to run OS X without being locked into Apple's proprietary hardware scheme would have an option other than piracy.
Apple's number one priority is growing earnings; they are cutting themselves out of a potentially enormous stream of them by keeping the Intel platform closed.
If Apple had a bit more vision, they would allow OS X to run across any Intel platform that met the minimum requirements ala M$. They would be in a position to make much more money off of straight licensing of the OS which is a much higher margin product than hardware (even with their artificially high prices). Piracy is always an issue, but it doesn't stop M$ from making a fortune off of their software. It would also give Apple inroads into the corporate desktop if they were aggressive enough. They could pursue partnerships with companies like Dell, etc. Instead, by keeping the hardware proprietary even in an Intel environment, they are severely limiting their ability to grow marketshare. Corporate IT won't even glance at desktops in bulk at Apple's prices. Apple has a golden opportunity here (which due to Jobs will never happen). They should spinoff the hardware division of Apple as a separate company, and have the parent focus on software. In the end, OS X will still be cracked to run on plain vanilla hardware.
This is Slashdot... Trust me, we believe you!
Tivo will let you do this, at least the older version I have will. You can set it to record manually for a given amount of time on a given channel without paying any subscription fee. If that's all you want it for, just pick up an old one used on ebay or something. I'm sure you could get one incredibly cheap.
The type of blogging you're referring to is just one of many possibilities. Those blogs are often egotistic, tired windows into an uninteresting life. The blogosphere is a big place. There are a ton of high quality blogs written by subject matter experts that are updated on a regular basis for a wide variety of topics. Some of these are both well written and often incredibly informative. I often scan a list of ones related to technology, investing/trading, books/publishing, wine, etc. The signal to noise ratio may tend toward the low side, but there are many interesting areas to explore in blogs. The idea of a blog as a personal diary of life's travails is one tiny piece of what they actually are.
Those aren't the scenes you're looking for...
He probably downloaded it because in cases where activation is required, that code is stripped out by the pirate release group, so it's not always as simple as just getting a keygen.
Spoken like a true Apple fanboy... Why should a consumer have to buy additional products to ensure that an item operates like it should in the first place?! The Nanos are marketed as being pocket sized, and appear to scratch horribly under very typical everyday conditions. Apple should have used a better material for the face. Personally, I was looking forward to picking one of these up, but am not going to consider it until Apple steps up and fixes this issue. It's not like these are cheap throwaway style items. I don't think it's too much to ask for a scratch resistant screen on a $200+ item.
Thanks for clearing that up. Now it all makes perfect sense!
Anyone want to explain the real world applications of this to someone who is considering turning in his nerd credentials after being unable to get the gist of this from the write up...and please don't tell me to RTFA, this is after all /.!
Ehrm...And who exactly doesn't frown on D&D, other than sadistic DMs and the dicerollers who love them?
Elmar, a level 12 half elf thief walks into a college party:
Rolling 20 sided die, possible outcomes:
1-15 Every girl there that happens to notice Elmar laughs and shakes their head sadly - Charisma -3
16-18 Other partygoers dump beer on nerd taunting him unmercifully - Defense -3
19 Jocks perform +5 super atomic wedgie on Elmar grievously injuring him
20 It is dark in the closet you are locked in. You are likely to be eaten by a GRUE.
"Saying that P2P is an important network standard and therefore grokster cannot be held liable for what it enables with its software is the equivalent of saying that, since libraries are essential to the transmission of information, the government cannot request that the book "Practical Guide to Terrorist Attacks" be taken off library shelves."
Your analogy inadvertently argues for the opposite of what you and MGM are proposing. Many of us still believe that people have the right to publish books without government censorship or interference.
Can we now expect the same lack of effort on /. from the moderators that we get from the editors?
The parent was a joke employing wordplay regarding the fact that Adobe has named its open source releases Adam and Eve. The Apple comment is referencing the Downfall of mankind via Original Sin in the Garden of Eden, not an attack on the Apple corporation trolling for trouble.
Hmmm, the jokes aren't as funny when they have to be explained in detail to triggerhappy mods...
It looks like the industry are willing to do their best to kill the golden goose as a gosling. 99 cents is a very powerful psychological pricepoint with consumers. I would guess raising prices above it at this early stage in the online legal music game would make many people think twice about downloading and paying for it.
It seems the music industry is determined to continue to gouge customers. They never let CD prices fall significantly as production costs fell, and it looks like they are going to be just as thick headed with a nascent industry that needs support to continue to grow.
Great job guys!
Thanks for the reply. I hesitate to admit this on /. but I'm not up on all the Linux solutions since I have fallen to the XP darkside (for gaming first and foremost).