I just bought an Ubuntu PC from Dell a couple of days ago. I looked around at a bunch of smaller retailers, and Dell was still cheaper by about 20% for equivalent hardware. I don't think the OEM OS is their only discount, not to mention other economies of scale.
Actually, what exactly is the business use of being able to edit spreadsheets on your mobile phone?
Well, it's more useful for displaying them than for editing them. That's come up for me a number of times. I have occasionally entered in a small amount of data into a new spreadsheet in order to check some basic statistics (e.g. standard deviation, annualized returns over a shorter period than what they're showing me) while in a meeting, too.
I think in general it's more that you will be displaying spreadsheets on the phone, and in a pinch you can make small changes to them. Hardly a make-or-break feature, but whether a phone has the capability to do so will influence my decision on my next phone somewhat.
here you go. It doesn't actually support your point of view; gasoline prices are set by supply & demand, and as the article says, we actually ship gasoline from Europe because of our shortage in refinery capacity.
Who needs music piped into every room of their house available constantly?
Who needs music?
Who needs an ipod to get through the day at work?
I do. I work on a trading floor as a quantitative analyst. When I need to concentrate, music is a hell of a lot less distracting than the conversations I can hear otherwise.
Incidentally, this is what you get for asking rhetorical questions on Slashdot. Some nerd will always take you literally anyway.
Yeah, no kidding. In fact, it isn't at all possible that the SEC could require Jobs to resign from Apple. They could fine Jobs, or ban him from working in the financial industry, but they can't force him to quit his position at Apple.
Maybe the IRS could get him on tax evasion, since they may feel he should have reported options received at a strike below market value as income, provided they vested that year.
It's a good thing it might be profitable, otherwise we would have to forget about the idea forever.
There are already plenty of nonprofitable ways of generating power. Paying people to run on giant hamster wheels, for instance.
Surely when our goal is efficiency the only ideas worth pursuing are those that can generate a profit. Or look at it from the other direction: all good ideas in power generation will generate enough energy output to cover the cost of capital investment and energy input; they will be profitable.
How about one pc with 2 monitors, a second pc that I connect to? Processor-intensive stuff gets done on the remote connection pc (for me, mostly monte carlo runs & bulk data updates), and then you still have a reference screen and a work screen for everything else. And you don't need two keyboards.
t's a classical example of showing why in statistics other measures are used than just the mathematical average; there is, for instance, the median which will give you the value that shows up most often in a given sample. The median number of arms of humans is, indeed, two.
Actually, the mode is the value that shows up most often. The median is the 50th percentile, i.e. the value in the middle of an ordered list of all observed values. In this particular case, both the median and the mode are 2, however, so your point still stands.
I appreciate your false dichotomy. That's real cute. I might suggest you look into the fastest growing financial sector in the world which is islamic banking. Islam forbids charging of interest (actually christianity also calls it a sin but the xtians don't really pay attention to that one so much) so the banks act more like venture capitalists.
Yeah, I probably shouldn't have put the Amazon thing in. Looks like you didn't quite make it to the end of my post, though. While private equity funds have been expanding into the Middle East, that's not really what investing under sharia is all about. Basically, the two components of Islamic banking are socially responsible investing (eg no alcohol companies), and structured products that skirt the prohibition against interest. It's fairly simple; say I want to borrow $10,000. You give me $10,000 worth of copper (or any commodity with a reasonably stable price), which remains in a warehouse, on condition that I sell it back to you for $11,000 in a year's time. No one has 'made money from money' since I held a nominal asset while I was making use of the loan.
For a simpler example, if I want a sharia-compliant mortgage, I just mortgage a house for, say, the present value of its actual worth plus interest payments over 20 years. It's not interest, I'm just paying more for the house than it's worth, and in installments.
It's usually pretty easy to overcome artificial constraints put on the financial system. You probably haven't, but ever wonder why Japanese institutions like their alternative investments to pay dividends? It's so that they can classify them as fixed income, rather than the speculative products they really are, and thus have a lower capital witholding requirement under BASEL II.
This 'right to copy' you speak of is not being taken away, it is being infringed upon. You would only steal it if you permanently took it away from the holder. For example, if you somehow conned them into signing the rights to you for free. By ignoring their right, you do not deprive them of it; otherwise, they would have no legal recourse.
So, in conclusion, we are infringing the copyrights of the RIAA, who has come close to stealing them from the recording artists.
The money does not go to job creators. It goes mostly to people who borrow to pay for a car, house or credit cards.
Well, not really. While some money goes to fund consumer debt, I think you'll find that a great deal more goes to promote capital investment. Banks do not just make loans for consumption, and people don't just invest in banks. They also invest in equity and corporate bonds, for example.
Moreover, even if every cent saved by one group where loaned out to consumers, their spending would still employ more people and generate more income for someone. In your example, someone has to be making the car, building the house, and selling the goods.
As a guess, I'd say bank accounts and savings have been in integrated capital markets for almost 100 years now. If this were all some vicious cycle in which banks skim ever greater amounts off the capital of the proletariat, surely they should have all of it by now.
People are charged interest because there is a risk that they will not repay there debt, and because there is a time value to money; banks are compensated for the opportunity cost of not having that money in their pocket. If you'd like to switch back to a barter economy, I'm sure there's a tribe in the Amazon that won't kill you. If you'd only like to find a place where interest is banned, you need look no further than the tribal protectorates of Pakistan (I'd say any country under Sharia, but it's actually pretty easy to get around the injunction against making money from money provided you have someone to structure the transaction).
...managed the investment of those funds astutely enough to make the conversion of those outstanding notes to common stock a huge win for both the company and creditors.
Convertible bonds aren't a win for existing stockholders, however, who find their stake diluted by the new issuance. To oversimplify, it would be like the US government printing money to pay debts.
economics? you know i submitted a request for an economics section for slashdot and it got rejected. just because this article was gaming related then it gets a mention on slashdot? is economics really not-geeky-enough for this crowd?
Do you really want to hear what this crowd thinks about economics? The oblique comments are infuriating enough.
Generally speaking, the SEC's insider trading investigators focus on conspicuous investments near events. For example, if someone shorts a thousand lots just before a firm announces an earnings shortfall, or if some buy calls before a company becomes the official target of a buyout. The standard for insider trading is trading with the possession of material, nonpublic information. There's nothing wrong with being consistently right (or lucky), but if that information were passed to the SEC (and the EULA had better say that it can be), the investor could be charged with racketeering provided he and his compatriots commanded a sufficient percentage of the float to make it appear that there was serious buying action in the stock. This is not insider trading, however. It's more of a Boiler Room-type scenario.
Not to mention that cattle would not be able to survive in the wild. They are one of humanity's earliest and longest-lived experiments in genetic engineering.
I'd like to disagree on a couple of things. (BTW, the following statements are for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as direct advice nor as a solicitation)
Firstly, I don't think a savings account is particularly good at its stated purpose. Given that you don't intend to need the money in the account at the drop of a hat, you could put the same amount in a money market fund (low to no commission if you go directly through the provider) and earn a couple points more per year. The downside would be that if you want to get the money out with low transaction costs, you'll have to wait 3 business days for it to clear from the fund back to your checking account. So for the cost of liquidity, you'll earn significantly more in an extremely safe investment.
Secondly, while you should pay back all your high interest debt as soon as possible, as a student you may have loans at a fixed rate below the current short term interest rate. Don't pay that off right away. If you owe $1000 at 3%, and you can get 5% in, say, VMMXX, then you're better off just paying the minimum on the debt and earning the interest with the rest of your savings.
Finally, I wouldn't say an SPX ETF is a particularly safe investment, especially in the current environment. If the submitter's time horizon is less than say 5 years, he should steer clear of even the S&P. If he's saving for the long term, on the other hand, he should take bigger risks, since he cares less about near term drawdowns. If he's investing in 3-5K chunks, it might be a little difficult to diversify meaningfully with ETFs or mutual funds, anyway.
Say iPods are 64% of their gross profit (i.e. before subtracting longer-term costs). Thats revenue - cost of sales. Their gross profit margin is
revenue / (revenue - cost of sales)
How precisely is the analyst going to back out the margin on an individual business unit from this data?
Since you only have figures in aggregate, you don't know what the margin is on iPods, just on iPods + computers + other stuff.
It's a fairly standard practice for companies with multiple lines of business to break out their income statements. What the analyst is asking for isn't unreasonable or a symptom of laziness.
In spite of what everyone else is saying in their replies, you're right within certain parameters. The productivity statistics they're quoting include capital investment as a factor, and hence don't exactly equate to just 'working harder'. Imagine a farmer sitting on a combine harvester compared to a farmer with a scythe. Noone's arguing that the first farmer isn't more productive, but is he working harder?
Marginal productivity certainly goes down when you work longer hours. How else would France end up more productive by these measures than the US?
I think you're confusing the goal of the act with its actual ramifications. Sarbanes-Oxley amounts to a regressive cost of doing business. Small firms pay a disproportionately larger share of their revenues to comply: they have to hire a lawyer or auditing firm when they could have done the paperwork themselves in the past. Meanwhile, larger corporations merely pay more to their existing compliance teams.
Meanwhile, financial companies, especially hedge funds, are increasingly choosing to set up shop in London rather than New York/Connecticut to escape the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC registration. Like them or not, these entities contribute a huge amount of money to local coffers: investors flock from all over the world to place capital in hedge funds, and they leave generally 2% of the investment and 20% of the profit annually with the fund managers.
No-one wants more catastrophes like Enron, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
If you tell them that Friday at 3pm, the a server is going down, they'll ignore it, and call you at 3:01 screaming that they are kicked off.
Maybe they were just annoyed that you chose to kick everyone off the server during trading hours, potentially costing the bank tens of millions of dollars.
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought an Ubuntu PC from Dell a couple of days ago. I looked around at a bunch of smaller retailers, and Dell was still cheaper by about 20% for equivalent hardware. I don't think the OEM OS is their only discount, not to mention other economies of scale.
Well, it's more useful for displaying them than for editing them. That's come up for me a number of times. I have occasionally entered in a small amount of data into a new spreadsheet in order to check some basic statistics (e.g. standard deviation, annualized returns over a shorter period than what they're showing me) while in a meeting, too.
I think in general it's more that you will be displaying spreadsheets on the phone, and in a pinch you can make small changes to them. Hardly a make-or-break feature, but whether a phone has the capability to do so will influence my decision on my next phone somewhat.
here you go. It doesn't actually support your point of view; gasoline prices are set by supply & demand, and as the article says, we actually ship gasoline from Europe because of our shortage in refinery capacity.
Who needs music?
Who needs an ipod to get through the day at work?
I do. I work on a trading floor as a quantitative analyst. When I need to concentrate, music is a hell of a lot less distracting than the conversations I can hear otherwise.
Incidentally, this is what you get for asking rhetorical questions on Slashdot. Some nerd will always take you literally anyway.
Yikes, and I was pretty sure, too. My apologies.
Yeah, no kidding. In fact, it isn't at all possible that the SEC could require Jobs to resign from Apple. They could fine Jobs, or ban him from working in the financial industry, but they can't force him to quit his position at Apple. Maybe the IRS could get him on tax evasion, since they may feel he should have reported options received at a strike below market value as income, provided they vested that year.
I dunno, the fact that he's willing to state the correlation coefficient so precisely makes me leary of his own statistical expertise.
There are already plenty of nonprofitable ways of generating power. Paying people to run on giant hamster wheels, for instance.
Surely when our goal is efficiency the only ideas worth pursuing are those that can generate a profit. Or look at it from the other direction: all good ideas in power generation will generate enough energy output to cover the cost of capital investment and energy input; they will be profitable.
How about one pc with 2 monitors, a second pc that I connect to? Processor-intensive stuff gets done on the remote connection pc (for me, mostly monte carlo runs & bulk data updates), and then you still have a reference screen and a work screen for everything else. And you don't need two keyboards.
I'm a fan of Firefly, but Cowboy Bebop was definitely first on this one. Or do we not count anime?
Actually, the mode is the value that shows up most often. The median is the 50th percentile, i.e. the value in the middle of an ordered list of all observed values. In this particular case, both the median and the mode are 2, however, so your point still stands.
Yeah, I probably shouldn't have put the Amazon thing in. Looks like you didn't quite make it to the end of my post, though. While private equity funds have been expanding into the Middle East, that's not really what investing under sharia is all about. Basically, the two components of Islamic banking are socially responsible investing (eg no alcohol companies), and structured products that skirt the prohibition against interest. It's fairly simple; say I want to borrow $10,000. You give me $10,000 worth of copper (or any commodity with a reasonably stable price), which remains in a warehouse, on condition that I sell it back to you for $11,000 in a year's time. No one has 'made money from money' since I held a nominal asset while I was making use of the loan.
For a simpler example, if I want a sharia-compliant mortgage, I just mortgage a house for, say, the present value of its actual worth plus interest payments over 20 years. It's not interest, I'm just paying more for the house than it's worth, and in installments.
It's usually pretty easy to overcome artificial constraints put on the financial system. You probably haven't, but ever wonder why Japanese institutions like their alternative investments to pay dividends? It's so that they can classify them as fixed income, rather than the speculative products they really are, and thus have a lower capital witholding requirement under BASEL II.
So, in conclusion, we are infringing the copyrights of the RIAA, who has come close to stealing them from the recording artists.
Well, not really. While some money goes to fund consumer debt, I think you'll find that a great deal more goes to promote capital investment. Banks do not just make loans for consumption, and people don't just invest in banks. They also invest in equity and corporate bonds, for example.
Moreover, even if every cent saved by one group where loaned out to consumers, their spending would still employ more people and generate more income for someone. In your example, someone has to be making the car, building the house, and selling the goods.
As a guess, I'd say bank accounts and savings have been in integrated capital markets for almost 100 years now. If this were all some vicious cycle in which banks skim ever greater amounts off the capital of the proletariat, surely they should have all of it by now.
People are charged interest because there is a risk that they will not repay there debt, and because there is a time value to money; banks are compensated for the opportunity cost of not having that money in their pocket. If you'd like to switch back to a barter economy, I'm sure there's a tribe in the Amazon that won't kill you. If you'd only like to find a place where interest is banned, you need look no further than the tribal protectorates of Pakistan (I'd say any country under Sharia, but it's actually pretty easy to get around the injunction against making money from money provided you have someone to structure the transaction).
Convertible bonds aren't a win for existing stockholders, however, who find their stake diluted by the new issuance. To oversimplify, it would be like the US government printing money to pay debts.
Yeah, what they need is to establish some kind of 'market' where dealers establish the price of options based on the aggregate demand. Oh, wait...
Do you really want to hear what this crowd thinks about economics? The oblique comments are infuriating enough.
Generally speaking, the SEC's insider trading investigators focus on conspicuous investments near events. For example, if someone shorts a thousand lots just before a firm announces an earnings shortfall, or if some buy calls before a company becomes the official target of a buyout. The standard for insider trading is trading with the possession of material, nonpublic information. There's nothing wrong with being consistently right (or lucky), but if that information were passed to the SEC (and the EULA had better say that it can be), the investor could be charged with racketeering provided he and his compatriots commanded a sufficient percentage of the float to make it appear that there was serious buying action in the stock. This is not insider trading, however. It's more of a Boiler Room-type scenario.
Not to mention that cattle would not be able to survive in the wild. They are one of humanity's earliest and longest-lived experiments in genetic engineering.
RenTec is in the house?
Firstly, I don't think a savings account is particularly good at its stated purpose. Given that you don't intend to need the money in the account at the drop of a hat, you could put the same amount in a money market fund (low to no commission if you go directly through the provider) and earn a couple points more per year. The downside would be that if you want to get the money out with low transaction costs, you'll have to wait 3 business days for it to clear from the fund back to your checking account. So for the cost of liquidity, you'll earn significantly more in an extremely safe investment.
Secondly, while you should pay back all your high interest debt as soon as possible, as a student you may have loans at a fixed rate below the current short term interest rate. Don't pay that off right away. If you owe $1000 at 3%, and you can get 5% in, say, VMMXX, then you're better off just paying the minimum on the debt and earning the interest with the rest of your savings.
Finally, I wouldn't say an SPX ETF is a particularly safe investment, especially in the current environment. If the submitter's time horizon is less than say 5 years, he should steer clear of even the S&P. If he's saving for the long term, on the other hand, he should take bigger risks, since he cares less about near term drawdowns. If he's investing in 3-5K chunks, it might be a little difficult to diversify meaningfully with ETFs or mutual funds, anyway.
Say iPods are 64% of their gross profit (i.e. before subtracting longer-term costs). Thats revenue - cost of sales. Their gross profit margin is
How precisely is the analyst going to back out the margin on an individual business unit from this data? Since you only have figures in aggregate, you don't know what the margin is on iPods, just on iPods + computers + other stuff.
It's a fairly standard practice for companies with multiple lines of business to break out their income statements. What the analyst is asking for isn't unreasonable or a symptom of laziness.
Marginal productivity certainly goes down when you work longer hours. How else would France end up more productive by these measures than the US?
Meanwhile, financial companies, especially hedge funds, are increasingly choosing to set up shop in London rather than New York/Connecticut to escape the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC registration. Like them or not, these entities contribute a huge amount of money to local coffers: investors flock from all over the world to place capital in hedge funds, and they leave generally 2% of the investment and 20% of the profit annually with the fund managers.
No-one wants more catastrophes like Enron, but that doesn't mean we should throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Maybe they were just annoyed that you chose to kick everyone off the server during trading hours, potentially costing the bank tens of millions of dollars.