Is there any demonstrated correlation between college grads and losing a few teaching days?
10 calendar days per year less than the national average. 1 hour less per day than the national average. This adds up to Chicago students losing two full school years (or more) compared to the national average by the time they get to college.
I don't know if you really need a scientific study to make the demonstration that 2 years is a huge gap, but one thing is for sure: the odds that such study could be done by someone who went to school in Chicago are tiny - with a college graduation rate of 12%, which is 1/3 of the national average and even lower than Alaska.
By the capitalist wreckers who are trying to smash the unions and destroy public education.
Or do you think all those millionaires like Bill Gates and Obama who send their kids to elite private schools give a shit about public school students?
Interestingly, Obama always supported the all-powerful teachers union in Chicago, who managed to get working conditions so good for their members that the schools had to cut the number of teaching days to afford those gold-plated teachers. As a direct consequence, this is one of the areas in the country with the lowest ratio of college grads. Yes we can!
Antonick will appeal the ruling, his lawyers said. "The evidence showed they used his source code without permission," said attorney Robert Carey.
And so it's overturned, but will be appeled.
I think I'm going to trust the little guy getting screwed on this one.
One does not get to appeal just because he lost his case and wishes to give it another go. One gets to appeal because there is some evidence that the judge overseeing the case may have made a mistake as far as the law is concerned, such as giving wrong instructions to the jury or rejecting a valid motion. So to bring the case in front of a second judge means that already there was a valid concern about the behavior of the first judge; winning this appeal means that the second judge agrees that something went wrong. It usually has nothing to do with the actual dispute.
I suggest speculating why the source code of the possible derived version was not made available to the court or the expert witness.
It may have been completely innocent worry about trade secrets but there are other possibilities, such as the unwillingness to incriminate themselves, that sound more likely to me.
Sounds plausible: "Your honor, I invoke the fifth, there is no way I will show you the source code of Module1.bas".
An expert saying "The answer is cactus" and the defense saying nothing would lead to a finding (in civil) that the answer is cactus. With one witness, one word, and no response, the answer will always be for the plaintiff. That's how preponderance should (and does) work.
No. The preponderance of evidence means that the plaintiff must make the demonstration that it is more likely than not that what he claims is true (unlike a murder trial where there must be no doubt). It does not mean that the defense has to contradict the plaintiff or provide any kind of evidence.
If you sit in a jury and the plaintiff claims that the defendant is a witch who prevented him from winning the lottery, you don't have to agree and award him 25 millions even if the defendant does not contradict that claim. The jury is expected to come to their own conclusions based on the evidence presented in court, and it does not matter who came up with it. If it's more likely than not that the claim is wrong, the jury has to find for the defendant.
That sounds like a bad ruling. If the expert was right, then the jury was right. If the expert was wrong, then the defense should have shown them side-by-side to show the differences.
The defense does not have to provide any evidence (unless they make claims of their own). It is always up to the party who initiates the lawsuit to either prove without reasonable doubt (in criminal law) or to show preponderance of evidence (civil law).
When a defendant has deeper pockets than the other party, it can be a good trial strategy to suffer in silence in front of a jury then have the case reviewed on appeal. On one hand cooler heads prevail (jurors often feel for the smaller guy) and also there is always the chance that the other party will run out of money and give up. Being a civil case this is fair game.
But those 20% are just 20%. You cater to the other 80%.
You build for the majority of your users. If you're in the minority, you deal with it, find a competitor who offers that functionality, or you build your own.
It is an unusual approach to remove a feature because "only 20%" of people are using it. Plus, they make billions, it's not as if they were on a tiny budget and had to make tough decisions in cutting features to save on future maintenance work.
No, this is in line with other "improvements" on Gmail or Google search. They have lost touch with reality and make decisions according to internal politics alone, exactly like it happened in the US car industry. Now if you will excuse me I have to take my Fiat Cherokee to the carwash.
I have a reasonable expectation I won't get the price I agree to.
That's preposterous. Do you typically shop online with the intent of paying half of the posted price because of a buggy shopping cart? If you see a TV on sale at $500 and you add that TV to your shopping cart, you should "expect" to pay $500, not $250.
That's exactly what happened in this situation. Brick did not post a price then came back later to cancel orders after figuring out that it was not cost-effective for them to sell at that price (something Best Buy did a few times in the past). There was a bug in the checkout process, that's a whole different story.
You must be one of those people who ask for a free apple pie at McDonalds when you get a regular Coke instead of the Diet Coke you asked for. Guess what: being a customer does not put you on a pedestal, and if you think that a company that does not agree to let people get away with an invoicing error deserves a "bad rep" you are correct that Brick (or any other company) does not need you as a customer.
You know what con artists say about their marks: if someone is too stupid to hold on to their money it's ok to take it from them. Basically when someone knowingly pays 50% of the posted price during an online transaction and expects that there will be no follow-up from the seller they are applying the same logic, and to add insult to the injury they dare come out publicly and throw a fit because the other party is not bending over to let them enjoy the spoils of victory.
The issue here is not that Brick needs PR lessons, it's that people need to learn that abusing a broken system is wrong. Until then it will remain necessary to bolt park benches to the ground and to put chains on the pens at the DMV. Thank you for making the world such a nice place.
Return customers are overrated. Most people shop for low prices and Brick is not in a niche market so they have little to gain from good PR. Actually this incident may scare away the kind of people they don't need as customers, and whatever money they get back will come from people who don't hold this mistake against Brick and will come shop again if they happen to need something and the price is right.
Good PR is good, but depending on the amount wasted on that mistake it may be more profitable to ask for money back and mitigate the loss.
Taking requirements to the letter instead of using common sense is as close as it gets to passive-aggressive behavior in IT.
Just look at the definition: "an educational tool that helps patients, caregivers, or authorized representatives understand and communicate their beliefs and preferences related to their treatment options, and to decide with their health care provider what treatments are best for them based on their treatment options, scientific evidence, circumstances, beliefs, and preferences"
Before saying that "any computer system that was attempting to deliver to these requirements was doomed from day one", did you have a look at Wikipedia? It does exactly that. Just add a bookmarking feature linked to the patient account and you have a simple solution.
But no, of course, people will insist to create committees filled with system architects, business analysts, users advocates, communication facilitators and other meeting-fillers to create a consensus with all stakeholders and define a common vision that will then be communicated to the various task forces for approval, before being reviewed during a sprint planning session by a group of developers who will find a way to translate the requirements in a justification to create a json API connected to a NoSQL database with three cache tiers including of course html5 local storage. Of course it's doomed if you work that way.
Not convinced? Look at the requirements with a simple Wikipedia solution in mind:
(2) REQUIREMENTS FOR PATIENT DECISION AIDS—Patient decision aids developed and produced pursuant to a grant or contract under paragraph (1)— (A) shall be designed to engage patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives in informed decision making with health care providers; (B) shall present up-to-date clinical evidence about the risks and benefits of treatment options in a form and manner that is age-appropriate and can be adapted for patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives from a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds to reflect the varying needs of consumers and diverse levels of health literacy; (C) shall, where appropriate, explain why there is a lack of evidence to support one treatment option over another; and (D) shall address health care decisions across the age span, including those affecting vulnerable populations including children.
The problem is not the technology or the process. The problem is common sense.
Your numbers don't make sense. If there are 4.3 billions cell phone subscribers worldwide and people change their phone every 18 months, this would mean that almost 2 billion new phones are sold every year; yet the cell phone industry has yet to ship 1 billion units in any given year (they hover in the 750-800 million units). Given the current production level, your 4.3 subscribers cannot replace their device more than once every 4 years, which is basically on par with PC evergreening.
The cell phone industry is still in its growth phase but it will soon reach market saturation. Anyone who follows quarterly numbers can already see that because most of the recent growth in the smartphone segment is done at the expense of the feature phone segment and is not in the customer acquisition bucket; once the transition to smartphones is completed you can bet that people will start predicting "the death of smartphones" like they did for the death of PC because morons don't understand that a commodity industry with little or no growth is not the same as a dead industry.
As for pointing the finger at PC vendors who chased the market share by cutting prices: what do you think all the big smartphone players are doing at the moment? Ever heard of the iPhone 5C? Or the low-end Lumias? It's the same thing. And in this cutthroat market Apple is already on the losing side because they can't afford to sell cheap phones (because of brand image as well as production costs) but more and more people can see that a $600 iPhone is not truly worth 4x more than a $150 Lumia WP or LG Android. Which explains why the iPhone took a dive from 45% to a mere 12% market share in less than 2 years.
This does not mean that Apple is dying, but there is a limit to growth and overhype, and we are just starting to see that in their quarterly reports. Ask GM, once the biggest company in the world who now has 1/6 of Apple's assets.
There is no doubt that Apple is immensely successful, but don't get confused by market cap numbers. When Dell went private, they had assets valued around 45-50 billions, for a market cap of about half that value. Apple is currently close to the 500 billions market cap but has less than half that in assets (closer to 1/3).
The market cap number is meaningless because it does not bring money to the company once the IPO is completed. The only impact of the share price is that shareholders who want to increase the value of their investments typically put pressure on the CEO to make decisions that will bring the share price higher in the short term. That's the reason why Dell went private; they wanted to switch the focus on enterprise products and services but this takes time and they were getting distracted by shareholders short-term objectives. This is also probably the reason why Apple is not releasing more innovative products but is focusing on milking their existing cash cows like the iPhone. It takes quite a spine to weather the storm of unhappy shareholders when you take months or years to build a disruptive product - and I believe that this was the true value of Steve Jobs, much more than his design skills.
Another example of the irrelevance of market cap as an indicator of value: Tesla market cap is currently 1/3 of Ford market cap, yet Tesla is losing 400 millions a year while Ford is making 5 billions. Or look at Twitter: their market cap is 15x higher than the New-York Times market cap, yet they have never made a single dollar in profit while the NYT made about 130 millions this year and has been in business for more than 150 years.
Over the last 10 years, Microsoft has hired more people than Google's current headcount.
People who bring up growth to explain high turnover at Google are like those Apple marketing magicians who sweep their shrinking market share under the carpet and pretend that what matters is that average users spend more time using iPhones than Androids on a daily basis.
One does not need to be a Microsoft shill to see...
Okay, so you're beholden to them for some reason other than material compensation. Thanks for making that clear.
Idiots have posted more clever versions of this lame accusation countless times over the last 14 years. Is your life that pathetic that you find it entertaining to be an incompetent copycat?
This being said, it's interesting to see that the level of bitching against IT companies on Slashdot is basically proportional to the median employee tenure in those companies (Microsoft = 4 years, Apple = 2 years, Google = 1 year, Amazon = 0.8 year). While a lot of people dream of working at Google, the company actually has a higher turnover rate than the Family Dollar Store... no wonder that they can't keep up with the competition.
Their image search seems to be better at giving you what you are looking for which probably ties to
I agree with this. Bing is a lot better than Google for image search; the results are more relevant but also the GUI is better.
Lately I found out that the maps are also better on Bing. The new Google maps is retarded; when I search for something nearby like a Starbucks it shows some random results that are pretty far, and when I try to get directions between two cities the first option they give is a flight... When I want to fly from one city to another I go on Expedia or Delta; what are the odds that I would use Google map for that? That's the kind of "feature" that people with too much time on their hands come up with.
Google search is still better but Microsoft is catching up pretty fast on various areas where Google used to dominate. Not so long ago Chrome was so much better than IE, now it's not that obvious. Same for Gmail vs Hotmail, or Google Apps vs Office365. It's like Google is dumbing down their products and is focusing on the ads business while Microsoft is rolling out improved stuff all the time. One does not need to be a Microsoft shill to see that.
Now if Microsoft could either bring back the Start button or fix the search in Windows 8.1 it would help make these claims more convincing...
You mean: he knows more than someone who anonymously reported stuff he was allegedly told during an alleged visa lecture given by an alleged expert. This is called hearsay, I know this for a fact because it has been confirmed by this guy next door who once went to law school (I think).
It's OK when the champions of rights actually abuse and ignore those same rights when honoring those rights is inconvenient for them because, you know, they are champions of those rights.
Move along, citizen, there is nothing to see here.
First of all to be able to short something you need a broker that will lend it to you. There is no broker out there that will lend bitcoins on signature, so IRL you'd need to provision a fairly high amount to cover your position. But let's stay in your fantasy world and suppose that because you are blowing the brokerage firm's CEO at will they lend you 10,000 bitcoins.
So you go on the exchange and sell them at their market value of $100 each (of course in your fantasy world there are no brokerage or exchange fees, and there are always buyers lined up to pile on virtual currency). Then you give a call to your mole in the DHS and ask him to crack down on a random bitcoin exchange. The market falls and you buy back the bitcoins at $50 a piece (since all other people in the market are morons who will sell when the price is low), making a nice $500k profit after giving the bitcoins back to the broker. Wonderful.
Of course there is the unlikely scenario that your DHS mole cannot deliver, or that the DHS is unable to shutdown a bitcoin exchange, or that the market will not react with a panic and wipe half the value of bitcoins. In that scenario, for each $1 increase in the value of bitcoin you will lose $10,000. Depending on how nervous the broker is, once the value reaches $110 he may very well knock on your door to recall the loan, at which point you have to not only give him the $1 million you made when you sold the borrowed bitcoins but also re-mortage your house to pay the extra $100k you owe him.
See, when a scheme is described in more than simplistic bullet points it often loses its apparent cleverness.
Anyone claiming to be able to perform market manipulation or use a government agency to trigger a series of predefined actions that will end up in making millions is either severly misinformed or outright stupid. There could be other explanations but they fall under the "diagnosis" category and legally require a medical degree so I'll leave them out.
I think maybe some one from DHS wanted to generate some bad publicity for bitcoins. Now they can buy some and make a little money.
If your explanation for this situation was part of a list of 50 explanations where the 49 others are redacted and I had to gamble every dollar I have, I would definitely pick at random one of the other 49.
Yes, that's how bad I think your explanation is. It's like a bad plot for a Steven Seagal movie except instead of being a former Special Ops operative trying to save an orphan from a ukrainian pedophile ring he would be the owner of an indian-friendly BitCoin exchange that throws a fit when he finds out that a retarded intern at the DHS has added the name of his exchange to the no-fly list in order to damage his business and make money. The movie would end with no explanation as to how exactly the retarded intern was planning to make money with this scheme because even while they were high the writers could not find an explanation that would make sense to their undemanding audience.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any demonstrated correlation between college grads and losing a few teaching days?
10 calendar days per year less than the national average. 1 hour less per day than the national average. This adds up to Chicago students losing two full school years (or more) compared to the national average by the time they get to college.
I don't know if you really need a scientific study to make the demonstration that 2 years is a huge gap, but one thing is for sure: the odds that such study could be done by someone who went to school in Chicago are tiny - with a college graduation rate of 12%, which is 1/3 of the national average and even lower than Alaska.
By the capitalist wreckers who are trying to smash the unions and destroy public education.
Or do you think all those millionaires like Bill Gates and Obama who send their kids to elite private schools give a shit about public school students?
Interestingly, Obama always supported the all-powerful teachers union in Chicago, who managed to get working conditions so good for their members that the schools had to cut the number of teaching days to afford those gold-plated teachers. As a direct consequence, this is one of the areas in the country with the lowest ratio of college grads. Yes we can!
The microwave in the example does suck, even the very first microwave oven we got in the 80s did boil a glass of water in 60 seconds.
Maybe it's not the microwave, maybe the guy does not keep his dishes clean. See http://www.snopes.com/science/...
Antonick will appeal the ruling, his lawyers said. "The evidence showed they used his source code without permission," said attorney Robert Carey.
And so it's overturned, but will be appeled.
I think I'm going to trust the little guy getting screwed on this one.
One does not get to appeal just because he lost his case and wishes to give it another go. One gets to appeal because there is some evidence that the judge overseeing the case may have made a mistake as far as the law is concerned, such as giving wrong instructions to the jury or rejecting a valid motion. So to bring the case in front of a second judge means that already there was a valid concern about the behavior of the first judge; winning this appeal means that the second judge agrees that something went wrong. It usually has nothing to do with the actual dispute.
I suggest speculating why the source code of the possible derived version was not made available to the court or the expert witness.
It may have been completely innocent worry about trade secrets but there are other possibilities, such as the unwillingness to incriminate themselves, that sound more likely to me.
Sounds plausible: "Your honor, I invoke the fifth, there is no way I will show you the source code of Module1.bas".
An expert saying "The answer is cactus" and the defense saying nothing would lead to a finding (in civil) that the answer is cactus. With one witness, one word, and no response, the answer will always be for the plaintiff. That's how preponderance should (and does) work.
No. The preponderance of evidence means that the plaintiff must make the demonstration that it is more likely than not that what he claims is true (unlike a murder trial where there must be no doubt). It does not mean that the defense has to contradict the plaintiff or provide any kind of evidence.
If you sit in a jury and the plaintiff claims that the defendant is a witch who prevented him from winning the lottery, you don't have to agree and award him 25 millions even if the defendant does not contradict that claim. The jury is expected to come to their own conclusions based on the evidence presented in court, and it does not matter who came up with it. If it's more likely than not that the claim is wrong, the jury has to find for the defendant.
That sounds like a bad ruling. If the expert was right, then the jury was right. If the expert was wrong, then the defense should have shown them side-by-side to show the differences.
The defense does not have to provide any evidence (unless they make claims of their own). It is always up to the party who initiates the lawsuit to either prove without reasonable doubt (in criminal law) or to show preponderance of evidence (civil law).
When a defendant has deeper pockets than the other party, it can be a good trial strategy to suffer in silence in front of a jury then have the case reviewed on appeal. On one hand cooler heads prevail (jurors often feel for the smaller guy) and also there is always the chance that the other party will run out of money and give up. Being a civil case this is fair game.
But those 20% are just 20%. You cater to the other 80%.
You build for the majority of your users. If you're in the minority, you deal with it, find a competitor who offers that functionality, or you build your own.
It is an unusual approach to remove a feature because "only 20%" of people are using it. Plus, they make billions, it's not as if they were on a tiny budget and had to make tough decisions in cutting features to save on future maintenance work.
No, this is in line with other "improvements" on Gmail or Google search. They have lost touch with reality and make decisions according to internal politics alone, exactly like it happened in the US car industry. Now if you will excuse me I have to take my Fiat Cherokee to the carwash.
I have a reasonable expectation I won't get the price I agree to.
That's preposterous. Do you typically shop online with the intent of paying half of the posted price because of a buggy shopping cart? If you see a TV on sale at $500 and you add that TV to your shopping cart, you should "expect" to pay $500, not $250.
That's exactly what happened in this situation. Brick did not post a price then came back later to cancel orders after figuring out that it was not cost-effective for them to sell at that price (something Best Buy did a few times in the past). There was a bug in the checkout process, that's a whole different story.
You must be one of those people who ask for a free apple pie at McDonalds when you get a regular Coke instead of the Diet Coke you asked for. Guess what: being a customer does not put you on a pedestal, and if you think that a company that does not agree to let people get away with an invoicing error deserves a "bad rep" you are correct that Brick (or any other company) does not need you as a customer.
You know what con artists say about their marks: if someone is too stupid to hold on to their money it's ok to take it from them. Basically when someone knowingly pays 50% of the posted price during an online transaction and expects that there will be no follow-up from the seller they are applying the same logic, and to add insult to the injury they dare come out publicly and throw a fit because the other party is not bending over to let them enjoy the spoils of victory.
The issue here is not that Brick needs PR lessons, it's that people need to learn that abusing a broken system is wrong. Until then it will remain necessary to bolt park benches to the ground and to put chains on the pens at the DMV. Thank you for making the world such a nice place.
Return customers are overrated. Most people shop for low prices and Brick is not in a niche market so they have little to gain from good PR. Actually this incident may scare away the kind of people they don't need as customers, and whatever money they get back will come from people who don't hold this mistake against Brick and will come shop again if they happen to need something and the price is right.
Good PR is good, but depending on the amount wasted on that mistake it may be more profitable to ask for money back and mitigate the loss.
For the record, at the moment they already got over $8,000.
That's a bit over 40% of the goal in a bit under 40% of the drive duration.
People who see conspiracy theory nuts everywhere are even worse than conspiracy theory nuts.
It's wrong but it's easier to understand what is meant without having to mention "with the dot not the feather".
Ethnicity overloading can be a bitch.
Taking requirements to the letter instead of using common sense is as close as it gets to passive-aggressive behavior in IT.
Just look at the definition: "an educational tool that helps patients, caregivers, or authorized representatives understand and communicate their beliefs and preferences related to their treatment options, and to decide with their health care provider what treatments are best for them based on their treatment options, scientific evidence, circumstances, beliefs, and preferences"
Before saying that "any computer system that was attempting to deliver to these requirements was doomed from day one", did you have a look at Wikipedia? It does exactly that. Just add a bookmarking feature linked to the patient account and you have a simple solution.
But no, of course, people will insist to create committees filled with system architects, business analysts, users advocates, communication facilitators and other meeting-fillers to create a consensus with all stakeholders and define a common vision that will then be communicated to the various task forces for approval, before being reviewed during a sprint planning session by a group of developers who will find a way to translate the requirements in a justification to create a json API connected to a NoSQL database with three cache tiers including of course html5 local storage. Of course it's doomed if you work that way.
Not convinced? Look at the requirements with a simple Wikipedia solution in mind:
(2) REQUIREMENTS FOR PATIENT DECISION AIDS—Patient decision aids developed and produced pursuant to a grant or contract under paragraph (1)—
(A) shall be designed to engage patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives in informed decision making with health care providers;
(B) shall present up-to-date clinical evidence about the risks and benefits of treatment options in a form and manner that is age-appropriate and can be adapted for patients, caregivers, and authorized representatives from a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds to reflect the varying needs of consumers and diverse levels of health literacy;
(C) shall, where appropriate, explain why there is a lack of evidence to support one treatment option over another; and
(D) shall address health care decisions across the age span, including those affecting vulnerable populations including children.
The problem is not the technology or the process. The problem is common sense.
Your numbers don't make sense. If there are 4.3 billions cell phone subscribers worldwide and people change their phone every 18 months, this would mean that almost 2 billion new phones are sold every year; yet the cell phone industry has yet to ship 1 billion units in any given year (they hover in the 750-800 million units). Given the current production level, your 4.3 subscribers cannot replace their device more than once every 4 years, which is basically on par with PC evergreening.
The cell phone industry is still in its growth phase but it will soon reach market saturation. Anyone who follows quarterly numbers can already see that because most of the recent growth in the smartphone segment is done at the expense of the feature phone segment and is not in the customer acquisition bucket; once the transition to smartphones is completed you can bet that people will start predicting "the death of smartphones" like they did for the death of PC because morons don't understand that a commodity industry with little or no growth is not the same as a dead industry.
As for pointing the finger at PC vendors who chased the market share by cutting prices: what do you think all the big smartphone players are doing at the moment? Ever heard of the iPhone 5C? Or the low-end Lumias? It's the same thing. And in this cutthroat market Apple is already on the losing side because they can't afford to sell cheap phones (because of brand image as well as production costs) but more and more people can see that a $600 iPhone is not truly worth 4x more than a $150 Lumia WP or LG Android. Which explains why the iPhone took a dive from 45% to a mere 12% market share in less than 2 years.
This does not mean that Apple is dying, but there is a limit to growth and overhype, and we are just starting to see that in their quarterly reports. Ask GM, once the biggest company in the world who now has 1/6 of Apple's assets.
There is no doubt that Apple is immensely successful, but don't get confused by market cap numbers. When Dell went private, they had assets valued around 45-50 billions, for a market cap of about half that value. Apple is currently close to the 500 billions market cap but has less than half that in assets (closer to 1/3).
The market cap number is meaningless because it does not bring money to the company once the IPO is completed. The only impact of the share price is that shareholders who want to increase the value of their investments typically put pressure on the CEO to make decisions that will bring the share price higher in the short term. That's the reason why Dell went private; they wanted to switch the focus on enterprise products and services but this takes time and they were getting distracted by shareholders short-term objectives. This is also probably the reason why Apple is not releasing more innovative products but is focusing on milking their existing cash cows like the iPhone. It takes quite a spine to weather the storm of unhappy shareholders when you take months or years to build a disruptive product - and I believe that this was the true value of Steve Jobs, much more than his design skills.
Another example of the irrelevance of market cap as an indicator of value: Tesla market cap is currently 1/3 of Ford market cap, yet Tesla is losing 400 millions a year while Ford is making 5 billions. Or look at Twitter: their market cap is 15x higher than the New-York Times market cap, yet they have never made a single dollar in profit while the NYT made about 130 millions this year and has been in business for more than 150 years.
How did "market share" help Dell, HP, Gateway, and the other titans of the PC industry? How are they doing now?
Funny that you bring this up. Sales of PC from Dell and HP are actually improving while Macbooks sales are dwindling. Look at IDC latest numbers.
As Mark Twain would say: the reports of the death of PC have been greatly exaggerated.
Over the last 10 years, Microsoft has hired more people than Google's current headcount.
People who bring up growth to explain high turnover at Google are like those Apple marketing magicians who sweep their shrinking market share under the carpet and pretend that what matters is that average users spend more time using iPhones than Androids on a daily basis.
One does not need to be a Microsoft shill to see...
Okay, so you're beholden to them for some reason other than material compensation. Thanks for making that clear.
Idiots have posted more clever versions of this lame accusation countless times over the last 14 years. Is your life that pathetic that you find it entertaining to be an incompetent copycat?
This being said, it's interesting to see that the level of bitching against IT companies on Slashdot is basically proportional to the median employee tenure in those companies (Microsoft = 4 years, Apple = 2 years, Google = 1 year, Amazon = 0.8 year). While a lot of people dream of working at Google, the company actually has a higher turnover rate than the Family Dollar Store... no wonder that they can't keep up with the competition.
Their image search seems to be better at giving you what you are looking for which probably ties to
I agree with this. Bing is a lot better than Google for image search; the results are more relevant but also the GUI is better.
Lately I found out that the maps are also better on Bing. The new Google maps is retarded; when I search for something nearby like a Starbucks it shows some random results that are pretty far, and when I try to get directions between two cities the first option they give is a flight... When I want to fly from one city to another I go on Expedia or Delta; what are the odds that I would use Google map for that? That's the kind of "feature" that people with too much time on their hands come up with.
Google search is still better but Microsoft is catching up pretty fast on various areas where Google used to dominate. Not so long ago Chrome was so much better than IE, now it's not that obvious. Same for Gmail vs Hotmail, or Google Apps vs Office365. It's like Google is dumbing down their products and is focusing on the ads business while Microsoft is rolling out improved stuff all the time. One does not need to be a Microsoft shill to see that.
Now if Microsoft could either bring back the Start button or fix the search in Windows 8.1 it would help make these claims more convincing...
You mean: he knows more than someone who anonymously reported stuff he was allegedly told during an alleged visa lecture given by an alleged expert. This is called hearsay, I know this for a fact because it has been confirmed by this guy next door who once went to law school (I think).
I find it amusing the Apple is accused of being a "ringmaster" when it's Amazon that is in total dominance of the electronic book market and pricing.
This story is about collusion with publishers, not about market share. Read the article, there is a part where they discuss Amazon.
It's OK when the champions of rights actually abuse and ignore those same rights when honoring those rights is inconvenient for them because, you know, they are champions of those rights.
Move along, citizen, there is nothing to see here.
It's called the Jack Bauer principle
Ok I'll call your BS on shorting BC.
First of all to be able to short something you need a broker that will lend it to you. There is no broker out there that will lend bitcoins on signature, so IRL you'd need to provision a fairly high amount to cover your position. But let's stay in your fantasy world and suppose that because you are blowing the brokerage firm's CEO at will they lend you 10,000 bitcoins.
So you go on the exchange and sell them at their market value of $100 each (of course in your fantasy world there are no brokerage or exchange fees, and there are always buyers lined up to pile on virtual currency). Then you give a call to your mole in the DHS and ask him to crack down on a random bitcoin exchange. The market falls and you buy back the bitcoins at $50 a piece (since all other people in the market are morons who will sell when the price is low), making a nice $500k profit after giving the bitcoins back to the broker. Wonderful.
Of course there is the unlikely scenario that your DHS mole cannot deliver, or that the DHS is unable to shutdown a bitcoin exchange, or that the market will not react with a panic and wipe half the value of bitcoins. In that scenario, for each $1 increase in the value of bitcoin you will lose $10,000. Depending on how nervous the broker is, once the value reaches $110 he may very well knock on your door to recall the loan, at which point you have to not only give him the $1 million you made when you sold the borrowed bitcoins but also re-mortage your house to pay the extra $100k you owe him.
See, when a scheme is described in more than simplistic bullet points it often loses its apparent cleverness.
Anyone claiming to be able to perform market manipulation or use a government agency to trigger a series of predefined actions that will end up in making millions is either severly misinformed or outright stupid. There could be other explanations but they fall under the "diagnosis" category and legally require a medical degree so I'll leave them out.
I think maybe some one from DHS wanted to generate some bad publicity for bitcoins. Now they can buy some and make a little money.
If your explanation for this situation was part of a list of 50 explanations where the 49 others are redacted and I had to gamble every dollar I have, I would definitely pick at random one of the other 49.
Yes, that's how bad I think your explanation is. It's like a bad plot for a Steven Seagal movie except instead of being a former Special Ops operative trying to save an orphan from a ukrainian pedophile ring he would be the owner of an indian-friendly BitCoin exchange that throws a fit when he finds out that a retarded intern at the DHS has added the name of his exchange to the no-fly list in order to damage his business and make money. The movie would end with no explanation as to how exactly the retarded intern was planning to make money with this scheme because even while they were high the writers could not find an explanation that would make sense to their undemanding audience.