1) Brand new user 2) Posts a multi-paragraph post within a minute of the story going live 3) Glowing review of Facebook that goes against every conventional wisdom 4) Gets basic facts wrong about finance 5) Gets basic facts wrong about business etiquette
Woo. More astroturf.
To be a bit more on-topic: the facebook valuation is insane. A 100 times current earnings? It'll be years before Facebook can justify that kind of price, and that's assuming that it will keep growing as it has - which is an insane proposition, considering that there aren't that many more people who CAN join Facebook.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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· Score: 1
As Google will tell you, there's a huge gap between having a product that you know has to succeed, and having a product that is actually successful.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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· Score: 1
Yes - but you don't just shift people over into emerging technologies. I'm good at what I do, but if you want me to develop mobile apps, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You first get rid of the people who don't have the skills you need for the future, and then you hire people who have those skills. That's why I said that it is an open question whether she can execute on the turnaround: firing is easy, hiring is about the hardest thing you can do. Now that she's planned the firing, I'd like to see what her plans are for the hiring. Because otherwise, you're entirely right - they will downsize themselves into oblivion.
Err, no. Driving has some significant extra costs that aren't captured by how much I spend on gas in a week: the time I sit in the car, being utterly unproductive. For some - specifically for those who drive for fun or work - this might lead to a zero reduction in gas costs. But it will reduce it for a whole lot of other people.
Re:The 21st century formula for a successful compa
on
HP To Cut 30,000 Jobs
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
I actually have read the papers. And mostly, I found people to be wholly uninformed about what is in there. The most egregious example is the discussion of republic vs democracy. Those who refer back to the Federalist Papers to support their position have absolutely no reading comprehension. Kinda like you assuming that I personally was behind the Interstate Commerce clause.
As for your dig about big government countries - they are actually quite nice. I've been there. A nice job offer, and I'll be there for good. In the meantime, have you checked out some of your small-government utopias? You might find that they have some significant draw backs that require some serious cash to overcome - like needing a private security force.
Taxes for Constitutionally authorized functions of the government (military, police, etc) are not theft. Taxes for the explicit purpose of transferring money from one person or group of people to another person or group of people are theft.
And what you don't get is that the English language isn't nearly precise and specific enough to make your interpretation of the Constitution the only possible one. Constitutionally authorized functions are much larger than just military and police, and say nothing about how big it needs to be. Not to mention that you fail to understand how a government works.
When actually they are for "Limited Government" which means there should be limits to what the government can do (like taking property rights from people) and limits to how much of the money they can get from taxes (like a 10% cap on all taxes), and limits to what legislation can be passed (no more multi-thousand page monstrosity bill that have all sorts of hidden crap in them), and limits to what the government can do to you and you currently established rights (upholding the right to free speech, the right to practice Religion, and the right for self defense/weapon ownership).
And that's the other problem with Libertarians/Tea Partiers: they have no clue what things cost or how politics work. Their ideas on cost are so unrealistic that they might as well campaign on funding the military, the legal system, and the public works via unicorn farts. Their ideas on politics are based on "I've got mine, fuck you", which makes cooperation impossible.
Libertarians/Tea Partiers think that the Federal Government should only do things that are prescribed in the constitution,
And the final problem with Libertarians/Tea Partiers is that they think that there is exactly one interpretation to the Constitution: theirs. They miss the delicious irony of complaining about people not understanding the Constitution, when there is no way for the English language to be specific enough that a 1 page document can provide an exact to every political problem.
Considering that they call government evil, and that government is always the problem, and that taxes are theft - yes, they actually support the elimination of all taxes. If they don't, they should stop with the overheated rhetoric. Finally, people do argue that there are some that are entirely self-sufficient, and don't need any help at all. See the post I replied to.
Before throwing around accusations of straw men, you might want to make sure you've actually read what's being written.
The most rabid right-wingers seem to have a serious reading comprehension problem. Pay attention to the part that says "for one". It implies that there are others, just like it, but that aren't mentioned. Once you demonstrate that you have the physical capability to understand what someone is saying, we will move to actually discussing whether this is a good idea or a bad idea.
Nobody is entirely self-sufficient. Even the people who live out in the boonies, have their own well, their own power and their own food depend on living in an environment where thugs don't roam the area, looking for cheap thrills or money.
That's the problem with every single Libertarian/Tea Partier in the US. They think that a lack of government simply means that they get no medicare in exchange for no taxes. What they fail to understand is that the political and social stability of the US is built on taxes as well.
.... where you seem to define "voluntary" as "physically able to drive across state lines". There's a lot more to moving than to just packing some things and driving somewhere.
Not to mention - why is this a problem in the first place? Yeah, yeah, Godwin-light, etc, but this kind of crap isn't much different from the Berlin Wall: erect a significant barrier to exit so that people can't leave your shithole. No, we're not at the point of shooting people wanting to leave (just those who enter), but this is a much more significant barrier than "Have a nice day, sir. Sorry to see you leave".
And finally - why would you want to keep these people around? They clearly don't value the place enough. They OUGHT to be able to leave.
That said, I'm pretty sure this isn't going anywhere. Republicans, for one, will oppose it just because it comes from Democrats.
No, it means that you have no understanding what's going on in the world, and what situation our war on terror has put us in. Anwar Al-Awlaki might be American, but you don't ask for passports when you find yourself in a firefight with people.
Is that why everyone was cheering when bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS? Let's face it, we went down the slippery slope of extra-judicial killings a VERY long time ago.
Here's the deal: you either accept that we are in an actual war against people who are trying to kill any Americans they can get their hands on, and we use military methods to deal with the threat. Or you accept that we are dealing with a bunch of common criminals, and we bring in the detectives, the cops, and the judges.
One or the other. You don't send your military into a place to deal with people, and then act surprised because they shoot to kill.
Their TOS allows for it. There's no restriction along the lines of "You can't do it if your name is Google, or if you have more than $1B in revenue and a competing social network." There ARE storage restrictions though: for one, you can't actually replicate the entire site and store it somewhere outside of FB servers. You're only allowed to cache things for 24 hours.
Bullshit. Their primary business is information collection, with their primary revenue being advertising. If they don't have relevant information to offer to their users, their core business is withering on the vine. If the users decide that they're better off looking for info elsewhere, their advertising revenue dries up.
Google needs an active G+. They're just fighting a losing battle against the network effect.
In other words, the network effect was re-discovered. I'd love to use G+, but everyone I know is on Facebook. And since I'm too lazy to post things twice and visit two different sites for the same purpose, I stick to Facebook.
Here's what would spur the adoption of G+: Google needs to develop a social network aggregator, where G+ is just one of the networks. Have it pull posts from all your networks, and allow you to cross-post to every network you want. Google needs to realize that it lost this battle, and is staring at the possibility of losing the war. Which means that it cannot simply push G+ accounts to everyone who signs up with any Google service, but it needs to position itself as the complete newcomer who has to play nice with the existing networks. The main trouble could be the TOS for using APIs, but I'm sure that the basic 24 hours storage rule should allow Google to at least have it pull relevant data and display it at the time of request.
There is something that kinda works like it, but doesn't really have the interface I would look for (full disclosure - the people working on it are good friends): http://www.socxs.com/.
Lazy analysis. Even if no government wants a truly free Internet, there are still differences between all the other governments. And quite frankly, the US is on a very short list of countries I'd like to see have control over the Internet.
The UN controlling the Internet will be a lowest common denominator kinda issue, and that will be to regulate pretty much everything. Do not want. And that's coming from someone who supports the UN far more than the average american.
Well, if you're just looking for a bullet point list, Chrome comes out on top of or tied for a lot metrics: * speed * implementation of standards * extensibility * cross-device synching * ability to deploy across multiple devices
Firefox loses in the corporate world thanks to some publicized missteps, IE loses in the FOSS world because it's IE, and Opera is the perennial also-ran. Chrome nicely splits the middle between IE and Firefox. As a result, it's not surprising that a number of common review sites show Chrome as tied or slightly ahead of the others. Compare that to hubpages (smells like Geocities to me) , and I'm surprised that Bing is actually going there.
Finally, do a search for What's the best social network, and Google returns oodles of results that don't even mention G+. Considering that G+ is much more important to Google than Chrome, I'd say that if they are tweaking their results, they're doing it wrong.
Finally, the sites that sit on top of the Google search are the ones I expect to be there: PCMag, usatoday, lifehacker...
CGI is replacing actual photos in the stock picture business, and in the catalog business. I haven't seen an office catalog in years that uses actual pictures. It's all semi-competent CGI.
1) The main problem was people were NOT buying cars. Because few people can afford to buy a new car cash, the auto industry is highly reliant on loans. Those loans were basically unavailable. I could see it directly in my area: the day that they postponed the initial bailout of the banks, three major auto dealers closed shop. Over the course of that year, the major auto shopping areas lost about 1/3 of their dealers, most of which still have not returned. 2) Bankruptcy still requires operating capital to allow a company to work. That was done also mostly via overnight loans. Those loans were also drying up fast. 3) Reorganization implies reorganization of loans. No bank was willing to do that if there was not some sort of guarantee that GM was going to make it, and be able to repay whatever was left. Otherwise, they were willing to test their luck in liquidation. 4) The biggest headache wasn't GM - it was the supplier networks. With JIT fabrication and supply lines, there is no slack in the supply line, and it is very difficult to suddenly go serve a completely different car maker. If GM had stopped making cars, the entire GM supply line would have been handed a death sentence. Yes, bankruptcy there was more feasible, but still - you don't retool your entire distribution network from one week to the next, or even over the course of a month. 5) Finally, even if we assume that other carmakers would at some point pick up the slack, that would not be instantaneous. At the very least, it would take a few months to ramp up and hire the GM workers (and that's assuming completely unrealistically ideal situations). In the meantime, you'd have a ton of GM workers not contributing to the economy at large, dealer networks not contributing to the economy, and supplier networks not contributing. In other words, just when you'd need demand to stay stable, it would drop even more.
Common sense is vastly overrated. If you don't have data, your common sense is just a guess supported by prejudice.
I'm sure you say the same thing to your compiler if it throws up because you forgot a semi-colon somewhere. Education, and that includes knowing grammar, is a requirement for being able to communicate efficiently and effectively. Making up your own shit might make you cool in your own head, but makes you a communication failure in the real world.
[citation needed] And please make it something actually useful. Because I can pull out the timecube guy equivalent for every topic under the sun, and end the thread there and then.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Brand new user
2) Posts a multi-paragraph post within a minute of the story going live
3) Glowing review of Facebook that goes against every conventional wisdom
4) Gets basic facts wrong about finance
5) Gets basic facts wrong about business etiquette
Woo. More astroturf.
To be a bit more on-topic: the facebook valuation is insane. A 100 times current earnings? It'll be years before Facebook can justify that kind of price, and that's assuming that it will keep growing as it has - which is an insane proposition, considering that there aren't that many more people who CAN join Facebook.
As Google will tell you, there's a huge gap between having a product that you know has to succeed, and having a product that is actually successful.
Yes - but you don't just shift people over into emerging technologies. I'm good at what I do, but if you want me to develop mobile apps, you're shooting yourself in the foot. You first get rid of the people who don't have the skills you need for the future, and then you hire people who have those skills. That's why I said that it is an open question whether she can execute on the turnaround: firing is easy, hiring is about the hardest thing you can do. Now that she's planned the firing, I'd like to see what her plans are for the hiring. Because otherwise, you're entirely right - they will downsize themselves into oblivion.
Err, no. Driving has some significant extra costs that aren't captured by how much I spend on gas in a week: the time I sit in the car, being utterly unproductive. For some - specifically for those who drive for fun or work - this might lead to a zero reduction in gas costs. But it will reduce it for a whole lot of other people.
Well - in Whitman's defense, HP needs to retool itself. If their claim to fame is personal computers, they will be an also-ran within 5 years. They need to retool with services, get in on the cloud-storage/processing game, and start putting out products and services that people are interested in. Otherwise, they can sit in a corner with Gateway and talk about the olden days.
That, unfortunately, takes drastic measures. Apotheker had the right idea, but just executed it in the worst possible way. Now the question is whether Whitman has the right idea, AND can execute on it. Cutting 10k workers sounds harsh, but it's a nasty requirement for effecting a turn-around.
I actually have read the papers. And mostly, I found people to be wholly uninformed about what is in there. The most egregious example is the discussion of republic vs democracy. Those who refer back to the Federalist Papers to support their position have absolutely no reading comprehension. Kinda like you assuming that I personally was behind the Interstate Commerce clause.
As for your dig about big government countries - they are actually quite nice. I've been there. A nice job offer, and I'll be there for good. In the meantime, have you checked out some of your small-government utopias? You might find that they have some significant draw backs that require some serious cash to overcome - like needing a private security force.
Taxes for Constitutionally authorized functions of the government (military, police, etc) are not theft. Taxes for the explicit purpose of transferring money from one person or group of people to another person or group of people are theft.
And what you don't get is that the English language isn't nearly precise and specific enough to make your interpretation of the Constitution the only possible one. Constitutionally authorized functions are much larger than just military and police, and say nothing about how big it needs to be. Not to mention that you fail to understand how a government works.
When actually they are for "Limited Government" which means there should be limits to what the government can do (like taking property rights from people) and limits to how much of the money they can get from taxes (like a 10% cap on all taxes), and limits to what legislation can be passed (no more multi-thousand page monstrosity bill that have all sorts of hidden crap in them), and limits to what the government can do to you and you currently established rights (upholding the right to free speech, the right to practice Religion, and the right for self defense/weapon ownership).
And that's the other problem with Libertarians/Tea Partiers: they have no clue what things cost or how politics work. Their ideas on cost are so unrealistic that they might as well campaign on funding the military, the legal system, and the public works via unicorn farts. Their ideas on politics are based on "I've got mine, fuck you", which makes cooperation impossible.
Libertarians/Tea Partiers think that the Federal Government should only do things that are prescribed in the constitution,
And the final problem with Libertarians/Tea Partiers is that they think that there is exactly one interpretation to the Constitution: theirs. They miss the delicious irony of complaining about people not understanding the Constitution, when there is no way for the English language to be specific enough that a 1 page document can provide an exact to every political problem.
Considering that they call government evil, and that government is always the problem, and that taxes are theft - yes, they actually support the elimination of all taxes. If they don't, they should stop with the overheated rhetoric. Finally, people do argue that there are some that are entirely self-sufficient, and don't need any help at all. See the post I replied to.
Before throwing around accusations of straw men, you might want to make sure you've actually read what's being written.
The most rabid right-wingers seem to have a serious reading comprehension problem. Pay attention to the part that says "for one". It implies that there are others, just like it, but that aren't mentioned. Once you demonstrate that you have the physical capability to understand what someone is saying, we will move to actually discussing whether this is a good idea or a bad idea.
Nobody is entirely self-sufficient. Even the people who live out in the boonies, have their own well, their own power and their own food depend on living in an environment where thugs don't roam the area, looking for cheap thrills or money.
That's the problem with every single Libertarian/Tea Partier in the US. They think that a lack of government simply means that they get no medicare in exchange for no taxes. What they fail to understand is that the political and social stability of the US is built on taxes as well.
.... where you seem to define "voluntary" as "physically able to drive across state lines". There's a lot more to moving than to just packing some things and driving somewhere.
Not to mention - why is this a problem in the first place? Yeah, yeah, Godwin-light, etc, but this kind of crap isn't much different from the Berlin Wall: erect a significant barrier to exit so that people can't leave your shithole. No, we're not at the point of shooting people wanting to leave (just those who enter), but this is a much more significant barrier than "Have a nice day, sir. Sorry to see you leave".
And finally - why would you want to keep these people around? They clearly don't value the place enough. They OUGHT to be able to leave.
That said, I'm pretty sure this isn't going anywhere. Republicans, for one, will oppose it just because it comes from Democrats.
No, it means that you have no understanding what's going on in the world, and what situation our war on terror has put us in. Anwar Al-Awlaki might be American, but you don't ask for passports when you find yourself in a firefight with people.
Is that why everyone was cheering when bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS? Let's face it, we went down the slippery slope of extra-judicial killings a VERY long time ago.
Here's the deal: you either accept that we are in an actual war against people who are trying to kill any Americans they can get their hands on, and we use military methods to deal with the threat. Or you accept that we are dealing with a bunch of common criminals, and we bring in the detectives, the cops, and the judges.
One or the other. You don't send your military into a place to deal with people, and then act surprised because they shoot to kill.
Their TOS allows for it. There's no restriction along the lines of "You can't do it if your name is Google, or if you have more than $1B in revenue and a competing social network." There ARE storage restrictions though: for one, you can't actually replicate the entire site and store it somewhere outside of FB servers. You're only allowed to cache things for 24 hours.
Bullshit. Their primary business is information collection, with their primary revenue being advertising. If they don't have relevant information to offer to their users, their core business is withering on the vine. If the users decide that they're better off looking for info elsewhere, their advertising revenue dries up.
Google needs an active G+. They're just fighting a losing battle against the network effect.
In other words, the network effect was re-discovered. I'd love to use G+, but everyone I know is on Facebook. And since I'm too lazy to post things twice and visit two different sites for the same purpose, I stick to Facebook.
Here's what would spur the adoption of G+: Google needs to develop a social network aggregator, where G+ is just one of the networks. Have it pull posts from all your networks, and allow you to cross-post to every network you want. Google needs to realize that it lost this battle, and is staring at the possibility of losing the war. Which means that it cannot simply push G+ accounts to everyone who signs up with any Google service, but it needs to position itself as the complete newcomer who has to play nice with the existing networks. The main trouble could be the TOS for using APIs, but I'm sure that the basic 24 hours storage rule should allow Google to at least have it pull relevant data and display it at the time of request.
There is something that kinda works like it, but doesn't really have the interface I would look for (full disclosure - the people working on it are good friends): http://www.socxs.com/.
Lazy analysis. Even if no government wants a truly free Internet, there are still differences between all the other governments. And quite frankly, the US is on a very short list of countries I'd like to see have control over the Internet.
The UN controlling the Internet will be a lowest common denominator kinda issue, and that will be to regulate pretty much everything. Do not want. And that's coming from someone who supports the UN far more than the average american.
Well, if you're just looking for a bullet point list, Chrome comes out on top of or tied for a lot metrics:
* speed
* implementation of standards
* extensibility
* cross-device synching
* ability to deploy across multiple devices
Firefox loses in the corporate world thanks to some publicized missteps, IE loses in the FOSS world because it's IE, and Opera is the perennial also-ran. Chrome nicely splits the middle between IE and Firefox. As a result, it's not surprising that a number of common review sites show Chrome as tied or slightly ahead of the others. Compare that to hubpages (smells like Geocities to me) , and I'm surprised that Bing is actually going there.
Finally, do a search for What's the best social network, and Google returns oodles of results that don't even mention G+. Considering that G+ is much more important to Google than Chrome, I'd say that if they are tweaking their results, they're doing it wrong.
Finally, the sites that sit on top of the Google search are the ones I expect to be there: PCMag, usatoday, lifehacker...
Interesting. Had never heard of this. But, as you pointed out, nothing happened. To think that this time would be different seems.... hasty.
CGI is replacing actual photos in the stock picture business, and in the catalog business. I haven't seen an office catalog in years that uses actual pictures. It's all semi-competent CGI.
1) The main problem was people were NOT buying cars. Because few people can afford to buy a new car cash, the auto industry is highly reliant on loans. Those loans were basically unavailable. I could see it directly in my area: the day that they postponed the initial bailout of the banks, three major auto dealers closed shop. Over the course of that year, the major auto shopping areas lost about 1/3 of their dealers, most of which still have not returned.
2) Bankruptcy still requires operating capital to allow a company to work. That was done also mostly via overnight loans. Those loans were also drying up fast.
3) Reorganization implies reorganization of loans. No bank was willing to do that if there was not some sort of guarantee that GM was going to make it, and be able to repay whatever was left. Otherwise, they were willing to test their luck in liquidation.
4) The biggest headache wasn't GM - it was the supplier networks. With JIT fabrication and supply lines, there is no slack in the supply line, and it is very difficult to suddenly go serve a completely different car maker. If GM had stopped making cars, the entire GM supply line would have been handed a death sentence. Yes, bankruptcy there was more feasible, but still - you don't retool your entire distribution network from one week to the next, or even over the course of a month.
5) Finally, even if we assume that other carmakers would at some point pick up the slack, that would not be instantaneous. At the very least, it would take a few months to ramp up and hire the GM workers (and that's assuming completely unrealistically ideal situations). In the meantime, you'd have a ton of GM workers not contributing to the economy at large, dealer networks not contributing to the economy, and supplier networks not contributing. In other words, just when you'd need demand to stay stable, it would drop even more.
Common sense is vastly overrated. If you don't have data, your common sense is just a guess supported by prejudice.
I'm sure you say the same thing to your compiler if it throws up because you forgot a semi-colon somewhere. Education, and that includes knowing grammar, is a requirement for being able to communicate efficiently and effectively. Making up your own shit might make you cool in your own head, but makes you a communication failure in the real world.
[citation needed] And please make it something actually useful. Because I can pull out the timecube guy equivalent for every topic under the sun, and end the thread there and then.