Like it or not Jobs is a corporate officer and a large beneficial owner of the company's stock.
If the company was withholding information that is considered material to the value of the business then it should be disclosed. Like it or not, his privacy has limits. He has voluntarily given some of it up in becoming a corporate officer. Failure to disclose can be a huge deal, especially if insiders sold stock during the time when this was not common knowledge.
In the long run it will not be a bunch of fanboys on slashdot or Apple's PR department that decide the correct level of disclosure. It will be the courts. I have little doubt that the class-action lawyers are already all over this issue. If they smell blood (or easy money) then they will pursue a case. At that point it will be up to the legal system.
Personally, I think Apple has left itself open for an expensive court case.
I just finished taking the GMAT test. the quantitative (math) section covers almost all of the math you are looking to learn. A good book (like the official guide to the gmat) has problems arranged in order of difficulty and explains all of the answers in a step by step process.
GMAT math covers basic athrimetic, geometry, algebra, combinatorics, probability, word problems and data sufficiency. I haven't done long division by hand in probably 15 years so I found the steps to be quite helpful.
One plus of using the gmat math as a stepping stone is that if you ever want to take the test yourself then you will be pretty well prepared for it.
Another plus is that there is a ton of free material out there for gmat math preparation - study guides, practice tests, quizzes, etc. that can all be downloaded for free.
The parent hit the nail on the head here. I was in Beijing for the first time last week. Save for his face on the money and his portrait in Tiannenman square, Chairman Mao is nowhere to be seen. Japan is the bogeyman there. Contrast this with Vietnam (at least in Hanoi) where Ho Chi Minh and the Party is everywhere. It's far more subtle in China.
Of course, the converse to this situation is also a strength of the US system. In few other countries would they ever waste the resources on 2nd or 3rd tier students to pursue a physics or engineering degree.
In othe countries your career path is mostly determined before you start having to shave. If you screw up your high-school or college entrance exams your life is over.
In the USA this is not true. I know a high school dropout who ended up at Cal Tech. How likely is that to have happened in France, China, India or Japan?
We should be celebrating the face that 10% of these students were able to make the grade and move on to engineering or physics, not bemoaning the fact that 90% couldn't cut it. If you took a random sample of the adult population what percent would make the cut?
America is all about people bouncing back from adversity. If you manage to conquer college level calculus coming out of remedial math and a 6th grade reading level then you should be proud. I would certainly love to talk to you about working for me. Bouncing back from adversity is a key life skill. It shows tenacity, discipline, and self-confidence.
As for improving educational standards, I agree with the parent. Our primary and secondary schooling systems are failing many students, especially those students whose parents do not take an active part in their education. Why do we tolerate parents who let their children fail? They are damaging not only their offspring, but society as well. Everyone should be held to higher standards, including parents.
The U.S. Department of State is recruiting IT people RIGHT NOW to work in the Foreign Service and support the work of our diplomatic corps at embassies and consulates overseas. The recruitment period ends on 11/3/06 - less than 10 days from now.
Working at a US Embassy has some major perks. When you work for the government overseas they pay all of your housing and utilities. Embassy housing ain't like Army housing. Think mansion in the 3rd world and downtown apartments in the first world. Cost of living pay to help afford life in London, danger pay for Kabul or Baghdad, hardship pay for subsaharan Africa. Uncle Sam takes care of his own.
Sure the work is boring, the coworkers are annoying, and people like to blow up your workplace. On the plus side, you move every 2-4 years, sometimes to very very nice places. You get USA and local country holidays off (15-20 holidays per year) plus vacation and benefits like every other USG employee.
Besides, how cool would it be to have a Diplomatic (Black) Passport?
The pay band quotes on the page doesn't seem too high, but remember that the pay listed doesn't include all the freebies like housing, utilities, cost-of-living, hardship, etc - many of which are tax-free. I'd pay the numbers by $30,000 to get a real approximation of the value of overseas benefits paid by Uncle Sam.
$0.04 per kwh on top of the regular rates is about 50% higher. I think someone misplaced a decimal point. I use about 1500 kwh per month. This extra cost would be $60 per month, not $6.
It would be cheaper to pay farmers not to farm than to come up with kooky schemes like this that pay them twice - once for their crazy milk subsidies then again to get rid of the methane gas that it produces.
We might as well run power plants fueled by combusting dollar bills.
R-i-g-h-t. The minute they announce they're abandoning the USA for tax purposes their stock will drop like a brick. It might make business sense on the surface but the PR damage might as well be lethal.
Google would do less damage to itself by annoucing they've changed their motto to "Do be evil."
And their uber-powerful navy doesn't even have a legitimate plan to invade taiwan? I think not. This is the USA after all.
The real reason is it's more likely China's middle class will surpass the entire size of the USA in 20 years. That's a lot of coca-cola, gilette razors, and tide laundry soap.
I believe that system was the Mikohn SafeJack. Apparently the problem was that the chips with integral RFID's were more expensive than their par value. A $1 chip actually cost several dollars.
An interesting idea but perhaps just too far ahead of its time.
The NFL is a convicted monopolist anyway. Remember the USFL? They sued under antitrust law and won. Unfortunately, the sum awarded was only $3 (one dollar of damages trebled under the Sherman Act.)
This has got to be one of the dumbest moves of all time - selling cars at invoice through dealers who charged a lot more.
Basically, you could go to carorder.com, select your car, and then they'd sell it to you. You'd deal with a local car dealer (or they'd truck it to you on a flatbed truck)
I wanted a 1999 civic lx. Cheap, reliable transportation (especially when buying said vehicle at invoice) I had recently been in an accident and my old car was a total loss. This was in august/september of '99.
A week or so later, the supply of '99 civics has dried up. They offer to sell me a 2000 civic at '99 invoice price (about $500 below 2000 invoice) if I wait for a month. Since I'm driving a rental courtesty of the idiot who totalled my last car I take the deal.
About a month later (early october I think) I get a call from the dealer telling me my car is ready. I get there are check it out. We go in to sign the paperwork. I ask about the whole carorder.com deal.
The dealer person says that they don't know the whole story, but a check arrived in the mail. She pulls the check out. It's from caroder.com and it's for about $2300.00. They basically gave me a free downpayment on my car. I asked if I could make a copy of the check. I framed it and posted it in my office.
The moral of the story?
Losing money on every sale but making it up in volume probably isn't a good idea, especially when you are losing $thousands per sale.
Still, it was a sweet deal for me. The free TiVo I got at networld+interop in may of 2000 was also a nice runner up. These were the glory days of N+I with a private party every night in vegas.
--chuck
they've been working on this stuff for years now.
on
RFID Casino Chips
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Mikohn Gaming was working on a similar concept called safejack (safe blackjack) since at least 1998. The idea there was that special chips would "announce" their value (1,5,25,100, etc.) to a computerized table so that the back of house systems knew how much was being bet.
Assuming they have any brains at all, mikohn probably filed for a patent on this stuff years ago. The gaming equipment industry is one big bee's nest of predatory and defensive patent plays. (I wish I was the guy with the touch-screen gaming machine patent)
Incidentally, I recall the system also had a mini-ccd camera under the shoe so it could also "see" the cards being dealt to each player.
Seemed like a pretty interesting idea, but I don't think it ever caught on. Maybe it was too expensive, or just too far ahead of it's time?
--chuck
Re:The article misses a few things as well.
on
Sun's Last Stand
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nice try at passing the buck. Sun screwed themselves over. McNeally still thinks his
pile of cash is going to save him. It ain't.
The crown is gone, the glory days are over, and
the death spiral begins in about 18 months.
Sun squandered everything of importance to them
in the last 5 years in a rush to overthrow the
king of the hill (Microsoft) and so when a new
challenger (Linux) arrived, they were too busy
fighting the last war.
They acted like the dotcom era was eternal, and that people were going to buy their overpriced systems forever. When the easy money dried up, they didn't know what to do. You can't go from
$5billion a quarter in sales to $3billion/qtr
in sales and not expect your competition to eat you alive.
It wasn't the baby bell's fault that morons with bad business plans and a lot of cash decided to spend $millions on Suns while the money was flowing. Sun rode the dotcom wave and that wave hit the shore. Now the Linux tsunami is going
to decimate Sun's beach and they have no time to
move to higher ground.
The reason that $10k ultrasparcs are a dime a dozen isn't because of some grand conspiracy, it's the market sorting it out. The supply
of these things is big (see dotcom wave crashing
above) and the demand is weak - a $1000 linux
box performs just as well and is more flexible,
can run more apps, more O/S's and have a larger
market to sell into. The market has to discount
niche sun equipment to find willing buyers. That's
econ 101 stuff.
Sun is not becoming a marginal player because the X protocol is denting CAD sales - They are becoming irrelevant because a $2500 wintel box will perform just as well, if not better, than their $10k offering. Sun abandoned the workstation market a long time ago anyhow.
Sun's chips are impressive but Intel's economy of scale kills them in price and comes close enough
in performance that x86 is the smart decision
for 99% of people today.
Sun shot themselves in the foot. It's
their decision whether they limp along and heal
or the foot becomes gangerous and eventually kills them. Frankly, I think they are toast.
My bad on this one. I just got an email from the creator of the unix family tree saying it's all on the up and up. They asked for and were given permission to use the unix family tree (which btw is super cool and totally worth checking out.
It appears that SCO has helped themselves to Éric Lévénez's unix family tree, possibly in violation of the "you can freely use this diagram for non-commercial purposes" line at the bottom of the page.
The subject says it all. HP's E-services division uses tomcat in many of their public-facing sites. This is significant because HP owns/used to own bluestone application server and are now in bed with BEA. Nevertheless they are using tomcat in production for real e-commerce sites right now.
I assume you are speaking of Rebecca Adams' class Field Research Methods and Applied Social Theory at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
That class actually did produce several published papers and eventually a book with more papers from the students' experience.
Although it does seem a bit frivolous on the surface, I've read the book and it is quite detailed and objective - a balanced look at the social structure and community of deadheads.
Slashdot Mirror
Like it or not Jobs is a corporate officer and a large beneficial owner of the company's stock.
If the company was withholding information that is considered material to the value of the business then it should be disclosed. Like it or not, his privacy has limits. He has voluntarily given some of it up in becoming a corporate officer. Failure to disclose can be a huge deal, especially if insiders sold stock during the time when this was not common knowledge.
In the long run it will not be a bunch of fanboys on slashdot or Apple's PR department that decide the correct level of disclosure. It will be the courts. I have little doubt that the class-action lawyers are already all over this issue. If they smell blood (or easy money) then they will pursue a case. At that point it will be up to the legal system.
Personally, I think Apple has left itself open for an expensive court case.
I just finished taking the GMAT test. the quantitative (math) section covers almost all of the math you are looking to learn. A good book (like the official guide to the gmat) has problems arranged in order of difficulty and explains all of the answers in a step by step process.
GMAT math covers basic athrimetic, geometry, algebra, combinatorics, probability, word problems and data sufficiency. I haven't done long division
by hand in probably 15 years so I found the steps to be quite helpful.
One plus of using the gmat math as a stepping stone is that if you ever want to take the test yourself then you will be pretty well prepared for it.
Another plus is that there is a ton of free material out there for gmat math preparation - study guides, practice tests, quizzes, etc. that can all be downloaded for free.
The parent hit the nail on the head here. I was in Beijing for the first
time last week. Save for his face on the money and his portrait in
Tiannenman square, Chairman Mao is nowhere to be seen. Japan is
the bogeyman there. Contrast this with Vietnam (at least in Hanoi)
where Ho Chi Minh and the Party is everywhere. It's far more subtle in
China.
Of course, the converse to this situation is also a strength of the US system. In few other countries would they ever waste the resources on 2nd or 3rd tier students to pursue a physics or engineering degree.
In othe countries your career path is mostly determined before you start having to shave. If you screw up your high-school or college entrance exams your life is over.
In the USA this is not true. I know a high school dropout who ended up at Cal Tech. How likely is
that to have happened in France, China, India or Japan?
We should be celebrating the face that 10% of these students were able to make the grade and move on to engineering or physics, not bemoaning the fact that 90% couldn't cut it. If you took a random sample of the adult population what percent would make the cut?
America is all about people bouncing back from adversity. If you manage to conquer college level calculus coming out of remedial math and a 6th grade reading level then you should be proud. I would certainly love to talk to you about working for me. Bouncing back from adversity is a key life skill. It shows tenacity, discipline, and self-confidence.
As for improving educational standards, I agree with the parent. Our primary and secondary schooling systems are failing many students, especially those students whose parents do not take an active part in their education. Why do we tolerate parents who let their children fail? They are damaging not only their offspring, but society as well. Everyone should be held to higher standards, including parents.
Gates is a college dropout. They make great CEOs. Ask Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs.
Engineers do make great CEOs - in France. Seriously. I'm not
sure why.
--chuck
Make that ' pad the numbers ' by $30,000. The tax-free housing and free utilities are h-u-g-e.
The U.S. Department of State is recruiting IT people RIGHT NOW
t ies/infomanage.html
to work in the Foreign Service and support the work of our diplomatic
corps at embassies and consulates overseas. The recruitment period
ends on 11/3/06 - less than 10 days from now.
Working at a US Embassy has some major perks. When you work for the
government overseas they pay all of your housing and utilities. Embassy
housing ain't like Army housing. Think mansion in the 3rd world and
downtown apartments in the first world. Cost of living pay to help
afford life in London, danger pay for Kabul or Baghdad, hardship pay
for subsaharan Africa. Uncle Sam takes care of his own.
Sure the work is boring, the coworkers are annoying, and people
like to blow up your workplace. On the plus side, you move every
2-4 years, sometimes to very very nice places. You get USA and
local country holidays off (15-20 holidays per year) plus vacation
and benefits like every other USG employee.
Besides, how cool would it be to have a Diplomatic (Black) Passport?
Check the Department of State recruitment page here:
http://www.careers.state.gov/specialist/opportuni
The pay band quotes on the page doesn't seem too high, but remember
that the pay listed doesn't include all the freebies like housing,
utilities, cost-of-living, hardship, etc - many of which are tax-free.
I'd pay the numbers by $30,000 to get a real approximation of the value
of overseas benefits paid by Uncle Sam.
3 words: central air conditioning. I live in Las Vegas.
$0.04 per kwh on top of the regular rates is about 50% higher.
I think someone misplaced a decimal point. I use about 1500
kwh per month. This extra cost would be $60 per month, not $6.
It would be cheaper to pay farmers not to farm than to come
up with kooky schemes like this that pay them twice - once for
their crazy milk subsidies then again to get rid of the methane
gas that it produces.
We might as well run power plants fueled by combusting dollar bills.
R-i-g-h-t. The minute they announce they're abandoning
the USA for tax purposes their stock will drop like a brick. It might make business sense on the surface but the PR damage might as well be lethal.
Google would do less damage to itself by annoucing they've changed their motto to "Do be evil."
--chuck
And their uber-powerful navy doesn't even have a
legitimate plan to invade taiwan? I think not. This
is the USA after all.
The real reason is it's more likely China's middle
class will surpass the entire size of the USA in
20 years. That's a lot of coca-cola, gilette razors,
and tide laundry soap.
Uh, the power to regulate interstate commerce is
reserved to the Congress. Duh.
--chuck
otherwise, I'd be shorting their stock the
whole way to zero.
This whole "rent music" deal will go over
like a lead balloon.
The consumer market has repeatedly rejected
these schemes. I fail to see how napster is
going to overcome Apple's momentum in this
space.
I'm hard-pressed to pick who has the worse business model between napster and SCOX.
--chuck
I believe that system was the Mikohn SafeJack. Apparently the problem was that the chips with integral RFID's were more expensive than their par value. A $1 chip actually cost several dollars.
An interesting idea but perhaps just too far ahead of its time.
Or better yet, to write his reflections on going through life with a complete lack of social skills?
Dear IBM:
Please buy us so I can have job in 12 months.
The NFL is a convicted monopolist anyway. Remember the USFL? They sued under antitrust law and won. Unfortunately, the sum awarded was only $3 (one dollar of damages trebled under the Sherman Act.)
The NFL and EA Sports deserve each other.
R.A. Heinlein, perhaps? He was pretty active
in Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential campaign.
If that don't make you a right-winger, nothing does.
--chuck
This has got to be one of the dumbest moves of all time - selling cars at invoice through dealers who charged a lot more.
Basically, you could go to carorder.com, select
your car, and then they'd sell it to you. You'd
deal with a local car dealer (or they'd truck it to you on a flatbed truck)
I wanted a 1999 civic lx. Cheap, reliable transportation (especially when buying said vehicle at invoice) I had recently been in
an accident and my old car was a total loss. This
was in august/september of '99.
A week or so later, the supply of '99 civics has dried up. They offer to sell me a 2000 civic at '99 invoice price (about $500 below 2000 invoice) if I wait for a month. Since I'm driving a rental courtesty of the idiot who totalled my last car I take the deal.
About a month later (early october I think) I get
a call from the dealer telling me my car is ready. I get there are check it out. We go in to sign the paperwork. I ask about the whole carorder.com deal.
The dealer person says that they don't know the whole story, but a check arrived in the mail. She pulls the check out. It's from caroder.com and it's for about $2300.00. They basically gave
me a free downpayment on my car. I asked if I could make a copy of the check. I framed it and posted it in my office.
The moral of the story?
Losing money on every sale but making it up in volume probably isn't a good idea, especially when you are losing $thousands per sale.
Still, it was a sweet deal for me. The free TiVo I
got at networld+interop in may of 2000 was also a nice runner up. These were the glory days of N+I with a private party every night in vegas.
--chuck
Mikohn Gaming was working on a similar
concept called safejack (safe blackjack)
since at least 1998. The idea there
was that special chips would "announce"
their value (1,5,25,100, etc.) to a
computerized table so that the back of house
systems knew how much was being bet.
Assuming they have any brains at all, mikohn
probably filed for a patent on this stuff
years ago. The gaming equipment industry
is one big bee's nest of predatory and
defensive patent plays. (I wish I was the
guy with the touch-screen gaming machine patent)
Incidentally, I recall the system also
had a mini-ccd camera under the shoe so it
could also "see" the cards being dealt to
each player.
Seemed like a pretty interesting idea, but
I don't think it ever caught on. Maybe it
was too expensive, or just too far ahead
of it's time?
--chuck
Sun squandered everything of importance to them in the last 5 years in a rush to overthrow the king of the hill (Microsoft) and so when a new challenger (Linux) arrived, they were too busy fighting the last war.
They acted like the dotcom era was eternal, and that people were going to buy their overpriced systems forever. When the easy money dried up, they didn't know what to do. You can't go from $5billion a quarter in sales to $3billion/qtr in sales and not expect your competition to eat you alive.
It wasn't the baby bell's fault that morons with bad business plans and a lot of cash decided to spend $millions on Suns while the money was flowing. Sun rode the dotcom wave and that wave hit the shore. Now the Linux tsunami is going to decimate Sun's beach and they have no time to move to higher ground.
The reason that $10k ultrasparcs are a dime a dozen isn't because of some grand conspiracy, it's the market sorting it out. The supply of these things is big (see dotcom wave crashing above) and the demand is weak - a $1000 linux box performs just as well and is more flexible, can run more apps, more O/S's and have a larger market to sell into. The market has to discount niche sun equipment to find willing buyers. That's econ 101 stuff.
Sun is not becoming a marginal player because the X protocol is denting CAD sales - They are becoming irrelevant because a $2500 wintel box will perform just as well, if not better, than their $10k offering. Sun abandoned the workstation market a long time ago anyhow.
Sun's chips are impressive but Intel's economy of scale kills them in price and comes close enough in performance that x86 is the smart decision for 99% of people today.
Sun shot themselves in the foot. It's their decision whether they limp along and heal or the foot becomes gangerous and eventually kills them. Frankly, I think they are toast.
--chuck
My bad on this one. I just got an email from
the creator of the unix family tree saying
it's all on the up and up. They asked for and
were given permission to use the unix family
tree (which btw is super cool and totally worth
checking out.
I didn't see any notice and assumed the worst.
--chuck
It appears that SCO has helped themselves to
r y0 1.html
t io n.ppt (slide #4)
Éric Lévénez's unix family tree, possibly in
violation of the "you can freely use this diagram
for non-commercial purposes" line at the bottom
of the page.
compare http://www.levenez.com/unix/
with
http://www.sco.com/scosource/unixtree/unixhisto
http://www.sco.com/scosource/SCOsource_Presenta
I guess "What's mine is mine, and what's yours
is negotiable" rings true at SCO.
--chuck
The subject says it all. HP's E-services
division uses tomcat in many of their
public-facing sites. This is significant
because HP owns/used to own bluestone
application server and are now in bed with
BEA. Nevertheless they are using tomcat in
production for real e-commerce sites right
now.
--chuck
I assume you are speaking of Rebecca Adams' class
Field Research Methods and Applied Social Theory
at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
That class actually did produce several published
papers and eventually a book with more papers
from the students' experience.
Although it does seem a bit frivolous on the
surface, I've read the book and it is quite
detailed and objective - a balanced look at the
social structure and community of deadheads.
details on the book at amazon.com