From the title of the article. "First quarterly loss ever" is not particularly important when the loss in question is just an accounting trick to defer and lump together the recognition of a loss that occurred a long time ago in practice.
Sure, its important. Sure, if Accounting worked such that you posted write-downs back to the fiscal period of the acquisition of the asset, the fiscal period in which this loss occurred would have been earlier, but unless Microsoft was making substantially more money before considering this expense in the quarter in 2007 in which the acquisition occurred than it is now, it still would have been posting its first quarterly loss at the same time.
I think the point is that it's meaningless to look at the loss and say that it's indicative of this quarter being particularly worse than the preceding ones - i.e. that it's a start of a downward trend (which TFS is implying).
How do you get the implication of something "particularly worse than the preceding ones" or being the "start of a trend" from the claim that was disputed in TFS -- the claim that the loss stems from continuing struggles in the online services division?
That actually outright states (not merely implies) the opposite of what you are trying to argue that it wrongly implies -- that the problem isn't new, and that its not the start of anything but a symptom of something that has been going on for quite a while.
"The loss stems from Microsoft's continued struggles with the online services division."
That's a flat-out deception!
No, its not.
The loss stems from the fact that they made a 6 billion dollar write-off.
A $6.2 billion write-off against a $6.3 billion dollar purchase of an online advertising firm in 2007 that was intended to be a main engine of profit for their online services division. When you purchase a business for $6.3 billion to reinforce a particular part of your company, and five years later recognize that its only worth $100 million (or less than 1/60th of what you paid for it), its pretty fair to describe as that part of the company as struggling.
The summary makes it seem like their online division is just naturally bleeding billions. Millions, maybe, but not billions.
Microsoft themselves, in the write-down, is recognizing that $6.2 billion that they spent on their online services division might as well have been piled up as cash and made into the world's largest currency bonfire.
Bleeding in worthless acquisitions is still bleeding. Some might attempt to distinguish losses from acquisition write-downs from losses from other operations, but with Microsoft -- and many other large firms -- acquisitions are a key and regular part of their operations. If their acquisition strategy is bad and bleeding money, they are bleeding money just as much as if they were losing it from other operations.
No, Microsoft did not bring in less money than it spent. It has decided to wash its hands off of some of the investments it made.
The second sentence is basically true, but the first is somewhat misleading. Essentially, they recognized that a $6.3 billion purchase of aQuantive that they made (which wasn't counted as an expense at the time, because it was treated as the acquisition of an asset of equal value to the purchase price) was, in fact, almost a pure expense, since the asset they acquired turns out to be pretty much entirely worthless (they took a $6.2 billion writedown against the $6.3 billion purchase.)
But that writedown is money that was actually spent, its just money that was spent in 2007 and not counted as an expense then.
Will we all have 3D printers on our desks in a few years? Good question. round us up in 2020 or 2025 at our local hackerspace and we may have an answer for you.
If by "2020 or 2025" you still have to round people up at a "local hackerspace" to get information on the how who is using 3D printers, the answer to the question posed in the first sentence is "No."
No, its not. Its a discussion about regulating the conditions in and purposes for which entities, including the government, can use a particular technology It is not about outlawing technology, any more than speed limits, drunk driving laws, and driver's license requirements are the about outlawing automobiles.
When are we going to accept change and take steps to live within that world?
Discussing whether there is a need for regulation on the use of a particular technology and if so what that regulation should be is part of the process of accepting the change in technology and taking steps to live within that world.
If you are so afraid of it, then stop putting your photo online?
Not every person in a photo posted online is in a photo that that person posted. So, insofar as there is an issue, your proposed approach does little to address it.
I do agree that the government shouldn't be monitoring without a warrant though. Just like they aren't supposed to before technology.
Actually, information that is in public view hasn't required a warrant for the US government to monitor "before technology" (presumably, you mean before this technology, as the government didn't exist before technology.) Warrant requirements exist in a subset of those cases where someone has what is referred to in law as a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
Google may be out to prove that fast networks can be built and maintained at reasonable prices.
More importantly, Google may be out to prove that they are willing and able to go toe-to-toe with the incumbents as a network provider. The big attraction of the anti-neutrality position for incumbent network providers is that it lets them use their regional market power in network access to extract rents from content providers, privileging the network providers own content and capturing the profits other of content providers. And they can do that without fear of losing customers because of the lack of effective choice. But, if Google is able to provide meaningful competition for the incumbent network providers without playing the same game, then suddenly consumers have a meaningful choice, which reduces the viability of the rent-seeking strategy by other network providers.
I like how "client side ASPX" is one of the "web standards" that 'Napa' incorporates. Since when is this proprietary Microsoft technology a "web standard"?
I would not be all that surprised if it would cost more to maintain and extend Accumulo than it would to build the security features into HBase or Cassandra and allow those communities to shepherd the project.
Were either HBase or Cassandra in such a state at the time work on Accumulo was initiated that it would have been reasonable to conclude that using them would be better than building on Hadoop directly (which is what Accumulo did)?
Even if violating the terms of imposed as a result of a previous anti-trust conviction were a common practice, I suspect the EU would continue to impose sanctions on firms that engaged in that practice.
The present investigation isn't about a new anti-competitive practice, its about Microsoft violating the sanctions for the previous conviction and filing a false declaration of compliance with those sanctions.
The EU says M$ has to inform users they can use other browsers. Why?
Because that's the penalty Microsoft agreed to in place of a larger fine when they were convicted of illegally leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to constrain browser choice.
Does Ford, Mercedes, BMW or any other car maker have to inform their owner they can use a different radio in the dash?
Neither Ford, Mercedes, nor BMW has been convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly in the market for cars (unsurprising, since none of them has anything approaching such a monopoly) to constrain the market for radios and agreed to such notification as part of a negotiated penalty for that conviction, so the situations aren't parallel.
And why is this not an issue for Apple and Safari?
The same reason its not an issue for the auto manufacturers.
...who thinks this rambling about browser choices is seeming practically benign considering all the things Apple is doing...
Many of the things Apple is doing might be considered worse for their users than the way Microsoft has leveraged their market power in the OS space, but antitrust is about leveraging market power, not about being bad for your users. (The former is also the latter, but not vice versa.)
Apple is doing a very good job of driving itself to the same point in the mobile market that it reached in the desktop market -- the biggest and most individually significant hardware vendor, but not dominant as a hardware vendor and not even in first place as an OS vendor. They have -- and look to continue to have -- a significant minority of the market, but lack the capacity to deny choice in the marketplace (they can deny further choice to the people that choose their product, but that's generally not an antitrust concern.)
This contrasts with what Microsoft was found to have done with regard to its dominant position in the desktop OS market and leveraging that in the browser space (and this new issue isn't really about what Microsoft has done in that regard so much as what Microsoft has failed to do in regard with the complying with the remedy imposed for what they were found to have done previously.)
Try real hard not to start rounding when you are adding lots of shit up. You can introduce some very large errors.
Or, better, just round and track the uncertainty. Most sensible rounding methods (to integers) result in the initial values having an uncertainty of +/-0.5 (though some give a larger uncertainty, which may be offset by other benefits, up to +/-1)
As an example, using the common round-half-up method, 2.5 + 2.5 rounds to 3 + 3. This, of course, gives 6, which seems like an "wrong" since 2.5 + 2.5 = 5.
But if you keep track of the uncertainty produced by the rounding method (+/-0.5 in each source value) its 3 (+/-0.5) + 3 (+/-0.5) = 6 (+/-1)
This can be useful, since the uncertainty produce by the rounding method is knowable independent of the particular data values -- if you are summing 100 numbers, the total uncertainty is +/-50 -- and when you are doing sums without technical aid, its often for tasks where very broad ballpark numbers are suitable, so long as you know what the range is that the actual results would fall in.
2.9 + 2.9 is either 5.8 or 6
No, 2.9 + 2.9 is 5.8, no options available. If you round before computing, depending on rounding method, it might compute as 5 (+/-1), 6 (+/-1), or something similar -- and if its rounded after computation it would be (knowing only the rounding method and not the original result) 6 (+/-0.5) by most rounding methods, or something else that includes the 5.8 in its range by some of the less obvious ones.
What about iOS and the fact they force safari browser on you. Don't even allow to change it off the default browser? gonna go after apple any time soon? been going over MS for less.
Antitrust actions are largely about misusing dominant market power. What market power you have in the market you are leveraging is a key factor. Microsoft Windows is quite dominant in the desktop OS market in the EU. Apple iOS isn't even #1, much less dominant, in the mobile OS market in the EU.
Bundling, as such, isn't the fundametnal issue. Its just the means by which Microsoft was found to have leveraged their dominant position in the desktop OS market.
If you fine a company because of a bug in their software this is really not understanding how software development works.
Any sanctions won't be for "a bug in their software". They will be for: 1) Violating the agreement they made in place of the fine for the past violation, and 2) Filing a false declaration of compliance with the agreement in December 2011.
When you have a legal obligation to do something, and when you declare in an official legal document that you have, in fact, done what you had an obligation to do, well, the fact that you didn't do what you had an obligation to do and hadn't actually verified that you had before you made the legal declaration has consequences.
Apple bundles Safari with every computer sold, last I checked.
The issue isn't bundling a browser with a computer.
The issue is leveraging dominant market power in the desktop OS market in the EU in an anticompetitive way in the existing-and-distinct desktop browser market. Something Apple can't do with desktop Safari, since it doesn't have dominant market power in the desktop OS market.
In fact, I'm pretty sure Safari is the ONLY browser you can use in iOS (everything else is just a reskin).
iOS isn't even the #1 mobile OS in the EU, much less as dominant in that space as Windows is in the desktop OS market. Market power in the market that is being leveraged is a key factor here.
But those services don't follow the W3C standards, so strictly speaking they are not web.
Since the web existed before the W3C was created to develop and promote standards for the web, the fact that services don't follow W3C standards can't mean they aren't part of the web. It might mean that they aren't part of the "open web" (though if they follow open standards that don't happen to be W3C standards, even that's dubious.)
That's kind of different than programmers not writing SQL. Since SQL is strings, and there shouldn't be hardcoded strings embedded in programs, it stands to reason that there shouldn't be raw SQL embedded in programs.
That doesn't mean that programmers shouldn't write SQL, or that non-programmers should be writing stored procedures so that programmers can avoid writing SQL.
Most programmers are most decidedly not competent in the relational model (the very existence of numerous NoSQL fanbois is a testament to this fact.)
While I agree that most programmers aren't competent in the relational model, the solution isn't to accept that and ban programmers from writing SQL, its to demand that programmers -- at least those working on the model side (less reason for concern from programmers doing, say, pure UI work) -- be competent with the relational model, which is fundamental to understanding data. Further, while I agree with your conclusion, it doesn't follow from the evidence you cite: proficiency with the relational model doesn't mean that you have an obsessive need to have either a RDBMS or a DBMS that speaks SQL (which aren't the same thing, as you can be either without the other) used for all data storage needs. Understanding the relational model is fundamental to effectively modelling data, whether its going to be stored in a black box where someone else has implemented the relational model for you or not (probably moreso when "not".)
Indeed, even many DBA's aren't either as the job is rife with far too many sys admin types
That's why they are called data base administrators. Data modelling and database development are more related to programming than to database administration.
All database access should be done through stored procedures written by people competent in the relational model.
Well, no. All non-administrative access to a database should be through views configured by someone competent in the relational model, but those views should be accessed through SQL also written by people competent in the relational model. Competence with the relational model is a fundamental skill that all professional programmers should have.
I'm guessing that many of the signers of a petition started and promoted by someone associated with the Cato Institute wouldn't vote for Obama independently of his position on this issue.
But, yeah, I doubt that there are many who will sign the petition but who, aside from this issue, would be likely to vote for Obama that would switch based on this issue.
One could argue that the Romans left Britain (or did not expend more energy on holding it) because they stopped being able to make vine and transport over those distances was unfeasible.
One could, if one was completely ignorant of the history of the Roman Empire and its presence in Britain.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, its important. Sure, if Accounting worked such that you posted write-downs back to the fiscal period of the acquisition of the asset, the fiscal period in which this loss occurred would have been earlier, but unless Microsoft was making substantially more money before considering this expense in the quarter in 2007 in which the acquisition occurred than it is now, it still would have been posting its first quarterly loss at the same time.
How do you get the implication of something "particularly worse than the preceding ones" or being the "start of a trend" from the claim that was disputed in TFS -- the claim that the loss stems from continuing struggles in the online services division?
That actually outright states (not merely implies) the opposite of what you are trying to argue that it wrongly implies -- that the problem isn't new, and that its not the start of anything but a symptom of something that has been going on for quite a while.
No, its not.
A $6.2 billion write-off against a $6.3 billion dollar purchase of an online advertising firm in 2007 that was intended to be a main engine of profit for their online services division. When you purchase a business for $6.3 billion to reinforce a particular part of your company, and five years later recognize that its only worth $100 million (or less than 1/60th of what you paid for it), its pretty fair to describe as that part of the company as struggling.
Microsoft themselves, in the write-down, is recognizing that $6.2 billion that they spent on their online services division might as well have been piled up as cash and made into the world's largest currency bonfire.
Bleeding in worthless acquisitions is still bleeding. Some might attempt to distinguish losses from acquisition write-downs from losses from other operations, but with Microsoft -- and many other large firms -- acquisitions are a key and regular part of their operations. If their acquisition strategy is bad and bleeding money, they are bleeding money just as much as if they were losing it from other operations.
The second sentence is basically true, but the first is somewhat misleading. Essentially, they recognized that a $6.3 billion purchase of aQuantive that they made (which wasn't counted as an expense at the time, because it was treated as the acquisition of an asset of equal value to the purchase price) was, in fact, almost a pure expense, since the asset they acquired turns out to be pretty much entirely worthless (they took a $6.2 billion writedown against the $6.3 billion purchase.)
But that writedown is money that was actually spent, its just money that was spent in 2007 and not counted as an expense then.
Will we all have 3D printers on our desks in a few years? Good question. round us up in 2020 or 2025 at our local hackerspace and we may have an answer for you.
If by "2020 or 2025" you still have to round people up at a "local hackerspace" to get information on the how who is using 3D printers, the answer to the question posed in the first sentence is "No."
(Presumably, you mean "of" rather than "if".)
No, its not. Its a discussion about regulating the conditions in and purposes for which entities, including the government, can use a particular technology It is not about outlawing technology, any more than speed limits, drunk driving laws, and driver's license requirements are the about outlawing automobiles.
Discussing whether there is a need for regulation on the use of a particular technology and if so what that regulation should be is part of the process of accepting the change in technology and taking steps to live within that world.
Not every person in a photo posted online is in a photo that that person posted. So, insofar as there is an issue, your proposed approach does little to address it.
Actually, information that is in public view hasn't required a warrant for the US government to monitor "before technology" (presumably, you mean before this technology, as the government didn't exist before technology.) Warrant requirements exist in a subset of those cases where someone has what is referred to in law as a "reasonable expectation of privacy".
More importantly, Google may be out to prove that they are willing and able to go toe-to-toe with the incumbents as a network provider. The big attraction of the anti-neutrality position for incumbent network providers is that it lets them use their regional market power in network access to extract rents from content providers, privileging the network providers own content and capturing the profits other of content providers. And they can do that without fear of losing customers because of the lack of effective choice. But, if Google is able to provide meaningful competition for the incumbent network providers without playing the same game, then suddenly consumers have a meaningful choice, which reduces the viability of the rent-seeking strategy by other network providers.
I like how "client side ASPX" is one of the "web standards" that 'Napa' incorporates. Since when is this proprietary Microsoft technology a "web standard"?
I rather suspect there is a lot less begging and pleading and a lot more forking over cash.
Were either HBase or Cassandra in such a state at the time work on Accumulo was initiated that it would have been reasonable to conclude that using them would be better than building on Hadoop directly (which is what Accumulo did)?
Even if violating the terms of imposed as a result of a previous anti-trust conviction were a common practice, I suspect the EU would continue to impose sanctions on firms that engaged in that practice.
The present investigation isn't about a new anti-competitive practice, its about Microsoft violating the sanctions for the previous conviction and filing a false declaration of compliance with those sanctions.
Because that's the penalty Microsoft agreed to in place of a larger fine when they were convicted of illegally leveraging their desktop OS monopoly to constrain browser choice.
Neither Ford, Mercedes, nor BMW has been convicted of illegally leveraging a monopoly in the market for cars (unsurprising, since none of them has anything approaching such a monopoly) to constrain the market for radios and agreed to such notification as part of a negotiated penalty for that conviction, so the situations aren't parallel.
The same reason its not an issue for the auto manufacturers.
The same reason it is not an issue for Apple.
Many of the things Apple is doing might be considered worse for their users than the way Microsoft has leveraged their market power in the OS space, but antitrust is about leveraging market power, not about being bad for your users. (The former is also the latter, but not vice versa.)
Apple is doing a very good job of driving itself to the same point in the mobile market that it reached in the desktop market -- the biggest and most individually significant hardware vendor, but not dominant as a hardware vendor and not even in first place as an OS vendor. They have -- and look to continue to have -- a significant minority of the market, but lack the capacity to deny choice in the marketplace (they can deny further choice to the people that choose their product, but that's generally not an antitrust concern.)
This contrasts with what Microsoft was found to have done with regard to its dominant position in the desktop OS market and leveraging that in the browser space (and this new issue isn't really about what Microsoft has done in that regard so much as what Microsoft has failed to do in regard with the complying with the remedy imposed for what they were found to have done previously.)
Or, better, just round and track the uncertainty. Most sensible rounding methods (to integers) result in the initial values having an uncertainty of +/-0.5 (though some give a larger uncertainty, which may be offset by other benefits, up to +/-1)
As an example, using the common round-half-up method, 2.5 + 2.5 rounds to 3 + 3. This, of course, gives 6, which seems like an "wrong" since 2.5 + 2.5 = 5.
But if you keep track of the uncertainty produced by the rounding method (+/-0.5 in each source value) its 3 (+/-0.5) + 3 (+/-0.5) = 6 (+/-1)
This can be useful, since the uncertainty produce by the rounding method is knowable independent of the particular data values -- if you are summing 100 numbers, the total uncertainty is +/-50 -- and when you are doing sums without technical aid, its often for tasks where very broad ballpark numbers are suitable, so long as you know what the range is that the actual results would fall in.
No, 2.9 + 2.9 is 5.8, no options available. If you round before computing, depending on rounding method, it might compute as 5 (+/-1), 6 (+/-1), or something similar -- and if its rounded after computation it would be (knowing only the rounding method and not the original result) 6 (+/-0.5) by most rounding methods, or something else that includes the 5.8 in its range by some of the less obvious ones.
In which case, it should be "'Interwebs' is plural." (or, "'Interwebs' is a plural".) Omitting the quotes is a use/mention error.
Antitrust actions are largely about misusing dominant market power. What market power you have in the market you are leveraging is a key factor. Microsoft Windows is quite dominant in the desktop OS market in the EU. Apple iOS isn't even #1, much less dominant, in the mobile OS market in the EU.
Bundling, as such, isn't the fundametnal issue. Its just the means by which Microsoft was found to have leveraged their dominant position in the desktop OS market.
Any sanctions won't be for "a bug in their software". They will be for:
1) Violating the agreement they made in place of the fine for the past violation, and
2) Filing a false declaration of compliance with the agreement in December 2011.
When you have a legal obligation to do something, and when you declare in an official legal document that you have, in fact, done what you had an obligation to do, well, the fact that you didn't do what you had an obligation to do and hadn't actually verified that you had before you made the legal declaration has consequences.
The issue isn't bundling a browser with a computer.
The issue is leveraging dominant market power in the desktop OS market in the EU in an anticompetitive way in the existing-and-distinct desktop browser market. Something Apple can't do with desktop Safari, since it doesn't have dominant market power in the desktop OS market.
iOS isn't even the #1 mobile OS in the EU, much less as dominant in that space as Windows is in the desktop OS market. Market power in the market that is being leveraged is a key factor here.
If stories could be modded, this story would argue for adding a new "Obvious" mod.
Since the web existed before the W3C was created to develop and promote standards for the web, the fact that services don't follow W3C standards can't mean they aren't part of the web. It might mean that they aren't part of the "open web" (though if they follow open standards that don't happen to be W3C standards, even that's dubious.)
That's kind of different than programmers not writing SQL. Since SQL is strings, and there shouldn't be hardcoded strings embedded in programs, it stands to reason that there shouldn't be raw SQL embedded in programs.
That doesn't mean that programmers shouldn't write SQL, or that non-programmers should be writing stored procedures so that programmers can avoid writing SQL.
While I agree that most programmers aren't competent in the relational model, the solution isn't to accept that and ban programmers from writing SQL, its to demand that programmers -- at least those working on the model side (less reason for concern from programmers doing, say, pure UI work) -- be competent with the relational model, which is fundamental to understanding data. Further, while I agree with your conclusion, it doesn't follow from the evidence you cite: proficiency with the relational model doesn't mean that you have an obsessive need to have either a RDBMS or a DBMS that speaks SQL (which aren't the same thing, as you can be either without the other) used for all data storage needs. Understanding the relational model is fundamental to effectively modelling data, whether its going to be stored in a black box where someone else has implemented the relational model for you or not (probably moreso when "not".)
That's why they are called data base administrators. Data modelling and database development are more related to programming than to database administration.
Well, no. All non-administrative access to a database should be through views configured by someone competent in the relational model, but those views should be accessed through SQL also written by people competent in the relational model. Competence with the relational model is a fundamental skill that all professional programmers should have.
I'm guessing that many of the signers of a petition started and promoted by someone associated with the Cato Institute wouldn't vote for Obama independently of his position on this issue.
But, yeah, I doubt that there are many who will sign the petition but who, aside from this issue, would be likely to vote for Obama that would switch based on this issue.
Is there any company that doesn't like you to buy their product as frequently as possible?
One could, if one was completely ignorant of the history of the Roman Empire and its presence in Britain.