Go where the money is
Great to see leaps and bounds in technology being harnessed for military purposes as a priority...
1131 posts • joined 12 Oct 2010
Moderately tangential (but wanted to mention his name anyway) memory is getting hazy but I seem to recall after MS threw together its seat-of-the-pants OS for the Altair Paul Allen realised while on the plane going to see the proprietor for a demo that they had not yet written the boot code. So he wrote it on the plane.
Really? Then how curious there is lots more stuff in the Imperial Palace Museum, Beijing which somehow did not get smashed by the Red Guards - which is a tiresome, misleading and an unsubstantiated knee-jerk excuse for the Nationalist looting.
How about the hundreds of thousands of Imperial treasures held at the Taipei Museum looted by the Nationalists and transported by the trainload when they fled to Taiwan? So many barely 10% may be displayed at any one time.
Or is it the other way round.
Over a period of (many) years any time Amazon was at risk of turning a profit Bezos would cut prices.
Back then the only way to guarantee a stratospheric share price was run at as large a loss as possible.
For those of us who over the years built their own office and home PC's and struggled endlessly with this OS or that - and who probably have too many computers at home* -
"people who want to turn their stuff into Chromebooks in an easy, faff-free way"
is exactly right.
* Re-installed XP on one a couple of weeks ago, Why? 'Cos it's there. Idle, even though not that long ago it did everything I wanted. Mostly still does. Haven't turned it on since then,
Toss them to the back of the cupboard and they're gone. But keep coming back again and again - like Covid!
Now I shall spend hours trying to find the charger for the LG Google Phone then descend into frustration trying to load this latest OS iteration on to it and waste a good part of the weekend. Can't wait :-)
Was it Stevie J or someone else at Apple who veered towards fingers?
He it was who said (about a forthcoming possibly rival product) words to the effect "If they have a stylus we know we've won".
True - easy to say now - but how did he know that since we had stopped using fingers in kindergarten?
Utter tripe. The PLA occupies barracks in the heart of HK Island and are generally invisible save when driving in impeccably maintained vehicles to other PLA facilities - all taken over in 1997 from the British Army - and never exceeding the speed limit. They certainly never appear on the streets of HK least of all to quell protests - especially when Xi JinPing made it clear that it was a HK problem and HK had better fix it.
Anyone know how much net profit lost that translates to - if any?
And assuming that means abandoning all the related regional logistics and other support - all cost centres - HP probably comes out ahead.
In any event the accountants will be busy turning the shuttering costs into a balance sheet positive.
In a profession treating chargeable time as sacrosanct I gave up time sheets years ago. Did the right thing : installed a time recording package (running under DOS - yes, DOS); pick up the phone - keyboard click to start the timer; put down the phone - click to stop it. I was genuinely shocked to find most phone calls are barely 2 minutes. Especially when time is routinely recorded in 5 minute segments.
So half the chargeable time was illusion.
And I could not figure out at all how I was getting by on 1.5 hours work a day.
Scepticism required when ingesting reports on China from Western media. FT for example prints what is presented as a definitive shareholder breakdown. Underneath the attribution in tiny print is "Sources : Documents seen by the FT; sources". I had better send them some more "sources" I just wrote in wax crayon.
Voice controls=good?
If memory serves it was in OS/2 Warp when I tried it but the hardware fell short as well as the brainware. That is, hand (on mouse) and eye connection was fast and instinctive whereas screen-eye-brain-vocal chord was a good deal slower. Even assuming you could remember the correct wretched word.
Have not tried recent iterations.
Agree. Faithful OS/2 user here until finally had to move (to OS/X) but just a daily office (=place of business) user so never had the need or chance to exploit the depth and richness of the Workplace Shell.
In fact now you mention it I am tempted to reinstall it on an old but not too old machine. Should go like greased lightning.
Three cheers for the original MP3 portable player of which I have fond in fact very fond memories.
The first time you sit on the bus with the ability to enter your private hi-if world and actually choose what you listen to.
Since El Reg and nobody else mentioned it I shall, again : the Rio MP3 player
Easy. Perfectly normal business. Control at least cost. And maximise return against investment which is malleable.
So invest $100 and get back $110 you make 10%.
But get some other lunkhead to fund your $100, pay him $1 interest you made 900%.
AND the lunkhead loses sleep cos if the investment tanks and you declare bankruptcy he is the one who lost $100, not you.
..should stick to their lasts. I mean you, El Reg, Stick to IT.
He is buying the company i.e. paying existing shareholders for their shares. The $$ goes to them.
The debt raised by EM to fund the buyout and therefore the interest is his liability, not the company's. There is no reason why it would raise the company's expenses a single cent.
'Course he may want to force through dividends, or even loans, to help his cash flow but that is not an expense and is routine cash management.
And he may want to get into more creative financial management - the bankers cannot wait to bump up their pension funds with Elon as a client - affecting the balance sheet and P&L account but that is hypothetical and an entirely different point.
The world we live in is the one in which banks already have the entire funding covered by their portfolio investment clients. The banks do not have to risk a single cent of their own money**
**except they do of course (but only technically) when they can book a profit in 5 minutes, 5 hours or 5 days it takes them to toss the thing over to their kept-in-the-dark clients with whom they have discretionary management arrangements.
The most infuriating aspect of US takeovers. The first thing Directors and senior management do is rush to check their service contracts. Then they figure out the way to maximise their own returns. In a perfect world the Board would recuse themselves since in no way are they giving independent recommendations to shareholders.
As an earlier poster said shareholders can say yes or no; or do nothing. There is a plethora of sources of information today; and advising shareholders has not been a closed shop for decades. Yet the second thing the Board does is ask the lawyers to drop in a poison pill, no more than a form of blackmail, a way to say **** you to the (temporarily) hostile party which benefits neither the company nor the shareholders.
Biting the hand that feeds IT © 1998–2022