The Ballmer Days Are Over - <AUTHOR> http://brooksreview.net/2011/05/ballmer/ <comment><USER3> I'm sorry, he lost me at comparing Microsoft stock to Apple and Google over the past 10 years. In retrospect, those are two of the most successful publicly traded tech companies of the period--not a fair comparison.

Not to mention those were small companies in 2000. For Microsoft stock to have increased 1200% (as Google's did) it would have probably had to grow into some very significant portion of the world economy.

Obviously Microsoft hasn't outperformed over the past 10 years, and it looks like the rest of the article gets into actual substantive critique, but it's hard for me to trust substance from someone who starts out with such an unfair introduction.

<comment><USER4> Note: I do not hold shares in any of the below companies.

Apple and Google were in their heydays during this time period. If anyone is interested in seeing a _really_ interesting comparison then go to finance.google.com and do the following:

1\. Look up MSFT

2\. Click "All" for your zoom option, this should give you from 1986 to present

3\. Add GOOG and AAPL using the compare box

Now look at the chart. MSFT is up 25,019.04% since it was publicly listed. AAPL is up 11102.07% since it was publicly listed. GOOG is up 394% since it was publicly listed.

If we want to truly assess Ballmer's performance as a CEO using stock performance as a metric then I strongly suggest we look at the past ten and five years of performance of Microsoft and compare it to similar tech companies.

Offhand, I think that IBM and Oracle make suitable comparison points. Looking at the past ten years of performance, we can see that MSFT is down about 27%, while IBM is up 49% and ORCL is up 109%. Now we can more clearly see that Ballmer has more than likely missed some opportunities along the way. When you narrow to the last five years, the picture doesn't change.

I agree with the author of the blog piece - Ballmer has proven to be a mediocre CEO of Microsoft. However, we need to make sensible comparisons to get the point across.

Frankly, I don't understand how MSFT could sit on 40 billion dollars in cash and short term investments without increasing its dividend to something more in line with what one should expect from a mature cash-rich business.

Increasing shareholder value should be the goal of all publicly listed companies. Purchasing Skype for $8.5 Billion dollars flies straight into the face of this - it is a crazy move. Any shareholders that are not screaming about this should wake and smell the sinking share price.

Edited: Formatting in the step-by-step portion of this post was messed up initially...

<comment><USER5> MSFT was the overpriced darling of the Dotcom era. Ballmer inherited an insane valuation. Meanwhile, in the last ten years, net income has gone from under 8 billion to over 18 billion. This is not a failure and will eventually be reflected in the stick price.

Source -- <http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/inside_ms.mspx>

<comment><USER4> An insane valuation? At the start of January 2000, Microsoft's most recent earnings per share was $0.90. It's share price was about $58 dollars. This would have given it a P/E ratio of about 64x. This was relatively tame by dot com standards.

MSFT's current P/E ratio is about 10x. Just looking at that number right there, most people would conclude that MSFT was a great value play. In my personal opinion it is indeed a great value play - but not so long as Ballmer is still calling the shots.

If market prices were solely set based on income then you would be right; the price would eventually rise regardless of whether Ballmer remained at the helm or not. However, market prices are more complex than this. They also incorporate expectations for the future. It is here where MSFT's current problem is.

If you look at the components of MSFT's cash flow their major income sources are the Windows Operating System and the MS Office Suite. It is unbelievable that either revenue source will suddenly evaporate.

The problem is that both of MSFT's core business functions are under pressure. This pressure is coming from the decreasing dominance of the PC as the digital platform of choice and the increasing prevalence of Internet-based solutions to problems that were previously solved by offline software packages.

While MSFT is currently conducting expansions into a large array of industries, it is unlikely to dominate these industries to the same degree that it currently dominates the desktop sphere. In all of the industries where MSFT is trying to expand its footprint it faces vigorous competition from fairly formidable competitors. Even in its core industries, challenges are appearing on the horizon. Here's just a really quick summary:

1\. Video Gaming - Nintendo, Sony, Apple? (Perhaps for "casual" gamers only, but I am not well versed enough to know how serious of a contender Apple is as of yet)

2\. Tablets/Mobile - Google, Apple, HP

3\. Search/Advertising - Google (Look, this is a big enough fish, I don't even need to name anything else)

4\. Operating Systems - Google (ChromOS in the distant? future, Android everywhere, tablets eating market share), Apple (tablet popularity may erode Windows market share)

5\. Server & Server Tools - ORCL, Linux, IBM, etc, etc, etc

6\. Microsoft Office - Nothing serious yet, but GOOG is salivating at a chance to chip away at this

Market prices incorporate expectations for future growth as well as performance relative to peers. In the near term Microsoft is making buckets and buckets of solid cash. In the medium term, there are threats on the horizon that are looming large. In the long term, there is a great deal of uncertainty and this uncertainty is not made any better by strange moves like acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion.

I have heard some people say that acquiring Skype was a defensive move. Look, defensive moves like that are the last ditch strategy of someone that knows they are losing. There were a billion strategies that could have been taken that would have yielded a better strategic position.

What Microsoft needs is a visionary leader that can turn its buckets of cash into something that can carve out a substantial, permanent, and secure foothold on one of the fronts that they are fighting. That sounds cliche, but it is what they really need right now.

Microsoft is a fantastic company with an amazing amount of talent in it. I actually believe that it has some incredible earnings potential, but unlocking this potential will take bold, aggressive moves - not expensive defensive posturing.

It is not my intention to bash Microsoft. I have a lot of respect for the company. However, something obviously needs to change in response to the new challenges that they are facing. The status quo is no longer good enough.

Sources:

Edgar online for the year 2000 10-Q filing, yahoo finance for price in 2000, [http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-Q3-2011-...](http://www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Microsoft-Q3-2011-by- the-numbers-Record-1643B-Windows-revenue-declines/1304021955) for revenue break down.

I apologize in advance for any formatting strangeness in this post. In my defense - I am new here, and it is 1:31 am.

<comment><USER6> 64x being tame by dot com standards still doesn't make it cheap!

As for the earnings argument, look at it this way - Apple and Microsoft both made about 18B after taxes in 2010. Difference is, Microsoft's been printing money for almost a decade. Google doesn't even come close.

It's a fantastically profitable company. You can speculate about the future however you want, the fact remains that this company that until a year or two ago made more than Apple and Google combined is priced far below that combination.

<comment><USER4> It is a fantastically profitable company. A fantastically profitable company with the P/E ratio and historical growth rates of a public utility.

Why invest in Microsoft when you could invest in Exxon Mobile, Johnson & Johnson, The Coca-Cola Company, Novartis - all companies with better long term growth rates and beefy dividends.

Look, I am not trying to be discouraging, but I find it grating how little progress Microsoft has been able to make despite its huge market advantages.

Maybe the question is one of perspective. I tend to constantly think in terms of long-term investments. If you are investing because you intend to cash in on an upcoming bounce in the price (rather than holding on for the long term) then that is actually a sound strategy - I wish you luck in timing the bounce.

It's the long-term perspective that I am mostly referring to. That is the reason for the speculating about the future.

Disclaimer: I own none of the shares mentioned above - as a matter of fact I currently own no shares of anything.

<comment><USER6> Microsoft's had better earnings growth than any of the companies you listed. In the past 5 years Novartis grows its revenue from 30B to 45, MSFT does it from 51 to 62. Keep in mind that it gets harder the bigger you are - if you're already sucking 51B from your customers, how the hell do you find another 11?

The flaw with speculating about the future is that anything that's certain will be priced into the stock immediately. Any other "educated guesses" you make might as well go to a blackjack table.

A lot of people think they're being prudent just because they're investing with a "long-term perspective". That doesn't get you anything in and of itself - I can buy a car and hold onto it forever but it'll never appreciate (well, until it becomes an antique). It's true that you shouldn't daytrade, that you should be willing to stomach holding something even if it loses value. But that just makes it more important that you understand _why_ you've chosen to hold onto this stock for so long. And I don't think speculation about the future is a good basis for that decision. If you can point to something in the present (e.g, 18B in net income) there's a lot more assurance that you're actually getting something for your money.

<comment><USER7> If Novartis has put on 50% or 15B, how is Microsoft doing better by putting on 22% or 11B?

Now, I'm not fully convinced that companies on that scale are really delivering the best market value to either shareholders or wider society compared to their functions being split across a network of smaller organisations that can stand or fall on their own merits, but still... other large companies exist and have done better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Microsoft issues dividends. Google and Apple don't.

<comment><USER9> Can you expand on that comment? I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Should this change how we interpret the stock price growth comparison between Microsoft, Apple, and Google?

Just thinking about it, I only see two ways in which that would change the stocks valuation. On the one hand, it must reduce the capital that Microsoft has on hand, which might reduce the price of the stock. On the other hand, I would imagine that the fact that owning Microsoft gives you real value in the form of an (quarterly?) payout might increase the stock's price. One can still buy and sell the stock just like a stock that doesn't pay a dividend, betting on the future success of the company, plus you get money on a regular basis. Is there some other way it relates? I really don't know much about this.

<comment><USER10> You can make money by buying a stock, having the business get more valuable so the stock goes up, and selling the stock at a higher value. Or you can make money by buying a stock, having the business make money and pay it out to you in dividends.

At the end of the day, what matters here is how much money you make and how long it took you to get it, which is a function of sell price - buy price + dividends received - transaction costs and taxes paid. This chart ignores the dividends received part, and thus misrepresents the value of the stock. I don't know how big the dividend is so I don't know by how much. I doubt it would really make -50whatever% a whole lot better, but it would certainly be something better.

Traditionally dividends are generally paid out by businesses that can't reasonably expect to use their cash to grow - reinvesting all your cash to grow may not make sense if your growth is limited by geography or by completely owning an entire market. The textbook example is a utility company.

<comment><USER6> Even a company that's growing _ought_ to pay dividends in most cases. After all, if your shareholders have faith in continued good business they have the option of reinvesting their dividends. Companies that don't pay out are essentially telling you that your money's better off in the company, which strikes me as a rather arrogant way to treat your owners.

<comment><USER11> Dividends are basically saying "we're returning earnings because you can probably invest them better than we can". It's up to the investor balance their portfolio and decide how much money they have invested in the company, dividends are supposed to be that mechanism.

<comment><USER6> Sure, and as a shareholder I can say that I always know better. In reality I probably don't, but it's a matter of principle. We own this company, and they're telling us that they'd rather use all the profits they generated (out of the money _we_ provided) for themselves.

It's not that I think every company should always pay out a dividend. It doesn't make sense if you're growing fast, or losing money. Berkshire doesn't have to because we generally agree that Buffett's a better investor than the rest of us. For the vast majority of companies not in these categories though, it seems like the shareholders would be better off if they just got the cash.

<comment><USER12> No, not for themselves; for their shareholders – ie for you. They're saying that there's an illiquid opportunity they can access which you can't.

You might disagree with them; if you do, sell the stock.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think Microsoft should break itself up and leave Ballmer in charge of the business focussed parts and put a new CEO in charge of WP7, xbox and the other consumer parts. Everyone heaps platitudes on Jobs but the reality is he has no understanding of or interest in business needs. On the other hand, you can make an argument that Ballmer has performed quite well on this front.

The simple fact is that it may be impossible to reconcile the different business styles needed to succeed in both the consumer space and the business space. Let them separate and have genuinely different corporate personas and both might succeed more.

<comment><USER14> >Everyone heaps platitudes on Jobs but the reality is he has no understanding of or interest in business needs. On the other hand, you can make an argument that Ballmer has performed quite well on this front.

Yeah Apple definitely doesn't need all that cash they're raking in.

Move along please, point to something substantive and back it up with evidence before you arrogantly dismiss Steve Jobs. He has valid criticisms such as how will he be replaced? But what you said, absolutely is not backed up by all the available evidence. You then go on to praise Ballmer? Bizarre.

<comment><USER15> I think the OP is right, but you are misunderstanding. Jobs understands his business, but what products does Apple put out there for businesses? Microsoft has Exchange, Active Directory, .NET/C#/MVC, MSSql, plus many more products aimed at the enterprise. Apple makes consumer products and does it will. The iPhone/pad/pod, AppleTV, laptops, and desktops. They tried the server market with XServer, but that was discontinued this year.

I want to mention again .NET and C#. C# has become a cornerstone of the enterprise world, much like Java. You could say that Apple has XCode and Obj-c, but that doesn't really compete against .NET, except for desktop apps. But the focus of XCode lately has been iOS and .NET has been web apps. Of course this is a broad generalization.

Back to business needs. Microsoft is great at products for the businesses, and great at selling them to the businesses. They are also great at other things too, like XBox. I have had a feeling for a couple years now that there are departments with great product managers that put the product above the politics of a large corporation and upper management that shield the workers from the politics. Those departments end up with great products, like the XBox, Office (though I have heard Office just has the clout of being a big money maker to get whatever they want), Visual Studio/.NET/etc, Windows, and possibly IE (or at least the the current IE team). But reading about what happened with purchasing Danger to take on the iPhone stinks of to many people trying to tell Danger team what to do.

About the only place where Microsoft and Apple true stand toe to toe is the OS. Windows 7 looks great (I have only used it sparingly being a Mac/Linux guy) and OSX is great. I guess you could say the browser is another place. Both IE9 and Safari are good, but really, I think Firefox and Chrome have them beat.

How Microsoft can use this to their advantage is for someone else to figure out. Maybe splitting up would be good, or maybe they just need to say to hell with completing against Apple when in comes to consumer gadgets.

<comment><USER16>
         what products does Apple put out there for businesses

That's the beauty of it - they don't have to target businesses, because businesses buy their shit anyway.

         doesn't really compete against .NET

Apple doesn't have to compete against .NET - Microsoft shot itself in the foot years ago by not building a Unix and by not taking advantage of the open- source ecosystem.

You may say what you want about .NET, but go to any software or web-related conference, and you'll see more than half the room filled with Apple computers.

Apple doesn't compete with .NET because it doesn't have to.

<comment><USER15> I don't care for MS, but I do grudgingly respect .NET from everything I have seen. And while it is hip to use Apple and run RoR, Django, Erlang, or any other next big language and stack, .NET is huge in the corporate world where the stack is decided based upon politics and who plays golf with who instead of by the developers.

And yes, Apple doesn't compete with .NET, that was sort of my point. They different products to address different needs—iOS/desktop apps vs web based CRUD apps for insurance companies (example corporate industry).

<comment><USER16> These alternative platforms for software development are actually eroding Microsoft's market share.

It isn't just the hipsters that are deploying to Linux, it's the big guys too, like the London Stock Exchange.

<comment><USER17> > These alternative platforms for software development are actually eroding > Microsoft's market share.

where is the data about that ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So this is just shareholder activism at its finest. A lot of M$ share holders are upset at the Skype deal and with the returns on the stock since Ballmer took over. Nothing new here, just that Microsoft lead by Ballmer has underperformed the market.

I keep waiting for these folks to say who they think _should_ be running Microsoft but that doesn't come up a lot.

<comment><USER19> Inside Microsoft, many hope it will be Steven Sinofsky.

<comment><USER20> Sinofsky is really good at running Windows & Office, but is he the right guy to successfully expand beyond that? MS is getting its butt kicked in mobile, social, and consumer electronics, all of which Sinofsky doesn't have direct experience.

<comment><USER21> Gates didn't have direct experience in any of the areas Microsoft ended up dominating. In the end, the CEO's role is more visionary than mentor. His job is to guide, not to teach. A good CEO can make smart choices about technologies with which he's unfamiliar, if he has a vision in mind. Compare Sculley and Jobs in their approach to Apple: neither was technologically gifted, but Sculley relied on the engineers to dictate direction, whereas Jobs (mk II) dictated direction to the engineers. The point is that a CEO need not be Gates: he need not have an intimate knowledge of the technology, so long as he has a clear and accurate vision of its future.

<comment><USER15> Also, it doesn't have to be the CEO with the vision. The CEO can, in the scenario, find and back up someone else with the vision.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The world will be a little better off with a decline of Microsoft. 90% desktop market share is too much. More diversity will be healthier. Chromebooks should take some market share. Microsoft can own 50-70% market share and still be very profitable. They might even be more innovative in other areas.

<comment><USER19> Chromebooks as they are now are not attractive. Apple's mobile platform, MacBook, IPad, IPhone, is significantly eating into MS share.

<comment><USER23> Who exactly are you speaking for when you say they are not attractive? A large part of Microsoft's share is in school/org licenses. Another large one is for the unskilled users of computers. I would very much consider Google as a real competitor for them.

<comment><USER19> <http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385301,00.asp>

I look at it this way. Chrome notebooks are priced beyond that of PC laptops, they offer no benefit over a PC laptop running Chrome, so why buy one? Further ChromeOs will have limited local storage, and absolutely no native apps. This means no Skype, no local movie player, etc. A buyer would actually be getting less for their money by buying a ChromeOS machine instead of a $350 laptop at BestBuy with Chrome installed.

The form factor for consumption of media, video and news, does not require a keyboard. In fact it does not seem to require much of the laptop form factor at all. The tablet may already be the best solution, time will tell. But ChromeOS is avoiding stepping on Android's toes, and is not expanding in that direction. And that is limiting.

Leasing will only be available for schools, businesses, and governments-- entities already in long term contracts with Apple or PC manufacturers. There won't be much penetration in the short term. And when it comes to price comparisons, ChromeOS will not have the support base and personelle which is already built up around PCs.

Lastly Chrome notebooks necessitate a wireless data plan, but as of now no carrier gives unlimited access for a low, flat fee. That means no unlimited Netflix or Hulu. And judging from my experience with a mobile data card, the connection is not stable enough for video streaming anyway, nor voice calls, nor multiplayer gaming.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >> In fact, the acquisition by most accounts sounded more like a move by Ballmer to buy something that others may have wanted to own — just for the sake of others not owning it.

This struck me because I'm presently reading Stephen Levy's _In the Plex_ , in which he reports at great lengths about why Google decided not to purchase Skype when eBay had it up for sale: mainly owing to Skype's peer-to-peer technology not being compatible with Google's existing centralized infrastructure. What reason would Microsoft have to think that this reasoning had changed?

<comment><USER25> If you look at Microsoft's words and actions in regards to their competitors, they are clearly completely clueless.

In fact, "Microsoft people" are often completely blind to everything not made by Microsoft. Reading HN you may never know, but if you've met actual .NET stack developers, or MSCE's or anyone else similar, and you'll find people who _make websites_ and don't know what _apache_ is. Or they'll dismiss open source technologies with ridiculous reasoning.

That's what I see when MS speaks.

(To be fair, IBM can be the same way, if you are in certain industries, and I would imagine Cisco has the same effect in networking, but that's outside my knowledge)

<comment><USER26> Thank you. I'm a .NET developer by trade. (ASP.NET MVC).

Yes, I know Haskell. Yes I know python. Yes, I've used django. Yes I've programmed in PROLOG and EIFFEL. Yes I can use a shell and succesfully configured a linux server countless of times. Fuck me, totally unrelated, but I even know MATLAB. Yes, I had my hands on SOLARIS servers. Yes, I programmed a SPH solver with CUDA. Yes I know javascript, not just jQuery. ETC.

So here I am, an actual ".NET stack developer". Ask me anything.

<comment><USER27> I am doing some work with C# right now, and I would agree with "are often ..." in my workplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 _Windows Mobile 6.5 was a powerhouse of a product. Pre-2007 most U.S. buyers of smart phones chose between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile 6.5. Both were small screened devices with a hardware keyboard — with exception to the few HTC devices with stylus based touch screens. Palm was struggling at the time and Windows Mobile was the dominate player in consumer minds, BlackBerry was the beast in boardrooms._

This seems off to me. Am I the only one who doesn't remember "Windows Mobile was the dominate player in consumer minds" in 2006?

<comment><USER28> You had to be one of the rare consumers who were purchasing a "smart phone". I remember writing software for the platform because it seemed like it was really going to take off, especially when things like the Dell Axim were starting to sell.

Side note: Anyone want a Dell Axim?

<comment><USER29> I remember how badly I wanted a Motorola Q or a Samsung Blackjack when they came out but I had just started a contract... Luckily for me my contract was up just in time to get an iPhone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Whereas I agree that Microsoft's performance and innovation over the past decade has been abysmal, I'm not sure it's just Ballmer to blame.

It all started with the Google brain drain - and that happened while Bill Gates was very much involved at Microsoft. Once the brain drain begins, you lose talent at a rapid clip and no matter how great an idea you may have, it's very hard to execute.

So then if you can't build it, you buy it. The product and the talent. Hence the Skype purchase. Here MSFT is buying a business and the people who run it, granted at a hefty price, but Skype is well established around the world and I see it as a better integration with Microsoft than eBay, which never made any sense to me. No it didn't cost Apple 1 billion dollars to build Facetime - <USER2> it also didn't cause Skype 1 billion dollars to build Skype. I can't say what it's worth now but I do know that I use it a lot since it's been available on the iPhone - great when traveling abroad.

Bing is slowly making strides as a search engine, Windows 7 is selling rather well and Kinect is a huge it. And they have partnerships with Yahoo! and Facebook.

Ballmer may need to go, but I really don't think Microsoft is entering the early stages of it's finale.

<comment><USER31> Buying Skype might have been the first smart thing Microsoft has done in a while. Skype is a relevant brand to consumers globally, Microsoft just is not anymore. The real question is will Microsoft destroy Skype.

Bing search is another good move Microsoft has made. Adcenter, on the other hand is an embarrassing disaster on its own two feet and an ugly nightmare in comparison to Adwords. Adcenter is like a buggy crashing version of Adwords in 2005. Given that Microsoft provides the only real alternative search engine to Google that is pretty damn pathetic.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the brain drain. The fact is even with a brain drain companies have assets. Apple was effectively a dead company in the late 90s. Microsoft needs this same type of brutally intense focused leadership right now -- not attention deficit disorder look at me showmanship.

<comment><USER32> Trick is, I don't think Microsoft bought Skype for the consumer service. I think it's solely to make Exchange/Lync a better enterprise offering.

MS has apparently realized that there's still a huge opportunity following the analog PBX shakeout of the last decade. They've been pushing Lync pretty heavily lately and I think the Skype purchase was made so they can directly address the things people ask for when they're evaluating Lync.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The same board that approved this deal would be responsible for appointing a new CEO.

<comment> brown9-2 Exactly - a lot of this rant about how the board should sack Ballmer presumes that the board knows better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think it's a disservice to Ballmer to not consider that every business goes up and down.

This chart (courtesy turar) is the real story -> [http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/net_income#compCos=AAPL,GO...](http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/net_income#compCos=AAPL,GOOG&zoom=10)

It just bothers all the Silicon Valley tech press that Microsoft continues to thrash its competitors.

Google makes money via search. Apple started off with fucking mp3 players and now makes 'post-PC' devices.

It just bothers SiValley that no one can touch the Windows domination.

Microsoft made $5 billion+ in profit last quarter. The CEO who's been in charge for the last 10 years should be given a prize for surviving and growing the company's profits.

A new emerging company will always have more room to grow. If you consider each company at its core competency they are all dominating.

Google has 64% or so search share. Bing+yahoo get 30% or so. Microsoft has 90%+ desktop OS share. After 16 or 20 continuous quarters of growth Mac is still less than 10%. Apple is dominating smartphones (though Android might slow it down, notably without making any profit itself - unless you want to count it as a defence for mobile search). It's also dominating Tablets and trying to change things - because it doesn't want to fight Microsoft head-on in PCs - Just too difficult given Microsoft's advantages.

So each company is dominating its niche and trying to find ways to make its niche dominate the entire tech landscape.

Microsoft still being so dominant and the success of Windows 7 point to Sinofsky and Ballmer being God level. Growing profits from a couple of billion a quarter to $5 billion to $6 billion a quarter is extremely impressive.

Apple's growth is more impressive - However, that doesn't mean Microsoft's profits are unimpressive and it'd be foolish to take your personal dislike of Microsoft as a reason to discount some really solid work by CEO Ballmer.

Finally, Ballmer's first duty is to Microsoft and himself and Gate and Microsoft people. Who fucking cares what the vultures of Wall Street and shareholders who don't do squat think.

</comment><comment><USER35> Sure, Microsoft could have built a skype clone in-house for far less than $8bn. But would people actually sign up and use it - to the tune of 124 million people per month? My guess is no, at least not for several quarters.

<comment><USER36> > Microsoft could have built a skype clone in-house for far less than $8bn. > But would people actually sign up and use it

Yes. MS has a massive installed base. If they can't leverage that to get people to use it, they are clearly incompetent.

<comment><USER37> Pre-antitrust days, that would be exactly what MS would have done. But it has been battered and bruised by the investigations and must have sworn to themselves "never again" will they ever devote managerial time to do what could have been solved by an outright purchase.

<comment><USER28> I think this is a key point. Ballmer has been hogtied with the fallout of the anti-trust stuff. Microsoft can't use it's "installed base" advantage in the same way it once could. We'll see how great Google does once it inevitably faces the same issue.

<comment><USER37> Actually, I think it is that whether bad memories can get institutionalised. If Balmer leaves, that body of bad memories will be gone, and people more willing to take risks again. We need to remember the software landscape has changed considerably. What might not be permissible of Microsoft in the 90s may now be fair game.

<comment><USER38> Hmm.. haven't Microsoft been forced to introduce the browser ballot not so long ago?

<comment><USER37> Yes, and I believe that includes email client etc. There is no reason why they can't do that with VOIP.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Microsoft is entering what Jim Collins would call the 4th stage of decline: Grasping for salvation. Unless something changes dramatically very soon, I wouldn't be placing my bets on Redmond.

<comment><USER40> That's an overstatement to say the least. Microsoft still mints money at an incredible rate. They may be doing terrible in the mobile and web space, but Windows and Office will continue to live for a _long_ time, particularly in corporate environments.

<comment><USER41> But unless Microsoft finds a new vision and direction, they're in _serious_ trouble when those cash cows start to go dry.

What makes Microsoft's floundering under Ballmer particularly galling is the fact that Microsoft has been acutely aware of this for a very long time; the Sun and Netscape antitrust suits were born of Microsoft's fear of a platform- neutral world.

It's not here today, and we're only starting to see the first seeds of it with the rise of rich web applications and platforms like ChromeOS, but it's on its way. Microsoft still has a timeline in the scale of years to work with, but they need to start focusing aggressively on the future sooner rather than later, and, frankly, I don't see Ballmer as being the person capable of guiding the company through a transition they're going to have to make if they're going to survive in the long-term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> >> Beyond that is the fact that Microsoft has 89,000 employees — are you telling me that the company that put a computer in every home couldn't create a Skype clone? <<

Yes, that's right. They couldn't create a Skype clone, no chance. Of course, they could create a similar product in terms of functionality, but how many would switch to it from Skype?

<comment><USER43> Actually it's a lot worse than that. MS already has a very successful Skype competitor, that does better than Skype in most metrics

 _Windows Live Messenger boasts in excess of 330 million monthly active users with 40 million concurrent, compared to Skype's 170 million and 20 million-30 million concurrent_

[http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/05/microsoft- conf...](http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/05/microsoft- confirms-85-bn-skype-purchase-clarifies-nothing.ars)

Only 8 million Skype customers pay, so the income they'll get from it is pretty much nothing (compared to other sources of income MS has)

Read that whole article - it shows how dumb this purchase really is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> People often forget the Microsoft right before Balmer was slapped with one of the largest anti trust lawsuits in decades. People wonder why MSFT hasn't been competing aggressively for the following decade... It's because they've been afraid of anti trust litigation yet again.

I've had a couple of conversations with people in semi-upper levels of MSFT management. Long term Microsoft employees are still scarred from that litigation. So much that it still comes up in conversation 12 years after the fact.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would guess they are mainly purchasing entrenched users of an already- implemented service. This same outcry (largely inspired by the sheer magnitude of the numbers involved) accompanied the MySpace acquisition and then YouTube. One failed miserably, the other is still playing out and might actually have made sense. The prognosticating is, at the very least, as desperate a flailing as the purchase itself. It's a serious business gamble. If you think you know with certainty at this point in time whether or not it will pay off, I submit that you are really into yourself or just really nervous. Skype has millions of users who couldn't care less who owns Skype. We just cannot say at this point that this is a disastrous business decision.

P.S. I have been following Skype for a long time and worked for a company that sought to partner with them in their early days (fudge - just dated myself). Beyond the old school "acquire eyeballs" angle, in my humble opinion, their technology is very legit. The algorithms/techniques/architecture/infrastructure they use for audio compression and transmission (and now video) are very finely tuned and if you think it is easy to recreate that just because you have thousands of developers at your disposal, you should reconsider your position.

</comment><comment><USER46> Microsoft's strategy is much more in the 'stability' mode now (similar to Boeing). Most often, exponential growth (as seen in GOOG's chart) occurs in the first ten years of existence. From what I see, once a company is established and the rate of change for acquiring additional market share slows, their stock price tends not to climb up the charts with the same (dare I say 'speculative') uni-directional velocity.

Also, MS has had a nice streak of anti-competition battles during Ballmer's tenure. Just one data point that may be relevant to the lack of growth in MSFT share price.

Last thing, a chart showing the 100-day Simple Moving Average (post tech burst) may more accurately depict/model the normal MSFT price range under Ballmer's leadership.

Interesting blog/review for sure, thanks

</comment><comment><USER47> This article is too business-centric. MS is sinking slowly because the world is moving to better things than Windows. It's sort of like selling bicycles, when motorbikes are becoming increasingly available.

</comment><comment><USER48> "just for the sake of others not owning it."

Perhaps this is why it's worth $8.5 billion to MSFT and not to others. It's pretty silly to say someone got a bad deal a week after they bought it. If Ballmer has some awesome plan for it that will require a year or two to implement it would behoove him to disclose this so that others could move competitively to destroy the value from such a purpose.

<comment><USER49> Why's it silly? He's buying a commodity business (thats what VOIP is) for 32x earnings.

There's a reason M&A is often referred to as a winner's curse -- because winning the bidding typically means overpaying. The synergies execs often talk about almost -always- fail to be realized.

Shareholders of Microsoft would have been much better off if the company just bought back $8.5bn in stock. A dividend would have been out of the question due to tax repatriation issues.

<comment><USER50> Having Windows users be able to call each other and every other Skype user right out of the box could be pretty interesting.

<comment><USER51> Skype already has enough market share that bundling with Windows is not likely to generate enough growth to justify the purchase alone.

<comment><USER52> Windows has ~4 times as many users as Skype.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I get the impression that Ballmer does not have great vision. I dont have evidence to support it. That said, I dont buy many of the arguments made in this article. He is comparing Skype to Facetime. I dont think buying an app for 8 billion dollars make sense. I am sure there is more to skype deal than just the GUI app. The deal may have brought rights for usage of certain IP networks or something along those lines.

I am not sure how MSFT is planning to leverage this deal with plans of pushing into the mobile market. I am sure there is something in the works there.

Stock Price comparison: There were many Billion dollar companies that are doing fine without a staggering growth seen in Apple or Google, that does not mean that CEO's are doing a bad job.

</comment><comment><USER54> So this seems to be largely a rehash of existing arguments against Steve Ballmer with the added bonus of the skype purchase being thrown in. I cant say that I disagree with the article, but I would agree with others' comments that direct comparisons of MS to Apple and Google are not completely valid. I personally think that there is space for all 3 companies to thrive(which to some degree _is_ the case) since they all have a different niche. It does seem that MS is not the less agile and forward thinking company of the 3. I could liken it somewhat to Detroit vs japan/Korea

</comment><comment><USER55> If you take into account stock split and dividends for Microsoft, the total return from 2000 until today is about 13% which is not great but much different than the misrepresentation of a 60% loss. The returns would be much higher if you had not bought in 2000 before the crash which Ballmer could have had no control over. For example if you had bought shares at the end of 2002 than your total return over that time would have been about 130%.

I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't missed opportunities or that Ballmer shouldn't be replaced but its not quite as bad as pictured in that graph.

<comment><USER46> 13% per annum is better than most top-rated mutual funds earn

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> One thing I never see considered in comparisons to younger or more nimble and retooled competitors is that by 2000, Microsoft was already a convicted monopolist!

For the first few years of the decade, the company was still dealing with governments on two continents on what and how they could compete in the software business.

As others have mentioned, in this time frame they have also paid _billions_ in dividends.

It may well be time for Ballmer to go, but the comparisons in stock price to Apple and Google over these short time frames don't reflect all the context and dynamics of the share prices.

</comment><comment><USER57> The bothersome thing about the Skype acquisition is that it's really not going to save them at all. It was a statement purchase. They bought it to show off.

They could have bought up a lot of innovative, smaller companies for $8.5B... some that might rebuild their character.

</comment><comment><USER58> No mention of Nokia deal?

</comment><comment><USER59> The article doesn't mention Xbox or its more enterprise solutions at all instead focusing more on Apple.

</comment><comment><USER60> If Windows 8 is a success, I would be quite surprised if Steven Sinofsky didn't become the CEO.

</comment><comment><USER61> Anyone else have Florence and the Machine in their heads after reading this headline?

</comment><comment><USER62> I think buying Skype was a good move — although letting Ray Ozzie go was a bad move.

</comment><comment><USER63> Particularly heinous for the Skype purchase: it's amazingly buggy. It's gotten shinier over the years, but they still payed 8.5 billion for a POS.

<comment><USER64> That's definitely overstating it. They are better than everyone else in the consumer space. Not enough to be worth 8.5 billion for but the core underlying technology is good(They suck at client development though). People underestimate how hard VOIP is because it sounds so simple.

<comment><USER65> The echo cancellation algorithms, the speed of their sip like algorithm as well as the infrastructure to run their entire network is an engineering marvel. While, Skype's UI could use an update as well as some usability testing, their backend infrastructure is most definitely not a POS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Hardly, here's why: If you can link the phone with desktop applications you have a hit that neither Apple or Google can duplicate. Think of you desktop as a server for your phone. Who better to coordinate the operating systems of the two than Microsoft. If that's what he is thinking, I can't wait to watch the dog fight between the three of them.

<comment><USER67> You mean like Apple's facetime or Google's gtalk (not sure about the standalone client, but you can call phone numbers from gmail)?

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> CEO doesn't control the price of his company's stock. It's silly to use stock price, which is set by the market as a performance indicator. It's makes more sense to compare metrics like net income, free cash flow, etc.

And Microsoft isn't doing that badly on those: [http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/net_income#compCos=AAPL,GO...](http://ycharts.com/companies/MSFT/net_income#compCos=AAPL,GOOG&zoom=10)</comment>


Self-driving truck delivers butter from California to Pennsylvania in three days - <AUTHOR> https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2019/12/10/a-self-driving-truck-delivered-butter-from-california-to-pennsylvania-in-three-days/ <comment><USER2> For better or worse, millions of truck drivers are going to be displaced. Just like the way robots replaced manufacturing jobs.

The best plan is to prepare, like Yang and others are saying: [https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking- czar/](https://www.yang2020.com/policies/trucking-czar/)

So we can soften the blow.

<comment><USER3> We need to create lots of jobs in other industries that allow living wages without a college degree.

The government should massively incentivize:

\- solar farms

\- wind turbines

\- battery storage deployments

\- residential solar w/ batteries and grid-down operation (most grid-tied virtual battery solar stops working completely in a power outage)

\- achieve fusion power net output

\- elderly and disabled caregivers

\- offer an option to teach and mentor people the fundamentals of running a successful small business (expanding SBA/SCORE)

\- give people a chance to showcase, see and try out different industries

\- setup a factory incubator to allow bootstrapping and designing efficient, streamlined operations for quality products made in the US at globally- competitive prices.

Investing in people and infrastructure brings lots of indirect returns. Do everything possible to help people to succeed and have a future.

<comment><USER4> These don't sound like drop in replacements for truck driving. A truck driver might not be able-bodied enough to install solar panels, might not be willing to take the pay cut or move to a new state where the job is.

<comment><USER5> > might not be willing to take the pay cut

A paying job is better than no job. And there is such a thing as minimum wage. And no reason to assume it'll necessarily be a pay cut. EDIT: And according to another comment further down this thread, trucker jobs don't even pay all that well.

> move to a new state where the job is.

Because that's worse than being away from home/family for long periods of time? I don't understand this logic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "the truck drove mostly autonomously."

That last 10% is going to be a lot of work.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety- ninety_rule](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninety-ninety_rule)

<comment><USER7> I'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day. If they can drive I-70 from SF to NYC with no human, or the 10 from Florida to California, that seems like a win, even if the person has to drive in the city. Warehousing will just get shifted around to work with where the trucks can safely drive.

<comment><USER8> _I 'll take a 90% efficiency gain any day._

If you need a safety driver 100% of the time, the net gain in efficiency is 0%.

Edit: There's no comment in the article about there being period with no safety driver.

<comment><USER9> If it's one safety driver monitoring 4 vehicles it's still a win.

<comment><USER8> But that isn't what the article talked about either (A European company did do a run like that a while though).

It did talk about "level 4 autonomy" based on a single drive with no disengagements (they mentioned they'd made a lot of drives but didn't mention their disengagement rate overall), doesn't sound like "achieving level 4" autonomy either-either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous- truck...](https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck- completes-coast-to-coast-delivery-in-3-days/568729/) : Level 4 autonomy. more details here [..] The company has run smaller-scale pilots across the U.S. and has operations underway in Beijing and Shanghai, China, Kerrigan said.

The delivery for Land O' Lakes is the first where Plus.ai has been able to disclose companies involved. Kerrigan said he was unable to confirm whether Plus.ai would run similar deliveries for Land O' Lakes. He said the trip allowed Plus.ai to collect data on driving conditions, including rain and snow, which is crucial to ensuring the technology is safe for mainstream use.

TuSimple, another autonomous trucking company, is planning to run fully autonomous commercial freight deliveries in 2021. The company's trucks also run at L4 autonomy, and completed pilots delivering cargo for UPS and the U.S. Postal Service in Arizona this year.

Amazon, Google and other major companies have explored using autonomous trucks to speed up delivery times, address the driver shortage, or potentially phase out drivers.[..]

</comment><comment><USER10> They were delivering butter... to Pennsylvania? TIL: California is the nation's leading milk producer, New York is fourth, Pennsylvania is 7th.

<comment><USER11> Yeah that doesn't make much sense to me. Local brands of butter made with local dairy are popular in Pennsylvania. It's alarming to think how environmentally inefficient shipping butter two thousand miles must be.

<comment><USER12> One can not forget the genius product that is Fiji Water[1]. Thinking about what happened to get that bottle into the fridge of my bodega makes me shudder.

1: [https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html](https://www.fijiwater.com/faqs.html)

"IS FIJI WATER FROM FIJI?

One hundred percent of FIJI Water is from a single source in the pristine, tropical Fiji Islands, an archipelago of over 300 islands nestled in the South Pacific, more than 1600 miles from the nearest industrialized country."

<comment><USER13> I hope you don't buy it.

I've seen it for sale in Europe, which is as far from Fiji as one can be.

They must have a very effective marketing team. It seems every US TV show has Fiji water in the fridge.

<comment><USER14> > Europe, which is as far from Fiji as one can be

Almost! West Africa is a little further.

[https://www.geodatos.net/en/antipodes/fiji/western/nadi](https://www.geodatos.net/en/antipodes/fiji/western/nadi)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> PBS recently had a good show about the AI revolution, saying it's similar to the industrial revolution. They show Embark AI/trucking in SF, and interview an unsuspecting truck driver: [https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline- in...](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/announcement/frontline-investigates- the-promise-and-perils-of-artificial-intelligence-in-a-two-hour-special/)

Excerpt about tearing society apart:

"I believe about 50 percent of jobs will be somewhat or extremely threatened by AI in the next 15 years or so," says Kai-Fu Lee, who has written a book called AI Superpowers. He fears that the rise of AI will contribute to another alarming trend: the growing inequality in earnings. "AI will exacerbate that and I think it will tear the society apart," Kai-Fu Lee warns, "because the rich will have just too much, and those who are have-nots will have perhaps very little way of digging themselves out of the hole."

It also mentions China's heavy investment in AI.

</comment><comment> t-h-e-chief What is my purpose.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7HmltUWXgs)

<comment><USER15> My favorite variation on this meme is where the robot is labeled "clisp" (a less popular Lisp implementation) and its purpose is "to bootstrap sbcl" (a popular Lisp implementation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Interesting thing is that their Silicon Valley office is next to a strip mall and is more of an office space than an industrial one. I live near there and so far haven't seen any of their branded trucks or anything of their brand really relative to other self driving startups like Apple roaming around with their mattress-like hardware system.

So I'm guessing most development work is happening in China, just like several other Chinese based self-driving companies.

<comment><USER2> Their webpage shows 15 engineering job openings in Silicon Valley: [https://plus.ai/join/](https://plus.ai/join/)

<comment><USER17> imo the open req for an auto tech is a tell that they either have a low key shop or are building a shop out in sv

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Sooner or later, drones will start plying across aerial routes too for transportation of goods. That will be perhaps both cheaper for ebay/amazon and also leave the roads free for people to walk. What do you think?

<comment><USER19> Isn't flying stuff more expensive than driving it around?

<comment><USER20> Depends. Uf you have solar panels, the electricity is more or less free after you buy and deploy them. So if you have some drone fleet and solar panels + batteries, the only real cost you have is basically maintenance. The way many businesses work, variable cost is what matters. So you'd lease the drones, the solar panels & batteries (or just get a cheap energy supplier) and focus on handling and transporting packages. Drones are interesting for that because you can save time by flying point to point, and cost by not having to employ drivers/pilots.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I rather wish we could use trains more.

<comment><USER22> Same here. All this tech is cool and all, but trains would remove some of the variables.

<comment><USER23> Maybe technology could help us all buying more locally sourced butter? :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Sorry to pour cold butter on this...

This is not at all what we want. We need to build an automated electric high speed cargo rail system connecting the coasts and major ports. The system has to have the ability for individual container units to be routed independently.

Nothing would compare to moving cargo at 300 mph or more on an efficient rail system.

We need trucking to be local or short range and eliminate individual trucks for long range delivery.

<comment><USER4> Nothing except moving the cargo at 50 or 100mph. A shipping container moving 300mph at ground level is going to encounter some insane wind resistance even if you do attach fairings.

<comment><USER24> Seriously? Look up TGV and imagine the cars have containers inside. Not that difficult. Far more efficient than trucks.

And then there's Hyperloop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is an impressive feat but something is confusing.

Picture caption:

> A safety driver was behind the wheel, but the truck drove _mostly_ > autonomously.

Body text:

> A Silicon Valley startup has completed what appears to be the first > commercial freight cross-country trip by an autonomous truck

> There were zero "disengagements," or times the self-driving system had to be > suspended because of a problem, Kerrigan said.

What is the "mostly" qualifier in the picture caption referring to?

<comment><USER26> Probably refueling. I can't imagine the truck drives into a truck stop autonomously.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wish I had posted this link..it's a much better one and gives more details [https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous- truck...](https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/plusai-autonomous-truck- completes-coast-to-coast-delivery-in-3-days/568729/) [..]To comply with hours of service (HOS) requirements, Shawn Kerrigan, COO and co-founder of Plus.ai, told Supply Chain Dive that the truck driver took over when getting off the highway for rest stops and breaks, otherwise, he said the journey was completed autonomously.[..]

<comment><USER27> I've driven this route before. What's remarkable about it is how unremarkable it is. The only thing could be a possible risk would be a snowstorm in Colorado. Otherwise the route is basically one long boring ride. Maybe the Las Vegas 95-15 intersection presents a challenge? St Louis and Kansas City have some transitions. Everywhere else - Mojave, Utah, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, PA is all relatively straight, without obstacles and rural. Even the 78 to 309 transition to Quakertown is a fairly pedestrian two lane merge. I guess my point is if you're gonna do a 3000 mile butter run, it could get any easier. Personally I would have hired a 78 Trans Am and shipped a container's worth of Coors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Here is the PBS AI segment showing Embark's technology in action: [https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2019/11/06/pbs- front...](https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2019/11/06/pbs-frontline- surveys-a-future-with-artificial-intelligence/)

</comment><comment><USER28> Out of curiosity, how do they handle the transmissions in self-driving trucks? My guess was automatics, but torque converter automatics aren't strong enough for use in a big-rig like this. DSG? Fully "automatic" clutch-based manuals? These things have to be pretty expensive.

<comment><USER20> When trucks go electric, they'll be a lot easier to control. Current trucks are optimized for truck drivers. They become a lot simpler if you no longer need to worry about transporting humans. IMHO autonomous ICE vehicles on the road will probably not happen because they are getting replaced with cheaper EVs in roughly the same time frame that autonomous driving is happening and not having to worry about complex engines simplifies the job of automating things.

<comment><USER29> >>When trucks go electric, they'll be a lot easier to control

The big elephant in the room is of course the fact that no one can actually explain _how_ you'd make trucks electric. Cabs aren't fitted with dual 300 litre diesel tanks for show - moving 40+ tonnes takes a lot of energy and a battery that would provide a similar range to what we have now would be gigantic, meaning both very heavy and very expensive.

<comment><USER20> Tesla is planning to ship a truck soon and they've been driving the prototypes around for a few years now. So they seem to have a plan for this with all these boxes ticked (class 8 heavy duty truck, check, 500 miles, check, etc.). Also other's are already producing electric vans, trucks, buses, as well. And I think there was a story about some ginormous heavy duty mining ore EV trucks [https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck- produces...](https://hackaday.com/2019/08/22/electric-dump-truck-produces- more-energy-than-it-uses/). Takeaway point is that if you need heavy duty engines with insane amounts of torque, electric is the way to do it. Most modern oil tankers are electric engines powered by diesel generators for the same reason.

Batteries are not cheap of course. But then the life time consumption of diesel for a Truck is not exactly cheap either and probably buys you a lot of battery and power to charge them. Assuming a million miles (which is what Tesla is shooting for with their drive trains) and a generous 6 miles to the gallon, we're talking about 0.5M fuel cost at 3$/gallon. Your mileage may vary a little of course but it's a nice round number. If you'd buy Tesla 3's at 50K each and stripped their batteries you'd end up with with 10 x 75kwh = 750kwh (and a lot of premium cars). So, lets just say that amount of money easily gets you into mwh territory which fully explains why Tesla can advertise a 500 mile range, which in a truck doing 50m/h is about ten hours of driving, which I'm sure legally requires taking some breaks in the US as well (i.e, plenty of opportunity for charging, just in case you'd bring up range anxiety as a thing).

As the whole point of a truck is to move heavy loads, adding a few tonnes of battery that you would need for this should not be a problem. Torque is superior with electric. I doubt moving 40+ tonnes is going to be much of a problem given that they routinely demonstrate the torque of EVs by having them pull e.g. freight trains, large jets, or whatever. Also, EVs can do regeneration downhill or when braking and they barely use any power when idling (unlike Diesel engines).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Amazing! Though, you have to wonder, would it be better if people just got their butter from local producers... This, of course, goes with any sort of food. Seems trucking has helped centralize farming which, from a risk perspective, is not a good thing.

</comment><comment><USER31> How does a self-driving truck refill its gas tank without human intervention?

<comment><USER32> Why does it need to be without human intervention? A gas station attendant on major trucking routes is a pretty easy solution until some autonomous docking standard is developed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How much would it usually take? And didn't the hands-off driver and safety engineer need breaks?

</comment><comment><USER34> Is this really doing more than lane keeping and anti-rear-ending? It's hard to tell.

</comment><comment><USER35> I could be wrong but I think a good initial phase would be to have some kind of station at the edge of cities where human drivers can jump in and take over for navigating within cities for pickup and dropoff, and then getting out and letting the AI drive the long-haul.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sure, it proved it can do an autonomous truck Cannonball run, but why not produce and use locally? Not as some hippy-dippy thing, but it seems like a waste of petroleum to truck products clear across the entire country when there's enough land and resources to make the same or similar products nearer to the points of consumption. Common. sense.

<comment><USER36> It isn't like we never tried your idea. That's exactly how it worked for decades & centuries and then the world discovered shipping stuff from far away works better.

<comment><USER3> Yes, obviously about the past. .. and it also worked. You say "better" but you don't give any evidence to support your claim other than it's implicitly the status quo. Furthermore, shipping things halfway around the world is killing us in terms of carbon emissions. Hyperlocal manufacturing + regional manufacturing is inevitable because we cannot afford to keep that near vertical CO2 graph going up another 100 ppm.

Also, corporate giant agribusinesses with their pesticide residues and crop monocultures will likely lead us into illnesses and famines from "unexpected" crop failures by putting all their "eggs" into one clone crop "basket" and one region "basket."</comment></comment></comment>


Chinese phone maker to release first mainstream holographic smartphone. - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAJrrQzBs_Y

<comment><USER2> Wow that looks fake. Is that just because the youtube video has to simulate it? Or because it doesn't actually exist.</comment>


E-cigarettes could stub out tobacco bonds sooner than thought (2014) - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tobacco-bonds-ecigs-insight/e-cigarettes-could-stub-out-tobacco-bonds-sooner-than-thought-idUSKBN0EZ0CZ20140624 <comment><USER2> The last article about the tobacco bonds being hurt by e-cigs which was from the WSJ disappeared completely by the time the archive version finished so I could read behind the paywall.

I wonder if this is part of the reason for the recent craze in banning them everywhere.

I know vitamin E acetate in the black market THC vapes are what caused the lung issues in the 8 reported deaths, not the flavored nicotine.

<comment><USER2> [https://www.wsj.com/articles/tobacco-bonds-feel-heat- from-e-...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/tobacco-bonds-feel-heat-from-e- cigarettes-1403648086?mod=rsswn) was posted, and disappeared pretty quickly.</comment></comment>


Cheating VoIP Security by Flooding the SIP - <AUTHOR> http://resources.infosecinstitute.com/cheating-voip-security-by-flooding-the-sip/ <comment><USER2> A useful tool to stresstest your VoIP server or PBX: [http://www.mizu- voip.com/Software/VoIPTester.aspx](http://www.mizu- voip.com/Software/VoIPTester.aspx)</comment>


Microsoft hits new low – sneaks Win 10 ads into IE security patch - <AUTHOR> http://betanews.com/2016/03/09/windows-10-advertising-in-ie-security-patch/ <comment><USER2> Earlier HN discussion about this: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262037](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11262037)

</comment><comment><USER3> As much as I don't like Microsoft, they are far from the first to create "updates" or "fixes" that have other crap bundled into them, and plenty of developers should be blamed for this anti-user practice.

Still, it's a shame. Technologically, near-instant software updates ought to be fantastic. In reality, developers have abused this power.

And when there is abuse, you need a system that returns power to the users.

For instance, an update protocol should probably use cryptography, with keys distributed across a web of trust that the user is part of. If the web of trust collectively distrusts an update (e.g. because several people had problems with updates signed by that key), it should automatically raise red flags for other users and not be installed automatically. For random 3rd-party developers, this would make it hard to push unwanted updates; and for big companies that don't want to have a poor public image, it would be incentive to not push updates that aggravate a lot of users.

</comment><comment><USER4> Also, automatically starting the Windows 10 upgrades without permission: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4a5edx/psa_window...](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/4a5edx/psa_windows_7_computers_are_being_reported_as/) Any goodwill they gained this week by other actions, such as porting SQL Server to Linux and R tooling for Visual Studio, is now lost. How do you trust any company that starts behaving like that?

<comment><USER5> By having worked in companies of similar size and learning how they are schizophrenic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just like some people mentioned in the comments on the previous article.

I have every important update installed. And every optional/recommended update hidden. I can't replicate the behavior.

The older GWX update (KB303555XX something) is still tagged as recommended, not important.

The only time I saw the ad, is when I visited msn.com _before_ updating. Now I can't seem to replicate even that.

</comment><comment><USER7> This article seems to have been written like clickbait. It's kind of hard to take seriously because if that. Plus Apple has done this with Safari, and no one has batted an eye at that. This just seems like an overreaction.

<comment><USER8> Can you link to a case where Apple did this? Not doubting you, just curious.

<comment><USER9> [http://i.stack.imgur.com/BkQTT.png](http://i.stack.imgur.com/BkQTT.png)

[http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/disable- try-...](http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/153379/disable-try-the-new- safari-popup)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why do so many people not want to upgrade to Windows 10? It looks better and will be supported for longer. And the upgrade is free. What is all the fuss all about?

<comment><USER11> The fuss is about the fact that Microsoft is employing dark patterns and aggressive tactics to trick and nag people into upgrading their operating systems, sometimes against their will. That and the telemetry, embedded advertising, extreme bandwidth use, privacy concerns, etc, but for me personally, just the fact that they're working so hard to make it not an option leads me to never want to touch it or any future version of Windows again.

Which is unfortunate because I actually don't hate Windows. Microsoft, though...

<comment><USER10> Interesting. I dislike Windows in general because it is too complicated, but I like Microsoft in general for things like C#.</comment></comment></comment>


DigiCert Statement on Trustico Certificate Revocation - <AUTHOR> https://www.digicert.com/blog/digicert-statement-trustico-certificate-revocation/ <comment><USER3> The situation is unfolding in this Mozilla security policy mailing list thread: [https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.securi...](https://groups.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/mozilla.dev.security.policy/wxX4Yv0E3Mk)

<comment><USER4> I hope it's not overly pedantic to point out that what you linked to is not a CAB forum thread. That's a thread on the Mozilla security policy list, which many root programs and CAs make use of for disclosure and discussion.

CAB forum has its own lists elsewhere. A relevant difference is that CAB forum discusses creating and modifying policy but is not involved in enforcement. The root programs typically deal with enforcement.

<comment><USER5> To elaborate slightly::

The CA/B is a standing meeting between two groups with very different objectives that have an ongoing need to reach some sort of agreement: the Certificate Authorities and the Browsers (in reality more or less the Operating System vendors except Mozilla represents the Free Unixes). This meeting must not appear to be a cartel because cartels are illegal, so it mustn't discuss prices or agree what products should or should not be marketed.

m.d.s.policy is de facto the only public oversight for the entire Web PKI. Mozilla as a Browser vendor (and as hinted above, on behalf of all the Free Unixes) gets to insist upon Rules, not only enforcing rules agreed at CAB, but also making its own rules on top for Certificate Authorities in its Trust Store. As a Charity one of its rules is that it insists on doing almost everything in Public using m.d.s.policy, there is no other obligation on a Certificate Authority to engage with the public at all, but Mozilla's rules force them to tell Mozilla important things via this public group and to answer questions impertinent members of the public (like me) ask them on m.d.s.policy.

Mozilla (and other Browser vendors) is entirely free to insist upon whatever rules they want. The CA/B does not bind them, like the UN it is a forum to meet, and to come to agreements, but it cannot force you to agree to anything you don't want. Two recent illustrative examples:

The CA/B took ages to reform the Domain Validation methods, terribly weak methods had been popular for years, with all sorts of stupid design flaws, and after it did finally vote on a reformed list of methods, CA members claimed a bunch of patents needed to be licensed stalling things for months extra. Mozilla cut through the bullshit and said essentially "See that list of ten methods you voted on that's stuck in Lawyer hell? Too bad, our policy now requires you obey the list which we're naming the Ten Blessed Methods"

Google wanted to reduce the maximum lifetime of new certificates. It takes ages to get CAs to introduce a new rule, and then years while the old certificates made under the old rule expire, too long for Google. So they made an ultimatum, fix it or we'll just tell Chrome to reject certificates after 90 days, and that's the new maximum certificate lifetime. The CA/B eventually voted through a compromise 825 days (which goes into effect tomorrow, 1 March 2018) instead of the previous 39 month limit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Trustico's CEO indicated that Trustico held the private keys for those certificates, and then emailed us approximately 20,000 certificate private keys."

Well, that's one way to ensure they're considered "comprimised".

</comment><comment><USER7> Trustico now posted a statement on their site[1]. My favourite part is this:

> Trustico® followed the requests of DigiCert by initially recovering Private > Keys from cold storage and subsequently e-mailing the associated order > number and Private Keys to DigiCert in a ZIP file. The file did not contain > any other type of data.

[1]: [https://www.trustico.com/news/2018/symantec- revocation/certi...](https://www.trustico.com/news/2018/symantec- revocation/certificate-replacement.php)

<comment><USER8> What a bizarre defense. Do they think this makes them look...better?

The core issue is 1) they had the keys at all 2) they decided to compromise them by emailing them DigiCert

Saying "hey, we did nothing wrong, all we did is email the keys we had to DigiCert" just isn't a very compelling defense to claims they had the keys and emailed them to DigiCert. More like a "total admission of guilt" than a defense, really.

<comment><USER9> The secondary part is that they requested mass revocation of active certificates, including from brands such as RapidSSL which were not being browser distrusted AFAIK (even though some others were.. if I need to be corrected on this please let me know).

They did this without notifying their customers in advance, so literally, they were going to intentionally screw their customers by revoking all their active SSL certificates without their authorisation and without any notice. Which then happened.

This would have affected ALL certificates, but since Digicert said no, they then pulled all of these generated private keys from storage which they should NOT have been storing -- on their reseller web interface when you generate a certificate (which is a questionable activity but lets just go with it for the argument).. a few days after you place the order the private key disappears from the web interface. You would therefor assume they deleted it. It seems they kept a copy of all of them this whole time - which is doubly irresponsible let alone stupid.

All I can say is thankfully LetsEncrypt is making these guys mostly irrelevant...

The good news is, as far as I know, they're only revoking the certificates that used the generator at least (though I haven't confirmed that) -- so hopefully most people that used a normal CSR certificate won't have them revoked.

Bunch of morons, I can't see why they thought this was a good idea, and as the commentator above said, this response doesn't sound better in any way. It just proves they are intentionally screwing their customers for no real reason. Even if they were intent on this distrust process, they should have at least been ensuring customers got new certificates first and had plenty of notice -- e.g. how the chrome distrust worked. They didn't.

<comment><USER7> > The secondary part is that they requested mass revocation of active > certificates, including from brands such as RapidSSL which were not being > browser distrusted AFAIK (even though some others were.. if I need to be > corrected on this please let me know).

To my knowledge all CAs under Symantec's control, including RapidSSL, are affected[1], with only a handful of exceptions for cross-signed intermediates where Symantec was not under control of issuance. IIRC they belong to Apple and Google (and maybe a few others).

[1]: [https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to- dist...](https://security.googleblog.com/2017/09/chromes-plan-to-distrust- symantec.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The DV CA space is such a mess. I still wish DV certificate issuance was the responsibility of the domain registrar, with technical measures taken to prevent competing registrars from misissuance. This way, you don't need to play whack-a-mole around your certificates, just pick a reputable registrar when you buy your domain, avoid the need to "prove" you hold the domain (your registrar control panel is today already the sole security barrier protecting your domain), and avoid the possibility that a third party can play the impostor game. And it would bring some meaning back to the reputation of different TLDs and their various registrars.

<comment><USER11> CAA records help with that now. You can just specify your certificate issuer at the DNS level.

<comment><USER10> See, that requires trusting that all CAs actually respect the CAA records. AFAIK, CAA records aren't validated by end-user client software during SSL negotiation.

I would love to see some technical measure implemented where DV SSL certificate issuance and validation was tied to the TLD registry and the domain's particular registrar. It would eliminate the frankly unnecessary trust we put in all root CAs and their sub-CAs to behave. (Well, at least CT logs are becoming a thing now)

It would also eliminate today's more or less awkward validation routines that depend on third parties querying DNS/HTTP/whois-email addresses. The registry has the definite database, mapping the domain to your account at your registrar, anyways. They should simply have a public key upload button next to your domain name in your registrar's domain name control panel that immediately returns an appropriate certificate, no further validation needed :)

<comment><USER12> > See, that requires trusting that all CAs actually respect the CAA records. > AFAIK, CAA records aren't validated by end-user client software during SSL > negotiation.

I think the CAB rules require respecting CAA records? If a CA gets caught on that, they'll have some amount of hell to pay.

Client software can't go back in time to verify what the CAA records were at the time the certificate was issued. CAA records are not intended as a means to revoke previously issued certificates, only an indication of which CAs are _currently_ allowed to issue new certificates.

That said, I agree with you, but the general consensus doesn't seem to, that we de facto trust registries/registrars as stewards of domain ownership, so we may as well de jure make them CAs, since they already have an account relationship.

<comment><USER10> I found your last paragraph especially well phrased!

You're also on point regarding the CAA records. But to me the current system still feels too reactionary. I'd love to see a system where we need to put less trust in all third parties playing by the rules pinkie-promise. Diginotar, StartSSL and Symantec are all examples of CAs gone wild, and I think we've just seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

<comment><USER13> And all examples of CAs essentially no longer in business (or bought up by DigiCert).

<comment><USER10> Yes, but after the damage was done and only because the damage happened to be uncovered.

<comment><USER13> Well, obviously yes.

The CA/B mailing list can't do much about shady behaviour they don't know anything about.

I do trust in Mozilla to ensure that the game rules for CAs are strict enough that my trust in the green lock isn't 0. It's not 100% either but it's above 50%. When I connect to a website and it has SSL, I'm fairly certain it's the right place.

Most likely there will never be a replacement for it, any PKI requires some third party to vouch for an endpoint otherwise you get easy MitM (I believe there is a proof floating around somewhere from the area of Signal Theory).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Apparently they had a web front end where customers could _request private keys_...

[https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/968834765888589825](https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/968834765888589825)

<comment><USER15> Had? Have.

[https://www.trustico.com.au/ssltools/create/csr- pem/create-a...](https://www.trustico.com.au/ssltools/create/csr-pem/create-a- new-csr-instantly.php)

Generated server-side.

[http://termbin.com/eu4c](http://termbin.com/eu4c)

<comment><USER16> Yeah, that's actually surprisingly common, I remember working with a few before that did it. StartSSL and a Comodo reseller of some sort I think.

I'm done with these companies, Let's Encrypt seems to be the only people doing it right.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> To clarify trustico disclosed private keys to an entity other than the owner of the key, which automatically starts a 24 hour countdown for the CA.

regardless of who discloses the private key, a CA is required to revoke any keys that they learn have been compromised within 24 hours. CAs have been reprimanded in the past for failing to do so.

The only ambiguity is the initial request to revoke by trustico - <USER2> for a CA the question is whether trustico is the agent for the certificatesTo clarify they disclosed private keys to an entity other than the owner of the key, which automatically starts a 24 hour countdown for the CA.

The only ambiguity here is whether a reseller like trustico gets to decide to revoke certificates that they sold or whether the end users are the owner and so are the only people who can request revocation without proof of key compromise.

From the point of view of the CA the initial "revoke all these certs " email could have been any random person on the internet collecting public certificates, and then telling the CA to revoke them.

The communication that needlessly included the private keys was equivalent to someone trawling github or what have you, then reporting all private keys that they found to the appropriate CA. It doesn't matter how someone proves access to the private key, and it doesn't matter who demonstrates it, all that matters is that someone said "here is evidence this key is no longer under complete control by its owner".

At that point a CA must revoke and no one gets to stop that.

</comment><comment><USER18> This is insane. I guess Trustico emailed the private keys because Digicert was acting reluctant to revoke them? Pretty bold move.

Hopefully the fact that revocation is largely broken doesn't make this worse...

</comment><comment><USER19> Having receiving multiple emails and free certificate replacements from all parties involved, it's really just a turf war.

Trustico want to sell their customers their own branded certs, and DigiCert aren't going to just let those customers go.

I for one am done with all of them and had any affected sites shifted to auto- renew certs within about 20 min.

</comment><comment><USER20> On a side note they have a shady business model. When it comes to using certificates regularly they withhold funds if you don't buy enough certificates from them until you top up with 200 USD again. That means funds just get stuck. They won't return them even if you cancel the account.

</comment><comment><USER21> I won't be too surprised if Comodo decides not to do business with Trustico after this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Nobody who has depth in the business would create keypairs online if they could avoid it. So I ask myself if key escrow requirements "back then" permitted this kind of engagement with an agent, on behalf of government or other constrained PKI contexts where escrow was a requirement.

If its just "for your convenience" I would have walked off this keypair years ago.

Private key generated for me one line and held in your keystore? No thank you.

</comment><comment><USER23> Interesting move by the CEO.

Personally thinks that centralized CA proving trust of unknowns of long distance again and again prove that the security of centralized trust is weak!

</comment><comment><USER14> Had to read it like 3 times before I could process. Unreal.

<comment><USER24> Help me understand: this CEO has 20k private certificates he obviously should never have seen, yet alone stored.

How is this not related to "the big distrust"? Unreal.

<comment><USER25> If they operate as any other CA does, there's no reason to assume that they would have had any way to have the private keys which would only ever be on customer systems.

This implies that Trustico was sent the keys (or recieved them somehow) from a third party who had compromised them.

20k certs implies a tremendous number of clients; seems tome it's more likely one of Trustico's intermediate CA certs got compromised and these 20k are newly issues ones against that compromised CA cert.

<comment><USER3> They apparently have a "certificate wizard" that will generate the certificate and corresponding private key for you. Of course that's practical for the end user (generating a CSR can be cumbersome), but obviously insecure.

They're not the only party to do so either, e.g. DNSimple (which is otherwise a great company!) also provide APIs to have them generate and store certificates including private keys: [https://developer.dnsimple.com/v2/certificates/#getCertifica...](https://developer.dnsimple.com/v2/certificates/#getCertificatePrivateKey)

<comment><USER26> > _They apparently have a [webgui] "certificate wizard" that will generate the > certificate and corresponding private key for you._

Any company doing that deserves to have their decision makers crucified, head down, on the outer wall of the town church, with the nails hammered through their genitals.

If you didn't create the private key yourself, by definition it's not private. If generating CRSs and handling the certificates is too difficult, then feed improvements upstream. And yes, I know how horrible openssl's UI is for dealing with anything other than CN based certs. It's awful enough for those, an absolutely atrocious for pretty much anything else.

For the record, CN has been deprecated in certificates since ~2000 (RFC 2818), and practically obsoleted since 2011 (RFC 6125). Regardless of all this, I have dealt (in 2017) with parties who don't understand SAN over CN, and have even had their software stacks blow up when I provide a cert with SANs only, and no CN.

<comment><USER27> That's bit harsh. I bet that significant amount of the impacted people had only the vaguest idea what they were actually buying ("a lock icon for the web thingy"), and never even heard of private keys, never mind CSRs or actually understanding public-key crypto and PKI.

<comment><USER28> I find this argument unconvincing, but even if you really feel the need to help people generate keys, you do it in JS in the browser, without ever sending them to your server! Open source code to do this has been around since 2001: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:87MSSBj...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:87MSSBjLHGkJ:shop- js.sourceforge.net/crypto2.htm+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=lu&client=ubuntu)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I do not understand.

</comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone know the name of Trustico's CEO?

<comment><USER30> Ah, never mind. Zane Lucas, who is listed as a "director" most places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fucking insanity.

</comment><comment><USER32> I recently learned in my security class that certificates are the way by which domains are publicly identified. But I don't understand why there hasn't been any alternatives besides trusting these companies to issue certificates...

<comment><USER33> It would be really hard to keep everyone's browsers/operating systems updated with a list of certificates as they're generated and renewed.

You pretty much have to concentrate it down to a small subset of trusted certificate authorities to sign your certificate.

Also, it _should_ be a way to verify that random people aren't able to get certificates on behalf of a domain they don't own (there's nothing stopping me from generating a cert for google.com - but it should be impossible for me to get it trusted by your browser).</comment></comment>


AMD Ryzen Prices Leaked - <AUTHOR> http://www.forbes.com/sites/antonyleather/2017/02/09/amd-ryzen-prices-revealed-massive-blow-to-intel <comment><USER2> See original blog post: www.wccftech.com

And HN discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13609842](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13609842)</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find meaning in life? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Start with the end in mind. Everyone dies. I try to die on my own terms.

There's a lot to think about in death. How do you die? Who will be at your funeral? What do you leave behind?

You can control how you die, by committing suicide. But that's wasteful. Your life is valuable. But like any valuable, you shouldn't just keep it locked up. Valuable things should be used or traded - risk your life something that _can_ kill you but is worth it. Start a business, climb Everest, volunteer to help in a dangerous country, be an activist for something worth dying for.

You'll want to think about what happens after you die. You'll have stuff. What happens to it? Does it go to your family? A cause? Does it disappear in a disorganized jumble?

Also the afterlife. People have literally sat down for thousands of years pondering this. Don't reinvent the wheel; dig up what others have researched. As time goes on, a lot of religions are hijacked by people who want power. It's best to read the studies of early scholars than latter ones.

At least two thirds of people were born with the wrong idea of the afterlife. Statistically, you're one of them. Don't idly follow whatever you were born into. Pick something consciously (your default is fine). Run experiments. If it doesn't click, try something else.

Your life is exceptionally valuable. It belongs to only you. There's nothing wrong with being a cog in the corporate machine. There's nothing wrong with being an acstetic monk. You don't need to contribute anything into the world. You don't need to have a family or even a cause.

But whatever you do with your life, it should be a conscious, deliberate decision.

</comment><comment><USER3> As a christian I follow the teachings of Jesus and believe this life is just the beginning. This doesn't mean I walk around in a state of bliss. I often think on the meaning of my work in IT. At nearly 50 I am beginning to realise daily life has more meaning when I focus less on myself and more on others.

A funny thing happened last Christmas which highlights my being too introspective. I wrote a poem for the first time in my life and gave it to my wife, son and daughter. They absolutely misunderstood the poem and thought it was about our strong family bond. The poem was actually about stars, space and time. I honestly believe my family's interpretation of my poem was better than my own. This was just a quirky reminder for me of how I was missing the bigger picture by being so internally focussed. I also think it may be my last poem ;-)

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't believe in "finding" meaning in life. I think you create your meaning (or maybe "choose" your meaning if you prefer). As the old saying goes "The meaning of life is a life of meaning". My personal take on that is that you get to decide what a "life of meaning" is to you.

As an atheist who tries to believe in free will, but who frankly has a hard time seeing how the universe is anything other than strictly deterministic (ergo, free will is actually an illusion), I don't see much room for any idea of an objective "meaning of life" that comes from any external source, or even any intrinsic notion of that sort that is universal to everyone. So you get to choose... or if free will really is an illusion, you get to walk around thinking you chose. :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Have fun and try to leave the world a better place than you found it.

</comment><comment><USER6> I don't look for any ultimate or final meaning, ordinary everyday meaning seems quite sufficient. But worldly meaning is a vast thing with unfathomable depths.

[https://meaningness.com/misunderstanding-meaningness- makes-m...](https://meaningness.com/misunderstanding-meaningness-makes-many- miserable)

 _"What's something useful and enjoyable I can do now?" prompts the answer "Who cares—so what?" Mere usefulness and enjoyability doesn't sound good enough. This "complete stance"—of enjoyable usefulness—is emotionally unattractive at first. Once accepted, though, it does eliminate the anguish of an existential dilemma. If you can let go of the grandiosity that leads you to imagine that some special task awaits you, and the false hope that getting enough of what you want would make life satisfactory, you can be useful and enjoy yourself._

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been looking for the purpose in life since I asked that question out loud once. Maybe I'll find it, maybe I won't.

I live through everyday to the best of my abilities doing the things I love to do, have to do, and only I can do. I have no regrets.

</comment><comment><USER8> I find meaning in living an enjoyable life and trying to make the life of future generations even more enjoyable (starting with my own kids, but hopefully something wider too eventually).

</comment><comment><USER9> Find who you really are. In the sense of the one who says - 'my body...' , 'my mind...'

</comment><comment><USER10> It's reproduction because you exist. We are the goal of life of our parents.

</comment><comment><USER11> 42</comment>


Is 24hr Cold Storage Possible Without Constant Power? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@reelfruit/is-24hr-cold-storage-possible-without-constant-power-we-think-weve-cracked-the-code-e641ca19fe88 <comment><USER2> In case anyone else is wondering, the spreadsheet gives a total cost for the project of 1,448,100.00, without specifying any units. I think it's safe to assume the price is in Nigerian naira. Given an approximate (Google-provided) exchange rate of 0.0026, this works out to $3,765.06.

</comment><comment><USER3> There's a great book called "Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold" that talks about medieval cooling using salts, and later with ammonia and other chemicals. INAS but it sounded like the key thing was circulation and ventilation. So if somehow you could keep a pump working, by crank, solar, wind, water, you could keep it circulating. Likewise to some type of air displacement.

<comment><USER4> If you can keep a pump running, then you may as well just use adiabatic cooling (gas under pressure gets cooler when released) to keep your stuff cool. That's how your fridge works!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's not clear to me what the "Coolbot Pro"[0] is doing. Near as I can tell, it is an aftermarket electronics kit to run a normal window or split system AC unit right above freezing, because otherwise ice forms on the unit and it stops operating until the ice has melted.

[0] [https://www.homedepot.com/p/CoolBot-Generation-7-WiFi- Walk-I...](https://www.homedepot.com/p/CoolBot-Generation-7-WiFi-Walk-In- Cooler-Controller-with-Air-Conditioner-Control- from-59F-to-34F-CB-G7/308002549)

<comment><USER6> Yes. We use one, also in a reefer, to store cheese from our cheese plant. It's an alternate thermostat, basically. It has a small electric heating element that you attach to the AC unit's temperature sensor, and then you stick the coolbot's sensor in the fins of the AC unit. Works great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> So interesting to hear about this niche problem. I never would have imagined that this would be an issue. When I read the title, I thought.. "duh... just use a backup generator", but the back of the napkin math doesn't seem to work out.

I wonder what the economic impact of such a simple issue is. If you think of food loss from all processors in a whole country, it is definitely huge. What other seemingly small issues actually could have huge impact? What problems in my country are hiding right under my nose?

<comment><USER8> There is heavy reliance on GPS for precision timing to make cellular radios work (why spend $100k on an atomic clock, when a $500 GPS unit will do). A few other things are starting to take a dependency on GPS (power grid, TV).

Good roads can be hard to come by in quite a few areas. Even if a area has a road big enough to support a truck, they can be impassable during the rainy season.</comment></comment>


AngularJS and scope.$apply - <AUTHOR> http://jimhoskins.com/2012/12/17/angularjs-and-apply.html

<comment><USER2> This has been my issue with angular and the reason that I'm still using other frameworks when I can. Knockout makes you consciously use set all the time. You rarely are shooting your self in the foot. Angular requires you to remember what scope you are in. If you use something like postal to do messaging you have to use apply constantly.

The magic of angular that was proposed to me was that I could use POJOs instead of inherited objects, but I end up just trading one hardship for another.

I'm not sure if there is some fancy way of wrapping everydamnthing in apply or not, but that would be helpful.</comment>


On Bricks and Code - <AUTHOR> http://tombartel.de/2016/09/24/on-bricks-and-code/ <comment><AUTHOR> Author here, comments welcome.

<comment><USER2> I don't disagree w/ your attidude towards the LOC metric, and I especially like your idea in the footnotes about each line of code being a tax on future programmers who have to read the code. I'm afraid that the code example itself is a bit hand-wavy though, since you introduce a "downloadAsync" function that needs to be implemented differently for each example. So I thing your argument could be strengthened with a more concrete code sample. Continuing the money/tax analogy, if each line of code represents a tax to be paid each time the code is read, then the cost of understanding the code with fewer lines represents an "entrance fee" that would be a barrier to less-experienced devs. I could see how even a technically-minded manager might appreciate the code with the lower barrier to entry -- and justifying their continued use of the LOC metric thereby.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your comment. I see your point with the missing implementation of "downloadAsync()".

About the "entrance fee": Do you really feel that the shorter version is more difficult for less-experienced devs to understand? The verbose version is unlikely to be easily understandable, in my opinion.

In general, I don't think that more lines of code make something more readable.

<comment><USER2> The "entrance fee" in this case would be: understanding promises. When you introduce a new feature into a language, my assumption is that a "less- experienced dev", by definition, would not have experience using promises in production. So if you're going to sprinkle in higher-level (or just _new_ ) concepts into your code, you're assuming a certain level of experience for the devs who will come after you. If, instead, you sort of "spell everything out", it will take more words to do that, but you aren't referencing an assumed set of shared knowledge.

If anything, I think it would help to identify what assumptions are inherent in our code, and at least point to references for a "less-experienced dev" in the comments. A comment that said: "Hey you! This code uses promises, so if you don't know about those, check out this ref: [URL]", would be extremely helpful in this case.</comment></comment></comment></comment>