shingen

Douche much?

Looking over your comments on HN, that latest comment seems to be the peak of your contribution here. In over two years you've picked up 394 karma points. I'm going with the assumption that all of those karma points are from being a pedant about the English language. You're such a valuable member of this community! Rock on.

Softlayer is a lot more expensive than most hosts these days. They're closer to being in Rackspace territory now.

You can get a dual E5-2609 with 32gb of ram + bandwidth from a good host like WebNX for $369 / month.

And if you wanted to spend $1k per month, you can get a dual e5-2687W (16 cores @ 3.1ghz) with 128gb ram; with a 4x SAS RAID 10, plus a 120gb ssd drive, plus a 2tb backup freebie, plus 100mbps unmetered bandwidth (30tb). That literally blows the doors off Softlayer.

Maybe it's just me, but watching all those robots move with purpose across the inventory floors is pretty damn sexy. lol

Google decided to kill Firefox. Not by lack of financial support, but by giving their own browser radically more financial support (the homepage marketing alone is worth an astronomical sum). There was never going to be enough room in the market for four or five major browsers, each with a lot of market share - markets consolidate naturally. Once Chrome gained traction, Firefox was destined to fall down to Opera's levels.

Yep, should probably be the headline

Google understands that its goose might be cooked if the DMCA's safe harbor rules are trashed any time soon. All the things Google would plausibly be legally responsible for would add up to a very big liability risk.

It's nice when one of the giants has skin in the game on the good side of the table.

I wonder if Amazon is going to try to do in fulfillment / logistics / etc. what they've done in web services.

Perfect a highly efficient system, then charge others for access to the same technology.

Or if this is just a play to keep the KIVA system to themselves and provide a competitive advantage. They obviously didn't need to buy KIVA to get access to the system, so it strikes me that it's one of those two possible reasons.

The fiasco is the losing $10 to $15 billion in taxpayer funds part, according to the latest update by the Treasury on expected outcomes to that deal.

HP, Dell, Facebook, ARM Holdings, TXI, Cisco, Google, Amazon, Oracle, Intel, AT&T, Verizon.

Apple could buy any one of them, either through friendly or hostile means. Not a single one of those would make it through anti-trust. Shareholders for Cisco would love to get $200 billion for their company; the US Government would never allow it in a million years. Shareholders for Amazon would love to get $200 billion, and they'd likely outvote Bezos' family holdings to agree to the purchase. Larry Ellison would sell Oracle for $300 billion in a heartbeat, and all shareholders would agree. Intel shareholders would instantly take a $300 billion bid; the US Government would never allow that purchase either. Apple also would never be allowed to gobble up either of the telecom monsters; AT&T shareholders would take a cash + $250 billion in shares deal, and Verizon shareholders would easily sign off on a $200 billion deal.

I think Apple would love to own their own telecom network, given their love of all things integrated. The things they could probably do in owning something like Verizon's network would be astounding. It would never be allowed.

They're now accumulating $40 billion per year in cash (for likely fiscal 2012 numbers).

So they'll continue to add to the stock pile of cash most likely. By 2015, under this plan, they'll have perhaps $135 to $150 billion in cash, unless they increase the buy-backs or dividend further, and that's assuming their annual profit stops growing.

As the world's largest corporation, they are now under intense scrutiny by the US Government, which prefers to leash all massive corporations.

Apple is not allowed to spend its $100 billion buying companies, even if it wanted to. For example, they could buy HP and Dell and shut them down (maybe all PC manufacturers in fact, just with cash); such would not pass anti-trust concerns. They could buy Facebook with cash + stock; again, that wouldn't make it through anti-trust review. And so on.

Even though they're not formally regulated under anti-trust just yet as, say, Microsoft was - their actions are indeed strictly limited by what the government will allow them to do.

It's the least they could do for making it so radically expensive to start a new car company in the first place. Not to mention the Feds were giving massive loans to the other manufacturers under the same umbrella (DOE).

Fortunately I doubt the taxpayer will lose billions on the Tesla loan, unlike the GM bailout fiasco.

You're not wrong.

Nobody deserves it more than Elon. After PayPal the guy could have just done what so many others do, lay down and casually invest, chill on a beach, and let others do the hard work.

Instead he's killing himself running multiple ground breaking companies, directly challenging near government monopolies in GM / Ford / Boeing / Lockheed (protected by massive lobbying, deep political ties going back decades, and regulation designed to protect them from competition).

If America could get a few more Elon Musks, we might start to get our mojo back. Hey there immigration policy.

Bank of America == US Government

For a modest down payment I know a guy that launches small objects into space using the world's largest trebuchet.

The title doesn't exaggerate

Nope, not that guy at all.

To clarify for your benefit, I wasn't complaining about Google's optimization or lack-thereof (spammy vs not spammy). I think it's hilarious, watching the endless dance that Google is going through because their fundamental approach to search is broken and they're trying to drag that broken approach into the future. It's like watching Microsoft with each iteration of Windows & Office, trying to figure out how they can cheat death and drag 1980s software into the future.

On a business level, I don't care about Google's survival or their optimizations. My product doesn't benefit from SEO, nor from their search engine. I'm indifferent to them. If they make a good product, great; if they don't, someone else will eat their lunch eventually.

The Google guys are so smart, with enough time they'll get all their algorithms so optimized they'll eventually exclude every site from ranking on the first page of results. It'll just be a blank white page, the ultimate in minimalism and speed. It'll be an engineering feat not rivaled in the 21st century.

I hadn't bothered to look at Spotify, in terms of using the service (I was familiar with the company et al). I've used iTunes with locally stored music for a really long time.

So I went to spotify.com, read over their product and information. Checked out their plans. Decided I'd see what they can do with the Unlimited $4.99 plan.

I went to sign up for Spotify. They required I use my Facebook account.

Nope.

If we're talking zero to crazy scale: Formspring.

They went from zero to 70 million daily pageviews in 90 days.

The domain Formspring.me was registered Nov 12, 2009. They hit 69 million pageviews on February 11, 2010. They did 1.8 billion pageviews that February.

They're worth a hundred billion... three or four years post IPO, and if they don't screw it all up.

As an investor, they're not worth buying at a hundred billion. There's little to no value upside over the next five years (value, not price; value being what you get, price being what you pay), short of a stock market bubble spiking everything.

It's not surprising FB would get a $100b valuation though. Investors are desperate for growth.

Compression is a word FB investors should get used to. Facebook will spend years growing into that valuation, much like other tech stocks in a similar outsized valuation situation.

Google for example has returned a weak 6% per year for the last five years. Not much greater than the dividend that Verizon and AT&T pay. eBay has spent a decade growing into their crazy dotcom days valuation, and now sport a very modest 15x pe ratio.

At $8 billion in sales, FB can generate $3 billion in net income. Their model scales extremely well in terms of margins and expenses per extra dollar of sales/profit.

At $3 billion in net income, they'd have a 33 pe ratio. They can absolutely hold a valuation around those levels three years out. This is assuming their sales growth continues to slow. However, point being, there's no value upside left in the stock.

I agree on the added value. Their offerings are incredible. I've used their Cloudfront at various times for example. If they get their prices down further, I'd love to make use of a lot more of their services.

It's bound to happen given the collapse of industrial America (blue collar unemployment among men has skyrocketed). Not to mention the way that women are out-graduating men in almost every respect (high school and college).

Women dominate jobs such as nursing, healthcare and education; which compared to manufacturing have done very well. America has lost half of its manufacturing jobs since the mid to late 1990s.

Seems like even the fastfood jobs are dominated by young women. Step into a Dairy Queen and it's all women. Sometimes it seems like the young guys won't take a job if it's not up to expectations.

The outlier male earners are the only thing even keeping the ratios separate at this point.

When these guys get within 25% +/- of dedicated hosting on price for what you get (specifically ram, bandwidth, processor), I'll switch immediately. They have a long ways to go.

Microsoft makes about as much in profit every 12 days as Amazon does in a year. I don't think Microsoft is overly worried about margin at this point. They have a huge incentive to keep the Windows Server environment competitive in the cloud game.

They mention the only way Amazon will lose pricing power is if someone undercuts them in the cloud. I don't think that's accurate at all. Amazon is competing on the bottom side with dedicated hosting providers that give you twice as much for half the price plus bandwidth, and they're getting better constantly. I'd swear that Amazon taking some PR beating recently about how expensive their offerings are, was the primary reason for the EC2 drop. That comparison basis was mostly against dedicated and self/colo hosting.

I hadn't visited Mashable in some time. I wonder if they can possibly load any more crap on one page.

Or do you suppose they're at their absolute crap loading limit, explaining why there isn't even more crap on that page?

Am I the only one that judges HN stories on an 'I regret wasting my time on this' scale?

As in:

Outcome A) working, take a break, visit HN, read linked post, regret wasting my time on terrible blog post, immediately think: I should be working right now, not reading about some supposed megalomaniac's personal problems.

Outcome B) working, take a break, visit HN, read linked post, judge my time well spent learning something of value.

In some form or another I value appraise all HN stories by this scale.

When the guy started talking about getting his feelings hurt by a stranger's nearly worthless opinion (why would you value a stranger's opinion so highly Mr. Megalomaniac?), and then getting wasted accordingly, I knew I was in for a real special read. When he followed that up by calling himself a megalomaniac, I bailed. And it is thus that piece of junk goes in the 'I regret reading any of this' category.

Tap -> Acquire -> Store -> Manipulate -> Analyze -> Supply

They've already long since taken your privacy.

Extortion, you're doing it right.