Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: Activist Investors & Venture Captialists

What's this stakeholder thing supposed to mean? Am I a stakeholder of The Register, just for being a reader? Do I have a right to veto how much profit they're allowed to make? Can I insist that they must invest all their cash in a better forum design, rather than spending it down the pub. Or blowing it on rockets...

Shareholders are owners. It's their property. And they should have a right to do what they like with their stuff, in compliance with the law and absent a court order. The company has legal duties towards its staff of course. And fewer towards its customers. But if the customer doesn't like it, their choice is to take their money elsewhere. Again, so long as their legal rights have been met. Executive pay has bugger-all to do with them.

Until the voters tell the politicians to change the law, giving customers representation on the board. Then watch business flee our country, and our economy suffer.

It's all very fine and dandy saying how you'd like a share of other people's property. But if you do that too arbitrarily, you're no longer running a free economy - and people will start squirrelling their money away elsewhere. There's a lot of deeply unattractive stuff goes on in the City. But the side-effects of mustering the morality police and mounting our high horses could be quite dangerous. We've got plenty to do trying to regulate our banks for now.

Yes it's sad that the Glazers got to buy Man U for a song, them load it up with debt and make a killing. But that's because everyone else undervalued it, so they got it incredibly cheap. Very hard to regulate to stop that, and I'm not even sure we have any right to complain. Other than a general feeling that someone's getting more than we are...

Re: Activist Investors & Venture Captialists

Steve Davies,

You mentioned the A round, so I assumed you were talking start-up venture capital.

In the case of turnaround venture capital, you're somewhat correct. Phones 4U, Rover, Comet are all cases I can think of where the companies took them on and took too much out, or too much debt. I'd be interested to see more aggressive auditing and/or enquiries as to whether they were trading while insolvent i.e. committing fraud. Didn't the Rover directors get struck off?

None of these companies were doing well before the VCs walked in though. It's not as if they've come along and destroyed healthy companies. They've failed to rescue crap ones. You can add to this some of the junk bond deals from the 80s, or the Man United purchase. I don't know if it would be posible to legislate so that you have to have skin in the game to be able to buy up a company and load it with debt - so you lose massively too. But it's hard. Once you've bought a company, it's your asset to borrow against. It's hard to make legislation work right.

There have also been plenty of successful turn-arounds by VCs as well. Just as the vulture has a vital niche in the ecosystem, so does the corporate raider. Sometimes you need someone to pick out and turn around the good bits, while losing the crap bits. Or the crap bits take the whole company out. Sadly VCs can cock up their companies, just as well as the original managment did. Or to be fair, sometimes the market just turns hostile, and companies are doomed.

Re: Activist Investors & Venture Captialists

Steve Davies 3,

There's nothing wrong with taking value out of a company. That's called earning a profit on your investment. If the company was viable without investment, then it wouldn't take it.

The alternative is taking money from banks. Who want assets to secure it against. If you don't have that, or don't fancy risking your house, then you borrow from VCs. Or your family. Or keep your job, and start your company in your spare time.

Remember that people investing at the A round are going to lose all their money on half their projects. Assuming a hit rate of say 3 out of 10 - they have to treble their stake in each of the surviving companies, just to break even. You've then got to cover several years of inflation and add in some pay for the VC's staff and some profits.

Re: to buy a failing company

There's no doubt they had to buy Nokia in order to stay in the mobile market (no other company wants WP). But should they have even bothered?

I guess it depends when his idea was to buy Nokia. Personally I'd have thought buying HTC might have been a better move if they just wanted to push Windows Phone. But like you, I suspect they only bought Nokia because otherwise there'd have been no-one making Win Pho.

On the other hand, there's nothing wrong with MS blowing $10 billion on a mobile strategy. They've got the money, and so much of the medium-term future of computing is in tablets and phones that it's important that they're in this area to stay relevant. They bet a lot of money on XBox, and lost a lot originally, but are now turning nice profits. Admittedly they've not done as much with it as they should. No-one seems to have been able to make the huge convergence and cash that was expected from controlling the TV. I suspect it's because TV content providers wanted as much control as they could manage to keep, and so pushed their own set-top boxes*.

Google blew billions on Android before they knew it would be a success. And that investment is paying off handsomely in terms of juicy user-data, local search, mapping, push to Google's services etc. And so would have been worth a try, even if it had failed. And of course Google have tried and failed at many things, as they've spectacularly succeeded at others.

Maybe tablets and mobiles will become a no-profit commodity soon, and all the cash (and data-harvesting opportunities) will be in cloud services for a while. So if you've got the cash, it's got to be worth spreading some money around in related areas, to catch the next big thing. The trick is not to piss off your existing big market, that funds all this experimentation. So say Google mustn't fuck up search, or scare their customers away with blatant privacy abuse. And MS mustn't upset their core desktop customers by buggering up their UI to suit a half-baked Windows everywhere strategy. Oh, hang on a minute... Doh!

*Why were they ever called set-top boxes? I don't recall seeing many CRT tellies that had a flat enough top that you'd balance the video on them. And now everyone's telly is less than 1" thick, you'd need a special self-balancing box... Why weren't they called something else? And can we now rename them?

Re: Economics is like philosophy

kmac499,

Climate scientists only have to deal with one climate. So they can look at why it behaved differently over time, and try to theorise about it.

Economists are having to look at different countries. Which all behave differently. They have different culture and different economies. So Germans save more than British people do given the same income. We both have welfare states, so they don't have the same reasons as why the Chinese save so much more than Europeans do. Is it cultural? Well their property is cheaper, because their market and history is different. But it makes the economies perform differently.

The USA have different labour laws to Europe. They tend to come out of recession much more quickly, because companies can hire people and know they can sack them again with almost no notice. But then US states differ as to exactly how this works.

So what can you compare? The UK economy is totally different to what it was 30 years ago, with completely different employment laws. So not only is it very hard to compare the early 90s UK recession with the equivalent French one, but you can't even compare it with the early 80s UK one. Without accounting for all the changes in the economy in the intervening period.

Re: Economics is like philosophy

Frankee Llonnygog,

I guess you do have a point. We'll maybe never get an over-arching theory of stuff. One theory to rule them all is pretty hard when the data is of such poor quality.

Also politics doesn't help. The politicians need answers in order to run the economy. You can't blame them for that. But you get political orthodoxies. And plenty of economists willing to defend the party line. They've stopped being scientists and started being cheerleaders.

Climate scientists should take a good long hard look at economics. And be very afraid. Then try to learn the lessons and avoid some of the pitfalls. They've got less excuse, as they don't have to try and model the sometimes irrational behaviour of markets and consumers.

Re: Economics is like philosophy

I disagree. We have quite a good understanding of lots of things. It's just we are totally unable to be precise. Because we don't have good data. Or an ability to experiment.

That's also going to continue into the future. However good our theories are, we'll never know the exact value of the various multipliers and exact price elasticities of particular goods. Nor is there any reason to suppose we can ever know where any specific tax is on the Laffer curve.

We are unable to experiment, and the system is too complex to model accurately. Economics can only ever be a guide, we'll never be able to accurately work stuff out. That's one reason why free markets are often better than governments. Because if you're going to cock up anyway, better to do it with your own money. Or at least money you were given freely by investors. Rather than money that was taken in taxation. Much better for government to try and set fair and reasonable rules, and tweak them as required. Which is why a carbon tax is likely to work better than government attempts to try and cut CO₂ emissions with subsidies. Although it's almost always worth subsidising research.

Re: Economics is like philosophy

No economics is a set of tools to look at various problems. Some are better and more well understood than others. Unfortunately quite a lot of them, particularly in macroeconomics are too controversial to be of precise use, but often give at least a guide, or rule-of-thumb.

So for example, we know that if you put up the price of a good, demand will drop. Except in a few specific cases like Giffen goods (staple food in a famine). We also know this relationship is defined by the price elasticity of that good. Which tells us how strong the relationship is between price and demand. So food is quite price inelastic, you'll eat less if it costs more, but not too much less - as you're more likely to sacrifice other things from your budget first.

But then the devil's in the detail. Do you know your price elasticity? If prices rise, we also know that supply will rise to try and cash in on the lovely extra moolah now on offer. But we don't know by how much, as you may have barriers to entry to the market (regulations etc).

We also know that if you raise taxes too high, they start collecting less money. The good old Laffer curve. The problem is, no-one's quite sure what point on the Laffer curve they're ever at - or exactly what shape it is. So it's not very helpful to set specific tax rates. It can sometimes mean that you can lower a tax, and raise more income. But it's still nice to know the pitfalls when setting policy, and you may of course be deliberately setting a tax rate to discourage something, rather than to maximise revenue. In which case you may not care.

As Keynes said, economics is very good at telling you what you did wrong in the past, but not so good at forecasting the future.

On the other hand, it's the best we've got. And it's better to know more than less. And there are some obvious lessons to take. So governments should spend in recessions to help keep the economy on an even keel (and stop the unemployed starving). But there's another side to this equation, that in booms governments need to save. They need to spend a bit less than they take in tax, in order to stop the economy overheating, and so they're in a position to safely borrow lots in the bust. That's the hard bit of Keynesianism. The bit no-one ever remembers. Like the saying there are no atheists in foxholes, everyone's suddenly a Keynsian when the recession comes. Even when they were advocating massive over-spending in the boom *cough* Ed Balls *cough*.

Oh yes, another rule we don't understand, can't accurately predict, but know is roughtly true. There'll be a recession every ten years or so. We don't really know why capitalism has to be broken in this fundamental way, but it seems to be unfixable. Put it down to people being rubbish. Free market economies work on the level of the average. On average everyone gets richer over time, but that doesn't account for the people who don't - or the odd ten year blip of falling wages. So in Tim's example rare earth prices are back to roughly where they were before, but not without several companies going pop first, and the shareholders of others losing their investment. It's a messy old system.

A bit like climate change research, we only have really decent statistics starting in the 20th century. And even there, the quality is variable. And we don't have the ability to do controlled experiments. It's also bloody hard to try and forecast the future, because the accurate stats on our current economies usually take about 6 months to arrive. And even then we don't know all the inputs and outputs. But maybe as we build up a larger history of good quality data we can try and build better models, and we'll have more past scenarios to study, which is the closest we're ever going to get to experiments.

Re: @AC

I agree. My iPhone 5 is on iOS 8 now, so that's it's second upgrade. I was mostly happy with iOS 7, and 8 adds a few useful options. I wouldn't be sad if I hadn't upgraded to it though, there's not much I'd miss.

I've noticed no appreciable loss in the battery life or speed. I can still easily get 2 normal days of use out of it (probably 80% of the time at locations with WiFi) - and well over a day if I'm out-and-about all day and hammer the phone, plus a bit of sat-nav / WiFi hotspot.

I've not got an iPhone 4, and I'd be wary of chucking iOS 8 on that. Depends on whether any apps I used demanded it. But phone hardware has been moving very fast of late, although that seems to be flattening out. So it's no surprise that older stuff will struggle with newer software requirements.

I think this is a downside for Apple about all the media hype they get. I've talked to a couple of people about it this week, who would happily admit they know bugger-all about computers. Both said that Apple updates were designed to slow down older iPhones so you'd buy the latest one.

I'm no fan of Apple, but that sounds like bollocks to me. I certainly thought that my iPad 1 slowed down with both the updates it got. I think they must have been building down to a price, because I remember that the iPhone that came out a couple of months after it, got a newer processor, and I think more RAM. Then iOS 4 didn't go onto the iPad 1 for at least 4 more months, and I felt slowed it down - and re-introduced a bunch of WiFi bugs they'd only just squashed in iOS 3. I had to put the iPad back on a fixed IP address on the local network, as it seemed to be unable to stay connected if it had to talk to the DHCP server.

iOS 5 was a mistake, and I regretted putting the poor iPad 1 on that. There was sometimes quite severe lag in the UI, if it was trying to process stuff in the background.

On the other hand, I've since waited for updates until the reports after the first patch comes out. And my work iPhone 5 went to iOS 8 with no problems, and seems to be just as fast, and have just as good battery life as before.

One comment I would make about iOS is that it's getting awfully complicated. It used to be that there only a few settings, scattered somewhat randomly around the settings menu. But I went through them from top to bottom after my latest update, and there are absolutely loads now. Almost as many as the last 'Droid I set up (Galaxy Note 2 for a friend). Also Apple had reset some of them to their defaults after the update, that I'd specifically set the other way before. Which is rather cheeky - although backing up to iCloud worked perfectly, other than that obvious deliberate decision to re-enable all sorts of stuff that I don't want.

They need to nuke their settings and start again from scratch, in some more logical way. Quite a few useful bits are hidden away in the accessibility stuff. Although I do give them credit for having lots of accessibility options, far more than Android. And I happen to know that this is an area Tim Cook takes personal interest in pushing - as I know people with disabilities he's talked to about how to improve their systems (along with enrolling them on a testing/evaluation program). So kudos to Apple for making considerable effort in that area.

Re: Erm...

5 thumbs down, eh? Tsk, tsk! Apparently it's necessary to include the joke icon every time.

I think the problem is people just didn't follow your thread. They just didn't have that same lightbulb moment as you...

Or perhaps your sense of humour is off by just a hair?

Re: No silver bullet

JeffyPoooh,

I'd forgotten how bad Windows 8 was until a couple of weeks ago. Had to set up a new laptop for a friend, and it came with Win 8. Just installing anti-virus and deleting the odd bit of vendor crap, before applying all the updates and going to 8.1 was a right pain in the arse. I'd forgotten how hard it was to do simple things like getting to the desktop, or shutting down.

With 8.1 you can right click where the start menu should be - and most stuff you want is there. And the windows key takes you from desktop to Metro, then back again. I'd totally forgotten just how unfinished it was.

Basically my work PC died, so I made a run to PC World and bought a new one, Win 8 was the only option. I think I got it about 2 weeks before 8.1 came out, so I didn't have long to put up with it. I'm used to 8.1, and so never even bothered to install Classic Shell. Though I have for a couple of friends.

Re: with no simple way to prevent users receiving the MS update nag...

It shouldn't even nag. The 8.1 update is done through the Windows Marketplace, that nobody uses.

As for the OP, the last 3 laptops people I know have bought (all in the last 2 months), came with unpatched Windows 8. So they required about 100 patches to be applied, before the Marketplace would even allow me to install Win 8.1. None of them mentioned the service pack once upgrading was complete.

Re: Need to speed up deliveries

Sounds like you might die of starvation before it arrives though...

Re: petrochemicals -- just, not fossil fuels @I ain't Spartacus

Ivan 4,

But that windmill energy is free. It costs us no new carbon to generate it. Yes I know the turbines cost, and you'll have to burn some gas keeping plants on spinning reserve.

There's a certain percentage of capacity where wind is an advantage, as you get not to run some gas plants, and save some CO₂. Obviously that gets more inefficient as you try and get more of your power mix from wind. And I've seen figures that suggest we've reached, or surpassed, that point.

At grid scale, the only solution I can see is nuclear. Which also generates power we often can't use, so it would be nice to have some sort of power storage method for that too. With some gas for back-up and emergency reserve. I guess some wind, as we've got it, and hydro is obviously good. I'm dubious about wave and tidal power, but it might have its place too.

I don't think we can do grid scale solar in this country. But it may have a place locally, especially if we use solar-thermal and PV. Along with heat pumps.

Re: I hope you're right

mark 63,

That's part of the point of the article. Of course people won't cut back. Not voluntarily. And there's a limit to what even the most repressive of governments can force people to do. It's the thing a lot of the greens don't seem to grasp. People will take long-term pain in order to get short-term gratification. Especially if they're not sure they believe in the long-term pain. If that weren't true, the UK economy wouldn't currently be sitting on nearly £1.5 trillion of government debt (and rising.

So in the end we can only solve climate change by making the green alternatives cheaper than the dirty ones. People will put up with the price of carbon being pushed up, but as Ed Miliband's popular success with his policy of capping energy prices shows, not too much of that either.

Fortunately I believe that nuclear can be easily pushed cheaper than coal, though probably not gas. But remember that's nuclear with the costs of cleanup being compared to gas and coal without the costs of climate change or mitigation added in.

We should be able to get thorium to work, which should be cheaper and safer. Hopefully fusion too. Solar is getting ever cheaper, and is probably not as great for the UK, but should be wonderful for many other places round the world.

Rural Africa has gone from crap communications to mobile without the expensive step of fixed-lines in between. With solar and local storage they could make a similar leap with power, which should do wonders for their quality of life.

Climate change should be perfectly possible to deal with, by moving our energy to stuff that doesn't emit CO₂. Then we can continue with growth perfectly happily. There are other big environmental issues, but making everyone in the world richer should help solve population growth and a lot of the damage done to rainforests and natural habitats. As well as stopping millions from living in misery, starving and dying unneccesarily. So mostly a good thing. Even if it forces us into tother policies to deal with the downsides. It's still mostly upside.

Re: petrochemicals -- just, not fossil fuels

Wind turbines do cut it, if you've got a method of storing power. But we don't, and I'm sure there are better methods of generating leccy anyway. Nuclear is the only viable answer I can see. With lots of solar, still making big gains in efficiency, also looking like a possible good thing.

Re: Dear reader

Squaring those two is easy. GEC management were shit, did the wrong stuff. Bye bye company. Other companies do better. GE, Rolls Royce and Google are examples, even Microsoft (though management haven't done very well with the stuff they've had). The whole pharmaceuticals industry have continued to pour billions into R&D (both basic and applied) for year after year.

Market economies work on average. It's a messy business, but we have continued to get richer overall. Mistakes are guaranteed to happen, but there's a survival of the fittest element going on too. So more successful companies can kick out the old-guard if they fail to pass muster. That competition can have bad effects too, as the companies that don't think long-term might out-compete those that are spending on R&D. But that's one of the points of having things like intellectual property. We regulate the market to reward things we want, in the hopes we'll get more of them. Of course if we cock up, and reward things we don't want (patent trolls), we get more of them.

Which leads me to my next point. Government. Planned economies are the less messy alternative to market ones. Compare and contrast the shambles that was the German World War II economy to the far more rigidly planned British and Soviet ones. But that requires competent government that keeps making the right choices. Broadly the British government ran its war-economy brilliantly. But the post war attempt to carry that on failed miserably. And here you have the downside of central planning, as there's no alternative waiting in the wings, hungry to kick out the big boys and take over.

Take another example of government, UK energy policy. I lost track of the different initiatives and pay-back schemes they ran over the years. But in one of their renewable energy schemes they only consulted one company, who were the only ones certified to comply, who therefore hoovered up all the sales before anyone else could get registered. They also had this bizarre obsession with domestic solar power, which in this country is utterly unsuitable. We don't get that much sun, and we have no means of storage, so as most people are out during the day, what's the point? Whereas solar-thermal costs the same to install, but allows you to save about 40-60% of your heating fuel use - and storing heat in a tank of hot water is a well-proven system. And they seemed to ignore heat-pumps. Whereas incentives to have solar PV on office buildings, or even better combined solar-thermal and PV, would have been brilliant at cutting daytime power use.

Much better to let the capitalists fight like dogs in a sack to get your money, and just set the overall rules and watch them do it. So give incentives for not creating CO₂. A carbon tax seems the easiest. Spread around liberal amounts of research money. Then sit back and see what works best.

Re: Handbags at dawn

But do women carry their phones in their handbags because they haven't got the pockets? My Mum complains because when she's at home, she obviously no longer requires her handbag, but with no pockets to put the phone in it either gets left in the bag, or abandoned in whichever room she happens to take it out in first. Obviously if she's visiting me it's no problem, as it can sit by her seat with phone available. Not that anyone gets signal in my flat...

Whereas a man's phone can stay in his pocket, and be available at all times. Ready for fondling or answering, as required.

Given the annoyances women are willing to put up with in the name of fashion, should we seek another solution? If pockets spoil the line of a well cut trouser. How's about autonomous drone handbags? Either flying or wheeled, which follow you round the house, with all your bits-and-pieces.

Eponymous Cowherd,

Ouch. Comparing Ender's Game to Battlefield Earth seems rather harsh. Although the lead actor didn't seem to be able to make Ender likeable - which was either a failure of script or acting ability.

However, I didn't think they dawdled through the plot. I think that only having 90 mnutes was its problem. Maybe Ender isn't likeable (you don't get named Ender The Xenocide for nothing), but he is supposed to be a born leader. The book can sidestep that problem by spending the whole time inside his head, so you can understand his motives. Film can't.

As to your problem with the ending, the book isn't about the aliens. The book is about Ender and why he's not like his brother or sister. So I guess their choice was do it properly as two films (or a TV series), or just make another aliens vs. humans film and option a best-selling book so you can hopefully get some people guaranteed to come and see you. In which case they should have dumped most of the plot, and just kept the battle room and the space battles. After all, Total Recall and The Running Man are great fun films, but bear very little relation to the short stories they're nominally based on. Total Recall didn't even keep the name, although I suppose it would be hard to fit 'We Can Remember it for You Wholesale' on the poster...

I'd have thought some of Hamilton's stuff would film really nicely. I've gone off him, since his books started getting mind-bogglingly enormous, but then I've not been reading as much in the last few years either.

I lost the ability to suspend disbelief in the Night's Dawn trilogy, though ploughed through to the end anyway. I can see any attempt to make telly out of that risking becoming utterly ridiculous. Although who wouldn't want to see Al Capone in spaaaaaaace. If you could find a way round that, it would be easy to translate to the screen. I gave up early on in the next lot (Void trilogy?). Obviously decent modern CGI makes space opera a lot easier.

I was thinking that his first three books would work as well. The Greg Mandell stuff. But then maybe not. How to do mind-reading on screen?

I guess this is why I've always preferred books to telly. Although at least the TV series can do a lot better job than a film. A TV series of 'Ender's Game' might have been great. The film just didn't work at all. There wasn't enough time to grow to understand and like the character, so you didn't care what happened to him. The space opera bits worked fine.

One of our clients are doing their Christmas do at Madame Tussauds. The blurb says something about celebs looking on as you dine on your sumptuous meal (yeah right!), and I was wondering how odd it would look to be surrounded by plastic-faced dummies.

Then I see a picture of Lagerfeld and Wintour, the autons of the fashion world, and realise that it'll be just like being at a real celeb bash.

I don't understant it. They're both pretty old (late 60s or 70s?), and sure they have no wrinkles on their faces. But guys, we can still see your necks. And anyway, even the youngest of smoothest faced children doesn't have a shiny plastic fizzog like that. Although I suppose plastic is the wrong word. Paralysed into immobility, would be better.

My theory is that this is what Saddam did with his WMDs. The UN didn't get all of his botulinum toxin in the 90s, and it's not been found since, so I suspect it's all gone into celebrity faces...