I'd like to agree, but I don't. If companies didn't want to be involved, they would aggressively be pushing governments to provide ways to confirm age w/o transmitting any other data. Primarily because you can't leak data you never had in the first place. I don't see that happening.
I think you are mistaken. The pages are split -- see that closed quote and parenthesis. That quote is a continuation from pdf page 3, which has the opening parenthesis. Each of the cells for classes A, B, C overflow onto one page (each) that follows.
So the C holders are entitled to a distribution on sale or repurchase, but not an annual distribution.
> The Preferred 'C' Shares are entitled to receive dividends (and shall rank equally with the 'A' Ordinary Shares and 'B' Ordinary Shares). On a return of the entire capital of the Company or a winding up (other than a redemption of Shares or the purchase by the Company of its own Shares), the surplus assets of the Company available for distribution among the members (the "Distribution
... which leads into your quote above.
Frustratingly, it seems to be impossible to link these pdfs directly.
I was quantifying the 'plus any return owed' in the original article.
In a sale, the C holders get the greater of:
A) a % of proceeds as if all shares were ordinary shares, or
B) what they paid the company for their shares PLUS 18% per annum accrued interest.
So if the company were sold 9 years after they invested X, and the sale proceeds were less than 4X, the C shareholders would get 100% of the proceeds, the ordinary shareholders would get nothing.
It's interesting to me as well as an ex-microsofter who worked on surface devices. Leadership (at least below the VP level) knew they were getting killed by Chromebooks and tried a few times to get a low cost device (Surface Go 1/2 for example) that ran a slimmed down version of windows (Windows S?). It tries to be more like chrome OS (hard to mess up, easy to flatten and restore a fresh OS on) but kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place (legacy app compatibility) to be not bad at the thing Chromebooks are good at.
That said, I don't believe the Chromebook lock-in. It's just chrome and the web, which you can get on literally almost every laptop/pc sold today. Should Microsoft be concerned that you don't need windows as more and more things move onto the web? Absolutely. They should be doubling down hard on the gaming ecosystem (which atm still requires windows for certain games) as their hold is eroding week by week.
There's a growing set of ARM windows laptops that might bite into the Chromebook market. The surface laptop 7 is pretty nice and comes in both large(ish) 15 inch and small 13.8 inch form factors.
All of the ARM laptops are priced as premium business models in the $900-1700 range and kind of fall down in that space - Qualcomm until recently even refused to release any drivers to anyone not a developer partner and it's honestly still not even close to consumer/business friendly. The hardware is capable of doing what people need the culture around it is just not aligned.
Also it's a joke to run OpenGL on Windows ARM (it fully works just no one makes it anything easy)
My x13s laptop can almost run A tier games without a fan which is impressive but it really feels disconnected and unsupported from all parties making these laptops.
> kind of just throws away the things you would pick windows for in the first place
I'd be interested to see a legacy-free Windows, stripped out like LTSC, with no 32-bit binary support. Especially an Arm64 version with no x86 binary support.
I think Windows was a pretty good desktop environment circa. Windows 7. Hardware compatability and just working are huge. If they can get an independent M4 competitor from AMD etc. you would have a compelling reason to switch from Mac (for Joe Average user).
> I think they (and even Apple) are going to get a walloping from mostly ceding the education market to chromebooks.
I think this is an Americentric view. As far as I can tell, the mass adoption of Chromebooks for education is just the US, which is 4% of the world population. And in this particular case there's little reason to believe it will suddenly propagate everywhere else - the US education ceding has been going on for years, and yet it's still confined. It's not like the iPhone which started in the US and within a few years rapidly gained ground in Japan, then Europe and so on.
What I heard is you would like some highly relevant ads to be at the top of your start menu for your convenience every time you want to start a program.
airfare: $500, 5 nights (sun -> thur) in a hotel, fully costed: $250, per-diem of $100 6 days (fri is a travel day) is already $2350. If you rent a place that thousands can show up you'll be in for at least $5k.
A competitive bloodbath plus OpenAI has investment valuing it like it will achieve agi rather than (merely) being a huge advancement in computing, but not a fundamental rewriting of how all work is done.
It's rarely a great sign when an article opens with... maybe not quite a lie, but by actively misinforming the reader. To wit:
> My beloved Boston Celtics paid top dollar for an accomplished point guard to help win a championship two seasons ago. This year, they opted for a player who isn’t as good but reduces payroll.
That is not what happened. If you don't follow the nba: Their best player (Tatum), tore his achilles. Worse, in one of the last games of the season. That's typically a year plus injury to return to form, if you return to form.
Separately, the nba has, for the first time, essentially a hard salary cap (the 2nd apron). If you exceed the first cap -- which everyone with a competitive roster must do -- you have penalties that escalate the more years in a row you are within the penalty zone. Thus Boston ate a year, while their best player was injured so they have no real hope of winning anything, to reset their penalty status for next year.
tl;dr: they didn't dump someone to reduce payroll (that was a side effect, not the goal). They wanted to reset the repeater penalty in a year where without your best player, you ain't winning anything anyway. This is just competent cap management.
Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.
Even factoring in parking, traffic, and bus lanes, it's much faster to drive within SF than take the bus. Stopping every 2 blocks and missing every other green light kills throughput.
My local bus stop to connect to BART supposedly had service every 20 mins, but often a bus would be out of service and the wait would be 30-40 minutes. Unless a bus was right there, it was faster to walk.
The crazy people depend a lot on routes, the part of the city, and the time of day. E.g. the 1 (Sacramento St/California St) is basically fine all the time. The 38 (Geary) and 14 (Mission) are OK during the commute rush since they are packed full of commuters, but outside of those times, you will eventually see all kinds of unsocial behavior (shouting, fights, defecation, etc.), especially closer to civic center/tenderloin/mission.
Learning that it was almost always faster to walk from 4th and King to my place in the TL in the three hour period around "rush hour", and often faster late at night -depending on how out of sync the bus and Caltrain arrival times were- was lifechanging in a couple of ways.
Because of Muni's inability to stick to schedule, [0] the Nextbus displays are absolutely essential for making the "Do I walk, or do I wait?" decision. I hate stops that don't have them.
It's a damn shame that the city didn't build many more subway lines during the boom times.
[0] Granted, it's not entirely their fault; they have to contend with SF traffic, too.
> Honestly, there aren't that many crazy people on the SF Muni/busses. The detractor for taking these services is speed and frequency.
Everyone can form their own opinion on the acceptable number of visibly intoxicated people they’d like to encounter. That said, my understanding of the law is that the correct number is zero. So seeing more than zero is an indication that laws are not being enforced.
People can debate whether particular laws regarding drug use are justified. However, if enforcement itself is optional, one might reasonably question whether that applies to other, less controversial laws as well.
> What is the correct number of crazy people you think you should meet on the bus?
As many as you'd expect to meet given how many choose to use the bus to go somewhere.
Retorts:
"Buses shouldn't be mobile homeless shelters." Sure, I agree. But I also agree that someone who has paid their fare and isn't disrupting the safe operation of the bus is entitled to ride the bus. If I want to purchase a ticket and sit my ass down for an hour and a half [0] to watch the city go by, then -assuming there's a seat available for my ass- I'm entitled to do that.
"I shouldn't have to sit next to smelly people." It's not just the poor or crazy that can be smelly. Your diet influences your odor, and some diets make you smell very strongly. Some folks just douse on the perfumes and that sort of thing triggers the migraine headaches of some other folks. As you age, you may lose reliable control of your bladder and bowels. ("Adult undergarments" are a thing people buy for a reason, after all.)
"I shouldn't feel uncomfortable in public." I'm sympathetic, but it's simply a fact of life that you will sometimes feel uncomfortable when around other people.
[0] Last I checked, Muni tickets offer gratis transfers to any other bus or train for 90 minutes after the time of purchase. OTOH, operators rarely check the validity of the tickets of riders, so -IMO- sitting on transit all damn day is fine by me... just so long as you get another ticket if yours is expired and the operator requests that you do so.
People always claim this and then talk about their car as a perfect save heaven. When in reality road rage incidents are also incredibly common. People taking out their guns or starting fights. And of course generally accidents kill a lot of people.
That said, if you only look at driving in a city like SF, this is likely less of an issue.
It could be, but I think it's also as likely it was the scrapers treating that as a trigger event of some type. eg you got a job and might have regrets.
I also saw... not sure what to call them, but honeypot friend requests? I used to get regular requests from profiles I didn't recognize with a generic pretty woman (I'd assume stock photography). Since I ignored them, they would re-request on intervals that were exactly 90 or 180 days. I occasionally glanced at them and there seemed to be no rhyme nor reason to their friends. I'd assume this was also some type of scraping, probably for friends-only profile data.
Sure, but they pretty conclusively lost, and it would likely require a major fumble by Sony to change that. So I'm not sure what they're supposed to do?
Loss is admitting defeat when you have a mature hardware team, decades of fans, and a brand that was born from, and reached its heights, from really connecting with what people want. That's fertile ground that got doused in salt. At some point you just have to admit that people don't want what they don't want. No reality distortion field will make people want crap games made without love bloated to the gills in microtransactions. Microsoft would rather shut the whole thing down than admit that though.
Was it really profitable when it was doing things fans did want? The original console was a massive loss and a mess because they didn't know what they were doing. The 360 gave them a few good years but in the end the ended the cycle in second place yet again. Afterwards it was years of being distant third. Will Microsoft ever recoup that investment? The only good years they had were because their competitor stumbled momentarily. How good was the brand when they never really made inroads into asia?
(I say all this as someone enamoured with the first console as it was a core moment of my upbringing)
Of course it was. The proof is in the pudding. You don't go from a skunkworks program to a major division without profit. Selling millions of consoles and games for hundreds of dollars with healthy margins is a printing press. The issue is while searching for making the printing press to have ever growing margins you squeeze the soul out of the product and make it so your customers leave. Optimizing for 3 months out kills you in 24 months. This is textbook enshittification. It is very obvious when it's happening and it should be very obvious when looked back on.
It was xbox yesterday, it's Windows today. Microsoft is on the way out.
I'm not so sure. Your comment is based on assumption that all they needed to do was launch the thing and then its free riding there. This is developing an entire platform we are talking about.
There are xbox engineers confirmed reading these forums so maybe some of them can shed some light but it seemed like the first console was a dud for multiple reasons and they killed it off early. Why would they do that if it was making money?
So thats a confirmed negative two billion dollars and we haven't even talked about the cost to develop 360.
Sony caught up to them after RROD and managed to turn PS3 around so 360 didn't even end the cycle as number one in sales. After that, they never had any real success again and continued to fall further behind until today.
reply