> It's not "MBA-speak"; this sense of the word "secular" is used in economics, time-series analysis, astronomy, etc.
Of course it's MBA-speak. MBA-speak does not mean that they invented the word, or that only MBAs use the word. It just means that MBAs prefer to use the word where another one would do.
Nadella could have talked about "long-term trends" or "ongoing trends" or "sustainable trends." However, he chose to use "secular trends." His fondness for jargon makes him harder to understand.
Another example of MBA-speak is "synergy." The OED traces "joint action, cooperation" to 1632, and "a combined effect which is greater than additive" to 1904 ("synergism"). The first listed MBA-speak usage of the term is a 1981 article in The Economist on brokerage mergers.
Does that mean that "synergy" is "not MBA-speak" because the term is also used by scientists? Of course not! It just means that the MBAs adopted a term that others had already been using.
I would place "secular" into the same category as "synergy." The OED traces its astronomical usage to 1801 and its economics usage to 1895. Its first appearance outside a scientific context is in 1973, in an article in The Daily Telegraph on interest rates.
In general English, "secular" means "non-religious."
In MBA-speak, "secular" means "non-cyclical."
An example of cyclical growth would be ExxonMobil between 2004 and 2007. They couldn't keep up this growth, because it was due entirely to swings in the price of oil.
An example of secular growth would be Google between 2004 and 2007. They were able to ride the trend of advertising moving online. (Advertising is a cyclical business, but Google won't feel it until advertising stops moving online.)
Nadella is saying that he believes LinkedIn is riding a sustained trend.
Before 2013, Visa and Mastercard forbade credit card surcharges. However, cash discounts were allowed.
The problem was the Most Favored Nation clause in the credit card contracts. Merchants could offer cash discounts, but they could not offer discounts to non-Visa credit cards.
Since the antitrust settlements, all four U.S. credit card networks have allowed surcharges. Also, the Most Favored Nation clause only applies to "equal or higher cost" competitors.
Walmart US could fight Visa by adding a surcharge only to Visa cards. Walmart Canada cannot. In 2013, a similar antitrust case was dismissed in Canada.
Oh. Then I agree with you that Microsoft screwed up the licensing -- but it's a different screw-up.
Windows 7 Ultimate is just like Windows 7 Enterprise, except for the virtualization rights. With Enterprise, each license allows 4 concurrent VMs. With Ultimate, you only get one.
The original idea of Ultimate was to be a consumer version of Enterprise. You didn't have to go through a salesman. You could just buy Ultimate on Newegg or Amazon.
However, Microsoft crippled Ultimate by putting in the 1-VM restriction. Considering how much Ultimate cost, this was a really cheap move on Microsoft's part.
> It's a shame that Google Maps is inferior to my iGo tablet running Windows Mobile from 10 years ago. And it didn't need to have continuous wireless data access. ... How was iGo capable to deliver superior maps so many years ago?
They purchased data from a mapping company. Ten years ago, the two largest mapping companies in the world were Navteq and Tele Atlas. Google used to buy data from these companies as well, but they stopped paying and decided to build up their own maps data from scratch.
Navteq was bought by Nokia, got renamed HERE Maps, and has just been sold to a consortium of German automakers.
Microsoft currently has a multi-year contract with HERE Maps as part of their deal with Nokia. Also, Helmut Panke is on the Microsoft Board of Directors. He used to be the Chairman of the Management Board of BMW.
> Even if you don't allow them to be sold off, nothing is stopping someone from entering an agreement where they have to pay the same amount monthly to a person X in exchange for a lump sum received now. So they still receive their checks but they have to pay that money to someone anyway.
Such an arrangement would be an unsecured personal loan, which would not survive a bankruptcy filing.
This is why you see commercials on late-night TV for structured settlement cash-outs, but you don't see commercials offering to pay you a lump sum in return for handing over your Social Security payments.
The Social Security system pays out $700 billion in benefits each year. The entire structured settlement market is only about $6 billion a year. However, Social Security payments cannot be assigned, and structured settlements can.
These companies don't want to give out unsecured loans to poor people with lead poisoning who don't have jobs. They want to pay pennies on the dollar for a guaranteed stream of payments.
> Structured settlement cases became more popular in the United States during the 1970s as an alternative to lump sum settlements. The increased popularity was due to several rulings by the IRS, an increase in personal injury awards, and higher interest rates.
Well, in the 1970s, people had pensions and the 401(k) was a "thrift plan." Yet we've enacted all sorts of protections for the 401(k), because it is now the primary mechanism of retirement savings available to most Americans.
Structured settlements may have originated as a tax break in the 1970s. However, in the last 40 years they've become a way to provide a secure income stream for plaintiffs. We need to treat them as such.
I don't see why structured settlements should be allowed to be sold off at all.
The whole point of choosing a structured settlement is to prevent the person from spending a one-time windfall. So why allow that arrangement to be undone after the fact?
When you retire, you cannot assign your Social Security payments to a company in return for a lump sum. Many pension plans also prohibit you from assigning your pension checks. As a society, we've decided that preventing retirees from becoming destitute is more important than allowing those retirees to access their benefit as a lump sum.
> It would take only one nuclear device being "detonated" in low orbit, to wipe out nearly all of the satellites in a large area of that space. The resulting EMP may wreck quite a few ground-based systems too, IIRC from a book I read recently. Can't recall the name, though...
A nuclear weapon detonated in low earth orbit would not destroy a single global navigation satellite. They are not in low earth orbit.
A nuclear weapon detonated in medium earth orbit would wipe out between 0 and 1 navigation satellite, depending on how close you get. The satellites just aren't that close together.
An EMP would destroy electronics on the ground, but this will be a systemic effect. Satellite navigation would be collateral damage. When the ground-based electronics are replaced, though, the satellites will still be working.
> In any case, disrupting satellite-based navigation is the simplest kind of rocket science: a missile that just has to go up and then detonate, no aiming required.
Nuclear weapons are powerful, but they still have to obey the laws of physics. If you get far enough away, the inverse-squared law makes even a nuclear explosion look like a firecracker.
So basically, it's going to take one nuclear warhead to destroy one navigation satellite. If a rogue nation has 60 nuclear warheads, it's hardly going to waste them to take out 60 navigation satellites.
> I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites?
GPS is not the only system. We currently have about 2.7 global satellite navigation constellations available for use.
The American GPS and the Russian GLONASS are both complete. The Chinese Beidou system is about 40% complete. The European Galileo system is about 30% complete. Each system also has about 20% redundancy in the form of on-orbit spares.
Dual-system GPS/GLONASS receivers are now nearly everywhere. I was just looking at a phone that has a triple-system GPS/GLONASS/Beidou receiver. In a few years, quad-system receivers will be commonplace.
A rogue nation would have to shoot down about 1.9 constellations, or about 60 satellites, before we drop below full coverage.
The American, Chinese, and European systems have the same orbital inclination. If a gap opened, any satellite from any of these three systems could theoretically fill that gap. It would take some time to reposition the satellites, though.
There is also additional redundancy in the eastern hemisphere. India and Japan have satellites that provide regional coverage. Part of the Chinese system also operates as a regional constellation.
At this point, the rogue state is at war with the US, Russia, China, the EU, India, and Japan. They might as well just surrender.
> His business means rockets are going to go from $400 million to $150 million. That's nice and all, but it's not an extraordinary revolution.
Rockets didn't cost $400 million before SpaceX. You could already get a satellite into geostationary orbit for about $70 million -- or rather, you would have been able to, if politics hadn't intervened.
Twenty years ago, the Chinese were major players in the launch services market. They picked up quite a bit of business after the Challenger explosion. One of the two commercial satellites that was retrieved by STS-51A was re-launched on a Chinese rocket. One-fifth of the original Iridium constellation was launched on Chinese rockets.
In the late 1990s, the United States banned launches on Chinese rockets if the satellite had any American parts. That meant that no Western satellites could be launched on Chinese rockets. What happens to prices when the low bidder isn't allowed to bid? You guessed it.
What SpaceX has accomplished so far is to restore prices to where they would be if the Chinese had stayed in the market. It's impressive that they can match "the China price" from California. However, it's not exactly revolutionizing the industry yet.
A large communications satellite costs hundreds of millions of dollars. A large military satellite costs over $1 billion. Launch costs are simply not the constraining factor in the satellite industry.
However, SpaceX is promising to drive costs even lower through reusability. Then we'll see if there's actually as much price elasticity in launch services as Elon Musk is expecting. That will ultimately determine SpaceX's legacy, whether it is a revolution or not.
> If you want to see some sci-fi magic, just look at the Space Shuttle, That's some amazing witchcraft right there.
A reusable spacecraft that costs more than an expendable launcher?
Japan had been allied to Germany. The Wehrmacht had been one of the most effective fighting forces the world has ever known. The Imperial Japanese Army had been formed on the Prussian model back in the 19th century.
The German Wehrmacht had just been defeated by the Soviet Army three months earlier.
Also, the Japanese army had already tried and failed to defeat the Soviet army in 1939. In fact, that's how Zhukov got his first Hero of the Soviet Union award. That was in 1939, before the massive Soviet arms buildup, before the dissipation of Japanese strength in the Pacific.
A Japanese general would have to be delusional to think that he could hold out against the Soviets in 1945.
> I think that the real problem is that most people will not pay for 5 different streaming services. Remember, the median family income in the US is only about 50k, which I'm guessing is less than most people here make by themselves.
Why won't they pay for 5 streaming services? They're already paying for 100 channels.
Remember, cable or satellite TV together have 80% penetration in the United States. That means that your median family with the $50k income is paying close to $80 per month for video entertainment. ($80 happens to be Comcast's video ARPU.)
If the end-game is the unbundling of video content from the delivery mechanism, then that $80 will buy a lot of streaming services. Probably more than five. Depends how they're bundled.
I can believe that their technology works. I've been hearing about this sort of stuff for ten years before I first heard of Theranos. Search for "lab on a chip." There are grad students working on this sort of stuff at every major research university.
However, the $9 billion valuation feels bubblish. Consider that Quest and Labcorp are both $10 billion companies, and Theranos is talking about driving down the price of testing. They need a lot of elasticity in this market to make the numbers work out.
Since NT 6.0 (Vista), graphics drivers run primarily in user mode. There is still a kernel mode component, the miniport driver, but it is kept small to reduce the likelihood of crashes.
There are some other drivers that also run in user mode, but graphics drivers were the really big change. Most bluescreens in Windows XP were caused by graphics drivers.
Since Vista, Windows has been able to recover from a failure in the graphics driver. The screen blinks for a second, and then a balloon notification comes up, saying that the graphics driver has been restarted.
Well, corporations are launching new products all the time. Each new product can be thought of as a
VC investment in a new startup.
However, the VC investors have to share the winnings with the founders, while the large corporations get to keep basically all of it. Oh, sure, the corporation might pay out bonuses and promotions, but this is a small fraction compared to what startup founders get to keep.
Thus, VC investors start out with a built-in disadvantage that they have to overcome: call it "founder drag." It's sort of like the race between active funds and index funds. The actively-managed funds have to overcome their higher expense ratio just to get back to even.
You don't even need an annual fee. Even a one-time fee is sufficient deterrent to blanket extension of copyright.
The old 56-year copyright term used to be split into two 28-year periods. You basically paid a one-time fee: half at the original registration, then half (adjusted for inflation) at renewal. If you didn't renew, then you got to pay half the fee for half the copyright term.
Only 15% of copyrights on books, periodicals, and music were ever renewed. The renewal rates were higher for maps (40%) and motion pictures (50%).
Thus, commercially-significant work was protected. However, the vast majority of work (85% of books!) only had an ephemeral cultural value, so the authors chose to take the fee discount and allow their works to enter the public domain.
Source: Divide 1977 renewals by 1950 registrations for each category. This is off-by-one (27 years instead of 28) because 1949 and 1978 tabulations aren't as easy to access. That's why I give round numbers.
> A), ambitious and unrealistic are not mutually exclusive. It was ambitious and unrealistic to attempt a moon landing in under a decade.
That's absolutely not true. It was ambitious and totally realistic to attempt a moon landing in 10 years.
Kennedy only selected that goal after von Braun said that it could be done "by 1967/68". He even added an extra two years of padding, just in case von Braun was being optimistic.
Anyone who knew anything about space flight knew that Kennedy's goal was achievable. In fact, some thought that von Braun was gold-plating the program unnecessarily. McDonnell did some engineering studies for landing one man on the moon using Gemini and a Saturn C-3 (about half the payload capacity of a Saturn V).
If 90% of civil engineers would say in 2013 that Elon Musks hyperloop plan was realistic, then it would be where the moon landing was in 1961. But they wouldn't. In comparison to the moon landing, Elon Musk's hyperloop was wildly unrealistic.
Of course it's MBA-speak. MBA-speak does not mean that they invented the word, or that only MBAs use the word. It just means that MBAs prefer to use the word where another one would do.
Nadella could have talked about "long-term trends" or "ongoing trends" or "sustainable trends." However, he chose to use "secular trends." His fondness for jargon makes him harder to understand.
Another example of MBA-speak is "synergy." The OED traces "joint action, cooperation" to 1632, and "a combined effect which is greater than additive" to 1904 ("synergism"). The first listed MBA-speak usage of the term is a 1981 article in The Economist on brokerage mergers.
Does that mean that "synergy" is "not MBA-speak" because the term is also used by scientists? Of course not! It just means that the MBAs adopted a term that others had already been using.
I would place "secular" into the same category as "synergy." The OED traces its astronomical usage to 1801 and its economics usage to 1895. Its first appearance outside a scientific context is in 1973, in an article in The Daily Telegraph on interest rates.