71–80 of 86 posts
Invest in companies that are actually producing something valuable. That's the way to restart the economy. Can we all move on from the social media bubble and get back to real work now ?
But IBM doesn't build products anymore. They're primarily a consultancy.
Invest in companies that are actually producing something valuable. That's the way to restart the economy. Can we all move on from the social media bubble and get back to real work now ?
... says the guy posting his comment via social media. (Yes, HN qualifies.)
I can just imagine less scrupulous investors saying, "Hey, look! That thing you're doing? It fits in my overly-broad buzzword category! Give me money for my Social Media fund!"
FWIW, IBM is more expensive on a PE basis, trading at trailing PE of 14 compared to Microsoft's PE of 9.8.
He said he won't buy MSFT b/c he's close with Gates. If he bought and they announced a share buyback / dividend, people would wonder if he heard something from Gates. He sees no point in running that risk. Not a MSFT fan myself but I have to regard Buffett's frienship with Gates as a pretty strong endorsement of him as a businessman.
I would have assumed it had more to do with endorsing him as a philanthropist...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, they build specialized products for their clients; they just don't build consumer products. They build very complicated, extremely expensive products based on cutting edge research that they perform in their own labs, which is why this investment is solid. I heard an IBM guy give a talk at a research conference recently, about a 1U rack system that processes 8 live feeds of traffic, automatically cla…
As an example, this reminds me a bit about P4 (Perforce www.perforce.com). It seems to be not that well known as say git, or other versioning systems, but in reality it's widely used in the game development, and last I've heard google, Microsoft and other big companies do use it (or use some licensed source code based version of it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please, read the HN guidelines, especially the parts about being civil and replying to arguments instead of calling names.
You may not realize it, but 6sigma just did the equivalent of walking into a programming discussion and shouting "goto is evil!". It displays a disturbing and dangerous disconnect from reality. As a rule, I don't try to sugar-coat my responses to the willfully ignorant, but in the context, I don't see anything uncivil about my reply.
Starting off with "Hint" is condescending. Don't do it unless you intend to condescend, as this is uncivil. 6sigma offered a fact, qualified with "For what it's worth". You read a specific meaning into that fact, and are attacking him for the meaning that you have chosen to assign to his statement. This is impolite. Ask for clarification before assuming intent. And try to avoid insults like "worst kind of shallow, ignorant investor".
But please stick around and offer more solid comments like the one to Hessenwolf!
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... says the guy posting his comment via social media. (Yes, HN qualifies.)
It bothers me when people apply a new buzzword to an old concept. Calling things like HN and forums "Social Media" is no more descriptive than calling a garbage truck driver a "sanitation engineer." I can just imagine less scrupulous investors saying, "Hey, look! That thing you're doing? It fits in my overly-broad buzzword category! Give me money for my Social Media fund!"
But it's a social... version of media...
What exactly is wrong with using a properly descriptive term that is in popular usage? Almost entirely unlike your garbage truck driver.
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IBM's business model is approximately "We will solve your problems for piles and piles of money. Usually not problems that require technical breakthroughs or research level computer science knowledge, but ill-defined problems that involve many stakeholders, much politics, and complex business logic." They make their money as a professional services company (a model Buffett has no trouble understanding) that uses tech…
That is IBM Global Services, which is basically the same as Accenture, Cap Gemini, Wipro etc, IT outsourcing/offshoring. It's about half of IBM, by revenue.
Like any lab looking at fundamental science, it's hard to judge how much of that activity leads to profit. Some research groups do also make/sell products that are cutting edge, though, on a consulting basis. E.g. the storage group in Almaden makes insanely large custom storage systems for very big - often federal govt - clients.
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As an example, this reminds me a bit about P4 (Perforce www.perforce.com). It seems to be not that well known as say git, or other versioning systems, but in reality it's widely used in the game development, and last I've heard google, Microsoft and other big companies do use it (or use some licensed source code based version of it).
Perforce is unpleasant to use, but it scales effectively to positively massive codebases with large binary blobs and many developers.
P4 also comes with approachable UI (p4win (MFC), and the not so pleasant, but then again better P4v (Qt)).
The command line is one of the easiest things ever p4 has did. For large binary files it's very well done, there is good customization of how many levels of file log to be kept.
But the best feature it's is changelists. The CL (heh, not common lisp) becomes part of your language at work, such as - get this CL, or shelve this CL, unshelve that one. It's very clear to a lot of people (coders, artists, production) what it is, and how it works.
I'm still puzzled by "git stash" or push/pull here and there (granted I'm n00b, and it would take me a lot of time to progress).
P4 is like good action game, GIT is like hard-core RPG where you need to level all the time, and learn magic, collect artifacts (that is scripts, and .gitignores).
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On the contrary, they build specialized products for their clients; they just don't build consumer products. They build very complicated, extremely expensive products based on cutting edge research that they perform in their own labs, which is why this investment is solid. I heard an IBM guy give a talk at a research conference recently, about a 1U rack system that processes 8 live feeds of traffic, automatically cla…
As an example, this reminds me a bit about P4 (Perforce www.perforce.com). It seems to be not that well known as say git, or other versioning systems, but in reality it's widely used in the game development, and last I've heard google, Microsoft and other big companies do use it (or use some licensed source code based version of it).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, they build specialized products for their clients; they just don't build consumer products. They build very complicated, extremely expensive products based on cutting edge research that they perform in their own labs, which is why this investment is solid. I heard an IBM guy give a talk at a research conference recently, about a 1U rack system that processes 8 live feeds of traffic, automatically cla…
As an example, this reminds me a bit about P4 (Perforce www.perforce.com). It seems to be not that well known as say git, or other versioning systems, but in reality it's widely used in the game development, and last I've heard google, Microsoft and other big companies do use it (or use some licensed source code based version of it).