kalininalex

Amazon has been operating at near breakeven point for a long time. Most of the years the make some money, sometimes they lose a bit.

Their stock holds up because they increase their revenue, and market share, at a huge speed. This is reasonable. In fact, that's what most startup companies do after raising Series A, B, C, etc. funding - they usually spend a lot more than they make (i.e. "burn" cash) with the goal to grow the market share as quickly as possible. Amazon is a public company with significant cashflows, so they use internal funds to grow.

Here're the latest approximate revenue/profits number from Amazon (all in billion):

2007: $14 / $0.5

2008: $19 / $0.6

2009: $24 / $0.9

2010: $34 / $1.1

2011: $48 / $0.6

2012: $61 / $(0.04) (loss of $40 million)

This is a very impressive growth (in revenue) for a large company. Having said that, one day it will stop, so by then Amazon will need to show impressive earnings, or its stock may get punished.

The threat from Android to iPhone probably looks bigger than it actually is. Per study that just came out [1], iPhone users are much more loyal than Android users: 24% of Android users plan to switch vs. 9% of iPhone users. If this persists, Android users will over time "leak over" to iPhone.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/08/iphone-and...

We've built a complete continuous deployment system with TeamCity/MSBuild that worked quite well for us. It probably took about two-three weeks to work out all the details, and now it's been running for over a year with almost no modifications.

Our Git/TeamCity/MSBuild-based build server rebuilds/upgrades the database (SQL Server), builds a web app, and a ClickOnce desktop app installer package. Everything is then copied to the target web site. At the end of each build we have a fully functional web app + downloadable desktop app (the desktop app also auto-updates if it's already running somewhere).

We use NUnit to develop unit tests, but TeamCity has it's own NUnit runner that nicely reports unit test stats and any failures.

Production deployment is slightly different - the build box pushes everything to git, and production boxes pull the latest version from git.

I did have to copy a couple of directories from Visual Studio to the build box. I guess that's the dependency everyone is talking about. I ended up with just copying a couple of things (and documenting them somewhere) rather than installing the entire Visual Studio.

One thing I didn't get to is automating C++ builds on the build box. We have some C++ dependencies. Fortunately, those almost never change, so we build them manually, commit binaries to git, and the build process picks them up from there.

All in all, it was a pretty good experience. I didn't even have to use PowerShell that much. Ordinary cmd-scripts were sufficient for most tasks. The git command line interface is quite rich, even though it can be confusing at times (but stackoverflow typically has the answers).

If you're interested in any specific items, feel free to email me.

You can use profits-to-GDP metric, for example: http://money.cnn.com/2012/12/03/news/economy/record-corporat....

It's no guarantee profits won't go even higher, of course, but they are quite high now.

I think it reflects the general Microsoft philosophy of having APIs for everything. After all, they are an API company. It shows in the PowerShell design with it's object API approach.

Also, with the API you should be able to configure IIS without restarting it, while changing web.config recycles web apps (in ASP.NET scenario). With load-balancing, however, this is less of an issue.

It would be interesting to know what the median valuation is. Half the startups will be above it, and half below it. This would provide additional interesting details.

One of them is Eric Lippert. If you use C# you'll enjoy his blog, http://ericlippert.com/.

Some businesses are fundamentally high-margin, and some are low-margin. It mostly depends on the amount of raw materials involved.

For example, Microsoft (software) is a high-margin business. Their cost of raw materials is low, so 77% of revenues goes to pay for R&D, other expenses, and then profit.

Apple is a lower, but still a high-margin business with healthy 37% of revenues remaining after paying for the cost of materials and assembly. Apple can charge significantly more for their devices than they pay in raw material costs. But it may change, so Apple investors are generally watching its gross margins. For example, last year Apple's margin was 47%, i.e. it declined quite a bit since then.

Amazon (as any retailer) is a low-margin business. They move a lot of products, but 89% of the revenue goes to pay for those product. So only 11% of the total revenue is available for R&D costs and profit.

Most definitely. He may well be completely innocent per numerous laws, executive orders and/or the Constitution. An example of the relevant recent piece:

"Executive Order 13526:

Sec. 1.7. Classification Prohibitions and Limitations. (a) In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to: (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error.."

I guess the question requires further qualification, "What has Microsoft done, in the last 12 years, to compete with the Sony rootkit?"

OK, I guess the issue is with the "never in production". One size rarely fits all. I can have a lookup table with three rows in my database, for which Large Hadron Migrator is hardly an appropriate solution. ALTER will work just fine. For large tables - yes, a more complex migration solution is in order.

Albania, Argentina, Belarus... am I looking at the right list? OK, some first-world countries are mixed in there too, but the entire list is hardly a source of inspiration.

Many first world countries are absent from that list, as well as all developed Common Law countries (e.g. UK, Australia, Canada, etc). I don't think US should be on that list either. While a National ID is indeed not an instant tyranny, it may well be a step in that direction.

Or you may have just cashed out your 1-year CD that paid you .86%. You had $2.3M there and received income of ... $20k. Disappointed by the depressed interest rates you went on a shopping spree, which included a Ferrary.

"ALTER is in itself an odd command, useful only in development, never in production"

How would you then ever modify an existing database?

And why specifically do you dislike, say, SQL Server? (except for price; obviously Microsoft wants to make money off of it).

"case-sensitive filesystem"

What is the business use case for a user to treat documents "Annual Report.docx" and "Annual report.docx" as absolutely different and unrelated?

200-300 "pieces" = $200,000-$300,000. One "piece" is 1,000, typically applied to money.

That doesn't affect net profit either.

But it may be increasingly assembled by the providers of virtual services from components, rather than purchased from Dell.

"Starting Jan. 30, 2013, only Google Apps for Business, Education, and Government customers can set up new devices with Google Sync."

Am I reading it correctly that only new setups will be disallowed while existing devices will continue to work as-is?

Hyper-threading doesn't mean you magically get extra 4 cores. It's a technology that works well for _some_ workloads, and for those it achieves up to 30% performance boost, per Intel claim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading). So, at best you could treat it as approximately 5-core. This may not change the original argument, but mac mini is not an 8-core computer. A true dual 4-core CPU server will have significantly more CPU capacity.

But it displays fine on the iPhone (and probably on many other devices and browsers). So, for its purpose it functions reasonably well.

> If the employer didn't have to pay those 31% to the government, he would have paid them to you, and you would have been taxed on them.

It's unlikely the employer would pay you more. You negotiated and expect 10,000 SEK. Yes, the employer knows it'll cost 13,000, but you only get 10,000. So if there's no employer tax, you'll still likely get 10,000, but now the employer can hire another person using the money that's freed up, or invest in some other ways.

As far as I know air traffic control is part of FAA and it's covered by taxpayers (or perhaps, it's an extra charge in the ticket?). In any case, ground control will probably be a lot less expensive since it's just one team in one location, while air traffic control covers the entire country.

If we assume two things: the current cost of fuel is 1% of the total launch cost, and launching a reusable rocket is similar to operating an aircraft, then we can use numbers from commercial aviation:

- the cost of fuel is 35% of the total cost.

The total cost of the rocket launch then will be 3 times its fuel cost, or 3% of the _current_ expense. That's savings of 97%. Even if the analogy is not perfect and we make numerous allowances, the potential for cost-cutting by 80-90% is not inconceivable.

Again, this is based on the two assumptions above. If they are totally off, so are these calculations.

They are mostly fuel and wages of (frequently unionized) employees. For example, numbers for Southwest for the last quarter, of the total $4.2 bil expense:

Fuel: $1.5 bil

Salaries: $1.2 bil

Depreciation + Maintenance: $0.5 bil (basically all airplane related expenses)

So, maintenance expenses are only 12% of the total, while fuel is 35% and salaries 28%.

If the cost of fuel in orbit launches was indeed just 1% of the total cost, then compared to air travel those launches are very inefficient and there may be a huge room for improvement.

Although Karmas are known to catch fire on many occasions, including while submerged in water (http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/fisker-fire-new-jersey/).

The battery on Model S IS swappable, in fact quick-swappable, at least per Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/03/18/idUS24518959652011...)

We switched to Oregon once we discovered the price advantage and never looked back. Granted, our deployment is relatively small right now.

Compared to what?