Disney's net income falls 32%

We knew it would be ugly. Now we're starting to see just how hard the economic meltdown is hitting showbiz.

Disney kicked off what's likely to be a grim earnings season in the media sector by posting on Tuesday a 32% drop in net income for the first quarter. Overall revenue slumped 8% to $9.6 billion, and net income was $845 million.

Can anyone... put this in context? Has it ever gotten this bad this fast other than the slide towards the depression?

Disney's net income falls 32% - Entertainment News, Entertainment Industry & the Economy, Media - Variety

Ok recently I have been working on backing up my 17″ Mac Book Pro OS X machine (10.5). I am pretty good about backups… but not offsite backups, which would survive theft or server crash or house burning down.

I’ve become even more superstitious of late, because of what I’ve done to my Mac Book Pro - installing a striped RAID of two 500GB hard drives.

damien stolarz blog » Blog Archive » 1 Terabyte raid in my 17" Mac Book Pro

There is an annoying problem with Ubuntu. Using the command line editor nano, the backspace key acts sometimes as the delete key (deleting the first character on the right and not on the left).

You can fix this by adding the following line to your /etc/nanorc file:

set rebinddelete

//extrabright » Blog Archive » Ubuntu Nano Backspace Problem Fix

I've heard stories of military drives being sanded down and the particles mixed with concrete, but I have not personally witnessed that process.

I've told a few people about this and all laughed. Very funny 'overkill.'

RE: Lazyweb: Hard Drive Degaussing

Limited partners measure VC firms not only on their cash-on-cash multiple ("ten-baggers" and such) but on their rate of return, measured from the day of the capital call to the day of the ultimate distribution (after a sale, merger, or IPO). Sitting on cash earning 2% would inexorably drag down the eventual IRR for a particular deal, and eventually for the entire fund.

Which is a longwinded explanation of why VC firms don't have any money, and why they practice "just-in-time" capital calls.

Now, firms are getting worried about their institutional investors defaulting on these calls. You can read samples here, here, here, and here.

But I haven't seen anyone mention a critical element of this problem, which is asset allocation.

CCO of GaTech, Stephen Fleming, explains VC Capital Calls and the current economic crisis's impact on VCs.

Academic VC: Capital Calls

Select public data sets are hosted on Amazon EC2 for free as Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots. Amazon EC2 customers can access this data by creating their own personal Amazon EBS volumes, using the public data set snapshots as a starting point. They can then access, modify and perform computation on these volumes directly using their Amazon EC2 instances and just pay for the compute and storage resources that they use. If available, researchers can also use pre-configured Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) with tools like Inquiry by BioTeam to perform their analysis.

To get started using the Public Data Sets on AWS, simply perform these three easy steps:

1. Sign up for an Amazon EC2 account.
2. Launch an Amazon EC2 instance.
3. Create an Amazon EBS volume using the Snapshot ID listed in the catalog above for your chosen snapshot.

Fun, free datasets to play with on Amazon S3/EBS.

Public Data Sets on Amazon Web Services (AWS)

You are probably well aware that Amazon S3 provides unlimited
scalability but does not have locking and transactions. There's also
a delay between the time when data is written to S3 and when it
becomes available for reading.

I tried several approaches but the best one turned out to be one of
hacking Mnesia internals to add s3_copies as a table type. I started
from scratch, as opposed to building up on Ulf Wiger's RDBMS but I
doubt I could have done it without reading the RDBMS code and asking
lots of questions, all of which Uffe was kind enough to asnwer.

Hacking Mnesia turned out to be a veritable pain in the rear as I had
to touch most of the modules, including today's extensive modding
session with mnesia_loader.erl. I will also need to apply the changes
to any upcoming releases of Mnesia.

Erlang Forum - Trap Exit - View topic - Amazon S3: Now with locking, transactions and caching

The current financial crisis has shut off venture capitalists’ opportunities to cash in their investments by bringing their portfolio firms to public stock markets. As a consequence, they are currently hesitant to invest in young firms in the first place. However, taken together, the evidence supporting the positive impact of VC on innovation is weak at best. Some innovations, especially less profitable ones, may take more time to be commercialised, but innovation is likely to persist even during this downtime, thanks to scientific curiosity and enthusiasm.

I'm not sure I buy the methodology here. For example, I think the patent system is a sham, so I don't think it has any relationship with innovation.

Companies looking to get VC have a tendency to patent, because VC's think patents signify the realness of an entity they are buying into when the cashflow isn't there, but once the money is in, there is no longer a need for patents. Patents don't come up again until the startup gets sucked into a large entity that uses them as a way of extorting money from competitors.

These facts explain the results found by this study, but the study reaches the bizarre conclusion that the VC funds actually discouraged patent application and that the patents were a product of spontaneous creativity or something. The fact is that patents are filed because the VC wants to see them before they will invest. If you take VC away you'll get less total patents, because there will be no need to patent things. If patents are what you want, VC is a way to get them (although large commercial R&D is probably better). However, patents are not actually what you want. Patents are not innovation.

Real innovation involves bringing a product to market, not coming up with an idea on paper, failing to execute on it, and then suing the guy who did it right. Furthermore, patents do not protect real innovators from established interests while they are trying to bring their product to market. Its just the opposite. Patents are used by the big guys to stop innovation that threatens them. They come up with a bunch of potentially dangerous ideas, lock up patents up them, and then sue anyone who gets near them. Real innovators mostly can't afford patents -- not without capital investments that is. IE not without angels and VC.

Venture capital isn’t crucial to innovation | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

For almost three decades, John Francis has been a planetwalker, traveling the globe by foot and sail with a message of environmental respect and responsibility (for 17 of those years without speaking). A funny, thoughtful talk with occasional banjo.

Compelling talk.

John Francis walks the Earth | Video on TED.com

Are you running MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu with InnoDB? You might want to disable /etc/mysql/debian-start. When you run /etc/init.d/mysql start it runs this script, which runs mysqlcheck, which can destroy performance.

It can happen on a server with MyISAM tables, if there are enough tables, but it is far worse on InnoDB. There are a few reasons why this happens -- access to open an InnoDB table is serialized by a mutex, for one thing, and the mysqlcheck script opens all tables. One at a time.

The perils of InnoDB with Debian and startup scripts | MySQL Performance Blog