I worked at Tableau until very recently and I can't think of any way that the Salesforce acquisition has improved things yet (I do think it will eventually improve things). Did you hear about anything specific?
I've been working with Tableau for around 10 years and the most noticeable thing was making it easier for both developers and end-users to use the platform. Everything from mobile, to toolbar improvements, alerts, the API, etc. seem to have really come together.
Now, these could all have very well been in development before the acquisition, but as a whole, the capabilities have grown tremendously since that time.
Also, it seems like the licensing options for smaller businesses has really been focused on since the acquisition. It's become much more affordable for a small business to get and use Tableau compared to 4-5 years ago.
Clean room tyvek coveralls that cover head to toe. You'll see them in automotive paint shops and electronic rooms. This was a hypersonic lab so even a strand of hair, blown at +2000mph, could do serious damage to equipment.
And since I was working between classes it made it easier to change.
Why not allow people to set a cap that disables everything set to that billing method once it's been reached? That seems to be the use case that people are saying is missing from cloud offerings.
I imagine most of those companies can afford to have some overages built into their caps. They should also be able to afford the developer time to create fallback behavior, and graceful degradation of services.
Yes, and it seems to be a fair comparison to me. Both the unsafe situations and fraudulent situations can be avoided by the adherence to standards, which the software industry currently does not have. The other industries mentioned do, and they seem to work quite well.
Of course it seems like a fair comparison to you, it's your comparison. To everyone else, putting it as nicely as possible, it's very off. Software that has the potential to cause serious, directly attributable material harm to lives is already heavily regulated: The FDA regulates medical device software, the FAA regulates flight software, the FTC regulates communications software, etc. For everything else, there is court. If you buy a laptop with a lithium ion battery that explodes and causes you burns, you will probably be rewarded handsomely in a suit. If you want to sit here and try to argue in front of a judge that dark UI patterns are causing you some sort of material harm, by all means go for it in court. My advice to you is you probably won't get very far / laughed at.
One often overlooked relationship I find to this sort of argument is that economic harm is somehow independent of physical harm.
While in the purest theoretical sense, its obviously clear/true, the more we abstract parts of life away to monetary valuation and control, the more economic effects have real serious indirect physical consequences.
So someone lost a few bucks due to a manipulative ad? Most the time this has no serious consequences as devious as it may be. However, when lost assets become more significant or lead to serious economic distress, it can and does directly result in health effects that have physical consequence.
Obvious extreme examples include cases of financial ruin that lead to mental health distress leading to suicides. Small repeated loss could also lead to unhealthy lifestyles over time coupled with poor financial choices resulting in limited to no access to preventative healthcare... directly leading to a cause of death (say heart disease from poor dieting).
Practices of advertising from the tobacco industry in the past provide a good model for how these can effect peoples choices which over time had serious physical consequences--the main difference being the tobacco industry actually provided a dangerous product that their behaviours pushed. Arguably consumers have to actively make a choice to follow through but with enough data, people are tending to be more and more easily manipulated.
Software developers are not professional lawyers, businessmen or psychologists. It is therefore not their job to judge whether to implement functionality that sells things you don't have. The only way they could be held accountable in the ways tou want is if we force them to be expert in every field in existence so that whenever they implement software related to it they understand the implications fully.
> To everyone else, putting it as nicely as possible, it's very off.
As one of the other people, I disagree.
Also note that a lot of the trade regulation groups like the bar associations also ensure a good standing in the "community", so they would sanction whatever equivalent lawyers have to dark patterns, if they were frequent enough/egregious enough.
If I adhered to standards I would have forced password rotation (a shit policy) because the standards are behind me. They only recently changed. I was right all along. I literally protected people's data when the standards would have put them at risk. No, thank you.
UBS's market cap is $46B. After this was announced, their stock fell 4%. This drop, if permanent, would equate to a loss of ~$1.84B in market cap.
There are many factors that could be influencing price, but if we attribute this 4% delta entirely to the announcement, the market is guessing the actual penalty will amount to $1.84B. This could be bc the market thinks UBS can appeal with a 50% success rate, or can negotiate the penalty down by 50% with high certainty.
Edit: I hadn't considered tax implications. If UBS is able to deduct these penalties pre-tax (which I'd assume they would), then it suggests that they are very likely going to have to pay the full penalty. Of course, this is all guess work. e.g. the market could be scared that this sets a precedent for future additional penalties which would decrease the signalling towards full payment on this penalty.
This isn't quite right -- The 4% loss could just represent the delta between what was already priced in and the actual loss. This case has been a long time coming so the expectation of the penalty should have been priced in long ago.
Secondly, and it depends on the jurisdiction, but penalties and fees associated with wrongdoing generally aren't tax deductible.
First, there are two ways to value companies, depending on what kind of companies they are. The two extremes are on one side a consulting firm, where the value is worth only the present value of the future fees to be earned by the consultants. But the company itself has no asset, very little debt, and its balance sheet is pretty much irrelevant to its valuation. The other extreme is an investment fund, where the company is worth exactly the current market value of its assets, it has no other future revenues other than the expected incomes from these assets.
A bank is somewhere in the middle. It is kind of an investment fund in the sense that all its assets are financial assets that can be sold pretty much at their book value (unlike a factory where the book value may mean very little in term of how much the asset is really worth). But the book value may differ from the fair market value (that's often the case if there are bad loans). But part of the value will also be generated from profits that are unrelated to these assets: fees on payment processing, advisory fees, trading income, etc. So part of the value is also a PV of future revenues.
And these future revenues may be negative. If you look at the past 10 years, banks have experienced huge revenue volatility. From trading losses, fraud (Kerviel style), fines (like UBS here), bad loans (RBS and HBOS style), etc.
And then you can have all sort of weird technicalities. Like the book value may be increased for gains on own credit (if the company fair values part of its liabilities). That's a paper gain that the market is unlikely to give any credit for.
Presumably that is down to straightforward doubt as to the value of UBS's book. It is not uncommon for unpopular companies that are holding a lot of their balance sheet at "market value" (as banks do) to trade at discounts to their stated book. Take a look at LSE:LAND, a "£10bn" REIT trading at a £6bn market cap.
Well, just as this case demonstrates, certain companies have exposure to other things (like paying a gargantuan fine) that would make their shareholder equity trade at a discount.
”if we attribute this 4% delta entirely to the announcement, the market is guessing the actual penalty will amount to $1.84B”
No, the market’s guess is $1.84B higher today than it was yesterday. The latter likely isn’t zero, as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies#... states ”In July 2014, the bank was required to post a bond of 1.1 billion euros, which UBS complied with while making multiple appeals in the French court system, finally losing its appeal at the Cour de Cassation, France's highest court”
It seems like your back-of-the-envelope estimate is assuming that the market values UBS at exactly its assets minus its liabilities. This disregards goodwill, which (someone correct me if I'm wrong) includes expectations of future earnings. That number wouldn't even be affected in a straightforward way since banks, especially European banks, tend to be levered quite a bit in order to survive on interest income.
Goodwill is often counted as an asset (or a liability if they don’t want to pay taxes) on the company’s book. I’m not sure if UBS included it on theirs, though
I want to be hopeful of this, but according to the article: "In the U.S., UBS is contesting charges from ... the financial crisis more than a decade ago."
That was 10 years ago, and and it's still being argued in court. I can very well see this being another delayed settlement that will drag on for another decade or more.
They already paid a 1B€ “bail” (read in a dream has newspaper) before the court hearing.
I am unfamiliar with the procedure, so I don’t know what kind of events would trigger a restitution (it’s not intuitive, because you can’t put a company in jail before the trial)
Is there any other benefit than scaling better? Because I'm pretty sure 99.9% of projects never hit the "need to scale more" part, and if they did it doesn't seem like this would be too difficult to move off of
I'm surprised compiler warnings haven't come up yet in this discussion. Checking if an unsigned number is smaller than zero typically triggers one, and code style tools can be set to treat any such check as a compilation error/not allow code with such a check to be checked in.
