Today is the fourth time in 2 months this has happened. At first it was hard to imagine the government would go through with it but they did.
It's strange, the first time any such news get floated (blocking FB, YouTube, phones or Supreme Court rulings) it comes as a shocker, people huddle and complain and with some passing of time expectations are lowered across the nation. Complete mobile network blackout doesn't feel like a big deal now that it has become a regular occurrence.
People have been making plans ahead of the scheduled outage and some are even happy to be offline and free of interruptions.
Calibre [1] can do a reasonably good job on most types of PDF files,
but a lot depends on the type of PDF file you want to convert. PDF
is essentially a container format, and as expected, it can contain
a whole lot of different types of data such as images, text, fonts,
scripting, and much more. The results you'll get from Calibre (or
any other conversion tool) will depend heavily on the types of data
within the PDF file you want to convert, and also on what kind of
output you want to generate.
Not really. The problem is that PDF is basically a destination format. Converting to PDF strips all of the semantics out of it, leaving you with plain text, fonts, and boxes. The latest versions of the official Adobe Acrobat Reader are able to convert PDF to Doc but I have no idea what the quality is like.
Every time I have used Acrobat to convert PDF to Word, the only usable parts have been the tables. The rest is generally garbage.
Fortunately, the tables were the only parts I wanted! I needed to get them from the PDF into text (csv) form. So, from Word, I copied the tables, pasted them into Excel, and saved that as csv. Easy as 1-2-3-4-5!
I hope some more thought goes into the usability as well. I find the syntax for links confuses a lot of users for whom I have enabled mark down editing. Wiki style [[link text]] works great if you assume links have no space or maybe something similar. Similarly the syntax for images has also always bothered me.
I have no problems remembering the Markdown link format, but I never remember the expected order in what you describe as "Wiki style" (which is really a style employed by some wiki software - there are plenty of wiki software that uses other syntaxes, including Markdown)
It's about reach versus monetization. The web lets you build a great audience very fast. The iPad comparatively has a much smaller audience, albeit a potent one.
The introductory article talks about what it's going to talk about and that it's for people "who love the Internet... and even coffee" which doesn't excited me much but either way, given the attention on this HN post, I would like to get a taste of the goods. Any sample articles would be nice otherwise it's a complete toss in the dark for me.
> Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was overvalued pre-IPO.
You could have shorted the stock or traded options.
There was a fair bit of uncertainty because the average Joe, his family and friends all used FB. Many investors feared that the stock would be driven by sentiment rather than rationality. If the stock went to 50, it would not have surprised me.
Like you I didn't support the high IPO valuations either but I still would love to own the stock with minimal downside risk. As would a lot of other people out there. FB has a lot of appeal.
At $10 the company will have a market cap of about $20 billion, which is pretty low for a company with a billion monthly active users. If you discount that, you are probably discounting the bigger picture.
At some point Apple had tremendous unrealized potential. The idea that it could get into phones and do really well wasn't hard to digest. On the contrary, it seemed like an obvious move.
FB has similar unrealized revenue potential. It could start charging $X per month to businesses with > Y fans. It could offer premium dashboards + analytics or similar features. There is no shame in premium, I am not sure why they only do advertising and commissions but my sense is that currently they are focused on growth and building a moat around their business.
I don't own the stock and I don't care if it goes up or down but your post seems be discounting the company's potential.
Its really difficult, if not impossible to short stocks after IPOs and completely impossible to have shorted at the exact IPO price arranged prior to the IPO. This is a brief article on why:
It is also not possible to buy put options prior to the IPO as there are some guidelines that must be met prior to being able to buy puts. On Facebook specifically, they were not offered for almost 10 days after the IPO:
> Lots of people (myself included) had been saying that Facebook was overvalued pre-IPO.
You could have shorted the stock or traded options.
Before you short any stock, it is wise to keep in mind the maxim "Markets can remain irrational a lot longer than you and I can remain solvent". This isn't really a problem on the long side (sans margin), but is a real problem on the short side.
That's the main reason I didn't short it - so many people seemed so invested in the IPO being a success, that I thought it would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm surprised it fell so far and so fast; I think the trading glitch on NASDAQ took the bubbles out of the champagne for so many people that fiscal reality set in a lot earlier than it would have otherwise. Of course, going on the market at $38 didn't help, but their pricing strategy was sort of constrained by activity on Second Market.
This. You can't even safely short a stock that you're certain will crater sooner or later, you also have to know when, and how high it could go first. You're betting you know just how irrational the market is.
At $10-$12, that's effectively saying that the company has the potential to grow its profits by a factor of three or four. Then it would have an industry-standard P/E ratio, roughly on par with Apple's. This sounds about right to me.
If you were to actually discount the company's future potential, then an industry-standard P/E ratio would put it at $3-$4.
[Edit: I'm not a trader, but if I were, I'd be shorting down to about $18, and buying at $9.]
At $10 the company will have a market cap of about $20 billion, which is pretty low for a company with a billion monthly active users
I think you're making the mistake of backing into the valuation based on an arbitrary statistic they tell you is important. Who cares how many monthly active users they have if they can't make any money off of them. They could have six billion people using their service, but if they can't generate revenue from them I wouldn't pay $5 for the stock, regardless of how much potential they claim they have.
If all those users have the potential to generate massive revenue, fine... then prove it. Then maybe I'll buy the stock, but in the meantime here's no reason to rush in based on promises and "potential".
I found the example complicated. Real learning comes from simplifying. In the case of the provided example, it is trivial to simplify.
$100 is worth $121 after two 10% interest cycles. The PV formula asks the reverse: what is $121 two cycles out, worth today (what is its present value)? In reverse, we can calculate that by dividing $121 with 1.1 twice. That's pretty much what the formula is : FV/(1 + i)^N or $121/((1.1)^2) = $100.
It's strange, the first time any such news get floated (blocking FB, YouTube, phones or Supreme Court rulings) it comes as a shocker, people huddle and complain and with some passing of time expectations are lowered across the nation. Complete mobile network blackout doesn't feel like a big deal now that it has become a regular occurrence.
People have been making plans ahead of the scheduled outage and some are even happy to be offline and free of interruptions.