PeopleSoft vs. Oracle Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

PeopleSoft vs. Oracle - Research Paper Example s, â€Å"The acquisition of one company by another that is accomplished not by coming to an agreement with the target companys  management, but by going  directly to  the company’s shareholders or fighting to replace management in order to get the acquisition approved† (Investopedia, 2012). The hostile takeover bid of the company was unusual due to the fact that the company had no interest in the product or services that PeopleSoft offered. Instead Oracle was solely interested in the customers of PeopleSoft. The plan of Oracle was to convert all the customers of PeopleSoft into its EPR system. Another unusual aspect of the original offer was that it was only 6% above the market value of the firm. Typically most hostile takeover bids are at least 20% above the market value. It seemed as if Oracle was taking a huge gamble in this takeover offer since the firm was not going to utilize the intellectual property of PeopleSoft to its advantage. The plan of Oracle was to increase its market share by eliminating its top competitor. The conditions that needed to be met for the independent boards of directors to determine if the sale of the company was in the best interest of the company was whether the hostile takeover bid maximizes the shareholders wealth. The initial offer was so low that there was no reason for the company to accept it since the bid was undervalued in comparison with other hostile takeovers of publicly traded companies. Even though the primary focus of the board should be the shareholders, the interest of other stakeholders of the company such as the employees and the customers were also important. Based on Oracle’s plan some of the negative consequences included mass firing of employees due to downsizing and a deterioration of customer relations. PeopleSoft had in its bylaws a poison pill to protect itself against hostile takeovers. The poison pill was a bylaw that stated that the company had the ability to release more shares in order to dilute

Portfolio A new force for social change Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Portfolio A new force for social change - Essay Example The realization of these ideals across every nation is what empowers human rights organizations in achieving their goals. Communications Technologies Human rights organizations find strength in the internet’s ability to bring geographically distant and isolated human rights violations to public attention and, in turn, elicit immediate response. Unconstrained by spatial and temporal boundaries, the internet can disseminate pertinent human rights information in real-time and in low cost. The two-way information flow facilitated by the internet, in addition, enables immediate feedback and interaction among the public. Human rights violations are brought to light, discussed over, and immediately acted upon through the use of the internet. Human rights organizations can also utilize social networking sites such as Facebook to reach more people and get them informed about their activities. The Press The press contributes to the goals of human rights organizations by reporting on hum an rights issues, humiliating/praising human rights violators/followers, and encouraging immediate action from the government. Like the internet, newspapers provide information on human rights issues, developments, and activities to the public. Being labeled as a human rights violator by the press, meanwhile, serves both as a wake-up call to offenders and a warning to those who are on the verge of committing violations.

From the period of the Spanish American War through the end of World Essay

From the period of the Spanish American War through the end of World War two, why does the United States move from relative isol - Essay Example The initial consequence of this increased global involvement resulted in a psychological and cultural impact on the American society that established a sense of supremacy in the minds of the general population about their country’s standing in the world. Another consequence of America’s increased global involvement was the economic development that was observed as a result of its emergence and ultimate dominance on the international stage during the period between the Spanish American War and World War II. The reason why the United States went to war against Spain in 1898 was because from its early days, policymakers in the country believed that Cuba’s geographic location was of monumental significance to the United States. Moreover, Spain’s loss of the majority of its lands in Central and South America led some of the politicians to suppose that France or Great Britain may take sweeping action to take control of Cuba and cause a great measure of problems for the United States. As Cuba became an important producer of tobacco and sugar cane, North American investment in the island saw a tremendous increase; the great degree of these economic relations by 1895 between the two countries was becoming more and more significant, as the U.S became an importer of 90% of Cuba’s sugar produce1. 30 years before the Spanish American war broke out, the Cubans had begun fighting for independence2, and this quest for freedom reached its climax in the year of 1895 when General Maximo Gomez, with his inadequate militia rose against a powerful Spanish army. The persistence of the Cuban insurgents came as a surprise to the Spanish opponents, who vowed to answer with a much ruthless response, killing about one fourth of the island’s population by 1898. As the Spanish government carried out its bloody campaign to repress the Cuban uprising, secretary of state, Richard Olney faced rising public demands to intervene in the matter to which the U.S made it clear to Spain that with the onset of war between the two nations, the United States considered its interests in Cuba being in danger. The event which ultimately triggered the Spanish American War occurred on February 15th 1898 when USS Maine, a US navy battleship blew up Havana harbor, killing 266 people. The US media heavily speculated that this act had been performed on the part of the Spain and even though diplomatic intermediaries from both sides intervened to resolve the issue, Congress went on to declare Cuba independent upon President McKinley’s request, demanding Spain’s withdrawal from the island and empowering the US president to engage in a war with Spain if it refused to recognize Cuba’s independence. When Cuban nationalists had first cried for independence, their determination to seek their goal had been evident but the lack of personnel and resources on their part could never have compensated for the

How Ian Mcmillan Conveys His Attitudes Towards the Death of His Mother Essay Example for Free

How Ian Mcmillan Conveys His Attitudes Towards the Death of His Mother Essay McMillan uses harsh words throughout the poem to show his grief and remorse at his mothers death. Words like â€Å"shatters† link with how he is feeling, like everything is broken and cannot be repaired. This word makes us imagine something broken into lots of tiny pieces which cant be put back together again, and it helps us to understand how broken and jumbled up he is feeling. The word â€Å"slap† when talking about â€Å"the tears (that) slap my torn face† insinuates the idea that he is in physical pain, that the emotional pain he feels is is so strong that he physically hurts. In the first stanza, we find out about his mothers death. Enjambment is used to speed up the pace of the poem, and show how quickly someones whole live can change, like in the phraseâ€Å"In the moment it takes a life to pass/ from waking to sleeping† The phrase â€Å"from waking to sleeping† highlights the opposites in what he and his mother are doing, as she passes from life to death. The word sleeping creates quiet a gentle image, and suggests that her death was not unexpected, and perhaps was drawn out and painful. Sleep is a very relaxed and calm time, the only time when the human mind can escape from problems in the day, so perhaps the idea of his mother falling asleep is comforting, like she has now stopped suffering and can rest happy. The second stanza uses a lot of words relating to the senses, to help us understand how McMillan is feeling. The sentence â€Å"outside a milk float chinks and shines† shows that the world is carrying on as normal, despite the fact that McMillans world has personally just stopped. The rhyming pattern throughout this poem is abab, but in this stanza the words â€Å"mine† and â€Å"shines† are meant to rhyme, but the fact that they don;t fully rhyme represents the disorientation he is feeling upon finding out about his mothers death, and perhaps also shows how nothing is quite right any more. Also, the word drones when describing a plane has been used to represent the deep grief he is feeling, and makes us feel like he has completely given up. In the third stanza McMillan seems to be describing a state of shock that he has fallen in to, which is quite a normal reaction when a loved one dies. McMillan describes his tears to slap his torn face; as well as slap being a raw and aggressive word, the way he describes his face as torn perhaps suggests that it was his mother who held him together, and now, without her, he is broken. This helps us to realise how important his mother was to him, which makes us sympathise for him a lot and evokes a feeling of empathy when we put ourselves in his position. McMillan says he feels trapped, like he is trapped by his own emotion and although its up to him to find a way out of this dark place, he cant see an escape. This shows how alone and scared he is feeling knowing his motherr is no longer around and also makes us think how panicked he must be feeling, as we would be if we were trapped somewhere. The word float makes us think that McMillan is no longer in control of his emotions, that what he is feeling is unstoppable, but also it instigates the sense that nothing seems quite normal around him, and that he is detached from reality. The final stanza is a rhyming couplet that summarises the grief and emptiness and the lack of will to go on without his mother. â€Å"Feeling that the story ends just here† conveys the idea that there isnt a story to continue without his mother, showing how depressed McMillan is feeling, like he has reached a dead end in his life.

Consumer Purchase Decision Essay Example for Free

Consumer Purchase Decision Essay There are many reasons that a consumer chooses a certain product. It may be that it is environmentally friendly, a great design or it might be as simple as the price of the product. As a business organization we must be able to conduct our research and decipher what is most important to our target market. The consumer buying decision process is a systematic way of looking at how a consumer makes the decision to purchase a product (any product) in a product category. In our restaurant we will determine what products they want and develop a successful strategy on how to market our products and services. As a customer in our restaurant we will have many choices available to them at a low cost. There are five steps in the consumer purchase decision that I’ll explain. Step one is need recognition which simply means that we identify what the potential customers need in our market. What kind of foods do they like and what kind of experience do they want when they go to a restaurant? Step two is searching for the product that the customer wants. We will have many avenues, such as print ads and our website, in which to market our product and inform the public of our food and services. The third step is product evaluation where the consumer gathers information on our products and services. We will have the best menu and service in our market to gain a larger market share in our area. The fourth step is product choice and purchase so it is vital that we successfully advertise and market our restaurant. We will have the best menu, greatest service and the most updated restaurant within a hundred mile radius. The fifth step is the post purchase and evaluation step where the consumer will decide whether our food and  service is worth a return visit. We will make a great impression on our customers through our delicious menu and excellent dining experience. A consumer’s buyer behaviour is influenced by four major factors: 1) Cultural, 2) Social, 3) Personal and 4) Psychological. Cultural factors include a consumer’s culture, subculture and social class. These factors are often  inherent in our values and decision processes. Our target customers are mostly young families and lower to upper middle class. Social factors include groups (reference groups and member groups), family, roles and status. This explains the outside influences of others on our purchase decisions either directly or indirectly. Personal factors include such variables as age and lifecycle stage, occupation, economic circumstances, lifestyle (activities, interests, opinions and demographics), personality and self concept. These may explain why our preferences often change as our `situation changes. Psychological factors affecting our purchase decision include motivation (Maslows hierarchy of needs), perception, learning, beliefs and attitudes. Other peop le often influence a consumer’s purchase decision. Word of mouth can be one of our biggest allies or our greatest threat in the marketing of our restaurant. We will make sure that every customer will enjoy their experience from the moment that they walk through our doors. They will be greeted when they enter and when they exit and our servers will be courteous and knowledgeable. We need to know which people are involved in the buying decision and what role each person plays, so that marketing strategies can also be aimed at these people. Understanding these behaviours as they pertain to our restaurant will help us gain a competitive advantage against all competitors in our area. Market segment is defined as the process of defining and subdividing a large homogenous market into clearly identifiable segments having similar needs, wants, or demand characteristics. Its objective is to design a marketing mix that precisely matches the expectations of customers in the targeted segment. We have effectively indentified our market segment as having fewer than ten thousand potential customers in our area with an additional five thousand from outside our area such as truck drivers and customers passing through. Our town has consistently been moving to a younger crowd (Generation X) so our fresh new look and our website should appeal to this younger generation. This market also values environmentally friendly products so we will utilize environmentally safe products in our restaurant. The majority of our market are family oriented so our family style menu and restaurant will be very appealing to our customers. We understand that the  customer has a process that they u se to determine where they want to dine. With our excellent customer service, great new menu and low prices we will gain their loyalty and get them back through our doors. Our customers are always number one and our customer service will be second to none. There are many options to dine in our area but we will set ourselves apart from the competition.

Reflection On Augstines Love Philosophy Essay

Reflection On Augstines Love Philosophy Essay Augustine stresses love as an important player in his moral philosophy. Man naturally loves. For Augustine people love in many ways and there are two most common ways. One is love for something instrumental where in someone loves something for the utility that it has for us. We see this in advertising quite often a prime example would be McDonalds which proudly uses the slogan love ko to. A kind of love that springs from something satisfying our own desires, just like McDonalds satisfies ones desire for a burger. The other kind of love which Augustine describes is a more intrinsic love. This is the kind of love we have for other people. Augustine asserts that this love differs from the instrumental kind of love because we dont simply only love others because of their utility sometimes this is actually the opposite. Augustine asserts this love as inhuman because as a human being people are made in Gods image. And that human beings deserved to be loved both as the image of God because none of us are independent of God, who created us, and as their own individual person. This is where the idea of morality and virtue steps in. When in loving people we love their utility rather than who they are. Virtue for Augustine is rightly ordered love. It is not virtuous to love an object that is instrumental and expect it to give us true happiness. Augustine also points out that we cannot love God unless we love ourselves because in learning to love ourselves we understand ourselves as creations of God from whom all good things come. On the other side of the spectrum Augustine considers choice to be the thing that gives birth to evil and that the pursuit of good is born out of moral illumination that is given by God and rooted in love. Someone once told me that if someone had a crush on me it might not be something they would admit because Id be pretty only if I was thinner. At first it sounded like a compliment but I was instantly taken aback. Does liking someone even just on the level of a crush so conditional on ones looks? I honestly didnt know what to think but the truth is that Ive always looked different from all of my classmates. In high school everyone was thin and dainty with pin straight black hair and ivory skin while I was big with a loud head of curls. It took me some time to accept the fact that I would never be that kind of pretty. I know it seems shallow but today appearances are so important they are everywhere and lets face it advertising and celebrity culture doesnt make it easy to have self-esteem. It took me a while to feel comfortable in my own skin and realize that Im not a dainty Asian flower, Im a giant mountainous woman to quote my uncle. Having finally accepted it I gained more confidence and I felt more open and I knew that appearances werent everything. The new challenge that sprung up it seemed was that because Im fat and tall some people thought that I shouldnt be confident or that the word fat is immediately equated to ugly. This was something I couldnt wrap my head around. Why does my weight or appearance matter so much to other people? And how does it dictate how kind or intelligent or honest I am? In a world like this are looks the first step to loving oneself, it seems the my stretch marks go deeper than just my skin. Do these angry red marks go down into who I am and therefore make me less than anyone else? It was Augustines idea of loving yourself and why you should love yourself that resonated with me the most. I think that it is also hard for non-Christians to relate to Augustine because his philosophy is so God centred. However, I think that his progression of loving oneself first then realizing that there is something more to it all is something that is true for anyone. Personally sometimes it is hard to do this and it is especially hard to do without looking at the physical side of things especially today when there is so much emphasis on physical ideals. Looking at the times when I have just sit there with my thoughts quietly thinking to myself about who I am and it has made me realize that it is moments like that wherein you truly discover how to love yourself. I realized there isnt really merit in loving myself because I am thin or because my skin is flawless. As Augustine says there is a right order to love and that in many toxic relationships people have quite disordered love . People love for the wrong reasons such money and status and people ask for something that the other can just simply not give. It has made me realize that a lot of disordered love is rooted in insecurity people love things that they thing can make them complete instead of first loving themselves and essentially knowing who they are to begin with. It is so easy now to say that you are how you look and thats it or you are the gadgets that you own but To go even further it seems to have become taboo to even just sit silently and be alone with your thoughts. I think what makes it quite hard is that sometimes when I find myself doing this I get overwhelmed by my thoughts and soon enough I am submerged in it all. Soon enough though I find myself being able to ride the waves of my thoughts and finding what I truly value in myself. And the answers honestly arent about anything physical or about anything external from me. The answers I find to all of the questions about myself come from somewhere very internal. The answer to where this voice I hear comes from in Augustines philosophy would most definitely be God, a supreme God who has created me and therefore my love is rooted in Him. In essence when I was able to look past all of the physical ideals and the comments others would have about whether or not I was deserving of love I realized only I could answer the question of whether or not I feel I could love or should be loved. It is f rom this insight that the rest the role of love in Augustines philosophy follows and it is something that I think many people tend to forget. While reflecting on this it insight it made me wonder about those who truly love themselves and yet do not necessarily believe in God and whether or not Augustines philosophy would still apply to them. It is this part of Augustines philosophy that I had to really think about. And after hours of thinking about it I realized that there are many people who have ordered love and are not necessarily Christian because no matter what religion you are to love seems to be something natural for humans. When people are faced with great tragedy and bleakness the natural response isnt necessarily hate or revenge its love. In the recent and very tragic Newtown shooting the children wrote notes to their parents about how much they loved them for fear that they may never be able to say it again. From here we see that it is so natural and unpretentious to love intrinsically. While for Augustine true happiness is found in God and comes from God it made me realize that happiness in its many forms is fo und in love. Love for loves sake not because of what it can give you but because love is something natural that we do. After having reflected on love in my life and out of it Ive realized that the only response I can give that can truly make a difference is to ponder how I love and why I love. It is so easy to doubt yourself as worthy of being loved and when others perceive you as not good enough or not of the norm and I think the best response is to be secure in the fact the that your body isnt the only reason there is to love yourself and that it should definitely not be the primary reason that you find to love yourself. I think that this is something important that I can actually share with other people. Loving connotes openness and that in loving others for who they really are and not treating them as an object is how I should really love. I think that the best response I can possibly have is to be mindful of how I love and what I love lest it become disordered and self-destructive even.

The Great Depression in America :: essays research papers fc

October 29th, 1929, a day in history that I will never forget. My name is Bob Bigsby, and I survived The Great Depression. My survival was all due to two of the hardest working people I have ever met, my mom and dad. It was just the three of us living in our small two-bedroom house in New York City, right outside of Manhattan, home to Wall Street and the New York Stock Exchange. I was 11 years old at the beginning of the Depression; old enough to remember some of the worst sights and experiences I have encountered till this day.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Black Tuesday, October 29th, 1929, was, as I remember, the day that the whole stock market went to hell (Gupta 17). All the stocks began to plummet at the fastest speeds ever recorded in history. There are many arguments of how and why the stocks did crash on October 29th. I believe that it was due to President Hoover, the current president at the time, keeping the Federal Reserve from expanding the money supply while bank panics and billions of dollars in bank deposits were lost (Gupta 19). Basically, the stock markets crashing began a chain reaction, which ended in what we call, The Great Depression (Nelson 1). But the how’s and why’s are not very important because nobody really understands that economic â€Å"mumbojumbo† that analysts and experts talk about. The thing that is important is what went on during the Great Depression after Black Tuesday.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Our family had a small turkey farm that contained about 200 some wild turkeys. It was an â€Å"ok† business before the arrival of Black Tuesday. We had to buy the feed for the turkeys on credit because we were just getting started with this business and couldn’t afford to pay for the feed just yet. It was our job to make the turkeys nice and plump so that they would attract customers during Thanksgiving. Last year we made a killing off of our turkey sales, we were able to pay off all our debts and still have enough money for good Christmas presents. My mom and dad were greatly anticipating this years Thanksgiving sale, because we had twice as many turkeys as we did last year. We were only about a month and a half away from Thanksgiving. Spirits were high. I remember just chasing the turkeys in the field without a care in the world.