Peter Cohan has five reasons you should dump your Cisco stock, if your portfolio includes any. His first reason is that Cisco appears to have lost its ability to keep up with a marketplace of quickly changing technology. In the last three years, Cisco has announced 21,000 firings - 11,000 in 2011; 4,000 a year ago, and now, a restructuring that will mean 6,000 more job cuts. It was announced on August 13. 6000 jobs are equivalent to 7% of its 74,000 person workforce.

From Reuters:

"The market doesn't wait for anyone. We are going to lead it, period," Chief Executive Officer John Chambers told analysts on a conference call. "The ability to do that requires some tough decisions. We will manage our costs aggressively and drive efficiencies."

Chambers partly blamed the cuts on the uncertainty in global demand. In emerging markets, where the company faces sluggish sales and increased competition, Cisco saw continued challenges. China product orders fell 23 percent, and Brazil had 13 percent declines.

Maybe humans are just intrinsically jerks. Or some of them. Or maybe jerks are attracted to the Internet to do their dirty work. Who knows. What's indisputable is that a lot of unpleasant people have wound up on Twitter and Twitter has roundly failed to effectively control them. This has made headlines again in the shadow of actor Robin Williams' suicide, as his daughter Zelda has announced she is leaving Twitter due to the extraordinary abuse she endured there.

The Atlantic has posted a good piece on the subject, declaring "As it considers revising its rules on abuse, the company must decide which users it really values." And quick, too. Twitter's market value is stagnant and the platform's founders are struggling to figure out ways to make Twitter a newly dynamic, vital site to which advertisers will flock. Letting the world think participating on its site exposes you to this kind of unchecked abuse isn't going to help. From the Atlantic:

Twitter, though, has structured its architecture for reporting abuse particularly poorly: It effectively rewards abusers while discouraging support, solidarity, and intervention for their victims. ... Every platform has values and regulation built into its very structure, built by human designers who make choices about which values to promote and which to inhibit. ... Mass abuse happens fast, and targeted users can drown in a sea of abuse within minutes: The journalist Caroline Criado-Perez received one rape threat per minute after daring to suggest that a woman be featured on British currency.

Your move, Twitter.

Getting ready to purchase a laptop before classes start - for yourself or your kid? Considering a chromebook instead of a regular laptop? Over at ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (SJVN) reviews six of the top Chromebooks and provides a couple of recommendations.

Chromebooks are increasingly well-suited to the classroom, with little maintenance or management overhead, a low cost, and much of what the typical user needs. In fact, now that Microsoft Office is an online web service, you can even access them from a Chromebook! This post was submitted using a Chromebook I intended to reformat and use with a Linux distro but haven't needed to re-image. If you can stomach being harnessed to Google's software ecosystem and services, there are lots of good reasons to check out Chromebooks, and the low price is just one of them. Over to SJVN with the rest.