I'm not certain as to why it has the gamut that it does. I DO know that it oversaturates the color a bit. It's not a "true to life" film in the sense that it takes perfectly accurate images, but instead takes more color saturdated images. Which leads me to beleive that it has a more red and blue response than green, for more "popping" color. Although it's greens are VERY rich and vibrant.
The most striking color photos I've seen have always been on Velvia.
But it also seems like the gamut wouldn't get wider (from a frequency range point of view) unless the red and blue frequencies were actually shifted further from center. Otherwise you're still stuck with the same overlap issues, and also stuck with the same problem of shades that are outside the range of the primaries being difficult to capture accurately, due to the trace amounts of other primaries required to produce them correctly.
I could see the addition of violet (higher frequency that B), and the addition of sub-red (lower frequency than R), and a cyan that's right in between the blue/green responses where the ugly overlap of the eye is could REALLY increase the gamut of the display... Although in doing so, you might end up picking new frequencies for RGB.
But... with their monitor/display tech (from the article), and color profiles, if they could reproduce some of hte "negative red" shades, then perhaps they could use color profiles and remap the RGB space appropriately for thier monitor... Perhaps only with enabling a feature of the monitor through drivers/color spaces, etc...
Yeah, I've definitely noticed how blues go wonky, especially DEEP blue skies on film, with a polarizer just go off into la-la land. Better film seems to help a lot (Velvia does wonders with it, thankfully).
It definitely is an interesting problem.
And one where I can see how the CMY might be able to help, depending on where they place the CMY frequencies.
I wonder if with a 4th frequency, buried into that heavily overlapping section, you could get massively better results, although, as you mention with the CIE XYZ and L*a*b, they aren't exactly linear...
Re:RGBCMY is more marketing factoid than it isreal
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 1
The technicality here is that the R G and B frequencies don't line up (and scale) in line with the human eye. If a better set of frequencies/scales was chosen, then we'd be able to see any color as a compilation of the R, G and B receptors in the eye.
This is gleaned from your linked-to article, aside from the whole bit about negative response, which really makes no sense at all. Perhaps a failing on my part, but it's not at all obvious how to properly display a 500nm color we need to have a negative amount of 625nm red.
And in comparing their sensitivity charts vs. their primary values necessary charts it seems like they've chosen the wrong primary colors to use for RGB, and that an appropriate one may exist that will do better (or not, I'm not a scientist at this, but as a photographer, I'm very curious in this area).
Re:RGBCMY is more marketing factoid than it isreal
on
RGB to become RGBCMY
·
· Score: 1
Really, RGB only really works because it's a close match to the 3 colours our eyes are sensitive to.
For all intents and purposes, that means that it works about as well as it can.
Since the human eye reacts to a range of colors, with a nice peak at RGB, and tapers off in a nice fashion, we can't tell the difference between yellow and the appropriate levels of red and green, because they both have the same reaction on our eyes.
With your case of going higher frequency than the blue cones, all we see is a dimmer blue, we can't actually perceive that as a "more violet" blue, unless the eye actually reacts differently to higher frequency blues than lower frequency blues in the blue cones.
Which, as far as I know (and I may be mistaken), isn't the case. It's not as simplistic as something like a 3 band graphic equalizer display, but it's not that far off, either.
Color Negative film (what you put in cameras, if you're most people) is CMY. It's meant to be an intermediary between a color scene, and a color print. To turn it into a print, you shine a light through the image, and with a chemical bath it causes a chemical reaction with the paper to make a color image (actually, you do this 3 times, one for each color).
Color Slide film (and cinema film) is RGB based. They are meant to have light passed through them, that is reflected directly to the viewer (aka, a projector).
In both cases, the color print film and the color slide film have three separate layers, one for each color.
The gamut of the film is based on the frequency curve of each of the three layers, how those line up with the human eye's rods and cones, etc.
No print film I've seen can come close to the gamut that quality slide film has (like Kodak's EliteChrome or FujiChrom Velvia, although Velvia is purposely oversaturated to make amazingly color-rich images). And few digital cameras are up to slide film levels, though some are ($1000 Cannon's and the monster from Sigma).
An interesting side note with the three-layers of film vs. a flat image is that a digital image with single-layer CCD (99.9% of the cameras out there) cannot produce the same image that film will, because the color layers in the film are at different focal lengths in the camera. So you get slightly different ranges of the depth of field in focus at each color. This seems to actually impart some "depth" information to the image. It gets completely lost with color prints as well.
When directly viewing exposed and developed slide film, you can see it (most noteably on a light-box). Also Sigma's camera used a 3-layer CCD that does a much better representation of it (looks like a quality scanned slide, giving it a bit more depth), but still not as much depth as actual film gives.
It's something that I want to look into further, and another reason why cinema will look different than video.
Solzenhitzen's work (I know I murderd that spelling) is less fiction, and much more fictionalization. He spent time in the seberian work camps, and wrote Ivan as a summary of what the conditions were like. Much more interesting to read about one persons day, and have it open a door up into an entire section of history well glossed over in US texts (ie, skipped). Shows what life was like there, very well, and very well written.
It's only about 250-350 pages or so, couple nights reading (if you're slow). Very, very good.
But if you want to learn about russia, make sure that you pick up enough sources to get a well-rounded view. Solzenhitzen spent a great deal of time OUTSIDE of russia, since he wouldn't shut up and stop writing, so they just exiled him.
The problem with a democracy is that it requires educated voters concerned with the overall welfare of the nation. NOT immature, whining, assholes that just want to pay less taxes and have the government give them everything for free.
I'd love to see this country go hell-bound libertarian for a while, to the point that all the whiners realize that they have to DO something to protect thier own property, because no one is looking out for them. That would be fricking hilarious.
From talking to the Comcast techs doing the install, my area supposed got the 90V upgrade to be able to finally do cable-modems at high speed, but we've not been turned on. No idea why.
SBC had plans drawn up, and a site surveyed for a remote CO to get DSL out in my area (I'm 5 miles from the CO). But no dice there, either. Seems like a couple hundred homes is all it would take to make it worth their while for the remote CO. And I'd gladly pay $100/mo for any form of broadband. I'm on a 26K modem. I can ISDN, but that's over $100/mo after all the fees (the line itself is $80/mo).
What made me leave red-hat was actually the pain and suffering involved with installing source-code provided drivers for my printer (hp inkjet). It required a newer version of Ghostscript than I could get via an rpm.
And the source version of Ghostscript installed to a different place than RedHat had deemed was appropriate. And uninstalling the binary version either broke everything, or didn't work, depending on how I went about doing it.
Eventually, I hacked away at it long enough to get it to work.
Gentoo uses the source's own./configure and install scripts. Things go where the developers meant them to go, which means that if I need to get a different version, or patch things on my own, I can do that with a minimum of pain.
Initial install from Stage1 is slow, and a PITA, granted. But I spend less time in front of the computer than I did with an install of RedHat where I attempted to choose what I wanted installed. Downloading over a slow connection is rough, but my computer doesn't need to sleep or go to work, so it really doesn't bother me. For home use, I don't mind a 6-hour compile time, I'm not baby-sitting it through it. It just does it.
But once I've got the system installed, maintainance is cake, especially for security patches.
Another nice benefit is that Redhat was bumping revs at an insane speed, and rpms for RH9 wouldn't work with RH7. Not a problem with portage. With portage, it's what packages I have installed, not which version of the OS. And I can upgrade the whole box to the latest sources with a single command.
I know of an Allen-Bradley PLC2 that was running at over 15 years of uptime. The PLC2 used an Intel 8080, and ran it's own, custom OS used to execute interpreted programs for controlling industrial systems.
The control program itself had been running for that long, as the box can be patched while it's running, and patches tested and reverted while running.
At the time (about 5 years ago), it was slated for replacement with a PLC5, a much newer box based on the 68000 series processors.
More info on AB's PLCs here: http://www.ab.com/abjournal/nov2002/feature s/bittw iddlers/
Well, yes, that's what the expenses/earnings are for, yet the key is to accurately represent what your assets and liabilities are.
Likewise, if you are paying your employees in stock options, and not estimating the value of those options, you won't know if you're really profitable or not. If you wind up running out of options, you might find that the _real_ compensation package that they expect is 10x what you are paying them now, and that what you thought was a profitable operation was in fact just a drain on your "options" asset. However, since you were only doing books on a cash basis, you didn't see the true costs of doing business, and didn't realize until years later that you were truly unprofitable.
So, if the options are expensed at the time of issuance, they hit the books then, even though they have no negative impact on the business at that time, and in the future, they have no more potential gain than if the company sold the shares outright for that price.
So, the company is out a small chunk of money (as opportunity), now, in the short-term, but will be getting that back later, IFF the stock price goes up. So THAT's why they should be expensed, if they are going to be expensed. ie, we could have sold this, but we didn't, so it cost us something we didn't have to do in the first place.
If I'm a company, and plan on issueing options, I set aside, say half my total pool of shares for options, the other half for "general investing" on the market, and IPO that half of the shares. Now, I can convert the options pool into general pool. That's all done up-front.
So, at that point in time is when the expense would be, not when the options are issued. Because when the shares are created is when the potential income didn't happen.
So why should I expense them later?
Eventually, yes, if you run out of options in that pool, then you need to find some other way of compensating your employees, but at that point in time, you may have the cash-flow to double their salaries. Suddenly, you need to spend more money to compensate them. So, yes, I can see that argument for expensing the options, as it provides continuity into the future for when options run out.
However, if that pool is known, then it's something that can be planned for.
While the expensing of options hits the books now, as an immediate expense, when it really only becomes an expense at the time of exercise, at which point it's offset by the income from the exercising of the option in the first place.
So, a hybrid method for managing options expensing would be to debit the value of the options at grant, mark the income at time of exercise, and credit the value back at time of expiration, if the grant was to expire.
Now, to provide continuity over time, if this were to go into place, a company that currently has options granted, and options expiring, will need to do both at the same time. However, you're going to have a wierd lag of the Expenses vs. the cashflow due to the vesting schedule of the options. Which of course, as you've well put, is the point of the expenses in the first place. To tell you now how screwed you are in the future.
But... I'm still trying to decide if that makes sense.
But you've got the best point so far for expensing the options, or at least the clearest presentation of that side of the argument.
But I think that this method of expensing them is less transparent than simply stating what the options risks are, and then letting the investor decide what to do.
Instead, the investors simply look at a few numbers, like EPS, and that's the holy-grail of the company's worth for investing.
Right, if I had given it away, however, I'm not giving it away, just not making as much as I could from it. The option has value as an incentive, that's different than it's value on the market. It's potentially worth more to the company as an ISO grant to the employee than it would be in the hands of joe-investor (who knows jack about anything, as the last 10 years have proven admirably).
It's worth to the company is an extra incentive beyond the wages for the work done. I.e, "We're paying you, but if you help us become highly profitable, we'll pay you a LOT more, and here's the proof of that."
So, if expenses don't reflect cash-flow (or what cash-flow should be, if people paid on time), what do they do? (this is rhetorical/sarcastic, I know that expenses are, but have never understood their usefulness. What really matters to me is money in the bank, what's being spent, where it's being spent, and what income is coming in. Expenses just muddy that into oblivion.
But, can't a company decide to create new shares of stock. Thereby increasing the number of shares in existence (and decreasing the value of all others).
This shouldn't be done frequently, but can't it be done.
I own a truck, I could sell it for some value, and be out it's usefulness. But that doesn't make it an expense (aside from operating costs).
The option *could* have been sold, but would they have issued that share of stock if not for the options? maybe, maybe not. If not, then why would the option be an expense?
Opportunity cost is an interesting philosophical discussion, but has no bearing on the real-world cash-flow.
If I decide not to produce a product, and thereby don't profit greatly, I didn't LOSE anyting, nothing was taken away, I just never GAINED anything. Very different. Accountants never seem to deal with with that, though.
Ok, I see your point, and I agree with your final paragraph.
While I don't think the status quo should remain as-is, I don't think that the current proposal is better (I think it's much worse).
But publicly stating the strike-price, number, vesting schedule, and expiration date of ISO options will go a long way towards making this right.
It's not as simple as a single number, like EPS (frankly I think anyone who invests based on the summary stats from NASDAQ should get what they deserve... I think that as an investor I should know what projects are in the works, what the competition's projects are, the market(s) that the company is in, and how likely the company is to make successfull product(s).
But if you dilute the shares now, at a low price, when the company is seen as worth relatively little, then you're possibly shooting yourself in the foot. If you're granting large numbers of options, the dilution could seriously drag down the value of the stock.
Whereas the future dilution, when the stock value is high, will simply temper the value up high. The company makes the same amount, either way, just at a different point in time.
And early on, a company may have a VERY hard time getting investors, during which any dilution of thier stock is going to be very painful. Dilution after the stock price has gone up doesn't limit the initial investment to the company nearly so much.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain as to why it has the gamut that it does. I DO know that it oversaturates the color a bit. It's not a "true to life" film in the sense that it takes perfectly accurate images, but instead takes more color saturdated images. Which leads me to beleive that it has a more red and blue response than green, for more "popping" color. Although it's greens are VERY rich and vibrant.
The most striking color photos I've seen have always been on Velvia.
But it also seems like the gamut wouldn't get wider (from a frequency range point of view) unless the red and blue frequencies were actually shifted further from center. Otherwise you're still stuck with the same overlap issues, and also stuck with the same problem of shades that are outside the range of the primaries being difficult to capture accurately, due to the trace amounts of other primaries required to produce them correctly.
I could see the addition of violet (higher frequency that B), and the addition of sub-red (lower frequency than R), and a cyan that's right in between the blue/green responses where the ugly overlap of the eye is could REALLY increase the gamut of the display... Although in doing so, you might end up picking new frequencies for RGB.
But... with their monitor/display tech (from the article), and color profiles, if they could reproduce some of hte "negative red" shades, then perhaps they could use color profiles and remap the RGB space appropriately for thier monitor... Perhaps only with enabling a feature of the monitor through drivers/color spaces, etc...
Yeah, I've definitely noticed how blues go wonky, especially DEEP blue skies on film, with a polarizer just go off into la-la land. Better film seems to help a lot (Velvia does wonders with it, thankfully).
It definitely is an interesting problem.
And one where I can see how the CMY might be able to help, depending on where they place the CMY frequencies.
I wonder if with a 4th frequency, buried into that heavily overlapping section, you could get massively better results, although, as you mention with the CIE XYZ and L*a*b, they aren't exactly linear...
The technicality here is that the R G and B frequencies don't line up (and scale) in line with the human eye. If a better set of frequencies/scales was chosen, then we'd be able to see any color as a compilation of the R, G and B receptors in the eye.
This is gleaned from your linked-to article, aside from the whole bit about negative response, which really makes no sense at all. Perhaps a failing on my part, but it's not at all obvious how to properly display a 500nm color we need to have a negative amount of 625nm red.
And in comparing their sensitivity charts vs. their primary values necessary charts it seems like they've chosen the wrong primary colors to use for RGB, and that an appropriate one may exist that will do better (or not, I'm not a scientist at this, but as a photographer, I'm very curious in this area).
Really, RGB only really works because it's a close match to the 3 colours our eyes are sensitive to.
For all intents and purposes, that means that it works about as well as it can.
Since the human eye reacts to a range of colors, with a nice peak at RGB, and tapers off in a nice fashion, we can't tell the difference between yellow and the appropriate levels of red and green, because they both have the same reaction on our eyes.
With your case of going higher frequency than the blue cones, all we see is a dimmer blue, we can't actually perceive that as a "more violet" blue, unless the eye actually reacts differently to higher frequency blues than lower frequency blues in the blue cones.
Which, as far as I know (and I may be mistaken), isn't the case. It's not as simplistic as something like a 3 band graphic equalizer display, but it's not that far off, either.
the picture will look more like film
Sorry, but slide and movie film are all RGB, whereas print film is CMY, used to create an RGB image on white paper when developed.
Color Negative film (what you put in cameras, if you're most people) is CMY. It's meant to be an intermediary between a color scene, and a color print. To turn it into a print, you shine a light through the image, and with a chemical bath it causes a chemical reaction with the paper to make a color image (actually, you do this 3 times, one for each color).
Color Slide film (and cinema film) is RGB based. They are meant to have light passed through them, that is reflected directly to the viewer (aka, a projector).
In both cases, the color print film and the color slide film have three separate layers, one for each color.
The gamut of the film is based on the frequency curve of each of the three layers, how those line up with the human eye's rods and cones, etc.
No print film I've seen can come close to the gamut that quality slide film has (like Kodak's EliteChrome or FujiChrom Velvia, although Velvia is purposely oversaturated to make amazingly color-rich images). And few digital cameras are up to slide film levels, though some are ($1000 Cannon's and the monster from Sigma).
An interesting side note with the three-layers of film vs. a flat image is that a digital image with single-layer CCD (99.9% of the cameras out there) cannot produce the same image that film will, because the color layers in the film are at different focal lengths in the camera. So you get slightly different ranges of the depth of field in focus at each color. This seems to actually impart some "depth" information to the image. It gets completely lost with color prints as well.
When directly viewing exposed and developed slide film, you can see it (most noteably on a light-box). Also Sigma's camera used a 3-layer CCD that does a much better representation of it (looks like a quality scanned slide, giving it a bit more depth), but still not as much depth as actual film gives.
It's something that I want to look into further, and another reason why cinema will look different than video.
piss-poor? You've obviously never seen the pricetag on a harley...
you can buy 2-3 decent sport-bikes for the cost of many harleys, especially once you get into custom paint/chrome.
Solzenhitzen's work (I know I murderd that spelling) is less fiction, and much more fictionalization. He spent time in the seberian work camps, and wrote Ivan as a summary of what the conditions were like. Much more interesting to read about one persons day, and have it open a door up into an entire section of history well glossed over in US texts (ie, skipped). Shows what life was like there, very well, and very well written.
It's only about 250-350 pages or so, couple nights reading (if you're slow). Very, very good.
But if you want to learn about russia, make sure that you pick up enough sources to get a well-rounded view. Solzenhitzen spent a great deal of time OUTSIDE of russia, since he wouldn't shut up and stop writing, so they just exiled him.
He's got one view, there are countless others.
The problem with a democracy is that it requires educated voters concerned with the overall welfare of the nation. NOT immature, whining, assholes that just want to pay less taxes and have the government give them everything for free.
I'd love to see this country go hell-bound libertarian for a while, to the point that all the whiners realize that they have to DO something to protect thier own property, because no one is looking out for them. That would be fricking hilarious.
And if you statically link your app, you can do the same with any C++ app. The circle comes back around full, is all.
It's really quite funny.
Well, if you're going to get picky about it like that, then it's infinite (ie, fractal).
From talking to the Comcast techs doing the install, my area supposed got the 90V upgrade to be able to finally do cable-modems at high speed, but we've not been turned on. No idea why.
SBC had plans drawn up, and a site surveyed for a remote CO to get DSL out in my area (I'm 5 miles from the CO). But no dice there, either. Seems like a couple hundred homes is all it would take to make it worth their while for the remote CO. And I'd gladly pay $100/mo for any form of broadband. I'm on a 26K modem. I can ISDN, but that's over $100/mo after all the fees (the line itself is $80/mo).
What made me leave red-hat was actually the pain and suffering involved with installing source-code provided drivers for my printer (hp inkjet). It required a newer version of Ghostscript than I could get via an rpm.
./configure and install scripts. Things go where the developers meant them to go, which means that if I need to get a different version, or patch things on my own, I can do that with a minimum of pain.
And the source version of Ghostscript installed to a different place than RedHat had deemed was appropriate. And uninstalling the binary version either broke everything, or didn't work, depending on how I went about doing it.
Eventually, I hacked away at it long enough to get it to work.
Gentoo uses the source's own
Initial install from Stage1 is slow, and a PITA, granted. But I spend less time in front of the computer than I did with an install of RedHat where I attempted to choose what I wanted installed. Downloading over a slow connection is rough, but my computer doesn't need to sleep or go to work, so it really doesn't bother me. For home use, I don't mind a 6-hour compile time, I'm not baby-sitting it through it. It just does it.
But once I've got the system installed, maintainance is cake, especially for security patches.
Another nice benefit is that Redhat was bumping revs at an insane speed, and rpms for RH9 wouldn't work with RH7. Not a problem with portage. With portage, it's what packages I have installed, not which version of the OS. And I can upgrade the whole box to the latest sources with a single command.
And no, my CFLAGS only fit on one line.
In Soviet Redmond, the 11 goes to you?
Possibly showing my ignorance here, but wouldn't the preferred code be:
w = x;
w += y;
w += z;
??
I know of an Allen-Bradley PLC2 that was running at over 15 years of uptime. The PLC2 used an Intel 8080, and ran it's own, custom OS used to execute interpreted programs for controlling industrial systems.
e s/bittw iddlers/
The control program itself had been running for that long, as the box can be patched while it's running, and patches tested and reverted while running.
At the time (about 5 years ago), it was slated for replacement with a PLC5, a much newer box based on the 68000 series processors.
More info on AB's PLCs here:
http://www.ab.com/abjournal/nov2002/featur
Which version of VS actually has those tools? My "Professional" version certainly didn't.
Ok, thanks, that makes more sense now.
I knew about splitting, but wasn't thinking of that, I was instead thinking of the second, of making shares available.
I wasn't aware that they had to come out of a pre-allocated pool, formed when the company is incorporated (I'm slightly familiar with that paperwork).
Well, yes, that's what the expenses/earnings are for, yet the key is to accurately represent what your assets and liabilities are.
Likewise, if you are paying your employees in stock options, and not estimating the value of those options, you won't know if you're really profitable or not. If you wind up running out of options, you might find that the _real_ compensation package that they expect is 10x what you are paying them now, and that what you thought was a profitable operation was in fact just a drain on your "options" asset. However, since you were only doing books on a cash basis, you didn't see the true costs of doing business, and didn't realize until years later that you were truly unprofitable.
So, if the options are expensed at the time of issuance, they hit the books then, even though they have no negative impact on the business at that time, and in the future, they have no more potential gain than if the company sold the shares outright for that price.
So, the company is out a small chunk of money (as opportunity), now, in the short-term, but will be getting that back later, IFF the stock price goes up. So THAT's why they should be expensed, if they are going to be expensed. ie, we could have sold this, but we didn't, so it cost us something we didn't have to do in the first place.
If I'm a company, and plan on issueing options, I set aside, say half my total pool of shares for options, the other half for "general investing" on the market, and IPO that half of the shares. Now, I can convert the options pool into general pool. That's all done up-front.
So, at that point in time is when the expense would be, not when the options are issued. Because when the shares are created is when the potential income didn't happen.
So why should I expense them later?
Eventually, yes, if you run out of options in that pool, then you need to find some other way of compensating your employees, but at that point in time, you may have the cash-flow to double their salaries. Suddenly, you need to spend more money to compensate them. So, yes, I can see that argument for expensing the options, as it provides continuity into the future for when options run out.
However, if that pool is known, then it's something that can be planned for.
While the expensing of options hits the books now, as an immediate expense, when it really only becomes an expense at the time of exercise, at which point it's offset by the income from the exercising of the option in the first place.
So, a hybrid method for managing options expensing would be to debit the value of the options at grant, mark the income at time of exercise, and credit the value back at time of expiration, if the grant was to expire.
Now, to provide continuity over time, if this were to go into place, a company that currently has options granted, and options expiring, will need to do both at the same time. However, you're going to have a wierd lag of the Expenses vs. the cashflow due to the vesting schedule of the options. Which of course, as you've well put, is the point of the expenses in the first place. To tell you now how screwed you are in the future.
But... I'm still trying to decide if that makes sense.
But you've got the best point so far for expensing the options, or at least the clearest presentation of that side of the argument.
Thanks.
Your .sig perfectly fits this.
But I think that this method of expensing them is less transparent than simply stating what the options risks are, and then letting the investor decide what to do.
Instead, the investors simply look at a few numbers, like EPS, and that's the holy-grail of the company's worth for investing.
Right, if I had given it away, however, I'm not giving it away, just not making as much as I could from it. The option has value as an incentive, that's different than it's value on the market. It's potentially worth more to the company as an ISO grant to the employee than it would be in the hands of joe-investor (who knows jack about anything, as the last 10 years have proven admirably).
It's worth to the company is an extra incentive beyond the wages for the work done. I.e, "We're paying you, but if you help us become highly profitable, we'll pay you a LOT more, and here's the proof of that."
So, if expenses don't reflect cash-flow (or what cash-flow should be, if people paid on time), what do they do? (this is rhetorical/sarcastic, I know that expenses are, but have never understood their usefulness. What really matters to me is money in the bank, what's being spent, where it's being spent, and what income is coming in. Expenses just muddy that into oblivion.
But, can't a company decide to create new shares of stock. Thereby increasing the number of shares in existence (and decreasing the value of all others).
This shouldn't be done frequently, but can't it be done.
Opportunity cost, not real cost.
Very different.
I own a truck, I could sell it for some value, and be out it's usefulness. But that doesn't make it an expense (aside from operating costs).
The option *could* have been sold, but would they have issued that share of stock if not for the options? maybe, maybe not. If not, then why would the option be an expense?
Opportunity cost is an interesting philosophical discussion, but has no bearing on the real-world cash-flow.
If I decide not to produce a product, and thereby don't profit greatly, I didn't LOSE anyting, nothing was taken away, I just never GAINED anything. Very different. Accountants never seem to deal with with that, though.
Ok, I see your point, and I agree with your final paragraph.
While I don't think the status quo should remain as-is, I don't think that the current proposal is better (I think it's much worse).
But publicly stating the strike-price, number, vesting schedule, and expiration date of ISO options will go a long way towards making this right.
It's not as simple as a single number, like EPS (frankly I think anyone who invests based on the summary stats from NASDAQ should get what they deserve... I think that as an investor I should know what projects are in the works, what the competition's projects are, the market(s) that the company is in, and how likely the company is to make successfull product(s).
But if you dilute the shares now, at a low price, when the company is seen as worth relatively little, then you're possibly shooting yourself in the foot. If you're granting large numbers of options, the dilution could seriously drag down the value of the stock.
Whereas the future dilution, when the stock value is high, will simply temper the value up high. The company makes the same amount, either way, just at a different point in time.
And early on, a company may have a VERY hard time getting investors, during which any dilution of thier stock is going to be very painful. Dilution after the stock price has gone up doesn't limit the initial investment to the company nearly so much.