Deferring revenue is a pretty common accounting practice... it's used to make your revenue streams more static...
For example, if you were, say HR & Block and you make money for only 3 months out of the year, instead of marking all your revenue for that quarter and posting a loss the other 3 quarters, you would defer some of that revenue and "use" it some of the other three quarters if you have salaried employees... This isn't sketchy at all.
Also, they aren't counting the upgrade coupons as full sales next year... this example is kind of like Red Sox tickets. Let's say the Red Sox sell out all their regular season games on one day at the beginning of the season. They won't say that they made $200 million in revenue on one day, and then had losses the rest of the season. They'll defer that revenue over all the games, even though most people paid for their tickets on the first day... Whether or not people actually show up for the game or not (or choose to install Vista or not), they paid for it in one way other another, and that's what counts for your earnings.
Since they're taxing email, I assume that it wouldn't be a problem to treat it like an import and place a tariff on it appropriately. Yeah, I know, tariffs are for things like protecting infant industries in competative markets, but, in a way, it's protecting Americans from being flooded from foreign markets with emails.:)
I don't know, I'm here at MIT, and the response to both the inception of LAMP and its destruction was extremely apathetic. A whole bunch of people I know used it once for the novelty ("Hey, that's kinda cool.") and went back to their machines in their rooms and played _their_ music. It was frustrating; I think there were 16 channels? It was more like an all request radio station than an MP3 player, so you had to listen to everyone else's crappy music, too.
I can't say much about us taking it personally; I live on West Campus and we're, sterotypically, the more "normal" kids on campus. I can't speak for the kids on East who are more MIT stereotypical (who are the types of kids typically behind these types of engineering projects), but I don't think many people care about this whole thing.
I guess after a while the novelty of all the nerdy things starts to dwindle. Sure, it sounds cool that people were able to "outsmart" the RIAA, but, when it comes down to sheer usability, it didn't score very high marks.
In my quest to understand where I really want to go in my life, I came across a school named St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland. Currently, I'm a baby, yes, only a Junior in High School, and I currently hold an internship at a small e-business company. We mainly work with (but not limited to) languages commonly tied in with web applications such as Java (JSP's), BASIC (ASP's), Javascript, HTML, C++, and Perl. I personally have aquired a Programmer's Java Certification over this past summer.
Anyway, back to St. John's... lots of kids at my school want to grow up. It's what kids want to do. They want to leave their nests, stay out all night... they want to be free and in college. I was "blessed" with an early shot at the business world--a well paying job that would look wonderful on college applications and give me a real jump-start on people going into the working world as well as college programming classes. Yes, I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I'm a little bit further than the kids in the CS classes learning VB who don't know what a switch statement is. And at first, yes, it was a blessing. I loved it. I got to go to "work" after school and talk to people who liked fast cars and video games and browse Slashdot and make fun of something that whenever you were feeling down you could rip on (Microsoft, our IBM e-commerce platform, or other people's code). It was heaven on Earth.
Slowly things change. I realize that I'm accelerating myself into a dead-end of my life. For some reason at one point I actually wanted my own cubical. Why?
Eventually, in my mail I received something from a college named St. John's. I didn't know what to expect. But it was a lot different than everything else. This was the entire curriculum. And honestly, for a long time I would have rather died than read a single item on that list. But... something in me has changed. I don't want to be an average Joe and chill with people who only want to have LAN parties and dream of sitting in a cubical all their lives so they can have the fastest cars and feel superior to the people that once made fun of them. That's not me. I'm sorry, but it really isn't. As much as it was me one day, I'm a different person now. And I really think there's more to life than money (which, from what I've come to understand at my company, is really the only thing that concerns most people. They'd complain often about their 60-70K salaries, about how the people in Silicon Valley were making more money than them. This company's in a rural area outside of Philidelphia. Cost of living is 25% of that in Silicon. WTF?) I honestly hate working there. The only thing that makes me go on there is that High School jobs really are either the local theme park or food stores. While I'll probably continue my work there for the rest of my high school career, I look forward to the day I leave.
Most of the people here, yes, will scorn at a liberal arts school and laugh when they realize you don't get a real degree there. But you'll learn something much more important than the fastest algorithm to sort though this list or the "least ass" way of formating your Java code. You'll learn about life. You'll read about people's successes, failures, and have an additional 4 years to understand where you really want to go with your life. I wasn't born to be a code monkey, or a lemming. I want to live the best, most full life I possibly can. And if that means I'm gonna drive a Ford, live in suburbia, have kids that come before my drunk fragging on weekends, so be it. I will love every minute of it. And if this post somehow makes someone look at their live and decide to change it, it would make me completely overjoyed. And if this post gets a score of 2 and gets buried in the database--so be it.
In conclusion, everybody will go where they want to go. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're all destined to walk around with keyboards implanted in our chests and plug into boxes all over the planet. I bet some people here would be so happy and somehow manage to wire the Quake XII output directly into their brain.
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Deferring revenue is a pretty common accounting practice ... it's used to make your revenue streams more static ...
... This isn't sketchy at all.
... this example is kind of like Red Sox tickets. Let's say the Red Sox sell out all their regular season games on one day at the beginning of the season. They won't say that they made $200 million in revenue on one day, and then had losses the rest of the season. They'll defer that revenue over all the games, even though most people paid for their tickets on the first day ... Whether or not people actually show up for the game or not (or choose to install Vista or not), they paid for it in one way other another, and that's what counts for your earnings.
For example, if you were, say HR & Block and you make money for only 3 months out of the year, instead of marking all your revenue for that quarter and posting a loss the other 3 quarters, you would defer some of that revenue and "use" it some of the other three quarters if you have salaried employees
Also, they aren't counting the upgrade coupons as full sales next year
Seriously, this is very normal.
Since they're taxing email, I assume that it wouldn't be a problem to treat it like an import and place a tariff on it appropriately. Yeah, I know, tariffs are for things like protecting infant industries in competative markets, but, in a way, it's protecting Americans from being flooded from foreign markets with emails. :)
I don't know, I'm here at MIT, and the response to both the inception of LAMP and its destruction was extremely apathetic. A whole bunch of people I know used it once for the novelty ("Hey, that's kinda cool.") and went back to their machines in their rooms and played _their_ music. It was frustrating; I think there were 16 channels? It was more like an all request radio station than an MP3 player, so you had to listen to everyone else's crappy music, too.
I can't say much about us taking it personally; I live on West Campus and we're, sterotypically, the more "normal" kids on campus. I can't speak for the kids on East who are more MIT stereotypical (who are the types of kids typically behind these types of engineering projects), but I don't think many people care about this whole thing.
I guess after a while the novelty of all the nerdy things starts to dwindle. Sure, it sounds cool that people were able to "outsmart" the RIAA, but, when it comes down to sheer usability, it didn't score very high marks.
In my quest to understand where I really want to go in my life, I came across a school named St. John's in Annapolis, Maryland. Currently, I'm a baby, yes, only a Junior in High School, and I currently hold an internship at a small e-business company. We mainly work with (but not limited to) languages commonly tied in with web applications such as Java (JSP's), BASIC (ASP's), Javascript, HTML, C++, and Perl. I personally have aquired a Programmer's Java Certification over this past summer.
... lots of kids at my school want to grow up. It's what kids want to do. They want to leave their nests, stay out all night ... they want to be free and in college. I was "blessed" with an early shot at the business world--a well paying job that would look wonderful on college applications and give me a real jump-start on people going into the working world as well as college programming classes. Yes, I'm not the best programmer in the world, but I'm a little bit further than the kids in the CS classes learning VB who don't know what a switch statement is. And at first, yes, it was a blessing. I loved it. I got to go to "work" after school and talk to people who liked fast cars and video games and browse Slashdot and make fun of something that whenever you were feeling down you could rip on (Microsoft, our IBM e-commerce platform, or other people's code). It was heaven on Earth.
... something in me has changed. I don't want to be an average Joe and chill with people who only want to have LAN parties and dream of sitting in a cubical all their lives so they can have the fastest cars and feel superior to the people that once made fun of them. That's not me. I'm sorry, but it really isn't. As much as it was me one day, I'm a different person now. And I really think there's more to life than money (which, from what I've come to understand at my company, is really the only thing that concerns most people. They'd complain often about their 60-70K salaries, about how the people in Silicon Valley were making more money than them. This company's in a rural area outside of Philidelphia. Cost of living is 25% of that in Silicon. WTF?) I honestly hate working there. The only thing that makes me go on there is that High School jobs really are either the local theme park or food stores. While I'll probably continue my work there for the rest of my high school career, I look forward to the day I leave.
Anyway, back to St. John's
Slowly things change. I realize that I'm accelerating myself into a dead-end of my life. For some reason at one point I actually wanted my own cubical. Why?
Eventually, in my mail I received something from a college named St. John's. I didn't know what to expect. But it was a lot different than everything else. This was the entire curriculum. And honestly, for a long time I would have rather died than read a single item on that list. But
Most of the people here, yes, will scorn at a liberal arts school and laugh when they realize you don't get a real degree there. But you'll learn something much more important than the fastest algorithm to sort though this list or the "least ass" way of formating your Java code. You'll learn about life. You'll read about people's successes, failures, and have an additional 4 years to understand where you really want to go with your life. I wasn't born to be a code monkey, or a lemming. I want to live the best, most full life I possibly can. And if that means I'm gonna drive a Ford, live in suburbia, have kids that come before my drunk fragging on weekends, so be it. I will love every minute of it. And if this post somehow makes someone look at their live and decide to change it, it would make me completely overjoyed. And if this post gets a score of 2 and gets buried in the database--so be it.
In conclusion, everybody will go where they want to go. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe we're all destined to walk around with keyboards implanted in our chests and plug into boxes all over the planet. I bet some people here would be so happy and somehow manage to wire the Quake XII output directly into their brain.