That's an interesting idea. Thanks! I wish they were a little cheaper, but I'll raise this the next time I'm talking with the computer folks. Possibly the abusers would opt for it.
I teach and find laptop abuse to be an issue. The Slate article misses the real problem, which is not that the student checks out (the article correctly notes there are lots of ways to do this), but that others can see the laptop screen. Suddenly there is a group of five students giggling about something. I've had students complain about the distracting laptop usage of others.
I don't know what the right solution is, since I think that in theory it's fantastic for students to have a laptop to take notes, perform calculations, and look up related issues during class. But it's a real problem when the abusers distract a group of students. I suspect that shutting off internet access during class is the best practical solution.
There are two reasons MS Office thrives in corporate settings (which almost always pay much less than $500/seat): (1) the ability to customize the products using VBA, and (2) the need to use MS Office for document compatability. Businesses reliant on (1) won't in the short run look at a new office suite, but businesses forced to use MS Office for compatability *will* (IMHO) look at an alternative if it offers halfway decent document compatability and is easy to try. I personally think the floodgates will open once MS Office no longer seems essential. If a few influential users demand more open document standards, it will have a ripple effect.
Your point about Google hacking is important but I will be surprised if that isn't addressed.
Really, if MS Office is the best product, let them dominate the market. My personal objection is that Office (most especially Word) sucks and I deeply resent the time I waste having to use it just so that I can share documents with others. I would love to be able to say to colleagues "let's use Google Office for this project". I think it would be the death knell for MS Office as we know it. And I'll bet that Office would improve by leaps and bounds.
Jeremy Andrews: Reiser3 is in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Reiser4 is in Andrew Morton's -mm kernel, aiming for eventual inclusion into the 2.6 kernel. What happened to Reiser1 and Reiser2?
Hans Reiser: Just before journaling got added, one of the programmers put two versions up on our website, and bumped the major version number when he should have bumped the minor version number. I was not willing to go backwards in version numbers to fix it because one should never go backwards in version numbers. Oh well. In retrospect, probably I should have gone backwards. Not doing it now.....;-)
I totally agree. I'm always amazed that publishers want authors to use Word. (Publishers are accustomed to "rekeying" manuscripts, which creates mistakes and imposes an enormous proofreading burden on the author.)
I published a book using LaTeX and ***strongly*** recommended to my colleagues that they do the same. They were using the same publisher and editor and could have done so. At least one of the authors dearly regrets not taking my advice.
Two colleagues are writing a textbook using Word, which they selected because of the collaboration features. At some point the auto-numbering got confused and the publisher had to hire a consultant to go through the entire manuscript and fix it: sections, figures, equations, you name it.
I used Word to prepare a report full of autonumbering. I was careful to use styles for everything. I inserted a table of contents and not only did all the numbering vanish, so did all the bullets!
I know that there are folks who have figured out Word's idiosyncracies and can produce high quality documents with it. But I have *never* had an acceptable experience with it. It always does something unexpected. Not a rant, just a statement of fact.
Ecco, available from Netmanage. This was an awesome piece of software 7 years ago when it was orphaned, and it is still an extremely capable calendar/phonebook/outliner. It does peer-to-peer synchronization (it automatically syncs across my two desktops and laptop, for example) and can sync with palms. You can link items flexibly using categories.
If you don't need workgroup calendars (although Ecco does those too) and if you run Windows, it's great software. And the price is right.
... but I may be off a bit. The price included shipping. I have been a fan of hers for years and I pre-ordered the CD of this album as soon as she announced that it would be available.
A few years back I ordered her third album from Amazon when I could not find it locally. It took about **6** months to ship. It's no wonder she's gone to a web distribution model. I would have paid more than $20 for this new album. And it appears on Amazon that her earlier albums are now out of print.
What a good example of why web distribution makes sense.
Since 1994 companies have been estimating the value of their compensation options and reporting this as a footnote in their annual reports. For example in Microsoft's 1999 annual report, you can easily tell that option grants that year amounted to $1.6 billion ($52,000 per employee), and the value of outstanding options was $69 billion ($2 million per employee; yes, that's correct).
So while it's true that earnings have been overstated, it has been possible to track the value of options and correct earnings. Joe Sixpack investor may not have been making this correction, but professional investors should have been doing it.
I advocate expensing, but it won't be the huge substantive issue it's being made out to be. These numbers haven't been a secret in the past.
Well, maybe we're haveing a semantic dispute, but the tax treatment of options is consistent with the tax treatment of other compensation. If you're saying that the accounting treatment before FAS 123R was a scam, I am in wholehearted agreement. For that you have to blame congress (in particular Joe Lieberman) and the lobbyists, not the IRS.
Why is the tax deduction a scam? A share has real value. If you give an employee a share worth $100 in exchange for $50 (as would happen when an option was exercised), you are lowering the value of shares held by others and in effect giving the employee $50. The company should have a tax deduction, exactly as if they paid cash to the employee.
Think about it this way: companies that *don't* use options as compensation will report lower profits because they will pay more cash to their employees. What the rule does is make reported income comparable between companies that do and don't use options.
Also, while you're right that the value of the company is the same, the distribution of that value is changed: existing shareholders get a smaller piece of the pie when the company grants options to employees.
Companies will use standard option pricing techniques, such as the Black-Scholes formula or binomial option pricing. You can read about them here.
You are incorrect in saying that the value of the option at grant is zero. If I flip a coin and you get $1 if heads and 0 if tails, that is worth something to you. An option is the same: you get a payoff if the stock goes up and nothing if the stock goes down. The valuation problem for standard options (like those traded on the CBOE) is well understood. There are tricky issues in applying option pricing to employee options, but their value is emphatically not zero.
The FAQ from the Financial Accouting Standards Board is here . You can download the actual statement from this page.
This change would have occurred 10 years ago if Congress hadn't interfered on behalf of companies trying to hide their largesse from shareholders. The rest of the world is in the process of implementing a similar accounting treatment of options. The US would have looked idiotic to have delayed this further.
Companies sell options to shareholders and others --- in this case the options are called warrants. The investor gets a warrant, the company gets cash.
The point of expensing is to account for the cash the company doesn't get. If the company gave the employee cash, and the employee in turn bought an option, there would be no problem with the accouting. It's the *grant* of an option in exchange for labor that necessitates expense being recorded at some point.
The option price is the present value of the expected employee profit. Thus, what Rubinstein proposes is equivalent to the FASB proposal in terms of dollars at the time of option grant, it's just that it's based on what did actually happen rather than what was expected to happen. As such, the Rubinstein measure is also less prone to manipulation.
If you know how to read a 10-K, you can verify that for several years in the late 1990's the employee profits on Microsoft's options were approximately the magnitude of earnings. So if Microsoft had used the Rubinstein proposal, they would have earned almost no profits for several years. That would have made for some interesting headlines: "Microsoft has no profits, piles up $40 billion in cash."
In my view the best proposal for how to expense is here.
Ecco is still fantastic and still completely usable. Its peer-to-peer synchronization is amazing. I have it running on 2 XP desktops and an XP laptop, and it syncs among the three and with my brand new palm phone.
I still can't believe that Microsoft had the brass to leave peer-to-peer synchronization out of Outlook. As if home users with a desktop and laptop are going to install exchange server.
I was in a room level with the back yard when lightning struck a tree perhaps 75 feet away. Several of us in bare feet felt an electric shock. So yes, it has happened to others!
To see one alternative distribution mechanism I'd suggest taking a look at Maria Schneider's web site. No, not that Maria Schneider, but the Maria Schneider who's a superb jazz composer (for example Allegresse). Her CD sales have always been disappointing, which I think is a shame. On this site, she's selling her forthcoming CD (a limited
pressing) and audio and video streams illustrating the making of the CD and more. There are different participation levels (you pay more if you're more interested). It's at least an attempt to do something new.
Otherwise, this item is a yawn. Sellers always want to raise the price and buyers always want it lower. The interesting question is: what will replace the obviously broken old distribution mechanism.
Book about the exponential function
on
Imagining Numbers
·
· Score: 1
If you are interested in books of this sort, I highly recommend e: the Story of a Number" by Eli Maor. He strikes a wonderful balance between history and mathematics. He has also written other books (that I have not yet read) about infinity and trig functions.
As if an impending collision could be kept secret. Heads of state will be told. Their aides will be told. A portion of the scientific community will know.
Just imagine one of the astronomers trying to keep this secret from their spouse: "Dear, what's with you! You just learned that your cholesterol is high and hear you are eating pizza, with ice cream for dessert! Well, after you've finished scarfing down that half gallon of rocky road we need to talk about that house renovation project..."
The LaTeX book class is pretty darn good, but (in my opinion) the pdf that results is not as readable or usable as a high quality published book. (Not every published book is high quality---sometimes publishers create drek---but done right the physical book is simply a more usable document. IMHO of course. YMMV.) A place to have an informed discussion about the value added by professional publishers is comp.text.tex. You'll get a range of opinions but by and large the opinions are informed.
Many students who had the full pdf of the book explicitly asked me to let them know when the book was published so they could buy it. They said this after grades were submitted and (since I suspect you're thinking that they were just trying to butter me up) many said this after they graduated. It happened; take it as data. It's also a fact that I routinely buy books for which I have manuscripts. A published book is a more usable document in many ways. If I couldn't afford to buy books I wouldn't. I can afford to so I do.
Finally, I don't know what goes on everywhere, but I've never experienced bribery from a publisher, unless you call complimentary copies bribery. I'm sure the publishers reps wish they could engage in bribery! My experience is that you typically have profs trying to do the right thing for their students, and choosing the right book is an important part of that process. If the book does things differently than existing books, you need to explain the difference so that the prof can make an informed decision. That's what I mean by marketing.
Well, as the recent author of a "ridiculously-priced" textbook, let me disagree.
Yes, I used the manuscript in class, so many mistakes were caught in advance. Yes, I submitted in LaTeX (the publisher wanted Word, LaTeX was my choice).
However, there is a *huge* difference from a student perspective (I know, I had to read the complaints) between a manuscript where many of the mistakes have been caught and one where almost all have been caught. In my case many got caught by the publisher, who found and engaged high quality people whose job was to go over every page and check the examples and cross references, etc. Students simply aren't sure when it is a mistake and when they don't understand something. The published book also looks a heck of a lot better than my.pdf manuscript. Maybe this matters more than it should, but it matters.
Finally, marketing. I was sort of assuming that if my book was high quality it would sell itself, since the market is well-defined. It doesn't. I've discovered that a lot of potential adopters are uncertain about some of the things I've done differently. The publisher's marketing efforts provide a channel through which I can make my case.
So I don't feel abused. I feel that the publisher added significant value and committed real resources. I know that not all authors feel this way, but I do.
Keep in mind that Amazon is not like Slashdot in that reviews are not automatically posted. I know of one review for a book that was posted two weeks after being submitted, and the review carries the posting date, not the submission date. So if Amazon does batch review, that could account for the identical dates.
But I agree that a lot of the one-star reviews have a fake feel to them.
On the other hand, I bought TaxCut this year instead of Turbotax for exactly the reasons expressed in those reviews.
I was in Oregon a few days ago and the Corvallis Gazette Times had a better article about this (unfortunately I couldn't locate it on line). The gist is that Oregon is forecasting a sharp reduction in gas tax revenue from the growth in fuel efficient cars. This is why they are searching for new revenue.
Unfortunately, a mileage tax will increase the relative tax on fuel efficient cars. They should be taxing cars based on emissions and weight, both of which are damaging to others. (A gas tax probably comes close to doing this.) Instead they will penalize environmentally preferred vehicles. I'm guessing they don't raise the gas tax because it would penalize SUV owners, who are probably politically powerful on average.
The real kicker in the article was an assertion that Oregon had considered a bicycle tax (!) to make up for lost gas tax revenue, but concluded it wouldn't raise enough to be worth the trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an interesting idea. Thanks! I wish they were a little cheaper, but I'll raise this the next time I'm talking with the computer folks. Possibly the abusers would opt for it.
I teach and find laptop abuse to be an issue. The Slate article misses the real problem, which is not that the student checks out (the article correctly notes there are lots of ways to do this), but that others can see the laptop screen. Suddenly there is a group of five students giggling about something. I've had students complain about the distracting laptop usage of others.
I don't know what the right solution is, since I think that in theory it's fantastic for students to have a laptop to take notes, perform calculations, and look up related issues during class. But it's a real problem when the abusers distract a group of students. I suspect that shutting off internet access during class is the best practical solution.
There are two reasons MS Office thrives in corporate settings (which almost always pay much less than $500/seat): (1) the ability to customize the products using VBA, and (2) the need to use MS Office for document compatability. Businesses reliant on (1) won't in the short run look at a new office suite, but businesses forced to use MS Office for compatability *will* (IMHO) look at an alternative if it offers halfway decent document compatability and is easy to try. I personally think the floodgates will open once MS Office no longer seems essential. If a few influential users demand more open document standards, it will have a ripple effect.
Your point about Google hacking is important but I will be surprised if that isn't addressed.
Really, if MS Office is the best product, let them dominate the market. My personal objection is that Office (most especially Word) sucks and I deeply resent the time I waste having to use it just so that I can share documents with others. I would love to be able to say to colleagues "let's use Google Office for this project". I think it would be the death knell for MS Office as we know it. And I'll bet that Office would improve by leaps and bounds.
Jeremy Andrews: Reiser3 is in the 2.4 and 2.6 kernels. Reiser4 is in Andrew Morton's -mm kernel, aiming for eventual inclusion into the 2.6 kernel. What happened to Reiser1 and Reiser2?
Hans Reiser: Just before journaling got added, one of the programmers put two versions up on our website, and bumped the major version number when he should have bumped the minor version number. I was not willing to go backwards in version numbers to fix it because one should never go backwards in version numbers. Oh well. In retrospect, probably I should have gone backwards. Not doing it now.....;-)
I totally agree. I'm always amazed that publishers want authors to use Word. (Publishers are accustomed to "rekeying" manuscripts, which creates mistakes and imposes an enormous proofreading burden on the author.)
I published a book using LaTeX and ***strongly*** recommended to my colleagues that they do the same. They were using the same publisher and editor and could have done so. At least one of the authors dearly regrets not taking my advice.
Two colleagues are writing a textbook using Word, which they selected because of the collaboration features. At some point the auto-numbering got confused and the publisher had to hire a consultant to go through the entire manuscript and fix it: sections, figures, equations, you name it.
I used Word to prepare a report full of autonumbering. I was careful to use styles for everything. I inserted a table of contents and not only did all the numbering vanish, so did all the bullets!
I know that there are folks who have figured out Word's idiosyncracies and can produce high quality documents with it. But I have *never* had an acceptable experience with it. It always does something unexpected. Not a rant, just a statement of fact.
If you don't need workgroup calendars (although Ecco does those too) and if you run Windows, it's great software. And the price is right.
... but I may be off a bit. The price included shipping. I have been a fan of hers for years and I pre-ordered the CD of this album as soon as she announced that it would be available.
A few years back I ordered her third album from Amazon when I could not find it locally. It took about **6** months to ship. It's no wonder she's gone to a web distribution model. I would have paid more than $20 for this new album. And it appears on Amazon that her earlier albums are now out of print.
What a good example of why web distribution makes sense.
Since 1994 companies have been estimating the value of their compensation options and reporting this as a footnote in their annual reports. For example in Microsoft's 1999 annual report, you can easily tell that option grants that year amounted to $1.6 billion ($52,000 per employee), and the value of outstanding options was $69 billion ($2 million per employee; yes, that's correct).
So while it's true that earnings have been overstated, it has been possible to track the value of options and correct earnings. Joe Sixpack investor may not have been making this correction, but professional investors should have been doing it.
I advocate expensing, but it won't be the huge substantive issue it's being made out to be. These numbers haven't been a secret in the past.
Well, maybe we're haveing a semantic dispute, but the tax treatment of options is consistent with the tax treatment of other compensation. If you're saying that the accounting treatment before FAS 123R was a scam, I am in wholehearted agreement. For that you have to blame congress (in particular Joe Lieberman) and the lobbyists, not the IRS.
Why is the tax deduction a scam? A share has real value. If you give an employee a share worth $100 in exchange for $50 (as would happen when an option was exercised), you are lowering the value of shares held by others and in effect giving the employee $50. The company should have a tax deduction, exactly as if they paid cash to the employee.
Think about it this way: companies that *don't* use options as compensation will report lower profits because they will pay more cash to their employees. What the rule does is make reported income comparable between companies that do and don't use options.
Also, while you're right that the value of the company is the same, the distribution of that value is changed: existing shareholders get a smaller piece of the pie when the company grants options to employees.
You are incorrect in saying that the value of the option at grant is zero. If I flip a coin and you get $1 if heads and 0 if tails, that is worth something to you. An option is the same: you get a payoff if the stock goes up and nothing if the stock goes down. The valuation problem for standard options (like those traded on the CBOE) is well understood. There are tricky issues in applying option pricing to employee options, but their value is emphatically not zero.
This change would have occurred 10 years ago if Congress hadn't interfered on behalf of companies trying to hide their largesse from shareholders. The rest of the world is in the process of implementing a similar accounting treatment of options. The US would have looked idiotic to have delayed this further.
Companies sell options to shareholders and others --- in this case the options are called warrants. The investor gets a warrant, the company gets cash.
The point of expensing is to account for the cash the company doesn't get. If the company gave the employee cash, and the employee in turn bought an option, there would be no problem with the accouting. It's the *grant* of an option in exchange for labor that necessitates expense being recorded at some point.
The option price is the present value of the expected employee profit. Thus, what Rubinstein proposes is equivalent to the FASB proposal in terms of dollars at the time of option grant, it's just that it's based on what did actually happen rather than what was expected to happen. As such, the Rubinstein measure is also less prone to manipulation.
If you know how to read a 10-K, you can verify that for several years in the late 1990's the employee profits on Microsoft's options were approximately the magnitude of earnings. So if Microsoft had used the Rubinstein proposal, they would have earned almost no profits for several years. That would have made for some interesting headlines: "Microsoft has no profits, piles up $40 billion in cash."
In my view the best proposal for how to expense is here.
Ecco is still fantastic and still completely usable. Its peer-to-peer synchronization is amazing. I have it running on 2 XP desktops and an XP laptop, and it syncs among the three and with my brand new palm phone.
I still can't believe that Microsoft had the brass to leave peer-to-peer synchronization out of Outlook. As if home users with a desktop and laptop are going to install exchange server.
I was in a room level with the back yard when lightning struck a tree perhaps 75 feet away. Several of us in bare feet felt an electric shock. So yes, it has happened to others!
Otherwise, this item is a yawn. Sellers always want to raise the price and buyers always want it lower. The interesting question is: what will replace the obviously broken old distribution mechanism.
If you are interested in books of this sort, I highly recommend e: the Story of a Number" by Eli Maor. He strikes a wonderful balance between history and mathematics. He has also written other books (that I have not yet read) about infinity and trig functions.
As if an impending collision could be kept secret. Heads of state will be told. Their aides will be told. A portion of the scientific community will know.
Just imagine one of the astronomers trying to keep this secret from their spouse: "Dear, what's with you! You just learned that your cholesterol is high and hear you are eating pizza, with ice cream for dessert! Well, after you've finished scarfing down that half gallon of rocky road we need to talk about that house renovation project..."
I will respond to a few of these comments.
The LaTeX book class is pretty darn good, but (in my opinion) the pdf that results is not as readable or usable as a high quality published book. (Not every published book is high quality---sometimes publishers create drek---but done right the physical book is simply a more usable document. IMHO of course. YMMV.) A place to have an informed discussion about the value added by professional publishers is comp.text.tex. You'll get a range of opinions but by and large the opinions are informed.
Many students who had the full pdf of the book explicitly asked me to let them know when the book was published so they could buy it. They said this after grades were submitted and (since I suspect you're thinking that they were just trying to butter me up) many said this after they graduated. It happened; take it as data. It's also a fact that I routinely buy books for which I have manuscripts. A published book is a more usable document in many ways. If I couldn't afford to buy books I wouldn't. I can afford to so I do.
Finally, I don't know what goes on everywhere, but I've never experienced bribery from a publisher, unless you call complimentary copies bribery. I'm sure the publishers reps wish they could engage in bribery! My experience is that you typically have profs trying to do the right thing for their students, and choosing the right book is an important part of that process. If the book does things differently than existing books, you need to explain the difference so that the prof can make an informed decision. That's what I mean by marketing.
Well, as the recent author of a "ridiculously-priced" textbook, let me disagree.
.pdf manuscript. Maybe this matters more than it should, but it matters.
Yes, I used the manuscript in class, so many mistakes were caught in advance. Yes, I submitted in LaTeX (the publisher wanted Word, LaTeX was my choice).
However, there is a *huge* difference from a student perspective (I know, I had to read the complaints) between a manuscript where many of the mistakes have been caught and one where almost all have been caught. In my case many got caught by the publisher, who found and engaged high quality people whose job was to go over every page and check the examples and cross references, etc. Students simply aren't sure when it is a mistake and when they don't understand something. The published book also looks a heck of a lot better than my
Finally, marketing. I was sort of assuming that if my book was high quality it would sell itself, since the market is well-defined. It doesn't. I've discovered that a lot of potential adopters are uncertain about some of the things I've done differently. The publisher's marketing efforts provide a channel through which I can make my case.
So I don't feel abused. I feel that the publisher added significant value and committed real resources. I know that not all authors feel this way, but I do.
Keep in mind that Amazon is not like Slashdot in that reviews are not automatically posted. I know of one review for a book that was posted two weeks after being submitted, and the review carries the posting date, not the submission date. So if Amazon does batch review, that could account for the identical dates.
But I agree that a lot of the one-star reviews have a fake feel to them.
On the other hand, I bought TaxCut this year instead of Turbotax for exactly the reasons expressed in those reviews.
I was in Oregon a few days ago and the Corvallis Gazette Times had a better article about this (unfortunately I couldn't locate it on line). The gist is that Oregon is forecasting a sharp reduction in gas tax revenue from the growth in fuel efficient cars. This is why they are searching for new revenue.
Unfortunately, a mileage tax will increase the relative tax on fuel efficient cars. They should be taxing cars based on emissions and weight, both of which are damaging to others. (A gas tax probably comes close to doing this.) Instead they will penalize environmentally preferred vehicles. I'm guessing they don't raise the gas tax because it would penalize SUV owners, who are probably politically powerful on average.
The real kicker in the article was an assertion that Oregon had considered a bicycle tax (!) to make up for lost gas tax revenue, but concluded it wouldn't raise enough to be worth the trouble.