Cash flow, they don't show profits, they have non cash charges that mean that no movie ever shows a profit, but all of them pull in large cash flows. I can't find much online, but this mentions the issue on the first page. It is all legal according to GAAP, which are the rules for accounting, but the accounting boards are trying to fix some of the issues associated with this problem. It's like depriciation, when a company buys a piece of equipment, say a server with a price of $10,000, that will last several years, say three for our example, they company would pay for the server up front, but would not charge all of the cost to their earnings in the year they purchased it. Instead, they would take a charge of $3,000 each year, assuming the server is worth about $1,000 at the end of the three years. The company's profits are reduced by $3,000 each year, but the depriciation does not affect each year's cash, they already bought the server. The biggest benefit is that your taxable earnings are reduced by your depriciation, so you lower your future taxes. Cable companies almost never make a profit, and I don't think any movie in history has ever shown more than a negligable net profit, there are many costs that can be ammortized against profitable movies. So, if any of you ever are in working out a movie contract, be sure your cut is of Gross not net, note that you could also hire a good agent or lawyer with experience in motion picture contracts. They should know this as well.
They will save all those parts for the extra special trilogy 15 disc set, which will bereleased after the third movie's special edition with the extra hour of special added footage not included in prior versions, of course.
My last new drive spec'ed 4 iron screws for heat transmission, I went ahead and used aluminum just in case. I think most of the failure problems were related to heat. The only friend's drive, that I knew of, that failed was in an iMac with no fan, and fairly poor ventalation. He put a fan on the replacement, which has been going strong for more than a year.
Mostly because they never made any money at it (The PDF is much easier to read). It just got worse last year when all the news about their 75GXP line having quality issues. They lost $423 million on the hard drive business in 2001, and almost $100 million in the first three months of this year. The hard drive business is in the middle, adjustment, column and the division's total loss can be found in the line net income from continuing operations. Because it is an adjustment column, all the numbers are of the opposite sign. Hitachi hopes that by focusing on harddrives they can return the division to profitability, or it can gain an advantage of EMC in storage arrays, I'd assume. IBM will probably continue to do some R&D to get licensing income, although I don't believe that the final transaction has taken place so the drive business might still be a part of the company. They have also been focusing on services, their high end server business, storage, and semiconductors, and getting out of most of their other businesses. They fully removed themselves from PCs and the like, licensing their name and selling the products only to those who ask for it. If you wanted to be an IBM only shop or something similar.
I'm planning to shell out for a projector when I have the cash for a livingroom large enough to accomodate it. Even when I looked at some really nice 50" plasma screens, at the local high end audio shop, they just didn't seem as clear or as sharp as the projector when watching anything besides an action flick. While not cheap at all, hey were all dreaming a bit here, you can get projectors that can compete with your monitor in case you want to fire up a game of quake on the neighbor's wall in 1600x1200 anti-aliased goodness.
The interviews in the article seemed more concerned about the SACD player sounding worse than their high end CD players. I'm assuming that SACD players probably have pretty good D to A converters, since they are designed for audiophiles and only have analog output. Would it sound worse running 6 channel analog to your amplifier, than running the digital signal and decoding it with your amp? I know with my sound card, it sounds worse, but I think that has more to do with my soundcard's cheap components.
The biggest difference is 5.1 encoding. There are some differences with encoding, SACDs use a much higher sampling rate, but fewer bits to record data with. I haven't heard one but I think it would be nice to have surround sound versus just stereo signals.
Assuming that jackpots are really random and players don't change much, it should still reach EV>$1 just as often as it did before. Since jackpots will occur less often so pots will get bigger more often, I think.
Qwest was running tests on services like these, in Phoenix and Denver I believe. Also, there was a start up that tried to sell DSL based VOIP phone lines to small businesses for about $5 a line, they would split a single DSL connection into several phone lines. I don't remember its name, and haven't heard much from them since.
Yeah but it acutally has to be above about $140 million (Powerball) by the time you pay taxes depending on your tax bracket, and how tax effective you will be with the money once you win. Then you have to weigh the odds of another player getting the same number as you, which is more likely once you get above 80 million since so many more people start playing. Personally I start in the mid 100 range, and keep playing untill a winner happens, if I remember to buy the tickets.
Interestingly enough the Powerball noticed that their revenues went up significantly once they increased the odds from about 30 million to 1 to about 80 million to 1 and they started getting all the mega jackpots.
Re:Why should we care?
on
Root Zone Changed
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The root servers are the master list of domain names for the Internet. The computers still use IP addresses to talk, but us Humans prefer remembering slashdot.org to 66.35.250.150. In meatspace terms, I think this is along the lines of a construction company changing the composition of their concrete for use on the Highway system, you might not notice the change as a user, but it could be a bad decision. All I want to know is if Sun is back to being the . in.com?:)
Thnks for the tip. I bought it used from a fleet, and they just randomly stuffed the manual in a car. I got the TL manual, but perhaps the programming is the same.
I have an 1997 Integra and it will let you use the key to open the driver's door after locking with the remote, but heaven help you if you try the trunk, or unlock all the doors from the inside after using only the key. Also, it seems to unlock all 4 doors even though it's only supposed to open the driver's door if you press it once.
Dell, Gateway, and HP all licensed their Office suite. I haven't used the newest one but the last one wasn't too bad. I have heard that their software is popular in the legal industry, where there exists all manner of legal templates that were never switched over to MS Office.
Supply and demand, its similar in Hawaii, a round trip from Hawaii to the mainland is much cheaper than from the mainland to Hawaii. Air ticket prices are pretty well designed to extract as much value as possible from travelers, which is why they have sometimes goofy requirements, must leave on a Tues, and return on a Monday etc. They are constantly trying to segment those travelers who have to fly, ie business people who neet to be at a meeting ASAP, and are willing to pay a premium from simply those who will fly but don't have to get there anytime soon. They do this because once you have to make the flight at a certain time, the incremental costs of adding another passenger are nearly 0, it takes a little more fuel. The planes and employees have to be there regardless of 10 people flying or 100. So the airline wants to fill up the plane each flight, and the airline is willing to charge very low rates to get the last passenger to fly, but if they charge everyone the low rate, they will go bankrupt, becuase their fixed costs aren't covered. So they do their best to segment out how bad you want to go, and make you pay more for if you have to get there. I would guess that most UK tourists head somewhere other than the US when they take a holiday, while many Americans would like to, and do take pleasure trips to Europe. For a much longer description look up some articles on price discrimination, they usually mention the airlines, because its a nearly textbook case.
I would suggest Mozilla or Phoenix, although if you like another browser better feel free to use that. Then look for web based educational software. I would guess that there are significantly more educational sites than linux friendly educational software packages. If there are very few sites, this might pose a pretty profitable market for someone to enter. I would suspect that schools would love to cut their computer budget, by purchasing cheap linux systems and connecting to a subscription based educational sites that were really good. Since the client would simply have to run a browser, the systems would not need much in the way of hardware, unless you really did want to teach the eight year-olds Mathmatica.
Are those the ones with the little levers by each name and the big lever that records your vote. I don't see any problems with them. My folks were kind enough to take me in to vote with them most years, and I had them figured out as 10 year old. They seem pretty fool proof, especially if you asked for help. Here in Montana I used the connect the arrow next to the name you want. Previously I've used a scantron like bubble sheet, with dots to be filled in next to each name. Niether of these seem like a problem, except that it is expensive to get a new ballot if mistakes are common.
Re:MARIJUANA IN NEVADA!!!
on
Indecision 2002
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Sounds like what Montana did with their speed limits during the 55 era. If you never drove through back in the day, it worked like this. If you get pulled over, coverage is pretty limited here, they only time I still see a highway patrol is near a city, or highway patrol HQ, you paid the cop a $5 ticket that didn't get written up to your insurance. Most people in the state, drove with a stack of of 5s in the glove compartment. Technically the speed limit was 55 so they got their highway money, but enforcement was very limited.
I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft makes the vast majority of their revenue from Office not Windows. Both the applications and platforms divisions accounted for about $9 billion of Microsoft's revenue in their fiscal year ended in June. Applications includes project, visio, and a few others (not VB its down in enterprise software. Server versions of Windows are also included in the enterprise divisions, so windows revenue is probably just a little bit more than office revenue. I have no idea which costs more to produce and sell, but I would guess that they are pretty similar. I have seen estimates that place about 40% of MS earnings as a result of each program with the remaining 20% coming from everything else they do. Like pre-Xbox hardware, SQL, VB, and MSN.
Personally, I think MS will be giving the OS away for free in the same manner that they bundle the OS of the X-Box. I would also guess that they will try to make that their platform for the future, serving applications from their servers, and utilize passport to try to get a cut of e-commerce. I don't know if they will succeed, but at least they have some vision for how to build on their current situation. Incidentally, the register had a pretty good negative view of MS prospects comparing them to IBM.
You would have wanted to use the options market. Buying calls would have netted you a much larger return on today's news, unless your investment capital was well over 1 million or so. By some back of the envelope calcs an investment of about $3,000 would have netted you about $11,000 assuming the after market rally holds through tomorrow. If you're interested the calcs were: buy the 100 Nov 55 calls sell 37 of the the corresponding Nov 55 put. Reverse your position tomorrow. The ending prices assume that time value remains unchainged but intrinsic value does change. This also assumes $40 per contract round trip trading costs, the the market makers held the current spread, and assumes you can write naked puts, which are fairly risky, if you don't know the direction of the stock price. Your two trades would net you the $8,000 or so profit. There are doubtless better trades that could be made, some of the farther out of the money calls are likely to triple on the news, but this is a fairly straitforward transaction.
Traders move on the slightest hint of something, they did in this case too, look at the Microsoft chart for today, the stock moved up pretty healthily at the end of the day, which started shortly after the story was unearthed on slashdot. Also, they have the advantage of seeing where the volume is moving, and can get a feel for what others thing the news means, assuming they know it happened. You won't see a difinitive summary for years, but almost all the quick reads, place this decision in the Microsoft column, which is all the market needs. Additionally simply removing the hanging threat from Microsoft would help to move the stock price up, regardless of the news.
This was good news for Microsoft, the states wanted to prevent Microsoft from bundling IE, and WMP, for example, with Windows. The judge, as most of the market already expected, or that movement would have been quite a bit larger, more or less decided that the original settlement between the DOJ and Microsoft was fair.
They actually close at 4:00 Eastern. And this was available on/. about 25 minutes earlier, however it was not generally available nor supposed to be available until 4:30 Eastern after the markets close. Some one at the court who put the files on the web server's head will probably roll. It's sorta ironic that slashdot was, at least indirectly, responsible for an increase in Microsoft's stock price. Look at the chart notice the big up swing after 3:20 EST or so, then go look at the time stamp on the story.
Go look now, every major news outlet put this as their top story of the afternoon. If you had known the results an hour ago, wouldn't have been nice to scoop all of them?
Slashdot Mirror
Cash flow, they don't show profits, they have non cash charges that mean that no movie ever shows a profit, but all of them pull in large cash flows. I can't find much online, but this mentions the issue on the first page. It is all legal according to GAAP, which are the rules for accounting, but the accounting boards are trying to fix some of the issues associated with this problem. It's like depriciation, when a company buys a piece of equipment, say a server with a price of $10,000, that will last several years, say three for our example, they company would pay for the server up front, but would not charge all of the cost to their earnings in the year they purchased it. Instead, they would take a charge of $3,000 each year, assuming the server is worth about $1,000 at the end of the three years. The company's profits are reduced by $3,000 each year, but the depriciation does not affect each year's cash, they already bought the server. The biggest benefit is that your taxable earnings are reduced by your depriciation, so you lower your future taxes. Cable companies almost never make a profit, and I don't think any movie in history has ever shown more than a negligable net profit, there are many costs that can be ammortized against profitable movies.
So, if any of you ever are in working out a movie contract, be sure your cut is of Gross not net, note that you could also hire a good agent or lawyer with experience in motion picture contracts. They should know this as well.
They better hurry, it goes EOL in June, and it could take that long to get all the patches installed.
They will save all those parts for the extra special trilogy 15 disc set, which will bereleased after the third movie's special edition with the extra hour of special added footage not included in prior versions, of course.
My last new drive spec'ed 4 iron screws for heat transmission, I went ahead and used aluminum just in case. I think most of the failure problems were related to heat. The only friend's drive, that I knew of, that failed was in an iMac with no fan, and fairly poor ventalation. He put a fan on the replacement, which has been going strong for more than a year.
Mostly because they never made any money at it (The PDF is much easier to read). It just got worse last year when all the news about their 75GXP line having quality issues. They lost $423 million on the hard drive business in 2001, and almost $100 million in the first three months of this year. The hard drive business is in the middle, adjustment, column and the division's total loss can be found in the line net income from continuing operations. Because it is an adjustment column, all the numbers are of the opposite sign. Hitachi hopes that by focusing on harddrives they can return the division to profitability, or it can gain an advantage of EMC in storage arrays, I'd assume. IBM will probably continue to do some R&D to get licensing income, although I don't believe that the final transaction has taken place so the drive business might still be a part of the company.
They have also been focusing on services, their high end server business, storage, and semiconductors, and getting out of most of their other businesses. They fully removed themselves from PCs and the like, licensing their name and selling the products only to those who ask for it. If you wanted to be an IBM only shop or something similar.
I'm planning to shell out for a projector when I have the cash for a livingroom large enough to accomodate it. Even when I looked at some really nice 50" plasma screens, at the local high end audio shop, they just didn't seem as clear or as sharp as the projector when watching anything besides an action flick. While not cheap at all, hey were all dreaming a bit here, you can get projectors that can compete with your monitor in case you want to fire up a game of quake on the neighbor's wall in 1600x1200 anti-aliased goodness.
The interviews in the article seemed more concerned about the SACD player sounding worse than their high end CD players. I'm assuming that SACD players probably have pretty good D to A converters, since they are designed for audiophiles and only have analog output. Would it sound worse running 6 channel analog to your amplifier, than running the digital signal and decoding it with your amp? I know with my sound card, it sounds worse, but I think that has more to do with my soundcard's cheap components.
The biggest difference is 5.1 encoding. There are some differences with encoding, SACDs use a much higher sampling rate, but fewer bits to record data with. I haven't heard one but I think it would be nice to have surround sound versus just stereo signals.
Assuming that jackpots are really random and players don't change much, it should still reach EV>$1 just as often as it did before. Since jackpots will occur less often so pots will get bigger more often, I think.
Qwest was running tests on services like these, in Phoenix and Denver I believe. Also, there was a start up that tried to sell DSL based VOIP phone lines to small businesses for about $5 a line, they would split a single DSL connection into several phone lines. I don't remember its name, and haven't heard much from them since.
Yeah but it acutally has to be above about $140 million (Powerball) by the time you pay taxes depending on your tax bracket, and how tax effective you will be with the money once you win. Then you have to weigh the odds of another player getting the same number as you, which is more likely once you get above 80 million since so many more people start playing. Personally I start in the mid 100 range, and keep playing untill a winner happens, if I remember to buy the tickets.
Interestingly enough the Powerball noticed that their revenues went up significantly once they increased the odds from about 30 million to 1 to about 80 million to 1 and they started getting all the mega jackpots.
The root servers are the master list of domain names for the Internet. The computers still use IP addresses to talk, but us Humans prefer remembering slashdot.org to 66.35.250.150. In meatspace terms, I think this is along the lines of a construction company changing the composition of their concrete for use on the Highway system, you might not notice the change as a user, but it could be a bad decision. .com? :)
All I want to know is if Sun is back to being the . in
Thnks for the tip. I bought it used from a fleet, and they just randomly stuffed the manual in a car. I got the TL manual, but perhaps the programming is the same.
I have an 1997 Integra and it will let you use the key to open the driver's door after locking with the remote, but heaven help you if you try the trunk, or unlock all the doors from the inside after using only the key. Also, it seems to unlock all 4 doors even though it's only supposed to open the driver's door if you press it once.
Supply and demand, its similar in Hawaii, a round trip from Hawaii to the mainland is much cheaper than from the mainland to Hawaii. Air ticket prices are pretty well designed to extract as much value as possible from travelers, which is why they have sometimes goofy requirements, must leave on a Tues, and return on a Monday etc. They are constantly trying to segment those travelers who have to fly, ie business people who neet to be at a meeting ASAP, and are willing to pay a premium from simply those who will fly but don't have to get there anytime soon. They do this because once you have to make the flight at a certain time, the incremental costs of adding another passenger are nearly 0, it takes a little more fuel. The planes and employees have to be there regardless of 10 people flying or 100. So the airline wants to fill up the plane each flight, and the airline is willing to charge very low rates to get the last passenger to fly, but if they charge everyone the low rate, they will go bankrupt, becuase their fixed costs aren't covered. So they do their best to segment out how bad you want to go, and make you pay more for if you have to get there. I would guess that most UK tourists head somewhere other than the US when they take a holiday, while many Americans would like to, and do take pleasure trips to Europe. For a much longer description look up some articles on price discrimination, they usually mention the airlines, because its a nearly textbook case.
I would suggest Mozilla or Phoenix, although if you like another browser better feel free to use that. Then look for web based educational software. I would guess that there are significantly more educational sites than linux friendly educational software packages. If there are very few sites, this might pose a pretty profitable market for someone to enter. I would suspect that schools would love to cut their computer budget, by purchasing cheap linux systems and connecting to a subscription based educational sites that were really good. Since the client would simply have to run a browser, the systems would not need much in the way of hardware, unless you really did want to teach the eight year-olds Mathmatica.
Are those the ones with the little levers by each name and the big lever that records your vote. I don't see any problems with them. My folks were kind enough to take me in to vote with them most years, and I had them figured out as 10 year old. They seem pretty fool proof, especially if you asked for help. Here in Montana I used the connect the arrow next to the name you want. Previously I've used a scantron like bubble sheet, with dots to be filled in next to each name. Niether of these seem like a problem, except that it is expensive to get a new ballot if mistakes are common.
Sounds like what Montana did with their speed limits during the 55 era. If you never drove through back in the day, it worked like this. If you get pulled over, coverage is pretty limited here, they only time I still see a highway patrol is near a city, or highway patrol HQ, you paid the cop a $5 ticket that didn't get written up to your insurance. Most people in the state, drove with a stack of of 5s in the glove compartment. Technically the speed limit was 55 so they got their highway money, but enforcement was very limited.
I don't understand where this idea that Microsoft makes the vast majority of their revenue from Office not Windows. Both the applications and platforms divisions accounted for about $9 billion of Microsoft's revenue in their fiscal year ended in June. Applications includes project, visio, and a few others (not VB its down in enterprise software. Server versions of Windows are also included in the enterprise divisions, so windows revenue is probably just a little bit more than office revenue. I have no idea which costs more to produce and sell, but I would guess that they are pretty similar. I have seen estimates that place about 40% of MS earnings as a result of each program with the remaining 20% coming from everything else they do. Like pre-Xbox hardware, SQL, VB, and MSN.
Personally, I think MS will be giving the OS away for free in the same manner that they bundle the OS of the X-Box. I would also guess that they will try to make that their platform for the future, serving applications from their servers, and utilize passport to try to get a cut of e-commerce. I don't know if they will succeed, but at least they have some vision for how to build on their current situation. Incidentally, the register had a pretty good negative view of MS prospects comparing them to IBM.
You would have wanted to use the options market. Buying calls would have netted you a much larger return on today's news, unless your investment capital was well over 1 million or so. By some back of the envelope calcs an investment of about $3,000 would have netted you about $11,000 assuming the after market rally holds through tomorrow.
If you're interested the calcs were:
buy the 100 Nov 55 calls
sell 37 of the the corresponding Nov 55 put.
Reverse your position tomorrow.
The ending prices assume that time value remains unchainged but intrinsic value does change. This also assumes $40 per contract round trip trading costs, the the market makers held the current spread, and assumes you can write naked puts, which are fairly risky, if you don't know the direction of the stock price. Your two trades would net you the $8,000 or so profit. There are doubtless better trades that could be made, some of the farther out of the money calls are likely to triple on the news, but this is a fairly straitforward transaction.
Traders move on the slightest hint of something, they did in this case too, look at the Microsoft chart for today, the stock moved up pretty healthily at the end of the day, which started shortly after the story was unearthed on slashdot. Also, they have the advantage of seeing where the volume is moving, and can get a feel for what others thing the news means, assuming they know it happened. You won't see a difinitive summary for years, but almost all the quick reads, place this decision in the Microsoft column, which is all the market needs. Additionally simply removing the hanging threat from Microsoft would help to move the stock price up, regardless of the news.
This was good news for Microsoft, the states wanted to prevent Microsoft from bundling IE, and WMP, for example, with Windows. The judge, as most of the market already expected, or that movement would have been quite a bit larger, more or less decided that the original settlement between the DOJ and Microsoft was fair.
They actually close at 4:00 Eastern. And this was available on /. about 25 minutes earlier, however it was not generally available nor supposed to be available until 4:30 Eastern after the markets close. Some one at the court who put the files on the web server's head will probably roll. It's sorta ironic that slashdot was, at least indirectly, responsible for an increase in Microsoft's stock price. Look at the chart notice the big up swing after 3:20 EST or so, then go look at the time stamp on the story.
Go look now, every major news outlet put this as their top story of the afternoon. If you had known the results an hour ago, wouldn't have been nice to scoop all of them?