To have that kind of improvemnet seems to indicate either much more productive ore or better utilization of their fixed costs. Its probably both, the ore is more productive, I didn't see this in the article, but it was implied, as well as better use of their fixed expenses (the mine, heavy equipment, administrative department) which all have to be paid for even if little gold is pulled out of the ground.
I wasn't as impressed when I first saw mouse pointer activation, but after using it for a while I get almost as annoyed when windows don't auto activate on mouse overs, as when I grab a non reverse polish calculator.
Re:Read the sample chapter - didn't like it
on
The Venture Cafe
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· Score: 1
About the pension funds, they actually do. They invest some of their money in venture capital and generally are quite successful. The highest exposure is about 5%. Most keep at least 30-50% in bonds, which did quite well. Asset allocations are done according to modern portfolio theory, which seems strange but begins to make senese when you think of it, what seems counter intuitive is that adding a very risky asset can lower overall risk if the movements in price do not move with the assets you currently own. Pensions had a rough year last year but I would be surprised if they didn't generally make money over the past 2 years. I happen to work for one.
Also in most cases, pensions that are invested in VC would be defined benefit plans, so the company and the government is on the hook. The fund simply allows the company to invest some of the cost now, so they don't have to contribute as much in the future.
Either could probably purchase the rest of the company for much less than starting a new one. They could start a new company to buy the assets, but neither is in great shape to make a purchase like that. KPN was looking at liquidity options, a nice euphimisim for were spending more cash than we bring in and need some ways to improve this situation, and Qwest is facing pretty significant debt repayments. AT&T is considering a purchase, but I don't think anyone is expecting these assets to be worth much for several years.
There are possible penalties involved with fingering a GeForce at Best buy. While there are occasional busts of distributors of software its pretty rare for individual users to get busted.
Also it takes a whole lot less effort, so he can get back to his fps.
Network effects are a pretty interesting market failure (well at least to economists, I suppose others could seem them as about as exciting as watching paint dry) they are specifically any item that gets more valuable to users as more people use it. It is one of the only true barriers to entry which are costs that the initial user doesn't have to pay that later competitors do. This is the reason all the dpt coms wretched cash trying to gain first mover advantages from network effects. It turned out that for most of them there weren't any network effects and the money was largely wasted. We'll probably be living down those mistakes for a decade in some sectors (telecommunications). More specifically the interesting cases are items that are natrual monopolies, operating systems and telecommunications networks are the best examples. It is prohibitavly expensive to build another telephone network since you will not make enough if you only get 50% of the customers (I made that up on the spot), however two more competitive firms would be much less profitable than one single firm and consumers would be worse off imagine if you couldn't call half the phones out there. Operating systems are another less clear example, the more developers and users an OS has the more valuable it is since there are more useful applications, which are made because of the larger userbase. Other pieces of software are influenced by network effects, applications that allow additional application functionality browsers, appication servers, some servers, etc. and p2p because the draw is in how much stuff is there, think about how much simpler things were when Napster was the network over ftp/irc/usnet.
Other examples are standards, which become more valuable as more people sign on to the standard. This is why Rambus' actions were reviled by JDEC.
For most industries you are right people choose the first solution that works and gets their attention, however in industries with high levels of network effects the first company there usually has the advantage.
I'm not really a fan of Qwest, but haven't had any problems with their services yet. But I believe that its not technologically possible to only provide DSL without phone service. Someone more knowledgable is welcome to inform me otherwise but as I understand it, DSL connections simply divide the frequencies used into data and voice, thats why you have to put low pass filters on your regular phone lines.
Actually the rules for things like this are much stricter in the house, since its larger there are more rules about how debate will work on each specific bill. One of the committees in the house gets to set the rules for how debate will work, so when they don't want to have a bill go to debate that committee simply doesn't assign it a rule.
Like all other systems politics is a game, and there are ways that things work. Controversial stuff generally gets added to big pork laden bills like farm bills or defence bills. Stuff that the majority doesn't want to be seen debating or voting against dies in comittee. And things that either party wants to campaign on gets debated on for a long time, allowing many opportunities for soundbytes, both for and against. All in all I believe its a pretty good system, most of the time the laws that the country wants get passed, but the means that it takes to get there can be quite annoying.
I do believe that the Swiss while not quite there are getting close. I seem to recall their earliest contigous democratic government streching back to about 1200 AD (CE if you're Microsoft).
I would agree that the article is pointed toward VCs. They are expected to return 15-20% annually for their investors. They do this by maintaining a large portfolio of companies, because they beleive that they can't predict success. However, becuase they expect a 90% failure rate, they need to find companies that have the promise of returning almost 100% per year if they are the 10% that succeed. (This made them quite a bit of money when IPO demand shot up during the bubble. Now they had more like 30% go public, or get purchased, succeed in VC terms). The author's point seems to be that if you apply these principles you would need much lower return rates for all your comapnies because more of them would succeed, my calcs are closer to 50% annual return which would allow that many more companies to be funded.
I would guess that its mostly a result of him not looking agian since 1997. He probably wrote the book then and hasn't done a lot of follow up research on the subjuct since.
Don't forget production costs, which are likely about $30 per unit. Also the retail markup which is probably between $25 and $50, means that microsoft only collects about $150 to $175 per unit before unit costs. This ignores advertising and development costs, which are probably pretty high per box since they were origianlly expecting to sell about a million more units.
O/T does your sig measure that in dollar value or just acres? If its just acres, then that is fine with me, I don't need any eastern montana farmland. Its only worth about $500 per acre. I would guess that dollar value would be more equitable. 30-40% of the population holding 95% of the land.
Almost all the consoles are sold at a loss in the begining of their life. Intial estimates were that Microsoft lost about $100 per unit on X-Boxes. (Remeber that retail markups are about 25%, and think about the cost of a cheap PIII system.) Not including any advertising costs, which are much higer than R&D costs on something made from PC components. However prices drop fairly rapidly. I recall seeing that Sony was making money on $99 PSXs. Licensing fees per game run in the $10 range for new games, I don't know how much they get on older games. On the company's old games I have seen estimates that profit per game is closer to $15. But all of the above are esitmates.
Actually this is quite common, and has led to the blockbuster model that is so popular to movies these days. Studio's get a very high percentage of the take in the first week, and it drops down in following weeks. I had heard that first week cuts were in tne 80-90% range, but after the fourth week it is well below 50%. If anyone knows please let me know. Movies like Titanic and LotR are very popular with theatre owners becuase they get a lot more of the take. Movies like Jurassic park are better for the studios.
On the droids, while the driod's names and the fact that the droids don't remember the people is rather implausable, I would guess that they are more ubiquitous than we imagine, more like cars. While you certainly remember all the makes and models of cars you have owned, unless it had a very unique dent pattern or model (if its a ferrari you are much more likely to see only a few in your life), I challenge you to recognise your exact car in 40 years.
There aren't too many traditional fab companies. AMD, Intel, Texas Insturments, Motorola, and SiS are the only ones that I know of that use their own fabs for most of their products. Some of the others do some foundry stuff and some internal stuff. Almost everyone else is strictly foundry. By the way the old Zilog fab in Nampa, Idaho is for sale. I would guess that $30-$40 million will get you a fully functional.35u process fab. You could offer them $25 million to start, if you were feeling cheap.
Thats econimic profit. Economic profit includes opportunity costs. Oportunity costs are what you would making at your next best alternative. In most cases for businesses its aproxamitly the company's cost of capital. For individuals its the best job they could get excluding the one they are doing.
MCI was and still is a trucking firm. The telecomm arm was designed to save costs on controlling the trucks. It was only later that Ma Bell opposed it sparking the anti-trust suit.
Re:Id like to see him try to stor the elements....
on
Periodic Table Table
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· Score: 1
Ironically, almost all parts of the potato plant, including the eyes, are posionous. The plant being a relative of the nightshade. One of the earliest importers of potato plants to Europe's servants ate the red berries on a plant and nearly died.
I have a Kayak XA (it was cheap) and an older 735, and both have extremly solid construction. The 735 is very rigid, and fully tool less, of course it had to support a 19" monitor in the mid 1990s. That thing must weigh 50kg. It has a video card the size of a miniATX mainboard.
The Kayak is well built and well cooled, and with two PII 266 processors its fast enough for my daily needs. Email, surfing, office, and the occasional game of quake. I have no complaints about either system.
Actually DoCoMo offers the genuine article good streaming video on your cell. I think data speeds are between 200 and 400 kb/s, with peaks in the 2mb/s. The main complaint I have heard is that the handsets get rather warm. And the initial rates were pretty steep, but I don't have any idea what voice rates were in Tokyo before their 3G network came in. DoCoMo is using a real 3G network. I believe its CDMA2000, but I'm not 100% sure. Verizon and PCS incidentally are using an intermediate step known as 1xRTT. Its similar in speed to GPRS. Although I guess classified as 3G, assuming its profitable I believe Verizion is planning an upgrade to CDMA 2000. Or atleast Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia hope they will.
While I don't doubt you, but can't substantiate, most of the renessance was simply Europe rediscovering the learning of the Greek and Roman ages. They had largely forgotten these things during the middle ages. Arabic cultures kept the knowledge, and it wasn't until after the crusades that the two cultures began communicating, allowing the knowledge to return to western civilization.
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To have that kind of improvemnet seems to indicate either much more productive ore or better utilization of their fixed costs. Its probably both, the ore is more productive, I didn't see this in the article, but it was implied, as well as better use of their fixed expenses (the mine, heavy equipment, administrative department) which all have to be paid for even if little gold is pulled out of the ground.
I wasn't as impressed when I first saw mouse pointer activation, but after using it for a while I get almost as annoyed when windows don't auto activate on mouse overs, as when I grab a non reverse polish calculator.
About the pension funds, they actually do. They invest some of their money in venture capital and generally are quite successful. The highest exposure is about 5%. Most keep at least 30-50% in bonds, which did quite well. Asset allocations are done according to modern portfolio theory, which seems strange but begins to make senese when you think of it, what seems counter intuitive is that adding a very risky asset can lower overall risk if the movements in price do not move with the assets you currently own. Pensions had a rough year last year but I would be surprised if they didn't generally make money over the past 2 years. I happen to work for one. Also in most cases, pensions that are invested in VC would be defined benefit plans, so the company and the government is on the hook. The fund simply allows the company to invest some of the cost now, so they don't have to contribute as much in the future.
Either could probably purchase the rest of the company for much less than starting a new one. They could start a new company to buy the assets, but neither is in great shape to make a purchase like that. KPN was looking at liquidity options, a nice euphimisim for were spending more cash than we bring in and need some ways to improve this situation, and Qwest is facing pretty significant debt repayments. AT&T is considering a purchase, but I don't think anyone is expecting these assets to be worth much for several years.
There are possible penalties involved with fingering a GeForce at Best buy. While there are occasional busts of distributors of software its pretty rare for individual users to get busted. Also it takes a whole lot less effort, so he can get back to his fps.
Network effects are a pretty interesting market failure (well at least to economists, I suppose others could seem them as about as exciting as watching paint dry) they are specifically any item that gets more valuable to users as more people use it. It is one of the only true barriers to entry which are costs that the initial user doesn't have to pay that later competitors do. This is the reason all the dpt coms wretched cash trying to gain first mover advantages from network effects. It turned out that for most of them there weren't any network effects and the money was largely wasted. We'll probably be living down those mistakes for a decade in some sectors (telecommunications).
More specifically the interesting cases are items that are natrual monopolies, operating systems and telecommunications networks are the best examples. It is prohibitavly expensive to build another telephone network since you will not make enough if you only get 50% of the customers (I made that up on the spot), however two more competitive firms would be much less profitable than one single firm and consumers would be worse off imagine if you couldn't call half the phones out there.
Operating systems are another less clear example, the more developers and users an OS has the more valuable it is since there are more useful applications, which are made because of the larger userbase. Other pieces of software are influenced by network effects, applications that allow additional application functionality browsers, appication servers, some servers, etc. and p2p because the draw is in how much stuff is there, think about how much simpler things were when Napster was the network over ftp/irc/usnet.
Other examples are standards, which become more valuable as more people sign on to the standard. This is why Rambus' actions were reviled by JDEC.
For most industries you are right people choose the first solution that works and gets their attention, however in industries with high levels of network effects the first company there usually has the advantage.
I'm not really a fan of Qwest, but haven't had any problems with their services yet. But I believe that its not technologically possible to only provide DSL without phone service. Someone more knowledgable is welcome to inform me otherwise but as I understand it, DSL connections simply divide the frequencies used into data and voice, thats why you have to put low pass filters on your regular phone lines.
Two of the early anti trust successes were American Tabacco and Great A &P Tea company (Grocery Stores).
Actually the rules for things like this are much stricter in the house, since its larger there are more rules about how debate will work on each specific bill. One of the committees in the house gets to set the rules for how debate will work, so when they don't want to have a bill go to debate that committee simply doesn't assign it a rule. Like all other systems politics is a game, and there are ways that things work. Controversial stuff generally gets added to big pork laden bills like farm bills or defence bills. Stuff that the majority doesn't want to be seen debating or voting against dies in comittee. And things that either party wants to campaign on gets debated on for a long time, allowing many opportunities for soundbytes, both for and against. All in all I believe its a pretty good system, most of the time the laws that the country wants get passed, but the means that it takes to get there can be quite annoying.
I do believe that the Swiss while not quite there are getting close. I seem to recall their earliest contigous democratic government streching back to about 1200 AD (CE if you're Microsoft).
I would agree that the article is pointed toward VCs. They are expected to return 15-20% annually for their investors. They do this by maintaining a large portfolio of companies, because they beleive that they can't predict success. However, becuase they expect a 90% failure rate, they need to find companies that have the promise of returning almost 100% per year if they are the 10% that succeed. (This made them quite a bit of money when IPO demand shot up during the bubble. Now they had more like 30% go public, or get purchased, succeed in VC terms).
The author's point seems to be that if you apply these principles you would need much lower return rates for all your comapnies because more of them would succeed, my calcs are closer to 50% annual return which would allow that many more companies to be funded.
I would guess that its mostly a result of him not looking agian since 1997. He probably wrote the book then and hasn't done a lot of follow up research on the subjuct since.
Don't forget production costs, which are likely about $30 per unit. Also the retail markup which is probably between $25 and $50, means that microsoft only collects about $150 to $175 per unit before unit costs. This ignores advertising and development costs, which are probably pretty high per box since they were origianlly expecting to sell about a million more units.
O/T does your sig measure that in dollar value or just acres? If its just acres, then that is fine with me, I don't need any eastern montana farmland. Its only worth about $500 per acre. I would guess that dollar value would be more equitable. 30-40% of the population holding 95% of the land.
Almost all the consoles are sold at a loss in the begining of their life. Intial estimates were that Microsoft lost about $100 per unit on X-Boxes. (Remeber that retail markups are about 25%, and think about the cost of a cheap PIII system.) Not including any advertising costs, which are much higer than R&D costs on something made from PC components. However prices drop fairly rapidly. I recall seeing that Sony was making money on $99 PSXs. Licensing fees per game run in the $10 range for new games, I don't know how much they get on older games. On the company's old games I have seen estimates that profit per game is closer to $15. But all of the above are esitmates.
Actually this is quite common, and has led to the blockbuster model that is so popular to movies these days. Studio's get a very high percentage of the take in the first week, and it drops down in following weeks. I had heard that first week cuts were in tne 80-90% range, but after the fourth week it is well below 50%. If anyone knows please let me know. Movies like Titanic and LotR are very popular with theatre owners becuase they get a lot more of the take. Movies like Jurassic park are better for the studios.
On the droids, while the driod's names and the fact that the droids don't remember the people is rather implausable, I would guess that they are more ubiquitous than we imagine, more like cars. While you certainly remember all the makes and models of cars you have owned, unless it had a very unique dent pattern or model (if its a ferrari you are much more likely to see only a few in your life), I challenge you to recognise your exact car in 40 years.
I've always thougt that the Waterworld would make an excellent open ended rpg. That was the one thought that kept me watching the boring movie.
There aren't too many traditional fab companies. AMD, Intel, Texas Insturments, Motorola, and SiS are the only ones that I know of that use their own fabs for most of their products. Some of the others do some foundry stuff and some internal stuff. Almost everyone else is strictly foundry. By the way the old Zilog fab in Nampa, Idaho is for sale. I would guess that $30-$40 million will get you a fully functional .35u process fab. You could offer them $25 million to start, if you were feeling cheap.
Thats econimic profit. Economic profit includes opportunity costs. Oportunity costs are what you would making at your next best alternative. In most cases for businesses its aproxamitly the company's cost of capital. For individuals its the best job they could get excluding the one they are doing.
MCI was and still is a trucking firm. The telecomm arm was designed to save costs on controlling the trucks. It was only later that Ma Bell opposed it sparking the anti-trust suit.
Ironically, almost all parts of the potato plant, including the eyes, are posionous. The plant being a relative of the nightshade. One of the earliest importers of potato plants to Europe's servants ate the red berries on a plant and nearly died.
I have a Kayak XA (it was cheap) and an older 735, and both have extremly solid construction. The 735 is very rigid, and fully tool less, of course it had to support a 19" monitor in the mid 1990s. That thing must weigh 50kg. It has a video card the size of a miniATX mainboard. The Kayak is well built and well cooled, and with two PII 266 processors its fast enough for my daily needs. Email, surfing, office, and the occasional game of quake. I have no complaints about either system.
Actually DoCoMo offers the genuine article good streaming video on your cell. I think data speeds are between 200 and 400 kb/s, with peaks in the 2mb/s. The main complaint I have heard is that the handsets get rather warm. And the initial rates were pretty steep, but I don't have any idea what voice rates were in Tokyo before their 3G network came in. DoCoMo is using a real 3G network. I believe its CDMA2000, but I'm not 100% sure. Verizon and PCS incidentally are using an intermediate step known as 1xRTT. Its similar in speed to GPRS. Although I guess classified as 3G, assuming its profitable I believe Verizion is planning an upgrade to CDMA 2000. Or atleast Lucent, Nortel, Motorola, Ericsson, and Nokia hope they will.
While I don't doubt you, but can't substantiate, most of the renessance was simply Europe rediscovering the learning of the Greek and Roman ages. They had largely forgotten these things during the middle ages. Arabic cultures kept the knowledge, and it wasn't until after the crusades that the two cultures began communicating, allowing the knowledge to return to western civilization.