The only comment I'd make is that MS didn't recently realize that owning the standard was king, they most likely knew it all along (or figured it out sometime around the DOS/IBM deal. Most of the damning evidence from the anti-trust trial was executive statements expressing fear that they would loose ownership of several standards in the Internet era and so they were killing the obvious usurper while they pulled together an internet strategy.
Actually it's that the professional middle class man wants/has access to professional middle class women. Society being what it is, most people expect a women to increase her standard of living in a marriage/long term relationship. To accomplish this requires a much bigger hurdle for the young men. That and higher divorce rates by 30-40 year olds means more competition for 20-30 year old women, than a generation ago.
The number one factor in number of offspring a woman will have over her lifetime is her level of education (and they are inversly correllated. The leveling of the corporate world has resulted in women becoming far more selective in their mates.
The guy typically doesn't do the mental calculus of doing right by a family, at a certain level he gets picked by a woman who expects him to do right by the family.
I use scottrade (7+1.25 per k). Given the $0.15 spread, if the options go to $0.50 which (would take roughly a $2 drop in the stock price using a basic black scholes model-implied vol of 36%), and ignoring the $7 upfront trading fee but maintaining the 15 cent spread you would make $7.5 per contract before you subtract the $14 for the round trip trade--that is a healthy percentage gain of about 30%. I'd rather buy the Jan 45 put at $600, and still have a decent gain after fees if the move is $1 instead of $2 or more. My history has been that I'm decent at forecasting direction of moves, but not as good at forecasting the magnitude of the move.
Plus spreads tend to widen on the out of the money puts when the stock makes a quick move in any direction. It always sucks when you get everything right (correctly forecast the direction and magnitude of the move only to have most of your gain eaten by the spread widening from $0.15 to $0.25 because the option traders are worried about the recent move.
Typically the extra trading costs for puts (very wide spreads and higher than stock commissions) would require a move like that to just break even. If you think you know where the stock is going in the short run, buy some deep in the money puts (judging from the strike and quote, I'd suggest some Jan 55-60 puts. That will require extra upfront capital, but you'll basically return $1 for each dollar the stock price moves (up and down).
Business Week is the least capitalistic of all the business magazines. Their core reader is the useless MBA whose sole function is gumming up the works while collecting one more paycheck toward retirement. You can disagree with the Economist and WSJ but at a minimum they are anti-government intervention in all ways (good and bad for business). I generally find myself in agreement with the libertarian ethos of those, but can't stand the editorial bent of businessweek. Businessweek is pro corporate welfare but anti government intervention in anything that might hurt business.
They are protectionistic, rearview focused, and generally useless for even lining a bird cage. The sole redeeming feature is that they are pretty good at calling the top of a mainia (by focusing on why you should be there now).
It has always surprised me that the music companies blessed Apple's entry into music, when the most basic sales calculations were demonstrating that the iPod was the thing that legitimized the public use of shared music for a large subset of mainstream consumers.
The whole staff is 28 or 29 people including the secretaries and accountants. Their might be a few analysts (probably no quants), but I'd be amazed if there were more than 5. If Munger is still alive or they get on naming an heir apparent (watch the GEICO chief) they wont take as big a hit. Sure See's and McLane and the other subsidiaries aren't going to up and fold if he died but who ends up investing the proceeds once he's gone will have a tremendous impact on future returns.
The NASDAQ 100 membership requirements are easy to remember you have to be:
a. listed on the NASDAQ (duh)
b. one of the largest 100 companies in a
c. not a finanical company (bank or insurance)
d. meet these qualifications on a quarterly or semi-annual update to the membership period (this reduces flip floping between 100 and 101 on a daily basis).
The Russell indices are also managed in this manner (primarily by size). DOW and S&P are chosen by comittees (S&P has some elegibility requirements as well). MSCI is also chosen by a comittee but it might have some automated scoring based on quantitative factors. Other indexes were mostly recently created to cash in on ETF licensing (a pretty lucrative business for the investment of a computer and a year's subscription to the wire services).
Yeah but what good is a review if you cannot find the model that was expected to last 10-15 years, and the model's within the brand have considerable volatilty of reliability?
Wiki means fast (name came from the wiki-wiki bus at the Honolulu airport), which it is. Just compare the Paris riots entry with any other encyclopedia.
I decided after reading the research of the major financial houses and the independant smaller shops that most of the time, I'd rather have the advice of a known crooked expert than a straight forward idiot.
Same thing happened to my folks and most major appliances (washer dryer/dishwasher/fridge&freezer). They'd find one they liked go in to ask and find the company had discontinued it months ago with a new product. CR needs to move into the modern era of 6 mo product launch cycles.
Actually eating (drinking?) it is relativly safe, the vapors are what kills you. I was once prescribed as a laxitive. You wouldn't want a cup of it sitting by on your nightstand open and vaporising slowly.
Contrasted with shares in Google, Dow Jones, Ford, News Corp, Comcast, or any of the other companies that have a majority owner with supervoting shares. Google in particular you basically bought a whole lot of nothing--the founders retain full control of the company, it doesn't provide any real benefit to shareholder directly from google, and the real assets are probably worth a small fraction 1/20th or so of the share price. There's a ton of value in the ideas of Google, but there aren't many real assets that back that value up. Google can't up and quit and leave you with nothing (you'd probably get $5-10) but if the three founders quit and take their PhDs to go play with rockets or something, there wouldn't be a whole lot left to Google.
Yeah, and native resolution is the highest resolution an LCD screen can generally do, lower resolutions are interpolated which as you pointed out looks like crap most of the time.
This review, this one (over in the pros), and this one (way down in going wider) all note the resolution, typically in the first line. If it were interpolated all three reviews wouldn't rave about the displays unless Mikey was passing out a good chunk of his fortune. These are 15.4" widescreen screens with a native resolution of 1920x1200. "They are real, and they are spectacular!"
Since they are laptop screens they go pretty cheap on ebay when someone breaks their computer but the screen is in good shape.
I think that usage follows American participation in wars, (we finally see the necessity of fighting and mobilize almost every resource possible to bring to the fight). It's that mobilization that is intended to be connotated, not the actual battle. For a decent portion of the American populace that was what a war meant. I'm not sure what % of our population was directly involved (likely to get shot at) in WWI or WWII but would guess the low single digits.
The decision makers of America's power years 50s-early 70s would have recalled the massive effort expended during world war two and were trying to tap that for their pet project (poverty, drug use, etc). After that we never really fought in a war that had significant impacts beyond the theater, so most of the US has forgotten that war is hell. Our modern wars have cost very little compared to either world war or the older European wars in terms of men, resources, and sacrifices on the homefront.
Ha ha implies a more spiteful tone in slang. It's more frequently used in the style of the Simpson's Nelson rather than a joyful expression of laughter. Since typed messages are difficult to add the context, ha ha gets relagated to sarcastic or spiteful laughter online.
I believe it was the Russians (might have been the Germans) who expermented with trinary transistors, they ended up finding that it was very difficult to accuratly tell high from middle.
That's pretty funny. Interestingly, personally testing the new razor and blade was one of the requirements of the P&G CEO before completing the purchase of Gillette.
This is civil and not criminal court, most civil settlements include a term that while I'll grant you a concession provided that that concession does not imply that I did anything wrong, just that you were impacted. The alternative would be if the wronged party demands an apology and is willing to reduce the size of the other concessions to get that apology. The closest thing would be a true accident where a tree or hedge was in the line of sight of an intersection and two cars collide, one party may pay a portion of the damage of the other's car, even if they were not driving in a negligent manner.
That was the issue raised in the last line of the summary, normally in this type of case, payments are made to the company. However in this case, since Ellison owns ~25% of Oracle, he would benefit disproportinatly (and Oracle would just buy more treasury bills with the money). It is more difficult to allocate the money to all the individual minority holders who were wronged.
I see a large number of folk who speculate that Wikipedia contains a larger number of errors than competing information sources, but have never seen anything to back it up. It would be interesting to se an actual comparison of errors found in a large (say 500-1000) sampling of articles from Wiki, a major daily newspaper, and a print encyclopedia. It will probably be necessary to Wiki to have an independant source make this type of comparison since the others should have less need to defend their repuations.
The trick with any information source is that the author may be biased (and if we knew the information source would be useless to us in the first place). The way most people evaluate sources is to look at information on subjects they understand well (their profession, hobbies, etc) and judge the level of bias to apply to other subjects. Regarding the subjects I understand relativly well (financial topics) wikipedia as as good or better than most of the authoritative texts. I also appreciate having a single reference for current events (their Paris Riots page was excellent combining maps of impacted areas and narratives that were only available in many smaller articles elsewhere all of which was available in near real time). The speed of information is the major strength of Wiki, and I'll happily trade a certian portion of accuracy for speed.
Several industries have been greatly impacted by the several order of magnitude reduction in the cost of spreading information that the internet allows, it's too bad that the preferred response to this is to fight and increase barriers rather than use the changes to improve the industries.
The only comment I'd make is that MS didn't recently realize that owning the standard was king, they most likely knew it all along (or figured it out sometime around the DOS/IBM deal. Most of the damning evidence from the anti-trust trial was executive statements expressing fear that they would loose ownership of several standards in the Internet era and so they were killing the obvious usurper while they pulled together an internet strategy.
Actually it's that the professional middle class man wants/has access to professional middle class women. Society being what it is, most people expect a women to increase her standard of living in a marriage/long term relationship. To accomplish this requires a much bigger hurdle for the young men. That and higher divorce rates by 30-40 year olds means more competition for 20-30 year old women, than a generation ago.
The number one factor in number of offspring a woman will have over her lifetime is her level of education (and they are inversly correllated. The leveling of the corporate world has resulted in women becoming far more selective in their mates.
The guy typically doesn't do the mental calculus of doing right by a family, at a certain level he gets picked by a woman who expects him to do right by the family.
I use scottrade (7+1.25 per k). Given the $0.15 spread, if the options go to $0.50 which (would take roughly a $2 drop in the stock price using a basic black scholes model-implied vol of 36%), and ignoring the $7 upfront trading fee but maintaining the 15 cent spread you would make $7.5 per contract before you subtract the $14 for the round trip trade--that is a healthy percentage gain of about 30%. I'd rather buy the Jan 45 put at $600, and still have a decent gain after fees if the move is $1 instead of $2 or more. My history has been that I'm decent at forecasting direction of moves, but not as good at forecasting the magnitude of the move.
Plus spreads tend to widen on the out of the money puts when the stock makes a quick move in any direction. It always sucks when you get everything right (correctly forecast the direction and magnitude of the move only to have most of your gain eaten by the spread widening from $0.15 to $0.25 because the option traders are worried about the recent move.
I guess that's what 10 years of the internet will do for a guy.
I'm glad someone got the joke.
Typically the extra trading costs for puts (very wide spreads and higher than stock commissions) would require a move like that to just break even. If you think you know where the stock is going in the short run, buy some deep in the money puts (judging from the strike and quote, I'd suggest some Jan 55-60 puts. That will require extra upfront capital, but you'll basically return $1 for each dollar the stock price moves (up and down).
It would not be possible for your prediction to come true as the women would be unable to do much more than hum your praises. : )
Business Week is the least capitalistic of all the business magazines. Their core reader is the useless MBA whose sole function is gumming up the works while collecting one more paycheck toward retirement. You can disagree with the Economist and WSJ but at a minimum they are anti-government intervention in all ways (good and bad for business). I generally find myself in agreement with the libertarian ethos of those, but can't stand the editorial bent of businessweek. Businessweek is pro corporate welfare but anti government intervention in anything that might hurt business.
They are protectionistic, rearview focused, and generally useless for even lining a bird cage. The sole redeeming feature is that they are pretty good at calling the top of a mainia (by focusing on why you should be there now).
It has always surprised me that the music companies blessed Apple's entry into music, when the most basic sales calculations were demonstrating that the iPod was the thing that legitimized the public use of shared music for a large subset of mainstream consumers.
The whole staff is 28 or 29 people including the secretaries and accountants. Their might be a few analysts (probably no quants), but I'd be amazed if there were more than 5. If Munger is still alive or they get on naming an heir apparent (watch the GEICO chief) they wont take as big a hit. Sure See's and McLane and the other subsidiaries aren't going to up and fold if he died but who ends up investing the proceeds once he's gone will have a tremendous impact on future returns.
The NASDAQ 100 membership requirements are easy to remember you have to be: a. listed on the NASDAQ (duh) b. one of the largest 100 companies in a c. not a finanical company (bank or insurance) d. meet these qualifications on a quarterly or semi-annual update to the membership period (this reduces flip floping between 100 and 101 on a daily basis). The Russell indices are also managed in this manner (primarily by size). DOW and S&P are chosen by comittees (S&P has some elegibility requirements as well). MSCI is also chosen by a comittee but it might have some automated scoring based on quantitative factors. Other indexes were mostly recently created to cash in on ETF licensing (a pretty lucrative business for the investment of a computer and a year's subscription to the wire services).
Yeah but what good is a review if you cannot find the model that was expected to last 10-15 years, and the model's within the brand have considerable volatilty of reliability?
Wiki means fast (name came from the wiki-wiki bus at the Honolulu airport), which it is. Just compare the Paris riots entry with any other encyclopedia.
I decided after reading the research of the major financial houses and the independant smaller shops that most of the time, I'd rather have the advice of a known crooked expert than a straight forward idiot.
Same thing happened to my folks and most major appliances (washer dryer/dishwasher/fridge&freezer). They'd find one they liked go in to ask and find the company had discontinued it months ago with a new product. CR needs to move into the modern era of 6 mo product launch cycles.
Actually eating (drinking?) it is relativly safe, the vapors are what kills you. I was once prescribed as a laxitive. You wouldn't want a cup of it sitting by on your nightstand open and vaporising slowly.
Contrasted with shares in Google, Dow Jones, Ford, News Corp, Comcast, or any of the other companies that have a majority owner with supervoting shares. Google in particular you basically bought a whole lot of nothing--the founders retain full control of the company, it doesn't provide any real benefit to shareholder directly from google, and the real assets are probably worth a small fraction 1/20th or so of the share price. There's a ton of value in the ideas of Google, but there aren't many real assets that back that value up. Google can't up and quit and leave you with nothing (you'd probably get $5-10) but if the three founders quit and take their PhDs to go play with rockets or something, there wouldn't be a whole lot left to Google.
Yeah, and native resolution is the highest resolution an LCD screen can generally do, lower resolutions are interpolated which as you pointed out looks like crap most of the time. This review, this one (over in the pros), and this one (way down in going wider) all note the resolution, typically in the first line. If it were interpolated all three reviews wouldn't rave about the displays unless Mikey was passing out a good chunk of his fortune. These are 15.4" widescreen screens with a native resolution of 1920x1200. "They are real, and they are spectacular!"
Since they are laptop screens they go pretty cheap on ebay when someone breaks their computer but the screen is in good shape.
From the dell website (Inspiron 6000):
15.4" Widescreen TFT Active-Matrix Display
Available Resolutions:
WXGA (1280 x 800)
WSXGA+ UltraSharpTM (1680 x 1050)
WUXGA UltraSharpTM (1920 x 1200)
UltraSharpTM enables wider viewing angles and improved contrast ratio for brighter, more vivid colors.
I think that usage follows American participation in wars, (we finally see the necessity of fighting and mobilize almost every resource possible to bring to the fight). It's that mobilization that is intended to be connotated, not the actual battle. For a decent portion of the American populace that was what a war meant. I'm not sure what % of our population was directly involved (likely to get shot at) in WWI or WWII but would guess the low single digits. The decision makers of America's power years 50s-early 70s would have recalled the massive effort expended during world war two and were trying to tap that for their pet project (poverty, drug use, etc). After that we never really fought in a war that had significant impacts beyond the theater, so most of the US has forgotten that war is hell. Our modern wars have cost very little compared to either world war or the older European wars in terms of men, resources, and sacrifices on the homefront.
Ha ha implies a more spiteful tone in slang. It's more frequently used in the style of the Simpson's Nelson rather than a joyful expression of laughter. Since typed messages are difficult to add the context, ha ha gets relagated to sarcastic or spiteful laughter online.
I believe it was the Russians (might have been the Germans) who expermented with trinary transistors, they ended up finding that it was very difficult to accuratly tell high from middle.
That's pretty funny. Interestingly, personally testing the new razor and blade was one of the requirements of the P&G CEO before completing the purchase of Gillette.
This is civil and not criminal court, most civil settlements include a term that while I'll grant you a concession provided that that concession does not imply that I did anything wrong, just that you were impacted. The alternative would be if the wronged party demands an apology and is willing to reduce the size of the other concessions to get that apology. The closest thing would be a true accident where a tree or hedge was in the line of sight of an intersection and two cars collide, one party may pay a portion of the damage of the other's car, even if they were not driving in a negligent manner.
That was the issue raised in the last line of the summary, normally in this type of case, payments are made to the company. However in this case, since Ellison owns ~25% of Oracle, he would benefit disproportinatly (and Oracle would just buy more treasury bills with the money). It is more difficult to allocate the money to all the individual minority holders who were wronged.
I see a large number of folk who speculate that Wikipedia contains a larger number of errors than competing information sources, but have never seen anything to back it up. It would be interesting to se an actual comparison of errors found in a large (say 500-1000) sampling of articles from Wiki, a major daily newspaper, and a print encyclopedia. It will probably be necessary to Wiki to have an independant source make this type of comparison since the others should have less need to defend their repuations.
The trick with any information source is that the author may be biased (and if we knew the information source would be useless to us in the first place). The way most people evaluate sources is to look at information on subjects they understand well (their profession, hobbies, etc) and judge the level of bias to apply to other subjects. Regarding the subjects I understand relativly well (financial topics) wikipedia as as good or better than most of the authoritative texts. I also appreciate having a single reference for current events (their Paris Riots page was excellent combining maps of impacted areas and narratives that were only available in many smaller articles elsewhere all of which was available in near real time). The speed of information is the major strength of Wiki, and I'll happily trade a certian portion of accuracy for speed.
Several industries have been greatly impacted by the several order of magnitude reduction in the cost of spreading information that the internet allows, it's too bad that the preferred response to this is to fight and increase barriers rather than use the changes to improve the industries.