All the television moguls are pretty worried that ratings of 18-40 year old males dropped dramatically this year and their bright young advisors told them video games are to blame. They currently deliver a product that only has value if people (preferably young people) watch it, if something else is taking up that time, they want their fingers in that pot as soon as possible. Remember these guys became moguls by purchasing cable networks in the 1980s and 1990s when they were still cheap, they don't want some one else (video games) doing to them what they did to the broad cast industry 10-20 years ago.
I'm mulling one now. While I fit pretty squarely in the target market for a nice PC, I'm increasingly finding myself increasingly intrigued by something like this. As I my duron system gets long of tooth, I find myself doing almost all gaming on my XBox, so gaming is a less important feature to a new system. I'd like to do web surfing, office work, music, and movies on a PC. And since i keep the computer in the living room I'd like it to be small. The duron system is just under a cubic foot and fits but is large in the entertainment center. While I'd already have an order in if this were a G5 the only remaining choice for me is to get a 20" iMac or one of these and a flat panel.
I just can't justify shelling out a whole lot of cash on gaming components for games that I find my self playing less and less frequently. The most common PC games I've been playing lately have been Diablo II and Dawn of War (which wouldn't run on the Mac).
That's too bad because the Supremacy seemed like the best of the three to be coverted to a movie. It had a more action based plot w/ less introspective periods that seemed easier to transfer to the silver screen. Plus it is rather topical with the rise of China and current distrust of the US government. If you've only seen the movies do yourself a favor and check out the books, they are quite interesting.
Sure, it's not aimed at the same market but the concern is that you miss the market you were aiming for originally. Take the clones for example, they were supposed to expand the total user base of Apple customers by offering cheap systems to Windows users, however they ended up taking more high value Apple customers than they added in new revenue from former PC users. Shareholders were concerned about this, how ever the ADD shareholders dropped that concern with the Ohh, shiney! results posted tonight. The lesson to learn from this is that many time the stock market is far too short sighted and you can use tendancy this to make profitable investments.
That combined with the concern that Apple will be selling $500 systems to the same people they were selling $1200 systems to without adding enough additional computers to offset the loss.
Perhaps they should house the whole thing in a white housing, and give it a catchy name? Ok, well the screen isn't exactly cheap, but they are pretty nice. Oh and you have to buy a faster processor to get one.
I think the price increase was for US games which typically sell for $50 at launch (although the price doesn't include any taxes). I'd guess you'll see a $60 dollar pricepoint for the biggest and best titles.
How can they accurately compare visual quality when the signal has been amplified 10 times and is split over several hundred feet of cable broadcasting from the crappy DVD player in the back.
I think it flows back to the basic mindset of a geek, we're generally exceedingly utilitarian. For proof go look at the old polls about CPU speed, and compare to the dates (most of us were running systems that were 3-5 years old, but in the comments would mention how the specific chip architecture, orverclocking, or other components (SCSI, cutting edge ATA technologies, video cards) more than offset the aging processors. Design that does not improve use in some way is wasted effort. Generally rationals are happy to pay up for quality (which probably means longer life or fewer hassles in operation), but don't care to pay for status or image.
You might look for a food co-op in your area they are a great way to buy most organic foods at wholesale (still not cheap but better than the markup). If you live near the country you might befriend a local farmer (or their kid) to have them grow you a few rows of organic food. You might not get veggie patties but you could get some of the nicest produce and grain you've had in some time. This is easier to do with animals (hormone free, grass fed and such) you could pay them a decent summer wage and get all your meat for less than the grocery store prices (I'm biased here as I paid for a portion of college by bottle feeding a few calves each summer and selling the meat for about $2.00/lb plus about $50 for the butcher.
Yeah but many people who have them hide em behind art or such. Why not get a CRT and put it in a bigger cubby to be hidden behind your art. Personally, when I put up a home theater the images will be provided by a projector.
I've always found it interesting that the really wealthy generally understates their wealth, while the middle class to moderatly wealthy flaunts their ability to spend.
Great list, I'd suggest adding a projector it's pretty sweet if you can display the images from either in game or the visualizations from your MP3 player on the big screen. Also, let folks play lots of games, seems like at every LAN party I was ever at, there was a big Quake (or the newest release from id) game and several smaller games (Tribes, HoM&M, Diablo etc) for those who hadn't mastered the twitch. You might throw a free lan party and rather than door prizes raise money with by raffling any donated hardware/software.
Excactly what the company is trying to avoid. Say you are given a contract to buy 1,000 shares of the company stock at the current price at anytime during the next ten years. That contract transfers a signficant amount of value to you (probably something like $10,000-although ) even though it grants you options that are at the money. Employees generally don't assign any value to that option contract even though it has real costs. This was fine when companies could justify to the SEC that options were not real costs, but now not so much.
You have according to the rules of business, which require that you book $10 in revenue upon the promise to pay (and any associated costs or profits with the original $10 promise). The reduction would then be a writedown on the promise to pay. That is the heart of the difference between cash accounting and accrual accounting. If you sign a mortgage, have you not effectively given up spending $800/month for the next 30 years? Could you simply walk into the bank and expect to not pay them (without selling the house and paying off the mortgage)? Accounting says that your promise to pay should be reflected on the day you sign the mortgage rather than each month when the payment is due.
The intrinsic value is currently 0, but the value of the right to buy stock at the current price is non-zero. The simplest model is binominal. Say you have a $10 stock with a 60% chance of rising 10% in each of two years, and a 40% chance of falling 10% in each year. So there is a 36% chance of the stock finishing at $12.10, a 48% chance of finishing at 9.9 and a 16% chance of the stock ending at $8. Your call is valuable at the end of two years if it finishes in the money. So there is a 36% chance that your call option will be worth $2.1 and a 54% chance it will be worth nothing, two years from now. This totals about $0.75 (which would be discounted back to the present at the risk free interest rate). Using a risk free rate of 5% givees a call premium of $0.68. Even though the current intrinsic value is $0 (right to buy $10 stock at $10 for the next two years).
Of course, this is a very simplistic model (two end states, and two years). The most common model (Black-Scholes) is the limit of the binomial model as time approaches 0. You can google around for black-scholes and see the model.
The IRS rules are very accurate, but do not square with the guiding principle of GAAP (try to keep costs and revenues in the most appropriate period). The IRS waits until an option is excercised and then counts the cost as the difference between strike and excercise price. So the IRS is not taxing companies based on options that were issued in the past, GAAP tries to keep options expense on options issued in the present, which is why the model must use uncertainty.
Finally, I fully agree that most companies that issue any signficant number of options will be issuing numbers with and without options expense (and guess which numbers analysts (and therefor investors) will be following. The other change that is likely to occur is a shift toward fewer numbers of share grants. Since most employees don't correctly value options (they also assume option value=intrinsic value) companies can greatly reduce dilution by granting employees shares that are equal in value to the options they would have granted. Say you were granting $10,000 in options that might have been for 1,000 shares, now companies will be more likely to grant 50 shares of stock (worth the same $10,000), but to the company the stock has considerably less dilution associated with it. The end of the accounting trickery (options have zero income statement effect, but stock grants have considerable effect) will bring about this change.
You are correct, I only looked at old solutions noticed that they used simple single letter replacement cyphers in prior puzzles, which was where the idea came from.
Depending on how difficult they make it, look for letters that occur often (names usually have a lot of vowels). You could use a letter histogram for that, there should be a very wide distribution of letter frequency. Then it is just a matter of spelling out the words by trial and error, until you recognise a name then plug those letters into other names, and you will eventually see more partial names to complete. Most likely the names are relativly famous, so that should be a clue. As far as relating the names to together, you are on your own.
Free to the consumer, but not to the cellular phone company. Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson could not build phones that are that filled with expensive components for carrier prices. The average global cell phone goes for ~$150, and that includes a ton of basic phones for pre paid plans. Check the price of a phone without a service plan (say to replace a damaged or lost phone). The average subsidy is probably $150 now. Of course there is no free lunch, you pay for the phone over the life of your contract.
An iPod cell phone would be good for carriers (exclusivity would help sign up customers), and good for Apple, half the cost is not paid directly by the consumer so you will sell considerably more.
AFAIK the debt declined under a republican congress (that lost a ton of political capital shutting down the government) and a very, very savy treasury secretary (who must laugh daily at the current leadership of the treasury). If anyone should get the credit for the balancing of the budget, I'd suggest that its Perot (who convinced almost a fifth of the population that skyrocketing deficits were a major problem. Unfortunatly at this point I'm cynical enough to think that the only difference between democrats and republicans is the programs that get the excess spending.
Why does Costco come to mind? They are in every respect considerably better off with employee relations than Wal-Mart. I don't believe they have many unions, but Costco's strategy is to save money by not retraining employees annually and they offer much better wages and benefits than other non-union retailers.
I heard an interesting opinion on the movie awards the other night and think its pretty apt to describe the attitude today. Game developers probably consider these awards to be fairly meaningless because most of best developers don't care what the rest of the world thinks of their game. This is true for most geeks, we care about other geeks opinions and generally a few close friends, but meaningless acolades are quite meaningless to our self image. This isn't true of the general actor, writer, producer etc. They thrive off tokens of appreciation (think Sally Field's Oscar speech). They work hard to get this form of recognition (just look at Jim Carey's last several movies). So becuase of all the fuss they put on the awards, others put a similar amount of fuss on the awards.
I did the home school thing for two years (mom was a teacher so I turned out ok, I think) and we had an area homeschool association that had weekly meetings, field trips, and got a sweet deal on bowling a the local bowling alley. It helped many of the kids who had been homeschooled with social interaction and we got much more detailed tours and field trips than I recall getting in public school (probably because there were about 25 kids and at least 5 parent/teachers so the newspaper was happy to let us go see the presses in operation, etc). You might google around your area to find any similar orgs.
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Pre-bush doggy style was popular now it's strictly missionary position that is getting all of them pregnant, so it's true.
All the television moguls are pretty worried that ratings of 18-40 year old males dropped dramatically this year and their bright young advisors told them video games are to blame. They currently deliver a product that only has value if people (preferably young people) watch it, if something else is taking up that time, they want their fingers in that pot as soon as possible. Remember these guys became moguls by purchasing cable networks in the 1980s and 1990s when they were still cheap, they don't want some one else (video games) doing to them what they did to the broad cast industry 10-20 years ago.
I'm mulling one now. While I fit pretty squarely in the target market for a nice PC, I'm increasingly finding myself increasingly intrigued by something like this. As I my duron system gets long of tooth, I find myself doing almost all gaming on my XBox, so gaming is a less important feature to a new system. I'd like to do web surfing, office work, music, and movies on a PC. And since i keep the computer in the living room I'd like it to be small. The duron system is just under a cubic foot and fits but is large in the entertainment center. While I'd already have an order in if this were a G5 the only remaining choice for me is to get a 20" iMac or one of these and a flat panel.
I just can't justify shelling out a whole lot of cash on gaming components for games that I find my self playing less and less frequently. The most common PC games I've been playing lately have been Diablo II and Dawn of War (which wouldn't run on the Mac).
That's too bad because the Supremacy seemed like the best of the three to be coverted to a movie. It had a more action based plot w/ less introspective periods that seemed easier to transfer to the silver screen. Plus it is rather topical with the rise of China and current distrust of the US government. If you've only seen the movies do yourself a favor and check out the books, they are quite interesting.
Sure, it's not aimed at the same market but the concern is that you miss the market you were aiming for originally. Take the clones for example, they were supposed to expand the total user base of Apple customers by offering cheap systems to Windows users, however they ended up taking more high value Apple customers than they added in new revenue from former PC users. Shareholders were concerned about this, how ever the ADD shareholders dropped that concern with the Ohh, shiney! results posted tonight. The lesson to learn from this is that many time the stock market is far too short sighted and you can use tendancy this to make profitable investments.
That combined with the concern that Apple will be selling $500 systems to the same people they were selling $1200 systems to without adding enough additional computers to offset the loss.
Perhaps they should house the whole thing in a white housing, and give it a catchy name? Ok, well the screen isn't exactly cheap, but they are pretty nice. Oh and you have to buy a faster processor to get one.
I think the price increase was for US games which typically sell for $50 at launch (although the price doesn't include any taxes). I'd guess you'll see a $60 dollar pricepoint for the biggest and best titles.
How can they accurately compare visual quality when the signal has been amplified 10 times and is split over several hundred feet of cable broadcasting from the crappy DVD player in the back.
I have to agree Apple cinema displays are the only thing that approches the hallowed ground that the SGI 1600SW occupies.
I think it flows back to the basic mindset of a geek, we're generally exceedingly utilitarian. For proof go look at the old polls about CPU speed, and compare to the dates (most of us were running systems that were 3-5 years old, but in the comments would mention how the specific chip architecture, orverclocking, or other components (SCSI, cutting edge ATA technologies, video cards) more than offset the aging processors. Design that does not improve use in some way is wasted effort. Generally rationals are happy to pay up for quality (which probably means longer life or fewer hassles in operation), but don't care to pay for status or image.
You might look for a food co-op in your area they are a great way to buy most organic foods at wholesale (still not cheap but better than the markup). If you live near the country you might befriend a local farmer (or their kid) to have them grow you a few rows of organic food. You might not get veggie patties but you could get some of the nicest produce and grain you've had in some time.
This is easier to do with animals (hormone free, grass fed and such) you could pay them a decent summer wage and get all your meat for less than the grocery store prices (I'm biased here as I paid for a portion of college by bottle feeding a few calves each summer and selling the meat for about $2.00/lb plus about $50 for the butcher.
Yeah but many people who have them hide em behind art or such. Why not get a CRT and put it in a bigger cubby to be hidden behind your art. Personally, when I put up a home theater the images will be provided by a projector.
I've always found it interesting that the really wealthy generally understates their wealth, while the middle class to moderatly wealthy flaunts their ability to spend.
Great list, I'd suggest adding a projector it's pretty sweet if you can display the images from either in game or the visualizations from your MP3 player on the big screen. Also, let folks play lots of games, seems like at every LAN party I was ever at, there was a big Quake (or the newest release from id) game and several smaller games (Tribes, HoM&M, Diablo etc) for those who hadn't mastered the twitch. You might throw a free lan party and rather than door prizes raise money with by raffling any donated hardware/software.
Excactly what the company is trying to avoid. Say you are given a contract to buy 1,000 shares of the company stock at the current price at anytime during the next ten years. That contract transfers a signficant amount of value to you (probably something like $10,000-although ) even though it grants you options that are at the money. Employees generally don't assign any value to that option contract even though it has real costs. This was fine when companies could justify to the SEC that options were not real costs, but now not so much.
You have according to the rules of business, which require that you book $10 in revenue upon the promise to pay (and any associated costs or profits with the original $10 promise). The reduction would then be a writedown on the promise to pay. That is the heart of the difference between cash accounting and accrual accounting. If you sign a mortgage, have you not effectively given up spending $800/month for the next 30 years? Could you simply walk into the bank and expect to not pay them (without selling the house and paying off the mortgage)? Accounting says that your promise to pay should be reflected on the day you sign the mortgage rather than each month when the payment is due.
The intrinsic value is currently 0, but the value of the right to buy stock at the current price is non-zero. The simplest model is binominal. Say you have a $10 stock with a 60% chance of rising 10% in each of two years, and a 40% chance of falling 10% in each year. So there is a 36% chance of the stock finishing at $12.10, a 48% chance of finishing at 9.9 and a 16% chance of the stock ending at $8. Your call is valuable at the end of two years if it finishes in the money. So there is a 36% chance that your call option will be worth $2.1 and a 54% chance it will be worth nothing, two years from now. This totals about $0.75 (which would be discounted back to the present at the risk free interest rate). Using a risk free rate of 5% givees a call premium of $0.68. Even though the current intrinsic value is $0 (right to buy $10 stock at $10 for the next two years).
Of course, this is a very simplistic model (two end states, and two years). The most common model (Black-Scholes) is the limit of the binomial model as time approaches 0. You can google around for black-scholes and see the model.
The IRS rules are very accurate, but do not square with the guiding principle of GAAP (try to keep costs and revenues in the most appropriate period). The IRS waits until an option is excercised and then counts the cost as the difference between strike and excercise price. So the IRS is not taxing companies based on options that were issued in the past, GAAP tries to keep options expense on options issued in the present, which is why the model must use uncertainty.
Finally, I fully agree that most companies that issue any signficant number of options will be issuing numbers with and without options expense (and guess which numbers analysts (and therefor investors) will be following. The other change that is likely to occur is a shift toward fewer numbers of share grants. Since most employees don't correctly value options (they also assume option value=intrinsic value) companies can greatly reduce dilution by granting employees shares that are equal in value to the options they would have granted. Say you were granting $10,000 in options that might have been for 1,000 shares, now companies will be more likely to grant 50 shares of stock (worth the same $10,000), but to the company the stock has considerably less dilution associated with it. The end of the accounting trickery (options have zero income statement effect, but stock grants have considerable effect) will bring about this change.
You are correct, I only looked at old solutions noticed that they used simple single letter replacement cyphers in prior puzzles, which was where the idea came from.
Depending on how difficult they make it, look for letters that occur often (names usually have a lot of vowels). You could use a letter histogram for that, there should be a very wide distribution of letter frequency. Then it is just a matter of spelling out the words by trial and error, until you recognise a name then plug those letters into other names, and you will eventually see more partial names to complete. Most likely the names are relativly famous, so that should be a clue. As far as relating the names to together, you are on your own.
Free to the consumer, but not to the cellular phone company. Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson could not build phones that are that filled with expensive components for carrier prices. The average global cell phone goes for ~$150, and that includes a ton of basic phones for pre paid plans. Check the price of a phone without a service plan (say to replace a damaged or lost phone). The average subsidy is probably $150 now. Of course there is no free lunch, you pay for the phone over the life of your contract.
An iPod cell phone would be good for carriers (exclusivity would help sign up customers), and good for Apple, half the cost is not paid directly by the consumer so you will sell considerably more.
AFAIK the debt declined under a republican congress (that lost a ton of political capital shutting down the government) and a very, very savy treasury secretary (who must laugh daily at the current leadership of the treasury). If anyone should get the credit for the balancing of the budget, I'd suggest that its Perot (who convinced almost a fifth of the population that skyrocketing deficits were a major problem. Unfortunatly at this point I'm cynical enough to think that the only difference between democrats and republicans is the programs that get the excess spending.
Why does Costco come to mind? They are in every respect considerably better off with employee relations than Wal-Mart. I don't believe they have many unions, but Costco's strategy is to save money by not retraining employees annually and they offer much better wages and benefits than other non-union retailers.
It used to be TNN (the nashville network) but then Viacom (or was it Time-Warner) bought it and made it the network for frat boys.
I heard an interesting opinion on the movie awards the other night and think its pretty apt to describe the attitude today. Game developers probably consider these awards to be fairly meaningless because most of best developers don't care what the rest of the world thinks of their game. This is true for most geeks, we care about other geeks opinions and generally a few close friends, but meaningless acolades are quite meaningless to our self image. This isn't true of the general actor, writer, producer etc. They thrive off tokens of appreciation (think Sally Field's Oscar speech). They work hard to get this form of recognition (just look at Jim Carey's last several movies). So becuase of all the fuss they put on the awards, others put a similar amount of fuss on the awards.
I did the home school thing for two years (mom was a teacher so I turned out ok, I think) and we had an area homeschool association that had weekly meetings, field trips, and got a sweet deal on bowling a the local bowling alley. It helped many of the kids who had been homeschooled with social interaction and we got much more detailed tours and field trips than I recall getting in public school (probably because there were about 25 kids and at least 5 parent/teachers so the newspaper was happy to let us go see the presses in operation, etc). You might google around your area to find any similar orgs.