Hero was quite good (although foreign), and I really enjoyed The Incredibles. I liked De-Lovely, and will try to catch the Aviator this weekend. I've heard good things about both Ray and Finding Neverland.
The point is there has been a ton of crap this year (as every year) but there have also been plenty of excellent movies released this year if you look beyond the some of the popcorn flicks. I'd hope that anyone who cares a whit about creativity would not hold a sequel to a remake of what was originally just a movie for some cool cats to hang together and make a little coin in the process.
First mover advantage is very important in markets with network effects (ebay is the best example I can think of) in which the first guy there has a very valuable advantage by getting there first. The advantage is conferred by lower costs than later competitors to create their business network because the network they create is more valuable the more users it has. Later competitors (think about how little business there was on uBid or Yahoo auctions) must spend more per user than the initial competitor as their network is less valuable. Once eBay got the first million users it became considerably more difficult for uBid to sign up their 10,000th in then ebay had signing up its 10,000th user.
MS dominance was a result of being a first mover, but not in the way you think. Bill and Co were the first to figure out that application development had network effects and as a result courted application developers better than their earlier peers.
Intel has considerably less first mover advantage, if anything they achieved some advantages in manufacturing which allowed them to cover any other missteps by out investing their compeitors in down cycles (when AMD is attempting to remain solevant in a big downturn, Intel is building the next gen fabs.
AOL has never been anything except a stock scam that continued until they bought half of a real company.
Oracle built a natural monopoly (as did Veritas, Intuit, BEA and almost every other software company) but first mover was not the reason. Software is a natural monopoly because there is only room for a single competitor (two competitors are less efficient than a single one in software development) being first made little difference being the first to get bigger than any compeitors was crucial. If anything I'd say Oracle is experiencing rents to Larry's pursuasive selling of relational databases better than any competitors, and they probably would have won even if Informix had been offering RDBMS first. Development costs are fixed so the company with the most users has a lower production cost (which is why MS is terrified of the increasing vibrance of the linux development community).
To many management gurus (stock shills) whove never heard of industrial organization attempt to use very specific technical terms to mean things they were never intended to mean. Pets.com was not operating in a business that conferred any advantage to the first mover (that couldn't be replicated as easily by a later competitor). Amazon got a tiny amount of first mover advantage from the free media coverage by being the only dotcom most media companies did stories on. Although there was no lack of coverage of B&N's entry to online marketing.
I believe in this case Oracle paying cash for Peoplesoft. Not that it will break the bank mind you, but it does delay share repurchases for Oracle for a year or two. Between the two companies there is ~$10.8 billion in cash and short term equivalents.
Vertical traditionally implies that a company is buying a supplier or customer. Think Dell/Intel. Horizontal means buying a direct competitor like HP/Compaq. Vertical mergers are intended to provide significant streamlining of an entire supply chain, horizontal mergers are intended to reduce overhead costs (removal of one CEO, many accountants managers and such) while not cutting output. Most mergers are a mix of the two as most companies are big enough to compete with many of their suppliers.
The final type of merger that isn't used much anymore is a diversification/conglomeration merger where a company buys an unrelated business like MS buying an auto company or something. These can be useful for diversification (look at AOL whose shareholders got half of a real media company) but are rarely good for owners of either company.
Software is a bit tricky but I'd call this more of a horizontal merger a true vertical merger in software would be something like EA buying that development tools company (was it Radware?) or something similar.
One thing I've found about many geeks is that they love new toys, but they are exceedingly adept at streeching life from almost everything. If anything I'd say a tech fetish isn't a good sign of geekdom.
Just a quick FYI, but outside of the blue states NASCAR is one of the most popular activities in the area. While the millions of people who enjoy the store may not mean a hill of beans to you, they are generally the target market for NEXTEL (who happens to have the highest fees and lowest churn in the industry) so they must be doing something at least a little bit right. Also they are almost as profitable (per sub) as Verizon (who carries a tremendous advantage because of its size).
In the US we have a smaller differentiation. US numbers are 10 digits if you ignore the 1 country code. The first three numbers make up an area code which usually include a city (NY now has two LA might have two also) but generally they encompass a small region. Mobile and fixed lines share an area code. The next three numbers are for an exchange and are generally consistent within cities and towns (if you are in a small town you all have the same three numbers but the next town over will have a differeent set of three numbers) mobile numbers use a different set of 3 exchange numbers.
With regard to billing, from a fixed line, we have free local calling based on what is called a LATA which generally coveres an entire town, so you get free calls to your entire town from a fixed line. From a fixed line you do not pay for recieving a call.
Mobile calls are priced based on accessing the network either send or recieve, and the differentiator is time. During business hours mobile plans generally have a fixed number of minutes of calling (say 200-1000 per month) to send and recieve calls, after hours and on weekends most plans sold today allow either unlimited or enough minutes to be unlimited for most people.
It's my understanding that the big differences between Europe and US telecom are calling party pays, higher pop density, and the US had higher fixed line penetration prior to the development of wireless telecom which is why we have lagged Europe in mobile penetration (even though generally the larger number of carriers has resulted in considerably cheaper mobile service in the US. We're only at about 50% penetration of mobile phones.
If anything, in a black market you would get more for your yuan not less. They have had to buy lots of US bonds to keep the rate fixed. If you refinanced this year you can thank the Chinese gov't for your cheap mortgage.
Why couldn't a semi rotating mirror (think of an extruded parabola with the pipe continuing down the foci of each individual parabola) focus light on a black pipe containing water and generate electricity from the Carnot cycle?
The best security scheme I've ever heard of had no rules about password creation/maintenance. They just ran Jack the Ripper and possibly a brute forcing program against everyones password. If you got hacked you lost your account.
I'd suggest that one of the best lessons a parent can give children is fiscal responsibility through a regular allowance. I'm not sure if a 13 year old is ready for an allowance that covers their clothing and away from home food budget, but by about 6 they are ready for a fun stuff allowance, plus it reduces the I want this at the store to a quick response, "Do you want to spend your allowance money on it?"
Well, I was being a bit facetious in my ironic statement. Apple certainly has a hit with the iPod, but the strange part is that the company had no buzz before (which is crucial to a high valuation growth stock, even though there have been very few products announced that were not already out 1-2 years ago, or were not widely expected (think back to IBM's G5 literature of that era). The actual operation of the company really didn't change much from then to now, but they have that crucial buzz, and as the poem goes, "that has made all the difference."
Yeah but does your esteem really go up when someone praises you for something both of you know is quite simple. You tied your shoes this morning, great job, doesn't do nearly as much to build self esteem as you and your dad working on a cabinet, model rocket, buttonhook route, or installing that 4 barrell carb and hearing that you did well. The real problem is that kids too rarely hear praise from their folks for doing something challenging and succeeding (or even failing) and getting a look of pride that says you did wonderfully win or lose and you didn't give up doing it. Those kids have tons of self esteem (and a healthy dose of fear of letting their parents down in school) and are highly likely to be on the road to success in almost any school system.
Anyone who works with business figures had better at least understand integrals and differentials. Almost all of business deals with rates of change or growth in the preferred term and anyone who has a basic understanding of this has a tremendous advantage over those who does not grasp the relationship between a first (and sometimes second) order differential to the underlying function.
Ah but you see in college sports, the coach can make a tremendous difference in recruiting, and since you can't pay the players, the best way to get good players is through a good coach. (Player's realize that having played for a coach with a good reputation is more likely to eventually pay off through a pro contract).
I think the advantage (not in this castle but in general swordplay) comes from right handed people largely training against right handed people, but left handed people mostly training against right handed people. Left handed swordsmen would be much more likely to be used to dealing with cross hand fighting, while righties aren't. Have heard that while left handed fencers make up 10% of the fencing population they are something like 70% of the champion fencers.
Ironic that anyone could have bought the company for almost nothing ($6 billion market cap figure $7 billion price tag, but you get a little over $5 billion cash) even a year ago, and there was no speculation of anyone buying Apple, but now that Apple is worth almost $25 billion everyone is speculating about a purchase.
Personally, I thought SUN should have bought AMD and Apple last summer and given one last shot at a top to bottom proprietary hardware company. They'd be sitting a whole lot prettier then they are now.
Fradulent means you are clicking for the sole purpose of raising fees not because you are interested in the product. Effectivly Google is struggling with now that they are so popular advertisers are complaining that they paid for search words at one quality level, but are getting clicks that are of a different quality level. In other media content companies have provisions to adjust for the change in ratings/cirrculation of their content. However because this is such a new media, those provisions have not shifted over to this format yet.
A good example would be imagine a newspaper advertiser who finds to his dismay that most buyers of newspapers were buying them to recycle in China (if paper prices were higher) rather than read them.
To borrow a better term from the MMORPG industry rather than frad clicks would be farming clicks. I've heard that some adwords are valuable enough and searchers are cheap enough to hire Indians to click on them all day long. When the article came out about how much plaintiff's attorneys were paying for Meslotheleoma clicks ($10-$75 because it was such a targeted search word) I raised about $500 in revenue both Google and Overture in about a minute (I clicked around the page a little so it wouldn't be too suspicious).
No doubt you already knew this, and probably don't want me spoiling the secret, but Alberta is considerably warmer than most of Montana (at least once you get up to Calgary. You can grow fruit, while we're lucky to get lettuce to grow in our gardens (we had an 83 day growing season this year).
I think the problem arose from Moore's law. Computers got too cheap too quickly. Think about another complex tool that transitioned from capital good to consumer product. I will use cars, but you could substitute power tools (think table saw or 1/2" drill), airplanes, or telephones. With autos, they existed for several decades before mass consumer adoption, mostly because until Ford developed the assembly line (and even in the early part of that) you needed to either be quite wealthy or have a real need use the device. By the time mass adoption was reached, the device had been simplified, and consumers had been educated that this could potentially be dangerous, so they learned at least something about the operation (and potentially basic maintenance) of the device. Computers moved to a price that allowed mass adoption much faster, and buyers assumed they were buying devices that had undergone the bug checking of other consumer products so they didn't take any more time to learn about the product they were buying or installing.
After 20 years of debuging there are PCs out there that have reached that level of simplicity, they are called X-Boxes.
I think it is mostly because everyone on the right who is remotely interesting (and many who aren't) went to work in talk radio. Laura Ingram and Mike Savage are both consistently entertaining although the latter requires that you be in the proper frame of mind (drinking or stuck in traffic).
Keep in mind that cities weren't buying $0.99 incandencants to power traffic lights (the expensive part isn't the electricity or the bulb it's shutting down an intersection and paying one or more people to go out and change it (job costs are probably above $60/hr-and that includes any transit time). So the city was already buying pretty pricy bulbs that promised longer lives. To get an accurate calculation you would have to compare the price of those bulbs with the LEDs and then factor in the smaller difference in life and more significant change in electricity use.
Slashdot Mirror
Hero was quite good (although foreign), and I really enjoyed The Incredibles. I liked De-Lovely, and will try to catch the Aviator this weekend. I've heard good things about both Ray and Finding Neverland.
The point is there has been a ton of crap this year (as every year) but there have also been plenty of excellent movies released this year if you look beyond the some of the popcorn flicks. I'd hope that anyone who cares a whit about creativity would not hold a sequel to a remake of what was originally just a movie for some cool cats to hang together and make a little coin in the process.
First mover advantage is very important in markets with network effects (ebay is the best example I can think of) in which the first guy there has a very valuable advantage by getting there first. The advantage is conferred by lower costs than later competitors to create their business network because the network they create is more valuable the more users it has. Later competitors (think about how little business there was on uBid or Yahoo auctions) must spend more per user than the initial competitor as their network is less valuable. Once eBay got the first million users it became considerably more difficult for uBid to sign up their 10,000th in then ebay had signing up its 10,000th user.
MS dominance was a result of being a first mover, but not in the way you think. Bill and Co were the first to figure out that application development had network effects and as a result courted application developers better than their earlier peers.
Intel has considerably less first mover advantage, if anything they achieved some advantages in manufacturing which allowed them to cover any other missteps by out investing their compeitors in down cycles (when AMD is attempting to remain solevant in a big downturn, Intel is building the next gen fabs.
AOL has never been anything except a stock scam that continued until they bought half of a real company.
Oracle built a natural monopoly (as did Veritas, Intuit, BEA and almost every other software company) but first mover was not the reason. Software is a natural monopoly because there is only room for a single competitor (two competitors are less efficient than a single one in software development) being first made little difference being the first to get bigger than any compeitors was crucial. If anything I'd say Oracle is experiencing rents to Larry's pursuasive selling of relational databases better than any competitors, and they probably would have won even if Informix had been offering RDBMS first. Development costs are fixed so the company with the most users has a lower production cost (which is why MS is terrified of the increasing vibrance of the linux development community). To many management gurus (stock shills) whove never heard of industrial organization attempt to use very specific technical terms to mean things they were never intended to mean. Pets.com was not operating in a business that conferred any advantage to the first mover (that couldn't be replicated as easily by a later competitor). Amazon got a tiny amount of first mover advantage from the free media coverage by being the only dotcom most media companies did stories on. Although there was no lack of coverage of B&N's entry to online marketing.
I believe in this case Oracle paying cash for Peoplesoft. Not that it will break the bank mind you, but it does delay share repurchases for Oracle for a year or two. Between the two companies there is ~$10.8 billion in cash and short term equivalents.
Vertical traditionally implies that a company is buying a supplier or customer. Think Dell/Intel. Horizontal means buying a direct competitor like HP/Compaq. Vertical mergers are intended to provide significant streamlining of an entire supply chain, horizontal mergers are intended to reduce overhead costs (removal of one CEO, many accountants managers and such) while not cutting output. Most mergers are a mix of the two as most companies are big enough to compete with many of their suppliers. The final type of merger that isn't used much anymore is a diversification/conglomeration merger where a company buys an unrelated business like MS buying an auto company or something. These can be useful for diversification (look at AOL whose shareholders got half of a real media company) but are rarely good for owners of either company.
Software is a bit tricky but I'd call this more of a horizontal merger a true vertical merger in software would be something like EA buying that development tools company (was it Radware?) or something similar.
One thing I've found about many geeks is that they love new toys, but they are exceedingly adept at streeching life from almost everything. If anything I'd say a tech fetish isn't a good sign of geekdom.
Just a quick FYI, but outside of the blue states NASCAR is one of the most popular activities in the area. While the millions of people who enjoy the store may not mean a hill of beans to you, they are generally the target market for NEXTEL (who happens to have the highest fees and lowest churn in the industry) so they must be doing something at least a little bit right. Also they are almost as profitable (per sub) as Verizon (who carries a tremendous advantage because of its size).
In the US we have a smaller differentiation. US numbers are 10 digits if you ignore the 1 country code. The first three numbers make up an area code which usually include a city (NY now has two LA might have two also) but generally they encompass a small region. Mobile and fixed lines share an area code. The next three numbers are for an exchange and are generally consistent within cities and towns (if you are in a small town you all have the same three numbers but the next town over will have a differeent set of three numbers) mobile numbers use a different set of 3 exchange numbers.
With regard to billing, from a fixed line, we have free local calling based on what is called a LATA which generally coveres an entire town, so you get free calls to your entire town from a fixed line. From a fixed line you do not pay for recieving a call.
Mobile calls are priced based on accessing the network either send or recieve, and the differentiator is time. During business hours mobile plans generally have a fixed number of minutes of calling (say 200-1000 per month) to send and recieve calls, after hours and on weekends most plans sold today allow either unlimited or enough minutes to be unlimited for most people.
It's my understanding that the big differences between Europe and US telecom are calling party pays, higher pop density, and the US had higher fixed line penetration prior to the development of wireless telecom which is why we have lagged Europe in mobile penetration (even though generally the larger number of carriers has resulted in considerably cheaper mobile service in the US. We're only at about 50% penetration of mobile phones.
If anything, in a black market you would get more for your yuan not less. They have had to buy lots of US bonds to keep the rate fixed. If you refinanced this year you can thank the Chinese gov't for your cheap mortgage.
Why couldn't a semi rotating mirror (think of an extruded parabola with the pipe continuing down the foci of each individual parabola) focus light on a black pipe containing water and generate electricity from the Carnot cycle?
The best security scheme I've ever heard of had no rules about password creation/maintenance. They just ran Jack the Ripper and possibly a brute forcing program against everyones password. If you got hacked you lost your account.
I'd suggest that one of the best lessons a parent can give children is fiscal responsibility through a regular allowance. I'm not sure if a 13 year old is ready for an allowance that covers their clothing and away from home food budget, but by about 6 they are ready for a fun stuff allowance, plus it reduces the I want this at the store to a quick response, "Do you want to spend your allowance money on it?"
When you have enough money to endow your offspring indefinitely.
Well, I was being a bit facetious in my ironic statement. Apple certainly has a hit with the iPod, but the strange part is that the company had no buzz before (which is crucial to a high valuation growth stock, even though there have been very few products announced that were not already out 1-2 years ago, or were not widely expected (think back to IBM's G5 literature of that era). The actual operation of the company really didn't change much from then to now, but they have that crucial buzz, and as the poem goes, "that has made all the difference."
Yeah but does your esteem really go up when someone praises you for something both of you know is quite simple. You tied your shoes this morning, great job, doesn't do nearly as much to build self esteem as you and your dad working on a cabinet, model rocket, buttonhook route, or installing that 4 barrell carb and hearing that you did well. The real problem is that kids too rarely hear praise from their folks for doing something challenging and succeeding (or even failing) and getting a look of pride that says you did wonderfully win or lose and you didn't give up doing it. Those kids have tons of self esteem (and a healthy dose of fear of letting their parents down in school) and are highly likely to be on the road to success in almost any school system.
Anyone who works with business figures had better at least understand integrals and differentials. Almost all of business deals with rates of change or growth in the preferred term and anyone who has a basic understanding of this has a tremendous advantage over those who does not grasp the relationship between a first (and sometimes second) order differential to the underlying function.
Ah but you see in college sports, the coach can make a tremendous difference in recruiting, and since you can't pay the players, the best way to get good players is through a good coach. (Player's realize that having played for a coach with a good reputation is more likely to eventually pay off through a pro contract).
I think the advantage (not in this castle but in general swordplay) comes from right handed people largely training against right handed people, but left handed people mostly training against right handed people. Left handed swordsmen would be much more likely to be used to dealing with cross hand fighting, while righties aren't. Have heard that while left handed fencers make up 10% of the fencing population they are something like 70% of the champion fencers.
Ironic that anyone could have bought the company for almost nothing ($6 billion market cap figure $7 billion price tag, but you get a little over $5 billion cash) even a year ago, and there was no speculation of anyone buying Apple, but now that Apple is worth almost $25 billion everyone is speculating about a purchase.
Personally, I thought SUN should have bought AMD and Apple last summer and given one last shot at a top to bottom proprietary hardware company. They'd be sitting a whole lot prettier then they are now.
Fradulent means you are clicking for the sole purpose of raising fees not because you are interested in the product. Effectivly Google is struggling with now that they are so popular advertisers are complaining that they paid for search words at one quality level, but are getting clicks that are of a different quality level. In other media content companies have provisions to adjust for the change in ratings/cirrculation of their content. However because this is such a new media, those provisions have not shifted over to this format yet.
A good example would be imagine a newspaper advertiser who finds to his dismay that most buyers of newspapers were buying them to recycle in China (if paper prices were higher) rather than read them.
To borrow a better term from the MMORPG industry rather than frad clicks would be farming clicks. I've heard that some adwords are valuable enough and searchers are cheap enough to hire Indians to click on them all day long. When the article came out about how much plaintiff's attorneys were paying for Meslotheleoma clicks ($10-$75 because it was such a targeted search word) I raised about $500 in revenue both Google and Overture in about a minute (I clicked around the page a little so it wouldn't be too suspicious).
No doubt you already knew this, and probably don't want me spoiling the secret, but Alberta is considerably warmer than most of Montana (at least once you get up to Calgary. You can grow fruit, while we're lucky to get lettuce to grow in our gardens (we had an 83 day growing season this year).
I think the problem arose from Moore's law. Computers got too cheap too quickly. Think about another complex tool that transitioned from capital good to consumer product. I will use cars, but you could substitute power tools (think table saw or 1/2" drill), airplanes, or telephones. With autos, they existed for several decades before mass consumer adoption, mostly because until Ford developed the assembly line (and even in the early part of that) you needed to either be quite wealthy or have a real need use the device. By the time mass adoption was reached, the device had been simplified, and consumers had been educated that this could potentially be dangerous, so they learned at least something about the operation (and potentially basic maintenance) of the device. Computers moved to a price that allowed mass adoption much faster, and buyers assumed they were buying devices that had undergone the bug checking of other consumer products so they didn't take any more time to learn about the product they were buying or installing.
After 20 years of debuging there are PCs out there that have reached that level of simplicity, they are called X-Boxes.
I think it is mostly because everyone on the right who is remotely interesting (and many who aren't) went to work in talk radio. Laura Ingram and Mike Savage are both consistently entertaining although the latter requires that you be in the proper frame of mind (drinking or stuck in traffic).
If you set your sights on college math tutoring, I'm sure you can work out a pretty attractive barter scheme.
American's may have gotten sarcasm down, but we are still fighting a losing battle to grasp irony.
Keep in mind that cities weren't buying $0.99 incandencants to power traffic lights (the expensive part isn't the electricity or the bulb it's shutting down an intersection and paying one or more people to go out and change it (job costs are probably above $60/hr-and that includes any transit time). So the city was already buying pretty pricy bulbs that promised longer lives. To get an accurate calculation you would have to compare the price of those bulbs with the LEDs and then factor in the smaller difference in life and more significant change in electricity use.