When options are granted, you are getting an option to buy a certain number of shares before a certain expiration date. The option to buy shares is a "call" option.
You're talking options as the ones traded on the Chicago Borad Options Exchange. Employee stock options are a different beast - unlike market options, they are not transferable and (for the most part) never expire. They are also not clearly defined, because they sometimes void if your employment is terminated, but sometimes they have "triggers" in them whereby they automatically vest upon employment termination unless your employment is terminated "for cause" (i.e. you got fired for doing something bad). The options with triggers are subjectively more valuable, but how (and why?!) you'd want this reflected on the books escapes me completely.
Can someone confirm how this really works? When options are granted, it is usually an option to buy a certain number of shares at today's market value. So on the day of the grant, the value is usually always 0.
Let's say an option is granted to buy N shares and a year from the date of the grant, the stock is up by 10 points - then the value is then 10 x N. So the company now needs to subtract 10 x N from its earnings for the fiscal year during which the stock was up by 10 points? Then next year it goes up again and the company adjusts earnings again? Ad infinitum?
OR does the company just make a speculation, something like "we think the stock will go up by 10 points this year, so lets just subtract 10 x N from earnings". But what about the value 10 years from now?
What happens with taxes? It is advantageous for a company not to ever show any profits, this seems like a simple way to reduce your taxable income as far as the IRS is concerned. Most corporations don't pay any taxes anyway, but now this just got easier: "Let's grant everyone a bunch of options that we deem are worth 10 bazillion"?
Lastly, I don't see how this rule will affect anything at all since more likely than not companies will just be publishing two numbers - earnings with stock option adjustment and without. Kinda like EBDTA.
As/. knows AOL doesn't exactly have a terrific reputation among technical people
Not true at all. I know people at AOL, and people who know people at AOL, and everyone pretty much agrees that the average technical level over there is very high.
Having been through a "massive layoff" in the bubble-burst days, one nice thing was that there exists the WARN act which dictates that if a company of at least certain size (which I'm sure Time Warner is) is laying off more than 50 people in one metropolitan area, they are obligated to give 2 months notice. For us this turned out to be two additional months to the severance, since the management doesn't really want you to show up at the office once you've been given your notice.
Overall this is bad news, since this area (VA/DC/MD) has now pretty much two kinds of techies - those who have clearance, and those who are unemployed, and the AOL layoffs sure do not help.
Can you go into detail as to why Virtuozzo is more like Vserver than Xen?
The idea behind Virtuozzo, VServer and the like is the introduction of yet another id in addition to the process id. VServer calls it "context id", FreeBSD calls it "jail id", don't know what Virtuozzo calls theirs, but the concept is the same. So now a process belongs to a context, and processes in one context cannot see processes in another context. Additionally, networking (specific ip) and other (CPU scheduling policy, filesystem,...) restrictions can be applied to a context.
The concept is much better described than I can do it at this hour here and here.
What About Linux Vserver (http://www.linux-vserver.org/)?
Yes, we've been providing VServer-based virtual servers for almost a year now. The learning curve may be steep, but the quality, stability and the community on the mailing list/irc all are excellent.
In Xen, you only have to worry about bugs in the hypervisor itself, and the hypervisor is much smaller than Linux.
Yes, but "smaller" may be means "less work to secure" (source code clarity discipline is a big variable here), but does not automatically mean "more secure", which seems to be the claim. And in "less work" we're probably talking years. The linux kernel has been around much longer and is reviewed so much more widely. I'd be very careful claiming that Xen is somehow magically by design impenetrable, that's not even close to the truth. (I'm not saying the separation approach is flawless, but as implemented in freebsd and vserver (prolly also true for solaris), it mostly rides on exisitng time-tested security mechanisms).
Also, not to put Xen down, but some of the claims and terminology used seems on the hypish/too-good-to-be-true side - I have a hunch that some deeper digging will reveal that this isn't something that hasn't been done before (mach comes to mind). Xen needs to incubate for a few years IMHO.
There are 4 ways (I think) to provide what is loosely referred to as "virtualization":
1. Hardware emulation. QEMU, VMWare, Bochs all fall in that category. QEMU is open source and is actually pretty cool - a great way to test kernels during development or testing that new ISO you're trying to put together. This method is the slowest of all since all hardware is simulated in software.
2. User Mode Linux. In this scenario the kernel is run as a user process. This method has the second most overhead. Security-wise, it is only as secure as the host system, so if there is a known userland exploit, it is vulnerable.
3. Xen. To the best of my understanding, Xen is a kernel which runs other kernels. So this architecturally similar to UML, but (if you believe them) is much better optimized. And if Xen is as exploit-free as is claimed, it should also be pretty pretty secure, though I believe only time will tell.
3. Separation. This is Linux VServer, which is a fantastic project that doesn't have the publicity engine and funding of a big university behind it. This isn't really virtualization as much as it is separation. This approach is also shared by SwSoft's Virtuozzo, FreeBSD jails and Solaris containers. Since there is only one kernel in this scenario, this method is not OS-independent, i.e. VServer only runs Linux, Jails are only for FreeBSD, etc. Performance-wise, this approach should far outrun any other method as it carries practically no overhead and takes advantage of all the existing UN*X optimization. It is also very secure, possibly most secure of all (short of hardware emulation like QEMU) since it directly addresses all known virtualization exploits such as chroot escapes. But, perhaps I'm biased...
You probably mean AdvancedTCA... Potentially neat stuff at first glance, I'll need to read up on it, thanks for the pointer. Could be another Infiniband though...
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device that would provide me with 16 GE interface per blade, a crypto accelerator, an optional firewall module and whatever else cisco has up their sleeve for the 6500 series? IOS isn't what you pay for when you buy a router, Cisco is a hardware company.
I am not sure I understand the "disappointing" aspect of this. The USA is a vast, sparsely populated territory and it's simply unreasonable to expect broadband penetration similar to that of small, densely-populated places like South Korea and Taiwan. And I bet that large metropolitan areas (NY, DC, etc.) are far more wired individually than all of the mentioned countries put together. It's probably also true that in those countries Internet access is heavily government subsidized, and the outcries of Mr. Harris Miller et al. are aimed at getting some good old taxpayer money to play with. IMHO the Internet is evolving in the US just fine with less and less help from the government, and that is as it should be.
I'd argue that the USA by far leads the world in the meaningful use of the Internet - the real e-commerce exists in the US and not in South Korea, and the reasons behind it have little to do with broadband, but with the banking and business practices. In the US people really bank, shop and do many other things on-line, whereas in most other countries they don't. How do I know? Well, we don't even accept payments from South Korea and Taiwan because it's been all fraud so far in our experience. (Canada's alright though:-) )
This may be a stretch, but can you talk you admin into installing a Linux VServer kernel or setting you up with a User-Mode Linux (UML) - this way you'll have root access and the admin will not need to worry about the security of the main box?
For those who do not understand what multi-dimensional database is, here is how I explain it to myself:
A traditional relational database has two dimensions - rows and columns. Now if you take a table and make a copy of it to separate records by year (e.g. 2004data, 2003data, 2002data, etc.), you get a 3rd dimension. And if you were to take your entire database and make a copy of it to separate it by something else, you now have a 4th dimension. Of course the problem with all this would be inability to tie data in one database to data in another in an easy way.
A multi-dimensional database is something that allows you to add dimensions ad-infinitum _and_ query it in a clean way.
Totally the way to put all the electoral college debates to rest and to eliminate all issues relating to electronic voting security once and for all! Just calculate the election outcome using the ordinary-least-squares regression model (OLS) with and without robust standard errors, exactly as the paper says. Why couldn't we think of this sooner?
Re:Comparing UML to N1 Grid Containers? Ridiculous
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
UML has substantially low performance compared to N1 Grid Containers
Yep, when I read that, the credibility of the article fell by 5 points...
But Linux does have a feature comparable to Zones (is that the same thing as grid containers?), it's called Linux VServer, it'd be nice if it became part of the stock kernel some day.
Another thing that Linux desparately needs IMO is something similar to FreeBSD union mount or the translucent filesystem. There are a few projects out there, but they seem abandoned, and this is something that should be part of ext3. LVM could use improvement also - AFAIK snapshots are broken in 2.6.9. Last, but not the least, umount needs an -f option which forces unmounting no matter what.
These are a few little things off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a ton more if I had the time to think about it....
In fact, the fundamental problem that this article is highlighting, that an autocratic, antidemocratic, and abusive regime in China is using satellites to spy on its own citizens may not even be true in China in 10-20 years as China may (though it is of course by no means a certainty) evolve into a democratic, accountable state by that time.
Russia's been "evolving" since 1988 (16 years now) and some coups and financial crashes later some will say it is now headed in the autocratic direction, so I wouldn't count on any improvement in China in "10-20 years", not without a major social disturbance (political, military, financial or all of those)...
most Ukrainians tend to speak it, even if many of them don't particularly love it, and generally Russian is a much more useful language in the world than Ukrainian, because you can use it in Russia, too.
And because quite a few people in the Ukraine don't speak Ukranian, but do speak Russian. (This is true for many other former USSR republics, BTW).
Slashdot Mirror
When options are granted, you are getting an option to buy a certain number of shares before a certain expiration date. The option to buy shares is a "call" option.
You're talking options as the ones traded on the Chicago Borad Options Exchange. Employee stock options are a different beast - unlike market options, they are not transferable and (for the most part) never expire. They are also not clearly defined, because they sometimes void if your employment is terminated, but sometimes they have "triggers" in them whereby they automatically vest upon employment termination unless your employment is terminated "for cause" (i.e. you got fired for doing something bad). The options with triggers are subjectively more valuable, but how (and why?!) you'd want this reflected on the books escapes me completely.
ROTFL
Mod paren up, this is 5 Funny!
Can someone confirm how this really works? When options are granted, it is usually an option to buy a certain number of shares at today's market value. So on the day of the grant, the value is usually always 0.
Let's say an option is granted to buy N shares and a year from the date of the grant, the stock is up by 10 points - then the value is then 10 x N. So the company now needs to subtract 10 x N from its earnings for the fiscal year during which the stock was up by 10 points? Then next year it goes up again and the company adjusts earnings again? Ad infinitum?
OR does the company just make a speculation, something like "we think the stock will go up by 10 points this year, so lets just subtract 10 x N from earnings". But what about the value 10 years from now?
What happens with taxes? It is advantageous for a company not to ever show any profits, this seems like a simple way to reduce your taxable income as far as the IRS is concerned. Most corporations don't pay any taxes anyway, but now this just got easier: "Let's grant everyone a bunch of options that we deem are worth 10 bazillion"?
Lastly, I don't see how this rule will affect anything at all since more likely than not companies will just be publishing two numbers - earnings with stock option adjustment and without. Kinda like EBDTA.
I don't remember now - was the norton thing before or after symantec was into being an ide company competing with borland with symantec cafe?
Not true at all. I know people at AOL, and people who know people at AOL, and everyone pretty much agrees that the average technical level over there is very high.
Having been through a "massive layoff" in the bubble-burst days, one nice thing was that there exists the WARN act which dictates that if a company of at least certain size (which I'm sure Time Warner is) is laying off more than 50 people in one metropolitan area, they are obligated to give 2 months notice. For us this turned out to be two additional months to the severance, since the management doesn't really want you to show up at the office once you've been given your notice.
Overall this is bad news, since this area (VA/DC/MD) has now pretty much two kinds of techies - those who have clearance, and those who are unemployed, and the AOL layoffs sure do not help.
Who here remembers rumors about Apple merging with Sun back in the early 90's? Didn't happen...
Can you go into detail as to why Virtuozzo is more like Vserver than Xen?
The idea behind Virtuozzo, VServer and the like is the introduction of yet another id in addition to the process id. VServer calls it "context id", FreeBSD calls it "jail id", don't know what Virtuozzo calls theirs, but the concept is the same. So now a process belongs to a context, and processes in one context cannot see processes in another context. Additionally, networking (specific ip) and other (CPU scheduling policy, filesystem, ...) restrictions can be applied to a context.
The concept is much better described than I can do it at this hour here and here.
Yes, we've been providing VServer-based virtual servers for almost a year now. The learning curve may be steep, but the quality, stability and the community on the mailing list/irc all are excellent.
In Xen, you only have to worry about bugs in the hypervisor itself, and the hypervisor is much smaller than Linux.
Yes, but "smaller" may be means "less work to secure" (source code clarity discipline is a big variable here), but does not automatically mean "more secure", which seems to be the claim. And in "less work" we're probably talking years. The linux kernel has been around much longer and is reviewed so much more widely. I'd be very careful claiming that Xen is somehow magically by design impenetrable, that's not even close to the truth. (I'm not saying the separation approach is flawless, but as implemented in freebsd and vserver (prolly also true for solaris), it mostly rides on exisitng time-tested security mechanisms).
Also, not to put Xen down, but some of the claims and terminology used seems on the hypish/too-good-to-be-true side - I have a hunch that some deeper digging will reveal that this isn't something that hasn't been done before (mach comes to mind). Xen needs to incubate for a few years IMHO.
There are 4 ways (I think) to provide what is loosely referred to as "virtualization":
1. Hardware emulation. QEMU, VMWare, Bochs all fall in that category. QEMU is open source and is actually pretty cool - a great way to test kernels during development or testing that new ISO you're trying to put together. This method is the slowest of all since all hardware is simulated in software.
2. User Mode Linux. In this scenario the kernel is run as a user process. This method has the second most overhead. Security-wise, it is only as secure as the host system, so if there is a known userland exploit, it is vulnerable.
3. Xen. To the best of my understanding, Xen is a kernel which runs other kernels. So this architecturally similar to UML, but (if you believe them) is much better optimized. And if Xen is as exploit-free as is claimed, it should also be pretty pretty secure, though I believe only time will tell.
3. Separation. This is Linux VServer, which is a fantastic project that doesn't have the publicity engine and funding of a big university behind it. This isn't really virtualization as much as it is separation. This approach is also shared by SwSoft's Virtuozzo, FreeBSD jails and Solaris containers. Since there is only one kernel in this scenario, this method is not OS-independent, i.e. VServer only runs Linux, Jails are only for FreeBSD, etc. Performance-wise, this approach should far outrun any other method as it carries practically no overhead and takes advantage of all the existing UN*X optimization. It is also very secure, possibly most secure of all (short of hardware emulation like QEMU) since it directly addresses all known virtualization exploits such as chroot escapes. But, perhaps I'm biased...
You probably mean AdvancedTCA... Potentially neat stuff at first glance, I'll need to read up on it, thanks for the pointer. Could be another Infiniband though...
So which "PC components" do I use to implement a modular all hot-swappable (including the supervisory modules) device that would provide me with 16 GE interface per blade, a crypto accelerator, an optional firewall module and whatever else cisco has up their sleeve for the 6500 series? IOS isn't what you pay for when you buy a router, Cisco is a hardware company.
I am not sure I understand the "disappointing" aspect of this. The USA is a vast, sparsely populated territory and it's simply unreasonable to expect broadband penetration similar to that of small, densely-populated places like South Korea and Taiwan. And I bet that large metropolitan areas (NY, DC, etc.) are far more wired individually than all of the mentioned countries put together. It's probably also true that in those countries Internet access is heavily government subsidized, and the outcries of Mr. Harris Miller et al. are aimed at getting some good old taxpayer money to play with. IMHO the Internet is evolving in the US just fine with less and less help from the government, and that is as it should be.
I'd argue that the USA by far leads the world in the meaningful use of the Internet - the real e-commerce exists in the US and not in South Korea, and the reasons behind it have little to do with broadband, but with the banking and business practices. In the US people really bank, shop and do many other things on-line, whereas in most other countries they don't. How do I know? Well, we don't even accept payments from South Korea and Taiwan because it's been all fraud so far in our experience. (Canada's alright though :-) )
This may be a stretch, but can you talk you admin into installing a Linux VServer kernel or setting you up with a User-Mode Linux (UML) - this way you'll have root access and the admin will not need to worry about the security of the main box?
I'm only using an RDBMS as an example because it has rows and columns. To be excel-specific, substitute "table" with "sheet", "database" with "file".
For those who do not understand what multi-dimensional database is, here is how I explain it to myself:
A traditional relational database has two dimensions - rows and columns. Now if you take a table and make a copy of it to separate records by year (e.g. 2004data, 2003data, 2002data, etc.), you get a 3rd dimension. And if you were to take your entire database and make a copy of it to separate it by something else, you now have a 4th dimension. Of course the problem with all this would be inability to tie data in one database to data in another in an easy way.
A multi-dimensional database is something that allows you to add dimensions ad-infinitum _and_ query it in a clean way.
Totally the way to put all the electoral college debates to rest and to eliminate all issues relating to electronic voting security once and for all! Just calculate the election outcome using the ordinary-least-squares regression model (OLS) with and without robust standard errors, exactly as the paper says. Why couldn't we think of this sooner?
Yep, when I read that, the credibility of the article fell by 5 points...
But Linux does have a feature comparable to Zones (is that the same thing as grid containers?), it's called Linux VServer, it'd be nice if it became part of the stock kernel some day.
Another thing that Linux desparately needs IMO is something similar to FreeBSD union mount or the translucent filesystem. There are a few projects out there, but they seem abandoned, and this is something that should be part of ext3. LVM could use improvement also - AFAIK snapshots are broken in 2.6.9. Last, but not the least, umount needs an -f option which forces unmounting no matter what.
These are a few little things off the top of my head, I could probably come up with a ton more if I had the time to think about it....
Russia's been "evolving" since 1988 (16 years now) and some coups and financial crashes later some will say it is now headed in the autocratic direction, so I wouldn't count on any improvement in China in "10-20 years", not without a major social disturbance (political, military, financial or all of those)...
most Ukrainians tend to speak it, even if many of them don't particularly love it, and generally Russian is a much more useful language in the world than Ukrainian, because you can use it in Russia, too.
And because quite a few people in the Ukraine don't speak Ukranian, but do speak Russian. (This is true for many other former USSR republics, BTW).
they strictly adhere to the idea that NO GPL code will become part of the Solaris kernel
Hm... FreeBSD has a similar policy, and so does Apache - what's the problem?
NO CARRIER
Doesn't "Open Source Expertiese" prettuy much amount to thorough knowledge of Unix, C, TCP/IP, shell, and a scripting language of choice?