So very sad. Debian is what got me started with Linux. I remember dd'ing base images to floppy disks since the BIOS on the PC I was experimenting on didn't support bootable CDs. From then doing a net install seemed so futuristic at the time.
I believe the 20% cut that the manager make is after they clear a benchmark like the S&P 500 to ensure they get paid when they produce a superior return compared to what an index fund could deliver.
For example, let me pitch you on the Patio11 Hedgehog Fund. It uses complicated financial alchemy to produce market-beating returns, and you only pay if we beat the market. The fund has never lost money. Care to invest $10 million? You pay 2% per year and 20% of returns above the S&P 500.
Hypothetically suppose the S&P is up 10% next year. I deliver 20% returns. Alchemy, what can I say. You make $1.6 million, I make $0.4 million (from you), and since I did this in parallel with 100 other people life is pretty grand for me.
Now just between HN and me, my strategy is simple: I buy the S&P 500 as an index but I use 2X leverage.
What would have happened if the market went down 5% next year? Well, we would have lost 10%. That certainly sucks, and you need to make your $1 million back. Which is great, because I am now accepting new money on the Patio11 Chinchilla Fund. It uses complicated financial alchemy to produce market-beating returns, and you only pay if we beat the market. The fund has never lost money.
Well to be fair, it's also not the real hurdle than any investor in Hedge funds use. It's more of a marketing term than anything else (and often funds don't target the S&P as their benchmark, but something else closer to their trade category).
Almost all investors in hedge funds will want to see the portfolio of all previous funds you've managed as well as how much of your own money you have in the fund, how much leverage you are doing, alpha, beta, risk adjusted metrics etc.
That said, the Hedge Fund industry is going through a consolidation. Lots of small funds were essentially S&P indexes with leverage/hedges and execution ability. The rise of ETFs, the decrease in execution costs, and the creation of a true history of performance has made those funds pretty obviously useless and they are (rightly, I believe) dying.
I had a similar experience. I purchased a GoPro to use for a trip to Mexico. I had heard great stories about how durable and reliable they were from friends. So I didn't hesitate to buy one on Amazon.
Long story short all the footage from my vacation were unusable as many of the videos and pictures were corrupted/distorted which was annoying. Tried customer support but weren't able to fix the issue so I ended up returning it.
It looks like it's being reflected off an inverted four-sided hollow (perspex?) pyramid, rather than projected into a prism, but still a neat idea; sort of like the inverse of the (formerly Microsoft) Polycom 360 degree conference camera.[1]
I'm curious what it looks like viewed from one of the edges - I can't picture it being seamless?
I felt that Lotus Notes was trying to do too many things when in reality most people were using it for email and calendaring.
The UI looked terrible and it was overall slow and crashed often. You had to manually kill the zombie process or else you would not be able to re-open Lotus Notes.
I always thought about the engineering complexities of sending someone to the moon that I overlooked the operational aspects of managing such a trip. This article was enlightening.
I was going to say: He should have fired his agent for agreeing to any cut of the net. I thought everyone at this point knew that you always demand points on the gross just because no one every makes net points.
I can understand lacking clout to ask for gross, but I have trouble believing that he thought he'd actually get net. When someone like him gets offered net, doesn't he say "look, we both know that 'net' means 'zero', so don't blow smoke up my ass."
ETA: Also, one wonders if relative clout just means asking for a much smaller fraction of gross. Better a tenth of a percent of gross than 10 percent of net.
I've heard people who are signing deals call net points "monkey points".
Everybody knows they're worthless, but you take what there is.
Having said that, even experienced people might believe that net points would be worth something if a $19 million budget grosses $150 million. Especially on a project with no gross participants.
He might have been able to negotiate performance bonuses, extra money when gross milestones were hit. I've heard of those being a bit more common than gross points.
The bigger the budget, though, the more clout you need to get anything at all. I know of deals where gross points were offered to first timers on sub-million dollar budgets, but when you get up in the 10s of millions, it's a different game.
Why would offering share of gross revenue be a problem even on big movies?
Say, expected gross sales are $100M.
Studio may offer to 10 key people in the movie bonus of the size ~0.1% gross revenue per person (~$100K).
Spending 1% of revenue on having the team have some skin in the game could well worth it.
Less important hires could get 0.01% gross bonus etc.
At a guess, there are two reasons: First, they don't need to offer gross points to get people invested in working on movies, because they already have a steady stream of people desperate to be involved in any way just to be involved or to build experience or to get their big break; and second, if they don't have to, they don't want to because it's less money for them and it establishes a norm of people taking some real money home (a norm that's unnecessary because of the first point).
I was, for a while, peripherally involved in the Canadian film industry, and even in that stunted and low budget arena, there was no shortage of warm bodies to fill any role at all, for virtually nothing but a credit or a line on a C.V.
I'm surprised using some sort of hybrid gross/net points isn't more common. Like 5% of gross over $100M. Studio doesn't lose if the movie isnt a hit, and the employee can't get screwed by creative accounting.
