Sample PhD progress report
Thursday, September 3, 2020
Court System of Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico had an unmistakable lawful framework to that of American lawful framework till the American patches arrived in 1898 . The Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s structure including common law rules, organizations, systems and lawful culture were experienced significant change. There is an adjustment in the common law purview to the common law-blended law and different territories, for example, lawful structures, procedures, culture and on-screen characters. This paper analyzes the current lawful arrangement of the Puerto Rico and fundamentally looks at 3 states (Virginia Islands, Hawaii and New Jersey) court structures.It additionally gives the proposition to the court structure of Puerto Rico comparable to these 3 states. Brief presentation of Puerto Rico: Puerto Rico is a self-overseeing region in relationship with the United States. The President is USA is the head of state and chose Governor. It has command over the inside undertakings and without the obstruction of the USA. The signif icant contrasts between Puerto Rico and the 50 states incorporate exclusion from certain parts of the Internal Revenue Code, its absence of casting a ballot portrayal in either place of the U.S congress (Senate and House of Representatives), the ineligibility of Puerto Ricans to cast a ballot in presidential decisions, and its absence of meeting of some income saved for the states. Legal framework in Puerto Rica is coordinated by Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is contained 7 appointed authorities (a main equity and 6 partner judges) named by the Governor. The structure of Judicial System incorporates a Court of Appeals, Superior Court, a District Court (Civil and Criminal), and Municipal Court. There are 12 legal districts.The Commonwealth of Puerto Rica likewise has a locale court practically identical to those of the territory of US. Each area court has a least one region pass judgment and can have in excess of a score of region judges, just as an agent, a United States Attorney , a United States Marshall, at least one United States Magistrates, chapter 11 appointed authorities, post trial supervisors, court columnists, and their staff. The central government, situated in San Juan, is spoken to by 2 region judges and the procurator, who is named by the President of the United States. The Federal court has last authority of the ELA.Distinctive highlights of the American Judicial System incorporates the enemy framework, the custom-based law framework, predefined rules for directing case, announcing of legal procedures and the distribution of court assessments. There are 94 government legal locale, including in any event one area in each express, the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands and Puerto Rico. The intrigue courts take the interests from the region courts situated in the circuit and furthermore from the government authoritative agencies.The Supreme Court is the most noteworthy court in the administrative lega l executive . The legal arrangement of Puerto Rico depends on Spanish Law whereupon is put together the with respect to United States legal framework. The Puerto Rico legitimate court framework incorporates an area court, an unrivaled court, a redrafting court and the Puerto Rico Supreme Court as zenith court. Choices of the Puerto Rico Supreme Court can be engaged the Federal Court for Puerto Rico and to the U. S. Incomparable Court as a lost retreat. Hawaii state legal framework highlights investigative courts and preliminary courts.Appellate courts incorporate the Hawaii Supreme Court and the Intermediate Court of Appeals and the preliminary courts incorporate the Circuit, Family and District courts and capacities four legal areas. The legal arrangement of Virginia Islands comprises of the Supreme Court of Virginia, the Court of Appeals of Virginia, the General District Courts and the Circuit Courts . The structure of New Jersey's court framework is straightforward highlighting M unicipal courts, Tax Court, state Superior Court, which incorporates the preliminary courts, an Appellate Division and the New Jersey Supreme Court.All the previously mentioned court frameworks, for example, Hawaii, Virginia islands and New Jersey has distinctive arrangement of court structures . With the exception of in the crook and established fields, Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s lawful framework significantly remained that of the Spanish common law . Puerto Rico stateââ¬â¢s most elevated court: The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico is the most elevated court of the Puerto Rico, which is practically equivalent to one of the U. S state incomparable courts built up in San Juan. A definitive legal power exists in Puerto Rico for translation and settling on the subject of nearby region law.The Constitution and the laws of Puerto Rico decide the locale of the Supreme Court and works comparable path to the state Supreme Courts in the United States. It has simultaneous ward to decipher government laws, except if the Supremacy Clause requires something else. The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico utilized the custom-based law to determine the private-law issues and later floated to systematic examination incorporating the common law into the regular citizen setting . Correlation of the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico with the Virgin Islands, Hawaii and New Jerseyââ¬â¢s Supreme Courts.The Supreme Court of Hawaii hears advances for writs of certiorari to the Intermediate Court of Appeals and applications for move from the Intermediate Court of Appeals. It additionally hears held inquiries of law from the circuit courts, the land court, and the assessment claim court, guaranteed question from the government courts, applications for writs, grumblings on decisions and it makes rules of training and systems for all state courts, licenses, manages and teaches lawyers and judges. The New Jersey Supreme Court made out of a central equity and six partner justices.It takes up the interests f rom the lower courts including capital cases and cases in which a board of re-appraising adjudicators has oppose this idea. It likewise hears the instances of incredible open significance. The Superior Court has wide purview in tending to the lawful needs of the Virgin Islands people group. The Court hears all nearby preliminary issues including common, criminal, family, probate, proprietor inhabitant, little cases and traffic. It additionally goes about as a court of claims for choices of every legislative official and organizations . Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s Appellate Courts: U. S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is the re-appraising court for the District of Puerto Rico.The Circuit Court of Appeals set up in 1994 sits in San Juan and it is the middle person level between the courts of first example and the Supreme Court. With the assent of senate 33 judges were named by the Governor for the Circuit Court of Appeals. Most sittings are held in Boston, yet the court sits for abou t fourteen days every year in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico and sometimes at different areas inside the circuit. First Circuit is the littlest of the thirteen United States courts of offers Composition of U. S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is five dynamic (six approved) and four senior appointed authorities. Juan R.Torruella is the central adjudicator of the Puerto Rico obligation station designated by the Reagan. The set up technique for the qualification of the Chief Judge is that he should be beneath the age of 65, serving court effectively in any event one year and have not filled in as a Chief Judge prior. The investigative courts for different states in examination are U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for Hawaii. U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for Virgin Islands and U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for New Jersey. The Hawaii redrafting courts are included the Supreme Court and the Intermediate Court of Appeals.The Intermediate Court of Appeals of Hawaii hears all interests from preliminary courts and state offices in the State of Hawaii made out of 6 appointed authorities. It is having optional forces to hear cases without earlier suit in common cases or cases in circuit court or the duty advance court and furthermore when the gatherings settled upon the realities of the debate. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for Virgin Islands made out of 14 dynamic appointed authorities. The main appointed authority ought to have indistinguishable qualification models from if the Puerto Rico has. U. S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit for New Jersey is made out of 14 dynamic judges.Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s Municipal Courts Municipal courts have the locale to hear minor common and less genuine criminal cases with in the area under the forces presented by the constitution and the other law . Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s city judges, serving for a long time, and judges of the harmony, in country territories, choose c ases including neighborhood statutes. Civil Courts of New Jersey typically has purview to take cases, for example, engine vehicle and leaving tickets, minor criminal-type offenses, metropolitan law offenses and different offenses including fish and game violations.Municipal Court judges are generally delegated by the Mayor of the district, with the guidance and assent of the committee, and serve a term of three years and qualification set by the rule and he ought to have 5 years of training experience. The Municipal Court of the Virgin Islandsââ¬â¢ was named as the Territorial Court of the Virgin Islands and having purview over every single common activity and criminal issues. Regional court is presently changed to prevalent court by methods for Bill No. 25-0213. Hawaii doesn't have Municipal Courts.County and neighborhood statute and petty criminal offenses are attempted in state circuit and area courts. Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s Major Trial Courts: The nine predominant courts are th e Puerto Ricoââ¬â¢s Major preliminary courts. The term of the predominant court judges is 12-years. The predominant courts were isolated into 13 locale in 2003 and have unique purview of not surpassing $10,000 in common cases and furthermore in minor criminal cases. Area courts additionally hear starter movements in progressively genuine criminal cases . The Hawaii preliminary courts incorporate the Circuit, Family and District courts.The courts are organized geologically: Puerto Rico comprises one legal region and held at Mayaguez, Ponce and San Juan agreeing
Monday, August 24, 2020
Truman Show and Pleasantville Essay free essay sample
Pleasantville and The Truman Showââ¬â¢s story lines expand on numerous likenesses: David and Jennifer are both moved into a ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠world inside a highly contrasting TV program where there is no battling, no scrutinizing of power, there are no feelings and no flames. Truman, correspondingly, lives inside his own ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠world. He has the perfect employment, the light haired, blue-peered toward thin spouse, a slick home, cordial neighbors and an existence where he would be alright for a mind-blowing remainder. In the two shows the heroes, Truman and the individuals of Pleasantville, had definitely no concerns. In an early grouping of Pleasantville, there is a medium shot of the Parkerââ¬â¢s sitting in the kitchen all together. This scene is trailed by a low point shot of younger students strolling to class while the American banner waves over their heads. These two scenes represent the translation of the American dream. Family life is ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠, instruction is ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠and there is extraordinary enthusiasm. Life in this scene is depicted as great and total happiness. The film develops on these scenes to show the crowd precisely what Pleasantville ought to be deciphered as. These scenes depict Pleasantville as an ideal life where nothing turns out badly. They depict life in Pleasantville as happiness similarly as the American Dream is portrayed to be ââ¬Å"blissfulâ⬠. As the film advances, the audienceââ¬â¢s impression of ââ¬Å"The American Dreamâ⬠change. Towards the center grouping of Pleasantville, there is an eye level, medium close up on George Parker. Mary-Sue has gone out with her beau and George is guaranteeing Bud that Mary-Sue is a decent young lady and would do nothing incorrectly. During this time, Jennifer is at Lovers path having intercourse to her sweetheart. This scene portrays the obliviousness of individuals inside a ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠society, one depicted by ââ¬Å"The American Dream. â⬠This scene shows how individuals can be misused and cheated from reality in a ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠society as genuine occurrences are concealed away from them. The media, for example, twenty-four hour news channels, conceal numerous realities from present day society. Many predisposition news channels deliberately cover ââ¬Å"the second side of the storyâ⬠so as to give watchers a one-dimensional attitude toward the story. This thusly brings upon uninformed help towards the reason the news channels are inclination towards. In this film there is no spot other than the spot in which they live in-Pleasantville. This represents the nearby disapproved of perspective on individuals who have been raised in separated places or even individuals who havenââ¬â¢t got a more extensive perspective outwardly world. Kids in school are significantly shielded from the outside world, by their instructors and their folks. They are oblivious towards numerous happenings on the planet on the grounds that these happenings just have been concealed away from them. Pleasantville is attempting to make an impression on the crowd that an ideal existence with numbness is horrible quality of life. Also called ââ¬Å"ignorant blissâ⬠. Oblivious euphoria is extraordinary for undesirable concerns and stress, anyway obliviousness is extraordinarily impeding towards a general public. Obliviousness has the ability to help numerous wrongs in a general public. One in view of obliviousness may despise a country since one was raised in a supremacist family and knows no preferred other over to loathe. Indeed, even one may cast a ballot an administration in to control in light of the fact that the pioneer of that specific government is of a similar ethnic gathering as one. In their ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠lives, the individuals of Pleasantville are uninformed to a significant number of the issues and flaws of the cutting edge world. In Pleasantville there is where there are crosscuts among Bud and a hued Margret, who are embracing one another, and a ââ¬Ëblack and whiteââ¬â¢ kid from school. The kid asks Bud for what good reason he isnââ¬â¢t at the town meeting and furthermore why he is with a ââ¬Å"colouredâ⬠young lady. This scene depicts isolation and bias executed by people. In Pleasantville, Margaret is racially mishandled in light of the fact that she is ââ¬Å"colouredâ⬠. This is an episode, which happens, in our regular day to day existences. Individuals are victimized in light of their shading, race, sex, religion and convictions. The coloreds in Pleasantville are victimized in light of the fact that they are hued people. This depicts how a few people in present day society unconsciously and tenaciously segregate, menace and despise people since they are diverse to them. They additionally decline to be agreeable to people who are victimized in light of the fact that it would be, being distinctive to every other person. They are terrified that they additionally may endure a type of segregation since they are neighborly with a person who is distinctive to society. Therefore individuals oppose change. Society is anxious about the possibility that that change may bring inconvenience upon them. One of the fundamental scenes, which must be incorporated is where Pleasantville residents are consuming the townââ¬â¢s books. There is a high edge shot of the books being scorched just as cross cuts on the essences of the individuals indicating awfulness towards singularity. This scene shows the constraint implemented by the Pleasantville residents on the ââ¬Å"colouredâ⬠people in the public arena. It makes reference to an ongoing noteworthy occasion The Holocaust. The consuming of the books shows how individuals can be inculcated effectively and complete acts that are ethically off-base. The copying of the books represents absence of information, which can bring about uninformed indecency, for example, segregation. Without information individuals don't know preferable other over to follow, nor comprehend the distinction among good and bad. Individuals inside present day social orders settle on pivotal choice, for example, casting a ballot an administration into power, in light of uninformed perspectives as opposed to sensible thinking. In the end arrangement of Pleasantville, there is a medium shot of Mr. also, Mrs. Parker sitting on a seat talking about the future, at that point not long after there is a crosscut to Mrs. Parker and Mr. Johnson talking about the future too. Mrs. parker in this scene apparently is having sexual illicit relationships with both her significant other, Mr. Parker and her companion Mr. Johnson. This scene mocks the enormous measure of bombed relationships in view of disloyalty in present day society. Numerous relationships are built up on counterfeit aims, for example, cash. In Truman Show, there is a medium since a long time ago shot of Truman and his neighbors welcoming each other in high key lighting. This represents the ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠life of the ââ¬Å"American dreamâ⬠. Everything is tranquil, there is no battling and for the most part everybody is glad. The starting scene of this film portrays what precisely the ââ¬Å"American Dreamâ⬠is seen to be in present day society. It is depicted it to be straightforward, glad and serene. Truman welcomes his Black neighbors, representing the congruity among the distinctive ethnic gatherings in the American Dream. This scene likewise depicts the repeat of Trumanââ¬â¢s life. Everything is normal. Truman carries on with a similar life regular, one, which is impervious to change and thusly which is subject to Trumanââ¬â¢s numbness. Truman can carry on with a superior life, however just with information, which he doesn't possess. Anyway Truman is abused and confined in a shut society by Christoff. This demonstrates how a fascism in present day society can indoctrinate numerous people into doing an inappropriate things throughout everyday life. They are influenced essentially on the grounds that they know no better and have been escaped reality and information on the world, demonstrating how numbness in present day society limits people to better themselves and perform incredible activities in this world. There is a medium shot of Truman with his back went to a man in a parachute. The man is in a parachute since he flew from the sky to get into the film set to disclose to Truman he is on TV. This scene depicts the fixation on unscripted television in present day society. This scene shows how people in current society are totally beguiled by unscripted tv and with being on TV. Individuals are continually focused with the happenings on the unscripted tv show that they quit focusing on progressively significant things in their lives, for example, their own lives. This scene shows how individuals can be misused and cheated from reality in a ââ¬Å"perfectâ⬠society as genuine occurrences are concealed away from them. Truman has just observed the ideal world where he lives. He just comprehends what reality has been introduced to him. In this film there is no other spot to Truman other than the spot in which he lives. This clarifies how people in a confined society are overwhelmed by numbness. They don't see how the world functions. They are avoided the world and just follow the ethics that they have been raised to follow and comprehend. Offspring of strict fundamentalists are raised being instructed in school to abhor Israel just as become self destruction aircraft. The kids are detached from the outside world and know no preferred other over to do the obligations that have been educated to them since early on. A significant scene is when Truman is strolling in the transport. There is a low edge shot of Truman strolling, while every other person in the transport is sitting. This scene portrays isolation and partiality performed by individuals. It tends to be seen from the transport scene in the Truman Show that individuals mark others and treat them in an unexpected way. Truman is marked as various and individuals would prefer not to interface with him. Truman is viewed as the main individual remaining without anyone else in the transport, while every other person is sitting, as though he has been isolated from society. This scene portrays the enormous measure of preference and isolation in present day society. Individuals will not change and disclose to the ââ¬Å"differentâ⬠Truman what precisely is going on inside his reality. These individuals on the transport hav
Saturday, August 22, 2020
How to Get Started With the Reddit Essay Submissions
How to Get Started With the Reddit Essay SubmissionsThe first rule of free essay samples is not to buy anything. That is the very simple rule of thumb and is actually really difficult to achieve. If you do not buy something, there is no point in buying a company's free writing samples because it does not benefit you in any way at all. Buy only what you need and your free writing samples will be of great use to you in future projects as well.Free online writing samples are meant to help you in producing high quality work. And while many of them do help, there are some which do more harm than good. There are a lot of free articles which are written by writers who want to get into freelancing and start earning a bit of money from their writing skills. But, in reality, they do not mean much to you unless you really enjoy writing and also if you are comfortable writing. This is the very reason why many websites offer these writing samples for free.You can also create your own writing samp les for free. This is a great way to start out and it could even save you from the treadmill of regular writing jobs that you get every day. These writing samples may be great and you may even find that they look pretty good when you put them up on your website. There are many ways in which you can write your own articles and submit them for free but it is important that you stick to a formula as well.The best way to ensure that you get better at article writing is to always submit your articles for free sample to more websites. When you write every day, and post to various article submission sites, then your ability to write articles will improve gradually. You can also improve on your writing skills by using an automated software tool to help you find the most popular article submission sites.Another great site that you should not miss is EzineArticles.com. This is one of the biggest sites and also offers free samples of different types of writing and articles and also has forums where you can discuss different topics and even ask other people for their opinion about certain topics and subjects.Another great place to find free essays and articles is WordPress.com. This is a very popular website and also provides excellent free samples.However, before you buy any of the free online essay samples available on the internet, you should first know what you are getting yourself into. Buying this type of writing samples will ultimately mean that you are not getting value for your money and you are paying for something that you could do yourself. So the second rule of free essay samples is: do not buy.You can save yourself a lot of time and money by reading the many articles on this site and by bookmarking the ones that you like. But the truth is that you can easily get into free online writing samples by following the guidelines above.
Miles City Montana By Munro Essays - Point Of View, Style
Miles City Montana By Munro The dreariness of life has battled against the storyteller in Alice Munro's Miles City, Montana. The creator delineates the storyteller as a weak lady in search of an individual character among a network of similarity. This fight between local duty and individual fulfillment smells ruin on the trooper of this mother and spouse. Munro is an ace of portrayal, and through the hero she delineates the complexities of human instinct. Presently, as the group of four goes over the landmass, the storyteller can swamp off all the commitments which society has dumped on her. Nearly mitigated, we shed our home, the area, the city, and...our nation (378). On the street, she is not, at this point compelled to escape the well disposed calls or family unit tasks. The storyteller has been liberated on the interstate to Ontario, Canada. The Captive, held under attack in her own house, is freed to be confident also, cheerful (378). This excursion turns into a break from the existence that she's is at present driving, an actual existence which society thinks should make her substance. With this new piece of opportunity the storyteller can frame a character for herself. Catastrophe, be that as it may, nearly strikes as the storyteller enjoys this reprieve from the real world. As the family arrives at Miles City, Montana, the two little youngsters become charmed by the idea of swimming in a reviving pool. No grown-ups are out loud into the pool region during the mid-day break, however the kids are as yet ready to take a dip with the lifeguard present. As the storyteller ventures far out, the most youthful young lady's interest catches her, and she nearly suffocates in the pool. Meg had about lowered before the mother had a dubious feeling that something on this evening is off-base. Running toward the pool, the young lady's folks contact her in time, yet this episode leaks a lot further as the mother gains astuteness and personality from the experience. She is a mother. The storyteller has now acknowledged this duty, and will most likely grasp different commitments inside her locale. As the storyteller and her better half examine which course to take on the route back to Vancouver, she is loaded up with help (388) at the idea of home. That which was a jail before this game changing get-away has gotten a haven, and there is an astounding delight (388) inside this idea. Reference index Meyer, Michael. The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. 5 ed. Bedford Books. 1997.
Friday, August 21, 2020
Financial Accounting and Reporting Pewter Ltd
Question: Portray about the Financial Accounting and Reporting for Pewter Ltd. Answer: Issue 1 As passed on by Mr Con Pewter, it has been brought to the information on bookkeepers that there is an issue with respect to the strategy to be utilized for bookkeeping the paid leaves of workers. Bookkeepers counsel from the work area of McKenzie and Associates Despite the fact that the technique utilized by the organization is very straightforward and makes it simpler for bookkeepers to record the long assistance leaves cost. They account this cost when workers are really paid the pay rates. Be that as it may, this appears to be deficient since it repudiates with the acknowledgment idea of bookkeeping standards (Elliott, 2007). This standard says that all the costs and misfortunes ought to be accounted as and when they are acknowledged and not at the hour of installment. Consequently, I concur with the proposal of your senior bookkeeper Mr Peter. The technique recommended by him appears to be awkward, however it is the right method of bookkeeping these costs. The inquiry raised by you that on the off chance that basic techniques are working, at that point why not stay with them just is very self-evident. In any case it will have a critical ramifications on visit charge computations and accounting report certifications (Watts, 2003). It is delineated by the theoretical circumstance given beneath. Assume the companys net benefit before expense and recompense for Employee Bargaining Agreement for the year is $50,000. In 2015, 2 of its representatives have accepted leaves according to Employee Bargaining Agreement. One representative had leaves of about a month and the other had the equivalent for 7 weeks. The all out pay to be credited to representatives account is $14000+ $24,500 = $38,500 individually. Be that as it may, this credit is done in 2016. In this way, it will be appeared in the records of budgetary year 2016. Other than that, another representative has taken leaves of about a month and a half under a similar provision. The pay to be credited is $21,000. This will be credited in 2016 as it were. Net benefit before duty and stipend for Employee Bargaining Agreement is $55,000 for 2016. Assessment figuring for 2015 (expecting corporate duty to be 30%): net benefit before expense and recompense of Employee Bargaining Agreement is $50,000. According to companys prior strategies, there is no cost of paid leaves in this year. Thus, charge adds up to $15,000, which is a gigantic sum and net benefit is $35,000. Assessment estimation for 2016 (expecting corporate expense to be 30%): net benefit before duty and recompense for Employee Bargaining Agreement is $55,000. This year there will be a cost of $59,500 for paid leaves. Consequently, accounting report will show loss of $4,500. No duties will be required. Rather acknowledgment idea ought to be utilized (Schn, 2004). 2015 Sum (in $) 2015 Sum (in $) 2016 Benefit 50,000 55,000 Paid leave cost (38,500) (21,000) Benefit before charge 11,500 34,000 Duty paid @ 30% 3,450 10,200 Net benefit 7,050 24,800 All out expense paid = 13,650 (not exactly prior) Issue 2 The subsequent issue as spoke with us is by all accounts in regards to the strategy for bookkeeping to be utilized to record incomes from deal at stores and finding of expenses to possess the racks at the stores. For advertising merchandise and upgrading deals, it is a decent method to book explicit spots at the store only for the companys items consequently of certain measure of charges. It will create great measure of incomes. To make the installment procedure straightforward, it is adequate that charges ought to be deducted from the incomes picked up. In any case, the inquiry is whether it ought to be recorded in books a similar way. Bookkeepers guidance from the work area of McKenzie and Associates I consent to the point that recording net income will disentangle the issues to an extraordinary record. In any case, salary articulation of an organization is anything but a synopsis of the considerable number of expenses and incomes, it demonstrates nitty gritty data to the invested individuals of conclusive records or partners of the organization. It ought to include subtleties of every single purpose of costs and incomes created. On the off chance that utilizing straightforward strategies is the main thought process, at that point why would that be a need to show the measure of cost of products sold, authoritative costs, and so forth independently. They can be summarized and can be appeared as a solitary figure. In any case, at that point, that would not be the right method of introducing the pay explanation. Salary articulation should be educational for partners of the organization, yet additionally for the organization itself. Earlier years salary articulations are usually utilized for arranging and anticipating for future. Consequently, it should obviously show all the costs and incomes (Gaynor et al., 2011). A model is given to think about a summarized pay articulation and a definite enlightening salary proclamation. Summarized pay articulation Points of interest Sum (in $) Income 800 Cost of deals (396) Net benefit 404 Costs (298) Net benefit before expense and intrigue 106 Assessment and intrigue paid (52) Net benefit after assessment 54 Remark: subtleties are not satisfactory. It doesn't give the away from of companys position. Nitty gritty articulation Specifics Sum (in $) Deals income 800 Cost of deals: Devaluation of industrial facility Devaluation of apparatus Devaluation of licenses Cost of merchandise sold Complete expense of deals (32) (74) (8) (282) (396) Net benefit 404 Costs: Compensations Lease Organization costs All out costs (151) (90) (57) (298) Benefit before expense and intrigue 106 Intrigue (27) Benefit before charge 79 Expense paid (25) Net benefit 54 Remark: it gives total data about the costs caused and incomes produced. (Plants Plesko, 2003) Issue 3 According to the subtleties sent to us, I have gone over with another issue concerning Deferred Tax Assets (DTA) and Deferred Tax Liabilities (DTL). Your issue is that you are going through such an extensive amount cash and HR for recording the subtleties of conceded charge liabilities and conceded charge resources. As indicated by the load up individuals' contentions, time and cash ought not be squandered on recording impermanent contrasts with respect to burden liabilities. You need to abstain from recording such subtleties and disentangle the system for bookkeeping. Bookkeepers exhortation from the work area of McKenzie and Associates It is prudent for the organization to keep away from this straightforwardness. Above all else, the companys conceded charge risk is of basic significance for its financial specialists and loan specialists. On the off chance that they are not recorded appropriately, they may have results on future periods income proclamations and asset report. Consequently, they ought to be properly represented (Guenther Sansing, 2000). On the off chance that you don't record conceded charge obligation this year, at that point it might not have any antagonistic effect on this years fiscal reports and incomes, however will fundamentally impact one years from now money related revealing. Reason being the organization should pay the expenses one year from now. Henceforth, it will build the expense commitments and may show low benefits and low execution of the organization. This may affect companys altruism before financial specialists and banks. Consequently, such effortlessness should be evaded (Pocrnjiãââ⬠¡ et al., 2009). Besides, contentions given by governing body that these estimations are insignificant brief contrasts are least critical. A few costs and incomes are excluded from charges. Consequently, they represent a perpetual contrast in DTA or DTL. Thus, these should be recorded appropriately in books of records (Phillips et al., 2003). Genuinely Ms. Maria Mckenzie References Elliott, B. Elliott, J., 2007. Budgetary bookkeeping and detailing. Pearson Education. Gaynor, L.M., McDaniel, L. Yohn, T.L., 2011. Reasonable worth representing liabilities: The job of divulgences in unwinding the strange pay explanation impact from credit hazard changes. Bookkeeping, associations and society, 36(3), pp.125-34. Guenther, D.A. Sansing, R.C., 2000. Valuation of the firm within the sight of impermanent book-charge contrasts: The job of conceded charge resources and liabilities. The Accounting Review, 75(1), pp.1-12. Plants, L.F. Plesko, G.A., 2003. Crossing over the revealing hole: A proposition for progressively enlightening accommodating of book and expense pay. National Tax Journal, pp.865-93. Phillips, J., Pincus, M. Rego, S.O., 2003. Income the board: New proof dependent on conceded charge cost. The Accounting Review, 78(2), pp.491-521. Pocrnjiãââ⬠¡, D., Mladineo, L. Pepur, P., 2009. Conceded charge resources and conceded charge liabilities inside the extent of International Financial Reporting Standards and Croatian Financial Reporting Standards. Youthful Science AIESA 2009Participation of PhD. understudies and youthful logical specialists on working of society dependent on information. Schn, W., 2004. Global Accounting Standards-A Starting Point for a Common European Tax Base? European Taxation, 44(10), pp.426-40. Watts, R.L., 2003. Conservatism in bookkeeping part I: Explanations and suggestions. Bookkeeping skylines, 17(3), pp. 207-221.
Monday, July 20, 2020
DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at New York City interviewing Digital Ocean. Ben, who are you and what do you do?Ben: I am Ben Uretsky and I am CEO of Digital Ocean.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what is your background?Ben: I started DigitalOcean in 2011 and my background; I have a Bachelorâs Degree here from Pace University in information systems which I basically got to show my dad that I can finish college but I have been working since I was 15 years old in high school. So my background is I thought myself Linux and networking and servers and then ultimately joined a bunch of Tech Companies starting out into the voice over IP space, and then transitioning to hosting, and then ultimately starting my own company.Martin: Okay and in parallel you did study.Ben: Oh, yes. I did study, I finished. So when I started working in high school, I graduated from there and then went to University and was able to actually start my first business at 21 before graduating from University.Martin: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the similarities of those business models because most entrepreneurs have some area which are very like, and they tweak around and have some different business model in that kind of area.Ben: Yes, thatâs definitely true. The business model that we use is a recurring subscription is really the heart of the engine. So the first company that I started in 2003 was called ServerStack and it managed hosting, just taking care of customer environment online. So letâs say you generate some revenue because you are a retailer, so e-commerce or you drive some sort of a subscription network maybe itâs video ads or advertising in general, in other words you are generating revenue online, you want to make sure that your website stays active. And so we monitored and took care of that entire environment, provided a 100% uptime SLA, took care of back up security, capacity planning, network expansion, just everything that falls within IT management and helped our customers grow their business. And so what was great about that business was that as you sign up that first customer, more often than not, they continued to grow their business, so each month, each account produces more revenue and the goal is to get as many more accounts as you can.BUSINESS MODELMartin: And how is the current business model of Digital Ocean working?Ben: Itâs similar. Itâs interesting because we are a utility cloud provider. So customers can use as much or as little as they want. Our billing today works on hourly basis but the majority of our customers run what we call sticky infrastructure. So once they set it up, they wonât tear it down, it will continue to exist for months and essentially even for years. Although they have the luxury if the demand changes or they need to make a modification, they can pay by the hour and make those changes in real time. Nonetheless, each customer continues to spend more money every single month because they create a business which finds traction and attracts new users and so they need to grow the server foot print to keep up with demand. And so even though itâs not a traditional subscription model, based on that sticky usage, they wind up paying more every single month but thatâs tied directly to their success and usage.Martin: And did you transition DigitalOcean directly from your former company because the business model is quite similar but you are coming from managed hosting to cloud hosting?Ben: Yeah. We had an opportunity to step back in 2011 and really think about where our first business was headed. And we had some concerns about dedicated servers, many other providers came out with virtualized solutions where you can purchase these systems online. Some of them sold the fraction of the server, so it seemed like price was substantially less but thatâs also because youâve got substantially less resources. Nonetheless, a consumer, the person whoâ s actually going to use those recourse, didnât pay as much attention to the unit economics, they just thought, âOh wow, I can spend $20 bucks a month, instead of two or three hundred. So in general customers really began to adopt cloud based servers and wanted to make sure that we stayed relevant within the market place. We had a good grasp on business operations as well as the technical sides, so the servers and the networks. Where the first business didnât find traction was actually in its unique value proposition. So we were selling support like many other companies and it was hard to differentiate ourselves and stand out in that crowd of market.So as we began to analyze what the new business would be all about. We started reading a lot of books on marketing, on positioning, there is actually a book literally called, âPositioningâ. I think itâs Al Ries and Jack Trout if I remember correctly. It talks about finding a unique value proposition that fits within the custo merâs mindset. So if you have to re educate them, itâll be a very difficult proposition and you also canât compete against any of the existing values or opinions that they have. So you have to try to find a way to squeeze into all of that and still stay relevant.And so as we started thinking about building Digital Ocean the other concept that we really kept in mind is brand extension. And sometimes that works for example, perhaps you make a toothbrush and you decide to extend into the tooth paste business. It could work but it could also create some confusion. And what we see so many times in our industry is companies create brand extensions and so first they are dedicated server provider, then they become a managed service provider and then the cloud comes and around and all of a sound they offer virtually cloud offerings. But as the customer evaluates that front home page, they are confused, itâs like, âCan I buy this server or that serverâ? Itâs a mixed message. So what we realize is, we could not extend our original business to provide cloud servers.So we decided to start a company from the ground up with a single laser focus on providing the best cloud server experience that we could, that levered on nearly a decade of running the first business, going through a lot of growing pains in helping our customers achieve scale. So we took that operational experience and we created a product. And thatâs another huge distinction between the first company which was a services based business and essentially there, I like to say you tell the customer, âYesâ and you then you go home or you go back to your office and you try to figure out how to deliver that service. In a product based business itâs the exact opposite. You build a product that has certain characteristics and thatâs all that you can actually deliver because product developing takes a much longer time to actually achieve that new product version.So that really was the basis for D igital Oceans, all of these ideas floating around in our heads. We had access to couple hundred customers in our first company but we also did survey the market. And what we recognized is that no one was really focused on the developer. Everyone was focusing on larger scale businesses and the way that they thought about their companies was through technology lens. So they said, âHey, we can deliver and build these features and this is what you guys will useâ. And for a larger size business that actually works well because they understand their requirements, they have the necessary teams to manage that complexity and so access to this scalable infinite infrastructure is a great way for many companies to build their business. But if you take a look at the opposite end of that spectrum itâs an individual user, a developer who is just getting started, maybe they are learning a new language or they are pushing their application for the first time into a beta phase, trying to find t hat initial traction, create a start up thatâs ultimately going to scale, that user was neglected. We decided to focus digital ocean on providing the simplest cloud infrastructure experience possible catered to the developer rather than to a scaling business.Martin: Ben when somebody is thinking about âwhat type of server hosting I am using?â, you said that itâs quite hard to distinguish the unit economics, can you walk us through the unit economics for the different type of segments like dedicated, managed, cloud hosting?Ben: Yes. So dedicated servers are fairly straight forward because you can a la carte pick and choose your processors, memory, storage and all of that gets bundled into a monthly price tag. And then typically you also pay extra for bandwidth and you have a lot of customization on dedicated server side. So anything that fits into the chassis you can probably get from a provider.Once you go into a cloud environment, it becomes a little different. Most cloud p roviders bundle a specific set of resources together, so you will receive one or two CPUs with a couple of Giga bytes of memory and some storage space. Now, some providers charge separately for bandwidth. We actually include an allotment of network transferred bandwidth with that original plan as well, so that customers donât have to worry about, how much will I actually pay at the end of the month. The majority of our users fit within the allocated bundle and so they know exactly how much they are going to pay in advance. And with cloud, the business unit economics have become much more granular. So we see companies nowadays that are doing not only hourly billing but even per minute and I think we are even starting to see some come out that are gauging by the second. So thatâs great from environments where you have high volatility. A great example would be a news website, some event happens, everyone rushes to the website, you get 10x or 20x of traffic and then a day later you need to return back to that original amount. So in those cases the elasticity of cloud is a great fit for that use case.Martin: Okay great. What experiments did you do in order to understand how best to reach your customers? So what marketing channels did you test, and what have been your hypothesis, and how did you test them?Ben: The hypothesis for the most part we developed behind closed doors because we had almost a decade worth of experience working in this industry and understanding what our customers wanted. So in some regards itâs almost 10 years of continual customer development that gave us a really good foundation to work from. But as we created that initially hypothesis we then ran some very focused user groups. So we brought in one person at a time so that you donât create a group think environment and sat them down behind an alpha version of our product and ask them to use it. And we were looking for two things:Can they successful launch a virtual server?What are th e adjectives or how would they describe the experience of using our product?And I think every single person successfully created a server which is not the case with all providers. Sometimes people get stuck in that creation process, so we hit simplicity there. And two is the experience, they were actually quite pleased with what they say. So very intuitive straight forward control panel language that isnât confusing, keywords that resonate with their understanding of the market, and they also pointed out a bunch of mistakes or oversights on our part. Like you can only log in and sign up from the home page none of the other pages that we had provided those links. They helped us with a little bit of the user navigation to create a smoother flow. But that I think is actually very important. And we felt extremely challenged when we first said, âHow are we going to get people to come into our office and actually provide this feedback?âBecause you donât want to take a stranger fro m the street who might be doing grocery shopping to evaluate a cloud server business. So we placed an Ad on Craigslist and decided to pay $100 for this 1 hour session and the criteria was that you would need to use a competitor service to prove that you are a potential customer for our product. And I think that that experiment thought us a lot about where our customerâs heads were at, but the fundamental framework was really developed over that decade working in the first company.Martin: How did you evaluate whether the customer will use your service? How did you try to estimate the willingness to pay for example?Ben: I donât think we really estimated that, it wasâ"Martin: Just taking competitive prices, or so?Ben: Yes. Although our pricing we actually developed in a very interesting way, we are a price leader in the industry today and we approached it bottoms up. So we calculated how much it would cost to deliver this basic unit of compute and we created a healthy margin with which we could run the business successfully. It just turned out that price point was substantially less than our competitors. And thatâs a great question because why are we able to offer such a different price compared to the industry veterans?We do have a late comer advantage.We are extremely focused, so we only provide cloud servers.That means we donât have to worry about legacy business or competing interests when we are able to really optimize the entire operation to deliver that as cost efficiently as possible, plus we have the industry of experience from the first business to understand the right relationships that we should build with vendors and the proper financing terms to makes all of this happen, so it was an unfair advantage.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: When I am look at this business model from the outside, I see mainly three steps:the one customer acquisition,then this type of technology which means hosting, infrastructure, etc., andthen the last part this kind of c ustomer service.In what parts do you think is your completive advantage?Ben: Yes, I mean our competitive advantage stems from the actual customer. Most infrastructure providers care more about the infrastructure more than the customer. So you see them leading with the what, like we sell this amount of resources with these features at this price. We like to lead with why. Why are we doing this is to create a simple infrastructure experience that developers love and who do we focus on, we focus on people rather than the technology. Everyone has access to virtualization, to the same silicon that is used to build the microprocessor, RAM, storage, network, we are all plugged into the same internet. Those are the commodity components. But what we try to do is create an experience based around the actual needs of a person to empower them with these tools so that they can build and easily manage their infrastructure and dedicate it and really focus their attention on the application. Becaus e thatâs what creates their business, itâs not the server underneath. Itâs like if you turn on the light switch, you expect the electricity to work so the only time you actually think about the infrastructure is when it doesnât work. We try to really keep that analogy. We want to get out of the way our customers so that they donât have to think about us and can actually focus on their business building heir applications, getting user tractions and growing their companies on top our cloud.Martin: Imagine a young developer is currently hosting a Bluehost or somewhere else. Now you want to target this kind of person in using your service. How do you minimize the switching cost, is there some kind of automated process where he can just say Iâve got a blue host account or Go Daddy account, whatever and then just click this button, you take care of the rest, etc.?Ben: Well we are working on the easy button, itâs not ready just yet. What we do is slightly different, we lead w ith the education approach. So we have written almost a thousand tutorials to date that talks about how to use the latest and best open source technology, but also educate users on best practices in the industry. So a portion of topics go towards migration, so how do you take a database and move it from one server to another? How do you migrate a web server? Or how do you actually migrate an entire configuration across multiple machines. And a savvy developer will recognize, âHey I can actually use this information to migrate my service from Bluehost or any other host to DigitalOceanâ whatâs great is, itâs not proprietary, itâs not locked information it will be applicable to any provider on any server. And thatâs really something that we see lacking in the industry today.We have some great community sites like Stack Overflow but they limit the conversation to, here is a problem that I encountered and the community will provide solutions or answers but there is no open en ded conversation around, if I want to build a highly available low balanced, fault tolerant website, what are the technologies? How do I go about actually building this environment and then maintaining it? So you would have to dive deep into Google, find a couple of blog posts and use the spare piece of information to try to glue this together. And thatâs what we are trying to create with our DigitalOcean Community, is to be seen as the place where developers can go to conversate about these topics, to accelerate and improve their infrastructure, whether they are a host with us or not.Martin: And by doing this you do two great things:one thing, you generate trust between your potential customers, customers and you andsecond thing is I assume you lower you customer acquisition cost because there is some kind of network effect and SEO as well.Ben: Yes, absolutely. We are ranking in the top 5 or 6 results across many different terms on Google. But whatâs great about it is itâs va lidation from our customers because they succeed at deploying those applications and installing that software, it is also validationâ"what does Google try to do? They try to surface the best content and we fall into the top 5 or 6 because we do invest a lot of dollars into making sure that the content that we produce is top notch. That it is both technically accurate but then itâs also written in a way that, someone new to the technology perhaps they are coming from a shared environment where they did not need to install all these different software packages, they can actually make the switch relatively easily based on the information they find in our community.But yes, it also attracts a lot of people to our website that learn about DigitalOcean, Ultimately go on to try it but the community is just one part to our success. The real reason why we have this phenomenal rate of growth is when customers use DigitalOcean for the first time, they truly encounter a unique experience tha t they canât get anywhere else. And itâs exactly what they expect. Itâs really quick and easy to use. And ultimately it leaves them with the feeling of satisfaction that they want to go and share it with someone else, whether itâs a friend, another developer or even just write a blog post about their experience using DigitalOcean. And that speaks to the original mission that we set out on, itâs to delight our customers, to simplify infrastructure because itâs not complex, at the same time it is growing more complex everyday. And thatâs where we really want to use the community, as new projects come out, 4 west being a great example, a new product release that we just did last month. We are able to talk about it, educate our user base, and teach the best practices on how to deploy that in the cloud.Martin: When you are looking at your product and every entrepreneur that has some kind of vision and says âOkayâ this is where I want to goâ. What do you think is still missing in your product that you say, âI want to do that!âBen: Quite a few features are not present in the product just yet. So the challenge that we have is, we decided to write the software in house and that has created the experience that we have been able to deliver to our customers. Without writing it and owning the code there is just no way that we would have been able to deliver the intuitive interphase that we have. The other side of that sword is that we are responsible to develop the rest of the features as well. So I know our customers desperately want additional storage capacity. So it could be something like an object store, especially if you have a user generated content so someone that uploads pictures or media. You need a place to store that data and we provide only a limited amount with the droplet which is our virtual machine today. So there is no easy way to scale out storage. And the other component, I think that a lot of customers are asking for is more adv anced network services related to high availability. So as you develop a production website and want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible, taking advantage of low balance and to create full tolerance, or truly private and secure networking with access list and firewall policies. Those are the features that our customers would love to see us develop as quickly as we can. And a lot of where our investment dollars are going is into the engineering team and the efforts behind pushing those features to market.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Ben, letâs talk about the market development and the hosting segment. Imagine some kind of matrix where you have on one side the small companies and the larger companies. You are one of I would say the smaller companies, then you have something like Go Daddy or so on the larger spectrum. And then on the other hand you have the different kinds of hosting products that we talked about before like managed hosting, cloud, etc. What kind of trends can you identify in this? Is there some kind of migration from a lot of hosting users from the big ones to the small ones or the other way around? Is the hosting market in general growing in terms of total sales or is it more constant and just migration between the different services, what trends can you identify?Ben: Well, I think definitely the market is growing every single year, more users are coming online, more businesses are being built online and you might start out and host it from your apartment but as you gain revenue you quickly realize thatâs not reliable. So you look to a data centre so that your application can live in a true 24/7 uptime environment. So there is no doubt that the market is growing.I think that the cloud providers probably represent thisâ"one of the newer trends that we are starting to see is: before 2010 we may have only had one or two people in the space, today as we look around we have nearly 10 cloud providers that are trying to compete for busines s. And the majority of them are not able to differentiate clearly and I think that customers at that point then begin to look at things like price and convenience. The other trend that we are also seeing is the tools that are becoming available are actually starting to become much more complex, that complexity is really hitting away. So you have these frameworks for how to deploy larger applications so things like Docker. Platforms that are being open sourced so how do you run a Heroku inside of your own environment that allows you a quick and easy way to deploy a reels application.And I think in general we are starting to see that users care less and less about infrastructure and servers and more about the application that lies on top of it. So how can I really deliver my application as quickly as possible to the market and then ultimately maintain it with the least amount of resources and management that goes into it. So thatâs certainly a trend that we picked up on and are tryi ng hard to stay ahead of. You can almost phrase it like: âBy using DigitalOcean, you can delay the need for people that work in the developer operations segment, the SREs to ensure that your infrastructure is online. So we pour a lot of dollars into building a highly redundant environment from the start. Other cloud providers take a slightly different approach and say, these instances are ephemeral and they are here today, they could be gone tomorrow, so you really have to architect and application that can withstand a high level of failure. And we are not immune to issues and so we would always encourage customers to build availability into their applications, but we also have a better basis from which for them to get started. So in the early days when they are still relatively small they donât experience that issue as much, obviously when you scale to thousands of nodes failure rates, even if it stays at relatively small percentage still creates a lot of issues.So I think that âs another trend in general is that the software is finally beginning to catch up to these much larger distributing environments. The database has always been one of the biggest issues there with running a huge monolithic application on a single server that you scale horizontally. First you start out with two CPUs and then your business grows and you need a new chassis with 4 CPUs, and then it gets tricky after that. And some companies have actually been forced to re-write their application for months or a year to get out of that dependency and now what we are seeing is distribution and availability built into the software from the start so. NoSQL is a great example of that and many distributed Databases that have come as a result of it which inherently are a great fit for cloud providers because of the large number of nodes over disparate machines and resiliency to failure.The last thing on the trends, I think as a result of, I donât want to take too much credit here, but Digit alOcean coming in with a great price point, an easy to use interphase and the education. I think we have enabled a whole new set of users to come online, so people from countries that are really developing nations and are beginning just to have their people get on the internet from Asia, within Europe, south America as well, are able to take advantage of DigitalOcean because of itâ price point and ease of use and finally start building something online. Whereas in the past they would need to wait much longer, develop on their home computer or laptop and perhaps never even take the step to publish their application live. And I am very proud of the tens of thousands people worldwide that have access to the server resources as a result of our company. We have also enabled thousands of students whether itâs through hackathons orâ"we even sponsor our high school that I attended here in New York City so we provide them with a ton of resources every year for students to do their final term project and we do that across the nation and even internationally. These education facilities can actually request resources and sponsorship from DigitalOcean. We want to enable the next generation of developers and we donât think there is any better way than getting your hands dirty, partially thatâs how I learned, so I would love to see other students start out the same way.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In New York (NY), we meet DigitalOcean CEO Ben Uretsky. He shares how he came up with the idea for his fast-growing company, how the current business model works, as well as provides some advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are at New York City interviewing Digital Ocean. Ben, who are you and what do you do?Ben: I am Ben Uretsky and I am CEO of Digital Ocean.Martin: Great. When did you start this company and what is your background?Ben: I started DigitalOcean in 2011 and my background; I have a Bachelorâs Degree here from Pace University in information systems which I basically got to show my dad that I can finish college but I have been working since I was 15 years old in high school. So my background is I thought myself Linux and networking and servers and then ultimately joined a bunch of Tech Companies starting out into the voice over IP space, and then transitioning to hosting, and then ultimately starting my own company.Martin: Okay and in parallel you did study.Ben: Oh, yes. I did study, I finished. So when I started working in high school, I graduated from there and then went to University and was able to actually start my first business at 21 before graduating from University.Martin: Great. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the similarities of those business models because most entrepreneurs have some area which are very like, and they tweak around and have some different business model in that kind of area.Ben: Yes, thatâs definitely true. The business model that we use is a recurring subscription is really the heart of the engine. So the first company that I started in 2003 was called ServerStack and it managed hosting, just taking care of customer environment online. So letâs say you generate some revenue because you are a retailer, so e-commerce or you drive some sort of a subscription network maybe itâs video ads or advertising in general, in other wo rds you are generating revenue online, you want to make sure that your website stays active. And so we monitored and took care of that entire environment, provided a 100% uptime SLA, took care of back up security, capacity planning, network expansion, just everything that falls within IT management and helped our customers grow their business. And so what was great about that business was that as you sign up that first customer, more often than not, they continued to grow their business, so each month, each account produces more revenue and the goal is to get as many more accounts as you can.BUSINESS MODELMartin: And how is the current business model of Digital Ocean working?Ben: Itâs similar. Itâs interesting because we are a utility cloud provider. So customers can use as much or as little as they want. Our billing today works on hourly basis but the majority of our customers run what we call sticky infrastructure. So once they set it up, they wonât tear it down, it will con tinue to exist for months and essentially even for years. Although they have the luxury if the demand changes or they need to make a modification, they can pay by the hour and make those changes in real time. Nonetheless, each customer continues to spend more money every single month because they create a business which finds traction and attracts new users and so they need to grow the server foot print to keep up with demand. And so even though itâs not a traditional subscription model, based on that sticky usage, they wind up paying more every single month but thatâs tied directly to their success and usage.Martin: And did you transition DigitalOcean directly from your former company because the business model is quite similar but you are coming from managed hosting to cloud hosting?Ben: Yeah. We had an opportunity to step back in 2011 and really think about where our first business was headed. And we had some concerns about dedicated servers, many other providers came out wit h virtualized solutions where you can purchase these systems online. Some of them sold the fraction of the server, so it seemed like price was substantially less but thatâs also because youâve got substantially less resources. Nonetheless, a consumer, the person whoâs actually going to use those recourse, didnât pay as much attention to the unit economics, they just thought, âOh wow, I can spend $20 bucks a month, instead of two or three hundred. So in general customers really began to adopt cloud based servers and wanted to make sure that we stayed relevant within the market place. We had a good grasp on business operations as well as the technical sides, so the servers and the networks. Where the first business didnât find traction was actually in its unique value proposition. So we were selling support like many other companies and it was hard to differentiate ourselves and stand out in that crowd of market.So as we began to analyze what the new business would be all about. We started reading a lot of books on marketing, on positioning, there is actually a book literally called, âPositioningâ. I think itâs Al Ries and Jack Trout if I remember correctly. It talks about finding a unique value proposition that fits within the customerâs mindset. So if you have to re educate them, itâll be a very difficult proposition and you also canât compete against any of the existing values or opinions that they have. So you have to try to find a way to squeeze into all of that and still stay relevant.And so as we started thinking about building Digital Ocean the other concept that we really kept in mind is brand extension. And sometimes that works for example, perhaps you make a toothbrush and you decide to extend into the tooth paste business. It could work but it could also create some confusion. And what we see so many times in our industry is companies create brand extensions and so first they are dedicated server provider, then they become a m anaged service provider and then the cloud comes and around and all of a sound they offer virtually cloud offerings. But as the customer evaluates that front home page, they are confused, itâs like, âCan I buy this server or that serverâ? Itâs a mixed message. So what we realize is, we could not extend our original business to provide cloud servers.So we decided to start a company from the ground up with a single laser focus on providing the best cloud server experience that we could, that levered on nearly a decade of running the first business, going through a lot of growing pains in helping our customers achieve scale. So we took that operational experience and we created a product. And thatâs another huge distinction between the first company which was a services based business and essentially there, I like to say you tell the customer, âYesâ and you then you go home or you go back to your office and you try to figure out how to deliver that service. In a product b ased business itâs the exact opposite. You build a product that has certain characteristics and thatâs all that you can actually deliver because product developing takes a much longer time to actually achieve that new product version.So that really was the basis for Digital Oceans, all of these ideas floating around in our heads. We had access to couple hundred customers in our first company but we also did survey the market. And what we recognized is that no one was really focused on the developer. Everyone was focusing on larger scale businesses and the way that they thought about their companies was through technology lens. So they said, âHey, we can deliver and build these features and this is what you guys will useâ. And for a larger size business that actually works well because they understand their requirements, they have the necessary teams to manage that complexity and so access to this scalable infinite infrastructure is a great way for many companies to build the ir business. But if you take a look at the opposite end of that spectrum itâs an individual user, a developer who is just getting started, maybe they are learning a new language or they are pushing their application for the first time into a beta phase, trying to find that initial traction, create a start up thatâs ultimately going to scale, that user was neglected. We decided to focus digital ocean on providing the simplest cloud infrastructure experience possible catered to the developer rather than to a scaling business.Martin: Ben when somebody is thinking about âwhat type of server hosting I am using?â, you said that itâs quite hard to distinguish the unit economics, can you walk us through the unit economics for the different type of segments like dedicated, managed, cloud hosting?Ben: Yes. So dedicated servers are fairly straight forward because you can a la carte pick and choose your processors, memory, storage and all of that gets bundled into a monthly price tag. And then typically you also pay extra for bandwidth and you have a lot of customization on dedicated server side. So anything that fits into the chassis you can probably get from a provider.Once you go into a cloud environment, it becomes a little different. Most cloud providers bundle a specific set of resources together, so you will receive one or two CPUs with a couple of Giga bytes of memory and some storage space. Now, some providers charge separately for bandwidth. We actually include an allotment of network transferred bandwidth with that original plan as well, so that customers donât have to worry about, how much will I actually pay at the end of the month. The majority of our users fit within the allocated bundle and so they know exactly how much they are going to pay in advance. And with cloud, the business unit economics have become much more granular. So we see companies nowadays that are doing not only hourly billing but even per minute and I think we are even starti ng to see some come out that are gauging by the second. So thatâs great from environments where you have high volatility. A great example would be a news website, some event happens, everyone rushes to the website, you get 10x or 20x of traffic and then a day later you need to return back to that original amount. So in those cases the elasticity of cloud is a great fit for that use case.Martin: Okay great. What experiments did you do in order to understand how best to reach your customers? So what marketing channels did you test, and what have been your hypothesis, and how did you test them?Ben: The hypothesis for the most part we developed behind closed doors because we had almost a decade worth of experience working in this industry and understanding what our customers wanted. So in some regards itâs almost 10 years of continual customer development that gave us a really good foundation to work from. But as we created that initially hypothesis we then ran some very focused use r groups. So we brought in one person at a time so that you donât create a group think environment and sat them down behind an alpha version of our product and ask them to use it. And we were looking for two things:Can they successful launch a virtual server?What are the adjectives or how would they describe the experience of using our product?And I think every single person successfully created a server which is not the case with all providers. Sometimes people get stuck in that creation process, so we hit simplicity there. And two is the experience, they were actually quite pleased with what they say. So very intuitive straight forward control panel language that isnât confusing, keywords that resonate with their understanding of the market, and they also pointed out a bunch of mistakes or oversights on our part. Like you can only log in and sign up from the home page none of the other pages that we had provided those links. They helped us with a little bit of the user navigat ion to create a smoother flow. But that I think is actually very important. And we felt extremely challenged when we first said, âHow are we going to get people to come into our office and actually provide this feedback?âBecause you donât want to take a stranger from the street who might be doing grocery shopping to evaluate a cloud server business. So we placed an Ad on Craigslist and decided to pay $100 for this 1 hour session and the criteria was that you would need to use a competitor service to prove that you are a potential customer for our product. And I think that that experiment thought us a lot about where our customerâs heads were at, but the fundamental framework was really developed over that decade working in the first company.Martin: How did you evaluate whether the customer will use your service? How did you try to estimate the willingness to pay for example?Ben: I donât think we really estimated that, it wasâ"Martin: Just taking competitive prices, or so? Ben: Yes. Although our pricing we actually developed in a very interesting way, we are a price leader in the industry today and we approached it bottoms up. So we calculated how much it would cost to deliver this basic unit of compute and we created a healthy margin with which we could run the business successfully. It just turned out that price point was substantially less than our competitors. And thatâs a great question because why are we able to offer such a different price compared to the industry veterans?We do have a late comer advantage.We are extremely focused, so we only provide cloud servers.That means we donât have to worry about legacy business or competing interests when we are able to really optimize the entire operation to deliver that as cost efficiently as possible, plus we have the industry of experience from the first business to understand the right relationships that we should build with vendors and the proper financing terms to makes all of this happen, so it was an unfair advantage.CORPORATE STRATEGYMartin: When I am look at this business model from the outside, I see mainly three steps:the one customer acquisition,then this type of technology which means hosting, infrastructure, etc., andthen the last part this kind of customer service.In what parts do you think is your completive advantage?Ben: Yes, I mean our competitive advantage stems from the actual customer. Most infrastructure providers care more about the infrastructure more than the customer. So you see them leading with the what, like we sell this amount of resources with these features at this price. We like to lead with why. Why are we doing this is to create a simple infrastructure experience that developers love and who do we focus on, we focus on people rather than the technology. Everyone has access to virtualization, to the same silicon that is used to build the microprocessor, RAM, storage, network, we are all plugged into the same internet. Those are the commodit y components. But what we try to do is create an experience based around the actual needs of a person to empower them with these tools so that they can build and easily manage their infrastructure and dedicate it and really focus their attention on the application. Because thatâs what creates their business, itâs not the server underneath. Itâs like if you turn on the light switch, you expect the electricity to work so the only time you actually think about the infrastructure is when it doesnât work. We try to really keep that analogy. We want to get out of the way our customers so that they donât have to think about us and can actually focus on their business building heir applications, getting user tractions and growing their companies on top our cloud.Martin: Imagine a young developer is currently hosting a Bluehost or somewhere else. Now you want to target this kind of person in using your service. How do you minimize the switching cost, is there some kind of automated process where he can just say Iâve got a blue host account or Go Daddy account, whatever and then just click this button, you take care of the rest, etc.?Ben: Well we are working on the easy button, itâs not ready just yet. What we do is slightly different, we lead with the education approach. So we have written almost a thousand tutorials to date that talks about how to use the latest and best open source technology, but also educate users on best practices in the industry. So a portion of topics go towards migration, so how do you take a database and move it from one server to another? How do you migrate a web server? Or how do you actually migrate an entire configuration across multiple machines. And a savvy developer will recognize, âHey I can actually use this information to migrate my service from Bluehost or any other host to DigitalOceanâ whatâs great is, itâs not proprietary, itâs not locked information it will be applicable to any provider on any server. And thatâs really something that we see lacking in the industry today.We have some great community sites like Stack Overflow but they limit the conversation to, here is a problem that I encountered and the community will provide solutions or answers but there is no open ended conversation around, if I want to build a highly available low balanced, fault tolerant website, what are the technologies? How do I go about actually building this environment and then maintaining it? So you would have to dive deep into Google, find a couple of blog posts and use the spare piece of information to try to glue this together. And thatâs what we are trying to create with our DigitalOcean Community, is to be seen as the place where developers can go to conversate about these topics, to accelerate and improve their infrastructure, whether they are a host with us or not.Martin: And by doing this you do two great things:one thing, you generate trust between your potential customers, customers and you andsecond thing is I assume you lower you customer acquisition cost because there is some kind of network effect and SEO as well.Ben: Yes, absolutely. We are ranking in the top 5 or 6 results across many different terms on Google. But whatâs great about it is itâs validation from our customers because they succeed at deploying those applications and installing that software, it is also validationâ"what does Google try to do? They try to surface the best content and we fall into the top 5 or 6 because we do invest a lot of dollars into making sure that the content that we produce is top notch. That it is both technically accurate but then itâs also written in a way that, someone new to the technology perhaps they are coming from a shared environment where they did not need to install all these different software packages, they can actually make the switch relatively easily based on the information they find in our community.But yes, it also attracts a lot of people to our web site that learn about DigitalOcean, Ultimately go on to try it but the community is just one part to our success. The real reason why we have this phenomenal rate of growth is when customers use DigitalOcean for the first time, they truly encounter a unique experience that they canât get anywhere else. And itâs exactly what they expect. Itâs really quick and easy to use. And ultimately it leaves them with the feeling of satisfaction that they want to go and share it with someone else, whether itâs a friend, another developer or even just write a blog post about their experience using DigitalOcean. And that speaks to the original mission that we set out on, itâs to delight our customers, to simplify infrastructure because itâs not complex, at the same time it is growing more complex everyday. And thatâs where we really want to use the community, as new projects come out, 4 west being a great example, a new product release that we just did last month. We are able to talk about it, educate our user base, and teach the best practices on how to deploy that in the cloud.Martin: When you are looking at your product and every entrepreneur that has some kind of vision and says âOkayâ this is where I want to goâ. What do you think is still missing in your product that you say, âI want to do that!âBen: Quite a few features are not present in the product just yet. So the challenge that we have is, we decided to write the software in house and that has created the experience that we have been able to deliver to our customers. Without writing it and owning the code there is just no way that we would have been able to deliver the intuitive interphase that we have. The other side of that sword is that we are responsible to develop the rest of the features as well. So I know our customers desperately want additional storage capacity. So it could be something like an object store, especially if you have a user generated content so someone that uploads pi ctures or media. You need a place to store that data and we provide only a limited amount with the droplet which is our virtual machine today. So there is no easy way to scale out storage. And the other component, I think that a lot of customers are asking for is more advanced network services related to high availability. So as you develop a production website and want to ensure as close to 100% uptime as possible, taking advantage of low balance and to create full tolerance, or truly private and secure networking with access list and firewall policies. Those are the features that our customers would love to see us develop as quickly as we can. And a lot of where our investment dollars are going is into the engineering team and the efforts behind pushing those features to market.MARKET DEVELOPMENTMartin: Ben, letâs talk about the market development and the hosting segment. Imagine some kind of matrix where you have on one side the small companies and the larger companies. You are one of I would say the smaller companies, then you have something like Go Daddy or so on the larger spectrum. And then on the other hand you have the different kinds of hosting products that we talked about before like managed hosting, cloud, etc. What kind of trends can you identify in this? Is there some kind of migration from a lot of hosting users from the big ones to the small ones or the other way around? Is the hosting market in general growing in terms of total sales or is it more constant and just migration between the different services, what trends can you identify?Ben: Well, I think definitely the market is growing every single year, more users are coming online, more businesses are being built online and you might start out and host it from your apartment but as you gain revenue you quickly realize thatâs not reliable. So you look to a data centre so that your application can live in a true 24/7 uptime environment. So there is no doubt that the market is growing.I th ink that the cloud providers probably represent thisâ"one of the newer trends that we are starting to see is: before 2010 we may have only had one or two people in the space, today as we look around we have nearly 10 cloud providers that are trying to compete for business. And the majority of them are not able to differentiate clearly and I think that customers at that point then begin to look at things like price and convenience. The other trend that we are also seeing is the tools that are becoming available are actually starting to become much more complex, that complexity is really hitting away. So you have these frameworks for how to deploy larger applications so things like Docker. Platforms that are being open sourced so how do you run a Heroku inside of your own environment that allows you a quick and easy way to deploy a reels application.And I think in general we are starting to see that users care less and less about infrastructure and servers and more about the applicat ion that lies on top of it. So how can I really deliver my application as quickly as possible to the market and then ultimately maintain it with the least amount of resources and management that goes into it. So thatâs certainly a trend that we picked up on and are trying hard to stay ahead of. You can almost phrase it like: âBy using DigitalOcean, you can delay the need for people that work in the developer operations segment, the SREs to ensure that your infrastructure is online. So we pour a lot of dollars into building a highly redundant environment from the start. Other cloud providers take a slightly different approach and say, these instances are ephemeral and they are here today, they could be gone tomorrow, so you really have to architect and application that can withstand a high level of failure. And we are not immune to issues and so we would always encourage customers to build availability into their applications, but we also have a better basis from which for them t o get started. So in the early days when they are still relatively small they donât experience that issue as much, obviously when you scale to thousands of nodes failure rates, even if it stays at relatively small percentage still creates a lot of issues.So I think thatâs another trend in general is that the software is finally beginning to catch up to these much larger distributing environments. The database has always been one of the biggest issues there with running a huge monolithic application on a single server that you scale horizontally. First you start out with two CPUs and then your business grows and you need a new chassis with 4 CPUs, and then it gets tricky after that. And some companies have actually been forced to re-write their application for months or a year to get out of that dependency and now what we are seeing is distribution and availability built into the software from the start so. NoSQL is a great example of that and many distributed Databases that have come as a result of it which inherently are a great fit for cloud providers because of the large number of nodes over disparate machines and resiliency to failure.The last thing on the trends, I think as a result of, I donât want to take too much credit here, but DigitalOcean coming in with a great price point, an easy to use interphase and the education. I think we have enabled a whole new set of users to come online, so people from countries that are really developing nations and are beginning just to have their people get on the internet from Asia, within Europe, south America as well, are able to take advantage of DigitalOcean because of itâ price point and ease of use and finally start building something online. Whereas in the past they would need to wait much longer, develop on their home computer or laptop and perhaps never even take the step to publish their application live. And I am very proud of the tens of thousands people worldwide that have access to the server re sources as a result of our company. We have also enabled thousands of students whether itâs through hackathons orâ"we even sponsor our high school that I attended here in New York City so we provide them with a ton of resources every year for students to do their final term project and we do that across the nation and even internationally. These education facilities can actually request resources and sponsorship from DigitalOcean. We want to enable the next generation of developers and we donât think there is any better way than getting your hands dirty, partially thatâs how I learned, so I would love to see other students start out the same way.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: Ben over the last 15 years can you share what things have you learnt about how to start a company and whatâs better not to do?Ben: Yes. I chased lucrative opportunities, so I started when I was 15. My first job was in a appliance store and I worked there for two weeks before I quit. But at that point I had saved enough money that I could buy a server online and from that server I started to generate revenue online, initially with advertising then obviously in the infrastructure space and today in the cloud space. So I think these opportunities present themselves and thatâs what I love about New York City is the exposure to different industries. You should follow your passion and surround yourself with people, join a company or business that you are really interested in and let the business create itself. An opportunity will strike you, you will recognize that this is something that you feel passionate about and chase that dream. But I would say donât quit your day job. How can you use a lean model to interate quickly? Try to build a business on the side. When that responsibility becomes too great for you to manage as side project you know you have something thatâs worth investing into and I would recommend making the transition at that time. I have had a number of employees though out the years look up us as role models and say, âWow, itâs fantastic that you are able to start this business, I am going to quit and I am going to go ahead and start my own companyâ. And I always tell them the same thing, Iâm like, âAre you going to quit and disappear into a vacuum to try to create something or you are leaving because you have an idea that you want to pursue?â. And unfortunately so far those businesses havenât survived. So I would say surround yourself with the right environment, learn from it, see what you become passion about.Martin: Great. Thank you very much for your time, Ben.Ben: Yes. Definitely.Martin: And the next time you think about starting a company, you should think about whether you need some external funding and if thatâs the case maybe then you should quit the company and then start your business, or if you donât need very much money and you donât need to talk to clients all the time but having an online business then yo u can think about bootstrapping in parallel to your employment. Thank you very much.Ben: Yes. Thank you, nice to meet you.Martin: Thanks.
Thursday, June 11, 2020
Camelot Then and Now - Literature Essay Samples
How has the timeless story of King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot changed over the years to reflect the time period(s) that they are recreated in? From the Medieval period to the 1960ââ¬â¢s, the legend of Camelot has been repurposed to push agendas or teach morals that the populous of the world needs to hear. While the 1967 film, Camelot, is a retelling of one of history and literatureââ¬â¢s most famous love triangles, it has to do with so much more than love. It also has to do with love and loyalty to country, what justice is, the roles of females in society, and so many other important questions that we still think about today. A lot of the Arthurian texts of the Medieval Ages also touch on these subjects. I chose to do the project on this film and musical because it is a great retelling of the Arthurian legend that keeps intact some of the most important points that the original Arthurian texts brought up. The film was released in 1967 and starred Richard Harris as King Arthur, Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Guinevere, and Franco Nero as Sir Lancelot. It was received with mixed reviews around the world. A critic from Film Quarterly named William Johnson said ââ¬Å"Camelot is Hollywood at its worst and best.â⬠All of the actors in the film and the script were praised and celebrated for their performances, though the lavish costumes and settings discredited a lot of the work they did. The movie even got the nickname ââ¬Å"costalotâ⬠for how much money was spent on silly things, like the dress Guinevere wore for the wedding scene costing $12,000. The film focuses on the creation of the Round Table and the expansion of Camelot and its Golden Age. The main things the Round Table is created for is to promote justice and doing the right things. Arthur is trying to redefine chivalry and the code of chivalry. He wants to move away from the notion that the power should use their power to only benefit themselves. He believes that knights should use their power to help others and bring peace to all the land. He tells Guinevere that he wants ââ¬Å"Might for right.â⬠She tells him that it is a very original idea and supports his quest to create a brotherhood of knights who congregate to discuss the worldââ¬â¢s problems. The movieââ¬â¢s other focus is on the love between King Arthur, Queen Guinevere, and Sir Lancelot. Arthur and Guinevere are married and when Lancelot comes to Camelot, Guinevere falls in love with him as well. There is also a very deep fraternal love between Arthur and Lancelot, with Lancelot being Arthurâ⠬â¢s right hand man and best knight. This causes strain in all of their relationships with each other, as Arthur is aware of the affair, but does nothing about it. When Arthurââ¬â¢s illegitimate son, Mordred, comes to Camelot he wants to see the downfall of Camelot. He catches Guinevere and Lancelot in an intimate moment and, while Lancelot escapes, Guinevere is captured and is put on trial for treason against the King. The whole time Arthur is aware of the affair, but he cannot stop the trial or the guilty verdict because he has spent so long building the justice system. Everyoneââ¬â¢s only hope is for Lancelot to save Guinevere, which he does, but all of this leads to Camelotââ¬â¢s downfall and the end of the Knights of the Round Table. The movie ends with Arthur proclaiming to remember what they stood for mainly ââ¬Å"Might for right. Right for right. Justice for all.â⬠He realizes that though Camelot may fall, what they created and stood for will live on in history forever. This film was based off of the stage musical with the same title. The plot and characters are basically the same with a few minor changes. The original broadway cast starred Richard Burton as King Arthur, Julie Andrews as Queen Guinevere, and Robert Goulet as Sir Lancelot. One of the main differences from stage to screen is the character of Merlyn. In the film, while he is there, he doesnââ¬â¢t play a huge role and we arenââ¬â¢t sure what happened to him. In the stage musical he is lured into a Nimueââ¬â¢s cave for eternal sleep. There are a few songs that were cut from the film, but the plot is basically the same as the film. The musical was inspired by T.H Whiteââ¬â¢s novel The Once and Future King, which was inspired by Maloryââ¬â¢s Morte DArthur. Whiteââ¬â¢s novel is considered to be one of the most influential modern day pieces of Arthurian literature. Though heavily influenced by Malory, he takes a lot of new ideas and puts them in the four part novel. His novel, though mainly meant for young audiences, can also be read as a critique on the first half of the twentieth century in the Western world. Through a lot of the Arthurian literature the themes of chivalry and justice. One of the best examples of this is in the story of Sir Launfal which is a retelling of the story of Lanval told by Marie de France. In this story, Launfal is accused of proposing an affair between Queen Guinevere and himself by Guinevere. This is a false accusation, but because she is the queen he has to be tried. Instead of Arthur just choosing his fate, essentially acting as the sole judge, he calls on all of his knights to decide Launfalââ¬â¢s fate, so they act as a rudimentary form of a jury. There is a search for and an attempt at justice. One of Arthurââ¬â¢s biggest challenges in the film is creating a justice system because he is unhappy with the one, or lack of one, in place. One of the best scenes in the movie that supports this is when he is trying to explain how the system to work to King Pellinore and Pellinore just isnââ¬â¢t comprehending it. Pellinore represents the old ways and though he doesnââ¬â¢t really understand it, he trusts and supports Arthur. Of course because of the justice system, there is no way Arthur can save Guinevere when she is put on trial because he worked so hard to create it and he canââ¬â¢t go against what he believes is right. Itââ¬â¢s interesting to see how something so morally right, can basically lead to the downfall of the whole kingdom. The term Camelot has become synonymous with the Kennedy presidency in the United States. Peter L. Hays in his article The Classical and Current Tragedy of Camelot discusses how The Original Cast Recording of Camelot was one of JFKââ¬â¢s favorite things to listen to and how that was publicized after his death. He states that his favorite lines were these from the final number, ââ¬Å"Donââ¬â¢t let it be forgot. That once there was a spot. For one brief, shining moment that was known as Camelot.â⬠Hays states ââ¬Å"It was obviously Kennedyââ¬â¢s wish that he could create a Camelot that would live on in history as a shining moment.â⬠While the musical wasnââ¬â¢t made because of the Kennedy presidency, it reflects a lot of Western ideals during the time. It was written not long after World War Two and during the Vietnam War. Wanting a peaceful land that promotes justice and doing what is right was the goal of a lot of the world at the time. When Sir Thomas Malory wrote Le Morte DArthur, he was also writing in the context of history, like Lerner and Lowe. Malory probably wrote this as social commentary on The War of the Roses in England. It was the English Civil War that took place from 1455-1485 between the House of York and House of Lancaster. Maloryââ¬â¢s Le Morte DArthur is probably the most famous and influential piece of Arthurian legend, and it was also the first comprehensive piece of Arthurian literature that was written in prose. It is the basis for almost all of the Arthurian literature and legend that is created today. Itââ¬â¢s really interesting to think of the parallels that these pieces that were written almost 500 years apart from each other have in common. This proves that the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table is one of the most important and relatable in history. In the depths of tragedy and war, it provides a beacon of hope that one day there will be another time of peace an d prosperity. One of the most prominent changes from the Medieval Ages to the 1960ââ¬â¢s is womenââ¬â¢s roles in society. This is seen obviously in the portrayal of Queen Guinevere. In Kathleen Coyne Kellyââ¬â¢s review of Ulrike Bethlehemââ¬â¢s Guinevere: A Medieval Puzzle: Images of Arthurs Queen in the Medieval Literature of England and France she states ââ¬Å"scholars who attempt to create a coherent picture of Guinevere cannot succeed.â⬠She goes on to say that a lot of Arthurian literature contradicts what Guinevere was used for in terms of literary tools. A lot of scholars canââ¬â¢t pinpoint her purpose in literature. In some earlier Arthurian legend she is pretty horrible. She causes trouble for a lot of people, is dishonest and disloyal to Arthur, and is just a spoiled queen. In Camelot, though still entitled, is no longer the annoyance she is in the earlier writings. She has a pretty substantial character arch in the film that she doesnââ¬â¢t get in any other Arthu rian literature. She starts off as a maiden who is being forced into an arranged with King Arthur, not knowing anything about him she laments in her song ââ¬Å"The Simple Joys of Maidenhoodâ⬠that because she is getting married there is no longer going to be any excitement for her and men will not fight over her. When she meets Arthur everything changes. She becomes the Queen he needs. She supports him and his ideas, she puts the kingdom first, and loves Arthur and helps him think through all of his revolutionary ideas. She is loyal to him and loves him deeply. The only thing that ever comes between them is Lancelot, and even he doesnââ¬â¢t come between them in a way that makes them love each other less. Maloryââ¬â¢s Le Morte DArthur is the first to introduce Lancelot and Guinevereââ¬â¢s love affair. In his version, though, Guinevere is still pretty terrible like the earlier writings of her, though she has a few redeeming qualities and moments. She is very tempermental in Maloryââ¬â¢s version, she frequently throws Lancelot out when he does something that angers her. She is also very hostile up to the point when she needs him for something. Like the film, their relationship is the downfall of Camelot. In Le Morte Mordred and Agravaine (who was cut from the film) trap Lancelot and Guinevere in the same fashion that Mordred does in the film. Again, Lancelot escapes and has to save Guinevere. Unlike the film, many more characters are involved in the fight and many people end up dead, which is more of the reason the Round Table falls in the story. Many knights are killed in the rescuing of Guinevere. In both the film and book, Guinevere goes to live in a convent after being resc ued by Arthur rather than living with Lancelot because she feels so guilty and sinful for her actions. This redeems her a lot, even though maybe she didnââ¬â¢t need to be as redeemed as people thought she needed to be during those times. The only time she was unloyal to Arthur was with Lancelot because she loved him. She is human, had it not been the King, she would have never caused this much turmoil. All told, the portrayal of her over the centuries has made her more of a dimensional character than in the past. Sir Lancelot has also developed a lot from the beginning of Arthurian literature considering he really wasnââ¬â¢t a character at all until Malory. In most Arthurian literature before Malory, Sir Gawain was Arthurââ¬â¢s right hand man. Interestingly enough, Sir Gawain wasnââ¬â¢t included in the film, even though he was a character in both Malory and Whiteââ¬â¢s story. Malory, though, makes Lancelot the most accomplished knight in Camelot and starts the affair between he and Guinevere. Lancelot is still a little bit clueless like he is for Malory. He is praised for how physically dominant he is, but not for his common sense. In the film he is introduced in the song ââ¬Å"Cââ¬â¢est Moiâ⬠where he is singing about how virtuous he is. Before she falls for him, Guinevere makes fun of him and how innocent he is. Asking him if anything has changed with chivalry while she was napping is a great example of this. Though, for all of his virtue, he still commits treason by ha ving an affair with Guinevere. He seems to face the least amount of consequences at the end of the film, though. He is one of the reasons for the fall of the kingdom, but all that happens to him is that he gives up Guinevere and then goes home to France. Arthur dies and Guinevere goes into a convent as well as having to live with the guilt of bringing everything she loves down with her. Lancelot also has to live with the guilt, but nothing really happens to him. Irene Morra in her article Constructing Camelot: Britain and the New World Musical says about Lancelot ââ¬Å"By the end, the musical has endorsed Lancelots self-valuation; he is a romantic hero whose overwhelming loyalty to the king is challenged by a tragic passion for the beautiful Guinevere.â⬠In a lot of Arthurian literature after Malory, Lancelot is written as the best knight in Camelot and Arthurââ¬â¢s best friend. Maloryââ¬â¢s interpretation of Lancelotââ¬â¢s armor is discussed in Disarming Lancelot by Elizabeth Scala. Scalaââ¬â¢s article is about how arming scenes in literature symbolize a hero. Putting on armor is a sign that someone is going into battle to, presumably, fight the good fight. Malory puts a twist on this convention with Lancelot. ââ¬Å"It is the way Lancelot is disarmed in the Morte DArthur, I will argue, that should be read for its ââ¬Å"heroicâ⬠signification.â⬠Making Lancelot a fearsome opponent, even without armor, is a very bold statement in a kingdom that is known for having such excellent knights. Through all of his adventures, in all of Arthurian lure, Lancelot never gets defeated. That is one thing that stays consistent over time. One character who stays pretty consistent over the centuries is King Arthur. He is always noble, always a good king, always a great person. He wants what is best for Camelot and wants his people to be happy and safe and prosperous. Since he is the main character of all Arthurian literature, it is harder to change his character arch. Arthur is a very compelling leader. In the film, Richard Harris does a remarkable job at characterizing this. In a film critique by Roger Ebert from 1967 he says ââ¬Å" Harris is a convincing king. Better still, hes a human king.â⬠He isnââ¬â¢t good because he is brilliant, or strong, or powerful, but because he is a genuinely good human being. He wants to do the right thing for people and that is the best quality a leader can have. His one downfall is trusting people too much. He trusts Lancelot and Guinevere and that destroys his kingdom, and he trusts Mordred who wants to bring down the kingdom. It also adds a layer of tragedy to the downfall of Camelot because Arthur never did anything wrong. He just wanted to better the world around him and because of hate or love for and by other people, he loses that. That, to me, is the most tragic part of the whole story. King Arthur is the kind of leader that every leader should strive to be. To create ideals that outlast your life, to create a legacy that goes on to change the world is quite a feat. Arthurââ¬â¢s ideals and character are immortalized in the stories we tell of him from the past five hundred years to now.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)