I've seen this story before. NASCAR infamously has been trying to integrate technology, yet they can't track the speed or position of any of the 42 cars on the track at a specific moment in time...
That's a solved problem. That technology has been deployed since 1982. When we were doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, we went to talk to the Sportsvision people about precision real-time GPS. They use some tricks we couldn't; for example, they have a model of the track and can get precision GPS with fewer satellites because they know altitude for each point on the track.
You also fail to consider just how slow and limited unmanned craft are: In just four days on the Moon, the Apollo 16 rover (manned) covered 7.2 miles. In five *years* on Mars, Spirit covered just 5 miles.
The Soviet Lunoknod 2 rover covered 23 miles on the Moon in 1973. The Apollo rover ran on non-rechargeable batteries, so there was an upper limit on range. The robotic rovers were solar powered and could recharge, although rather slowly, and could keep on going.
The PC industry hates netbooks because they're so cheap. For about a year, it looked like the future of personal computing was going to be $100 netbooks sold in bubble-packs in drugstores. There were desperate efforts to sell "more computer per computer".
Despite industry hostility, netbooks continue to get better. The entry-level ASUS netbooks are quite capable. I have the $266 model, the 1011 PX, and it will run programs like Blender and LTSpice, which were once considered heavy-duty applications. If you're doing actual work, instead of passively consuming entertainment, you need a real keyboard.
Where's the "usability testing"? The linked article is just typical blogger blithering, spread over multiple pages for maximum ad insertion. They write "Since usability is a personal experience, we invited a bunch of people, from newbies to power users, to share their experiences with 3.2.". Which probably means "we asked for comments on a blog".
Real usability testing is not market research. It's measuring how well people did on tasks, not what they said they liked.
In retail areas, street numbers tend not to be too prominent. It may be necessary to read business signs and use that data to disambiguate addresses. This would help to clean up the phony-business problem in Google Places. An alternative is to use real estate records, as the USC Geocoder does for some areas, to get a solid lock on address vs. physical position. But that data is only available for some areas. There are also the Census Bureau's TIGER/LINE files, but they're US only and not complete for the entire US.
Outside the US, this is likely to be more useful. If you have a few street numbers and a few business signs per block, you can infer the rest reasonably accurately.
This story comes from the Magnetix recall of 2006:"CPSC and Mega Brands are aware of one death, one aspiration and 27 intestinal injuries. Emergency surgical intervention was needed in all but one case." The toy was a construction set of plastic parts with small embedded magnets, usable by small children. The small magnets weren't embedded very well, apparently just pressed into recesses in the plastic, and came out easily. Mega Brands paid a $1.1 million fine for this.
This is a step forward. Not a huge step, but a step. There's a standard, and although it's weak, it's at least there. And, importantly, there's a list of who's signed onto complying with it. The CA Browser Forum says that 94% of the issued certificates were issued by their members, and there's a list of all 40 members. All root certs from non-Forum members should be removed from browsers. Some browsers now recognize as many as 200 CAs. A purge is in order.
There's now a way to check whether a CA claims to comply with these rules. If the cert contains OID 2.23.140.1.2.2, the identity of the business behind the cert has supposedly been validated. If the cert contains OID 2.23.140.1.2.1, only the domain behind the cert has been validated. If it doesn't contain either of those, after July 2012, it's worthless. Browsers should be adjusted accordingly. Note that, for the first time, there's an actual verification process for business identity for non-EV certs. This is a big step forward.
I'm very interested in the validation process for business name information, as described in section 11.2.1 of the specification. We use that info in SiteTruth, and we'll be tightening up our cert validation, now that there are standards.
It's not clear how this will interact with Akamai's practice of issuing secondary certs for their customers, so that Akamai's caching servers can present SSL certs from companies Akamai represents. Akamai isn't a CA itself, and isn't a member of the CA/Browser forum.
I put my stuff on blip.tv, rather than YouTube, and have since Google acquired YouTube. But it really is my stuff. If you're creating interesting original content, blip.tv is a good place to put it.
They had to redefine "cold shutdown" to get there. Normally, cold shutdown of a reactor means temperature is below boiling and pressure is at 1 atmosphere. It's then possible to take the lid off the reactor and replace fuel rods.
Humans still can't enter the containment, and probably won't be able to do so for decades, if not centuries. So cleanup is going to have to be a robot job. Some kind of machinery is going to have to go in there and take the core apart, transferring each bit into a separate storage container.
Strangely, Japan seems to be behind the US in mobile robots for doing heavy work. They had to send to the US for iRobot units just to look around inside the containment, and for remote-controlled concrete pumping trucks to pour in water.
China is slowly building a blue-water naval capability. This is hard and expensive, and has to be done in steps. Now they have a test aircraft carrier, which they can use to train pilots to take off and land on deck. They can practice the difficult process of servicing and maintaining aircraft on board ship. From this, they'll figure out what to build into their own carriers (two are under construction) and carrier-based aircraft, and how to train their people.
China's current generation of warships is considered reasonably good, although until they see combat, no one will really know. (The US fights a lot of small wars, and thus has experienced troops, battle-tested hardware, and the logistic capabilities to fight a war almost anywhere on the planet. China hasn't been as active in recent decades. Nor has most of Europe, as becomes embarrassingly obvious when NATO actually has to send troops somewhere.)
As China develops more overseas economic interests, especially in the raw materials area, they'll want a force projection capability. This is the first big step.
The point of the actual paper has nothing to do with reactor design. It's that the financing of a 1GW plant creates too much economic risk for utilities. They point out that 70% of utilities with large nuclear plants at some point faced a bond rating downgrade.
A production line with steady production improves costs more than "modularity". That's how France did nuclear power - a lot of plants, built in the 1980s, all the same, with common components. There's a scale issue with how big an object you can move to the site - if the thing will fit on a road or rail car, it can be built and tested in a factory. There's a big discontinuity in delivered price when something gets too big to move and essentially gets built on site. The paper doesn't address that issue when talking about "modularity".
(This is even an issue with wind turbines. The upper limit on size comes from how big an object you can truck to the site. Ocean units can be bigger because they're brought in on barges.)
These days people expect their Blu-Ray player to have a network port, and sing and dance and give blowjobs. Well, maybe not the last part. But if you have a blu-ray drive it's retarded not to play movies, and you ought to support all the functionality if your hardware is sufficiently capable.
In the industry, this is known as the "Who's the king of the living room" fight. Which box is in charge? The TV? The disc player? The game console? The cable box? The amplifier? Some Boxee/RokuRevue box? Which ones have an Internet connection? Which one talks to Netflix?
And let's not even get started on remotes for all this.
What's really missing (in) the marketplace is a Linux console phone.
That's been done for OpenMoko. Someone demonstrated that from the command line, you could send AT commands to the modem in the phone and dial the phone.
Without ads, companies would have their own web sites, and search engine service would be paid with your ISP bill. (Running a search engine isn't really that expensive if you don't serve ads or do search personalization. AltaVista was a demo run by DEC to promote the DEC Alpha. Cuil indexed the whole web (badly), with about 25 people and $25 million. At Google itself, the core search engine team was only about 100 people as of 5 years ago.)
You'd be able to find anything you wanted to buy, but you wouldn't have it shoved at you.
We've been pointing this out for a while. Our latest paper,
"Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social", contains a tour of the social spam ecosystem. There's a whole industry out there selling not just "likes", reviews, and "+1s", but the fake accounts, IP proxies, and fake mail accounts needed to support them. Down at the bottom, the "search engine optimization" industry starts to connect to organized crime. There are several layers to separate the "legitimate businesses" looking for SEO services from the people selling IP proxies on botnets.
Social spam isn't primarily aimed at human readers any more. It's aimed at search engines. When Google started using reviews as a ranking factor for Google Places, and then merged Places results into main search results in October 2010, the social spam boom took off. Really fast. The ads for Google Places spam went over the top.
For the last two months of 2010, it was so bad that stories hit the New York Times about how Google had jumped the shark.
This is abandonware. That seems to be a trend. As something becomes unprofitable but still has a user base, it's open-sourced to make the support load go away.
That's a criminal offense. See 17 USC 506(c): "Fraudulent Copyright Notice. -- Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500. "
The Department of Justice is squishy-soft on enforcing this. It's apparently never been enforced. Nor does it create a private right of action, so you can't sue under it.
Moffett Field is becoming Google's private airport.
Moffett Field was a former Navy facility, but the Navy moved out years ago, when they stopped patrolling the seas with P-3 Orions. NASA had a presence there because they had a big wind tunnel at Ames. Once the Navy moved out, the place was way underutilized. Parts of the base are leased out to startups, the west coast branch of CMU. The airfield itself is barely used. NASA doesn't do much there. I've been over there for NASA meetings, and the place is dead.
Hangar One, the big dirigible hanger, has been out of use for years, and there's a "Save Hangar One" group. It's a nice structure; I've been inside it. But it needs work and the Navy doesn't want to maintain it. One of the Austin Powers movies had a scene in Hangar One, which is probably the biggest unused indoor clear space on the planet.
So if the Google guys want to convert it to their lair, that probably won't upset many people locally.
Writer ego needs to be turned way down.
on
The Condescending UI
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The author gets to the third sentence of the third paragraph before there's a sentence that doesn't contain "I" or "me". This is not an article from someone who is a user interface expert, or has analyzed help desk call data or videos of people trying user interfaces. It's just some loudmouth.
Currently, there are two frontiers in user interface design - the small touchscreen, and 3D applications. Phones are tough - the screen is dinky, fingers are blunt pointers, and users don't even have a manual. Given those limitations, the phone people have done surprisingly well.
Animation and engineering design applications face the problem of manipulating something with thousands to millions of manipulable properties. It took a long time to get that up to a tolerable level. The classic approach is seen in Blender - three or four views and a list of control keys that takes 19 pages to print. The modern approach is seen in Autodesk Inventor - one 3D view with very good mouse-driven manipulation tools. Neither UI is intuitive, although with Inventor the help system is good enough that you can muddle your way through.
Typically employees can't sell their shares until at least six months post-IPO.
The SEC required a 2-year wait until the early 1990s. Which is partly why IPOs that ran way up after the IPO and then crashed were so popular during the original dot-com boom.
How much is Facebook really worth, anyway? Let's look at the numbers. Facebook revenue for 2010 was $1.86 billion. Goldman Sachs, which makes a private market in Facebook stock, sent a report to their investors indicating Facebook earned $355 million in the first 9 months of 2010. That would be $473 million for the year, for a 25% profit margin. Of course, those are unaudited numbers. When the SEC filings take place for an IPO, they may decrease as accounting gimmicks are disclosed and discounted.
The next question is, do we value Facebook as a growth company or an ongoing company? Let's look at Facebook's traffic stats.Traffic went up steadily until mid-2011, when it peaked. (Before Google+ started, incidentally.) It's been down a bit since then. So Facebook may have maxed out and started on its decline, like every other social network from AOL to Myspace did. There probably isn't a lot of growth left. Is there anyone not on Facebook who wants in?
OK, what's a company with $473 million in annual revenue worth? Google's price/earnings ratio is 21.39. Microsoft, 9.34. IBM, 12.69. Netflix 16.11. AOL 26.43. Yahoo 19.51. IAC (Ask's parent) 18.27. So we can say that the market is at best valuing mature Internet companies around 20x earnings.
That gives Facebook a valuation around $9 billion.
Even that may be optimistic. That assumes Facebook's user base doesn't shrink. Remember when Myspace was on top?
This is Myspace on the way down. To earn that $9 billion valuation, Facebook has to maintain its current size and profitability for 20 years. Does anybody think that will happen?
(How many people here remember when one of the founders of Slashdot was asking on here what to do with his money when VA Linux, the parent of Slashdot, went public in 1999? They had the biggest first-day runup after an IPO ever. The stock hit $239 on the first day, and then went into a screaming dive. Six months later it was around $40. Not as rich as he thought. By 2002, it had dropped to $0.54. The stock is still trading as GKNT, formerly LNUX. Here's the chart.)
Slashdot Mirror
While businesses loudly proclaim their names and logos, their street numbers are often barely visible if present at all.
That's true, and annoying. Some cities require street address signs but most don't.
I've seen this story before. NASCAR infamously has been trying to integrate technology, yet they can't track the speed or position of any of the 42 cars on the track at a specific moment in time...
That's a solved problem. That technology has been deployed since 1982. When we were doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, we went to talk to the Sportsvision people about precision real-time GPS. They use some tricks we couldn't; for example, they have a model of the track and can get precision GPS with fewer satellites because they know altitude for each point on the track.
You also fail to consider just how slow and limited unmanned craft are: In just four days on the Moon, the Apollo 16 rover (manned) covered 7.2 miles. In five *years* on Mars, Spirit covered just 5 miles.
The Soviet Lunoknod 2 rover covered 23 miles on the Moon in 1973. The Apollo rover ran on non-rechargeable batteries, so there was an upper limit on range. The robotic rovers were solar powered and could recharge, although rather slowly, and could keep on going.
The PC industry hates netbooks because they're so cheap. For about a year, it looked like the future of personal computing was going to be $100 netbooks sold in bubble-packs in drugstores. There were desperate efforts to sell "more computer per computer".
Despite industry hostility, netbooks continue to get better. The entry-level ASUS netbooks are quite capable. I have the $266 model, the 1011 PX, and it will run programs like Blender and LTSpice, which were once considered heavy-duty applications. If you're doing actual work, instead of passively consuming entertainment, you need a real keyboard.
Where's the "usability testing"? The linked article is just typical blogger blithering, spread over multiple pages for maximum ad insertion. They write "Since usability is a personal experience, we invited a bunch of people, from newbies to power users, to share their experiences with 3.2.". Which probably means "we asked for comments on a blog".
Real usability testing is not market research. It's measuring how well people did on tasks, not what they said they liked.
I've been wondering when they'd make that work.
In retail areas, street numbers tend not to be too prominent. It may be necessary to read business signs and use that data to disambiguate addresses. This would help to clean up the phony-business problem in Google Places. An alternative is to use real estate records, as the USC Geocoder does for some areas, to get a solid lock on address vs. physical position. But that data is only available for some areas. There are also the Census Bureau's TIGER/LINE files, but they're US only and not complete for the entire US.
Outside the US, this is likely to be more useful. If you have a few street numbers and a few business signs per block, you can infer the rest reasonably accurately.
Texas just provides the cheap labor. They don't have the technology.
This story comes from the Magnetix recall of 2006: "CPSC and Mega Brands are aware of one death, one aspiration and 27 intestinal injuries. Emergency surgical intervention was needed in all but one case." The toy was a construction set of plastic parts with small embedded magnets, usable by small children. The small magnets weren't embedded very well, apparently just pressed into recesses in the plastic, and came out easily. Mega Brands paid a $1.1 million fine for this.
This is a step forward. Not a huge step, but a step. There's a standard, and although it's weak, it's at least there. And, importantly, there's a list of who's signed onto complying with it. The CA Browser Forum says that 94% of the issued certificates were issued by their members, and there's a list of all 40 members. All root certs from non-Forum members should be removed from browsers. Some browsers now recognize as many as 200 CAs. A purge is in order.
There's now a way to check whether a CA claims to comply with these rules. If the cert contains OID 2.23.140.1.2.2, the identity of the business behind the cert has supposedly been validated. If the cert contains OID 2.23.140.1.2.1, only the domain behind the cert has been validated. If it doesn't contain either of those, after July 2012, it's worthless. Browsers should be adjusted accordingly. Note that, for the first time, there's an actual verification process for business identity for non-EV certs. This is a big step forward.
I'm very interested in the validation process for business name information, as described in section 11.2.1 of the specification. We use that info in SiteTruth, and we'll be tightening up our cert validation, now that there are standards.
It's not clear how this will interact with Akamai's practice of issuing secondary certs for their customers, so that Akamai's caching servers can present SSL certs from companies Akamai represents. Akamai isn't a CA itself, and isn't a member of the CA/Browser forum.
I put my stuff on blip.tv, rather than YouTube, and have since Google acquired YouTube. But it really is my stuff. If you're creating interesting original content, blip.tv is a good place to put it.
They had to redefine "cold shutdown" to get there. Normally, cold shutdown of a reactor means temperature is below boiling and pressure is at 1 atmosphere. It's then possible to take the lid off the reactor and replace fuel rods.
Humans still can't enter the containment, and probably won't be able to do so for decades, if not centuries. So cleanup is going to have to be a robot job. Some kind of machinery is going to have to go in there and take the core apart, transferring each bit into a separate storage container.
Strangely, Japan seems to be behind the US in mobile robots for doing heavy work. They had to send to the US for iRobot units just to look around inside the containment, and for remote-controlled concrete pumping trucks to pour in water.
China is slowly building a blue-water naval capability. This is hard and expensive, and has to be done in steps. Now they have a test aircraft carrier, which they can use to train pilots to take off and land on deck. They can practice the difficult process of servicing and maintaining aircraft on board ship. From this, they'll figure out what to build into their own carriers (two are under construction) and carrier-based aircraft, and how to train their people.
China's current generation of warships is considered reasonably good, although until they see combat, no one will really know. (The US fights a lot of small wars, and thus has experienced troops, battle-tested hardware, and the logistic capabilities to fight a war almost anywhere on the planet. China hasn't been as active in recent decades. Nor has most of Europe, as becomes embarrassingly obvious when NATO actually has to send troops somewhere.)
As China develops more overseas economic interests, especially in the raw materials area, they'll want a force projection capability. This is the first big step.
The point of the actual paper has nothing to do with reactor design. It's that the financing of a 1GW plant creates too much economic risk for utilities. They point out that 70% of utilities with large nuclear plants at some point faced a bond rating downgrade.
A production line with steady production improves costs more than "modularity". That's how France did nuclear power - a lot of plants, built in the 1980s, all the same, with common components. There's a scale issue with how big an object you can move to the site - if the thing will fit on a road or rail car, it can be built and tested in a factory. There's a big discontinuity in delivered price when something gets too big to move and essentially gets built on site. The paper doesn't address that issue when talking about "modularity".
(This is even an issue with wind turbines. The upper limit on size comes from how big an object you can truck to the site. Ocean units can be bigger because they're brought in on barges.)
These days people expect their Blu-Ray player to have a network port, and sing and dance and give blowjobs. Well, maybe not the last part. But if you have a blu-ray drive it's retarded not to play movies, and you ought to support all the functionality if your hardware is sufficiently capable.
In the industry, this is known as the "Who's the king of the living room" fight. Which box is in charge? The TV? The disc player? The game console? The cable box? The amplifier? Some Boxee/RokuRevue box? Which ones have an Internet connection? Which one talks to Netflix?
And let's not even get started on remotes for all this.
What's really missing (in) the marketplace is a Linux console phone.
That's been done for OpenMoko. Someone demonstrated that from the command line, you could send AT commands to the modem in the phone and dial the phone.
Why not ride a balloon up to 70-80k, and then launch the rocket?
That was done in the 1940s. It works for small rockets, but usually isn't worth the trouble.
The internet cannot exist without ads.
Actually, it did for a long time.
Without ads, companies would have their own web sites, and search engine service would be paid with your ISP bill. (Running a search engine isn't really that expensive if you don't serve ads or do search personalization. AltaVista was a demo run by DEC to promote the DEC Alpha. Cuil indexed the whole web (badly), with about 25 people and $25 million. At Google itself, the core search engine team was only about 100 people as of 5 years ago.) You'd be able to find anything you wanted to buy, but you wouldn't have it shoved at you.
We've been pointing this out for a while. Our latest paper, "Social is bad for search, and search is bad for social", contains a tour of the social spam ecosystem. There's a whole industry out there selling not just "likes", reviews, and "+1s", but the fake accounts, IP proxies, and fake mail accounts needed to support them. Down at the bottom, the "search engine optimization" industry starts to connect to organized crime. There are several layers to separate the "legitimate businesses" looking for SEO services from the people selling IP proxies on botnets.
Social spam isn't primarily aimed at human readers any more. It's aimed at search engines. When Google started using reviews as a ranking factor for Google Places, and then merged Places results into main search results in October 2010, the social spam boom took off. Really fast. The ads for Google Places spam went over the top. For the last two months of 2010, it was so bad that stories hit the New York Times about how Google had jumped the shark.
There are ads on the Google search page? Hey, you're right!
Does AdBlock Plus block ads on Google search result pages? When I tried it, it didn't .
This is abandonware. That seems to be a trend. As something becomes unprofitable but still has a user base, it's open-sourced to make the support load go away.
That's a criminal offense. See 17 USC 506(c): "Fraudulent Copyright Notice. -- Any person who, with fraudulent intent, places on any article a notice of copyright or words of the same purport that such person knows to be false, or who, with fraudulent intent, publicly distributes or imports for public distribution any article bearing such notice or words that such person knows to be false, shall be fined not more than $2,500. "
The Department of Justice is squishy-soft on enforcing this. It's apparently never been enforced. Nor does it create a private right of action, so you can't sue under it.
Moffett Field is becoming Google's private airport.
Moffett Field was a former Navy facility, but the Navy moved out years ago, when they stopped patrolling the seas with P-3 Orions. NASA had a presence there because they had a big wind tunnel at Ames. Once the Navy moved out, the place was way underutilized. Parts of the base are leased out to startups, the west coast branch of CMU. The airfield itself is barely used. NASA doesn't do much there. I've been over there for NASA meetings, and the place is dead.
So Page and Brin cut a deal with NASA in 2007 to keep their private planes (their Boeing 767 airliner, etc.) there and use the field. That was controversial at the time, but Moffett was so underutilized that nobody cared.
Hangar One, the big dirigible hanger, has been out of use for years, and there's a "Save Hangar One" group. It's a nice structure; I've been inside it. But it needs work and the Navy doesn't want to maintain it. One of the Austin Powers movies had a scene in Hangar One, which is probably the biggest unused indoor clear space on the planet.
So if the Google guys want to convert it to their lair, that probably won't upset many people locally.
The author gets to the third sentence of the third paragraph before there's a sentence that doesn't contain "I" or "me". This is not an article from someone who is a user interface expert, or has analyzed help desk call data or videos of people trying user interfaces. It's just some loudmouth.
Currently, there are two frontiers in user interface design - the small touchscreen, and 3D applications. Phones are tough - the screen is dinky, fingers are blunt pointers, and users don't even have a manual. Given those limitations, the phone people have done surprisingly well.
Animation and engineering design applications face the problem of manipulating something with thousands to millions of manipulable properties. It took a long time to get that up to a tolerable level. The classic approach is seen in Blender - three or four views and a list of control keys that takes 19 pages to print. The modern approach is seen in Autodesk Inventor - one 3D view with very good mouse-driven manipulation tools. Neither UI is intuitive, although with Inventor the help system is good enough that you can muddle your way through.
The problem is, we know very little of what's 'reasonable'.
Not any more. There have been enough extrasolar planet discoveries that we have some idea now of what the odds are.
Typically employees can't sell their shares until at least six months post-IPO.
The SEC required a 2-year wait until the early 1990s. Which is partly why IPOs that ran way up after the IPO and then crashed were so popular during the original dot-com boom.
How much is Facebook really worth, anyway? Let's look at the numbers. Facebook revenue for 2010 was $1.86 billion. Goldman Sachs, which makes a private market in Facebook stock, sent a report to their investors indicating Facebook earned $355 million in the first 9 months of 2010. That would be $473 million for the year, for a 25% profit margin. Of course, those are unaudited numbers. When the SEC filings take place for an IPO, they may decrease as accounting gimmicks are disclosed and discounted.
The next question is, do we value Facebook as a growth company or an ongoing company? Let's look at Facebook's traffic stats. Traffic went up steadily until mid-2011, when it peaked. (Before Google+ started, incidentally.) It's been down a bit since then. So Facebook may have maxed out and started on its decline, like every other social network from AOL to Myspace did. There probably isn't a lot of growth left. Is there anyone not on Facebook who wants in?
OK, what's a company with $473 million in annual revenue worth? Google's price/earnings ratio is 21.39. Microsoft, 9.34. IBM, 12.69. Netflix 16.11. AOL 26.43. Yahoo 19.51. IAC (Ask's parent) 18.27. So we can say that the market is at best valuing mature Internet companies around 20x earnings.
That gives Facebook a valuation around $9 billion.
Even that may be optimistic. That assumes Facebook's user base doesn't shrink. Remember when Myspace was on top? This is Myspace on the way down. To earn that $9 billion valuation, Facebook has to maintain its current size and profitability for 20 years. Does anybody think that will happen?
(How many people here remember when one of the founders of Slashdot was asking on here what to do with his money when VA Linux, the parent of Slashdot, went public in 1999? They had the biggest first-day runup after an IPO ever. The stock hit $239 on the first day, and then went into a screaming dive. Six months later it was around $40. Not as rich as he thought. By 2002, it had dropped to $0.54. The stock is still trading as GKNT, formerly LNUX. Here's the chart.)