> except for the fact that man pages are something stuck in the 70s, a new cross-*nix standard needs to be defined
Yeah. But it would have to be at least as good as manpages. That means readable from a text terminal, and visible in a single-page format... And it would need to be compatible with man pages...
> How does Debian compare to FreeBSD in terms of integration and attention to detail, for example consistency of utilities, presence of man pages and their 'uptodateness'? I'd really like to know.
I don't have an extensive experience with debian (ie: I tried it only once), but based to what knowledgable people said on various mailing lists, it is a very cleanly integrated system. Apt-get is supposed superior to any other packaging system in this side of the universe.
But no matter how hard they try, they can't match a few niceties of FreeBSD that come from the fact that it is integrated. I, for one, track stable which means that all my systems are at most 1 week behind the latest stable release of FreeBSD. (There is a new stable release several times in a day. Each time a developer commit a modification, in fact). Debian is very well known to be an extremely robust linux distribution that uses extensively tested kernels. Which means that they are outdated (ie: stable debian is 2.2.x kernel)
This come from the linux kernel development process as there is no new stable linux release since 2.2.x. Why should anyone have to choose between USB and stability ? FreeBSD have USB since a long time ago.
In my opinion FreeBSD have a much more "bazaar" way of doing things than linux.
What I would dream of is exactly when FreeBSD did to the kernel + user-land beeing extended to the graphical interface software. This would produce a hackable box, with which one could get the job done without spending days downloading things as basic as text editors, mail software, and configuring things, etc, etc
> IMHO there's very little need for highly compressed images on the web right now.
If you download a whole book with text + pictures, then it would make a difference.
Today, scans of archives avalaible on the web are often ugly 1bits-per-pixels low-res scan embedded in PDFs. And that suck badly / is almost unreadable.
So, DjVu _is_ something interesting for reading non-copyrighted papers, research work, FOI publications, or public domains archives.
> but considering the format's not open
As many others have already pointed, the format is open.
you have a printed document, with color. Now, you want to archive/distribute it. What are you going to do ?
When going the PDF way, you blindly scan the color document and don't do any extra job (for instance, take all those re-editions of Sierra/Lucas Art old adventure games. The original manula is included as a huge PDF file).
So their stuff makes half-sense to me. But, clearly, there is a lot of hype on their site...
I heard this one a certain number of times. I can't beleive that it is totally true.
There are incredible usability errors in Windows.
For instance:
"Shut Down" is in the "Start Menu". This is ridiculous. *Everyone* I know had problems with this one the first time.
The french task manager of 98 have a 'Arreter' and 'Fermer' button (IIRC). One will shutdown the selected application, the other will shutdown the computer. *Everyone* I know have at least once (and generally several times) shutted down its computer instead of shutting down a locked applicaitons
Tool bars of IE 4/5 are absolutely unusable. Nobody seems to be able to get them exactly where they want. It is hilarious to look at someone trying to organise them.
The TaskBar can be moved on the different sides of the screen with little to none visual feedback. I know several unsuspecting users that missed the start menu and dragged they task bar on the left of the screen doing that. They left it there, because there was no clue about how to undo that.
I can't beleive such a product had real usability tests by dummies.
(Btw, KDE and Gnome are worse, as they are often a basic rip-off of what windows does)
But, I admit that there are very good ideas in windows, that seem to directly come from usability tests. Copy/Paste of files in the explorer is one of them.
> More importantly, is there a way to update and rebuild all of the ports you have installed with one command? I don't want to have to track the versions of all the ports I have installed to know that I need to update them. (Maybe I've been spoiled by apt-get:)
Yes. You look spoiled by apt-get:-). Magic upgrading of the ports (by opposition to manual upgrading of the system) is not possible yet (but pkg_version can help you, but this won't be magic).
It is supposed to come in a forthcoming version. Note that I didn't had any real need of that. I aim at a stable (but secure) system. The constant run-for-the-bleeding-edge of linux pissed me. I had a couple of box. One was a 'forgotten server' that was not upgraded (because it ran essential services. Guess what ? It have been cracked). The other one was one of my development machine. I'd say that about a quarter of the time was used to try to keep thing together while upgrading things (maynly the kernel, which in turn asked for binutils, which asked for an upgrade, which fucked up my pam configuration, etc, etc). Generally, when the system was too fucked, it was time for a re-install from scracth. Maybe I am a moron. Or, maybe I should have used a RH ditrib:-)
I may run into troubles with FreeBSD too, but the first 6 months have been a pleasant experience. It seems that debian aim at giving the same kind of user-experience too.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
I also love FreeBSD for this:
bash-2.03$ man ata
ATA(4) FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual ATA(4)
NAME
ata, acd, ad, afd, ast - Generic ATA/ATAPI disk controller driver
[...]
bash-2.03$ ls -l/usr/share/man/man4 | wc -l
261
bash-2.03$
This come from the fact that FreeBSD is a system, not a kernel + userland.
Yes, you are right. Thanks for all your insight. I hope I can be as intelligent as you one day (but it looks, it won't be possible. You are so brilliant)
Thanks you again. I now see that you really know what you are talking about. I thought you were a moron, but it is definitely not true. "You pay the money and have your code tested like everybody else". I didn't think about it. M$ certified code is tested before beeing certified.
> According to the article, this is an option that can be turned on or off - so in the appropriate setting, this is actually a very useful feature
So it will be turned on in corporate environments. And there, you could only run software signed by Microsoft.
I find this scary as hell. It won't be anymore secure (because you won't have all the scripts, excel macros, etc, etc, signed). But it will be more difficult to run free softweare.
> Is the motherboard/memory/fan/power supply AMD certified?
What do you mean ? (serious question)
The hardware have been bought from a single vendor. The mobo is a GA-7IX, which is one recommened by AMD. Yes, the fan had a few AMD logos on it. I didn't check the power supply, but I am pretty sure that it is a correct one. I checked many many different memory on it.
Anyway, I don't put the blame on the processor. AMD is not even mentionned in the post you are replying to. But, well, it is an Athlon-based system that don't work correctly.
> What I was trying to say is, if you're going to advise people on what to buy, you should base your advice not on how things were, but on how things are the moment the hardware is going to be purchased. That's the only moment that really matters. The past is hardly worth mentioning, the future questionable at best.
You are right. It definitely wasn't an buy advice. I hope that there is no slashdot reader stupid enough to buy an Intel today (other than the moderators, of course)...
> Nowadays there are some pretty goodmotherboars available for the AMD processors. In other words, don't blame AMD for the that crappy VIA chipset...
The discussion is slipping a bit there. The original comment was a guy saying that he had 'entrusted servers to AMD in the past, and they've been awful'. Someone replied he was 'using AMD forever and I never had trouble using them'. I pointed that I had problem too.
All those discussionas are about things of the past. At the time I bought those AMD systems, there was not much avalaible mobos (at least in France). Everyone I tried gave me headaches.
It is no longer the case, but in those time using AMD implied a lot potential problems.
(Sure, I could have waited a bit before switching to AMDs, but I wanted to stop paying the intel tax as soon as possible. The reason of it was the CPUID. Someone implementing such a feature don't deserve my money anymore)
I don't know. I tried almost any RAM combination on that motherboard: every 128Mb or 2x64Mb I used worked (I tried about 6 different 128Mb, 100Mh and 133Mh)
As soon as I put 2x128 or 128+64, then the machine crashes after a few minutes of work (ie: between 1 and 10 minutes). It never crashed with only 128Mb of ram (had uptimes of 15 days doing seti@home computations)
When I first got the machine, it only supported 64Mb (I wanted to do a 128Mb machines). Brought it back to the vendor. He said it was the processor (was skeptic, but what can I do ?). He gave it back with a 650 in it working with 128Mb. A few weeks later, I wanted to go to 256Mb. No way.
I suspect the motherboard. Maybe I should play with timings (but I already lost soo much time with this puppy). I want to try a 256Mb ram in it one of those days...
> I've been using AMD forever and I never had trouble using them in servers. They're rock solid for me.
*You* had no troubles. I, for one, had many troubles with AMD (Cache disabled on K7M mobo with default BIOS, random crashes with more than 128Mb of memory on Gigabyte mobo)
The fact it worked seamlessly for you don't imply that anyone that had problem is a liar. Maybe you are just smarter than us when it come down to motherboard choices, or you have a better luck factor...
If they price it correctly, consumers will start using this. As soon as the first glitches appear (ie: someone that have paid and is not able to write its document, a machine that crash and the application that is unusable after the OS re-install, someone that honestly forgot to renew its subscription, etc, etc) customers will be increadibly upset.
This won't stop so-called 'piracy', but will annoy regular customers, like protection on old software.
And given the great compliance of successive versions of Orifice, it will be fun, whern someone have to dig an old version of Office2K in 5 or 6 years to read a document, and find that it won't work anymore.
The last, and most frightening, problem is that at any time, M$ will be able to stop renewing the subscription and push customers onto a different product in a rigid time frame. And if your documents are not supported on the next version, then though luck: you won't have much time for the migration... Imagine if M$ was able to make all current installs of NT to stop working to force people on W2K...
But I am broadly skeptical of your idea that you cannot predict anything by looking at the stock market index
Predicting something by looking at the stock market index is called Charting. In my book, it is vastly similar to astrology, with an interesting twist, as the market is self-referencing (people look at market prices, take decision because of the prices, which is then reflected in the prices itself). Such value is not linked to the fundamental that the market is supposed to represent, and is the bubble we see. This may also be the root of the chaotic components found in market prices (chaos and feedback go hand in hand).
In particular, I would draw your attention to this graph, which compares the overall returns of the NASDAQ composite and the S&P 500 since 1985. Observe how closely one tracks the other [...]
Personally, I'm a strong believer in the efficient market hypothesis
I stop beleived at the efficiency of the markets shortly after I started working with option valuation. It is amusing to taklk about beleiving in market efficiency. Is capitalism already a religion ?:-)
it's not clear to me that the long-term valuation of any given stock will outperform the index.
About your MSFT example, I want to point you to the fact that the theory (well some of the various theories) actually pretend that everything will happend in the future. One day MSFT will get in par with the S&P, for which ever starting point you choose. One day it will also be twice at 200%, and another day at 50%. All those events will occur an infinte number of time.
MSFT halfing. See 1 Years (From 15 march to 15 oct)
MSFT doubling. See 5 Years (Doubling occurs somewhere in mid 98)
If you look at 1 Year MSFT you can see that in those current days, the volatility of MSFT is high. But what can you deduce from that ? Only that the various events (crossing, doubling, halfing) will occurs faster. But you don't know if MSFT will double before it halfes, or the opposite.
The idea is that if such a knowledge was possible, it would already be reflected in the market price.
Note that I am not arguing that the stock movment is random. There is a stochastic componenent on top of a fundamental. In the MSFT/ORCL case, the fundamental is the emergence of high-technology. When looking at the 15 years MSFT/ORCL graph, it is clear that something happened. But the past tells us nothing about the future, and we don't have the singlest clue about how this fundamental will evolve by starring at the stock market index.
> How about the stocks that don't offer anything? Red Hat?
Yes. As the original sentence is in a conditional statment, you can put those too if you want. And amazon. And rambus. And microsoft. Whatever you want.
Btw, did anyone already noticed that while ESR is a stock symbol while there is no RMS, nor GPL ?
> I think that we may be able to conclude that the Internet/Tech Stocks bubble has finally deflated
I think we are not able to conclude anything. The Internet/Tech Stock 'bubble' may still be present, and can put the world economy in a recession cycle, when the averge john doe will understand that the money he borrowed to day-trade have disapeared. Or it may rise again, when all the stupid (pets.com) or badly managed (boo.com) startups will all have failed and the few remaining will start trashing brick-and-mortar economy.
You cannot predict anything by looking at the stock market index. No matter how hard you try.
Slashdot Mirror
> except for the fact that man pages are something stuck in the 70s, a new cross-*nix standard needs to be defined
Yeah. But it would have to be at least as good as manpages. That means readable from a text terminal, and visible in a single-page format... And it would need to be compatible with man pages...
> How does Debian compare to FreeBSD in terms of integration and attention to detail, for example consistency of utilities, presence of man pages and their 'uptodateness'? I'd really like to know.
I don't have an extensive experience with debian (ie: I tried it only once), but based to what knowledgable people said on various mailing lists, it is a very cleanly integrated system. Apt-get is supposed superior to any other packaging system in this side of the universe.
But no matter how hard they try, they can't match a few niceties of FreeBSD that come from the fact that it is integrated. I, for one, track stable which means that all my systems are at most 1 week behind the latest stable release of FreeBSD. (There is a new stable release several times in a day. Each time a developer commit a modification, in fact). Debian is very well known to be an extremely robust linux distribution that uses extensively tested kernels. Which means that they are outdated (ie: stable debian is 2.2.x kernel)
This come from the linux kernel development process as there is no new stable linux release since 2.2.x. Why should anyone have to choose between USB and stability ? FreeBSD have USB since a long time ago.
In my opinion FreeBSD have a much more "bazaar" way of doing things than linux.
What I would dream of is exactly when FreeBSD did to the kernel + user-land beeing extended to the graphical interface software. This would produce a hackable box, with which one could get the job done without spending days downloading things as basic as text editors, mail software, and configuring things, etc, etc
Cheers,
--fred
To all folks that want to try: you need a PIIX IDE interface (at least it was true a couplke of month ago, and have not changed).
So, I had no luck booting it with a Gigabyte/Athlon and a K7M/Athlon.
Cheers,
--fred
Adding:
- The reset to get back to real mode in the 286 (note that it could be argued that it was a good idea)
- The A20 line kludge
And sure, segmentation, segmentation and segmentation.
Btw, did I mentioned that I hated segmentation ?
Cheers,
--fred
> IMHO there's very little need for highly compressed images on the web right now.
If you download a whole book with text + pictures, then it would make a difference.
Today, scans of archives avalaible on the web are often ugly 1bits-per-pixels low-res scan embedded in PDFs. And that suck badly / is almost unreadable.
So, DjVu _is_ something interesting for reading non-copyrighted papers, research work, FOI publications, or public domains archives.
> but considering the format's not open
As many others have already pointed, the format is open.
Cheers,
--fred
> Who makes pdf's that way?
you have a printed document, with color. Now, you want to archive/distribute it. What are you going to do ?
When going the PDF way, you blindly scan the color document and don't do any extra job (for instance, take all those re-editions of Sierra/Lucas Art old adventure games. The original manula is included as a huge PDF file).
So their stuff makes half-sense to me. But, clearly, there is a lot of hype on their site...
Cheers,
--fred
I heard this one a certain number of times. I can't beleive that it is totally true.
There are incredible usability errors in Windows.
For instance:
"Shut Down" is in the "Start Menu". This is ridiculous. *Everyone* I know had problems with this one the first time.
The french task manager of 98 have a 'Arreter' and 'Fermer' button (IIRC). One will shutdown the selected application, the other will shutdown the computer. *Everyone* I know have at least once (and generally several times) shutted down its computer instead of shutting down a locked applicaitons
Tool bars of IE 4/5 are absolutely unusable. Nobody seems to be able to get them exactly where they want. It is hilarious to look at someone trying to organise them.
The TaskBar can be moved on the different sides of the screen with little to none visual feedback. I know several unsuspecting users that missed the start menu and dragged they task bar on the left of the screen doing that. They left it there, because there was no clue about how to undo that.
I can't beleive such a product had real usability tests by dummies.
(Btw, KDE and Gnome are worse, as they are often a basic rip-off of what windows does)
But, I admit that there are very good ideas in windows, that seem to directly come from usability tests. Copy/Paste of files in the explorer is one of them.
Cheers,
--fred
Another poster replied to most of your questions.
:)
:-). Magic upgrading of the ports (by opposition to manual upgrading of the system) is not possible yet (but pkg_version can help you, but this won't be magic).
:-)
/usr/share/man/man4 | wc -l
> More importantly, is there a way to update and rebuild all of the ports you have installed with one command? I don't want to have to track the versions of all the ports I have installed to know that I need to update them. (Maybe I've been spoiled by apt-get
Yes. You look spoiled by apt-get
It is supposed to come in a forthcoming version. Note that I didn't had any real need of that. I aim at a stable (but secure) system. The constant run-for-the-bleeding-edge of linux pissed me. I had a couple of box. One was a 'forgotten server' that was not upgraded (because it ran essential services. Guess what ? It have been cracked). The other one was one of my development machine. I'd say that about a quarter of the time was used to try to keep thing together while upgrading things (maynly the kernel, which in turn asked for binutils, which asked for an upgrade, which fucked up my pam configuration, etc, etc). Generally, when the system was too fucked, it was time for a re-install from scracth. Maybe I am a moron. Or, maybe I should have used a RH ditrib
I may run into troubles with FreeBSD too, but the first 6 months have been a pleasant experience. It seems that debian aim at giving the same kind of user-experience too.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
I also love FreeBSD for this:
bash-2.03$ man ata
ATA(4) FreeBSD Kernel Interfaces Manual ATA(4)
NAME
ata, acd, ad, afd, ast - Generic ATA/ATAPI disk controller driver
[...]
bash-2.03$ ls -l
261
bash-2.03$
This come from the fact that FreeBSD is a system, not a kernel + userland.
Cheers,
--fred
Yes, you are right. Thanks for all your insight. I hope I can be as intelligent as you one day (but it looks, it won't be possible. You are so brilliant)
Thanks you again. I now see that you really know what you are talking about. I thought you were a moron, but it is definitely not true. "You pay the money and have your code tested like everybody else". I didn't think about it. M$ certified code is tested before beeing certified.
Really, thanks a lot.
--fred
> Refresh my memory as to why a free software vendor can't get a signature?
I, for instance, am not a 'Vendor', but I still produce free software. Do you beleive that I'll be trusted ?
You can troll me without going to name calling, sucker. Obscenity is the crutch of inarticulate motherfuckers. I preferred to old sig11.
Cheers,
--fred
> According to the article, this is an option that can be turned on or off - so in the appropriate setting, this is actually a very useful feature
So it will be turned on in corporate environments. And there, you could only run software signed by Microsoft.
I find this scary as hell. It won't be anymore secure (because you won't have all the scripts, excel macros, etc, etc, signed). But it will be more difficult to run free softweare.
Cheers,
--fred
FreeBSD rocks. I used linux for 3 years. I tried FreeBSD 6 months ago, and felt in love with it.
/usr/src
/bin directory
/sbin
/usr/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/src/bin/ls
/usr/bin/ls/ls., cd /usr/bin/ls and make install.
/usr/src
/etc/rc.conf
/usr/ports, present in the form of patches to the original versions. For instance:
/usr/ports/graphics/gimp1
The very very best thing about FreeBSD is the coherence of the whole. For instance, all the sources in
/usr/src/sys: the kernel
/usr/src/bin:
/usr/src/sbin:
/usr/src/usr.bin:
/usr/src/usr.sbin
etc, etc
The sources of ls are in
Wanna change and recompile ls ? Change
Wanna recompile the whole thing ?
cd
make buildworld
make installworld
mergemaster (if config files have changed)
reboot
All the system is maintained under CVS. Want to upgrade the *whole* system to current version ?
cvsup -L 2 stable-supfile
Then make buildworld & installworld.
Almost all of the configuration is made in
And there is the very clean port tree. About 4500 programs in
cd
make install
[Downloads source of the gimp]
[Patches sources]
[Compile]
[Install]
Of course all needed libraries will be fetched/patched/compiled in the way.
And all the ports are in CVS too, so
cvsup -L 2 ports-supfile
will keep you up-to-date with latest ports
Everything in the system is very very nicely engineered. There is a vision here, not a collection of hacks.
Cheers,
--fred
> And how is this an AMD problem?
> Is the motherboard/memory/fan/power supply AMD certified?
What do you mean ? (serious question)
The hardware have been bought from a single vendor. The mobo is a GA-7IX, which is one recommened by AMD. Yes, the fan had a few AMD logos on it. I didn't check the power supply, but I am pretty sure that it is a correct one. I checked many many different memory on it.
Anyway, I don't put the blame on the processor. AMD is not even mentionned in the post you are replying to. But, well, it is an Athlon-based system that don't work correctly.
Cheers,
--fred
> What I was trying to say is, if you're going to advise people on what to buy, you should base your advice not on how things were, but on how things are the moment the hardware is going to be purchased. That's the only moment that really matters. The past is hardly worth mentioning, the future questionable at best.
You are right. It definitely wasn't an buy advice. I hope that there is no slashdot reader stupid enough to buy an Intel today (other than the moderators, of course)...
Cheers,
--fred
> Nowadays there are some pretty goodmotherboars available for the AMD processors. In other words, don't blame AMD for the that crappy VIA chipset...
The discussion is slipping a bit there. The original comment was a guy saying that he had 'entrusted servers to AMD in the past, and they've been awful'. Someone replied he was 'using AMD forever and I never had trouble using them'. I pointed that I had problem too.
All those discussionas are about things of the past. At the time I bought those AMD systems, there was not much avalaible mobos (at least in France). Everyone I tried gave me headaches.
It is no longer the case, but in those time using AMD implied a lot potential problems.
(Sure, I could have waited a bit before switching to AMDs, but I wanted to stop paying the intel tax as soon as possible. The reason of it was the CPUID. Someone implementing such a feature don't deserve my money anymore)
Cheers,
--fred
> Uhmm .. that looks a lot like memory problems ...
I don't know. I tried almost any RAM combination on that motherboard: every 128Mb or 2x64Mb I used worked (I tried about 6 different 128Mb, 100Mh and 133Mh)
As soon as I put 2x128 or 128+64, then the machine crashes after a few minutes of work (ie: between 1 and 10 minutes). It never crashed with only 128Mb of ram (had uptimes of 15 days doing seti@home computations)
When I first got the machine, it only supported 64Mb (I wanted to do a 128Mb machines). Brought it back to the vendor. He said it was the processor (was skeptic, but what can I do ?). He gave it back with a 650 in it working with 128Mb. A few weeks later, I wanted to go to 256Mb. No way.
I suspect the motherboard. Maybe I should play with timings (but I already lost soo much time with this puppy). I want to try a 256Mb ram in it one of those days...
Cheers,
--fred
> I've been using AMD forever and I never had trouble using them in servers. They're rock solid for me.
*You* had no troubles. I, for one, had many troubles with AMD (Cache disabled on K7M mobo with default BIOS, random crashes with more than 128Mb of memory on Gigabyte mobo)
The fact it worked seamlessly for you don't imply that anyone that had problem is a liar. Maybe you are just smarter than us when it come down to motherboard choices, or you have a better luck factor...
Cheers,
--fred
If they price it correctly, consumers will start using this. As soon as the first glitches appear (ie: someone that have paid and is not able to write its document, a machine that crash and the application that is unusable after the OS re-install, someone that honestly forgot to renew its subscription, etc, etc) customers will be increadibly upset.
This won't stop so-called 'piracy', but will annoy regular customers, like protection on old software.
And given the great compliance of successive versions of Orifice, it will be fun, whern someone have to dig an old version of Office2K in 5 or 6 years to read a document, and find that it won't work anymore.
The last, and most frightening, problem is that at any time, M$ will be able to stop renewing the subscription and push customers onto a different product in a rigid time frame. And if your documents are not supported on the next version, then though luck: you won't have much time for the migration... Imagine if M$ was able to make all current installs of NT to stop working to force people on W2K...
Cheers,
--fred
MMm. Should be (Score: 5, Scary)
Cheers,
--fred
> the Spanish Inquisition
NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION !!!
Aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh.
> For these reasons, I believe the WINE project is more important than either VMware or Plex86.
Well, windows is not the end-of-everything. Plex86 will give me the possibility to run OPENSTEP. Or the HURD.
But, yes, for runnning windows *applications*, Wine is probably better...
Cheers,
--fred
There is also a dobermann pardoy. I had no idea that this movie was know to anyone outside of France.
A nice piece of parody, mixed with delightfull stupididities and cliches. A Comics on screen. Loved it.
Cheers,
--fred
Predicting something by looking at the stock market index is called Charting. In my book, it is vastly similar to astrology, with an interesting twist, as the market is self-referencing (people look at market prices, take decision because of the prices, which is then reflected in the prices itself). Such value is not linked to the fundamental that the market is supposed to represent, and is the bubble we see. This may also be the root of the chaotic components found in market prices (chaos and feedback go hand in hand).
In particular, I would draw your attention to this graph, which compares the overall returns of the NASDAQ composite and the S&P 500 since 1985. Observe how closely one tracks the other [...]
Personally, I'm a strong believer in the efficient market hypothesis
I stop beleived at the efficiency of the markets shortly after I started working with option valuation. It is amusing to taklk about beleiving in market efficiency. Is capitalism already a religion ? :-)
it's not clear to me that the long-term valuation of any given stock will outperform the index.
About your MSFT example, I want to point you to the fact that the theory (well some of the various theories) actually pretend that everything will happend in the future. One day MSFT will get in par with the S&P, for which ever starting point you choose. One day it will also be twice at 200%, and another day at 50%. All those events will occur an infinte number of time.
MSFT crossing the S&P. See this graph 2 Years
MSFT halfing. See 1 Years (From 15 march to 15 oct)
MSFT doubling. See 5 Years (Doubling occurs somewhere in mid 98)
If you look at 1 Year MSFT you can see that in those current days, the volatility of MSFT is high. But what can you deduce from that ? Only that the various events (crossing, doubling, halfing) will occurs faster. But you don't know if MSFT will double before it halfes, or the opposite.
The idea is that if such a knowledge was possible, it would already be reflected in the market price.
Note that I am not arguing that the stock movment is random. There is a stochastic componenent on top of a fundamental. In the MSFT/ORCL case, the fundamental is the emergence of high-technology. When looking at the 15 years MSFT/ORCL graph, it is clear that something happened. But the past tells us nothing about the future, and we don't have the singlest clue about how this fundamental will evolve by starring at the stock market index.
Cheers,
--fred
Yes. As the original sentence is in a conditional statment, you can put those too if you want. And amazon. And rambus. And microsoft. Whatever you want.
Btw, did anyone already noticed that while ESR is a stock symbol while there is no RMS, nor GPL ?
http://www.cnetinvestor.com/quote-fast.asp?symbol= ESR
Cheers,
--fred
Hemos is probably scanning the submissions from start to end while CmdrTaco is doing the opposite.
By my estimations, in about three hours, Hemo will post the Mir story, shortly followed by CmdrTaco's Iridium one...
Cheers,
--fred
> I think that we may be able to conclude that the Internet/Tech Stocks bubble has finally deflated
I think we are not able to conclude anything. The Internet/Tech Stock 'bubble' may still be present, and can put the world economy in a recession cycle, when the averge john doe will understand that the money he borrowed to day-trade have disapeared. Or it may rise again, when all the stupid (pets.com) or badly managed (boo.com) startups will all have failed and the few remaining will start trashing brick-and-mortar economy.
You cannot predict anything by looking at the stock market index. No matter how hard you try.
Cheers,
--fred