The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now.
That's right. But while Amazon and Apple probably are not going to grow 5 times either, they have a proven business model and they are unlikely to lose more than 50% in value. The same cannot be said about Facebook that depends for revenue heavily on a few partners. Therefore the risk/reward ratio should be much better for Facebook (to get me interested).
At a valuation of $75B to $100B, how much can we expect Facebook's share price to grow? Apple's valuation is now at $400B to $500B, so maybe 5 to 10 times at most while there is a considerable risk for not much growth at all. The share price of Amazon and Apple grew over 100 times since their IPO but this can't happen with Facebook because their IPO is coming fairly late. So, while the IPO is a great day for early investors, it's not worth it for average investors.
Your post has prompted me to finally set up a page for TurboVM, a virtual machine I have been working on. What makes TurboVM interesting is that it's (1) small and simple, (2) not tied into a programming model like typical VMs that are designed with a single language in mind, and (3) FAST. The problem with most modern code generators and VMs is that they are tied to a specific way of doing garbage collection and exceptions that might suit some but not all languages. If you decide to provide none of these runtime services you must provide an API such that language designers can implement their own. However, designing this API is also quite difficult. I looked at the TuboVM pages but found no design goals or principles that would explain this but also did not want to dig trough the code. Would you mind to explain them here?
Safari for the PC is interesting for three reasons: (1) if widely adopted, it would force more web apps to become Safari friendly. Google apps, for example, often don't work with Safari. (2) Safari is the developemnt platform for iPhone apps. And by releasing Safari for the PC, the developer base just multiplied enormously. (3) Just the fact that iPhone apps are build from HTML and Javascript is going to shake up the mobile web scenario.
Nesson's daughter Rebecca (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nesson/) works on a PhD in CS after going to Law School. Hence, you can be sure that he is very well aware of the discussion inside the CS community. Rebecca won Google's Anita Borg Fellowship 2007 (http://www.google.com/anitaborg/) and I remember here as a very nice person all around.
Unless you are interested in the business story of a porn outlet, there is almost nothing in TFA about copyright. They move to live streams (although at higher resolution than most non-porn streams seem to offer), to make it more difficult and less interesting to copy content. Editors: Why was this omitted from the summary?
This already happens and is called scheduling. (It is in no way OS X specific - all modern OSs take advantage of multiple cores.) Processes are distributed over cores (CPUs). A process is not tied to a specific core but can use one core during a time slice and another one later.
Talking about video drivers shows how much Linus is not ready for the
Laptop. If this is a problem, how much are audio, USB, FireWire, and
WLAN are going to be a problem? I'm working in a CS department and most
people I know don't even try to get Linux running on their laptop.
(That's also why Apple's OS X on iBooks and PowerBooks becomes more and more
popular around here.)
I am missing Apple's OS X in the picture drawn in the article. Apple does things differently than other Unices but companies like Adobe and Macromedia are present here. At least on the desktop, Apple is a much bigger threat to Microsoft than any Linux or *BSD. (Apple is probably a threat to Linux on the Desktop because here applications is what counts.)
Fight Back: Join the Society for HandHeld Hushing
on
Cell Phones In The Air?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The fine folks at Coudal http://www.coudal.com/ provide cards that you can hand to your neighbor blarring into his cell phone:
"Dear Cell Phone User, we are aware that your ongoing conversation with [ ] yer mother [ ] yer therapist... about [ ] last night [ ] the game... is very important to you, but we thought you'd like to know that it doesn't interest us in the least."
I have aleady printed my bunch of cards and started handing them out. Reactions are quite positive.
Aqua is based on Display-PDF and is resolution independent. That was a really smart move by Apple because resolution is only going up. Even if there were small problems with resolution being to low on laptops (don't think so) this will go away in the future. All bitmap-oriented window systems will suffer from this design decision increasingly.
The OS should be resilient enough to handle application crashes and keep on running, who cares who causes the crash? It's the OS's responsibility to handle it.
A MS driver is equivalent to a Linux kernel module. Linux is not any better at this because a poorly written kernel module crashes Linux, too.
It just seems that Linux kernel modules are better audited (by the kernel developers) than the average Windows driver.
This year's ICFP task, as well as last years, was all about finding a good algorithm. More than anything else, knowing the domain would help. Of course, using a language that provides strong typechecking (like OCaml) or garbage collection (OCaml, Python) allows a programmer to concentrate on the main task. You should not draw too many conclusions from the language that was used for the winning entries.
Lua (http://www.lua.org/) is a small, fast, extensible language that is designed to be embedded into an application. It has already become a favourite among game designers. The idea is, that you extend it with new datatypes in C, such that the objects in your application become scriptable. Think TCL, just better. For a performance comparison, see http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/craps.shtml. It beats both Perl and Python.
Given todays hardware, why you can't just simulate the old system if finding parts for repair becomes a problem. You would just run your old software on the simulated machine.
Just today the German news magazin Der Spiegel has a story about Lego cult and especially movies made with Lego characters. If yo don't speak German, just visit the box on the right of the page for the links.
Postfix's own documentation is fine
on
Postfix
·
· Score: 4
I am running Postfix on my
machines for two years now and never wanted to use any other MTA. Its
documentation is very complete so chances are good that you don't need
this book. The FAQ covers most aspects and the rest can be deduced
from the manual pages. If you are running sendmail do yourself a
favour and take a look at Postfix.
Slashdot Mirror
The deal isn't any worst than buying Apple or Amazon stock right now.
That's right. But while Amazon and Apple probably are not going to grow 5 times either, they have a proven business model and they are unlikely to lose more than 50% in value. The same cannot be said about Facebook that depends for revenue heavily on a few partners. Therefore the risk/reward ratio should be much better for Facebook (to get me interested).
I don't consider a factor of 5 or 6 extraordinary given the risk. Take a look at Intel or Amazon for their growth since they IPOed.
At a valuation of $75B to $100B, how much can we expect Facebook's share price to grow? Apple's valuation is now at $400B to $500B, so maybe 5 to 10 times at most while there is a considerable risk for not much growth at all. The share price of Amazon and Apple grew over 100 times since their IPO but this can't happen with Facebook because their IPO is coming fairly late. So, while the IPO is a great day for early investors, it's not worth it for average investors.
Sorry! I was indeed confused by another RIAA story at Slashdot where Nesson's daughter Rebecca and NewYorkCountryLawyer appeared.
The submitter of the story is Charles Nesson, who is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. See also Wikipedia.
Safari for the PC is interesting for three reasons: (1) if widely adopted, it would force more web apps to become Safari friendly. Google apps, for example, often don't work with Safari. (2) Safari is the developemnt platform for iPhone apps. And by releasing Safari for the PC, the developer base just multiplied enormously. (3) Just the fact that iPhone apps are build from HTML and Javascript is going to shake up the mobile web scenario.
Nesson's daughter Rebecca (http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~nesson/) works on a PhD in CS after going to Law School. Hence, you can be sure that he is very well aware of the discussion inside the CS community. Rebecca won Google's Anita Borg Fellowship 2007 (http://www.google.com/anitaborg/) and I remember here as a very nice person all around.
Unless you are interested in the business story of a porn outlet, there is almost nothing in TFA about copyright. They move to live streams (although at higher resolution than most non-porn streams seem to offer), to make it more difficult and less interesting to copy content. Editors: Why was this omitted from the summary?
This already happens and is called scheduling. (It is in no way OS X specific - all modern OSs take advantage of multiple cores.) Processes are distributed over cores (CPUs). A process is not tied to a specific core but can use one core during a time slice and another one later.
Talking about video drivers shows how much Linus is not ready for the Laptop. If this is a problem, how much are audio, USB, FireWire, and WLAN are going to be a problem? I'm working in a CS department and most people I know don't even try to get Linux running on their laptop. (That's also why Apple's OS X on iBooks and PowerBooks becomes more and more popular around here.)
I am missing Apple's OS X in the picture drawn in the article. Apple does things differently than other Unices but companies like Adobe and Macromedia are present here. At least on the desktop, Apple is a much bigger threat to Microsoft than any Linux or *BSD. (Apple is probably a threat to Linux on the Desktop because here applications is what counts.)
The fine folks at Coudal http://www.coudal.com/ provide cards that you can hand to your neighbor blarring into his cell phone:
... about [ ] last night [ ] the game ... is very important to you, but we thought you'd like to know that it doesn't interest us in the least."
"Dear Cell Phone User, we are aware that your ongoing conversation with [ ] yer mother [ ] yer therapist
I have aleady printed my bunch of cards and started handing them out. Reactions are quite positive.
Aqua is based on Display-PDF and is resolution independent. That was a really smart move by Apple because resolution is only going up. Even if there were small problems with resolution being to low on laptops (don't think so) this will go away in the future. All bitmap-oriented window systems will suffer from this design decision increasingly.
A MS driver is equivalent to a Linux kernel module. Linux is not any better at this because a poorly written kernel module crashes Linux, too. It just seems that Linux kernel modules are better audited (by the kernel developers) than the average Windows driver.
This year's ICFP task, as well as last years, was all about finding a good algorithm. More than anything else, knowing the domain would help. Of course, using a language that provides strong typechecking (like OCaml) or garbage collection (OCaml, Python) allows a programmer to concentrate on the main task. You should not draw too many conclusions from the language that was used for the winning entries.
Lua (http://www.lua.org/) is a small, fast, extensible language that is designed to be embedded into an application. It has already become a favourite among game designers. The idea is, that you extend it with new datatypes in C, such that the objects in your application become scriptable. Think TCL, just better. For a performance comparison, see http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/craps.shtml. It beats both Perl and Python.
http://intentsoft.com/
Check out the FAQ, some entries are just hilarious.
http://intentsoft.com/faq.html#q11
Given todays hardware, why you can't just simulate the old system if finding parts for repair becomes a problem. You would just run your old software on the simulated machine.
The following PDF reviews the book and mentions explicitly the problem and its solution.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gasarch/bookrev/32-1.pdf
Believe it or not, Donald Knuth has a paper "The Toilet Paper Problem" in his book Selected Papers on Analysis of Algorithms (ISBN 1575862123).
might have used Perl :-)
The links from the Spiegel article. Watch out for sapces splipped into the URLs.
o .m ov
? ti tle=montypython
h tm l
http://www.spiteyourface.com/one/index.html
http://pub89.ezboard.com/fbrickfilmsforumsfrm1
http://brickfilms.topcities.com/directory.html
http://www.lego.com/studios
http://www.legolomo.de
http://www.geocities.com/legomov
http://www.infernolab.com/videos/legoministry_l
http://www.lego.com/studios/screening/movie.asp
http://www.spiteyourface.com/dead/index.html
http://www.spiteyourface.com
http://www.1000steine.de
http://www.lugnet.com
http://www.brickshelf.com/scans/catalogs/index.
Just today the German news magazin Der Spiegel has a story about Lego cult and especially movies made with Lego characters. If yo don't speak German, just visit the box on the right of the page for the links.
I am running Postfix on my machines for two years now and never wanted to use any other MTA. Its documentation is very complete so chances are good that you don't need this book. The FAQ covers most aspects and the rest can be deduced from the manual pages. If you are running sendmail do yourself a favour and take a look at Postfix.