The "he" in the first paragraph refers to the author of the document, whoever he/she may be. It's pretty clear it's not Gates... but I had to address the point the author was trying to make.
He talks about a fracturing of programmer resources: three sets of programmers working on three window managers isn't wasted effort. What it means is that the software consumer has a choice. If Linux was a monolithic entity like Windows, he'd be right; but the fact that I can install a kernel and console, or kernel and X and Window Maker, or kernel, X, GNOME, Sawfish, Helixcode and Eazel is a benefit not a hindrance. The fact that KDE and GNOME coexist and are getting more stable and full featured by the day is proof that neither team is losing anything by not working together. Maybe there is some duplication of effort - but Linux I'm sure has more real programmers working on it (as opposed to people squeezed out of your MCSE mill who couldn't do anything without a drool-and-drop Wizard if you threatened them with a loaded pistol) than you could ever hire, so it balances out. The biggest problem Linux has is not programming resources, it's getting hardware manufacturers to part with technology without demanding usurious licensing fees and the right to own and patent everything in sight.
I guess Bill is just ticked because Linux has come up with actual innovations, like Arne Gangstad's exponential timeout value trick (kernel)... whereas Microsoft tries to take credit for inventing the symbolic link and the GUI.
when the Web first came out, it was seen as an exciting new medium, because hey, you didn't need a multimillion dollars and you didn't have regulations awarding the bandwidth to the same conglomerates over and over again. There's no reason why http://www.myvanitysite.com (just made that up, if it's a real site, I'm sorry) wouldn't get as much traffic as http://www.monolithic-bastard-corporation.com.
I guess the corporations didn't like being in control, and given that they couldn't take over TCP/IP to make it centrally managed and therefore all content on the Web would come from/be controlled by them, just hijacked ICANN.
Whoever told these people the way to make free speech a corporate right only has some serious negative karma coming. Ditto whatever moron told a certain set of CEOs that clicking on an item to buy it can and should be patented.
I know I'm burning karma by saying this, but it's become part of any Athlon-related story.
Why don't we just get some kind of petition together and go to the various motherboard manfacturers saying "if you build an SMP Athlon board, (Linux and FreeBSD compatible) you will NOT BE ABLE TO KEEP IT ON THE SHELVES."
Which is true...
Instead of legitimately complaining these options aren't available, why not pound on marketing at these various companies until the clue train finally arrives at the station?
Whereas I'm VERY disturbed by "White Wolf's Club CD" because of the whiny-Toreador-T-shirt crowd (or even worse, the "I am the reincarnation of Percy Bysshe Shelley and am therefore much Gother than thou, o fie, o fie me...") your reference to JtHM gave me quite a smile, ditto the script kiddie/kernel list comparison.
It's people like that that make me totally understand why Cliff Yablonski devotes half his hate pages to the Childer of Darknesse (TM). Fer a real hoot next time you're in Toronto, Canada check out a store called "Siren" - the proprietors, "Morpheus Blak" and "Groovella Blak", owners of the shop and founders of the *starts wiping tears of laughter from his eyes* "Toronto Gothick Society" *starts openly gut-laughing* give "Goth Talk" a certain air of believability.
RE: But so do gothic rock artists like marylin manson
Hey uninformed! Marilyn Manson is not Goth Rock. Please do not call him Goth Rock. He's a shit metal artist whose boneheaded minions have even less talent and/or any idea of Goth than he does. Neither is that loser Vampire wrestler, the other loser Vampire wrestler, Slipknot, Coal Chamber, Nine Inch Nails, or any of the other utter CRAP that gets passed off as "Goth" in "Hot Topic" at the mall.
Wanna see some examples of other non-Goth losers? http://www.gothgoose.net
Don't take it as a personal attack, it's just that I'm REALLY EFFING tired of getting lumped in with all the Vampire: The Pretentious RPG people.
*puts on Sisters Of Mercy to drown out the ambient BS*
RE: What makes you thnk that Sony's engineers who struggled to meet the marketing BS specs published have not tried every possible thing to make it happen?
They could have been constrained by costs, licensing agreements, deadlines, any of a number of reasons that have NOTHING to do with the engineering standpoint.
RE: What makes you think that some other people will be able to reverse engineer hardware without any specs,
Please check up on the dictionary definition of hacker. The hacker scene died when people started trading curiosity, rifling through pinouts documents et. al. and poking around with a soldering iron and/or hex editor for kiddie scripts and warez.
RE: possibly breaking Sony's license and getting sued later can do it???
I'm of the opinion that when I buy something it's mine, and if I fuck with it, and the warranty goes bye bye that's my problem and I couldn't care less.
RE: The days are changing, it;s no longer C64 world.
Yeah, but curiosity doesn't have to change, does it?
RE: Chips are more complicated to design, it takes very well coordinated efforts of MANY talented individuals to design one.
On the flip side, we also have the collaborative power of the Internet and more sophisticated and cheaper tools. So what's your point?
I'm sure at some point someone is going to come out with a hardware mod that breaks the bottleneck on the memory (increase your memory on the PS2! Get 40 million polygons per second!)
I know in the days of yore, every time something cool came out (e.g. Commodore 64) there were hordes of soldering iron wielding folk who'd figure out how to soup it up (e.g. 20 second backup - your hardware and software mod of choice)
Whatever happened to modding these kinds of things?
It's well documented that Trudeau said that whatever his advisors advised him to do with pot in his 1970s taskforce, he'd do.
And of course they unanimously said "decriminalise this stuff!". Given that the PM himself was rumored to be a pothead, all the stoners and hippies were sure that decriminalisation was around the corner.
A very abrupt change of heart occurred, strangely enough after a meeting with a delegation from the USA. He ended up following the American model. It's an "X files" type of thing in as much as it's something everyone has heard and believes but isn't proven - but there were rumors that the Men In Black of the USA walked in and said "want trouble? Do ya?"
There are rumblings about tying up the US border and ceasing to allow Canadians free passage across said border because of the American belief that Canada isn't doing enough about the "pot problem" in B.C. and Manitoba. I'm not a stoner, I'm a geek, I need every single brain cell thanks, you can keep your mind-stupefying weed; but watching the politics of this is strange.
The bulge in population ABSOLUTELY is a factor. In fact, it's almost the only one. Populations do the same thing over and over again. The supposed Gen X crowd (actually Gen 13) actually mirrors the generation following WWII to a T (what's referred to as the Silver Fox generation) - while the Baby Boomers and Gen Y/Millennials/Atari Generation (the following one to "Gen X") are nearly identical - but all of them go through the same cycles, it's just that certain ones (e.g. teen culture in the 60s vs teen culture in the early to mid 80s) are considered to have more of an impact and be more memorable simply because there were more around and more people to remember them. As I said again, whatever the Boomers do just by sheer weight of numbers will have an impact.
No need to apologise: I guess what I was saying was unclear.
Yes, they've basically stolen tons of stuff from everyone else... one MIGHT be tempted to say "fight fire with fire"... BUT...
Here's the chance to publicly say "even if it was offered to us, we wouldn't take it." That kind of corporate-espionage B.S. belongs to a totally different world. Open Source is a philosophy, let it live and or die on its own two feet and by its merits.
Showing the world the kind of class that Microsoft never had and never will should ratchet the public image of slashdot types way up, and counteract those stupid and offensive "hi! I'm the fat black hacker guy who has your credit card!" commercials...
No, I'm not saying any of what you just said. What I have said, though, is that there is a huge wad of people with unreasonable expectations (retiring with a full head of gray hair, perfect eyesight and hearing at 55 at a beach house somewhere exotic with 10 miles of private beach - see commercials for details) frantically scrambling for money.
I'm sure when I get to 55 28 years from now I and my colleagues will be doing the same thing - but we won't be a huge enough population mass to do that to the stock market.
My 18 year old brother, himself a member of another baby boom, and/or the people born in 2000 (a third baby boom) will do the same things at their respective ages, and they'll have the mass of people to do it.
I'm starting to invest (a bit late, mind you) because I don't want to be in that trip, but for now making that kind of money is a want, not a need.
I don't have the psychology of "oh crap, I don't want to be eating dog food in ten years, GO STOCKS GO!"
and thought *vomit* *barf* yet ANOTHER kewl l33t ha>
I saw the promo, and the Man finds the l33t ha>
Let me guess, the holographic 3D database loads onto a floppy disk.
Now, OK, so they use Linux or some facsimile thereof in the show. It still doesn't change the fact that hacking (white hat) is pretty boring looking, and hacking (black hat) is also pretty boring looking. A half an hour of someone combing through source code and hex to see what's going on inside the computer doesn't make for gripping TV, which is why even if they run the script past we slashdotters for technical accuracy, they'll still have to play great liberties with what hacking is. Which is why shows about hacking will ALWAYS suck. When I did some typical youthful indiscretions hem hem way back when I didn't end up being shot at by secret agents. Nor did I get the buxom Lara Croft babe.
UNLESS!!!!!
They do some serious documentary style courtroom drama about how they completely buried Capt. Crunch, Minor Threat, etc etc etc, ran roughshod over their rights, changed the rules completely with respect to these people, we all know the story.
Here's what drove the "dot com" boom. Aside from considerations of greed, there was something else.
Most baby boomers have this perception that they're going to be young, beautiful and rich forever. OK maybe they're starting to accept the idea that they're balding and fat, but they don't intend to retire gracefully - they want the big house on the beach while they go swimming in crystal clear blue water, you get the idea.
In order to have the of retirement lifestyle TV is pushing and that most boomers want, you conservatively need $1-$2 MILLION in reserve. The average boomer is 40-50+ and has on average less than $2000 in the bank.
So how do you make two million in less than a decade? Buy and hold? NAH! TOO LONG! They thought they'd retire at 55! So out comes the dice to roll on the market. When Netscape blew up people smelt the kind of stratospheric success of a Microsoft. And bought. And bought and bought. And borrowed, traded on margin, and bought. Hey, every one of those stocks rocketed on IPOs. Everyone was going to get rich. Noone wanted to INVEST, they wanted to SPECULATE - who cares if the company's a money loser - the stock's going to skyrocket, and someone's going to get rich. So long as I catch the upside, someone else'll be stuck with the tab on the downswing.
Well, thinks Mr. Boomer, I bought at $35, it's now at $100, time to harvest the profits and stick them into something a little more blue chip. Either that, or employee whose options have vested decides to cash out. Net result - more supply than demand, price goes down, people panic, sell etc.
You want to know when this'll happen again? When the boomers start hitting 60, STILL only have less than $2000 in the bank, Social Security is all but bankrupt, and the first biotech stock hits $100 in its first hour of trading. Mass panic and desperation will fuel yet another boom.
There are three ways to lie: lies, damned lies and statistics. Benchmarks are, have been, and always will be about politics.
Every time I see a benchmark or other metric in the computer world, I have to constantly ask myself, "Is that Linux worse than NT article comparing a Linux box on a 386 vs NT on a 8 processor SMP Alpha?", excuse the exaggerating to make a point.
So what if the benchmarks suck. Is getting the highest numbers the aim of the game? If so, then the person who wins hands-down is going to be the guy with the 5000W power supply that has to be plugged into a 220V outlet, with a liquid-nitrogen cooled non-conducting fluid bath containing a 20 PowerPC SMP Beowulf cluster with attached tachyon cache. The thing'll weigh 250 lbs, be totally impractical for practical use and burst into flames within five hours, but by God, it gets some serious BogoMips before heat death.
A processor that runs really cool, with low power consumption and the capacity to adapt to whatever's thrown at it is pretty cool in my book.
And given that most people do email and write documents, really a 8088 would do. I think we should get over the whole comparing antler or genital size thing that men do. RRR RRR RRR Thog have 200 MhZ! Ug have 240 MhZ! GRAR! Ug get girl!
there were a lot of *us* working 80 hour weeks and to unreasonable deadlines with relatively poorer salaries in the vain expectation that the stock options would eventually pay off. After all, we all knew, or knew someone who knew, someone who cashed in big on stock options and retired with millions in his or her early 20s.
While we yuk and guffaw at the suits watching their paper castles crash to the floor, remember that for each of these there was a back room where techs worked underpaid 12 hour days to support these 8 hour day clowns who were most certainly NOT underpaid.
I never benefited from the dot com boom. Am I bitter? Slightly. Do I celebrate the demise? Not really. Yeah, it's hubris, but a lot of people got crushed. Especially investors who bought high on margin.
is not that it contravenes free speech, because as we know, free speech is often abused - witness the utter drivel that gets put on a pedastal in the name of "freedom".
The biggest worry is the deliberate or unconscious political agenda that goes into these filtering programs.
Never mind that people and place names like Hancock, Assam and Scunthorpe are going to be blocked, look at the softwares being used to filter. Many of them have an outright political agenda - filtering out any non-Christian religious site, health information (AIDS education is NOT PR0N), abuse hotline information (gotta keep them women in line!) etc.
And the fact that filterware is explicitly closed-source (why don't they want us to know and/or configure what can be seen and can't be???) is the biggest screen to whatever might be behind the scenes.
A library is and should be a repository of information without political bias. "I don't want my kids reading Chairman Mao or Mein Kampf!" OK, but if you ignore history, you're destined to repeat it. I don't think I could have completed my first year university Psychology project on cultural influences on Freud's theories without having been able to research Victorian sexual mores.
In reality, the only problem I see with Internet material is not its potential subject matter, but its veracity. I mean, if you believe half the stuff that's out there you need your head examined. My biggest worry with the Internet is that it'll turn people into lazy researchers and then it'll just be TAKEN for granted that there's a hollow Earth with derro living in it, for example.
Yeah right, this'll be popular in tech places
on
The Ultimate Chair
·
· Score: 1
Apart from a couple of artsy poncy "Web design houses" - where tech illiterate art school dropouts in black Structure ribbed shirts and goatees play with their Macintosh "Kleenex Box" G4s in a "designed by Ikea" "Bauhaus meets New York Loft" one-room hole with artsy exposed brick and real wood floors while the huge brass espresso machine hisses in the corner to make cappucino for obese clients trying desperately to get out of the huge puffy leather couch in the waiting area...
...who else is gonna buy this?
Real techs balance the keyboard on their knees or on top of the room-heater sized case on the floor their server is housed in, surrounded by Industrial shelving.
Nota to anyone trying to get my interest with this - leave Star Trek: the Next Generation Borg cube to the artsies, and pass the savings onto me by giving me the 1/2 of a Volkswagon Jetta's cost in cash.
Slashdot Mirror
*sheepishly*
Well, yeah. Thanks for giving me credit, tho.
Not really: I don't see what in this is clueless.
The "he" in the first paragraph refers to the author of the document, whoever he/she may be. It's pretty clear it's not Gates... but I had to address the point the author was trying to make.
The comment about Gates after is genuine.
What did you find clueless?
He talks about a fracturing of programmer resources: three sets of programmers working on three window managers isn't wasted effort. What it means is that the software consumer has a choice. If Linux was a monolithic entity like Windows, he'd be right; but the fact that I can install a kernel and console, or kernel and X and Window Maker, or kernel, X, GNOME, Sawfish, Helixcode and Eazel is a benefit not a hindrance. The fact that KDE and GNOME coexist and are getting more stable and full featured by the day is proof that neither team is losing anything by not working together. Maybe there is some duplication of effort - but Linux I'm sure has more real programmers working on it (as opposed to people squeezed out of your MCSE mill who couldn't do anything without a drool-and-drop Wizard if you threatened them with a loaded pistol) than you could ever hire, so it balances out. The biggest problem Linux has is not programming resources, it's getting hardware manufacturers to part with technology without demanding usurious licensing fees and the right to own and patent everything in sight.
I guess Bill is just ticked because Linux has come up with actual innovations, like Arne Gangstad's exponential timeout value trick (kernel)... whereas Microsoft tries to take credit for inventing the symbolic link and the GUI.
Actually, that would be a patent on human reproduction. Life is something they couldn't even begin to describe.
Wow, imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh. Never mind.
when the Web first came out, it was seen as an exciting new medium, because hey, you didn't need a multimillion dollars and you didn't have regulations awarding the bandwidth to the same conglomerates over and over again. There's no reason why http://www.myvanitysite.com (just made that up, if it's a real site, I'm sorry) wouldn't get as much traffic as http://www.monolithic-bastard-corporation.com.
I guess the corporations didn't like being in control, and given that they couldn't take over TCP/IP to make it centrally managed and therefore all content on the Web would come from/be controlled by them, just hijacked ICANN.
Whoever told these people the way to make free speech a corporate right only has some serious negative karma coming. Ditto whatever moron told a certain set of CEOs that clicking on an item to buy it can and should be patented.
I know I'm burning karma by saying this, but it's become part of any Athlon-related story.
Why don't we just get some kind of petition together and go to the various motherboard manfacturers saying "if you build an SMP Athlon board, (Linux and FreeBSD compatible) you will NOT BE ABLE TO KEEP IT ON THE SHELVES."
Which is true...
Instead of legitimately complaining these options aren't available, why not pound on marketing at these various companies until the clue train finally arrives at the station?
Whereas I'm VERY disturbed by "White Wolf's Club CD" because of the whiny-Toreador-T-shirt crowd (or even worse, the "I am the reincarnation of Percy Bysshe Shelley and am therefore much Gother than thou, o fie, o fie me...") your reference to JtHM gave me quite a smile, ditto the script kiddie/kernel list comparison.
It's people like that that make me totally understand why Cliff Yablonski devotes half his hate pages to the Childer of Darknesse (TM). Fer a real hoot next time you're in Toronto, Canada check out a store called "Siren" - the proprietors, "Morpheus Blak" and "Groovella Blak", owners of the shop and founders of the *starts wiping tears of laughter from his eyes* "Toronto Gothick Society" *starts openly gut-laughing* give "Goth Talk" a certain air of believability.
Ah, for a decent scene...
RE: But so do gothic rock artists like marylin manson
Hey uninformed! Marilyn Manson is not Goth Rock. Please do not call him Goth Rock. He's a shit metal artist whose boneheaded minions have even less talent and/or any idea of Goth than he does. Neither is that loser Vampire wrestler, the other loser Vampire wrestler, Slipknot, Coal Chamber, Nine Inch Nails, or any of the other utter CRAP that gets passed off as "Goth" in "Hot Topic" at the mall.
Wanna see some examples of other non-Goth losers? http://www.gothgoose.net
Don't take it as a personal attack, it's just that I'm REALLY EFFING tired of getting lumped in with all the Vampire: The Pretentious RPG people.
*puts on Sisters Of Mercy to drown out the ambient BS*
RE: You must be hardware designed to be sure.
Nope, sorry. Software.
RE: What makes you thnk that Sony's engineers who struggled to meet the marketing BS specs published have not tried every possible thing to make it happen?
They could have been constrained by costs, licensing agreements, deadlines, any of a number of reasons that have NOTHING to do with the engineering standpoint.
RE: What makes you think that some other people will be able to reverse engineer hardware without any specs,
Please check up on the dictionary definition of hacker. The hacker scene died when people started trading curiosity, rifling through pinouts documents et. al. and poking around with a soldering iron and/or hex editor for kiddie scripts and warez.
RE: possibly breaking Sony's license and getting sued later can do it???
I'm of the opinion that when I buy something it's mine, and if I fuck with it, and the warranty goes bye bye that's my problem and I couldn't care less.
RE: The days are changing, it;s no longer C64 world.
Yeah, but curiosity doesn't have to change, does it?
RE: Chips are more complicated to design, it takes very well coordinated efforts of MANY talented individuals to design one.
On the flip side, we also have the collaborative power of the Internet and more sophisticated and cheaper tools. So what's your point?
I'm sure at some point someone is going to come out with a hardware mod that breaks the bottleneck on the memory (increase your memory on the PS2! Get 40 million polygons per second!)
I know in the days of yore, every time something cool came out (e.g. Commodore 64) there were hordes of soldering iron wielding folk who'd figure out how to soup it up (e.g. 20 second backup - your hardware and software mod of choice)
Whatever happened to modding these kinds of things?
It's well documented that Trudeau said that whatever his advisors advised him to do with pot in his 1970s taskforce, he'd do.
And of course they unanimously said "decriminalise this stuff!". Given that the PM himself was rumored to be a pothead, all the stoners and hippies were sure that decriminalisation was around the corner.
A very abrupt change of heart occurred, strangely enough after a meeting with a delegation from the USA. He ended up following the American model. It's an "X files" type of thing in as much as it's something everyone has heard and believes but isn't proven - but there were rumors that the Men In Black of the USA walked in and said "want trouble? Do ya?"
There are rumblings about tying up the US border and ceasing to allow Canadians free passage across said border because of the American belief that Canada isn't doing enough about the "pot problem" in B.C. and Manitoba. I'm not a stoner, I'm a geek, I need every single brain cell thanks, you can keep your mind-stupefying weed; but watching the politics of this is strange.
The bulge in population ABSOLUTELY is a factor. In fact, it's almost the only one. Populations do the same thing over and over again. The supposed Gen X crowd (actually Gen 13) actually mirrors the generation following WWII to a T (what's referred to as the Silver Fox generation) - while the Baby Boomers and Gen Y/Millennials/Atari Generation (the following one to "Gen X") are nearly identical - but all of them go through the same cycles, it's just that certain ones (e.g. teen culture in the 60s vs teen culture in the early to mid 80s) are considered to have more of an impact and be more memorable simply because there were more around and more people to remember them. As I said again, whatever the Boomers do just by sheer weight of numbers will have an impact.
No need to apologise: I guess what I was saying was unclear.
Yes, they've basically stolen tons of stuff from everyone else... one MIGHT be tempted to say "fight fire with fire"... BUT...
Here's the chance to publicly say "even if it was offered to us, we wouldn't take it." That kind of corporate-espionage B.S. belongs to a totally different world. Open Source is a philosophy, let it live and or die on its own two feet and by its merits.
Showing the world the kind of class that Microsoft never had and never will should ratchet the public image of slashdot types way up, and counteract those stupid and offensive "hi! I'm the fat black hacker guy who has your credit card!" commercials...
I mean in the sense that biotech becomes the "Dot Com" of about five years from now.
You could have invested in any of a number of internet, Linux and/or computer companies prior to 1999...
RE: Without Ford making cars, who would buy car tires?
Consumers. Usually repeatedly, after the Firestones that came with the car shred to pieces.
If you remember, Trudeau wanted to decrim, and the CIA walked into his office and threatened him and Canada with death and invasion, respectively.
Uncle Sam wants a war on drugs. Canada can never decrim.
No, I'm not saying any of what you just said. What I have said, though, is that there is a huge wad of people with unreasonable expectations (retiring with a full head of gray hair, perfect eyesight and hearing at 55 at a beach house somewhere exotic with 10 miles of private beach - see commercials for details) frantically scrambling for money.
I'm sure when I get to 55 28 years from now I and my colleagues will be doing the same thing - but we won't be a huge enough population mass to do that to the stock market.
My 18 year old brother, himself a member of another baby boom, and/or the people born in 2000 (a third baby boom) will do the same things at their respective ages, and they'll have the mass of people to do it.
I'm starting to invest (a bit late, mind you) because I don't want to be in that trip, but for now making that kind of money is a want, not a need.
I don't have the psychology of "oh crap, I don't want to be eating dog food in ten years, GO STOCKS GO!"
and thought *vomit* *barf* yet ANOTHER kewl l33t ha>
I saw the promo, and the Man finds the l33t ha>
Let me guess, the holographic 3D database loads onto a floppy disk.
Now, OK, so they use Linux or some facsimile thereof in the show. It still doesn't change the fact that hacking (white hat) is pretty boring looking, and hacking (black hat) is also pretty boring looking. A half an hour of someone combing through source code and hex to see what's going on inside the computer doesn't make for gripping TV, which is why even if they run the script past we slashdotters for technical accuracy, they'll still have to play great liberties with what hacking is. Which is why shows about hacking will ALWAYS suck. When I did some typical youthful indiscretions hem hem way back when I didn't end up being shot at by secret agents. Nor did I get the buxom Lara Croft babe.
UNLESS!!!!!
They do some serious documentary style courtroom drama about how they completely buried Capt. Crunch, Minor Threat, etc etc etc, ran roughshod over their rights, changed the rules completely with respect to these people, we all know the story.
Here's what drove the "dot com" boom. Aside from considerations of greed, there was something else.
Most baby boomers have this perception that they're going to be young, beautiful and rich forever. OK maybe they're starting to accept the idea that they're balding and fat, but they don't intend to retire gracefully - they want the big house on the beach while they go swimming in crystal clear blue water, you get the idea.
In order to have the of retirement lifestyle TV is pushing and that most boomers want, you conservatively need $1-$2 MILLION in reserve. The average boomer is 40-50+ and has on average less than $2000 in the bank.
So how do you make two million in less than a decade? Buy and hold? NAH! TOO LONG! They thought they'd retire at 55! So out comes the dice to roll on the market. When Netscape blew up people smelt the kind of stratospheric success of a Microsoft. And bought. And bought and bought. And borrowed, traded on margin, and bought. Hey, every one of those stocks rocketed on IPOs. Everyone was going to get rich. Noone wanted to INVEST, they wanted to SPECULATE - who cares if the company's a money loser - the stock's going to skyrocket, and someone's going to get rich. So long as I catch the upside, someone else'll be stuck with the tab on the downswing.
Well, thinks Mr. Boomer, I bought at $35, it's now at $100, time to harvest the profits and stick them into something a little more blue chip. Either that, or employee whose options have vested decides to cash out. Net result - more supply than demand, price goes down, people panic, sell etc.
You want to know when this'll happen again? When the boomers start hitting 60, STILL only have less than $2000 in the bank, Social Security is all but bankrupt, and the first biotech stock hits $100 in its first hour of trading. Mass panic and desperation will fuel yet another boom.
There are three ways to lie: lies, damned lies and statistics. Benchmarks are, have been, and always will be about politics.
Every time I see a benchmark or other metric in the computer world, I have to constantly ask myself, "Is that Linux worse than NT article comparing a Linux box on a 386 vs NT on a 8 processor SMP Alpha?", excuse the exaggerating to make a point.
So what if the benchmarks suck. Is getting the highest numbers the aim of the game? If so, then the person who wins hands-down is going to be the guy with the 5000W power supply that has to be plugged into a 220V outlet, with a liquid-nitrogen cooled non-conducting fluid bath containing a 20 PowerPC SMP Beowulf cluster with attached tachyon cache. The thing'll weigh 250 lbs, be totally impractical for practical use and burst into flames within five hours, but by God, it gets some serious BogoMips before heat death.
A processor that runs really cool, with low power consumption and the capacity to adapt to whatever's thrown at it is pretty cool in my book.
And given that most people do email and write documents, really a 8088 would do. I think we should get over the whole comparing antler or genital size thing that men do. RRR RRR RRR Thog have 200 MhZ! Ug have 240 MhZ! GRAR! Ug get girl!
Sheesh.
I think you mean "Ouvri barrié pou nou passé..."
there were a lot of *us* working 80 hour weeks and to unreasonable deadlines with relatively poorer salaries in the vain expectation that the stock options would eventually pay off. After all, we all knew, or knew someone who knew, someone who cashed in big on stock options and retired with millions in his or her early 20s.
While we yuk and guffaw at the suits watching their paper castles crash to the floor, remember that for each of these there was a back room where techs worked underpaid 12 hour days to support these 8 hour day clowns who were most certainly NOT underpaid.
I never benefited from the dot com boom. Am I bitter? Slightly. Do I celebrate the demise? Not really. Yeah, it's hubris, but a lot of people got crushed. Especially investors who bought high on margin.
is not that it contravenes free speech, because as we know, free speech is often abused - witness the utter drivel that gets put on a pedastal in the name of "freedom".
The biggest worry is the deliberate or unconscious political agenda that goes into these filtering programs.
Never mind that people and place names like Hancock, Assam and Scunthorpe are going to be blocked, look at the softwares being used to filter. Many of them have an outright political agenda - filtering out any non-Christian religious site, health information (AIDS education is NOT PR0N), abuse hotline information (gotta keep them women in line!) etc.
And the fact that filterware is explicitly closed-source (why don't they want us to know and/or configure what can be seen and can't be???) is the biggest screen to whatever might be behind the scenes.
A library is and should be a repository of information without political bias. "I don't want my kids reading Chairman Mao or Mein Kampf!" OK, but if you ignore history, you're destined to repeat it. I don't think I could have completed my first year university Psychology project on cultural influences on Freud's theories without having been able to research Victorian sexual mores.
In reality, the only problem I see with Internet material is not its potential subject matter, but its veracity. I mean, if you believe half the stuff that's out there you need your head examined. My biggest worry with the Internet is that it'll turn people into lazy researchers and then it'll just be TAKEN for granted that there's a hollow Earth with derro living in it, for example.
Apart from a couple of artsy poncy "Web design houses" - where tech illiterate art school dropouts in black Structure ribbed shirts and goatees play with their Macintosh "Kleenex Box" G4s in a "designed by Ikea" "Bauhaus meets New York Loft" one-room hole with artsy exposed brick and real wood floors while the huge brass espresso machine hisses in the corner to make cappucino for obese clients trying desperately to get out of the huge puffy leather couch in the waiting area...
...who else is gonna buy this?
Real techs balance the keyboard on their knees or on top of the room-heater sized case on the floor their server is housed in, surrounded by Industrial shelving.
Nota to anyone trying to get my interest with this - leave Star Trek: the Next Generation Borg cube to the artsies, and pass the savings onto me by giving me the 1/2 of a Volkswagon Jetta's cost in cash.
Really?
Never read it.