From what I understand, this is the work of two PhD students who have spent years working on this algorithm.
That should be patentable. It's not like you or I are the people they need protection from. They need protection from Lycos or AltaVista or whomever who would say "hey, this new algorithm would give us a better search engine, resulting in more people staring at our banner ads and making more revenue for us, and it's not patented, so let's use it."
There is a difference between the opening and the IPO price. The company sets the IPO price. The Underwriter sets the opening price.
The Underwriters are naturally seeking to maximize their investment.
Some quick math.
Company has 100 million shares and is worth $10/share, or $1billion
Decides it wants $100 million in capital, so it makes a public offering of 10% of it's stock. That's 10 million shares, at $10/share.
Underwriter spends $100million on these shares, turns around and sells them on the secondary market (that's to you or me) for $150/share. Now all the sudden the company is worth $15billion.
The company has made it's $100million, but the Underwriters (assuming they actually sold all 10million shares, has made $1.4 billion.
Where did the $140 increase come from? Not from you and me trading... but from the -opening- price on the -first day- of trading. Noone got to buy shares anywhere between $10 or $150. Either you're an employee, friend of the company, and get them at $10 (or less) a share, or you're a regular investor type and you get them for $150/share.
I don't know about you, but this bothers me. Underwriters are nothing more than loan sharks.
The way Underwriters work pisses me off. Look at COBT's IPO. Cobalt's IPO price was, what, $22/share? They opened at nearly $130!
This is f*&cking absurd. They aren't "up" $108 points. The Underwriters bought the shares from Cobalt at $22/share and turned around and sold them for $130/share. Do you think Cobalt would have said "no, we only want $22/share, you keep the rest" if they'd known the opening price?
I thought companies go public to make themselves come capital, not to make some greedy underwriters rich. I'm all for underwriters making themselves some cash, but I think there should be limits on how much the underwriters can charge over the IPO price. Either that, or they should be forced to disclose the opening price to the company, who can then better negotiate an IPO price.
Really Expensive (tm). But they work, and they work well.
Yes, they're network attached. Good for stuff that is going to be used over the network, naturally. Not good if you need -really- fast access to the data from -one- server. They have CIFS, HTTP, NFS, and something else. We use this for all of our UNIX and Windows home dirs - the same data is accessible via either NFS or CIFS, which can be quite convenient at times.
The feature I like the best from their WAFL file system is the snapshot. It's configurable, and can be set to take hourly and nightly snapshots of the entire file system. A user deleted a file? They can go back into their.snapshot directory and retrieve the copy themselves. Sure is a lot easier than having to pull files from a tape, and I don't know anyone who does hourly tape backups.:)
It doesn't sound like you need a lot of space if you're currently doing well with 9GB and 7GB. Get a pair of 18GB drives for the spools and a pair of 18GB drives for storage, and you should be set.
RAID 0+1 is a lot faster than RAID 5. It's disadvantage is that it's more expensive because you have to buy 100% more disk than storage, as opposed to 20-33% more for RAID 5.
As far as which controller to use... Sun now rebrands DPT controllers, but they're pci and you're stuck on sbus, so I don't know.
You mean the Network Appliance Filer that Dell resells and calls a 'PowerVault'? Yes, they're very nice. But Dell doesn't make them, and 3rd party support is rarely as good as getting support directly from the manufacturer (at least for those manufacturers that also sell their products directly to the public.)
That, and they start at around $50k for 100GB, which isn't even local storage - it's network storage. (Choose CIFS, NFS, HTTP, or whatever else they support.)
Not that these aren't great boxes - we have one and are about to get a second one. But they're pricey and not as fast as local storage - which I believe is what this guy is looking for.
since i still do like to run windows apps, i have windows at home. VMWare is a great product, which I can use to run windows within linux, but it does some funky emulation for all the drivers, so you get generic ethernet, generic serial for the modem, generic video for the video, sb16 for the sound, etc., and this means you can't actually use that super-nifty sound card that doesn't have linux drivers yet - you'll only get to use sb16.
so, if linuxone lets me run linux within windows, i get all of the best of both worlds - i can use all my windows-only hardware - but i can also use a real OS.
my questions would be: is networking properly supported? would it support multiple CPUs? how much of a performance hit would it take, assuming you have nothing running on the windows side of things?
i just ordered a copy, but their web form didn't make me feel too great (didn't look like it went to a secure server), so i called them. the guy i spoke to didn't speak very good english. also didn't have great customer service skills. i wonder if i just gave some total stranger my credit card number.:P
That didn't make me laugh. It made me mad. Of course, I'm also mad because I've been on hold with Sun for the last 3 hours, and someone tried to run me over on the way to work, but that's not the point.
Users who can't read piss me off. "It says it is NOT safe to turn off my computer" (Windows 95). "No, it says it is NOW safe to turn off your computer."
Users who have no idea what they're talking about also piss me off. Yes, I'm high and mighty, but it doesn't take that long to figure out that there's both RAM and a HDD in your computer, and that referring to both as `memory' doesn't help the rest of us.
I used to do tech support, so I can identify with a lot of the stuff on that site. I didn't think it was funny then, and I don't think it's funny now. It was, and is, frustrating. Computers for the masses? Please no!:( Computers for people with at least half a brain. And if they have half a brain but just don't know anything about computers, they should read a book or twelve before bothering me.
I don't recall seeing "handholding a bunch of idiots" in my job description, or in any of your job descriptions, either.
The sub-notebooks I've looked at are the Libretto and the new Sony picturebook. I unfortunately can't have anything larger than that, because I'm constrained by the space in my tank bag, as I commute on my motorcycle (Honda VFR800). The next two problems are that a) work won't spring for a laptop, so it comes out of my pocket, and b) I don't know that either of those laptops can withstand my agressive riding.:) So, that leaves me with a solid-state device, and I don't really care for anything bigger than a palm pilot.
Actually, I don't really have a requirement for the electronic book to be something book sized. I'm perfectly happy with paper books if I want to sit down and read them back to back. I just want to have my complete reference library to be in more than one place at once - namely at work and at home. Whether my digital copy moves with me on the road or sits on my home computer doesn't much matter to me -- since I don't carry a laptop, I can't get any work done unless I'm at home or at work anyway.:)
I have over $2000 invested in my technical reference library, which consists of about 4 boxes of o'reilly and other books which are a pain to move around. When I'm logged in to work from home trying to fix some problem on the weekend, desperately attempting to avoid having to actually go to work to fix it, the last thing I want is to find out that the book I need is sitting on my shelf in the flourescent hell I'm told is called an office.
It would be nice to have all of my books on digital media. I don't care if it's my Palm IIIx, or on CD (as long as I can use it on linux or freeBSD).
But how many megs are each of my books? Would the entirely of the 2nd edition of the bat book even fit in the 4 megs in my palm pilot? Even if it would, I have dozens of books, many of which are very useful as references. I don't think I can put enough of them on one tiny Palm Pilot, at least until they come out with the 512Meg Palm LXIX.
I don't want to give up my paper books. I'd be willing to spend a few dollars extra to have the digital media in addition to the hard copy, but I wouldn't pay more than half-price for a digital-only book. Even then, it would have to be a concise reference book for me to be interested in it.
Yes, it's a great product. But it costs nearly $200 for one license.:( Unless your company is paying the bill, or you're richer than I am, you might be better off just using linux, which has built-in, free NFS support.:)
Hummingbird makes NFS clients and X-servers for Windows. Linux already has NFS clients and X-servers built in for free... which is quite a bit cheaper than $300/seat/product (the pricing of one license of Exceed 6.1 as of two weeks ago.)
The only good thing I can see coming out of all of this is that the resulting marketing campaign will perhaps make clueless Windows IT managers and sysadmins more aware of the choices they have for Windows clients connecting to linux servers, but if they're that clueless, maybe they should find a different career.:)
Hummingbird and Caldera are just trying to get more press time.
The party was great. Assorted beer [1], chips and salsa, veggies and ranch, and appropriately greasy pizza.
I spoke with the VP of Publishing of andover.net [2] for about ten minutes about what I do [3], why I read slashdot and freshmeat daily, and why they're so much better than any other news sites. This interogation netted me a super-nifty slashdot hat, which I will cherish until the day I die, or until someone bids more than $100 for it on eBay. Actually, it was a wonderful and unexpected gift. Thank you!
<biker rant> I also met a super cool biker chick, and you guys all suck for driving cars. She was the only other person there (that I saw) who rode. </biker rant>
Oh yeah, I stole some slashdot cups as well.:D
[1] I saw Guinness and Anchor Steam. [2] I don't recall his name right now. [3] Unix admin, mostly solaris, some linux, some bsd/os
Many corporations will probably be more inclined to buy boxen from a well-established vendor with good support (which Dell has, IMO.)
This is probably also good for brand-conscious consumers who wouldn't want to buy from a 'small' shop like VA and who want linux pre-installed, for whatever reason. *ahem*
i tried to sign up for the ipo, and i got the message "no accounts are currently available". i guess they've already closed this offering, or they just hate me.
eRaid = eStupid eMarketing (lame comment)
on
IBM Buying Mylex
·
· Score: 2
Maybe if Mylex didn't proclaim themselves the eRaid company, IBM wouldn't have bought them.
I wish companies would eStop that already. It's eAnnoying.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand, this is the work of two PhD students who have spent years working on this algorithm.
That should be patentable. It's not like you or I are the people they need protection from. They need protection from Lycos or AltaVista or whomever who would say "hey, this new algorithm would give us a better search engine, resulting in more people staring at our banner ads and making more revenue for us, and it's not patented, so let's use it."
I went to high school (Bay Area, CA) with Dion Rayford of the Taco Bell incident. I'm not terribly surprised this happened.
Maybe he could have the cajones to plead innocent of disorderly conduct, but I hope he got his license revoked for having alcohol in the car.
What strikes me as most pathetic is that he'd try to burst through a window for a $0.99 chalupa. I made more than that sitting here typing this post.
:)
Er, I think you missed -my- point.
There is a difference between the opening and the IPO price. The company sets the IPO price. The Underwriter sets the opening price.
The Underwriters are naturally seeking to maximize their investment.
Some quick math.
Company has 100 million shares and is worth $10/share, or $1billion
Decides it wants $100 million in capital, so it makes a public offering of 10% of it's stock. That's 10 million shares, at $10/share.
Underwriter spends $100million on these shares, turns around and sells them on the secondary market (that's to you or me) for $150/share. Now all the sudden the company is worth $15billion.
The company has made it's $100million, but the Underwriters (assuming they actually sold all 10million shares, has made $1.4 billion.
Where did the $140 increase come from? Not from you and me trading... but from the -opening- price on the -first day- of trading. Noone got to buy shares anywhere between $10 or $150. Either you're an employee, friend of the company, and get them at $10 (or less) a share, or you're a regular investor type and you get them for $150/share.
I don't know about you, but this bothers me. Underwriters are nothing more than loan sharks.
The way Underwriters work pisses me off. Look at COBT's IPO. Cobalt's IPO price was, what, $22/share? They opened at nearly $130!
This is f*&cking absurd. They aren't "up" $108 points. The Underwriters bought the shares from Cobalt at $22/share and turned around and sold them for $130/share. Do you think Cobalt would have said "no, we only want $22/share, you keep the rest" if they'd known the opening price?
I thought companies go public to make themselves come capital, not to make some greedy underwriters rich. I'm all for underwriters making themselves some cash, but I think there should be limits on how much the underwriters can charge over the IPO price. Either that, or they should be forced to disclose the opening price to the company, who can then better negotiate an IPO price.
Bah.
Really Expensive (tm). But they work, and they work well.
.snapshot directory and retrieve the copy themselves. Sure is a lot easier than having to pull files from a tape, and I don't know anyone who does hourly tape backups. :)
Yes, they're network attached. Good for stuff that is going to be used over the network, naturally. Not good if you need -really- fast access to the data from -one- server. They have CIFS, HTTP, NFS, and something else. We use this for all of our UNIX and Windows home dirs - the same data is accessible via either NFS or CIFS, which can be quite convenient at times.
The feature I like the best from their WAFL file system is the snapshot. It's configurable, and can be set to take hourly and nightly snapshots of the entire file system. A user deleted a file? They can go back into their
It doesn't sound like you need a lot of space if you're currently doing well with 9GB and 7GB. Get a pair of 18GB drives for the spools and a pair of 18GB drives for storage, and you should be set.
RAID 0+1 is a lot faster than RAID 5. It's disadvantage is that it's more expensive because you have to buy 100% more disk than storage, as opposed to 20-33% more for RAID 5.
As far as which controller to use... Sun now rebrands DPT controllers, but they're pci and you're stuck on sbus, so I don't know.
Good luck
You mean the Network Appliance Filer that Dell resells and calls a 'PowerVault'? Yes, they're very nice. But Dell doesn't make them, and 3rd party support is rarely as good as getting support directly from the manufacturer (at least for those manufacturers that also sell their products directly to the public.)
That, and they start at around $50k for 100GB, which isn't even local storage - it's network storage. (Choose CIFS, NFS, HTTP, or whatever else they support.)
Not that these aren't great boxes - we have one and are about to get a second one. But they're pricey and not as fast as local storage - which I believe is what this guy is looking for.
since i still do like to run windows apps, i have windows at home. VMWare is a great product, which I can use to run windows within linux, but it does some funky emulation for all the drivers, so you get generic ethernet, generic serial for the modem, generic video for the video, sb16 for the sound, etc., and this means you can't actually use that super-nifty sound card that doesn't have linux drivers yet - you'll only get to use sb16.
:P
so, if linuxone lets me run linux within windows, i get all of the best of both worlds - i can use all my windows-only hardware - but i can also use a real OS.
my questions would be: is networking properly supported? would it support multiple CPUs? how much of a performance hit would it take, assuming you have nothing running on the windows side of things?
i just ordered a copy, but their web form didn't make me feel too great (didn't look like it went to a secure server), so i called them. the guy i spoke to didn't speak very good english. also didn't have great customer service skills. i wonder if i just gave some total stranger my credit card number.
perl is very easy to write, but it's difficult (for many) to read someone else's perl code.
The only reason I use perl over c or c++ for cgi is that it's a lot faster to write, and you can easily do string manipulation.
A lot of companies use Python nowadays, but I don't know much about that, or how it compares speed-wise to perl and c/c++
:P
Great... we're slashdotting servers before they're even ready for us.
:P
That didn't make me laugh. It made me mad. Of course, I'm also mad because I've been on hold with Sun for the last 3 hours, and someone tried to run me over on the way to work, but that's not the point.
:( Computers for people with at least half a brain. And if they have half a brain but just don't know anything about computers, they should read a book or twelve before bothering me.
Users who can't read piss me off. "It says it is NOT safe to turn off my computer" (Windows 95). "No, it says it is NOW safe to turn off your computer."
Users who have no idea what they're talking about also piss me off. Yes, I'm high and mighty, but it doesn't take that long to figure out that there's both RAM and a HDD in your computer, and that referring to both as `memory' doesn't help the rest of us.
I used to do tech support, so I can identify with a lot of the stuff on that site. I didn't think it was funny then, and I don't think it's funny now. It was, and is, frustrating. Computers for the masses? Please no!
I don't recall seeing "handholding a bunch of idiots" in my job description, or in any of your job descriptions, either.
The sub-notebooks I've looked at are the Libretto and the new Sony picturebook. I unfortunately can't have anything larger than that, because I'm constrained by the space in my tank bag, as I commute on my motorcycle (Honda VFR800). The next two problems are that a) work won't spring for a laptop, so it comes out of my pocket, and b) I don't know that either of those laptops can withstand my agressive riding. :) So, that leaves me with a solid-state device, and I don't really care for anything bigger than a palm pilot.
:)
Actually, I don't really have a requirement for the electronic book to be something book sized. I'm perfectly happy with paper books if I want to sit down and read them back to back. I just want to have my complete reference library to be in more than one place at once - namely at work and at home. Whether my digital copy moves with me on the road or sits on my home computer doesn't much matter to me -- since I don't carry a laptop, I can't get any work done unless I'm at home or at work anyway.
I have over $2000 invested in my technical reference library, which consists of about 4 boxes of o'reilly and other books which are a pain to move around. When I'm logged in to work from home trying to fix some problem on the weekend, desperately attempting to avoid having to actually go to work to fix it, the last thing I want is to find out that the book I need is sitting on my shelf in the flourescent hell I'm told is called an office.
It would be nice to have all of my books on digital media. I don't care if it's my Palm IIIx, or on CD (as long as I can use it on linux or freeBSD).
But how many megs are each of my books? Would the entirely of the 2nd edition of the bat book even fit in the 4 megs in my palm pilot? Even if it would, I have dozens of books, many of which are very useful as references. I don't think I can put enough of them on one tiny Palm Pilot, at least until they come out with the 512Meg Palm LXIX.
I don't want to give up my paper books. I'd be willing to spend a few dollars extra to have the digital media in addition to the hard copy, but I wouldn't pay more than half-price for a digital-only book. Even then, it would have to be a concise reference book for me to be interested in it.
Yes, it's a great product. But it costs nearly $200 for one license. :( Unless your company is paying the bill, or you're richer than I am, you might be better off just using linux, which has built-in, free NFS support. :)
Hummingbird makes NFS clients and X-servers for Windows. Linux already has NFS clients and X-servers built in for free... which is quite a bit cheaper than $300/seat/product (the pricing of one license of Exceed 6.1 as of two weeks ago.)
:)
The only good thing I can see coming out of all of this is that the resulting marketing campaign will perhaps make clueless Windows IT managers and sysadmins more aware of the choices they have for Windows clients connecting to linux servers, but if they're that clueless, maybe they should find a different career.
Hummingbird and Caldera are just trying to get more press time.
The party was great. Assorted beer [1], chips and salsa, veggies and ranch, and appropriately greasy pizza.
:D
I spoke with the VP of Publishing of andover.net [2] for about ten minutes about what I do [3], why I read slashdot and freshmeat daily, and why they're so much better than any other news sites. This interogation netted me a super-nifty slashdot hat, which I will cherish until the day I die, or until someone bids more than $100 for it on eBay. Actually, it was a wonderful and unexpected gift. Thank you!
<biker rant>
I also met a super cool biker chick, and you guys all suck for driving cars. She was the only other person there (that I saw) who rode.
</biker rant>
Oh yeah, I stole some slashdot cups as well.
[1] I saw Guinness and Anchor Steam.
[2] I don't recall his name right now.
[3] Unix admin, mostly solaris, some linux, some bsd/os
Many corporations will probably be more inclined to buy boxen from a well-established vendor with good support (which Dell has, IMO.)
This is probably also good for brand-conscious consumers who wouldn't want to buy from a 'small' shop like VA and who want linux pre-installed, for whatever reason. *ahem*
Baby steps to world domination...
Derek
i tried to sign up for the ipo, and i got the message "no accounts are currently available". i guess they've already closed this offering, or they just hate me.
Maybe if Mylex didn't proclaim themselves the eRaid company, IBM wouldn't have bought them.
I wish companies would eStop that already. It's eAnnoying.