Anyway, MP3.com is the largest "net" IPO this year, to my knowledge. And, considering how other net IPOs like TheStreet.Com have *tripled* on the first trading day, it's going to happen to MP3.com
And, considering that MP3 is *all over* the media, it's definitely going to go up at least 300%, IMHO.
Though, you probably won't want to buy MP3.com on its opening day of trading. Classically, strong IPOs go straight up the first day, then follow with a week-long decline. Then they start going back up again.
Obviously, this stuff isn't guaranteed to be true, it's just usually that way.
I don't read too much Jon Katz at all - but I do read as much as I can about Star Wars.
I wasn't even born when the first Star Wars movie came out. I didn't know about the T-Shirts, popsicles and stuff, all I knew was that it was a great movie - and so were its successors. As long as Phantom is a movie that deserves its title "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace" I will happily go and take part in the "myth of Star Wars."
Sure, I don't really think that when I go to the mall, seeing all this Star Wars crap all over the walls is the greatest thing in the world, but I definitely have to look at the other side of the coin:
All these companies, be they Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken or even just the niche store at the mall that just sells pens or socks, are trying to make money
The reason that they are trying to make money is irrelevant - their goal is to make a profit. Also, in the end, Lucas would definitely like to make some money if he can - it's almost the American Way to take advantage of this type of situation.
Lucas spent his life and MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of his own money to create an epic story. He basically dropped $110 MILLION of HIS OWN MONEY to make The Phantom Menace.
I would bet that if Lucas could make another Star Wars movie for only $10 Million like he did the first, he would have - but that just isn't possible today. Katz - YOU try recouping $110 MILLION of YOUR OWN MONEY.
Furthermore, Microsoft Windows 2000, which made its debut in Chicago at last week's Comdex computer show, is a much more useful personal computer operating system than the dinky feature-weak, application-starved flavor of home-brewed Unix known as Linux.
How could a dinky operating system be used as the major operating system for web servers on the Internet today? How could a dinky operating system be used to create a Beowulf cluster more powerful than a Cray? How could a dinky operating system be used to create the special effects in Titanic?
I was approached by a Wired Magazine columnist that wanted my comments on GeekWorld when it was announced. I sent back the message below the same day, but it seems that journalism deadlines these days are quite cut-throat (I apparently sent in the response too late - although it was no more than 6 hours after she had sent it). Anyway, here is what I said.
Red Hat has received multiple grants of funds from industry heavyweights during the past few months, including Intel, Netscape and IBM. Also, Red Hat has become the major source for US vendors for a "standardized" Linux distribution. While I myself use Red Hat, I in no way see that Red Hat should become a "buzz-vendor" of Linux. Should Dell have, for instance, chosen SuSE Linux to be their distribution of choice for workstations, the announcement, in my belief, would not have created as much a stir as the decision to use the well-known US company's distribution.
Now, on to my previous statement about GeekWorld being a PR stunt. While Red Hat may have hit home with PC vendors and the mainstream public interest (for instance, readers of CNET News.Com), the company realizes the potential this capital has. Mainly, it will help attract new Linux developers to work for RedHat, but more importantly, it has the ability to draw users.
What other Linux distribution group has the funding to launch its own television advertising campaign? Possibly SuSE or Pacific HiTech, but keep in mind they are international vendors. Not that Red Hat has done so, but high profile media advertising (ie. television, the New York Times, or other popular newspapers) is definitely a viable option at this point. Branding of the company's red hat logo could be just as important to the company as the "Where do you want to go today?" slogan is to Microsoft. Keep in mind, Red Hat is a company. And its ultimate goal is to make a profit, albeit, in this case, there is a purpose behind the goal other than money. Note that it pays other developers around the world to keep working on projects such as GNOME.
GeekWorld seems to me to be a way of saying to the general public "Red Hat is as cool as MTV," alluding to the popular "Real World" television show. And in essence, Red Hat may imply that the people who use their distribution are also that 'cool.'
GeekWorld is a contest. And, therefore; will most likely will get much publicity, much like the Wired Magazine journalist's article. I would not be surprised if I saw a side-story about the contest winners on World News Tonight during the week of Linux Expo. Of course, Red Hat will gain a national spotlight in this sense, thereby growing consumer awareness of their product.
Note: The following becomes slightly off-topic from the subject of Red Hat paranoia, but it was part of the letter nonetheless.
About the difficulty of the contest: There is actually nothing really difficult about it. For instance, many geeks out there are taking their time away from kernel hacking (or whatever they used to coding) and writing Perl scripts that will scour Red Hat's site from 12AM to 11:59 PM and start over again the next day, just looking for that small footprint.
I do not denounce Red Hat for doing this. The Linux community needs something like this every once in a while to add some excitement to the regular life of the average geek. Heck, I'd love to go myself. However, I've got a summer job coming up, I'm an active coder on an open source project, and I'll be perfectly happy attending the Season Finals of the Professional Gamers' League in Manhattan, NY - it's free and definitely a lot closer. Also, I don't have to find a GNOME logo to go.
Some PR stunt RedHat is pulling. Have you read the rules? They specifically say that you have to find the Gnome logo 5 times within ten days, and the logo is only available on the site on one page on any particular day.
Considering the size of RedHat's site, including any page that its search engine may turn up, it's humongous.
Too bad Altavista isn't quite practical in this situation since the location changes every day. These contests need a search engine that updates as quickly as possible!
I had the same problems you have now, I tried to get FAT32 under 2.0.xxx but it didn't work. Here's what I did to get it working:
Compile and use kernel 2.2.xx Here's the tricky part: try and keep your kernel config as minimal as can be, regarding harddrives and filesystems. There's stuff about VFAT in the config utility. I can't remember if I turned it on or off, but if you try it set to on and it don't work, try it off...
The other thing is that when I set up the system with RedHat 5.2, I used Disk Druid to set up the directory structure for the FAT32 partitions. Of course, you can do this manually, I just forget how... I know that RedHat's configuration utility in X can map paths to partitions as well.
Finally, this will end up as having only root as having write access to the mounted partitions. So, login as root and give other users wrote and read access as needed.
This *should* give you a working FAT32 read/write set up under kernel 2.2 For some reason, I couldn't get it to work under 2.0.xx, but it wasn't really necessary, so I didn't mind.
This stuff's been around...
on
Robotic Dogs
·
· Score: 1
... just not in the commercial market. This robot has it's own league in the RoboCup Soccer Tournament. The winners last year were a team from Carnegie Mellon University (go CMU!! - I go there). It's really cool. Here's the site of CMU's team leader:
It is said that Futurama will most likely take place of King of the Hill on Tuesdays at 8PM, followed by The PJ's.
Sorry, CT.. it's not gonna be on Sundays before the X-Files..
System Crashes, and other observations
on
Gaming on Linux
·
· Score: 1
One thing interesting about the column is it points to system crashes as being one of the main problems hindering the fun in gaming. However, my experience has been the contrary.
Computer games, on any operating system, require the most amount of planning and programming. They incorporate not just graphics, but sound, input, user interface, even artificial intelligence for most games; while most software out there, such as *that* company's stuff, and more, don't even have any code that needs to rely on 3D APIs or system level input routines (at least, I *hope* MS Word doesn't need that stuff...).
But, as I was stating, my experience has been on the contrary.. Half-Life, Starcraft, and Quake 2 are absolutely the most stable programs running on my system. Most of the time, it's Windows itself or some other program that crashes on my system.
I really have to salute those game programmers out there who take the time to come up with the best code in the industry. Now if only someone like John Carmack would program business applications for a living, both worlds would be stable...
Futurama must be the reason that the Simpsons has gone down in quality. As many Simpsons viewers know, that past season and a half have had a serious lack of the same satirical quality the older episodes did. Hopefully, Futurama won't suffer the same slide the Simpsons did...
Transaction Processing Council?
on
Few Quickies
·
· Score: 1
There's a standards body for benchmarks of transaction processing? I mean, there needs to be a standard for the speed at which transactions are made?? Seriously, wouldn't you rather hear something like Transaction Security Council or something along those lines??
Hopefully this isn't another government funded standards council we have no need for...
What could really come of this? I mean, let's say that the Newton UI gets pasted on the Pilot (obviously, with a few changes to fit the PalmOS). It's still a Pilot, right? There's no real difference...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least you have musical talent. :)
Anyway, MP3.com is the largest "net" IPO this year, to my knowledge. And, considering how other net IPOs like TheStreet.Com have *tripled* on the first trading day, it's going to happen to MP3.com
And, considering that MP3 is *all over* the media, it's definitely going to go up at least 300%, IMHO.
Though, you probably won't want to buy MP3.com on its opening day of trading. Classically, strong IPOs go straight up the first day, then follow with a week-long decline. Then they start going back up again.
Obviously, this stuff isn't guaranteed to be true, it's just usually that way.
I don't read too much Jon Katz at all - but I do read as much as I can about Star Wars.
I wasn't even born when the first Star Wars movie came out. I didn't know about the T-Shirts, popsicles and stuff, all I knew was that it was a great movie - and so were its successors. As long as Phantom is a movie that deserves its title "Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace" I will happily go and take part in the "myth of Star Wars."
Sure, I don't really think that when I go to the mall, seeing all this Star Wars crap all over the walls is the greatest thing in the world, but I definitely have to look at the other side of the coin:
All these companies, be they Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken or even just the niche store at the mall that just sells pens or socks, are trying to make money
The reason that they are trying to make money is irrelevant - their goal is to make a profit. Also, in the end, Lucas would definitely like to make some money if he can - it's almost the American Way to take advantage of this type of situation.
Lucas spent his life and MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS of his own money to create an epic story. He basically dropped $110 MILLION of HIS OWN MONEY to make The Phantom Menace.
I would bet that if Lucas could make another Star Wars movie for only $10 Million like he did the first, he would have - but that just isn't possible today. Katz - YOU try recouping $110 MILLION of YOUR OWN MONEY.
Furthermore, Microsoft Windows 2000, which made its debut in Chicago at last week's Comdex computer show, is a much more useful personal computer operating system than the dinky feature-weak, application-starved flavor of home-brewed Unix known as Linux.
How could a dinky operating system be used as the major operating system for web servers on the Internet today? How could a dinky operating system be used to create a Beowulf cluster more powerful than a Cray? How could a dinky operating system be used to create the special effects in Titanic?
I was approached by a Wired Magazine columnist that wanted my comments on GeekWorld when it was announced. I sent back the message below the same day, but it seems that journalism deadlines these days are quite cut-throat (I apparently sent in the response too late - although it was no more than 6 hours after she had sent it). Anyway, here is what I said.
Red Hat has received multiple grants of funds from industry heavyweights during the past few months, including Intel, Netscape and IBM. Also, Red Hat has become the major source for US vendors for a "standardized" Linux distribution. While I myself use Red Hat, I in no way see that Red Hat should become a "buzz-vendor" of Linux. Should Dell have, for instance, chosen SuSE Linux to be their distribution of choice for workstations, the announcement, in my belief, would not have created as much a stir as the decision to use the well-known US company's distribution.
Now, on to my previous statement about GeekWorld being a PR stunt. While Red Hat may have hit home with PC vendors and the mainstream public interest (for instance, readers of CNET News.Com), the company realizes the potential this capital has. Mainly, it will help attract new Linux developers to work for RedHat, but more importantly, it has the ability to draw users.
What other Linux distribution group has the funding to launch its own television advertising campaign? Possibly SuSE or Pacific HiTech, but keep in mind they are international vendors. Not that Red Hat has done so, but high profile media advertising (ie. television, the New York Times, or other popular newspapers) is definitely a viable option at this point. Branding of the company's red hat logo could be just as important to the company as the "Where do you want to go today?" slogan is to Microsoft. Keep in mind, Red Hat is a company. And its ultimate goal is to make a profit, albeit, in this case, there is a purpose behind the goal other than money. Note that it pays other developers around the world to keep working on projects such as GNOME.
GeekWorld seems to me to be a way of saying to the general public "Red Hat is as cool as MTV," alluding to the popular "Real World" television show. And in essence, Red Hat may imply that the people who use their distribution are also that 'cool.'
GeekWorld is a contest. And, therefore; will most likely will get much publicity, much like the Wired Magazine journalist's article. I would not be surprised if I saw a side-story about the contest winners on World News Tonight during the week of Linux Expo. Of course, Red Hat will gain a national spotlight in this sense, thereby growing consumer awareness of their product.
Note: The following becomes slightly off-topic from the subject of Red Hat paranoia, but it was part of the letter nonetheless.
About the difficulty of the contest: There is actually nothing really difficult about it. For instance, many geeks out there are taking their time away from kernel hacking (or whatever they used to coding) and writing Perl scripts that will scour Red Hat's site from 12AM to 11:59 PM and start over again the next day, just looking for that small footprint.
I do not denounce Red Hat for doing this. The Linux community needs something like this every once in a while to add some excitement to the regular life of the average geek. Heck, I'd love to go myself. However, I've got a summer job coming up, I'm an active coder on an open source project, and I'll be perfectly happy attending the Season Finals of the Professional Gamers' League in Manhattan, NY - it's free and definitely a lot closer. Also, I don't have to find a GNOME logo to go.
- Shaheen Gandhi (sgandhi@andrew.cmu.edu)
Some PR stunt RedHat is pulling. Have you read the rules? They specifically say that you have to find the Gnome logo 5 times within ten days, and the logo is only available on the site on one page on any particular day.
Considering the size of RedHat's site, including any page that its search engine may turn up, it's humongous.
Too bad Altavista isn't quite practical in this situation since the location changes every day. These contests need a search engine that updates as quickly as possible!
I had the same problems you have now, I tried to get FAT32 under 2.0.xxx but it didn't work. Here's what I did to get it working:
Compile and use kernel 2.2.xx Here's the tricky part: try and keep your kernel config as minimal as can be, regarding harddrives and filesystems. There's stuff about VFAT in the config utility. I can't remember if I turned it on or off, but if you try it set to on and it don't work, try it off...
The other thing is that when I set up the system with RedHat 5.2, I used Disk Druid to set up the directory structure for the FAT32 partitions. Of course, you can do this manually, I just forget how... I know that RedHat's configuration utility in X can map paths to partitions as well.
Finally, this will end up as having only root as having write access to the mounted partitions. So, login as root and give other users wrote and read access as needed.
This *should* give you a working FAT32 read/write set up under kernel 2.2 For some reason, I couldn't get it to work under 2.0.xx, but it wasn't really necessary, so I didn't mind.
... just not in the commercial market. This robot has it's own league in the RoboCup Soccer Tournament. The winners last year were a team from Carnegie Mellon University (go CMU!! - I go there). It's really cool. Here's the site of CMU's team leader:
Manuela Veloso's Page
It is said that Futurama will most likely take place of King of the Hill on Tuesdays at 8PM, followed by The PJ's.
Sorry, CT.. it's not gonna be on Sundays before the X-Files..
One thing interesting about the column is it points to system crashes as being one of the main problems hindering the fun in gaming. However, my experience has been the contrary.
Computer games, on any operating system, require the most amount of planning and programming. They incorporate not just graphics, but sound, input, user interface, even artificial intelligence for most games; while most software out there, such as *that* company's stuff, and more, don't even have any code that needs to rely on 3D APIs or system level input routines (at least, I *hope* MS Word doesn't need that stuff...).
But, as I was stating, my experience has been on the contrary.. Half-Life, Starcraft, and Quake 2 are absolutely the most stable programs running on my system. Most of the time, it's Windows itself or some other program that crashes on my system.
I really have to salute those game programmers out there who take the time to come up with the best code in the industry. Now if only someone like John Carmack would program business applications for a living, both worlds would be stable...
- Shaheen Gandhi
Futurama must be the reason that the Simpsons has gone down in quality. As many Simpsons viewers know, that past season and a half have had a serious lack of the same satirical quality the older episodes did. Hopefully, Futurama won't suffer the same slide the Simpsons did...
There's a standards body for benchmarks of transaction processing? I mean, there needs to be a standard for the speed at which transactions are made?? Seriously, wouldn't you rather hear something like Transaction Security Council or something along those lines??
Hopefully this isn't another government funded standards council we have no need for...
What could really come of this? I mean, let's say that the Newton UI gets pasted on the Pilot (obviously, with a few changes to fit the PalmOS). It's still a Pilot, right? There's no real difference...
- Shaheen