I'd have thought the "exposure" in a national magazine could well be worth a lot more than the fee. Laker girls (LA Lakers BB cheerleaders) get paid next to nothing (or actually nothing?), but all do it for the publicity.
Clock for clock Athlon holds it's own against PIII, win some/lose some benchmarks.
Thunderbird adds 256K on-chip exclusive L2 cache, and will see similar speed gains as when Intel moved from Katmai to Coppermine PIII (i.e. when they did the same thing). Thunderbird will clock for clock beat PIII.
But here's the real kicker: Athlon is available in volume now at 1 GHz, while PIII is at 866MHz (except for a few 1GHz samples at Dell). Intel claim 1GHz volume in Q3/4, when Thunderbird will be at 1.3-1.4GHz.
Duron will also beat Celeron II due to having more total cache (L1 + L2) as well as a full speed bus, unlike Celeron's deliberately restricted 66MHz one.
PIII Coppermine core is at the end of its life, and according to Intel may reach 1.1GHz max. Intel's future lies in the PIII Coppermine replacement core - Willamette which may sample in Q3, but is not expected in any quantity until late Q4 or 2001. In the meantime AMD have Mustang coming out... AMD also have the advantage of a modern copper interconnect fab process in their Dresden fab (licenced from Motorola), while Intel are still using slower aluminum interconnect and won't catch up for around a year.
Conclusion: For at least the remainder of this year, AMD's high end processors will be faster than anything available from Intel. In 2001 things may be a little more even as Intel catch up to AMD in updating their fabs, and getting an up-to-date processor core out, but some analysis are suggesting that AMD Mustang (in.13 or.15u process) will still outclass Willamette - time will tell.
Slot A packaging is very expensive and is only necessary because the Athlon (like the Intel Katmai PIII) has off-chip L2 cache and therefore needs a CPU module mini PCB (slot A package) to integrate the processor and L2 cache RAM chips. By moving the cache on-chip, not only does performance increase but you no longer need the PCB - the CPU can be a simple ceramic socket part, which is what the socket-A Thunderbird and Duron are (same as Intel's move to the Coppermine PIII socket packaging).
For anyone curious about that statement, the way ARM does it is by making ALL instructions conditional. Rather than branch for a small piece of conditional code, you can just scream right thru it!
I used to work for Acorn (the original "A" in ARM before it was changed). The guy doing the Amulet work at U. Manchester is Steve Furber, who was one of the original Acorn design engineers and original architects of the ARM.
Or implementing a new widget in either. Qt is a joy to use. Motif is a pig. I've written huge amounts of Motif code, and never did get to like it. At best you learn how to work around it's deficiencies and bugs, but you never actually LIKE it. Qt is such a clean design and natural match with C++, that it is a genuine pleasure to use.
Like it or not, the X-Box will still be the fastest performing console available when it is released in Q4 2001.
Given how complex the PS2 graphics engine is, and how current games have only just scratched the surface of what it can do, I'm not convinced that the X-Box will even be faster than PS2, let alone PS3 which should be out by then. Never mind the graphics engine, the X-box would appear also to have a hard time competing on memory bandwidth vs PS2 with RDRAM. I'm no fan of RDRAM in general, but in situations where bandwidth is more important than latency - which includes graphics - it certainly beats SDRAM.
Anyway, my point wasn't how X-Box compares to other consoles, but how it compares to PCs and users general speed expectations. A 600MHz processor is hardly top-of-the-line today, let alone by Q4 2001. AMD's SLOWEST processor is about to be the Duron 600MHz, which has a full speed bus and will beat the PIII based Celeron II. Processor speeds from both AMD and Intel are expected at 1.5GHz in Q1 2001, and 2GHz by Q4.
VooDoo 5 6000 may be $600 now, but by Q4 2001 it'll doubtless be MUCH cheaper as well as replaced and outclassed by VooDoo 6 or whatever. nVideo will also obviously keep bringing out higher performance cards, while the X-Box's design is frozen. Given the relative size of the games console and PC markets, game developers will continue to target PC platforms for games (maybe X-Box/PC can be targeted together), and user's expecations wil be raised by PC performance levels.
If you've ever looked at the PS2 graphic engine architecture (Ars Technica have a good in depth review), you'll realize how complex it is, and what type of performance it can offer to games that truly take advantage. It's very hard to compare it to PC graphics cards. It's significant though that a number of arcade games manufacturers are switching to Sony's engine...
I agree. DRI is just appearing, and OpenGL on DRI should privide excellent performance.
3dfx VooDoo 5 6000 just BLOWS AWAY nVidia GeForce 2 according to early sightings, while Celeron II benchmarks shows that Intels decision to deliberately keep the 66MHz bus to slow it down was very effective!
So much for X-Box performance! A 600MHz PIII derived processor (i.e. Celeron II) and nVidia are already looking outdated before the box is even introduced!
Is working to that you can conveniently obtain a licence to the whole MPEG-4 patent bundle (over 200 patents), in the same way as you can for MPEG-2.
A free software imnplementation of an MPEG-4 CODEDC is available from ISO, which is linked from the M4IF site. Note that while the software (i.e. the implementation) is free, you still need to licence the patents to use it.
Still, we're all using free MPEG-2 players and encoders under Linux, so it sounds pretty good to me!
I'm not sure how far back the Xerox GUI's go, but it's certainly before the early 80's. I remember seeing the Apple Lisa get launched around '83, which was inspired by the Xerox work. I believe the Xerox Star was one of the first GUI workstations. Back then the paradigm was called "WIMP" (Windows, Icons, Mice, Pointers), not GUI.
It's sad how many people don't realize that prety much ALL of "modern" computing was invented at Xerox at least 20 years ago!
- bit mapped graphical displays - windows - mice / pointers - ethernet / networking
Even something like Visual Basic is really nothing more than a poor man's version of Smalltalk to provide an object orientated graphical component architecture.
Never mind my crack, yours seems to give a better high!
The server version of Willamette is "Foster" which is DDR. It's got nothing to do with cost, but simply the degrading performce of Rambus as memory sizes increase.
DDR already exists and is used by some graphics cards. It has also been demoed at WinHEC by AMD using their 760 chipset with Thunderbird. I'll accept that DDR chipsets could have problems, as could anything else, but given the strong support for DDR from Micron and other memory manufacturers, it's crazy to suggest there's anything in the least bit broken about the standard.
Intel themselves are only pushing RDRAM for consumer use. For workstation and server use they are pushing DDR since RDRAM slows down unacceptably for large memory sizes. "Foster" workstation/server version of Willamette is DDR, even if Intel are backpeddling on that to appease Rambus.
RDRAM's only claim to fame is bandwidth - it has long access latencies which bandwidth overcomes in some benchmarks, not in others. Only the very fastest PC800 RDRAM compares favorably to DDR (in some benchmarks only, at that). Slower/cheaper PC600 etc is pretty much useless.
Intel owns a large number of RMBS stock *warrants* with various strings attached.
If Intel did simply own RMBS stock then (absent their contract with Rambus) they could simply sell or hold it and specify memory subsystems based on simple price/performance considerations.
As it is, with the contract and warrants, Intel is coerced into pushing RDRAM regardless of whether it makes sense.
There's a problem running slot-A Thunderbirds (Athlon successor) in *SOME* KX-133 mobos due to Via having violated AMDs timing specs. AMD's own 750 Irongate chipset is fine for slot-A Athlon->Thunderbird upgrades (not that AMD intend to sell slot-A TBirds other than to OEMs). However, some mobo makers such as Abit and Asus are already releasing BIOS upgrades that make their KX-133 mobos Thunderbird compatible.
If you have a slot-A mobo and want to upgrade from Athlon to Thunderbird, then there should be third party "slocket" cards that'll let you use a socket-A Tbird.
So this KX-133 issue is a Via screw up, not an AMD one. More importantly the slot-A TBird is only a VERY short term OEM transition product. Aside from this, TBird/Duron/Mustang are all socket-A chips, and need a KZ-133 socket-A mobo.
Personally if I had a, say, 700MHz KX-133 Athlon I'd not be looking to upgrade to TBird, but would hold out for a KZ-266 DDR 1.3/4GHz Mustang due out in Q3/4! Or maybe even an AMD 770 dual-SMP Mustang!:-) If you're in the market for a new Thunderbird based PC, then go for a KZ-133 socket-A mobo which should let you upgrade to Mustang.
Yep - Intel is contractually obligated to hype (pretty much literally!) Rambus thru the end of 2002, and to push it as their sole memory option. I think the reason Intel was willing to sign such an odd contract is that they wanted to move more motherboard value onto their CPUs (i.e. get bigger % of the PC pie), and perhaps (seems a bit naieve, though...) genuinely thought that SDRAM couldn't be extended further.
Not only is their the contract, but Intel have for a long time been propping their earnings up with capital gains from various holdings that they sell each quarter. They'd have missed estimates last quarter without this (i.e. that fat P/E you're paying for is buying you one-time capital gains, not recurring growing earnings!!!). Intel own a large number of RMBS stock warrants as part of their deal with Rambus, and need to push RDRAM to be able to turn a profit on these to help earnings.
K7 (Athlon/Duron/Tunderbird/Mustang) and K8 (Sledgehammer) are AMD designs. EV-6 bus is licenced from DEC (Alpha). LDT (Lightening Data Transport) bus for Sledgehammer I believe is AMDs.
It's funny that the best thing Intel ever did for AMD was to stop licencing them their chip and bus designs. AMD are now running cirles around Intel.
Intel's Itanium (aka Merced) is such an awful design that HP (their partner) refused to use it and completely redesigned it - Intel then licenced the resulting McKinley (still IA-64) back from HP!
Latest Intel screw-ups after all their recent chipset failures are their having to revert to Katmai (off chip L2) slot-based PIIIs since the socketed Coppermines are overheating and cracking the packaging. Now today, Intel are recalling about 1 million 820 chipset based mobos because of spontaneous lockup and reboot problems...
Maybe it's time for Intel to try to licence some decent designs from AMD.
AMD have already stopped new Athlon wafer starts, so there's a limited quantity of Athlons in the pipeline, then there'll be a very limited quantity of slot-A thunderbirds (probably to be announced end of May). After that (sometime in June?), all of AMD's chips will be socket-A which are obviously tamper-proof.
It'd be nice to get credit for the story, just for kicks. I already blew my Karma way below +1 bonus level by moderating up a humorous first post, so that's not really an issue! What really pisses me off isn't that I didn't get credit, but rather that one day the story is deemed un-newsworthy, yet days later (when it's no longer news), it is!!!
Except for rare exceptions I've given up submitting stories anymore, since I've never had a single one accepted....but, a number of my stories have subsequently been used days later and attributed to someone else.
This is annoying, but more importantly for/. it means that they are more and more often running OLD "news" stories that are then no longer what I would call "news"!
It doesn't make any sense that/. relies on it's readers to scour out and submit timely and interesting stories, yet then believes they know better than their readership what that readership will find interesting, or what is actaully a new story and what is old news.
Slashdot desperately needs to switch from selectign stories manually themselves to having readers themselves moderate the "submission queue", which then simply becomes the days story list, with users as always being able to select their desired browing level. At "Score 5" you'd get the top 10 or so intersting and new stories, and at "Score 0" you'd get the whole submission queue of 3-400 stories.
If slashdot doesn't change soon, more and more people are going to end up leaving and instead rely on sites such as "The Register" that can be relied on to be among the first to carry technical breaking news.
Perhaps a story about the market as a whole is a little off topic, although seeing as this was primarily a tech stock crash, it does seem to fall under the "stuff that matters" category.
However, if you want to remain more on topic, then a story about the decline of the Linux related stocks would make sense.
RedHat is so far down 85% (!!!) from its 151 peak, and closed at 24 on friday. While this was inevitable and only a matter of time (I sold at 45 on the way up, and posted here how it was already overvalued at that price), it is nonetheless significant for Linux.
Without an inflated stock price to use for aquisitions, companies like RedHat and VA Linux are going to have a much harder time growing - having to rely on revenues instead, and this leaves much more of an opportunity for companies like IBM to step in and take much more control and more of the Linux opportunities.
Last week RedHat fell around 35%, which is more than the 25% NASDAQ drop. In fact, the whole NASDAQ decline (so far) from the 5000+ peak to friday's 3300 is only(!) 35%.
Also, remember all the slashdot stories about the RedHat IPO, and about the crazy climb of the stock price? Well, RHAT is so far down 84% (!!!) from its 151 peak, and closed on friday at 24 - well below it's IPO price.
VA Linux (LNUX) has plummeted also.
Perhaps a story on RHAT would be more topical than one on the market/NASDAQ as a whole, but either way IMO it does deserve coverage since the initial IPO and stock rise did.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have thought the "exposure" in a national magazine could well be worth a lot more than the fee. Laker girls (LA Lakers BB cheerleaders) get paid next to nothing (or actually nothing?), but all do it for the publicity.
Clock for clock Athlon holds it's own against PIII, win some/lose some benchmarks.
.13 or .15u process) will still outclass Willamette - time will tell.
Thunderbird adds 256K on-chip exclusive L2 cache, and will see similar speed gains as when Intel moved from Katmai to Coppermine PIII (i.e. when they did the same thing). Thunderbird will clock for clock beat PIII.
But here's the real kicker: Athlon is available in volume now at 1 GHz, while PIII is at 866MHz (except for a few 1GHz samples at Dell). Intel claim 1GHz volume in Q3/4, when Thunderbird will be at 1.3-1.4GHz.
Duron will also beat Celeron II due to having more total cache (L1 + L2) as well as a full speed bus, unlike Celeron's deliberately restricted 66MHz one.
PIII Coppermine core is at the end of its life, and according to Intel may reach 1.1GHz max. Intel's future lies in the PIII Coppermine replacement core - Willamette which may sample in Q3, but is not expected in any quantity until late Q4 or 2001. In the meantime AMD have Mustang coming out... AMD also have the advantage of a modern copper interconnect fab process in their Dresden fab (licenced from Motorola), while Intel are still using slower aluminum interconnect and won't catch up for around a year.
Conclusion: For at least the remainder of this year, AMD's high end processors will be faster than anything available from Intel. In 2001 things may be a little more even as Intel catch up to AMD in updating their fabs, and getting an up-to-date processor core out, but some analysis are suggesting that AMD Mustang (in
Slot A packaging is very expensive and is only necessary because the Athlon (like the Intel Katmai PIII) has off-chip L2 cache and therefore needs a CPU module mini PCB (slot A package) to integrate the processor and L2 cache RAM chips. By moving the cache on-chip, not only does performance increase but you no longer need the PCB - the CPU can be a simple ceramic socket part, which is what the socket-A Thunderbird and Duron are (same as Intel's move to the Coppermine PIII socket packaging).
You can buy a CD with the MPEG-4 source from ISO.
I can't find any mention of it on their web site (www.iso.ch), but you can send an e-mail to:
sales@iso.ch
For anyone curious about that statement, the way ARM does it is by making ALL instructions conditional. Rather than branch for a small piece of conditional code, you can just scream right thru it!
I used to work for Acorn (the original "A" in ARM before it was changed). The guy doing the Amulet work at U. Manchester is Steve Furber, who was one of the original Acorn design engineers and original architects of the ARM.
Or implementing a new widget in either. Qt is a joy to use. Motif is a pig. I've written huge amounts of Motif code, and never did get to like it. At best you learn how to work around it's deficiencies and bugs, but you never actually LIKE it. Qt is such a clean design and natural match with C++, that it is a genuine pleasure to use.
Like it or not, the X-Box will still be the fastest performing console available when it is released in Q4 2001.
Given how complex the PS2 graphics engine is, and how current games have only just scratched the surface of what it can do, I'm not convinced that the X-Box will even be faster than PS2, let alone PS3 which should be out by then. Never mind the graphics engine, the X-box would appear also to have a hard time competing on memory bandwidth vs PS2 with RDRAM. I'm no fan of RDRAM in general, but in situations where bandwidth is more important than latency - which includes graphics - it certainly beats SDRAM.
Anyway, my point wasn't how X-Box compares to other consoles, but how it compares to PCs and users general speed expectations. A 600MHz processor is hardly top-of-the-line today, let alone by Q4 2001. AMD's SLOWEST processor is about to be the Duron 600MHz, which has a full speed bus and will beat the PIII based Celeron II. Processor speeds from both AMD and Intel are expected at 1.5GHz in Q1 2001, and 2GHz by Q4.
VooDoo 5 6000 may be $600 now, but by Q4 2001 it'll doubtless be MUCH cheaper as well as replaced and outclassed by VooDoo 6 or whatever. nVideo will also obviously keep bringing out higher performance cards, while the X-Box's design is frozen. Given the relative size of the games console and PC markets, game developers will continue to target PC platforms for games (maybe X-Box/PC can be targeted together), and user's expecations wil be raised by PC performance levels.
If you've ever looked at the PS2 graphic engine architecture (Ars Technica have a good in depth review), you'll realize how complex it is, and what type of performance it can offer to games that truly take advantage. It's very hard to compare it to PC graphics cards. It's significant though that a number of arcade games manufacturers are switching to Sony's engine...
I agree. DRI is just appearing, and OpenGL on DRI should privide excellent performance.
3dfx VooDoo 5 6000 just BLOWS AWAY nVidia GeForce 2 according to early sightings, while Celeron II benchmarks shows that Intels decision to deliberately keep the 66MHz bus to slow it down was very effective!
So much for X-Box performance! A 600MHz PIII derived processor (i.e. Celeron II) and nVidia are already looking outdated before the box is even introduced!
VooDoo 5 6000 vs GeForce 2
Celeron II benchmarks
The MPEG-4 Industry Forum:
http://www.m4if.org
Is working to that you can conveniently obtain a licence to the whole MPEG-4 patent bundle (over 200 patents), in the same way as you can for MPEG-2.
A free software imnplementation of an MPEG-4 CODEDC is available from ISO, which is linked from the M4IF site. Note that while the software (i.e. the implementation) is free, you still need to licence the patents to use it.
Still, we're all using free MPEG-2 players and encoders under Linux, so it sounds pretty good to me!
I'm not sure how far back the Xerox GUI's go, but it's certainly before the early 80's. I remember seeing the Apple Lisa get launched around '83, which was inspired by the Xerox work. I believe the Xerox Star was one of the first GUI workstations. Back then the paradigm was called "WIMP" (Windows, Icons, Mice, Pointers), not GUI.
It's sad how many people don't realize that prety much ALL of "modern" computing was invented at Xerox at least 20 years ago!
- bit mapped graphical displays
- windows
- mice / pointers
- ethernet / networking
Even something like Visual Basic is really nothing more than a poor man's version of Smalltalk to provide an object orientated graphical component architecture.
Never mind my crack, yours seems to give a better high!
The server version of Willamette is "Foster" which is DDR. It's got nothing to do with cost, but simply the degrading performce of Rambus as memory sizes increase.
DDR already exists and is used by some graphics cards. It has also been demoed at WinHEC by AMD using their 760 chipset with Thunderbird. I'll accept that DDR chipsets could have problems, as could anything else, but given the strong support for DDR from Micron and other memory manufacturers, it's crazy to suggest there's anything in the least bit broken about the standard.
The only announced (not yet available) SMP AMD mobo I'm aware of is the Tyan Dolphin which will be available in Q4 of this year.
:-)
http://www.slota.com/motherboards/
The Dolphin will use AMDs 770 (aka 760-MP) chipset, and presumably support either dual Thunderbirds or Mustangs!
Note BTW, that despite the site's name, the Dolphin (and any 770 mobo) is a socket-A, not slot-A mobo.
Micron have also just entered the AMD SMP chipset business, and will support 4-way and higher SMP.
FYI AMD's 64/32 bit Sledgehammer processor due out next year will include a version with on-chip SMP!
Even if they gave you PC800 RDRAM to replace your 128M of PC100, do you realize how much it would cost you in the future if you wanted to upgrade?
Try costing out 128K of PC800 vs SDRAM....
Intel themselves are only pushing RDRAM for consumer use. For workstation and server use they are pushing DDR since RDRAM slows down unacceptably for large memory sizes. "Foster" workstation/server version of Willamette is DDR, even if Intel are backpeddling on that to appease Rambus.
RDRAM's only claim to fame is bandwidth - it has long access latencies which bandwidth overcomes in some benchmarks, not in others. Only the very fastest PC800 RDRAM compares favorably to DDR (in some benchmarks only, at that). Slower/cheaper PC600 etc is pretty much useless.
Intel owns a large number of RMBS stock *warrants* with various strings attached.
If Intel did simply own RMBS stock then (absent their contract with Rambus) they could simply sell or hold it and specify memory subsystems based on simple price/performance considerations.
As it is, with the contract and warrants, Intel is coerced into pushing RDRAM regardless of whether it makes sense.
There's a problem running slot-A Thunderbirds (Athlon successor) in *SOME* KX-133 mobos due to Via having violated AMDs timing specs. AMD's own 750 Irongate chipset is fine for slot-A Athlon->Thunderbird upgrades (not that AMD intend to sell slot-A TBirds other than to OEMs). However, some mobo makers such as Abit and Asus are already releasing BIOS upgrades that make their KX-133 mobos Thunderbird compatible.
:-) If you're in the market for a new Thunderbird based PC, then go for a KZ-133 socket-A mobo which should let you upgrade to Mustang.
If you have a slot-A mobo and want to upgrade from Athlon to Thunderbird, then there should be third party "slocket" cards that'll let you use a socket-A Tbird.
So this KX-133 issue is a Via screw up, not an AMD one. More importantly the slot-A TBird is only a VERY short term OEM transition product. Aside from this, TBird/Duron/Mustang are all socket-A chips, and need a KZ-133 socket-A mobo.
Personally if I had a, say, 700MHz KX-133 Athlon I'd not be looking to upgrade to TBird, but would hold out for a KZ-266 DDR 1.3/4GHz Mustang due out in Q3/4! Or maybe even an AMD 770 dual-SMP Mustang!
Yep - Intel is contractually obligated to hype (pretty much literally!) Rambus thru the end of 2002, and to push it as their sole memory option. I think the reason Intel was willing to sign such an odd contract is that they wanted to move more motherboard value onto their CPUs (i.e. get bigger % of the PC pie), and perhaps (seems a bit naieve, though...) genuinely thought that SDRAM couldn't be extended further.
Not only is their the contract, but Intel have for a long time been propping their earnings up with capital gains from various holdings that they sell each quarter. They'd have missed estimates last quarter without this (i.e. that fat P/E you're paying for is buying you one-time capital gains, not recurring growing earnings!!!). Intel own a large number of RMBS stock warrants as part of their deal with Rambus, and need to push RDRAM to be able to turn a profit on these to help earnings.
K7 (Athlon/Duron/Tunderbird/Mustang) and K8 (Sledgehammer) are AMD designs. EV-6 bus is licenced from DEC (Alpha). LDT (Lightening Data Transport) bus for Sledgehammer I believe is AMDs.
It's funny that the best thing Intel ever did for AMD was to stop licencing them their chip and bus designs. AMD are now running cirles around Intel.
Intel's Itanium (aka Merced) is such an awful design that HP (their partner) refused to use it and completely redesigned it - Intel then licenced the resulting McKinley (still IA-64) back from HP!
Latest Intel screw-ups after all their recent chipset failures are their having to revert to Katmai (off chip L2) slot-based PIIIs since the socketed Coppermines are overheating and cracking the packaging. Now today, Intel are recalling about 1 million 820 chipset based mobos because of spontaneous lockup and reboot problems...
Maybe it's time for Intel to try to licence some decent designs from AMD.
If DivX is a Microsoft extended version of MPEG-4, then isn't it likely to be protected by both Microsoft and other MPEG-4 patents?
Is MPEG-4 any less encumbered by patents than MPEG-2?
Note that some patents (such as H.263) are so broad as to apparently ensure that ANY implementation will infringe.
AMD have already stopped new Athlon wafer starts, so there's a limited quantity of Athlons in the pipeline, then there'll be a very limited quantity of slot-A thunderbirds (probably to be announced end of May). After that (sometime in June?), all of AMD's chips will be socket-A which are obviously tamper-proof.
It'd be nice to get credit for the story, just for kicks. I already blew my Karma way below +1 bonus level by moderating up a humorous first post, so that's not really an issue! What really pisses me off isn't that I didn't get credit, but rather that one day the story is deemed un-newsworthy, yet days later (when it's no longer news), it is!!!
Except for rare exceptions I've given up submitting stories anymore, since I've never had a single one accepted....but, a number of my stories have subsequently been used days later and attributed to someone else.
/. it means that they are more and more often running OLD "news" stories that are then no longer what I would call "news"!
/. relies on it's readers to scour out and submit timely and interesting stories, yet then believes they know better than their readership what that readership will find interesting, or what is actaully a new story and what is old news.
This is annoying, but more importantly for
It doesn't make any sense that
Slashdot desperately needs to switch from selectign stories manually themselves to having readers themselves moderate the "submission queue", which then simply becomes the days story list, with users as always being able to select their desired browing level. At "Score 5" you'd get the top 10 or so intersting and new stories, and at "Score 0" you'd get the whole submission queue of 3-400 stories.
If slashdot doesn't change soon, more and more people are going to end up leaving and instead rely on sites such as "The Register" that can be relied on to be among the first to carry technical breaking news.
Oops, you're right!
I meant the price it started trading at (45 or so), not the IPO price itself.
I don't remember what the split was, but if you look at RHAT's long term chart, it is now below the split-adjusted initial trading price.
Perhaps a story about the market as a whole is a little off topic, although seeing as this was primarily a tech stock crash, it does seem to fall under the "stuff that matters" category.
However, if you want to remain more on topic, then a story about the decline of the Linux related stocks would make sense.
RedHat is so far down 85% (!!!) from its 151 peak, and closed at 24 on friday. While this was inevitable and only a matter of time (I sold at 45 on the way up, and posted here how it was already overvalued at that price), it is nonetheless significant for Linux.
Without an inflated stock price to use for aquisitions, companies like RedHat and VA Linux are going to have a much harder time growing - having to rely on revenues instead, and this leaves much more of an opportunity for companies like IBM to step in and take much more control and more of the Linux opportunities.
Last week RedHat fell around 35%, which is more than the 25% NASDAQ drop. In fact, the whole NASDAQ decline (so far) from the 5000+ peak to friday's 3300 is only(!) 35%.
Also, remember all the slashdot stories about the RedHat IPO, and about the crazy climb of the stock price? Well, RHAT is so far down 84% (!!!) from its 151 peak, and closed on friday at 24 - well below it's IPO price.
VA Linux (LNUX) has plummeted also.
Perhaps a story on RHAT would be more topical than one on the market/NASDAQ as a whole, but either way IMO it does deserve coverage since the initial IPO and stock rise did.