The crash of '29 was absolutely real, whichever way you look at it - it was not some statistical anomaly created by choice of DJIA component stocks.
Some of the hardest hit stocks in the '29 crash were the "Nifty Fifty", which were the 50 most respected blue chip growth stocks of the day (i.e. the Home Depot and Cisco's). These stocks grew to have huge P/Es as everyone believed their growth rates deserved it. During the crash, these stocks fell 90-95% or more.
The '29 crash also marked the end of the prosperous "Roaring 20's", and gave rise to the ensuing depression.
FYI the NASDAQ drop, so far, from the 5000+ peak to fridays 3300 close is around 35%, which is more than the "Black Monday" drop. Last week's decline alone was around 25% - the same as Black Monday.
There are still many stocks selling at historicaly absurd prices, so the carnage is likely not over yet. We may get a sucker/technical rally sometime soon, but IMO we havn't seen the NASDAQ bottom yet.
While it's true that the evolutionary goal of play is learning, it's explicit goals and expectations that determine what we learn. Two children may have the exact same experience yet learn different things according to what their goals/expectations are, and therefore what they are attending to.
The legal way to compete is to provide a better product or a better price. AMD vs Intel is a good example of this kind of healthy competition (although Intel is right on the edge of being legal). Microsoft's exclusionary contracts with the PC manufacturers are just using it's size and dominance to push it's own products where it knows market forces would not have succeeded. You can't blame them for trying (although MSFT shareholders can't be too happy about the last year), but it's hardly in your best interest as a consumer to have competition eliminated in this way. I'm all for free market competition, and that's the whole point of anti-monopoly laws - to support free markets. Monopoly's just gat fat, lazy, and screw the consumer because they can - competition keeps them honest. Of course a smart company will steer just this side of the law - Bill Gates got way too arrogant and got what he deserved (an $11B hole in his pocket).
Re:But is this really for the better?
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
Why empathise with anybody? A lot of stocks were overpriced, and have now been knocked back down to more reasonable levels. Some stocks such as AMD even rose today - because they're undervalued. For the most part investors know what they're getting into, and are happy to ride the momentum to crazy levels on the upside - why be sorry if some get caught out by being too greedy? The stocks that deserve to bounce back will do so anyway.
Microsoft apparently already are doing illegal things (such as profit smoothing from one quarter to the next) to boost the stock price and keep the whole pyramid scheme going. Why on earth anyone thinks the stock is worth a P/E of 60 is a mystery to me. Considering it's now selling for 90 - the same as a year ago, while other tech stocks are on a tear, it seems that others are slowly coming to the same conclusion.
Re:Do we understand the implications?
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows - giving it away for free is what forced Netscape to also give away Navigator for free for commercial use. In any other market this is called dumping when you hurt other competitors by selling something (or giving it away!) for less than it cost you.
Hopefully Mozilla will again provide some real competition for IE, and at least the open source development model can't be hurt in quite the same way by Microsoft's tactics (although it does need a fair chance to be delivered with PCs as the default browser, which is something the courts are likely to force Microsoft to allow).
Microsoft's dominance has not been a benefit to anyone, especially not small developers. Look at how many times they's taken away the markets of small start-up companies by just ripping off their ideas and bundling them with Windows.
It's just that the current Athlon has it's L2 cache off chip, which is why the access is slow. The interesting thing is that even so, the benchmarks are pretty evenly divided between the 1GHz Athlon and the 1GHz PIII. Needless to say AMSD are adding on-chip L2 to the Athlon, as well as to their "low end" Spitfire which is going to be an AWESOME CPU (even Dell appears to be giving up their "Intel only" position becuase the Spitfire will blow away Intel's Celeron so badly). With AMD having now won over ALL TEN of the top PC manufacturers, they're obviously doing something right!
Success or failure only exist in the context of a goal, when they are defined by whether you met the goal or not. In non goal orientated behaviour such as play, we learn about the environment rather than about the success/failure of our plans.
If your self-stated goal is to answer questions in agreement with humans, based in a knowledge corpus, then that is the most you will achieve. This is somewhere between recall and cognition (closer to recall), not consciousness.
Machine cognition is not that hard a problem, and has already been solved by projects such as Allen Newell's Soar and Doug Lenat's CYC. CYC pushes what you are essentially attempting to do (extract knowledge and reasoning capability from data), and despite being much more sophisticated still predictable suffers from brittleness. Soar is a symbolic general purpose problem solver, able to create it's own sub-goals and impass breakers, and is therefore much more robust, but obviously suffers from the old GIGO maxim. Perception is intimately tied to cognition, and is the much harder problem of the two (machine perception has only met with very limited success so far); any attempt at machine cognition that takes as input symbolic questions/data is totally avoiding the much harder problem of perception.
If you achieve your goal then it will have been an interesting project, but will still be many years behind what has already been achieved, and will go nowhere toward addressing consciousness or any of the precursor harder problems such as perception, language (which you implicity claim it will), or full cognition.
AMD's Spitfire will have the Athlon core, on die cache, a fast bus, and be ridiculously cheap. While Intel cripple the Celeron 2 to avoid it competing with their high end offerings, AMD beef up the low end because they know they are going to own the high end for the next few years at least.
AMD has 1GHz pricing power over Intel AMD Spitfire beats Intel Celeron 2 AMD Sledgehammer will crush Itanium (esp. 32 bit) AMD copper interconnect soon, Intel in a year
Be grateful for AMD's competition, or Intel would also be pushing the overpriced underperformingn Rambus down our throats, rather than market realities having to force it to gradually accept that it's a crock of shit.
This is an old story. NASA have been trying to reproduce this (with some success, I believe) for at least a year or so now.
What they're trying to do (based on an amateur scientists original research) is to BLOCK a gravititional field thereby shielding objects from a mass that would otherwise attract them.
This is no wierder than being able to block an electromagnetic field. If fact it's a lot more intuitive if gravity is really based on gravitons as predicted by superstring theory.
Calling it "anti-gravity" makes it sound like pseudo-science.
The correct thing to do to wait for the bugs to be fixed before releasing the software or declaring it out of Beta.
Crackers have proved themselves smart enough to obtain source to packages to discover and exploit holes, and Mozilla will be no different. I certainly don't get a warm fuzzy feeeling about Mozilla if AOL pressures them into releasing it with security bugs, whether they're advertized or not.
I've used the web for e-commerce for a long time, and have always felt comfortable about it, but with the current spate of credit card heists, I am beginning to get a bit leary, and will personally choose to steer clear of Mozilla until I have reason to believe it has no known security bugs.
The effects in TPM may have been state-of-the-art as far as computer generated stuff goes, but for my money there was only one scene - the pod race - in which they actually *worked* for the movie. IMO Phantom Menace was a bad movie precisely *because* of the special effects - it relied on them totally to the exclusion of any real story or character development. It left me stone cold.
The Matrix, OTOH, was a great movie! The effects were technically impressive and ground-breaking, but much more importantly they worked in the context of the film, and added to it rather than detracting from it.
I think it would be mangingless if awards were given to special effects in movies that were overall bad, since bottom line is that this is all about movie making, not technical wizardry.
Tivo is $399 for 30hr (Tweeter), with Sony about to announce - in april - 30hr unit for $399 MSRP (street $300-350 ?). Phillips price likely to drop further.
Tivo service costs $10/mo, via 1.800 number
Replay service is "free", but for many people costs $10-20/mo since there is no 1.800 number and not very wide coverage for toll-free local call numbers.
Sure prices on both are likely to drop, but right now Tivo is well ahead, and the Phillips/Sony and soon DirectTV competition will IMO keep Tivo more competetive. Replay, AFAIK will only be available from Panasonic (or Replay themselves).
On the AV forum it seems that many Replay owners are still paying $10-20/mo for toll calls because there is no toll-free local number for them.
Tivo's latest software release (1.3) supports local toll-free calls, but also allows the owner to choose the 800 number if there is none.
Replay's built in $200 lifetime subscription fee is bogus if you can still end up paying $10+/mo for phone calls. I'd rather get a $399 30hr Tivo (from Tweeter) and pay the $10/mo, than pay $499 for a 20hr Replay and STILL pay $10/mo.!!!
Tivo uses MPEG-2 compression (same as satellite TV), so raw thruput is not very demanding. Tivo's lowest quality is 1GB/hr (30hr Tivo has 30G (2x15) HD), while highest quality is about 3 times that.
It uses Quantum fireball IDE drives with Quickview AV support.
You can archive to tape (play to video out), but there's no digital output yet. Sony may well add firewire to Tivo, since they've announced they want to integrate all their multimedia products, and PS-2 has firewire.
The AV forum (linked from www.tivo.com) has some posts pertianing to hacking Tivo.. it is possible to do a DIY disk upgrade if you know what you're doing, but it's not a Tivo supported feature yet.
While Tivo can replace much of what you use a VCR for (particularly "time shifting" your TV shows), you should think of it as a TV-enhancer rather than a VCR. Tivo market it as "personal television". A Tivo is an *addition* to your home theatre, not a replacement for your VCR.
If you want to archive stuff on Tivo to tape, then there is a "save to VCR" function that makes that easy to do.
At first the reasons TiVO gave why they weren't selling the units in Canada was the lack of available TV schedule information here and that some encryption built into the system made the things illegal to export. None of these reasons really seemed to hold up, so I recently asked again. Last I've heard they can't expand into new markets because they're having enough trouble keeping up with demand in current markets. Argh!
Someone at Tivo told you this (trouble keeping up with existing markets)? Was this via e-mail or phone? Do you remember who you talked to?
From following the Tivo AV forum, I don't think crashes are normal. With around 50,000 users so far (my guess - 25,000 last quarter), I think the forum would be swamed with complaints if it wasn't reliable. You should call Tivo or Phillips to get it replaced. There's a Tivo guy on the AV forum (link from www.tivo.com) who will help if you're having any problems.
Tivo has 30hr storage and costs $399 (from outpost.com/Tweeter), with Sony $399 MSRP unit coming out in April.
Tivo subscription costs $10/mo (or Lifetime subscription for $199), and uses an 800 number or local toll free call. Replay has no subscription fee, but costs about $10-20 a month in phone calls since they don't have an 800 number!
Potential privacy issues are the same with both. Tivo guarantees on their web site that they will not collect your viewing habits.
Slashdot Mirror
The crash of '29 was absolutely real, whichever way you look at it - it was not some statistical anomaly created by choice of DJIA component stocks.
Some of the hardest hit stocks in the '29 crash were the "Nifty Fifty", which were the 50 most respected blue chip growth stocks of the day (i.e. the Home Depot and Cisco's). These stocks grew to have huge P/Es as everyone believed their growth rates deserved it. During the crash, these stocks fell 90-95% or more.
The '29 crash also marked the end of the prosperous "Roaring 20's", and gave rise to the ensuing depression.
FYI the NASDAQ drop, so far, from the 5000+ peak to fridays 3300 close is around 35%, which is more than the "Black Monday" drop. Last week's decline alone was around 25% - the same as Black Monday.
There are still many stocks selling at historicaly absurd prices, so the carnage is likely not over yet. We may get a sucker/technical rally sometime soon, but IMO we havn't seen the NASDAQ bottom yet.
Interesting to see that there is a Linux version, but none (yet) for Solaris.. which sucks since that's what I have at work.
Oh well, at least I can run the Linux one at home.
While it's true that the evolutionary goal of play is learning, it's explicit goals and expectations that determine what we learn. Two children may have the exact same experience yet learn different things according to what their goals/expectations are, and therefore what they are attending to.
The legal way to compete is to provide a better product or a better price. AMD vs Intel is a good example of this kind of healthy competition (although Intel is right on the edge of being legal). Microsoft's exclusionary contracts with the PC manufacturers are just using it's size and dominance to push it's own products where it knows market forces would not have succeeded. You can't blame them for trying (although MSFT shareholders can't be too happy about the last year), but it's hardly in your best interest as a consumer to have competition eliminated in this way. I'm all for free market competition, and that's the whole point of anti-monopoly laws - to support free markets. Monopoly's just gat fat, lazy, and screw the consumer because they can - competition keeps them honest. Of course a smart company will steer just this side of the law - Bill Gates got way too arrogant and got what he deserved (an $11B hole in his pocket).
Why empathise with anybody? A lot of stocks were overpriced, and have now been knocked back down to more reasonable levels. Some stocks such as AMD even rose today - because they're undervalued. For the most part investors know what they're getting into, and are happy to ride the momentum to crazy levels on the upside - why be sorry if some get caught out by being too greedy? The stocks that deserve to bounce back will do so anyway.
Microsoft apparently already are doing illegal things (such as profit smoothing from one quarter to the next) to boost the stock price and keep the whole pyramid scheme going. Why on earth anyone thinks the stock is worth a P/E of 60 is a mystery to me. Considering it's now selling for 90 - the same as a year ago, while other tech stocks are on a tear, it seems that others are slowly coming to the same conclusion.
Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer with Windows - giving it away for free is what forced Netscape to also give away Navigator for free for commercial use. In any other market this is called dumping when you hurt other competitors by selling something (or giving it away!) for less than it cost you.
Hopefully Mozilla will again provide some real competition for IE, and at least the open source development model can't be hurt in quite the same way by Microsoft's tactics (although it does need a fair chance to be delivered with PCs as the default browser, which is something the courts are likely to force Microsoft to allow).
Microsoft's dominance has not been a benefit to anyone, especially not small developers. Look at how many times they's taken away the markets of small start-up companies by just ripping off their ideas and bundling them with Windows.
It's just that the current Athlon has it's L2 cache off chip, which is why the access is slow. The interesting thing is that even so, the benchmarks are pretty evenly divided between the 1GHz Athlon and the 1GHz PIII. Needless to say AMSD are adding on-chip L2 to the Athlon, as well as to their "low end" Spitfire which is going to be an AWESOME CPU (even Dell appears to be giving up their "Intel only" position becuase the Spitfire will blow away Intel's Celeron so badly). With AMD having now won over ALL TEN of the top PC manufacturers, they're obviously doing something right!
Success or failure only exist in the context of a goal, when they are defined by whether you met the goal or not. In non goal orientated behaviour such as play, we learn about the environment rather than about the success/failure of our plans.
If your self-stated goal is to answer questions in agreement with humans, based in a knowledge corpus, then that is the most you will achieve. This is somewhere between recall and cognition (closer to recall), not consciousness.
Machine cognition is not that hard a problem, and has already been solved by projects such as Allen Newell's Soar and Doug Lenat's CYC. CYC pushes what you are essentially attempting to do (extract knowledge and reasoning capability from data), and despite being much more sophisticated still predictable suffers from brittleness. Soar is a symbolic general purpose problem solver, able to create it's own sub-goals and impass breakers, and is therefore much more robust, but obviously suffers from the old GIGO maxim. Perception is intimately tied to cognition, and is the much harder problem of the two (machine perception has only met with very limited success so far); any attempt at machine cognition that takes as input symbolic questions/data is totally avoiding the much harder problem of perception.
If you achieve your goal then it will have been an interesting project, but will still be many years behind what has already been achieved, and will go nowhere toward addressing consciousness or any of the precursor harder problems such as perception, language (which you implicity claim it will), or full cognition.
$20K/yr for a pretty high volume site like that seems very low.
I'd load the site up with as many affiliate programs as you can.
Also unless you've been an extremely hardball negotiator, you're probably getting screwed on the rates you're getting.
AMD's Spitfire will have the Athlon core, on die cache, a fast bus, and be ridiculously cheap. While Intel cripple the Celeron 2 to avoid it competing with their high end offerings, AMD beef up the low end because they know they are going to own the high end for the next few years at least.
AMD has 1GHz pricing power over Intel
AMD Spitfire beats Intel Celeron 2
AMD Sledgehammer will crush Itanium (esp. 32 bit)
AMD copper interconnect soon, Intel in a year
Be grateful for AMD's competition, or Intel would also be pushing the overpriced underperformingn Rambus down our throats, rather than market realities having to force it to gradually accept that it's a crock of shit.
This is an old story. NASA have been trying to reproduce this (with some success, I believe) for at least a year or so now.
What they're trying to do (based on an amateur scientists original research) is to BLOCK a gravititional field thereby shielding objects from a mass that would otherwise attract them.
This is no wierder than being able to block an electromagnetic field. If fact it's a lot more intuitive if gravity is really based on gravitons as predicted by superstring theory.
Calling it "anti-gravity" makes it sound like pseudo-science.
The correct thing to do to wait for the bugs to be fixed before releasing the software or declaring it out of Beta.
Crackers have proved themselves smart enough to obtain source to packages to discover and exploit holes, and Mozilla will be no different. I certainly don't get a warm fuzzy feeeling about Mozilla if AOL pressures them into releasing it with security bugs, whether they're advertized or not.
I've used the web for e-commerce for a long time, and have always felt comfortable about it, but with the current spate of credit card heists, I am beginning to get a bit leary, and will personally choose to steer clear of Mozilla until I have reason to believe it has no known security bugs.
The effects in TPM may have been state-of-the-art as far as computer generated stuff goes, but for my money there was only one scene - the pod race - in which they actually *worked* for the movie. IMO Phantom Menace was a bad movie precisely *because* of the special effects - it relied on them totally to the exclusion of any real story or character development. It left me stone cold.
The Matrix, OTOH, was a great movie! The effects were technically impressive and ground-breaking, but much more importantly they worked in the context of the film, and added to it rather than detracting from it.
I think it would be mangingless if awards were given to special effects in movies that were overall bad, since bottom line is that this is all about movie making, not technical wizardry.
Replay is $499 for 20hr.
Tivo is $399 for 30hr (Tweeter), with Sony about to announce - in april - 30hr unit for $399 MSRP (street $300-350 ?). Phillips price likely to drop further.
Tivo service costs $10/mo, via 1.800 number
Replay service is "free", but for many people costs $10-20/mo since there is no 1.800 number and not very wide coverage for toll-free local call numbers.
Sure prices on both are likely to drop, but right now Tivo is well ahead, and the Phillips/Sony and soon DirectTV competition will IMO keep Tivo more competetive. Replay, AFAIK will only be available from Panasonic (or Replay themselves).
If you're not in a toll-free local call area, you're SOL.
On the AV forum it seems that many Replay owners are still paying $10-20/mo for toll calls because there is no toll-free local number for them.
Tivo's latest software release (1.3) supports local toll-free calls, but also allows the owner to choose the 800 number if there is none.
Replay's built in $200 lifetime subscription fee is bogus if you can still end up paying $10+/mo for phone calls. I'd rather get a $399 30hr Tivo (from Tweeter) and pay the $10/mo, than pay $499 for a 20hr Replay and STILL pay $10/mo.!!!
I found it. Thanks very much! :-)
Tivo uses MPEG-2 compression (same as satellite TV), so raw thruput is not very demanding. Tivo's lowest quality is 1GB/hr (30hr Tivo has 30G (2x15) HD), while highest quality is about 3 times that.
It uses Quantum fireball IDE drives with Quickview AV support.
You can archive to tape (play to video out), but there's no digital output yet. Sony may well add firewire to Tivo, since they've announced they want to integrate all their multimedia products, and PS-2 has firewire.
The AV forum (linked from www.tivo.com) has some posts pertianing to hacking Tivo.. it is possible to do a DIY disk upgrade if you know what you're doing, but it's not a Tivo supported feature yet.
While Tivo can replace much of what you use a VCR for (particularly "time shifting" your TV shows), you should think of it as a TV-enhancer rather than a VCR. Tivo market it as "personal television". A Tivo is an *addition* to your home theatre, not a replacement for your VCR.
If you want to archive stuff on Tivo to tape, then there is a "save to VCR" function that makes that easy to do.
At first the reasons TiVO gave why they weren't selling the units in Canada was the lack of available TV schedule information here and that some encryption built into the system made the things illegal to export. None of these reasons really seemed to hold up, so I recently asked again. Last I've heard they can't expand into new markets because they're having enough trouble keeping up with demand in current markets. Argh!
Someone at Tivo told you this (trouble keeping up with existing markets)? Was this via e-mail or phone? Do you remember who you talked to?
As a TIVO investor, this is very interesting!
From following the Tivo AV forum, I don't think crashes are normal. With around 50,000 users so far (my guess - 25,000 last quarter), I think the forum would be swamed with complaints if it wasn't reliable. You should call Tivo or Phillips to get it replaced. There's a Tivo guy on the AV forum (link from www.tivo.com) who will help if you're having any problems.
Only Tivo's mods to the Linux kernel (e.g. some file system changes) are GPL'd.
The Tivo *application* itself is proprietary, as you might expect. Pretty damn impressive Linux app, though!
ReplayTV has 20hr storage and costs $499
Tivo has 30hr storage and costs $399 (from outpost.com/Tweeter), with Sony $399 MSRP unit coming out in April.
Tivo subscription costs $10/mo (or Lifetime subscription for $199), and uses an 800 number or local toll free call. Replay has no subscription fee, but costs about $10-20 a month in phone calls since they don't have an 800 number!
Potential privacy issues are the same with both. Tivo guarantees on their web site that they will not collect your viewing habits.