In an interview, when questioned about money, Linus has referred to the fact that one of the Linux vendors (he wouldn't say which) *gave* him shares a while back.. I would tend to assume it was RedHat.
Brokers normally give (sell) hot IPO allocations to their big customers as a way of saying thanks for the business. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Nothing illegal about that, even if you don't like it. I'm not sure whether the RedHat directed offering comes under any specific SEC rule, but E-trade would always have discretion as to who they allocate shares to.
As for insider trading, that only applies if you are privvy to company knowledge that isn't publically available. As far as your friends company goes, getting in on the IPO (if you can) wouldn't violate insider trading rules unless it could be proved otherwise. You're not even going to pop up on the SECs radar screen unless you're making a BIG trade that stood out from the stock's normal trading patterns. You shouldn't be worried about the IPO, but more about dumping your 50,000 shares the day before your friend's company announces an unexpected loss...
The underwriter doesn't want to look bad by having an IPO they're launching to do badly. If it did, that would reflect that they screwed up by mispricing the issue. The way they guard against this is by pricing slightly conservatively, and by initally actively supporting the stock in the open market by buying it back when it is cheap. This is why IPOs can often drop after the initial increase - not only does interest wane, but the underwriter will stop supporting the stock.
Microsoft's offer was a free PC in exchange for 3yrs MSN signup at $17/mo, and others have similar deals. If you can't prioritize your spending to afford $17/mo on your kids, then you shouldn't be having kids in the first place.
What about the expansion theory of the creation of the universe, where a quantum blip went into expansion mode... Isn't conservation of enery/matter a classical (i.e statistical) phyisics "law", rather than a quantum reality? If the inventors of Quantum theory don't claim to understand it, then I doubt any slashdotter does!
I disagree that emotion implies experience (i.e. concsiousnes). From www.dictionary.com : "disturbance or agitation of mind caused by a specific exciting cause and manifested by some sensible effect on the body". If an animal enounters an unusual and/or rapidly changing stimulus (say I jump out in front of you!), then this will cause adrenaline to be produced, which will have a certain effect on it's mind & body and short term behaviour. In another situation (say the sensations of grooming), endorphins might be released which will have the effect of temporarily reducing the animals aggression level, and making it more apathetic.
The other poster in this thread brought up the example of a bird feeding a gaping mouth carp due to a hard-wired respose. My Canadian fiancee saw a moose in their backyard trying to mate with a PLASTIC deer! Things like this make it hard to deny that much behaviour is simply a hard wired responce to certain stimulii. I guess you could make the distinction between emotions (biochemical) and hard-wired neural behaviours, but obviously a robot like Kismet could easily parallel either via global state that is modified by stimuli and effects his behavior (as they have implemented), or via more specific behaviours such as wide eyed and slack jawed as a response to girls like Cynthia (not yet implemented).
Incidently, when I said that emotions make animals "react well", I didn't mean that it makes them react optimally all the time, just that it makes them react in ways that are statistically good for the species (i.e. that statisticaly have survival benefit).
FWIW, my own hobbyist "artificial animal" research is based on evolution, neurology and child development, rather than AI. Cog/Kismet are more along the right direction that projects like Cyc, but nonetheless still rather misguided..
I believe that nature evolved emotions before consiousness, and that there have been (and almost certainly still are) animals that have emotions but little if any concious experience of them. Remember that the evolutionary/adaptive power of an emotion is that it makes you react well in a given situation (e.g. fear -> fight/flight, etc). Kismet is like a primitive animal that has evolved to have emotions that benefit him, but has not evolved the brain architecture necessary for conciousness and hence the introspective awareness of his own emotions.
Kismet is not spoofing emotion - he is exhibiting emotion through his resultant behavior. There is nothing fake about this, or fundamentally different to the way emotions work in ourselves. If a human observer anthromorphises Kismet and assumes he is experiencing anything, then that is a human shortcoming, and not a reflection on the reality of Kismet's emotions (internal state).
Surely they're not relying on the occasional shuttle trip or computer simulation to test these things? Maybe NASA have used Roswell technology to develop an earthbased zero-G lab!;-)
The major reason you're seeing cool things like these space balls (sorry, couldn't resist), and like the mars rover is that NASA is having to cut costs and therefore innovate.
Emotions are a function of one of the oldest parts of the brain, and almost certainly are hard-wired evolutionary adaptive "knee-jerk" responses to external stimuli.
Would it be any more fake if Kismet was programmed to find "baby faces" (big eyes, rounded face, etc) cute, than humans finding Kismet cute?
This isn't spoofing. This is the way emotions work.
Sure you might make some money flipping it, but the numbers look pretty scary.
Total common is 66.6M (6M being sold). IPO at $10-12. That's a capitalization of $700M or so. $20 would be approx $1.3B...
Last years revenues were $10M or so (earnings around zilch), which would put the price/sales at 100. Or looking at it another way, even at a pretty high P/E of 50 they'd have to be earning $20M to justify a $1B market cap...
Bear in mind too that they only dominate in the US. SuSe (which has higher sales than RedHat) dominates in Europe. Pacific HiTech in Japan.. They're also not getting many takers for their service contracts (revenue was practically all sales), and their product can be bought for $1.99 from www.cheapbytes.com (vs $70 or so from RedHat)....
Looks scary to me as anything other than a short term gamble.
Why do you think people like Alan Cox went to work for RedHat in the first place? Not for the salaries - I remember reading about Rasta (before he quit) making some totally lame salary there - don't remember the exact number, but it was LOW.
I've always had excellent experiences buying (books) from Amazon. They have a good web, site, excellent selection, good prices, and excellent service. I've often had shipping upgrades for free, as well as a few free $5 gift certificates by e-mail. If Amazon can keep up these qualities as they branch out into other areas, then more power to them. I'd certainly consider buying other stuff from them based on my experiences to date.
However, the thing I question is how competetive their prices are going to be in the brutal consumer electronics area. While I like Amazon, I'm only going to buy from them if they can beat prices from other on-line vendors like onsale.com.
PNG offers better compression and features than GIF, and doesn't have the legal problems. The modern browsers all support it too. There's really little reason to even want to use GIF.
Seeing as the CRTC just decided NOT to regulate the Internet (or "New Media", if you prefer), I wouldn't take too much comfort in that. You might not get MSTV, but you'll sure as hell get MSWebTV, MSHotmail, MSN, MSPayPerView, MSVideoPhone and MSAnyBroadbadAppYouCanThinkOf.
I can't believe the CRTC allowed this to happen.:(
It seems that the same people who whine about "crackers" being called "hackers" will then go ahead and tell you that "seti@home was hacked"...
I'm not even sure what "hacker" is meant to connotate - just a hardcore programmer, or someone who's expert level? When I started out professionally in the early 80's (UK), "hacker" was actually a negative term for a undisciplined programmer who didn't really know what he was doing. Only if you were obviously NOT a hacker would you ever call your activity hacking! (e.g. "I just hacked together an assembler last night" - somehow I doubt today's "hackers" are that good..).
If Intel are going to SMP-disable the Celeron, they're obviously not too interested in this market themselves. Doesn't make any sense to me, since SMP means selling more CPU's to the customer, and the guy who's going to buy a dual Celeron system is unlikely to fork out the cash for a dual PIII instead - too expensive.
I've go to think there'd be plenty of demand for a 4 or 8-way SMP box using $100 processors that could start out cheap with a single CPU, and just be upgraded. Seing as Intel don't seem to want to support *cheap* SMP, AMD could step right in...
Too bad the Transputer never took off - that was a CPU *WAY* ahead of its time...
There are a number of MPEG1 players for Linux, but none for MPEG2 or MPEG4. MPEG2 source is available, though.
However comparing MPEG to AVI or QT is an apples-to-oranges comparison. AVI and QT are fileformats and frameworks, whereas MPEG is a fileformat and a CODEC. AVI and QT can be used with the uncompressed RGB/DIB and YUV CODECs, as well as the public domain H.263 implementations, and any other CODEC you care to implement and register a FOURCC for.
Not all CODECs (such as any of the MPEG versions) are cuitsable for all purposes. Different usages require different quality, bitrate, compress-time and decompress-time characteristics. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all CODEC.
First off, thanks for the excellent software you have on your site!
The general idea towards making money from Linux software is to give away a [possibly feature limited, but still useful] version of your software, but to make money elsewhere - either via support, or via selling a more full-featured version of the software. Broadcast 2000 certainly seems to be something that you could use this approach with.
If it's based on Linux, then it's *evolutionary* by definition.
I use Linux 100% of the time, so don't suggest I don't like lInux, but if I wanted a revolutionary multitasking OS suited to modern multimedia and realtime apps, there's only one choice: BeOS.
If Amiga want to provide a slick commercial Linux box with a lot of Amiga gloss on top, then more power to them. Just don't tell me it's revolutionary in the way the original Amiga was (truly an OS ahead of it's time).
Basically none of the modern low-bitrate CODECs are available for Linux for any video format. The only exception that I know of is Telenor's H.263 implementation, which is open-source and which xanim supports for AVI.
When (nobel prize winning physicist, the discoverer of QCD amongst other things) Richard Feynman investigated the challenger explosion, he found that very specifically it was known inside NASA that the O-ring seals were not functional at too low a temperature.
The engineers specified the lowest temperature the shuttle should fly at as being 53'F. On the day the challenger crew died, the temperature was 29'F. At his report to the commission, Feynman's rather low-tech demonstration of the O-ring material's behaviour was to put a piece of it into a glass of ice water, and show how it would not spring back to shape when deformed - as a seal should do.
Anyone interested in a very detailed story of what NASA knew should read Feynman's book: "What Do You Care What Other Poeple Think?". Feynman was one of the most brilliant people to live this century, as well as being a very interesting individual:)
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, the user/pass is the same for everyone.
The letter said that people are being identifed by e-mail address, and have to use that to sign up at E-Trade.
In an interview, when questioned about money, Linus has referred to the fact that one of the Linux vendors (he wouldn't say which) *gave* him shares a while back.. I would tend to assume it was RedHat.
Brokers normally give (sell) hot IPO allocations to their big customers as a way of saying thanks for the business. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Nothing illegal about that, even if you don't like it. I'm not sure whether the RedHat directed offering comes under any specific SEC rule, but E-trade would always have discretion as to who they allocate shares to.
As for insider trading, that only applies if you are privvy to company knowledge that isn't publically available. As far as your friends company goes, getting in on the IPO (if you can) wouldn't violate insider trading rules unless it could be proved otherwise. You're not even going to pop up on the SECs radar screen unless you're making a BIG trade that stood out from the stock's normal trading patterns. You shouldn't be worried about the IPO, but more about dumping your 50,000 shares the day before your friend's company announces an unexpected loss...
The underwriter doesn't want to look bad by having an IPO they're launching to do badly. If it did, that would reflect that they screwed up by mispricing the issue. The way they guard against this is by pricing slightly conservatively, and by initally actively supporting the stock in the open market by buying it back when it is cheap. This is why IPOs can often drop after the initial increase - not only does interest wane, but the underwriter will stop supporting the stock.
Microsoft's offer was a free PC in exchange for 3yrs MSN signup at $17/mo, and others have similar deals. If you can't prioritize your spending to afford $17/mo on your kids, then you shouldn't be having kids in the first place.
What about the expansion theory of the creation of the universe, where a quantum blip went into expansion mode... Isn't conservation of enery/matter a classical (i.e statistical) phyisics "law", rather than a quantum reality? If the inventors of Quantum theory don't claim to understand it, then I doubt any slashdotter does!
I disagree that emotion implies experience (i.e. concsiousnes). From www.dictionary.com : "disturbance or agitation of mind caused by a specific exciting cause and manifested by some sensible effect on the body". If an animal enounters an unusual and/or rapidly changing stimulus (say I jump out in front of you!), then this will cause adrenaline to be produced, which will have a certain effect on it's mind & body and short term behaviour. In another situation (say the sensations of grooming), endorphins might be released which will have the effect of temporarily reducing the animals aggression level, and making it more apathetic.
The other poster in this thread brought up the example of a bird feeding a gaping mouth carp due to a hard-wired respose. My Canadian fiancee saw a moose in their backyard trying to mate with a PLASTIC deer! Things like this make it hard to deny that much behaviour is simply a hard wired responce to certain stimulii. I guess you could make the distinction between emotions (biochemical) and hard-wired neural behaviours, but obviously a robot like Kismet could easily parallel either via global state that is modified by stimuli and effects his behavior (as they have implemented), or via more specific behaviours such as wide eyed and slack jawed as a response to girls like Cynthia (not yet implemented).
Incidently, when I said that emotions make animals "react well", I didn't mean that it makes them react optimally all the time, just that it makes them react in ways that are statistically good for the species (i.e. that statisticaly have survival benefit).
FWIW, my own hobbyist "artificial animal" research is based on evolution, neurology and child development, rather than AI. Cog/Kismet are more along the right direction that projects like Cyc, but nonetheless still rather misguided..
Ben
I believe that nature evolved emotions before consiousness, and that there have been (and almost certainly still are) animals that have emotions but little if any concious experience of them. Remember that the evolutionary/adaptive power of an emotion is that it makes you react well in a given situation (e.g. fear -> fight/flight, etc). Kismet is like a primitive animal that has evolved to have emotions that benefit him, but has not evolved the brain architecture necessary for conciousness and hence the introspective awareness of his own emotions.
Kismet is not spoofing emotion - he is exhibiting emotion through his resultant behavior. There is nothing fake about this, or fundamentally different to the way emotions work in ourselves. If a human observer anthromorphises Kismet and assumes he is experiencing anything, then that is a human shortcoming, and not a reflection on the reality of Kismet's emotions (internal state).
Ben
Surely they're not relying on the occasional shuttle trip or computer simulation to test these things? Maybe NASA have used Roswell technology to develop an earthbased zero-G lab! ;-)
The major reason you're seeing cool things like these space balls (sorry, couldn't resist), and like the mars rover is that NASA is having to cut costs and therefore innovate.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Emotions are a function of one of the oldest parts of the brain, and almost certainly are hard-wired evolutionary adaptive "knee-jerk" responses to external stimuli.
Would it be any more fake if Kismet was programmed to find "baby faces" (big eyes, rounded face, etc) cute, than humans finding Kismet cute?
This isn't spoofing. This is the way emotions work.
Ben
Yep, Cynthia could probably make a furby smile! :)
They need to check kismet with Janet Reno, to see if he's really just reacting to faces!
Sure you might make some money flipping it, but the numbers look pretty scary.
...
Total common is 66.6M (6M being sold). IPO at $10-12. That's a capitalization of $700M or so. $20 would be approx $1.3B
Last years revenues were $10M or so (earnings around zilch), which would put the price/sales at 100. Or looking at it another way, even at a pretty high P/E of 50 they'd have to be earning $20M to justify a $1B market cap...
Bear in mind too that they only dominate in the US. SuSe (which has higher sales than RedHat) dominates in Europe. Pacific HiTech in Japan.. They're also not getting many takers for their service contracts (revenue was practically all sales), and their product can be bought for $1.99 from www.cheapbytes.com (vs $70 or so from RedHat)....
Looks scary to me as anything other than a short term gamble.
Why do you think people like Alan Cox went to work for RedHat in the first place? Not for the salaries - I remember reading about Rasta (before he quit) making some totally lame salary there - don't remember the exact number, but it was LOW.
I've always had excellent experiences buying (books) from Amazon. They have a good web, site, excellent selection, good prices, and excellent service. I've often had shipping upgrades for free, as well as a few free $5 gift certificates by e-mail. If Amazon can keep up these qualities as they branch out into other areas, then more power to them. I'd certainly consider buying other stuff from them based on my experiences to date.
However, the thing I question is how competetive their prices are going to be in the brutal consumer electronics area. While I like Amazon, I'm only going to buy from them if they can beat prices from other on-line vendors like onsale.com.
PNG offers better compression and features than GIF, and doesn't have the legal problems. The modern browsers all support it too. There's really little reason to even want to use GIF.
Seeing as the CRTC just decided NOT to regulate the Internet (or "New Media", if you prefer), I wouldn't take too much comfort in that. You might not get MSTV, but you'll sure as hell get MSWebTV, MSHotmail, MSN, MSPayPerView, MSVideoPhone and MSAnyBroadbadAppYouCanThinkOf.
:(
I can't believe the CRTC allowed this to happen.
It seems that the same people who whine about "crackers" being called "hackers" will then go ahead and tell you that "seti@home was hacked"...
I'm not even sure what "hacker" is meant to connotate - just a hardcore programmer, or someone who's expert level? When I started out professionally in the early 80's (UK), "hacker" was actually a negative term for a undisciplined programmer who didn't really know what he was doing. Only if you were obviously NOT a hacker would you ever call your activity hacking! (e.g. "I just hacked together an assembler last night" - somehow I doubt today's "hackers" are that good..).
AMD should concentrate on (cheap) SMP systems..
If Intel are going to SMP-disable the Celeron, they're obviously not too interested in this market themselves. Doesn't make any sense to me, since SMP means selling more CPU's to the customer, and the guy who's going to buy a dual Celeron system is unlikely to fork out the cash for a dual PIII instead - too expensive.
I've go to think there'd be plenty of demand for a 4 or 8-way SMP box using $100 processors that could start out cheap with a single CPU, and just be upgraded. Seing as Intel don't seem to want to support *cheap* SMP, AMD could step right in...
Too bad the Transputer never took off - that was a CPU *WAY* ahead of its time...
But there are places that will sell you a tested overclocked celeron system.
I cam across this one the other day:
http://www.becomputing.com
Ben
There are a number of MPEG1 players for Linux, but none for MPEG2 or MPEG4. MPEG2 source is available, though.
However comparing MPEG to AVI or QT is an apples-to-oranges comparison. AVI and QT are fileformats and frameworks, whereas MPEG is a fileformat and a CODEC. AVI and QT can be used with the uncompressed RGB/DIB and YUV CODECs, as well as the public domain H.263 implementations, and any other CODEC you care to implement and register a FOURCC for.
Not all CODECs (such as any of the MPEG versions) are cuitsable for all purposes. Different usages require different quality, bitrate, compress-time and decompress-time characteristics. There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all CODEC.
First off, thanks for the excellent software you have on your site!
The general idea towards making money from Linux software is to give away a [possibly feature limited, but still useful] version of your software, but to make money elsewhere - either via support, or via selling a more full-featured version of the software. Broadcast 2000 certainly seems to be something that you could use this approach with.
If it's based on Linux, then it's *evolutionary* by definition.
I use Linux 100% of the time, so don't suggest I don't like lInux, but if I wanted a revolutionary multitasking OS suited to modern multimedia and realtime apps, there's only one choice: BeOS.
If Amiga want to provide a slick commercial Linux box with a lot of Amiga gloss on top, then more power to them. Just don't tell me it's revolutionary in the way the original Amiga was (truly an OS ahead of it's time).
Basically none of the modern low-bitrate CODECs are available for Linux for any video format. The only exception that I know of is Telenor's H.263 implementation, which is open-source and which xanim supports for AVI.
w are/
http://www.fou.telenor.no/brukere/DVC/h263_soft
The other option is MPEG1, which is really currently the best choice for multi-platform compressed video.
When (nobel prize winning physicist, the discoverer of QCD amongst other things) Richard Feynman investigated the challenger explosion, he found that very specifically it was known inside NASA that the O-ring seals were not functional at too low a temperature.
:)
The engineers specified the lowest temperature the shuttle should fly at as being 53'F. On the day the challenger crew died, the temperature was 29'F. At his report to the commission, Feynman's rather low-tech demonstration of the O-ring material's behaviour was to put a piece of it into a glass of ice water, and show how it would not spring back to shape when deformed - as a seal should do.
Anyone interested in a very detailed story of what NASA knew should read Feynman's book: "What Do You Care What Other Poeple Think?". Feynman was one of the most brilliant people to live this century, as well as being a very interesting individual