The model that I would suggest is not that book value and net income determine stock price and sometimes popularity determines stock price, but that book value and net income determine popularity, which determines stock price. It just seems like a far more parsimonious model. . I guess I failed to make that point clear in my previous post.
No really. The "capitalism makes everyone do well" theory just doesn't hold water. It is true that capitalist economies have a tendency to be more efficient (note: that has NOTHING to do with equity), but the argument that capitalism feeds starving masses can't explain what happened in Russia or Nicaragua when they abandoned socialism or explain why a country with a per capita GDP as small as Cuba's can have life expectancy or infant mortality rates on par with those of the United States and other countries with highly developed capitalist economies.
All companies have to pay out dividends eventually, otherwise the price of the share would be zero (since the price of the share is basically the net present value of the the stream of expected dividends).
The value of a share of stock is whatever people will pay for it, same as everything else. There are a lot of factors going into that, but I think anyone who follows the stock market would agree that the prime determinant of a share price is far more random than the one you suggest. The amount someone will pay for stocks today is related to how likely they think it will be that the stock will be worth more tomorrow. (i.e., I'm paying $15 a share because I think I will be able to sell it for at least $16 a share sometime in the future.)
It has little or nothing to do with dividends or anything else related to how much money the company has on hand, or even whether it's turning a profit. If it had much at all to do with those factors, there would be no way to explain the share prices that dot.coms were hitting during the last decade. I don't think it was exactly a big secret that most internet firms are considered fiscally fit if they succeed in having a net profit somewhere in the area of zero.
The solid state machine won't act like faster memory, making cache misses cost less. It will act like a faster hard drive, making page faults cost less. Using this stuff as a substitute for RAM will slow down your computer unless you have it hard-wired into your system's bus in place of RAM.
Mine's not shaped exactly like the Microsoft Natural, but it does have a hump in the middle (not just a split keyboard) and I find it more comfortable. Plus, it's a full-size - no chiclet keys like on the Microsoft Natural.
got it at CompUSA, I'm sure. Maybe Microsoft forced the company to take the thing of the market.
The bastards won't be able to keep me from ripping my CD's to turn them into MP3's until they break into my home to disable the headphone jack on my stereo and the microphone jack on my computer.
One question - was your AIM login showing up in the member directory? If so, there's no proof that AOL sold your e-mail address - somebody could have just as easily written a script that scans the directory for logins and sends e-mail to all of them, or a random smattering of them.
I am using a generic ergo bump-off of the Microsoft Natural that I actually think is superior. All keys are full-size, unlike the ones M$ is sellin now, and I like that the 6 key is on the right-hand chunk of keys instead of on the left. The keys press nicely - not too stiff, not too firm, and a nice click to 'em. I can't find a manufacturer's name on it and I forgot who made it, but the bottom says, "smart keyboard" and I got it at CompUSA for 30 bucks.
No kidding. . . a simple google search found me more sites that sell 30-pin SIMMS ranging up into the megabytes range than I care to count, and I have a feeling it wouldn't take me very long to find slack 3 on a sunsite server. . .
My school is in the process of moving all programming for its CS classes back to Unix. When I asked a professor why, the answer I got was, "Frankly, trying to turn Windows into a decent educational software development platform is about as fun as jumping naked into a pit of rabid wolves."
Having tried to do some homework for advanced classes on the Win2k workstations in the computer labs, I can only agree. . . with the minimal access student accounts get on the workstations, activities as simple as getting third-party libraries to work sometimes have their difficulty ratings upgraded from "routine task" to "black art."
Out in the general populace, "programmer network admin things" might be something no-one cares about.
But this is the Linux community. Honestly, how much of the Linux user community doesn't fit the "programmer/network admin" description? 1-2%, maybe?
Every single Linux user at my school is a heavy user of X's network transparency features, and I doubt my school is all that abnormal.
Getting rid of X, no. Fork of the whole system (X version, noX version), maybe. Redesign of X to include both directfb and network transparency? great idea!
Goodness, Windows and MacOS have been using them for/years/. Why the hell hasn't the Linux community taken a hint? Every X program I run has a different dialog, the common thread among all of them being that, for the most part, they are all crappy.
A lot of spam works through taking advantage of open relays. Due to the way abusing them works, I don't think it counts as cracking the mailserver (At least I certainly hope it doesn't, that could put a real damper on my hobby of sending out crank email.)
However, using someone else's mailserver to forward your spam without that person's permission would certainly count as interfering with another's goods and chattels.
Apple didn't have a want for office applications a few years ago, and yet it still became dependent on Microsoft Office support to be a viable desktop choice in a business environment, and is rapidly becoming so at home.
Like it or not, the percentage of documents out there in Microsoft formats is rapidly reaching 100%. This isn't an issue that will just go away if firms or consumers switch office suites. And although we would love to think otherwise, StarOffice's compatibility with Office documents isn't 100%, probably isn't even serviceably good for businesses that want to run smoothly, and is and definitely not serviceably good for the majority of users out there who aren't up to speed with the world of compatibility issues.
Believe me, if it were otherwise, the college I work at would have switched over by now rather than bow down to a license change in Microsoft Office that just cost us about $50,000.
The fact of the matter is, even if the documents being produced internally aren't in office format, other firms and people are used to it. There are organizations out there that require all documents sent to them to be in Microsoft Office format. If you send them a *.rtf file, you'll get it sent right back to you. It's foolhardy to think that anyone can budge *.doc files given all the inertia they have developed.
The fact of the matter is, Apple needs Office about as much (possibly more) as it needs Internet Explorer. If businesses and schools start phasing out their Apple hardware because of office suite incompatibilities, their target market will start getting more and more used to PC's and very well may make their next computer a PC.
Using Samba to tell me whether or not I am allowed to log into a Unix box?
I doubt it. . . Samba only handles filesharing. For the NT systems, you should still be able to auth against LDAP, Samba isn't needed, and I'm not sure if it's even useful except for filesharing purposes.
Hmm. ..for just under $2k, I could get a 15" flatscreen, 800mhz G4, 256meg RAM, 60GB HD, Superdrive (w00t), Geforce 2 graphics, all running OS X.
Or, I could get a p3-700, 256meg RAM, a weak-ass graphics chipset (judging from the 4mb(!?) of VRAM, a 20GB hard drive, a 24x DVD-ROM, all running on Windows Me. No monitor included.
Looking at this stuff, most of which was created before I was born, I can't help but feel a twinge of remorse. It seems the Golden Age of computer geekdom died with the Information Age.
Things were really hopping in computers a few decades ago. The high-level-laguage, GUI's, timesharing systems, networking. . . it was all new and exciting. It seems, though, that the wave has broken. Nothing new seems to have happened since the early '90's, when the WWW was first envisioned.
I catch myself sitting in classes with other CS majors who have never really learned DOS and are awed by and afraid of OpenGL and thinking back to high school when I spent my free time programming cute little VGA hacks in x86 assembly language and can't help but feel a twinge of superiority based on some unfounded feeling that I have touched the machine itself and they have not.
Then I go to a museum like this, take a look at what my elders were working on, and realize that I am the small fish. The magi have played their part, and I have a feeling of dread that the field has more or less reached its plateau point.
The US is a bunch of weenies when it comes to big business.
We allow GM foods of shaky nutritional quality and proprietary GM seeds that wreak havok on regular crops by crossbreeding with them. The EU bans this stuff, the US says we don't even have a right to know if we're getting GM crops.
Trademark lawsuits between legal firms and individuals with the same name have shown that, in the US, you don't have the right to your own name.
Heck, we allow firms to manufacture torture devices for export.
Slashdot Mirror
The model that I would suggest is not that book value and net income determine stock price and sometimes popularity determines stock price, but that book value and net income determine popularity, which determines stock price. It just seems like a far more parsimonious model. . I guess I failed to make that point clear in my previous post.
No really. The "capitalism makes everyone do well" theory just doesn't hold water. It is true that capitalist economies have a tendency to be more efficient (note: that has NOTHING to do with equity), but the argument that capitalism feeds starving masses can't explain what happened in Russia or Nicaragua when they abandoned socialism or explain why a country with a per capita GDP as small as Cuba's can have life expectancy or infant mortality rates on par with those of the United States and other countries with highly developed capitalist economies.
All companies have to pay out dividends eventually, otherwise the price of the share would be zero (since the price of the share is basically the net present value of the the stream of expected dividends).
The value of a share of stock is whatever people will pay for it, same as everything else. There are a lot of factors going into that, but I think anyone who follows the stock market would agree that the prime determinant of a share price is far more random than the one you suggest. The amount someone will pay for stocks today is related to how likely they think it will be that the stock will be worth more tomorrow. (i.e., I'm paying $15 a share because I think I will be able to sell it for at least $16 a share sometime in the future.)
It has little or nothing to do with dividends or anything else related to how much money the company has on hand, or even whether it's turning a profit. If it had much at all to do with those factors, there would be no way to explain the share prices that dot.coms were hitting during the last decade. I don't think it was exactly a big secret that most internet firms are considered fiscally fit if they succeed in having a net profit somewhere in the area of zero.
This is about the only downside of WalMart's--the little guys can't compete with them.
That and the products made in Saipan so they can be produced in third-world sweatshops and still bear a "Made in the USA" label.
I just wish I could use my last moderation point on this article insead of a post.
ncludes a 224-gigabyte Solid State Disk (SSD) with a data transfer rate of 80 gigabytes per
second
can hold 27 copies of the Human Genome and transfer data at a rate equivalent to 100
Human Genomes per second
Ok, so can it hold more data than it can transfer in a second, or can it transfer more data in a second than it can hold? Pick one, boys.
The CPU gets stuff from the cache.
The cache gets stuff from the RAM.
The RAM gets stuff from the hard drive.
The solid state machine won't act like faster memory, making cache misses cost less. It will act like a faster hard drive, making page faults cost less. Using this stuff as a substitute for RAM will slow down your computer unless you have it hard-wired into your system's bus in place of RAM.
Mine's not shaped exactly like the Microsoft Natural, but it does have a hump in the middle (not just a split keyboard) and I find it more comfortable. Plus, it's a full-size - no chiclet keys like on the Microsoft Natural.
got it at CompUSA, I'm sure. Maybe Microsoft forced the company to take the thing of the market.
The bastards won't be able to keep me from ripping my CD's to turn them into MP3's until they break into my home to disable the headphone jack on my stereo and the microphone jack on my computer.
How stupid do they think we are?
One question - was your AIM login showing up in the member directory? If so, there's no proof that AOL sold your e-mail address - somebody could have just as easily written a script that scans the directory for logins and sends e-mail to all of them, or a random smattering of them.
I am using a generic ergo bump-off of the Microsoft Natural that I actually think is superior. All keys are full-size, unlike the ones M$ is sellin now, and I like that the 6 key is on the right-hand chunk of keys instead of on the left. The keys press nicely - not too stiff, not too firm, and a nice click to 'em.
I can't find a manufacturer's name on it and I forgot who made it, but the bottom says, "smart keyboard" and I got it at CompUSA for 30 bucks.
No kidding. . . a simple google search found me more sites that sell 30-pin SIMMS ranging up into the megabytes range than I care to count, and I have a feeling it wouldn't take me very long to find slack 3 on a sunsite server. . .
My school is in the process of moving all programming for its CS classes back to Unix. When I asked a professor why, the answer I got was, "Frankly, trying to turn Windows into a decent educational software development platform is about as fun as jumping naked into a pit of rabid wolves."
Having tried to do some homework for advanced classes on the Win2k workstations in the computer labs, I can only agree. . . with the minimal access student accounts get on the workstations, activities as simple as getting third-party libraries to work sometimes have their difficulty ratings upgraded from "routine task" to "black art."
Out in the general populace, "programmer network admin things" might be something no-one cares about.
But this is the Linux community. Honestly, how much of the Linux user community doesn't fit the "programmer/network admin" description? 1-2%, maybe?
Every single Linux user at my school is a heavy user of X's network transparency features, and I doubt my school is all that abnormal.
Getting rid of X, no. Fork of the whole system (X version, noX version), maybe. Redesign of X to include both directfb and network transparency? great idea!
Goodness, Windows and MacOS have been using them for /years/. Why the hell hasn't the Linux community taken a hint? Every X program I run has a different dialog, the common thread among all of them being that, for the most part, they are all crappy.
I can't see any downsides. More computrons, faster brewing. Everyone's happy.
Wow, I could make an entire living out of parking illegally and suing cops who ticket me with this law.
A lot of spam works through taking advantage of open relays. Due to the way abusing them works, I don't think it counts as cracking the mailserver (At least I certainly hope it doesn't, that could put a real damper on my hobby of sending out crank email.)
However, using someone else's mailserver to forward your spam without that person's permission would certainly count as interfering with another's goods and chattels.
Apple didn't have a want for office applications a few years ago, and yet it still became dependent on Microsoft Office support to be a viable desktop choice in a business environment, and is rapidly becoming so at home.
Like it or not, the percentage of documents out there in Microsoft formats is rapidly reaching 100%. This isn't an issue that will just go away if firms or consumers switch office suites. And although we would love to think otherwise, StarOffice's compatibility with Office documents isn't 100%, probably isn't even serviceably good for businesses that want to run smoothly, and is and definitely not serviceably good for the majority of users out there who aren't up to speed with the world of compatibility issues.
Believe me, if it were otherwise, the college I work at would have switched over by now rather than bow down to a license change in Microsoft Office that just cost us about $50,000.
The fact of the matter is, even if the documents being produced internally aren't in office format, other firms and people are used to it. There are organizations out there that require all documents sent to them to be in Microsoft Office format. If you send them a *.rtf file, you'll get it sent right back to you. It's foolhardy to think that anyone can budge *.doc files given all the inertia they have developed.
The fact of the matter is, Apple needs Office about as much (possibly more) as it needs Internet Explorer. If businesses and schools start phasing out their Apple hardware because of office suite incompatibilities, their target market will start getting more and more used to PC's and very well may make their next computer a PC.
Using Samba to tell me whether or not I am allowed to log into a Unix box?
I doubt it. . . Samba only handles filesharing. For the NT systems, you should still be able to auth against LDAP, Samba isn't needed, and I'm not sure if it's even useful except for filesharing purposes.
Hmm. . .for just under $2k, I could get a 15" flatscreen, 800mhz G4, 256meg RAM, 60GB HD, Superdrive (w00t), Geforce 2 graphics, all running OS X.
Or, I could get a p3-700, 256meg RAM, a weak-ass graphics chipset (judging from the 4mb(!?) of VRAM, a 20GB hard drive, a 24x DVD-ROM, all running on Windows Me. No monitor included.
Hmm. . . this is gonna be a hard one. . .
I doubt this project is going to succeed, and, if it does, I doubt even more that it will be able to keep up.
If you REALLY want games for your system of choice, try voting w/ your money
Viruses usually work as intended.
Given the price of Microsoft tech support, I'm inclined to think that the sad truth is that Microsoft products really do work as intended.
Looking at this stuff, most of which was created before I was born, I can't help but feel a twinge of remorse. It seems the Golden Age of computer geekdom died with the Information Age.
Things were really hopping in computers a few decades ago. The high-level-laguage, GUI's, timesharing systems, networking. . . it was all new and exciting. It seems, though, that the wave has broken. Nothing new seems to have happened since the early '90's, when the WWW was first envisioned.
I catch myself sitting in classes with other CS majors who have never really learned DOS and are awed by and afraid of OpenGL and thinking back to high school when I spent my free time programming cute little VGA hacks in x86 assembly language and can't help but feel a twinge of superiority based on some unfounded feeling that I have touched the machine itself and they have not.
Then I go to a museum like this, take a look at what my elders were working on, and realize that I am the small fish. The magi have played their part, and I have a feeling of dread that the field has more or less reached its plateau point.
The US is a bunch of weenies when it comes to big business.
We allow GM foods of shaky nutritional quality and proprietary GM seeds that wreak havok on regular crops by crossbreeding with them. The EU bans this stuff, the US says we don't even have a right to know if we're getting GM crops.
Trademark lawsuits between legal firms and individuals with the same name have shown that, in the US, you don't have the right to your own name.
Heck, we allow firms to manufacture torture devices for export.
Why not let M$ run amok, too?