The valuation of a pre-market company is biased. I am surprised this is not more widely known.
Ordinarily, (and according to all the market analysts at the WSJ and elsewhere), a "valuation" is performed by market-driven factors when an equity interest is purchased in an arms-length transaction. The calculation of valuation is easy: If you buy 1% of the company for X, then the company must be worth 100X, right? Here, Goldman bought 0.9% of FB for $450M, creating a valuation of $450M/0.009 = $50B.
Wrong. It's not an arms-length transaction. Goldman is getting a lot of value out of the deal aside from the value it expects to earn purely as a shareholder.
(1) Goldman is setting itself up to be the underwriter for Facebook's IPO. That's worth a lot.
(2) Goldman is getting a lot of press, advertising, good will, bragging rights, etc. That's worth a lot.
(3) Goldman may get other business opportunities associated with Facebook such as contacts, financial services for FB & related companies & executives, a potential talent pool for ppl looking to jump ship (esp. at executive level?), etc.
If Goldman put a value of $441 million on all those "extras", the intrinsic amount paid for the 0.9% stake in FB is only $9M, putting Goldman's valuation of FB at a measly $1B.
Looks a lot different now, doesn't it? That Goldman's "internal" valuation of FB must be so different from the "external" market valuation just goes to show you how ignorant most financial types (and reporters) are.
The reported valuation (or any valuation based on an investment) is only accurate if you know the full extent of what was purchased.
I also have mod points and would love to mod you down, because education at this point is probably futile. There is a subtlety to understanding the nature of the universe that is difficult if not impossible to explain to the layman. But I will try.
Your reasoning is subtly but fundamentally flawed. Yet as with all subtlties, pinpointing the exact nature of the flaw is difficult without having a back-and-forth conversation.
You are right on target with respect to Ohm's law and Hooke's law -- but quite off base with your general assertion. The deep laws of physics *are* eerily symmetric, independent of our need to describe them so.
For example, the inverse-square law of gravity or electromagnetism can be derived as a consequence of living in a 3-dimensional universe. (Integrate your favorite conserved quantity over concentric spherical surfaces and you get something that must "fan out" as 1/r^2). Nothing very suprising there. Nevertheless the deeper into exploration of physical laws you get, the more surprising interconnections pop up independent of our need to observe them.
Your assertion that "momentum" is simply a convenient and observed quantity is both false and misleading. "Momentum" is a fundamental quantity that relates directly and... well, fundamentally to the nature of energy, space, time, et cetera. It is particularly noteworthy that the nature of space and momentum should relate to our perception of time -- a property/dimension/quality which is quite distinct from all others in its one-way observable nature. The laws of "physics" seem to be time-invariant, yet the laws of "thermodynamics" which are equally fundamental seem to recognize that time is somehow special.
Thus, it is misleading to imply that our physical laws are simple and elegant because we have simple and elegant requirements to describe the universe. An accurate description of the universe need not be simple -- and often it is not. For instance, I understand (although lack the mathematical sophistication to prove) that the electron spin g-factor has a theoretical value of exactly 2. Yet it is observed to be approximately 2.00232 and is one of the most precisely measured physical constants. So it is not always simple truth and beauty. Which makes it all the more surprising when the simplicity is there nevertheless.
And while it is true that the inverse-square law breaks down at relativistic energies, even that corrective factor of "gamma" remains mathematically simple, and in fact geometrically constructable via a pythagorean triangle analysis of a certain thought-experiment.
My point is that the easy examples are easily explained away by laymen, yet the surprisingly simple nature of the fundamental laws of the universe continue to pop up where you wouldn't expect. That is why expert scientists, true geniuses, of the sort that don't come along every day, routinely make comments about the "beauty" of physics. They have a deep understanding and "feeling" about the way the universe fits together that isn't captured by your example about momentum.
Just for the record, anti-matter is real, has mass, kinetic energy, et cetera, is affected by gravity, and is all around us. Lots of antimatter particles are created in nuclear reactions, and also naturally when radioactive elements decay. It's really not that weird. The only thing that is a little odd about it is that when antielectrons or antiprotons get together, they create (pairs of) photons. But on the other hand, a photon can create a matter-antimatter pair of particles also.
Dark matter, for the most part, is anything that is not a big ball of glowing hydrogen. The earth is not a big ball of glowing hydrogen, so much of what you know is ordinary "dark matter". The issue is that most of the mass of the universe *ought* to be concentrated in big balls of glowing hydrogen, yet galactic rotation rates and other observations predicated on the laws of physics as we know them imply that there is more out there than these big balls of glowing hydrogen. So what is the nature of all that non-hydrogen? That is a bit of a puzzle to physicists.
But "phantom matter" -- matter that is repelled by other matter (anti-gravity) --? That is just plain imaginary nonsense. Like asking what happens if you can travel faster than light, or if you can turn time around. In fact, all three of these concepts may in fact be the same idea in different aspects.
I'll be the first to admit that the laws of physics may not be the same everywhere (or everywhen) in the universe, but what exactly is even *meant* by a "connection to another universe"? If you can (even just theoretically) observe it, then it's within this universe, by definition, no?
Oh, and before someone points this out for me, you have to imagine that the routing requirements are VASTLY improved. Imagine a grid of ALU's each connected by a single bus, (simple,) rather than 128 bypass busses all multiplexed in to each ALU. (chaos! don't forget the MUX logic!) You map one instruction to one (virtual) ALU, rather than one result to a (virtual) register. Then you pipeline/march each instruction with its partial data down the grid until all the inputs come in. Instructions continually cascade in the top of the grid, and commit out the bottom. But their results are available to feed other instructions as soon as they are computed! Never have to wait for a MUX or a bus or what-have-you. Plus, you can clock the whole thing EXTREMELY fast, because you don't have these wire-delays from difficult routing requirements.
The big thing that all the commenters have missed that I've read so far is the fact that OOO execution is difficult not because it's hard to make many ALU's on a chip (vector design, anyone?) but because in a general-purpose processor the register file and routing complexity grows as N^2 in the number of units. That's bad. Every unit has to communicate with every other unit (via the register file or, more commonly, via bypasses to an OOO buffer for every stage prior to writeback). The issue being addressed here is wiring complexity which, as modern designers would tell you, is a much harder problem than designing fast logic. Routing is hard. Plunking down more ALU's is easy. If you eliminate the register file, and design your processor and ISA to feed instructions in a data-flow manner to thousands of ALU's then you may be able to vastly simplify routing requirements, thereby decreasing the length of your critical path electrical circuits, thereby allowing the processor to clock faster. (Data-flow execution is executing instructions when their data inputs are ready, rather than tracking the compiler-optimized order, which does not have the run-time information that the hardware has.) If you are clever about your compiler, and make your hardware wide enough, you can for example speculatively execute both sides of a branch until it is resolved, thus eliminating a certain percentage of pipeline stalls for branch mispredicts. Similarly, with data-prediction you can speculate during cache misses. The list goes on. This is a very new and different paradigm (ugly word) for CPUs which may lead to higher IPC. This isn't the single golden goose, but it's a very different way of looking at the problem of pushing more instructions through a processor at higher speeds.
Slashdot Mirror
Ordinarily, (and according to all the market analysts at the WSJ and elsewhere), a "valuation" is performed by market-driven factors when an equity interest is purchased in an arms-length transaction. The calculation of valuation is easy: If you buy 1% of the company for X, then the company must be worth 100X, right? Here, Goldman bought 0.9% of FB for $450M, creating a valuation of $450M/0.009 = $50B.
Wrong. It's not an arms-length transaction. Goldman is getting a lot of value out of the deal aside from the value it expects to earn purely as a shareholder.
(1) Goldman is setting itself up to be the underwriter for Facebook's IPO. That's worth a lot.
(2) Goldman is getting a lot of press, advertising, good will, bragging rights, etc. That's worth a lot.
(3) Goldman may get other business opportunities associated with Facebook such as contacts, financial services for FB & related companies & executives, a potential talent pool for ppl looking to jump ship (esp. at executive level?), etc.
If Goldman put a value of $441 million on all those "extras", the intrinsic amount paid for the 0.9% stake in FB is only $9M, putting Goldman's valuation of FB at a measly $1B.
Looks a lot different now, doesn't it? That Goldman's "internal" valuation of FB must be so different from the "external" market valuation just goes to show you how ignorant most financial types (and reporters) are.
The reported valuation (or any valuation based on an investment) is only accurate if you know the full extent of what was purchased.
Your reasoning is subtly but fundamentally flawed. Yet as with all subtlties, pinpointing the exact nature of the flaw is difficult without having a back-and-forth conversation.
You are right on target with respect to Ohm's law and Hooke's law -- but quite off base with your general assertion. The deep laws of physics *are* eerily symmetric, independent of our need to describe them so.
For example, the inverse-square law of gravity or electromagnetism can be derived as a consequence of living in a 3-dimensional universe. (Integrate your favorite conserved quantity over concentric spherical surfaces and you get something that must "fan out" as 1/r^2). Nothing very suprising there. Nevertheless the deeper into exploration of physical laws you get, the more surprising interconnections pop up independent of our need to observe them.
Your assertion that "momentum" is simply a convenient and observed quantity is both false and misleading. "Momentum" is a fundamental quantity that relates directly and ... well, fundamentally to the nature of energy, space, time, et cetera. It is particularly noteworthy that the nature of space and momentum should relate to our perception of time -- a property/dimension/quality which is quite distinct from all others in its one-way observable nature. The laws of "physics" seem to be time-invariant, yet the laws of "thermodynamics" which are equally fundamental seem to recognize that time is somehow special.
Thus, it is misleading to imply that our physical laws are simple and elegant because we have simple and elegant requirements to describe the universe. An accurate description of the universe need not be simple -- and often it is not. For instance, I understand (although lack the mathematical sophistication to prove) that the electron spin g-factor has a theoretical value of exactly 2. Yet it is observed to be approximately 2.00232 and is one of the most precisely measured physical constants. So it is not always simple truth and beauty. Which makes it all the more surprising when the simplicity is there nevertheless.
And while it is true that the inverse-square law breaks down at relativistic energies, even that corrective factor of "gamma" remains mathematically simple, and in fact geometrically constructable via a pythagorean triangle analysis of a certain thought-experiment.
My point is that the easy examples are easily explained away by laymen, yet the surprisingly simple nature of the fundamental laws of the universe continue to pop up where you wouldn't expect. That is why expert scientists, true geniuses, of the sort that don't come along every day, routinely make comments about the "beauty" of physics. They have a deep understanding and "feeling" about the way the universe fits together that isn't captured by your example about momentum.
Dark matter, for the most part, is anything that is not a big ball of glowing hydrogen. The earth is not a big ball of glowing hydrogen, so much of what you know is ordinary "dark matter". The issue is that most of the mass of the universe *ought* to be concentrated in big balls of glowing hydrogen, yet galactic rotation rates and other observations predicated on the laws of physics as we know them imply that there is more out there than these big balls of glowing hydrogen. So what is the nature of all that non-hydrogen? That is a bit of a puzzle to physicists.
But "phantom matter" -- matter that is repelled by other matter (anti-gravity) --? That is just plain imaginary nonsense. Like asking what happens if you can travel faster than light, or if you can turn time around. In fact, all three of these concepts may in fact be the same idea in different aspects.
I'll be the first to admit that the laws of physics may not be the same everywhere (or everywhen) in the universe, but what exactly is even *meant* by a "connection to another universe"? If you can (even just theoretically) observe it, then it's within this universe, by definition, no?
Oh, and before someone points this out for me, you have to imagine that the routing requirements are VASTLY improved. Imagine a grid of ALU's each connected by a single bus, (simple,) rather than 128 bypass busses all multiplexed in to each ALU. (chaos! don't forget the MUX logic!) You map one instruction to one (virtual) ALU, rather than one result to a (virtual) register. Then you pipeline/march each instruction with its partial data down the grid until all the inputs come in. Instructions continually cascade in the top of the grid, and commit out the bottom. But their results are available to feed other instructions as soon as they are computed! Never have to wait for a MUX or a bus or what-have-you. Plus, you can clock the whole thing EXTREMELY fast, because you don't have these wire-delays from difficult routing requirements.
The big thing that all the commenters have missed that I've read so far is the fact that OOO execution is difficult not because it's hard to make many ALU's on a chip (vector design, anyone?) but because in a general-purpose processor the register file and routing complexity grows as N^2 in the number of units. That's bad. Every unit has to communicate with every other unit (via the register file or, more commonly, via bypasses to an OOO buffer for every stage prior to writeback). The issue being addressed here is wiring complexity which, as modern designers would tell you, is a much harder problem than designing fast logic. Routing is hard. Plunking down more ALU's is easy. If you eliminate the register file, and design your processor and ISA to feed instructions in a data-flow manner to thousands of ALU's then you may be able to vastly simplify routing requirements, thereby decreasing the length of your critical path electrical circuits, thereby allowing the processor to clock faster. (Data-flow execution is executing instructions when their data inputs are ready, rather than tracking the compiler-optimized order, which does not have the run-time information that the hardware has.) If you are clever about your compiler, and make your hardware wide enough, you can for example speculatively execute both sides of a branch until it is resolved, thus eliminating a certain percentage of pipeline stalls for branch mispredicts. Similarly, with data-prediction you can speculate during cache misses. The list goes on. This is a very new and different paradigm (ugly word) for CPUs which may lead to higher IPC. This isn't the single golden goose, but it's a very different way of looking at the problem of pushing more instructions through a processor at higher speeds.