Saturday, July 23, 2005
Another tech-stocks bubble?
 | |
MARKETS like these need heroes, and Google is the closest thing they’ve got. With most share prices stuck in the mud until recently, Google’s has shot up by 60% this year alone, nearly quadrupling since the firm went public last August (see chart below).
Why? Investors with more dollars than sense are desperate to find something promising juicy returns. Google is too new to have burned buyers in the last dotcom downturn. And it has a plausible tale to tell. To hear the techie analysts sell it, prospects for online sales and advertising, especially the sort of paid keyword-search business that Google has perfected, are virtually limitless.
Yahoo!, Google’s rival in the search business, was the first of the big four internet firms to report second-quarter results. On Tuesday the firm announced revenues, net of commission to marketing partners, that were 44% higher than the same quarter a year earlier. Profit grew more than sixfold but most of it came from the sale of an unidentified investment (could it be Yahoo!’s shares in Google?). Investors reacted by “taking profits”—ie, dumping Yahoo! shares in after-hours trading.
The 53% increase in second-quarter profits and 40% rise in revenues reported on Wednesday by eBay, an online auction house, were better received. The figures exceeded expectations and eased worries that eBay's precipitous growth might be fizzling out.
To keep its share price above the $300 mark that it first achieved last month, Google needed to trump its two rivals when it announced its results on Thursday July 21st. On the face of it, they were pretty good: second-quarter profits more than quadrupled to $343m, on almost doubled revenues of $1.38 billion. Google's shares duly closed at a new record of just under $314 on Nasdaq. However, they then plunged below the $300 mark in after-hours trading, on worries that Google's rise may be running out of steam. The firm's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, admitted that revenue growth may not be so impressive in the current quarter.
The last of the four internet giants, Amazon, an online retailer, reveals its results next week. All have their fans. But it is Google that produces the acid burn. Now, Buttonwood likes a hero as much as the next hackette (and confesses to watching “The Last of the Mohicans”, ostensibly with her daughters, at least once every six months). She has approached the internet yarn with a fresh eye, determined to let bygone busts be bygone. And valuations are, in fact, better founded than many of them used to be.
But around 50 times next year's expected profits is still quite a leap of faith. At the levels seen in recent days, the price of Google's traded shares implies that it is the world's most valuable media company, with a market cap comfortably in excess of Time Warner's $76 billion—even though the latter had $42 billion in sales last year to Google’s $3.2 billion. True, Time Warner‘s business is increasing at a snail’s pace compared with Google’s. But putting so high a price on future growth only makes sense if all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds. And it isn’t. There are a lot of unknowns, plus some knowable storm clouds rolling in.
The arguments for these high valuations (and Yahoo!, at around 60 times expected profits is right up there too) all boil down to one: the growth in internet firms’ business reflects a secular shift that is broadly impervious to economic cycles and has a long way to run.
 | |
More people are gaining access to the internet, and specifically to broadband, to which about a third of American households, for example, are now hooked up. They spend more time—and money—online than dial-up peons. Sales on the internet grew by almost a quarter last year, and have been doing so at a similar clip since 2001. Even so they account for only a small fraction of American retail sales.
Meanwhile, on the marketing side a big gap has opened up between the proportion of their media time that people spend online (almost 35% in America, on figures from Forrester Research, an independent firm) and the percentage of ad spending devoted to the internet (about 6%). That void cries out to be filled. Internet advertising in America grew to about $12 billion in 2004 as a bouncing economy boosted all advertising and firms warmed to the web. Forrester expects it to increase by some 23% in 2005 and then to taper off to single-digit growth by 2010. Search-engine marketing, Google’s speciality, will see the fastest growth.
Add in abroad, where the business is growing twice as fast as in America, and the picture is rosier still. About half of the revenues of eBay and Amazon, along with two-fifths of Google’s and more than a quarter of Yahoo!’s, come from outside the United States. Mike Mahaney, an analyst at Smith Barney, reckons that if these patterns continue, and neither Google nor Yahoo! loses market share, their revenues should keep growing for quite a while at 25-30% annually. His estimate that Google’s shares will hit $360 in 12 months’ time is on the high side but it looks less outlandish all the time.
Now for the cold water. The internet’s growth is slowing markedly: most people in industrialised countries have access now, so just adding users is not the source of growth that it was. Broadband is increasing the value of the net as an advertising medium. But the growth rate of broadband connection is slowing too–not just in America but most places.
Another negative—who knows yet how important it will prove—is that a bit of a backlash against the net is setting in along with viruses and other malware, points out Fred Hickey, the editor of High-Tech Strategist, a newsletter. Independent research firms have found that people are increasingly unwilling to give their details online: Gartner found that of the roughly 30% of a survey sample who bank online, three-quarters were logging in less frequently than before, and nearly 14% of them had stopped paying bills online; Financial Insights found that 18% of internet users had stopped shopping online for fear of identity fraud; Jupiter Research found that even online dating is down, at least in America.
 |  When investors start focusing on a few get-rich-quick stocks, it is a sign that the bull market is about to turn...you have been warned |
Then there is competition. Barriers to entry in internet businesses are low, as Amazon’s slipping market share testifies. Yahoo! is trying to improve its search system to challenge Google in paid search ads, and Microsoft has entered the game too. And as Google, sensibly, also expands from its original business, it is running into higher costs and hostility. Its move into video search, especially, has ruffled the feathers of those providers whose content it blithely skimmed without asking first.
A bigger risk to Google even than competition is that of an economic downturn. For the more internet businesses grow, increasing their share of the wider market, the more cyclical they become, and this is something that its share price fails totally to reflect. America’s economy refuses to lie down, for the moment, but there are plenty of reasons to think it will. When it does, internet business will dwindle too, and the shooting-star stocks with it. After all, it has happened before.
At the end of the day, most people buy Google less from some rational assessment of the future of the internet than because they think “they can’t not be in it. There’s nothing else out there when the price is rising so fast,” says Fred Hickey.
Paul Desmond, the president of Lowry’s Reports, has a theory about this. Lowry’s is an old investor-advisory firm that has tracked supply and demand in individual firms’ shares for almost 70 years and is big on the cyclical ebb and flow of investor sentiment. Investors move from complete abandonment of the stockmarket at a major market bottom like March 2003, then gradually through a period of increasing confidence until they get to a point where greed really sets in, he says. When they start focusing on a relatively small number of get-rich-quick stocks, it is a sign that the bull market is about to turn. There is incredible buying strength behind Google right now, according to Mr Desmond. The bull is not nearly on its knees yet, but “we’re seeing a warm-up of that with Google,” he says. You have been warned.
source:http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?story_id=4194964&fsrc=slashdot.org
Google Launches Scholar Beta
source:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/23/1619231&tid=217&tid=95
TSA Violated Privacy Act
source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/23/1339252&tid=158&tid=103
Microsoft Frowned at for Smiley Patent
source:http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/23/138228&tid=155&tid=109
Spam Haters Given Right of Reply
Robots to offer Japan's elderly new lease on life
Researchers work to develop ultimate personal care givers for seniors
TOKYO - They won’t be leaping tall buildings in a single bound, but Japan’s growing number of elderly may someday have a new lease on life that allows them to care for themselves — and maybe even pump a little iron.
As the country’s population ages rapidly and its workforce shrinks, care workers may be hard to come by, so researchers are trying to develop the ultimate personal care givers: robots.
“Unlike the United States or Europe, Japan is reluctant to allow in cheap foreign laborers,” said Takashi Gomi, president of Canada-based Applied AI Systems Inc., whose company has developed a prototype of an “intelligent” wheelchair that can move around on its own and sense obstacles to avoid them.
“I don’t think this will change easily in the next 20 to 30 years, so robots are about the only solution,” said Gomi, a Canadian researcher born in Japan.
Mechanical helpers
Right now, most robots are used in factories. But many Japanese researchers have begun developing mechanical helpers for use in homes, offices, hospitals and nursing facilities.
Turning to robots makes economic sense.
A government report said in May that annual demand for non-factory “service robots” may reach 1.1 trillion yen ($9.75 billion) in 2015, when one in four Japanese is expected to be 65 or older.
Yoshiyuki Sankai is among those who see robots as the future of elderly health care.
A researcher at Japan’s University of Tsukuba, Sankai has developed a robotic suit designed to make it easier for elderly people with weak muscles to move around or for care-givers to lift them.
The sleek, high-tech get-up looks like a white suit of armor. It straps onto a person’s arms, legs and back and is equipped with a computer, motors and sensors that detect electric nerve signals transmitted from the brain when a person tries to move his limbs.
When the sensors detect the nerve signals, the computer starts up the relevant motors to assist the person’s motions.
Sankai says the suit, dubbed “Hybrid Assistive Limb (HAL) 5,” can let a person who can barely do an 176-pound leg press handle 397 pounds.
“The big goal is to expand or strengthen the physical capability of humans,” said Sankai, who set up a venture firm last year to market the robot suit and plans to start leasing HAL-5 to the elderly and disabled in Japan this year.
Expensive care
Japan may face a shortage of young workers but it has an abundance of robots.
It was home to 44 percent of the nearly 801,000 industrial robots around the world at the end of 2003.
Although the market for “rehabilitation robots” — those aimed at assisting the elderly or disabled — is still in its infancy, they are gradually coming into use.
Yaskawa Electric Corp., a leading industrial robot maker, has been selling a rehabilitation robot since 2000, says Hidenori Tomisaki, a manager at Yaskawa’s medical and assistive technology group.
Its bedside robot assists the physical therapy of patients recovering from strokes or artificial knee replacement surgery, helping them move their legs with its mechanical arm.
“Some patients become worried or feel pain unless such exercises are conducted at a consistent speed,” Tomisaki said.
Demand, however, has been limited, due partly to the cost.
The newest version, TEM LX2, is priced around 3.8 million yen, or well over $30,000. Only five to six units have been sold per year since 2003.
Shall we dance?
Costs may eventually come down. Developing robots that react to people’s whims is another matter.
Robot gurus at Tohoku University and Nomura Unison Co. Ltd, an industrial machinery maker, say the key is to equip robots with the ability to detect intent or action.
That’s what they had in mind when developing a “Partner Ballroom Dance Robot” that can dance a waltz.
The 5-foot-5-inch, 220-pound robot looks like a woman in a dress and can execute five types of dance steps to match the moves of a human dance partner.
It accomplishes this with a sensor that detects the force being applied to it by the human dancer and gauging how the person wants to dance based on such signals.
“We think that in the future, this technology can be applied to various areas including helping care for the elderly ... and for cooperation between humans and robots,” said Minoru Nomura, president of Nomura Unison.
Naoki Tanaka, managing director of Network Center for Human Service Association, a non-profit network of groups involved in elderly care, says some of the people he works with may even prefer robots to humans when it comes to their care.
“There are people who say they would rather have a robot help them take a bath than rely on help from another person,” he said.
Google Offers Hybrid Satellite and Map View
source:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/23/0237251&tid=217&tid=1
Why I Hate the Apache Web Server
source:http://apache.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/22/2159253&tid=133&tid=2
The Basics of RAID
The word RAID sounds like it might describe something Marines conduct in Fallujah, or a can of what all roaches fear, but it is simply an acronym that stands for Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks. Depending on who you talk to, the letter “I” can stand for either independent or inexpensive, but in my opinion independent is more appropriate, and far less subjective.
RAID generally allows data to be written to multiple hard disk drives so that a failure of any one drive in the array does not result in the loss of any data, as well as increasing the system’s fault tolerance. I say RAID generally does this, as there are several RAID configurations that provide different approaches to redundancy, but some RAID configurations are not redundant at all. Fault tolerance refers to a system’s ability to continue operating when presented with a hardware (or software) failure, as should be experienced when a hard drive fails in one of the redundant configurations of RAID.
The Hardware
The basic hardware required to run RAID includes a set of matched hard drives and a RAID controller.
RAID can be run on any type of hard drive, including SCSI, SATA, and ATA. The number of hard drives required is dependent on the particular RAID configuration chosen, as described later. I mention the need for matched hard drives, and although this is not absolutely necessary, it is recommended. Most arrays will only be able to use the capacity of the smallest drive, so if a 160GB Seagate drive is added to a RAID configuration with an 40GB Seagate drive, that extra 120GB would probably go to waste. The only time that this doesn’t apply is in a RAID configuration called JBOD, and we'll touch on that later. In addition to matching capacities, it is highly recommended that drives match in terms of speed and transfer rate as the performance of the array would be restricted by the weakest drive used. One more area that should be considered while matching is the type of hard drive. RAID controllers are generally for either SCSI, SATA, or ATA exclusively, although some systems allow RAID arrays to be operated across controllers of different formats.
The RAID controller is where the data cables from the hard drives are connected, and conducts all of the processing of the data, like the typical drive connections found on a motherboard. RAID controllers are available as add on cards, such as this Silicon Image PCI ATA RAID controller, or integrated into motherboards, such as the SATA RAID controller found on the Chaintech VNF4 Athlon 64 Socket 939. Motherboards that include RAID controllers can be operated without the use of RAID, but the integration is a nice feature to have if RAID is a consideration. Even for systems without onboard RAID, the relatively low cost of add on cards makes this part of the upgrade relatively pain free.
Another piece of hardware that is not required, but may prove useful in a RAID array is a hot swappable drive bay. It allows a failed hard drive to be removed from a live system by simply unlocking the bay and sliding the drive cage out of the case. A new drive can then be slid in, locked into place, and the system won’t skip a beat. This is typically seen on SCSI RAID arrays, but some IDE RAID cards will also allow this using something like this product.
The Software
RAID can be run on any modern operating system provided that the appropriate drivers are available from the RAID controller’s manufacturer. A computer with the operating system and all of the software already installed on one drive can be easily be cloned to another single drive by using software like Norton Ghost. But it is not as easy when going to RAID, as a user who wants to have their existing system with a single bootable hard drive upgraded to RAID must start from the beginning. This implies that the operating system and all software needs to be re-installed from scratch, and all key data must be backed up to be restored on the new RAID array.
If a RAID array is desired in a system for use as storage, but not as the location for the operating system, things get much easier. The existing hard drive can remain intact, and the necessary configuration can be made to add the RAID array without starting from scratch.
Basic RAID Configurations
There are about a dozen different types of RAID that I know of, and I will describe five of the more typical configurations, and usually offered on RAID controller cards.
RAID 0:
RAID 0 is one of the configurations that does not provide redundancy, making it arguably not a true RAID array. Using at least two disks, RAID 0 writes data to the two drives in an alternating fashion, referred to as striping. If you had 8 chunks of data, for example, chunk 1, 3, 5, and 7 would be written to the first drive, and chunk 2, 4, 6, and 8 would be written to the second drive, but all in sequential order. This process of splitting the data across drives allows for a theoretical performance boost of up to double the speed of a single hard drive, but real world results will generally not be nearly that good. Since all data is not written to each disk, the failure of any one drive in the array generally results in a complete loss of data. RAID 0 is good for people who need to access large files quickly, or just demand high performance across the board (i.e. gaming systems). The capacity of a RAID 0 array is equal to the sum of the individual drives. So, if two 160GB Seagate drives were in a RAID 0 array, the total capacity would be 320GB.
RAID 1:
RAID 1 is one of the most basic arrays that provides redundancy. Using at least two hard drives, all data is written to both drives in a method referred to as mirroring. Each drive’s contents are identical to each other, so if one drive fails, the system could continue operating on the remaining good drive, making it an ideal choice for those who value their data. There is no performance increase as in RAID 0, and in fact there may be a slight decrease compared to a single drive system as the data is processed and written to both drives. The capacity of a RAID 1 array is equal to half the capacity of the sum of individual drives. Using those same two 160GB Seagate drives from above in RAID 1 would result in a total capacity of 160GB.
RAID 0+1:
RAID 0+1, as the name may imply, is a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1. You have the best of both worlds, the performance boost of RAID 0 and the redundancy of RAID 1. A minimum of four drives is required to implement RAID 0+1, where all data is written in both a mirrored and striped fashion to the four drives. Using the 8 chunks of data from the example above, the write pattern would be something like this… Chunks 1, 3, 5, and 7 would be written to drives one and three, and chunks 2, 4, 6, and 8 would be written to drives two and four, again in a sequential manner. If one drive should fail, the system and data are still intact. The capacity of a RAID 0+1 array is equal to half the total capacity of the individual drives. So, using four of the 160 GB Seagate drives results in a total capacity of 320GB when configured in RAID 0+1.
RAID 5:
RAID 5 may be the most powerful RAID configuration for the typical user, with three (or five) disks required. Data is striped across all drives in the array, and in addition, parity information is striped as well. This parity information is basically a check on the data being written, so even though all data is not being written to all the drives in the array, the parity information can be used to reconstruct a lost drive in case of failure. Perhaps a bit difficult to describe, so let’s go back to the example of the 8 chunks of data now being written to 3 drives in a RAID 5 array. Chunks one and two would be written to drive one and two respectively, with a corresponding parity chunk being written to drive three. Chunks three and four would then be written to drives one and three respectively, with the corresponding parity chunk being written to drive two. Chunks five and six would be written to drives two and three, with the corresponding parity chunk being written to drive one. Chunks seven and eight take us back to the beginning with the data being written to drives one and two, and the parity chunk being written to drive three. It might not sound like it, but due to the parity information being written to the drive not containing that specific bits of information, there is full redundancy. The capacity of a RAID 5 array is equal to the sum of the capacities of all the drives used, minus one drive. So, using three of the 160GB Seagate drives, the total capacity is 320GB when configured in RAID 5.
JBOD:
JBOD is another non-redundant configuration, which does not really offer a true RAID array. JBOD stands for Just a Bunch Of Disks (or Drives), and that is basically all that it is. RAID controllers that support JBOD allow users to ignore the RAID functions available and simply attach drives as they would to a standard drive controller. No redundancy, no performance boost, just additional connections for adding more drives to a system. A smart thing that JBOD does is that it can treat the odd sized drives as if they are a single volume (thus a 10GB drive and a 30GB would be seen as a single 40GB drive), so it is good to use if you have a bunch of odd sized drives sitting around – but otherwise it is better to go with a RAID 0, 1 or 0+1 configuration to get the performance boost, redundancy or both.
Final Words
Implementing RAID may sound daunting to those unfamiliar with the concept, but with some of the more basic configurations it is not much more involved than setting up a computer to use a standard drive controller. But, the benefits of RAID over a single drive system far outweigh the extra consideration required during installation. Losing data once due to hard drive failure may be all that is required to convince anyone that RAID is right for them, but why wait until that happens.
source:http://www.btxformfactor.info/index.php?file=Article%207%20Page%201
IM someone: the online popularity test
New AOL feature turns buddy lists into a social pecking order
WASHINGTON - If all of life is like high school, at last we have the answer to the question that goes to the core of our id-driven, zit-popping, green-eyed insecurity:
Are you more popular, at this very second, than the person who's instant-messaging you?
Instant messaging, you will know, is the way tens of millions of Americans connect with their buddies faster than e-mail. Beginning this week, the 50 million users of AIM, America Online's version of instant messaging -- including nearly half of all Americans between the ages of 13 and 25 -- could perform a self-esteem check by visiting http://www.aimfight.com . There you enter your AOL or AIM screen name and your friend's AOL or AIM screen name. Then you click "fight" to figure out who's got a bigger score -- as in who's better connected and more popular. You can almost hear the tap-tap-tapping on the keyboards right now.
Your popularity is based on who has you on their buddy list. There's a complicated algorithm at work here. Your score is measured to the third degree, in the sense of the "six degrees of separation" game that seeks to link anybody on Earth to any other person through no more than five friends.
Say a couple of your friends, A and B, have you on their buddy lists. A, who has three people on her buddy list, doesn't add much to your score. That's because she doesn't have as many people on her buddy list as does B, who has 16. Your friend A is clearly not as well-connected as your friend B.
Not unlike life.
New measure of vanity
Online popularity is the state-of-the-art measure of vanity. There are several thriving communities that trade on how linked-up you are. They include the Facebook ( http://www.thefacebook.com ), an interactive yearbook that aims at the college crowd; Friendster ( http://www.friendster.com ), a more general place, like a downtown bar, to meet friends, co-workers and strangers; and MySpace ( http://www.myspace.com ), a do-it-yourself, all-around-service where you can blog, post pictures, etc.
Never mind that Yogi Berra once said that "anyone who is popular is bound to be disliked"; Mark Twain, after all, summed it up fine: "He liked to like people, therefore people liked him." In spite of that quiet but quaint voice in your head that says you shouldn't care how you stack up, of course you do.
"May it be online or offline, wherever, it's always about someone you know who knows someone else," says Chamath Palihapitiya, AOL's 29-year-old vice president and general manager for instant messaging, who speaks in a calm, unhurried voice that carries an air of someone who knows quite a bit about socializing. Because of the popularity of buddy lists, he adds, AOL last month decided to increase the number of people allowed to be on a user's buddy list from an impressive 200 to an astonishing 450. (Yahoo and MSN also offer instant messaging, although their versions are not as popular as AOL's in the United States, nor have they yet matched the new popularity fight feature. Their buddy lists are not taken into consideration by AimFight.)
"You can't affect your own score," says Palihapitiya. "The only way you can increase your score is to convince people to buddy-list you."
Around 2:30 in the morning Tuesday, a 50-year-old divorced computer trainer from Centreville is chatting on "Virginians over 40" at AOL.com. She wonders if she's more popular than her recent ex-boyfriend. "This is a nice little diversion," she says of AimFight. She's got "only 11 people" on her buddy list, she says, and she's "not sure" how many people her ex has on his.
Nonetheless, she types in her screen name and the screen name of her ex. "I won the fight, so it looks like he is not a lady's man, maybe?" crows Lydia, who repeatedly declines to give her last name out of embarrassment -- "What's a 50-year-old doing chatting in the middle of the night?"
Varying 'defcons'
Jordan "Jord" Vogt-Roberts, a 20-year-old film major at Columbia College Chicago, is part of that rarified company with more than 200 people on his buddy list. He has divided them into five categories that he calls "defcons."
"I was such a geek in high school, really big into conspiracy theories, and I think 'defcon' is a Department of Defense term," says Vogt-Roberts. "Defcon 1 is where I keep my four really good friends. Defcon 2 is about six people who I talk to on a regular basis. Defcon 3 to 5 are just randomly placed people I don't talk to very much."
Like so many people his age, Vogt-Roberts has had an AIM account since junior high. He prefers speaking face-to-face above all forms or communication, he says, but would rather instant-message than talk on his cell phone. When his family relocated from Royal Oak, Mich., to Mesa, Ariz., after the eighth grade, he kept in close contact with his buddies Matt ("the one who's really into metal music"), Tony ("the super witty guy"), Jon ("the artist of the group") and Jeremy ("the group's philosopher") through AIM. Before his senior year in high school, he moved back to Royal Oak.
So far, while chatting on AIM, he's "fought" against two screen names on AimFight.com -- his ex-girlfriend Kelly (he lost) and his friend Matt (he won).
"The more I played with it, the more it definitely had this neat little voyeur element to it, a nice little competitive element," says Vogt-Roberts. "It's a fun gimmick."
He types in five more screen names. "Well, if you think about it, the way this whole AimFight thing works, your worth is measured through other people." He realizes that he's only talking about instant messaging. "That's kind of messed up," he says. Then he types in two more screen names, testing their popularity.
Sitting in the smoke-filled SoHo Coffee House west of Dupont Circle, Ryan Jackson is doing what he does often: Web-surfing. In the course of five minutes or so on his laptop, he ranges from an article on "The Da Vinci Code" in http://www.christiantoday.com , to checking out Facebook, and then talks about AimFight.
"I'm sure plenty of people are getting a kick out of this," says Jackson, 19, biting on a chocolate croissant. He's had AIM -- "um, what, for like forever?" he says -- since he was 12 and has 62 people on his buddy list. Right now, 18 of his 62 friends are online. He types in his screen name and a friend's screen name. He wins. "I don't feel the need to judge my social standing," Jackson goes on, "by how many people I talk to, or talk to me, online."
Then he closes his AIM window, only to open it up again a few minutes later.
source:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8653708/page/2/
