Sections: Main page Security Kernel Distributions Development Commerce Linux in the news Announcements Back page All in one big page See also: last week's Back page page. |
Linux links of the weekGiven the stock market frenzy of the time, let's look at a couple of Linux investment sites...
Section Editor: Jon Corbet |
December 16, 1999 |
|
Letters to the editorLetters to the editor should be sent to letters@lwn.net. Preference will be given to letters which are short, to the point, and well written. If you want your email address "anti-spammed" in some way please be sure to let us know. We do not have a policy against anonymous letters, but we will be reluctant to include them. | |
From: Richard Simpson <rsimpson@ewrcsdra.demon.co.uk> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Binary only modules Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 14:03:55 +0000 Sir, In your item on possible support for binary only modules, you overlooked one significant agument against such a move. I refer to platform independence. No matter what happens most hardware vendors will not be producing binary modules for non-i386. Not least because they don't have any such machines to compile or test on. Therefore we non-i386 users must rely on open source drivers. Hardware vendors make their money by selling hardware and they are starting to notice a large group of potential customers called Linux users. Generally, their first solution is to produce a binary only i386 module. However, as you pointed out binary only modules create all sorts of problems. The vendor gets swamped with emails saying "I have your XYZ-Mega-Card and have just upgraded to Purple-Hat Linux 12.34 and now the driver doesn't work. What are you going to do about it!!!!" and finally even their pointy-haired bosses figure out that the best plan is to release a GPLed driver and let the Linux community sort out the problems (e.g. Creative SBLive). At this point those of us with Alphas, SPARCs etc can rejoice. If, however, support for binary only modules appears vendors will be able to stick with their binary modules and respond to requests from the likes of me as follow "You have an Alpha? Is that like a Pentium III? Sorry, I've never heard of it and we don't support it. Good bye!". Of course, I don't expect that all i386 users will agree with me. Binary only support would provide more drivers for i386 and I get the impression that there are a minority of Linux users who rage against the Microsoft monopoly whilst tacitely supporting the i386 one. Thank you, Richard Simpson -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Richard Simpson Farnborough, Hants, Uk Fax: 01252 392118 rsimpson@ewrcsdra.demon.co.uk | ||
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 01:45:56 -0600 From: Chris Lawrence <quango@watervalley.net> To: letters@lwn.net Subject: Minor nitpick in description of Andover IPO jump You wrote in this week's LWN: --- As of closing time on the 8th, ANDN shares were worth more than $63. Volume was over 8 million shares, meaning that each publicly-available share traded at least twice. It would appear that there was interest in this offering. --- This is an example of the ecological inference problem (trying to estimate the behavior of individual shares from aggregate data). All we really know is that the sum of the blocks of shares in the individual trades was over 8 million; there could have been 80,000 trades of the same block of 100 shares, for all we know. However, we know that because the prices were bidded up, there must have been a scarcity of supply (i.e. supply outstripping demand). If every Andover.net shareowner had ditched their shares today (which this phrasing implies), the stock would be in the gutter now, rather than in the mid-$60s. Chris -- ============================================================================= | Chris Lawrence | The Linux/m68k FAQ | | <quango@watervalley.net> | http://www.linux-m68k.org/faq/faq.html | | | | | Grad Student, Pol. Sci. | Join the party that opposed the CDA | | University of Mississippi | http://www.lp.org/ | ============================================================================= | ||
From: james@westongold.com To: <letters@lwn.net> Subject: counter-FUD Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 22:39:37 -0000 Are you going to include stupid postings by Linux evangelists about NT? Are you going to have a counter-hype site to counter over-enthusiastic evangelising about Linux? We should be told ... James | ||
|