See also: last week's Back page page.

Linux links of the week

• LinuxInvestments.com bills itself as "The Linux\Open Source Investment Portal." You'll find mostly links to other Linux stock-oriented sites.

• LinuxStockWatch.com is a front end to a number of network quote and information services with a wide view of what makes a "Linux company."

• LinuxFreak has a stock page which is mostly a Yahoo front end; it's easy to get some nice charts there.

Section Editor: Jon Corbet

Letters to the editor

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