Is Google just a bubble?

Some wonder at the growth of Google shares since their IPO. (Since the wondering, the stock continues to go up). And I too think this looks a lot like the old bubble.

However, the explanation of why Google is overvalued doesn't hold water.

... if you were to apply traditional metrics to the company, you'd find that Google's revenue would need to grow 30 percent a year for the next 15 years to justify its current valuation. And the chances of that happening do seem slim, particularly since Google is so dependent on advertising. ...

I actually like traditional metrics, but this analysis fails because it assumes Google's lines of business are static. While an old auto company may have a pretty static business, Google is a relatively young company and the web is evolving fast.

Google revenue is growing now at about 10% a year with essentially one (plus or minus) line of business. The question folks ought to be asking is to what extent the Google management team can leverage their assets to bring new businesses to market, with brand new streams of revenue. If they can, 30% growth is easy (though perhaps not year-over-year for the next 15 years). Investors need to evaluate whether the current team succeeded because they had one really good idea, or because they are good at choosing ideas and executing. If the team isn't up to picking the right next idea, the question of whether their current line of business can support even the current stock price (let alone further growth) is easily answered.

Now an award-winning homebrewer

After brewing beer in my kitchen for several years, I won my first homebrew competition yesterday in the 11th annual Brew-Ha-Ha at our friends Jack & Mo's.

The names brewers come up with for their beers are frequently a lot of fun. We had a real "elections" theme to the titles yesterday,  with Ballot Box Root Beer, Undecided Amber, and my own offering, False Victory.

As for the win, "Surprised" best conveys my feelings. Though perhaps it shouldn't, if one pays attention to recent political elections, where we've seen those staking out (or pretending to) the middle ground doing well. Just as in elections, my winning brew was somewhat lighter than my usual - a little less body, a little less hop. And that moderation seemed to work for many. Go figure.

Criminalize acts, not means

I number of years ago I saw a bumper sticker that read "Register Mongols, not crossbows". The point being, if crossbows are illegal, only the Mongols will have crossbows.

Fast forward.

Today I read that the U.S. Justice Department seems to be modeling a war on file sharing after the war on drugs, and has released a set of recommendations re. copyright bills that would criminalize passive file sharing on peer-to-peer networks.

What these lobbyist-trough-lickers don't or won't get is that P-to-P file sharing is a technology. It may be used either for both legal and illegal acts. While VCRs and videocassettes were sometimes used for illegal piracy, they remain legal because recording for private home purposes is legal.  While guns are sometimes (even frequently) used for illegal acts, they remain legal because they are also used for legal acts. The vast majority of people break the law in cars every day, yet they too remain legal.

 P-to-P file sharing is used for any number of legal purposes as well, including legal distribution of copyrighted software or media by the owners or licensees of the copyright involved.

But as Lessig says in another context, Ashcroft doesn't get it.

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. a reader left...

Wednesday, 13 October 2004 12:37 pm

 

A lot of different discussions on copyright/filesharing/fair use are raging right now. To be honest: most of the traffic on P2P network is copyrighted material. We'll skip the copyright issue, that's another discussion altogether.

By banning the easiest way to share files there will be a massive move to other ways of 'sharing'. We've seen it happening with Napster. A lot of people want to 'share' files, and are willing to put in some effort to do so. Closing one road to their destination will only encourage them to find other ways.

The war on drugs has not been won, has it? The war on filesharing will probably end the same way.

Jeroen

2. glen martin left...

Wednesday, 13 October 2004 1:15 pm

 

Yes, a lot of copyrighted material is illegally shared over P-to-P networks. If it gets harder, the folks doing this sharing will go further underground. Read: "Speakeasy"s during Prohibition. A criminal class is created. The folks who suffer are the innocent bystanders and the legitimate users, not the illegitimate users.

Thanks for your comment.

Social cost of spam

Everyone complains about the direct costs of spam, like bandwidth, storage, lost time, etc.  Well, except the spammers themselves.

I haven't seen much on the social cost.

I believe it was a character in a Henlein book that complained "I wonder how much the accumulated idiots slow down society and social evolution".  How much does spam interfere with culture?

An example: There was a media report today of a museum's emails being blocked by aggressive spam filters. The museum has the unfortunate name of "Horniman Museum".

No doubt my blog will now be blocked for having mentioned that.

Spammers have been deliberately misspelling words to get around spam filters - we've all seen that. I get literally hundreds of spam a day, and devote a small amount of time to filtering and anotehr small amount of time to look into a few of the messages (purely to track the kinds of techniques their using - honest). I've been wryly amused at their perseverence and their creativy. But their idiocy is interfering with legitimate ad desireable cultural exchanges. It just isn't funny.

Not that I have a lot of patience for the filters, or filterers, either. Aggressive filters have problems with much simpler situations, like legitimate information on breast cancer, boys clubs, and so forth, that aggresive keyword matching may flag as too sensitive for broad public consumption.

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. a reader left...

Wednesday, 6 October 2004 12:17 pm

 

With respect to spam, i have to say to not noticing it as a problem anymore. I am using SpamAssassin with the Baynesian filter on and its working a treat. We have setup two folders in our IMAP server; _IsSpam and _IsNotSpam. When an email that comes in that has slipped through, we simply drag it to there so the filter can learn once every 2hrs what is a good/bad email.

Over a small period of time, you find your spam folder now catching more and more, and i can now proudly report that my 'Spam' folder catches around 350+ emails a day, with very little false +ve's. Those that are caught that shouldn't we simply drag out and put them in the '_IsNotSpam' folder. 

Having tried a lot of filter techniques, this is the only one that has worked every day.

Alan

2. glen martin left...

Wednesday, 6 October 2004 3:04 pm

 

I too use SpamAssassin, and it keeps spam down to a dull roar. And running SpamAssassin on my local server, I can check for false positives periodically.

But not everyone uses SpamAssassin. Some folks' email is filtered at the provider, eg, AOL. And even SpamAssassin can fall in the trap of "words spammers use", which can include some popular misspellings. Such as, I suppose, "Horniman."

3. a reader left...

Monday, 25 October 2004 3:44 pm

adult galleries
adult-galleries [adult-galleries1161@yahoo.com]

4. glen martin left...

Monday, 25 October 2004 4:01 pm

 

Oh dear, I'm hoping the above was a joke. How positively ironic.

Circle of hell?

I heard a media report yesterday of a pair of comments by the 2 top candidates for US president.

Bush reportedly said: "The world is a better place for having Hussein in a cell. My opponent thinks he should still be in power."

Reportedly, what Kerry actually said was "There should be a circle of hell reserved for Hussein."

This is rather enlightening in either of two interpretations. Taken one way, Bush thinks of Iraq as a circle of hell. This is quite lucid of him, or at least, of Bush's own experience now with Iraq since he "won the war."

Taken another way, Bush views being in power as a circle of hell. I prefer this interpretation, and I trust, or dearly hope, he'll lose his sense of service to country again soon. God knows he's done it before.

Apologies for any minor innacurracies in the quotes. I heard them on the radio, no doubt my memory is less than perfect, but I assert they are thematically as I heard them reported.

Codepages be damned

Re. yesterday's blog, ok, so this is worse than I thought. Or perhaps better, depending on the way you look at it.

I broke down and booted into Windoze to try to figure out what codepage to use on the mount command, and lo and behold, regedit claims Windoze to be using CP 437, which is what I'd configured as the default in the kernel. But mounting from kernel 2.6.8 still doesn't work either specifying no codepage on the command, or cp 437.

Possibility 1 appears to be charset, which is another parameter on the mount command line.

Possibility 2 appears to be that Windoze is lying about what codeset the fs is formatted to.

Possibility 3 appears to be the new code is merely broken. I think I'd prefer this one, because while I'd owe some apologies re my uncharatable thoughts and comments, it is at least a reasonable mistake.

I think my next step is simply to back out the patch and produce a kernel-2.6.8--. Or perhaps check later kernels to see if someone further tweaked this area (but then those kernels might not have the various debian changes already incorporated into this one).

But coming back to "what is a user to do", I've gotta say this whole thing has been like a guessing game in that there isn't an apparent way for me to derive the parameter I need, and instead I'm left to guess what is expected. Ideally the mount error message would say "No, the drive is formatted to cp666 you moron! Use that!"

You: Pick a number between one and 100.
Me: Um, 42?
You: No! Wrong! Screwed! ....... Guess again!
... ad nauseum.

And I'm nauseated.

Users' shoes

No fewer than three times over the past two days I've run into something utterly boneheaded from a usability standpoint.

Don't get me wrong, I largely agree with the decisions these developers had taken that led me my frustrations, but in each case the developers had solved the technical problem and left us poor users in the lurch.

Case in point, and not to pick on these folks specifically: Codepage handling in VFAT filesystem under linux in 2.6.8 kernel.

VFAT filesystems have codepages, and the codepage is apparently important to know how to (for example) translate upper-case to lower-case in filenames.  The mount command allows you to specific the codepage to use.

When I migrated to 2.6.8 kernel this morning, I was surprised to find that my mounts didn't work. Seems the default codepage now has to be specified as a real codepage number, and that if it doesn't match the reality of the partition then no mount will occur.  Prior kernels somehow worked without anything being specified. At least for me.

Now don't get me wrong, I understand something of why they made this change, and even agree. If you are  interested in the reasoning, see the description of the change in the 2.6.8 changelog (searching for NLS_DEFAULT should turn it up).

However, where these developers utterly failed is in not providing any comment on how to determine which codepage is in use on the drive!  I've spent an hour or so in Google, searched for codepage in /usr/src/linux/Documentation, and even found a list of windows codepages, tried several (this, by the way, is what I call BFMI or Brute Force Massive Ignorance), all to no avail.  The codepage is encoded in the filesystem somehow, tell me what the number is!  And if for some reason that is impossible, then provide some description of how to figure it out manually.

I don't appear to be the only person to express this frustration.

Usability, dudes. Yes, you got the right technical solution, but what are users supposed to do with it?

[Comments from my previous blog]

1. Leena left...

Tuesday, 16 January 2007 5:20 am

 

Thanks for providing such a useful information about shoes, i usually visit it to check some new stuff and discussion

Also check some kool designs here, found it useful http://www.insidethesports.com

2. glen martin left...

 Thursday, 1 March 2007 6:12 pm

You're kidding, right?