VA Linux: The biggest dotcom IPO
dfarq.homeip.net
dfarq.homeip.net
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Many folks left Dig for their primary feed when they did the UI update. I think I switched over to Slashdot around that time. The multi selector for karma, on the comments and them changing usernames so my original no longer worked drove me to reddit as that prime feed for me, for about 10 or so years.
As reddit exploded... that main home switched to here. Not quite that same sense of community and always a grab bag of subject, so much closer to Digg/Slashdot feel. I never ended up doing facebook or some of the other social media sites. As reddit tried/tried to become that sort of space (with monetization!) it became something I was not looking for.
That's a name I haven't heard in a long time. I'd almost forgotten about the webcomic.
From wikipedia
The company raised $132 million, offering shares at $30/share, but the shares opened for trading at $299/share, before closing at $239.25/share, or 698% above the IPO price, breaking a record for the largest first day gain.[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Larry Augustin, the 38-year old founder and chief executive officer of the company, became a billionaire on paper and a 26-year old web developer at the company said she was worth $10 million on paper.[2] By August 2000, the shares were trading at $40 each[2] and only 24 mutual funds held the stock.[15] On December 8, 2000, one year later, after the bursting of the dot com bubble, shares traded at $8.49/share.[16]
per his essay he was given 150K shares. Even at the IPO price of $30 a share, that's 4.5 million. Do we not think the investment bank handling his shares would have been willing to take his whole stake at $30 a share?
But even if they wouldn't more than 6 months later it was still north of $40 a share (so $6mil or so) and even a year or so after the IPO, after the bubble popped, it was still north of $8 a share (so $1+mil).
He has, ahem, never exuded a "man of leisure" vibe. More power to him if he's actually loaded, I guess.
90-180 days would be normal and was still trading above ipo price (not opening price) 180 days after ipo as i documented above.
with that said perhaps directors have a different form of lockup, can't say I have any experience with that.
(disclosure: I was on the "Ignition team" for SF)
People forget that in the olden days we used Subversion and Bazaar (well, the latter if you were Canonical-adjacent), and before that CVS.
And before that, SCCS.
Going back decades, it's all people going "this sucks, I'm writing my own VCS", and for whatever reason Git was the one that gained traction in that particularly sticky and slippery swamp.
IMHO, we made better gear at the time, but we were not in a market as wide and deep for linux optimized machines as it is now. It's not an unusual story in the valley. We did have a deep talent bench that ended up in key roles in a bunch of firms that are doing well: Google, Apple, et al.
One of these days I should blog about how we ended up hosting Python for years...
As I recall, they were one of the earliest vendors to produce a 1u server, which was a big potential selling point for them (Cobalt's RaQ was first, but initially used a MIPS R5000 variant with a crippled cache so gained a reputation for being a bit "weird").
Unfortunately, the bursting of the telecoms/networking bubble shortly after their IPO (and a year before the dotcom bubble imploded) flooded the market with 4u servers at fire-sale prices. Rack density wasn't nearly so important back then, so VA's neater kit suddenly appeared a whole lot less competitive.
They were far more important for the business.
Err... no, it's definitely not unusual. I specifically spent a month looking for a laptop with Linux support just so I didn't have to go through the hell of unsupported hardware, and it's still not fully supported.
0. https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules/issues/644 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/1due6ni/hardware...
Wayland has done some progress, but still half of my applications look like sh when I use fractional scaling.
Linux is great if all you need is a terminal. Once you need a peripheral, then good luck, literally.
It has different issues, but wireless headsets nor hibernation are among them
Just wait until you try this new Windows thing. Zero hardware support for anything.
Do they look like shell, or like shit? You can use grownup words here.
If you want to keep Up you'll have to stay Down