“IF YOU need a poster child for the volatility of the market this year, you might choose VA Linux Systems Inc. (LNUX), the Sunnyvale company that produces workstations and servers embedded
with the open-source code first developed by Linus Torvalds.

VA Linux Systems’ great success might have been its greatest curse. Four months ago, it was
labeled the most successful IPO in history, soaring 700 percent above its offering price of $30. Its
first-day close was $239.25.

The stock has slipped relentlessly since, finishing at $38 Wednesday after dipping below its IPO price Friday. A child prodigy has become an ordinary teenager. A Mozart suddenly is churning out Muzak.”

“Consider this whole drama from the standpoint of the established players. What looks like something supremely irrational — how can VA Linux Systems be worth $10 billion in December and $1.6 billion in April? — suddenly begins to assume a vulgar rationality.”

Remember, the fund managers and institutional buyers who participated in the IPO got the stock at $30. And they were able to “flip” it for a big profit on the first day. Because supply was kept low — only 4.4 million shares were allowed to float initially — the demand insured a steep opening price. The stock cost $299 per share the first time the public could buy it. And many did, simply on the belief that it would go higher.”

For that matter, at least some of the institutional players and investment bankers were in a position to sell the stock short, which means they could make money as the shares declined in value. With more information about who was buying and who intended to flip, they could make better judgments than the average investor. The identity of short-sellers isn’t public, but the latest reports show that 1.6 million shares of LNUX are being held in a short position.”

“In fact, the only people who don’t benefit from this cozy arrangement were the investors who bought VA Linux during its first four months on the market. And as I say, it’s hard ordinarily to feel that sorry for people who swallow the hype. I just wish there wasn’t such a cottage industry producing it.”

“Human beings, as it turns out, have too much faith in themselves. The detection of falsehood is scarcely the only domain where they overestimate their abilities. A survey of British motorists not long ago revealed that 95 percent thought they were better-than-average drivers. Similarly, most people think they are likely to live longer than the mean. In a classic 1977 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Baruch Fischhoff, Paul Slovic, and Sarah Lichtenstein reported that people often pronounce themselves absolutely certain of beliefs that are untrue. Subjects would declare themselves 100 percent sure that,
say, the potato originated in Ireland, when it actually came from Peru.

Overconfidence is nearly universal. In fact, a study some years ago found that the only group of people free from it–the only group with a realistic view of their own capacities–were the clinically depressed. But is overconfidence distributed equally? Not according to a widely publicized paper in last December’s issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The authors, David A. Dunning of Cornell and his graduate student Justin Kruger, drew a poignant conclusion from their research: The most incompetent people have the most inflated notion of their abilities. “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices,” the two psychologists wrote, “but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.””

“Napster employees “neither protect, nor crack down on their user base, and therefore they have gotten away with being the cozy middleman for almost a year now,” he wrote. “In doing so, Napster is giving the MP3 format a bad name.” Paulson insists that the company’s goal should be to promote new artists, not make it easy for people to pirate copyrighted recordings.”

“A new model is emerging from the Internet. It represents the culmination of years of incremental evolution in the structure of the network and the clients that feed upon it. It is based upon the same principles upon which the Internet was founded. It is this: the client is the server.”

“The purpose of the Bubble Monitor was to point out the absurdity of the valuations given to Internet stocks. This was an amusing activity until this week. Now, it feels more like piling on.

This does not mean that I think we have reached bottom. Consider:

Each of the stocks on the Bubble Monitor is higher than it was 6 months ago. (WEBM only went IPO two months ago, of course.)

None of the stocks is in any danger of being “cheap” relative to earnings or sales. Yahoo’s P/E ratio still is well over 500, and the others have no earnings.”

” Neal Stephenson, a writer with a cultlike following among the technologically minded and author of
the classic “Snowcrash,” has given an over-long, hugely digressive — and brilliant — speech. After many, many turns and a deep stack of points and stories, Stephenson gets around to saying that the best defense for one’s privacy and personal integrity turns out to be not cryptography but, what do you know, “social structures.” He is not explicit about the exact nature of these structures, but from the slides that follow, we get a sense of every sort of social relationship from neighborly friendliness to political parties. The slides show drawings of small circles representing areas of social trust. The circles widen and merge, to create a field of autonomy, a trusted space.

Stephenson is making a point about code: Without a sociopolitical context, cryptography is not going to protect you. He singles out PGP for criticism, saying that relying on the encryption scheme is like trying to protect your house with a fence consisting of a single, very tall picket. A slide shows the lone picket rising into the sky, a bird considering it with bulging eyes.”