"...Exactly, remember kids that the total amount of your currency in the global economy is owned by foreigners in 2/3 part. Without that kind of support, your economy simply would just collapse..."
Current foreign investment in US financial assets is roughly $8.4 trillion, representing 74% of our GDP. That seems alarming until you realize that comparing it to the GDP is less enlightening than comparing it to the total US securities market..which is $34 trillion (50% of the world's total). Foreign investors hold 38% of US Treasury Bonds, but only 11% of agency bonds (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the like), only 23% of corporate bonds and 11% of outstanding equities.
People forget just how huge the US financial economy is.
And lets look at what a financial collapse in the US would do. The US is a huge consumer market. We spend like mad. How does the rest of the world handle losing such a big customer? Do you think Africa will start buying all those BMW and Mercedes? Hell, the EU already has staggering unemployment *WITH* the US as a customer, what happens when it goes away? What happens to China when the billions (trillions?) of FDI (foreign direct investment) from the US dries up?
The vague threats and doomsday scenarios on the Internet may help someone's ego (much easier to say "Well look how bad *they* have it" than to confront one's own problems), but really, today's global economy is too intertwined for any rational actor to think of cutting off an entire market.
And if you were poor and had the luxury of choosing just ONE gadget, just one, what would you choose? You're rich (comparatively) so you can choose your digital camera and your mp3 player and your Palm Pilot, etc, etc..try thinking, just once, about people who don't have your choices.
And when gas becomes $8+/gal and the Gas Riots of 2010 hit Dallas/Ft Worth you don't think things will change? People like you simply won't be able to *afford* to work anymore with your antiquated gas powered single family automobiles. It would seem to be in your interest that Sun's vision of the future (or some form of it) comes to fruition and you can sit at home with your thin client and work from there.
Speculation of course, but not out of the realm of possibility.
It is not I who speaks of the dangers of Socialism, it was Orwell. And he was most definitely talking about the Soviets and warning about what could happen in Britain. You can spin who meant what and who was a traitor to their ideology all you want. Facts are Facts, the book 1984 is what it is. Orwell was writing about specific trends in 1948. I proposed nothing. I advocated nothing. I merely educated as to what Orwell was talking about. Many people want to draw parallels from 1984 to today and to do that, it's more convenient to ignore exactly what Orwell was writing about and pretend it was just a work about some vague totalitarianism. It was not.
All you can deduce from my post is that I'm probably not a Big-L Liberal (comparable to a Big D Democrat, like Ted Kennedy I suppose). I am however very liberal in my political outlook. Note the difference between Liberal and liberal. Republican talking points? That's the new slur these days huh? It used to be a quick draw of the "neocon" card against anyone who dared speak out against Socialism or Big L Liberalism (even from a historical literary perspective it seems), I guess the Neocon card has gone out of favor. You must have gotten the Looney Liberal Memo on that (as opposed to the Republican Talking Points). Seriously though, you're an anonymous Internet goofball with no clue as to who I am and what I do. I guess I should be content in that you didn't call me a Randian or something, although your Greeditarian was a clever jab.
Preach on Comrade! How are your Two Minutes of Hate going? That was quite a rant I first responded to. When did you start hating the Individual so much?
"...(And, BTW, I'd also like to point out that Britain abolished slavery long before we ever got around to it, and they didn't even have to kill a couple hundred thousand of their own people to accomplish it.)..."
No, they (and Spain, Portugual, The Netherlands) just killed a FEW MILLION BROWN AND BLACK people during their couple hundred years of slave trade. Notice how Britain left slavery intact in their colonies even after they banned back home. Out of sight and out of mind, just get that American cotton picked darkie! So the US took ~70 years of Independence from Britain to completely address the well entrenched southern slavery, not bad really when you consider Europeans foisted nearly 300 YEARS of it upon the Americas (including the Carribean Isles where the first slaves were brought in 1502 or thereabouts). Britain didn't ban Atlantic slave trading until 1807, the SAME YEAR as the newly formed United States did. Britain didn't ban all slavery in it's colonies until 1833. Up until then slavery was STILL PERMITTED in the British West Indies.
Just a tip. Don't ever, ever try to bash the US's admittedly slow remedies to that horrid institution by bringing up Britain or any other European power of the time. It's estimated that 500,000 Africans were sent to what became the United States. Compare that to the FOUR MILLION sent to Brazil. Couple that with an additional 2,500,000 sent to various other Spanish Empire colonies and the 2,000,000 sent to the British West Indies or the 1,600,000 sent to the French West Indies. It sure as shit wasn't American slavery that accounts for those numbers matey.
"...And as to IngSoc, the term "Socialism" as it was understood by Orwell has far more to do with Germany's National Socialism, aka Fascism,..."
Actually Orwell was writing about the Soviet Union, a system that many a Liberal though was just peachy during much of the last century, thus Orwell's warning. Go back and look at the state of Britain during Orwell's time of writing in 1948 (war rationing still going on, Empire crumbling but that fact officially being denied). Orwell was drawing parallels to what he saw in the Soviet Union and linking them to what he mused *could* happen in Britain if the Socialistic trend continued.
By the way, you have Newspeak down pat, I could almost hear you chanting "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!" as I read your post. I applaud you sir, or should I say Inner Party Member?
I'm usually not one to pooh-pooh any constructive idea, but the "sleeping gas" one always gets me.
Scenario: - mother holding infant - sleeping gas goes off - mother drops infant (it would have to be fast acting to be effective against hijackings no?) - infant breaks neck - hijacker just turns out to be a drunken salesman from Hoboken on his way back from a weekend in Vegas
Because this article on BSC is geared toward IT-managers and their ilk, and how they should be wary of Open Source. What Open Source projects are IT-managers most likely to come in contact with? OpenOffice, Apache, Gnome, Firefox/Mozilla, the linux kernel, opensolaris. You know, the big, high profile ones that the Sun's and IBM's are contributing to. Are there 100 poorly implemented versions of a MP3 tagger on SourceForge? Sure..but that's not what businesses are concerned with and that's not what an article on the British Computer Society webpage would be concerned about.
If you limited your idea about Open Source to the stereotypical smelly hacker in his basement, sure, this article may have merit. When you come out of that delusion though, you see that IT industry heavyweights are contributing to Open Source. Sun, IBM and others brings tons of rigor and professionalism to Open Source.
Is he saying IBM and Sun aren't professional or have conceptual integrity?
If it has worked for them in the past, WHY should they consider other alternatives?
Microsoft is utterly convinced they can get the ENTIRE LOAF of bread, plus take over the entire bakery, so why settle for half a loaf?
Until they start losing substantial amounts of money, don't hold your breath for any changes. Look what IBM had to go through back in the 90s before they became the Linux savior. People were actually predicting the death of IBM. THAT'S what it takes to change for many companies.
Because if you don't pay them..they don't have to give it to you. Nothing in any open source license _requires_ that anyone give you their work product for ZERO dollars. Do some do so for all or a subset of their products..yep. Are they required to do so? No.
Where have you been for the last..oh 230 years? Prohibition? Alien & Sedition Acts? Lincoln suspending Habeus Corpus? Much of the New Deal legislation?
The erosion of Rights in the US has been happening since about 1776.
It's amazing how people's view of history is starting to change. It's almost as if WWII happened but then nothing else occured for 50 years until the Berlin Wall fell. Then...peace, love and happiness through the 90's (nothing bad happened in the 90's right?) until that evil GWB came to power.
People sort of remember the Soviets as "bad", but not much else unless they actually had to live under their thumb. (Polish people remember very well, Dutch? not so much). People think the US created and supported Israel for 50 years but forget that the US had Israel under a serious arms embargo for decades (why do you think early Arab/Israel Wars had the Israelis flying French Mirage Jets?) and that Eisenhower opposed the trio of Britain, France and Israel during the Suez Crisis.
Very little mention is given to how Europe divested themselves of their colonies after WWII. We know about India (Ghandi and all that) but little mention is made about how poorly things were handled in Africa by Britain, France and Belgium in particular. Vietnam is thought of almost exclusively as an American issue. Algiers? What's that?
Iran/Iraq are US problems now, but very little attention given to how Britain and Russia used that region as pawns in their Great Game of the 19th Century. No mention of how Iran respected Americans so much that they invited Americans to run their Finance Ministry on multiple occasions, in the hopes that an American could stop the British from stealing all the oil profits.
We are starting to see a generation of people come on the Internet that only know the Cold War via anteseptic history books. What's that quote about forgetting the past and being doomed to repeat it?
The University of Buffalo could not run their new Dell cluster at full capacity due to power problems. Power is becoming a HUGE issue in the datacenter.
Your gaming machine at home? Not so much. Hundreds if not thousands of servers in a datacenter (plus all the ethernet and san switches, storage media..etc, etc)...big problems.
Was CowboyNeal an option? We all know how accurate self-selecting web-based surveys are! Perhaps the only people with time to take the survey were the lazy ones surfing the web in the first place? Hell he even admits that this survey is biased towards IT workers who do nothing but sit their asses in front of a computer all day.
"...Besides that, how the fuck are you going to get approval to send _anything_ out of the studio? You obviously have never worked in the industry..."
That's a very, very shortsighted POV. Right now, your Tax Returns have a good chance of being done in India. Companies are hiring temporary consultants *daily* to do highly confidential coding and other development. These things are handled quite easily with appropriate controls and disclosure agreements (are there problems and do things fall through the cracks? Sure.) We are moving into a Corporate landscape were everything that *can* be outsourced, will be outsourced. Maybe studios have been reluctant to send out their rendering up until now because there have been no viable alternatives. Not enough bandwidth for the transfers, not enough security controls (DRM anyone?). But maybe tomorrow there will be enough bandwidth and there will be proper controls. At that point..BAM! That work is off to someone else.
Your "We're too complex!" points are the same cries heard when HR was being outsourced, or general IT work was being outsourced. As soon as your company realizes it can save considerable dollars using an outsourced grid farm, it will. Maybe not from Sun, maybe not today...but soon. If someone showed your CEO that he could save 50% on development costs, with guaranteed security and SLAs and all he had to do was mandate a few changes to your software configurations (to make it less custom and more easily ported), why wouldn't he do it?
How about helping China develop clean coal burning facilities? How about GM spending a BILLION dollars a year in China to help develop hydrogen fuel cell technology?
So now that Live8 has ended poverty and everything in Africa and all debt is forgiven, just what do you think is going to happen as these countries try to grow their economies? Do you forsee billion dollar nuclear power plants being developed? Or do you think they go for cheap (but dirty) oil and coal plants? Don't you think it is in everyone's interest to help them build cleaner facilities? What happens when they all want to drive cars?
But yeah, you go one talking about SUVs, that's what its all about.
China, as an up and coming economy, with a ever growing middle class, is going to get hit squarely with this issue. Right now, they have 1/4 of the world's population, with only 7% of the arable land for food production. They can barely handle their food needs now. As they get richer, that growing middle class is going to consume more and more meat. This middle class also is going to want to own a car or two. So..what do you think about 300+ million Chinese wanting to own 1.5 cars per household? They are going to make the US look postively small by comparision.
China is on the edge of a knife. They can't continue their economic growth with current technology or they will wreck their environment (probably they've already done so). They can't stop growth because then they'll have a billion people, all expecting the "good life", suddenly told they can't have it. (hellooo revolution!). Tough times for China in the next 30 years.
Oh, and China has no domestic oil to speak of either. Lots of dirty coal though. Yet, they look to surpass the US as the largest energy user in the next couple of decades.
And you would choose any other path? He's the President of the United States, that title doesn't make him a magician. Right now, oil (and coal) is still the cheapest and easiest form of energy to extract, refine and deliver to the customers on the scale that is needed. Is that really debatable? The US has reserves of natural gas, coal and oil. It would be assinine to expect the US to not use those resources. Just like it would be assinine to expect Norway or Great Britain to ignore their resources in oil or to ask China to ignore its resources in coal. But the Administration does realize that lowering consumption and lessening our dependence foreign sources are key steps in heading off rampant pollution, dealing with dwindling supplies and not allowing our energy policies to be hijacked by nutjobs in the Middle East.
Just what action are you waiting for anyway? A federal mandate to rip up every gasoline station and replace it with hydrogen pumps? Free bio-diesel cars paid for by the federal government? (our taxes by the way).
I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, but the "Bush is against anything but oil" rhetoric is getting stale. Try to stay current on what the White House is saying ok? Right now, the plan is Four-Fold: 1) tax incentives for hybrid and clean diesel vehicles 2) Increase domestic production capabilities 3) explore alternative fuels (hydrogen cells, ethanol, bio-diesel 4) help other countries become more fuel efficient & help them improve their energy outputs.
Now, one can certainly debate those points and any priority you would give to each. One can debate the amount of money set aside for each of them (1.2 billion for hydrogen as an example). What is not debatable is the nonsense of "the US government would want you to believe otherwise", that's tinfoil hattery of the first order.
The only way this will help is in the same vein as the Kyoto Treaty or "Make Poverty History". It's about raising awareness.
It's not always about finding the end-all-be-all of alterna-fuels. It's about getting early adopters to fork over large sums of cash, test things out, kick the tires and find out what actually works and what doesn't. It's about getting people to realize there are alternatives. So fuel cell, hybrid, bio-diesel, cars that run on poop..whatever. They all need exposure.
Slashdot Mirror
Current foreign investment in US financial assets is roughly $8.4 trillion, representing 74% of our GDP. That seems alarming until you realize that comparing it to the GDP is less enlightening than comparing it to the total US securities market..which is $34 trillion (50% of the world's total). Foreign investors hold 38% of US Treasury Bonds, but only 11% of agency bonds (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the like), only 23% of corporate bonds and 11% of outstanding equities.
People forget just how huge the US financial economy is.
And lets look at what a financial collapse in the US would do. The US is a huge consumer market. We spend like mad. How does the rest of the world handle losing such a big customer? Do you think Africa will start buying all those BMW and Mercedes? Hell, the EU already has staggering unemployment *WITH* the US as a customer, what happens when it goes away? What happens to China when the billions (trillions?) of FDI (foreign direct investment) from the US dries up?
The vague threats and doomsday scenarios on the Internet may help someone's ego (much easier to say "Well look how bad *they* have it" than to confront one's own problems), but really, today's global economy is too intertwined for any rational actor to think of cutting off an entire market.
And if you were poor and had the luxury of choosing just ONE gadget, just one, what would you choose? You're rich (comparatively) so you can choose your digital camera and your mp3 player and your Palm Pilot, etc, etc..try thinking, just once, about people who don't have your choices.
And when gas becomes $8+/gal and the Gas Riots of 2010 hit Dallas/Ft Worth you don't think things will change? People like you simply won't be able to *afford* to work anymore with your antiquated gas powered single family automobiles. It would seem to be in your interest that Sun's vision of the future (or some form of it) comes to fruition and you can sit at home with your thin client and work from there.
Speculation of course, but not out of the realm of possibility.
It is not I who speaks of the dangers of Socialism, it was Orwell. And he was most definitely talking about the Soviets and warning about what could happen in Britain. You can spin who meant what and who was a traitor to their ideology all you want. Facts are Facts, the book 1984 is what it is. Orwell was writing about specific trends in 1948. I proposed nothing. I advocated nothing. I merely educated as to what Orwell was talking about. Many people want to draw parallels from 1984 to today and to do that, it's more convenient to ignore exactly what Orwell was writing about and pretend it was just a work about some vague totalitarianism. It was not.
All you can deduce from my post is that I'm probably not a Big-L Liberal (comparable to a Big D Democrat, like Ted Kennedy I suppose). I am however very liberal in my political outlook. Note the difference between Liberal and liberal. Republican talking points? That's the new slur these days huh? It used to be a quick draw of the "neocon" card against anyone who dared speak out against Socialism or Big L Liberalism (even from a historical literary perspective it seems), I guess the Neocon card has gone out of favor. You must have gotten the Looney Liberal Memo on that (as opposed to the Republican Talking Points). Seriously though, you're an anonymous Internet goofball with no clue as to who I am and what I do. I guess I should be content in that you didn't call me a Randian or something, although your Greeditarian was a clever jab.
Preach on Comrade! How are your Two Minutes of Hate going? That was quite a rant I first responded to. When did you start hating the Individual so much?
No, they (and Spain, Portugual, The Netherlands) just killed a FEW MILLION BROWN AND BLACK people during their couple hundred years of slave trade. Notice how Britain left slavery intact in their colonies even after they banned back home. Out of sight and out of mind, just get that American cotton picked darkie! So the US took ~70 years of Independence from Britain to completely address the well entrenched southern slavery, not bad really when you consider Europeans foisted nearly 300 YEARS of it upon the Americas (including the Carribean Isles where the first slaves were brought in 1502 or thereabouts). Britain didn't ban Atlantic slave trading until 1807, the SAME YEAR as the newly formed United States did. Britain didn't ban all slavery in it's colonies until 1833. Up until then slavery was STILL PERMITTED in the British West Indies.
Just a tip. Don't ever, ever try to bash the US's admittedly slow remedies to that horrid institution by bringing up Britain or any other European power of the time. It's estimated that 500,000 Africans were sent to what became the United States. Compare that to the FOUR MILLION sent to Brazil. Couple that with an additional 2,500,000 sent to various other Spanish Empire colonies and the 2,000,000 sent to the British West Indies or the 1,600,000 sent to the French West Indies. It sure as shit wasn't American slavery that accounts for those numbers matey.
Actually Orwell was writing about the Soviet Union, a system that many a Liberal though was just peachy during much of the last century, thus Orwell's warning. Go back and look at the state of Britain during Orwell's time of writing in 1948 (war rationing still going on, Empire crumbling but that fact officially being denied). Orwell was drawing parallels to what he saw in the Soviet Union and linking them to what he mused *could* happen in Britain if the Socialistic trend continued.
By the way, you have Newspeak down pat, I could almost hear you chanting "FREEDOM IS SLAVERY!" as I read your post. I applaud you sir, or should I say Inner Party Member?
But what if they are expecting that we're expecting them to expect that we're looking for a new profile? GAME OVER MAN! GAME OVER!
I'm usually not one to pooh-pooh any constructive idea, but the "sleeping gas" one always gets me.
Scenario:
- mother holding infant
- sleeping gas goes off
- mother drops infant (it would have to be fast acting to be effective against hijackings no?)
- infant breaks neck
- hijacker just turns out to be a drunken salesman from Hoboken on his way back from a weekend in Vegas
So tell the artists to stop signing away their music rights to these companies. The artists are the last people I shed a tear for.
Million dollar talent, 10 cent brains..the lot of them.
Because this article on BSC is geared toward IT-managers and their ilk, and how they should be wary of Open Source. What Open Source projects are IT-managers most likely to come in contact with? OpenOffice, Apache, Gnome, Firefox/Mozilla, the linux kernel, opensolaris. You know, the big, high profile ones that the Sun's and IBM's are contributing to. Are there 100 poorly implemented versions of a MP3 tagger on SourceForge? Sure..but that's not what businesses are concerned with and that's not what an article on the British Computer Society webpage would be concerned about.
If you limited your idea about Open Source to the stereotypical smelly hacker in his basement, sure, this article may have merit. When you come out of that delusion though, you see that IT industry heavyweights are contributing to Open Source. Sun, IBM and others brings tons of rigor and professionalism to Open Source.
Is he saying IBM and Sun aren't professional or have conceptual integrity?
If it has worked for them in the past, WHY should they consider other alternatives?
Microsoft is utterly convinced they can get the ENTIRE LOAF of bread, plus take over the entire bakery, so why settle for half a loaf?
Until they start losing substantial amounts of money, don't hold your breath for any changes. Look what IBM had to go through back in the 90s before they became the Linux savior. People were actually predicting the death of IBM. THAT'S what it takes to change for many companies.
Because if you don't pay them..they don't have to give it to you. Nothing in any open source license _requires_ that anyone give you their work product for ZERO dollars. Do some do so for all or a subset of their products..yep. Are they required to do so? No.
Where have you been for the last..oh 230 years? Prohibition? Alien & Sedition Acts? Lincoln suspending Habeus Corpus? Much of the New Deal legislation?
The erosion of Rights in the US has been happening since about 1776.
It's amazing how people's view of history is starting to change. It's almost as if WWII happened but then nothing else occured for 50 years until the Berlin Wall fell. Then...peace, love and happiness through the 90's (nothing bad happened in the 90's right?) until that evil GWB came to power.
People sort of remember the Soviets as "bad", but not much else unless they actually had to live under their thumb. (Polish people remember very well, Dutch? not so much). People think the US created and supported Israel for 50 years but forget that the US had Israel under a serious arms embargo for decades (why do you think early Arab/Israel Wars had the Israelis flying French Mirage Jets?) and that Eisenhower opposed the trio of Britain, France and Israel during the Suez Crisis.
Very little mention is given to how Europe divested themselves of their colonies after WWII. We know about India (Ghandi and all that) but little mention is made about how poorly things were handled in Africa by Britain, France and Belgium in particular. Vietnam is thought of almost exclusively as an American issue. Algiers? What's that?
Iran/Iraq are US problems now, but very little attention given to how Britain and Russia used that region as pawns in their Great Game of the 19th Century. No mention of how Iran respected Americans so much that they invited Americans to run their Finance Ministry on multiple occasions, in the hopes that an American could stop the British from stealing all the oil profits.
We are starting to see a generation of people come on the Internet that only know the Cold War via anteseptic history books. What's that quote about forgetting the past and being doomed to repeat it?
The University of Buffalo could not run their new Dell cluster at full capacity due to power problems. Power is becoming a HUGE issue in the datacenter.
Your gaming machine at home? Not so much. Hundreds if not thousands of servers in a datacenter (plus all the ethernet and san switches, storage media..etc, etc)...big problems.
What a load of drivel.
That's a very, very shortsighted POV. Right now, your Tax Returns have a good chance of being done in India. Companies are hiring temporary consultants *daily* to do highly confidential coding and other development. These things are handled quite easily with appropriate controls and disclosure agreements (are there problems and do things fall through the cracks? Sure.) We are moving into a Corporate landscape were everything that *can* be outsourced, will be outsourced. Maybe studios have been reluctant to send out their rendering up until now because there have been no viable alternatives. Not enough bandwidth for the transfers, not enough security controls (DRM anyone?). But maybe tomorrow there will be enough bandwidth and there will be proper controls. At that point..BAM! That work is off to someone else.
Your "We're too complex!" points are the same cries heard when HR was being outsourced, or general IT work was being outsourced. As soon as your company realizes it can save considerable dollars using an outsourced grid farm, it will. Maybe not from Sun, maybe not today...but soon. If someone showed your CEO that he could save 50% on development costs, with guaranteed security and SLAs and all he had to do was mandate a few changes to your software configurations (to make it less custom and more easily ported), why wouldn't he do it?
That particular slogan was used against during the Albigensian Crusade against the Carthar heretics in Southern France.
Start paying attention. You're embarassing yourself.
So now that Live8 has ended poverty and everything in Africa and all debt is forgiven, just what do you think is going to happen as these countries try to grow their economies? Do you forsee billion dollar nuclear power plants being developed? Or do you think they go for cheap (but dirty) oil and coal plants? Don't you think it is in everyone's interest to help them build cleaner facilities? What happens when they all want to drive cars?
But yeah, you go one talking about SUVs, that's what its all about.
China is on the edge of a knife. They can't continue their economic growth with current technology or they will wreck their environment (probably they've already done so). They can't stop growth because then they'll have a billion people, all expecting the "good life", suddenly told they can't have it. (hellooo revolution!). Tough times for China in the next 30 years.
Oh, and China has no domestic oil to speak of either. Lots of dirty coal though. Yet, they look to surpass the US as the largest energy user in the next couple of decades.
Just what action are you waiting for anyway? A federal mandate to rip up every gasoline station and replace it with hydrogen pumps? Free bio-diesel cars paid for by the federal government? (our taxes by the way).
Now, one can certainly debate those points and any priority you would give to each. One can debate the amount of money set aside for each of them (1.2 billion for hydrogen as an example). What is not debatable is the nonsense of "the US government would want you to believe otherwise", that's tinfoil hattery of the first order.
It's not always about finding the end-all-be-all of alterna-fuels. It's about getting early adopters to fork over large sums of cash, test things out, kick the tires and find out what actually works and what doesn't. It's about getting people to realize there are alternatives. So fuel cell, hybrid, bio-diesel, cars that run on poop..whatever. They all need exposure.