I disagree. Virgin Atlantic has a revenue base that is greater than NASA's budget. If they can find a way to make some of their expenditures back, they can certainly fund bigger spaceflight advances than NASA can. Now add that to a dozen other companies trying to do the same thing, and you'll see the jump to LEO and beyond pretty quickly.
Or perhaps encase the insulation between two hard surfaces. For example, make a light-weight carbon fiber shell (the type of materials Rutan builds his stuff out of) around the tank. You'd lose some cargo capacity because of the extra weight... but not a lot, considering the lifting capacity of that stack.
Apple has always done that. That's one of the main reasons I can't deploy OSX in any enterprise server environment I run. I'd like to -- but they can't figure out how to treat the OS like a real enterprise company does.
The other issue is that while they give lip-service to supporting old versions, they tend not to come out with security patches for anything but the latest version -- or 1 or 2 releases back at best. Sun, Redhat and SGI would never get away with that.
Worse -- they only release security patches for the latest-and-greatest. Notice that this patch is only for 10.3.9. If you stayed back at 10.3.8 becuase you wanted Mail.app to keep working with SSL connectoins (10.3.9 broke that), you're out of luck.
Wish they'd start behaving like a real OS company and release security patches for every 'supported' version instead of trying to drive upgrades with them.
Sure -- but I bet most of that GMAC income came from auto loans, auto insurance, and related loans that tacked onto existing auto loan customers (sell them a car loan, then hit them up for a refi on thier house). So the car was a very important loss-leader. Without the car, they'd have to compete to get your loan with everyone else, and probably wouldn't win.
Same goes for IBM. Sure their services division is making lots of money. But it's mostly making money by sending consultants out to custmers who are buying their hardware. If they eliminated the hardware and software part, they'd have a much tougher time selling people on their services.
At the time, Microsoft still made a double-digit percentage of its profits off of selling software for the Mac OS. Propping up Apple did two things for them:
- kept that profit center open (though since then it's become way less important to them)
- insured that a real competitor existed in the marketplace in an attempt to keep away potential anti-trust lawsuits.
The "real" answer (as with all security problems) is a multi-pronged approach. This is an excellent start on one of those prongs... and will be even better if they actually manage to find any of these companies to collect.
And yes -- filtering the crap is another important prong. As is a better system for stopping spoofing so that tracking the perps is easier.
Yes, but in the case of roads, they're build and maintained by the government.
In the case of Internet backbones, they're all private. So the fees we pay to access them are what needs to pay for building them. We already pay that.
Actually... when you think about it, one reading might be that they dont' have the right to regulate the onramps (taxes on connectivity), but they do have the right to regulate the backbones (transit charges and such).
And since all vendors on the internet are engaged in interstate commerce (by selling into other states), the feds should be able to regulate them.
What i'd really like to see them do is ban taxes on interstate sales. IOW, if I'm in CA, I should only have to pay attention to state taxes in CA. That would make internet sales just like telephone and catalog sales. I know a few states want to do otherwise (charge sales tax on all sales into their state regardless of the origin of the sale). Even playing fields for all methods of selling -- that's what we should be striving for.
Logging onto the Internet is logging onto an interstate (and international) communications and commerce system. If that doesn't qualify as interstate commerce, I don't konw what does.
Just like the Feds deal with the interstate highway system, so should they deal with the interstate communications systems.
IMHO, that's one of the *few* places they have a place.
In fact -- since broadcast TV and radio have small broadcast areas, they could be said to NOT be interstate. So the feds have more business making rules about the Internet than they do about TV and radio.
Will that help? Google's searching ability on-line is dependent on their outstanding caching and searching ability... in other words, does their desktop search tool really search real-time through IE's caches, or is it creating its own caches taht we have to worry about?
Well I'd expect it to run as well as MKS Utilities... it IS MKS Utilities. Microsoft licensesd (or perhaps bought) it a number of years ago, and it's been available ever since. SFU is the basic MKS shell stuff, plus Intergraph's NFS and a couple of other bits thrown on top.
It's really a pretty cool setup. I was using MKS before Microsoft licensed it, and it works quite well and includes a number of tools that microsoft doesn't include.
Look again, including the Silver apps this time. In their rating system, Silver apps are fully functional, but haven't yet stood the test of time. They don't make them Gold until they've fully worked for a while.
When you include the silver ones there's quite a bit.
I use Crossover almost completely to hit web sites that were writting for IE only. There's only two that I hit regularly, but even one was annoying, and I'd been unsuccessful at getting the dweebs who wrote the sites to fix their code. It works fabulously.
Carter was a nuclear engineer trained at the Naval Academy. Hi just played a peanut farmer on TV and in retirement.
It's no wonder that most of the big military tech that Reagan claimed credit for was actually initiated during Carter's time, nor that we had the most progressive alternative energy programs during that time. That was his field.
But yeah -- nice guys make poor presidents in this country. We really don't respect honesty, and that makes someone like Carter pretty ineffective in the political arena here at home. You've got to play the game that you're actually in, not the game you wish you were in.
On the surface it seems silly to cancel a chip that was basically done. The vast majority of money put toward a chip is in the design, not the manufacturing. But when looking at the potential of having 7 different chip architectures in the marketplace at the same time in a couple of years, it really makes sense to simplify the product line a bit. Keep the tried-and-true, and finish the biggest capability jump. They just cut out an intermediate step.
I'm staying with US III machines for the next couple of years. In two years, say there was a new chip out that was only a littel better than the US III, and the Niagara coming out within months... I'd certainly decide to wait for Niagara and make the biggest jump possible (so I could sit on it a while). I suspect they'd have hardly sold any USV machines.
That's $175b over 25 years. Works out to $7b/year... mostly coming out of the existing $11b manned spaceflight budget.
Bush is only proposing $1b more over the next 5 years, bringing the nasa budget up to the level it was when Clinton took office (before the previous NASA Admin started reducing it). When you compare vs. the current NASA or militar budget, you should compare this year's increase rather than the 5-year plan. This year's increase is less than $750 mil.
It's pretty well thought-out budget-wise. I'd rather do it all faster, but that would mean taking that $175b price tag and splitting it over a shorter period. At THAT point you'd have the right to ask "Wheree's the money coming from!"
I would LOVE to have one of these that I could carry in my pocket into data centers and hook to console ports (aka serial ports) on machines in my racks.
Yes, serial is useful... thought there's no reason not to do it with a dongle like Apple does with lots of their larger ports (likve video) on laptops.
Nav pictures need to come back quickly and accurately over a very slow link, just in case. And the quality needs to be enough to navigate by, and no more. (cause more quality = longer transmission times, thus less photos to nav by). Don't worry, the high quality color cams will be really fantastic when they get going. One thing at a time.
This sale represents about 2% of their quarterly earnings. But the current estimates are that their earnings are gonna be down 7% this quarter. So I doubt it does much for renewed profits.
It's sort of interesting... I do envision a new space race for prestige out of this. But it won't involve the US and Russia... it'll be between India, China and possibly a SE Asia alliance.
Like any long-term project, the first part is formulating a more detailed plan, doing some basic research and costing, and building the infrastructure. In other words, the first year is not spent on the expensive stuff. $50M for the first year and $200M for the second year sort of makes sense, so long as the third year is even hight -- and based on the cost estimates that they come up with in that first two years of planning and research.
I work in government science research. Multi-year funding for projects always looks sort of like a bell curve. The planning and initial research is cheap, the building of the project and primary operation of the project is expensive, and the wind-down is cheap again.
Nope -- they've got the cash, in the form of an insurance policy with the premiums already paid. If someone wins, the insurance company pays them. If no-one wins, X-prize is out their premium. Nice thing about that -- the prize itself is protected because it doesn't depend the health of the xprize foundation.
No -- this is the next stage in Peter Diamandis plan for energizing space exporation. The xprize itself is just the first step. Then you play off the press and the research that went into that to make the next competition where people innovate even more, and you get more public attention and enthusiasm.
There'll be many steps before space travel reaches the same point our commercial air travel industry is at. But it's the same pattern if you look at the history of air travel.
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I disagree. Virgin Atlantic has a revenue base that is greater than NASA's budget. If they can find a way to make some of their expenditures back, they can certainly fund bigger spaceflight advances than NASA can. Now add that to a dozen other companies trying to do the same thing, and you'll see the jump to LEO and beyond pretty quickly.
Or perhaps encase the insulation between two hard surfaces. For example, make a light-weight carbon fiber shell (the type of materials Rutan builds his stuff out of) around the tank. You'd lose some cargo capacity because of the extra weight... but not a lot, considering the lifting capacity of that stack.
Apple has always done that. That's one of the main reasons I can't deploy OSX in any enterprise server environment I run. I'd like to -- but they can't figure out how to treat the OS like a real enterprise company does.
The other issue is that while they give lip-service to supporting old versions, they tend not to come out with security patches for anything but the latest version -- or 1 or 2 releases back at best. Sun, Redhat and SGI would never get away with that.
Worse -- they only release security patches for the latest-and-greatest. Notice that this patch is only for 10.3.9. If you stayed back at 10.3.8 becuase you wanted Mail.app to keep working with SSL connectoins (10.3.9 broke that), you're out of luck.
Wish they'd start behaving like a real OS company and release security patches for every 'supported' version instead of trying to drive upgrades with them.
Sure -- but I bet most of that GMAC income came from auto loans, auto insurance, and related loans that tacked onto existing auto loan customers (sell them a car loan, then hit them up for a refi on thier house). So the car was a very important loss-leader. Without the car, they'd have to compete to get your loan with everyone else, and probably wouldn't win.
Same goes for IBM. Sure their services division is making lots of money. But it's mostly making money by sending consultants out to custmers who are buying their hardware. If they eliminated the hardware and software part, they'd have a much tougher time selling people on their services.
Ah, how people forget...
At the time, Microsoft still made a double-digit percentage of its profits off of selling software for the Mac OS. Propping up Apple did two things for them:
- kept that profit center open (though since then it's become way less important to them)
- insured that a real competitor existed in the marketplace in an attempt to keep away potential anti-trust lawsuits.
Really, it did Microsoft quite well.
The "real" answer (as with all security problems) is a multi-pronged approach. This is an excellent start on one of those prongs... and will be even better if they actually manage to find any of these companies to collect.
And yes -- filtering the crap is another important prong. As is a better system for stopping spoofing so that tracking the perps is easier.
Then it would be only 37.7777778 things to do before you die. Much easier to accomplish.
Yes, but in the case of roads, they're build and maintained by the government.
In the case of Internet backbones, they're all private. So the fees we pay to access them are what needs to pay for building them. We already pay that.
Actually... when you think about it, one reading might be that they dont' have the right to regulate the onramps (taxes on connectivity), but they do have the right to regulate the backbones (transit charges and such).
And since all vendors on the internet are engaged in interstate commerce (by selling into other states), the feds should be able to regulate them.
What i'd really like to see them do is ban taxes on interstate sales. IOW, if I'm in CA, I should only have to pay attention to state taxes in CA. That would make internet sales just like telephone and catalog sales. I know a few states want to do otherwise (charge sales tax on all sales into their state regardless of the origin of the sale). Even playing fields for all methods of selling -- that's what we should be striving for.
Logging onto the Internet is logging onto an interstate (and international) communications and commerce system. If that doesn't qualify as interstate commerce, I don't konw what does.
Just like the Feds deal with the interstate highway system, so should they deal with the interstate communications systems.
IMHO, that's one of the *few* places they have a place.
In fact -- since broadcast TV and radio have small broadcast areas, they could be said to NOT be interstate. So the feds have more business making rules about the Internet than they do about TV and radio.
Will that help? Google's searching ability on-line is dependent on their outstanding caching and searching ability... in other words, does their desktop search tool really search real-time through IE's caches, or is it creating its own caches taht we have to worry about?
Well I'd expect it to run as well as MKS Utilities... it IS MKS Utilities. Microsoft licensesd (or perhaps bought) it a number of years ago, and it's been available ever since. SFU is the basic MKS shell stuff, plus Intergraph's NFS and a couple of other bits thrown on top.
It's really a pretty cool setup. I was using MKS before Microsoft licensed it, and it works quite well and includes a number of tools that microsoft doesn't include.
Look again, including the Silver apps this time. In their rating system, Silver apps are fully functional, but haven't yet stood the test of time. They don't make them Gold until they've fully worked for a while.
When you include the silver ones there's quite a bit.
I use Crossover almost completely to hit web sites that were writting for IE only. There's only two that I hit regularly, but even one was annoying, and I'd been unsuccessful at getting the dweebs who wrote the sites to fix their code. It works fabulously.
Carter was a nuclear engineer trained at the Naval Academy. Hi just played a peanut farmer on TV and in retirement.
It's no wonder that most of the big military tech that Reagan claimed credit for was actually initiated during Carter's time, nor that we had the most progressive alternative energy programs during that time. That was his field.
But yeah -- nice guys make poor presidents in this country. We really don't respect honesty, and that makes someone like Carter pretty ineffective in the political arena here at home. You've got to play the game that you're actually in, not the game you wish you were in.
They didn't give up on it... they finished it.
On the surface it seems silly to cancel a chip that was basically done. The vast majority of money put toward a chip is in the design, not the manufacturing. But when looking at the potential of having 7 different chip architectures in the marketplace at the same time in a couple of years, it really makes sense to simplify the product line a bit. Keep the tried-and-true, and finish the biggest capability jump. They just cut out an intermediate step.
I'm staying with US III machines for the next couple of years. In two years, say there was a new chip out that was only a littel better than the US III, and the Niagara coming out within months... I'd certainly decide to wait for Niagara and make the biggest jump possible (so I could sit on it a while). I suspect they'd have hardly sold any USV machines.
That's $175b over 25 years. Works out to $7b/year... mostly coming out of the existing $11b manned spaceflight budget.
Bush is only proposing $1b more over the next 5 years, bringing the nasa budget up to the level it was when Clinton took office (before the previous NASA Admin started reducing it). When you compare vs. the current NASA or militar budget, you should compare this year's increase rather than the 5-year plan. This year's increase is less than $750 mil.
It's pretty well thought-out budget-wise. I'd rather do it all faster, but that would mean taking that $175b price tag and splitting it over a shorter period. At THAT point you'd have the right to ask "Wheree's the money coming from!"
I would LOVE to have one of these that I could carry in my pocket into data centers and hook to console ports (aka serial ports) on machines in my racks.
Yes, serial is useful... thought there's no reason not to do it with a dongle like Apple does with lots of their larger ports (likve video) on laptops.
Nav pictures need to come back quickly and accurately over a very slow link, just in case. And the quality needs to be enough to navigate by, and no more. (cause more quality = longer transmission times, thus less photos to nav by). Don't worry, the high quality color cams will be really fantastic when they get going. One thing at a time.
This sale represents about 2% of their quarterly earnings. But the current estimates are that their earnings are gonna be down 7% this quarter. So I doubt it does much for renewed profits.
Odd all this talk about losing money, when they made a $.02 per share profit last quarter (the quarter BEFORE the dumping of the consumer product).
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ae?s=RHAT
...and can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these!?!
In fact, yes... I think it was.
It's sort of interesting... I do envision a new space race for prestige out of this. But it won't involve the US and Russia... it'll be between India, China and possibly a SE Asia alliance.
Like any long-term project, the first part is formulating a more detailed plan, doing some basic research and costing, and building the infrastructure. In other words, the first year is not spent on the expensive stuff. $50M for the first year and $200M for the second year sort of makes sense, so long as the third year is even hight -- and based on the cost estimates that they come up with in that first two years of planning and research.
I work in government science research. Multi-year funding for projects always looks sort of like a bell curve. The planning and initial research is cheap, the building of the project and primary operation of the project is expensive, and the wind-down is cheap again.
Nope -- they've got the cash, in the form of an insurance policy with the premiums already paid. If someone wins, the insurance company pays them. If no-one wins, X-prize is out their premium. Nice thing about that -- the prize itself is protected because it doesn't depend the health of the xprize foundation.
No -- this is the next stage in Peter Diamandis plan for energizing space exporation. The xprize itself is just the first step. Then you play off the press and the research that went into that to make the next competition where people innovate even more, and you get more public attention and enthusiasm.
There'll be many steps before space travel reaches the same point our commercial air travel industry is at. But it's the same pattern if you look at the history of air travel.