Actually the evidence I saw was more like two universities. One saw a reduction in the number of people buying CD's of 5%, the other saw a reduction of 0%. The one with the 0% reduction hadn't banned Napster; the other had banned Napster.
This implies to me that Napster actually increased sales by 5%. Of course to be definitive you'd need to do the study in lots of different places and extend it, but the record companies pointing to Napster and so forth and claiming that they are losing business is by no means proven; and they may well be wrong.
You seem to be assuming that the software you write is going to make money. Don't forget 95% of software/music never breaks even.
If it doesn't make money, who gets to eat the debt? Not the artist- the record company. In effect the record company has given you an unsecured loan, and if you don't pay it back, you don't go bankrupt. Try getting an unsecured loan like that from a bank.
The record companies have to pay for the advance out of the successful bands- they mathematically HAVE to take more of the profits than the band to stay in business.
"But the average user (IMHO) does just the opposite."
That's begging the question, and I don't agree that is true, but even if it were, it might still be the case that the record company sales go up as a result of Napster and its ilk (and the only evidence I saw showed that Napster increased sales).
The point about these tools is that they allow more people who might not otherwise have heard the music to listen. If they like what they hear- they are more likely to buy. It's free advertising, and not only that, it's positive advertising (posvertising), rather than force-down-your-throat way (adversising).
What's better having an audience of 10 people of which 5 buy or 20 people of which 6 buy?
NASA aren't in business. Atleast they aren't supposed to be. But not even billionaires seem to be able to get into the launch business due to NASA. Check out what Mr. Beal said when he left the launch platform business. But the competition from the Russians and other players is immense (they can launch for 1/4 the price of NASA), and NASA shows no sign of being able to compete, and are falling behind the price curve at a tremendous rate.
NASA's proportion of the space pie is shrinking- commercial operators, some of them NASA contractors are growing, and NASA can't grow due to it's fixed budget from the government- it's actually part of the government. That's a good thing in fact. Companies are supposed to grow, Governments can only grow by increasing taxation.
NASA should stick to what it's good at, exploration, not commercial launching.
>Even the new X-34 [nasa.gov] being developed by NASA for cheaper space-flight still estimates a $500'000 cost per launch...
>...That an amateur could attempt this at all is ridiculous, let alone be the first non-governmental outfit to achieve this.
I agree. For any commercial or private organisation to be as expensive as NASA, they'd be laughed out of court.
Besides, as every prisoner knows, that's not a constitutional requirement, nor a human rights issue!
So that's OK then!;-)
Ideas about what makes a company great...
on
Good to Great
·
· Score: 2
It seems to me that ALL of these kinds of books are written by people who don't actually run businesses, or if they do actually successfully run a business, like book publishing [say,;-)], then they try to apply the lessons learnt to every other business around; many of which may not be at all applicable.
Basically there's massive fashions in business, because nobody really knows what makes a business boom:
- merging
- spin-offs
- downsizing
- right sizing
- dot coms
- win-win
- seven habits
etc. etc.
If these patterns actually help the particular businesses they are applied to - that's great. But CEO's aren't always that clueful- being a CEO isn't easy; and they often bow to crowd pressure and follow a particular trend, sometimes to protect their own jobs, sometimes because they believe it is the right thing.
Russian Proton launcher. Actually if you look closely you'll find that quite a lot of the ISS was lifted there by the Proton. There's a reason for that...
NASA can't use the launcher directly because NASA is mostly a work creation scheme for Americans; so they end up spending orders of magnitude more for services they can get locally. It's nuts but that's politics I guess.
>Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break
>the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the
>initial mass of the rocket.
Oh so the costs all go into the rocket fuel? Nope. The rocket fuel costs are negligable. The costs to launch go into the armies of people that build, fuel, launch and control the rocket.
Thing is; if the launch rate went up by an order of magnitude, how many more people would you need? Not ten times, more like twice, at most. So the cost per kg would come down by 5 times... (Actually that's partly why the Shuttle is so expensive- it was designed to launch every week- but they weren't able to in the end.)
We don't actually need any new tech. We need to launch more.
>Yes, there is more solar energy on an asteroid
>that is near the Earth, but this energy is
>useless.
Oh really? So it wouldn't power a mining operation or allow you to extract particular minerals or compounds?
>There is no convenient method of transporting the
>energy to a convenient location.
I think the mine IS a convenient location.
For example, water would be a reasonable thing to mine, and the extraction equipment (distillation!) could certainly use the solar energy. Water is a basic ingredient for very decent rocket fuel, either steam rockets, or LOX/LH.
Right now, 1 tonne of water is worth upto $2.6 million in earth orbit.
And solar energy also is useful to power the trip back...
Actually Ion drives (Hall thrusters particularly) are pretty good at interplanetary travel. They need a fair amount of power, and a moderate amount of fuel; but they get you there.
Provided you have enough power (large solar panels or fission reactor) the're slow, but not *that* slow.
Also see VASIMIR; but that needs very much more power, and it isn't clear that the nuclear power plant can be made light enough to make VASIMIR practical- VASIMIR uses a LOT of power.
>Is the solar system just one big resource waiting for us to come take it.. or should we enter the
>ordeal of a mind to preserve something that's been there for billions of years?
The dinosaurs didn't have space flight. They died. Your choice.
Seriously it's largely irrelevant. The spindle speed upto about 10000 rpm drives can't max out an ATA66 cable never mind ATA100; and that assumes that the bottleneck is the hard-drive. Usually it is the processor.
>IMHO, extensive exploration of space will only start happening when it's no longer the
>governments of the world that are paying for it.
I think exploration is what the governments are supposed to do.
On the other hand, commercial use of space is going great, already more than 60% of space launches are commercial rather than governmental, and this is driving down the costs to access space; and there's a long way to go on that yet.
The problem with the tanks is that they are coated on the outside with insulation to keep the liquid hydrogen cold. The insulation fragments in orbit and becomes a major 'space junk' issue.
I personally think the tank is a red herring. It may be that NASA won't launch very many more of them anyway- the Space Shuttle design has been outcompeted; it's just a matter of time before Space Shuttle launch vehicles are replaced, alas. Indeed, I think they MUST go, for the good of NASA and the american space industry.
Actually that's more or less what the industrial revolution is doing, and continuing to do.
But that isn't going to get rid of money, or working for that matter.
To see that, consider what happens if the cost of producing some item drops to zero- say bread.
It wouldn't actually drop the price to nothing. It would only drop the price down somewhat- you'd still have to pay for the R&D for new sorts of bread, for advertising and so forth.
You could imagine an 'open source' recipe for bread; and that would drop the cost for the open source bread to zero, but I would expect that some sorts of bread wouldn't be open source, and would still sell.
Either way, bakers wouldn't be out of a job, its just that the job would change. Money isn't about paying for things, it's more to do with paying for persons time in fact. Time is money. (Only not exactly- there's also what you can get for an item...)
Kinda like they had to rename NMR to MRI because NMR stood for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and people refused to have Nukes applied to them. Of course there was no radiation in any part of the equipment at all...
The counter argument is that the asteroid isn't much more valuable than the rock in your backyard- it has much the same abundances; although more platinum group metals.
But the counter-counter argument is that the asteroid has something you don't have in your backyard- a continuous supply of mostly free solar energy. Smelting on the earth is enormously expensive. Smelting at an asteroid only needs a big sheet of foil and you can obtain ~5000C.
Solar ovens give 1.6 kw/m^2. That's a lot. On earth solar power is less than 1/6 of that due to weather, oblique angles, atmospheric effects and this phenomena called 'nighttime'. 200 watts isn't much. 1.6kw is getting respectable.
(And no- solar ovens are not hard to build- they don't require any kind of high precision; but they are not used much on earth chiefly because of weather and mounting/pointing issues, in zero gravity this is not an issue.)
"I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now. A metric ton of aggregate crap... you can mine out of my back yard."
Actually the costs to LAUNCH is "only" ~$2600/kg. That's $2.6 million/tonne, that's 3 orders of magnitude less than you quoted. And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
But that's launch. There's many reasons to think that space transport is going to be many times cheaper than that- if you use space resources to move around; IN space, rather than getting INTO space, the costs are much, much lower. For one thing, reusable interplanetary craft are pretty trivial to design- fully reusable launch vehicles are harder.
Incidentally, some materials are 'ungodly' expensive. Check out the price of platinum group materials- they run at over $500/ounce.
Oh yeah, BTW the underlying cost of launching something into space are under $10/kg. That's more than the fuel costs. We're a long way from that at the moment- but from my studies, there's a pretty convincing argument that that's mainly because the launch rate is so low right now (the costs are, surprisingly, roughly fixed, and amortise across the amount of launched mass).
I'm expecting the launch cost to go down by atleast 4x in the next ten years, and to do the same in the ten years after that. That will put Space Tourism in the ballpark of a Concorde flight.
No. That was the case 30 years ago- but the american usage has been universally adopted since then, atleast in all papers, government announcements and everyday usage; and the dictionaries indicate that also.
In UK, europe:
1 billion = 1e9
1 trillion = 1e12
Europe wouldn't make a satellite that cost 2e12 dollars!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the evidence I saw was more like two universities. One saw a reduction in the number of people buying CD's of 5%, the other saw a reduction of 0%. The one with the 0% reduction hadn't banned Napster; the other had banned Napster.
This implies to me that Napster actually increased sales by 5%. Of course to be definitive you'd need to do the study in lots of different places and extend it, but the record companies pointing to Napster and so forth and claiming that they are losing business is by no means proven; and they may well be wrong.
...only to Bill Gates or Richard Stallman.
Bill Gates thinks that all the software in the world should be licensed, (and he should hold the license).
Richard Stallman on the other hand, thinks that all the software in the world should be licensed, (and he should write the license).
To everyone else, I think it depends what you are trying to achieve with your software.
Would the IP protocol be here today if it hadn't been open source? Would Linux? Would Doom? [Doom: It's free, then it isn't!, then it's open source!]
I think it depends what you think is more important: great software or great profits
Personally I like both- and Doom shows one way to get the best of both worlds; but there's plenty of other ways through this particular maze.
You seem to be assuming that the software you write is going to make money. Don't forget 95% of software/music never breaks even.
If it doesn't make money, who gets to eat the debt? Not the artist- the record company. In effect the record company has given you an unsecured loan, and if you don't pay it back, you don't go bankrupt. Try getting an unsecured loan like that from a bank.
The record companies have to pay for the advance out of the successful bands- they mathematically HAVE to take more of the profits than the band to stay in business.
"But the average user (IMHO) does just the opposite."
That's begging the question, and I don't agree that is true, but even if it were, it might still be the case that the record company sales go up as a result of Napster and its ilk (and the only evidence I saw showed that Napster increased sales).
The point about these tools is that they allow more people who might not otherwise have heard the music to listen. If they like what they hear- they are more likely to buy. It's free advertising, and not only that, it's positive advertising (posvertising), rather than force-down-your-throat way (adversising).
What's better having an audience of 10 people of which 5 buy or 20 people of which 6 buy?
NASA aren't in business. Atleast they aren't supposed to be. But not even billionaires seem to be able to get into the launch business due to NASA. Check out what Mr. Beal said when he left the launch platform business. But the competition from the Russians and other players is immense (they can launch for 1/4 the price of NASA), and NASA shows no sign of being able to compete, and are falling behind the price curve at a tremendous rate.
NASA's proportion of the space pie is shrinking- commercial operators, some of them NASA contractors are growing, and NASA can't grow due to it's fixed budget from the government- it's actually part of the government. That's a good thing in fact. Companies are supposed to grow, Governments can only grow by increasing taxation.
NASA should stick to what it's good at, exploration, not commercial launching.
>Even the new X-34 [nasa.gov] being developed by NASA for cheaper space-flight still estimates a $500'000 cost per launch...
>...That an amateur could attempt this at all is ridiculous, let alone be the first non-governmental outfit to achieve this.
I agree. For any commercial or private organisation to be as expensive as NASA, they'd be laughed out of court.
>SEX!!!! You fogot SEX!!
;-)
;-)
We're nerds we don't get to have sex.
Besides, as every prisoner knows, that's not a constitutional requirement, nor a human rights issue!
So that's OK then!
It seems to me that ALL of these kinds of books are written by people who don't actually run businesses, or if they do actually successfully run a business, like book publishing [say, ;-)], then they try to apply the lessons learnt to every other business around; many of which may not be at all applicable.
Basically there's massive fashions in business, because nobody really knows what makes a business boom:
- merging
- spin-offs
- downsizing
- right sizing
- dot coms
- win-win
- seven habits
etc. etc.
If these patterns actually help the particular businesses they are applied to - that's great. But CEO's aren't always that clueful- being a CEO isn't easy; and they often bow to crowd pressure and follow a particular trend, sometimes to protect their own jobs, sometimes because they believe it is the right thing.
Oh yeah, I just found on the web that the Energia is/was able to launch for ~$1360/kg... (88 tonne payload to LEO... whoa)
*grin*
Russian Proton launcher. Actually if you look closely you'll find that quite a lot of the ISS was lifted there by the Proton. There's a reason for that...
NASA can't use the launcher directly because NASA is mostly a work creation scheme for Americans; so they end up spending orders of magnitude more for services they can get locally. It's nuts but that's politics I guess.
>Launch costs cannot go down much further with current technology, any more than propeller planes can break
>the sound barrier. You are limited by the rocket equation. V=-g0*Isp*ln(r) where r is the ratio between the payload mass and the
>initial mass of the rocket.
Oh so the costs all go into the rocket fuel? Nope. The rocket fuel costs are negligable. The costs to launch go into the armies of people that build, fuel, launch and control the rocket.
Thing is; if the launch rate went up by an order of magnitude, how many more people would you need? Not ten times, more like twice, at most. So the cost per kg would come down by 5 times... (Actually that's partly why the Shuttle is so expensive- it was designed to launch every week- but they weren't able to in the end.)
We don't actually need any new tech. We need to launch more.
>Yes, there is more solar energy on an asteroid
>that is near the Earth, but this energy is
>useless.
Oh really? So it wouldn't power a mining operation or allow you to extract particular minerals or compounds?
>There is no convenient method of transporting the
>energy to a convenient location.
I think the mine IS a convenient location.
For example, water would be a reasonable thing to mine, and the extraction equipment (distillation!) could certainly use the solar energy. Water is a basic ingredient for very decent rocket fuel, either steam rockets, or LOX/LH.
Right now, 1 tonne of water is worth upto $2.6 million in earth orbit.
And solar energy also is useful to power the trip back...
Actually Ion drives (Hall thrusters particularly) are pretty good at interplanetary travel. They need a fair amount of power, and a moderate amount of fuel; but they get you there.
Provided you have enough power (large solar panels or fission reactor) the're slow, but not *that* slow.
Also see VASIMIR; but that needs very much more power, and it isn't clear that the nuclear power plant can be made light enough to make VASIMIR practical- VASIMIR uses a LOT of power.
>Is the solar system just one big resource waiting for us to come take it.. or should we enter the
>ordeal of a mind to preserve something that's been there for billions of years?
The dinosaurs didn't have space flight. They died. Your choice.
;-)
Hey, if they can make this pay, it will still drop the price below the current one; more power to them I say. They may have enough money to do it too.
ATA100 is faster:
;-)
400 mbs is only 400 millibits/sec.
Seriously it's largely irrelevant. The spindle speed upto about 10000 rpm drives can't max out an ATA66 cable never mind ATA100; and that assumes that the bottleneck is the hard-drive. Usually it is the processor.
You hunt frozen turkeys? ;-) You daredevil!
>IMHO, extensive exploration of space will only start happening when it's no longer the
>governments of the world that are paying for it.
I think exploration is what the governments are supposed to do.
On the other hand, commercial use of space is going great, already more than 60% of space launches are commercial rather than governmental, and this is driving down the costs to access space; and there's a long way to go on that yet.
"Do you know what happens when you bring that much gold back?"
Yeah, you become a monopoly supplier, and can control the price. You make lots of money. That's not illegal incidentally.
The problem with the tanks is that they are coated on the outside with insulation to keep the liquid hydrogen cold. The insulation fragments in orbit and becomes a major 'space junk' issue.
I personally think the tank is a red herring. It may be that NASA won't launch very many more of them anyway- the Space Shuttle design has been outcompeted; it's just a matter of time before Space Shuttle launch vehicles are replaced, alas. Indeed, I think they MUST go, for the good of NASA and the american space industry.
Actually that's more or less what the industrial revolution is doing, and continuing to do.
But that isn't going to get rid of money, or working for that matter.
To see that, consider what happens if the cost of producing some item drops to zero- say bread.
It wouldn't actually drop the price to nothing. It would only drop the price down somewhat- you'd still have to pay for the R&D for new sorts of bread, for advertising and so forth.
You could imagine an 'open source' recipe for bread; and that would drop the cost for the open source bread to zero, but I would expect that some sorts of bread wouldn't be open source, and would still sell.
Either way, bakers wouldn't be out of a job, its just that the job would change. Money isn't about paying for things, it's more to do with paying for persons time in fact. Time is money. (Only not exactly- there's also what you can get for an item...)
Kinda like they had to rename NMR to MRI because NMR stood for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, and people refused to have Nukes applied to them. Of course there was no radiation in any part of the equipment at all...
Now its MRI, people have it done without a qualm.
"A rose by any other name..."
I would be karma whoring, but I'm maxed anyway.
Still check out NeoFuel. It talks about using water from NEO's and/or the moon for space travel/mining. Looks quite practical.
"I forget the price per Kilogram of sending something up in the space shuttle, but it's something like $20,000/kg +."
Yes, but the shuttle is ungodly expensive.
The Russians launch for about $2600/kg. Also SeaLaunch (Boeing/Russian collaboration) are about that price too.
The counter argument is that the asteroid isn't much more valuable than the rock in your backyard- it has much the same abundances; although more platinum group metals.
But the counter-counter argument is that the asteroid has something you don't have in your backyard- a continuous supply of mostly free solar energy. Smelting on the earth is enormously expensive. Smelting at an asteroid only needs a big sheet of foil and you can obtain ~5000C.
Solar ovens give 1.6 kw/m^2. That's a lot. On earth solar power is less than 1/6 of that due to weather, oblique angles, atmospheric effects and this phenomena called 'nighttime'. 200 watts isn't much. 1.6kw is getting respectable.
(And no- solar ovens are not hard to build- they don't require any kind of high precision; but they are not used much on earth chiefly because of weather and mounting/pointing issues, in zero gravity this is not an issue.)
"I'm sorry, I don't buy it. Space travel costs are in the billions of dollars per ton right now. A metric ton of aggregate crap... you can mine out of my back yard."
Actually the costs to LAUNCH is "only" ~$2600/kg. That's $2.6 million/tonne, that's 3 orders of magnitude less than you quoted. And although that still sounds expensive, it usually turns out that what is launched costs 5-10x more than that to develop and build; so launch costs aren't the issue.
But that's launch. There's many reasons to think that space transport is going to be many times cheaper than that- if you use space resources to move around; IN space, rather than getting INTO space, the costs are much, much lower. For one thing, reusable interplanetary craft are pretty trivial to design- fully reusable launch vehicles are harder.
Incidentally, some materials are 'ungodly' expensive. Check out the price of platinum group materials- they run at over $500/ounce.
Oh yeah, BTW the underlying cost of launching something into space are under $10/kg. That's more than the fuel costs. We're a long way from that at the moment- but from my studies, there's a pretty convincing argument that that's mainly because the launch rate is so low right now (the costs are, surprisingly, roughly fixed, and amortise across the amount of launched mass).
I'm expecting the launch cost to go down by atleast 4x in the next ten years, and to do the same in the ten years after that. That will put Space Tourism in the ballpark of a Concorde flight.
No. That was the case 30 years ago- but the american usage has been universally adopted since then, atleast in all papers, government announcements and everyday usage; and the dictionaries indicate that also.
In UK, europe:
1 billion = 1e9
1 trillion = 1e12
Europe wouldn't make a satellite that cost 2e12 dollars!