Without government coercion, monopolies only survive when they provide a better deal than whatever else is out there,...
Natural monopolies are a troubling case, however. With or without government coercion, natural monopolies will tend to exist at some regional level, due to some structural reason regarding infrastructural investment costs. There is less of a case for this these days for telecoms, where one can argue that land line, cable-phone, cellular, an emerging wifi all represent means by which non-entrenched competitors can enter the market.
Be that as it may, I don't think it wise to dismiss completely.
Consider Cable Television. In Calfiornia, cable is not granted as a monopoly nor regulated by the Public Utilities Commissions (PUC). And yet virtually every regional area of the country only has one cable T.V. provider. Why do you suppose that is? I would say that it's a natural monopoly (the textbook kind), and ought to be regulated as one, by the PUC. It might be true that I can get Satellite TV, but I view this competition as inadequate.
"Intrastructure" is locked up sufficiently that these natural monopolies do not particularly exhibit competition behavior, and retain a certain degree of monopoly power.
How would you propose to further "deregulate" cable?
Actually, I'd like to see the correspondence between downloading and gained sales, and more importantly, gained revenue.
Ironically, Microsoft used to have a policy of tacitly approving piracy at the fringes, precisely because of the synergistic impact of widescale lockin. Wonder how they drifted from their old tried and true?
It shows 13 lanes outgoing and 20 lanes incoming to each G3MX unit.
And then it references hypertransport. However, hypertransport is a duplex standard. It can transfer data 20GB/sec in each direction per 32bit link.
So how am I to interpret this.
Anyway, supposing that each of those 3GMX units is anything at all similar to an 32-lane HT3.0 protocol, we're talking 80GB/sec of memory bandwidth per processor. That's just nuckin' futz!:-)
But G3MX is meant for Barcelona successors AIU, and those need not necessarily have L3.
Well, perhaps, although I thought there was this big virtualization argument in favor of common L3 and dedicated L2 caches.
What I'm interested in is what total b/w their are targeting to a single piece of silicon. I recall that Niagara2's got 50GB/s. Woodcrest is doing 21GB/s or so. Those N2's must be something else again for throughput-oriented computing.
Not to mention that GMX-3 chip could host some L3 cache if needed in some later implementation and that combined speed of all G3MX chips is probably greater than existing solution, so interesting effects could be achieved with meory interlieve.
Surely you must mean L4. Barcelona has L3 on die.:)
They had 127% revenue growth last year. One may therefore conclude that rumors of their pending death may be exaggerated...... anyway, it is my opinion that you are being a bit myopic. It's not about the virtualization layer per se, but rather about the management of it that results in enterprise interest. For that, the commercial Virtuozzo product is quite slick.
Mind you, one might or might not consider wikipedia authoritative. I've seen OS virtualization most often used as described therein, but the term "app virtualization" I've found to be much murkier.
Been thinking about this. Looked around, wasn't having a lot of luck finding what I was looking for.
In San Diego, CA, USA:
Median Income: $42,000 US Pre Tax
Taxes: Direct State and Federal Taxes can be expected to reach a real 35%.
Rent: 2 bedroom apartment 900 sqft: $1295 US / Month
Gas: $2.95 US a gallon
Sales Tax (no VAT): 8%
My curiosity is about the VAT. Are rents VAT'ed? Anyway, the VAT is applied at every level of exchange of the good, from producer-to-distributor, distributor-to-seller, seller-to-buyer. 1.25 ** 3 == 1.95, essentially doubling the cost of purchased goods.
I'm sure those Norway figures don't include VAT impact, although I don't even know if Norway has a VAT.
They are. They are saying wait for update 1, and saying it in public, at their conferences.
There are features in the RHEL5 hypervisor that, when invoked, can cause any varieties of bad behavior, up to and including the crashing of the hypervisor and the catastrophic loss of all virtual machines hosted by it. Amongst other things.
This situation isn't a surprise to anyone who knows Xen very well. Redhat took the open source Xen, including features in that open source release that the Xen Source authors expressly stated as not being "fully baked yet" (quote), integrated those features into RHEL5, and called them "ready". The result has been an embarassing and highly visible misexecution of their virtualization strategy; that's why they've been turning the volume down a notch and attempting to slow the hype machine.
They're going through a lick the wounds cycle at the moment... attempt to repair the problem. This is one of the reasons that they have KVM as "plan B".
But your knowledge of Xen will be changed even now, if you go to their website, look at XenEnterprise V4, and get to understand how their paravirtualization components have been changed. You don't see Xen in data centers.....yet. But like VMWare, Xen's used in a lot of labs, developer pits, skunk works, underneath Virtual Iron, and so on.
I run one of those labs. We have a virtual data center prototyping lab with $1M in equipment and > 200 virtual machines of various different stripes. Xen is promising, quite promising, but it's not "data center ready yet," from a functional point of view, from a reliability point of view, from a hardware compatibility point of view,... generally it is at a poor Technical Readiness Level at the moment.
My OP in this thread was objecting to Xen being VMWare's biggest competitor: they're not. At a guess, Xen has a year or two to go before it can be seriously considered for production, high availability data centers.
Could they be VMWare's biggest competitor one day? Different question. However, I tired a long time ago of futuristic technomancy, and tend to focus on things on my near term horizon. The tech biz is rife with hype, as I am sure you know, including Xen, which has been seriously overhyped lately.
Whatever else is true, the industry developments are fun to watch.
Terminology may be a bit vague here. But as I see it, Virtuozzo is not application virtualization, it's operating system virtualization, like Solaris Containers, or like the original mainframe virtualization that started this stuff off 30 years ago.
And p.s., you don't have to "read the propaganda," as you put it, to know who VMWare's biggest competitor is: just ask VMWare, and they will tell you clearly: Microsoft.
Xen is hardly a competitor at all in data center space at the moment, BTW. Redhat is actively recommending you don't use their virtualization product yet for production, and Xen Source is only expecting $8M or so in sales this year.
I mean, jeeze: Live Migration is provably unstable in every distribution of Xen out there, except perhaps for the 4.0 beta stuff. Methinks someone else might be "reading propaganda," as the expression goes...
Xen is, of course, not VMWare's "closest competitor". Microsoft has over 25% of the market with their Virtual Server product. After that, Virtuozzo has the next largest deployment.
BTW, for future reference, anything you ever see about US incomes is always and without exception pre-tax.
Anyway, things would appear to be good for the norwegians.:)
OTOH, as we said before, it can be hard to compare. I usually do prefer to compare "white, and native born" when making a stronger effort to compare countries. Minorities and recent immigrants confound the data.
Ours is 10 through 35. I would assume yours is like ours: only money earned in excess of a certain figure is taxed at the rate. Money earned below the figure is taxed at the lower rate.
While I am not a big fan of the income tax, if I were to change it, I would set it to a flat rate, but give everyone in the country a deduction equivalent to a fixed percentage of the median income (perhaps maybe 33% of the median income). For individuals, no other deductions of any kind would be allowed.
For corporations, I would tax revenues (gross) and not incomes (net), at a very small rate, with no deductions permitted at all. Say 5% or some such.
The difference in treatments has to do with the changing semantics between individuals and businesses on the definition of the word "income".
As you note, comparing two countries incomes is perilously difficult for a wide variety of reasons.
The US has massive amounts of immigration, a great deal of it illegal. Other countries might or might not compare; this before even getting into the differences and valuation of social services offered and so forth.
And is your claim of "second most expensive city on the planet" claimed to be a good thing? And how does it jibe with your claim of low inflation if indeed it is so expensive? You're confusing me.:)
Finally what is the median wage in the capital?
In the US, we have 15% SSN, the Federal Income Tax, State Income Taxes (in most states), and State Sales Taxes (in most states). In California, that probably works out to something like this:
15% SSN, 15/28/33% Federal, 9% State Income, 7.5% State Sales. Then about a bazillion fees for this and that, plus some things like medicare/medicaid and unemployment insurance. There's about a bazillion deductions confounding the whole situation, that mostly only benefits the lawyers and accountants. By the time people are done doing all their paperwork and the like, taxes here probably average out in the 40-ish percent when all is said in done... for the upper half of the income earners. For the lowest quadrile, it's much better, because for them the federal income tax can flow in reverse (i.e., they get a check).
And with the top 2% owning over 50% of all the assets in the USA, you see absolutely nothing wrong with that situation?
Never said that.:) A friend of mine, his dad is considerably wealthy. Hotel and casino owner level wealthy.
We were hanging out one day at my friend's bachelor party, and I said to him something like this: "If you are a republican, and against the income tax, you are stupid." Needless to say, this got him going. But then I explained myself, something like this: "You cannot get blood out of a turnip. If the system needs to spend money, it needs to get money. You can't really tax people, you can only tax money. The sum of all things the poor have to be taxed is small. The wealthy have all the money. You cannot expect, that if the government needs money, it is going to get it from where the money actually is. This cannot be dodged or escaped. If you are a wealthy, and arguing about taxes, any kind of tax at all, then you are stupid. The only thing to argue about is spending. If you do not succeed in decreasing spending, you will always be taxed."
His response was something like "oh". It's obvious, isn't it?:)
Anyway, I rant.
Don't get too tweaked about the corporate tax situation. As small as their taxes look, remember that the sum of all individual income is, to the corporate world, the large part of their deductible expense. I.e., they calculate their "income," as what's left over after wages are subtracted.
The income tax itself is terribly silly. This is just one of the many reasons.
As for our income tax system, the wealthiest 5% pay the lion's share of our tax.
A tax on the unimproved value of land: there's one I like. Hard to dodge, can't be hidden, nothing to deduct, if you speculate on land without developing it, there is a price to pay (whereas, conversely, there is a benefit for developing it: no added tax).
Social security, medicare, and medicaid total receipts are four times the sum of all revenue taken from corporate taxes and nearly the same as the revenue taken from all individual income tax. With SSN tax capped at 95K or so, and a flat 15% tax on that base amount, it is by far not the wealthy that bare the brunt of our tax system. FYI.
I wouldn't mind paying 90% taxes if I lived in a country where my salary was a million USD for the same job I have today.
The above would seem to suggest link between inflation and taxes. So, for example, if Danish taxes were 90%, are you saying that Danish salaries would have to spiral up by several factors? If so, I think you would quickly discover that Danish currency would drop relative to those USD that you seem to covet.
Slashdot Mirror
Without government coercion, monopolies only survive when they provide a better deal than whatever else is out there,...
Natural monopolies are a troubling case, however. With or without government coercion, natural monopolies will tend to exist at some regional level, due to some structural reason regarding infrastructural investment costs. There is less of a case for this these days for telecoms, where one can argue that land line, cable-phone, cellular, an emerging wifi all represent means by which non-entrenched competitors can enter the market.
Be that as it may, I don't think it wise to dismiss completely.
Consider Cable Television. In Calfiornia, cable is not granted as a monopoly nor regulated by the Public Utilities Commissions (PUC). And yet virtually every regional area of the country only has one cable T.V. provider. Why do you suppose that is? I would say that it's a natural monopoly (the textbook kind), and ought to be regulated as one, by the PUC. It might be true that I can get Satellite TV, but I view this competition as inadequate.
"Intrastructure" is locked up sufficiently that these natural monopolies do not particularly exhibit competition behavior, and retain a certain degree of monopoly power.
How would you propose to further "deregulate" cable?
C//
Am I safe in assuming SATA transfer rates are sufficient to handle a SSD?
Yes. SSD transfer rates aren't spectacular. It's there random access times that are spectacular.
C//
He could probably get away with VMWare or the like running Linux under Windows, but that would just run the risk of landing him in jail.
I doubt it. The court order would have be very specific. Running Linux in Ubuntu is a perfectly valid application of Windows use.
C//
Actually, I'd like to see the correspondence between downloading and gained sales, and more importantly, gained revenue.
Ironically, Microsoft used to have a policy of tacitly approving piracy at the fringes, precisely because of the synergistic impact of widescale lockin. Wonder how they drifted from their old tried and true?
C//
Something bugs me about the chart in TFA.
:-)
It shows 13 lanes outgoing and 20 lanes incoming to each G3MX unit.
And then it references hypertransport. However, hypertransport is a duplex standard. It can transfer data 20GB/sec in each direction per 32bit link.
So how am I to interpret this.
Anyway, supposing that each of those 3GMX units is anything at all similar to an 32-lane HT3.0 protocol, we're talking 80GB/sec of memory bandwidth per processor. That's just nuckin' futz!
C//
But G3MX is meant for Barcelona successors AIU, and those need not necessarily have L3.
Well, perhaps, although I thought there was this big virtualization argument in favor of common L3 and dedicated L2 caches.
What I'm interested in is what total b/w their are targeting to a single piece of silicon. I recall that Niagara2's got 50GB/s. Woodcrest is doing 21GB/s or so. Those N2's must be something else again for throughput-oriented computing.
C//
Not to mention that GMX-3 chip could host some L3 cache if needed in some later implementation and that combined speed of all G3MX chips is probably greater than existing solution, so interesting effects could be achieved with meory interlieve.
:)
Surely you must mean L4. Barcelona has L3 on die.
C//
Please mod parent up! I don't understand how this can be legal.
Virtuozzo's story is basically over.
*shrug*
They had 127% revenue growth last year. One may therefore conclude that rumors of their pending death may be exaggerated...
C//
BTW,
e l_virtualizationz ation
We do have a terminology issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system-lev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_virtuali
Mind you, one might or might not consider wikipedia authoritative. I've seen OS virtualization most often used as described therein, but the term "app virtualization" I've found to be much murkier.
C//
Been thinking about this. Looked around, wasn't having a lot of luck finding what I was looking for.
In San Diego, CA, USA:
Median Income: $42,000 US Pre Tax
Taxes: Direct State and Federal Taxes can be expected to reach a real 35%.
Rent: 2 bedroom apartment 900 sqft: $1295 US / Month
Gas: $2.95 US a gallon
Sales Tax (no VAT): 8%
My curiosity is about the VAT. Are rents VAT'ed? Anyway, the VAT is applied at every level of exchange of the good, from producer-to-distributor, distributor-to-seller, seller-to-buyer. 1.25 ** 3 == 1.95, essentially doubling the cost of purchased goods.
I'm sure those Norway figures don't include VAT impact, although I don't even know if Norway has a VAT.
This is all very complicated.
C//
They are?!
They are. They are saying wait for update 1, and saying it in public, at their conferences.
There are features in the RHEL5 hypervisor that, when invoked, can cause any varieties of bad behavior, up to and including the crashing of the hypervisor and the catastrophic loss of all virtual machines hosted by it. Amongst other things.
This situation isn't a surprise to anyone who knows Xen very well. Redhat took the open source Xen, including features in that open source release that the Xen Source authors expressly stated as not being "fully baked yet" (quote), integrated those features into RHEL5, and called them "ready". The result has been an embarassing and highly visible misexecution of their virtualization strategy; that's why they've been turning the volume down a notch and attempting to slow the hype machine.
They're going through a lick the wounds cycle at the moment... attempt to repair the problem. This is one of the reasons that they have KVM as "plan B".
C//
But your knowledge of Xen will be changed even now, if you go to their website, look at XenEnterprise V4, and get to understand how their paravirtualization components have been changed. You don't see Xen in data centers.....yet. But like VMWare, Xen's used in a lot of labs, developer pits, skunk works, underneath Virtual Iron, and so on.
... generally it is at a poor Technical Readiness Level at the moment.
I run one of those labs. We have a virtual data center prototyping lab with $1M in equipment and > 200 virtual machines of various different stripes. Xen is promising, quite promising, but it's not "data center ready yet," from a functional point of view, from a reliability point of view, from a hardware compatibility point of view,
My OP in this thread was objecting to Xen being VMWare's biggest competitor: they're not. At a guess, Xen has a year or two to go before it can be seriously considered for production, high availability data centers.
Could they be VMWare's biggest competitor one day? Different question. However, I tired a long time ago of futuristic technomancy, and tend to focus on things on my near term horizon. The tech biz is rife with hype, as I am sure you know, including Xen, which has been seriously overhyped lately.
Whatever else is true, the industry developments are fun to watch.
C//
Virtuozzo isn't a server VM, it's an app VM.
Terminology may be a bit vague here. But as I see it, Virtuozzo is not application virtualization, it's operating system virtualization, like Solaris Containers, or like the original mainframe virtualization that started this stuff off 30 years ago.
And p.s., you don't have to "read the propaganda," as you put it, to know who VMWare's biggest competitor is: just ask VMWare, and they will tell you clearly: Microsoft.
Xen is hardly a competitor at all in data center space at the moment, BTW. Redhat is actively recommending you don't use their virtualization product yet for production, and Xen Source is only expecting $8M or so in sales this year.
I mean, jeeze: Live Migration is provably unstable in every distribution of Xen out there, except perhaps for the 4.0 beta stuff. Methinks someone else might be "reading propaganda," as the expression goes...
C//
Xen is, of course, not VMWare's "closest competitor". Microsoft has over 25% of the market with their Virtual Server product. After that, Virtuozzo has the next largest deployment.
C//
I never quite understood why chip manufacturers had added cores long after memory bandwidth had became a problem.
They've been increasing bandwidth while adding cores, and those cores also happen to have things like L1 and L2 caches, and so forth.
C//
You are of course right. Be that as it may, I'm hoping they break the corporate veil on this one.
C//
BTW, for future reference, anything you ever see about US incomes is always and without exception pre-tax.
:)
Anyway, things would appear to be good for the norwegians.
OTOH, as we said before, it can be hard to compare. I usually do prefer to compare "white, and native born" when making a stronger effort to compare countries. Minorities and recent immigrants confound the data.
C//
Ours is 10 through 35. I would assume yours is like ours: only money earned in excess of a certain figure is taxed at the rate. Money earned below the figure is taxed at the lower rate.
While I am not a big fan of the income tax, if I were to change it, I would set it to a flat rate, but give everyone in the country a deduction equivalent to a fixed percentage of the median income (perhaps maybe 33% of the median income). For individuals, no other deductions of any kind would be allowed.
For corporations, I would tax revenues (gross) and not incomes (net), at a very small rate, with no deductions permitted at all. Say 5% or some such.
The difference in treatments has to do with the changing semantics between individuals and businesses on the definition of the word "income".
C//
The US numbers are pretax. Looking to the original article, the Norwegian numbers are post tax.
C//
Hunted around superficially. Easiest thing to find was Norway (if you can find other countries, go ahead):
.1708 dollars.
h e_United_States
"There is substantial variation in median income by types of households. The national average for persons living alone is NOK 152800."
Exchange ratio: 1 NOK =
152800 = 26,098$ US.
Here are the US figures: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_t
As you note, comparing two countries incomes is perilously difficult for a wide variety of reasons.
The US has massive amounts of immigration, a great deal of it illegal. Other countries might or might not compare; this before even getting into the differences and valuation of social services offered and so forth.
C//
Does your 46,7% include the 25% on VAT?
And is your claim of "second most expensive city on the planet" claimed to be a good thing? And how does it jibe with your claim of low inflation if indeed it is so expensive? You're confusing me.
Finally what is the median wage in the capital?
In the US, we have 15% SSN, the Federal Income Tax, State Income Taxes (in most states), and State Sales Taxes (in most states). In California, that probably works out to something like this:
15% SSN, 15/28/33% Federal, 9% State Income, 7.5% State Sales. Then about a bazillion fees for this and that, plus some things like medicare/medicaid and unemployment insurance. There's about a bazillion deductions confounding the whole situation, that mostly only benefits the lawyers and accountants. By the time people are done doing all their paperwork and the like, taxes here probably average out in the 40-ish percent when all is said in done... for the upper half of the income earners. For the lowest quadrile, it's much better, because for them the federal income tax can flow in reverse (i.e., they get a check).
C//
And with the top 2% owning over 50% of all the assets in the USA, you see absolutely nothing wrong with that situation?
:) A friend of mine, his dad is considerably wealthy. Hotel and casino owner level wealthy.
:)
Never said that.
We were hanging out one day at my friend's bachelor party, and I said to him something like this: "If you are a republican, and against the income tax, you are stupid." Needless to say, this got him going. But then I explained myself, something like this: "You cannot get blood out of a turnip. If the system needs to spend money, it needs to get money. You can't really tax people, you can only tax money. The sum of all things the poor have to be taxed is small. The wealthy have all the money. You cannot expect, that if the government needs money, it is going to get it from where the money actually is. This cannot be dodged or escaped. If you are a wealthy, and arguing about taxes, any kind of tax at all, then you are stupid. The only thing to argue about is spending. If you do not succeed in decreasing spending, you will always be taxed."
His response was something like "oh". It's obvious, isn't it?
Anyway, I rant.
Don't get too tweaked about the corporate tax situation. As small as their taxes look, remember that the sum of all individual income is, to the corporate world, the large part of their deductible expense. I.e., they calculate their "income," as what's left over after wages are subtracted.
The income tax itself is terribly silly. This is just one of the many reasons.
As for our income tax system, the wealthiest 5% pay the lion's share of our tax.
A tax on the unimproved value of land: there's one I like. Hard to dodge, can't be hidden, nothing to deduct, if you speculate on land without developing it, there is a price to pay (whereas, conversely, there is a benefit for developing it: no added tax).
C//
Social security, medicare, and medicaid total receipts are four times the sum of all revenue taken from corporate taxes and nearly the same as the revenue taken from all individual income tax. With SSN tax capped at 95K or so, and a flat 15% tax on that base amount, it is by far not the wealthy that bare the brunt of our tax system. FYI.
C//
I wouldn't mind paying 90% taxes if I lived in a country where my salary was a million USD for the same job I have today.
The above would seem to suggest link between inflation and taxes. So, for example, if Danish taxes were 90%, are you saying that Danish salaries would have to spiral up by several factors? If so, I think you would quickly discover that Danish currency would drop relative to those USD that you seem to covet.
C//