The pre-payment was likely for tooling setup costs, and when the tested material did not beat gorilla glass (as it was likely promised it would), the deal unwound and the reimbursement schedule activated. Now you have this company that had multi-billion dollars in future revenue contracts suddenly losing those contracts and in fact having a half billion dollar liability and not enough revenue to keep the lights on and people paid.
That's a great recipe for disaster, or in this case bankruptcy.
This is brilliant. Intel's current processors (and those in the foreseeable future) beat the snot out of AMD offerings in performance.
They can further get the low end by offering upgradeable CPUs for bargain prices (to Dell, HP, etc) further putting pressure on AMD's margins, then recoup even higher profits by offering users a upgrade path that directly pays intel.
Intel's yields are ridiculous right now, few of their procs are disabled due to defects, but to offer different market segments options.
Stayed in a 500+ year old hotel in Florence, Italy, that had 4 or 5 different phone systems that they never got rid of to maintain historic value (showing the technology progression).
The story at the time was that you needed 2 different systems to call different people/numbers back in the 70s.
It makes less sense for former American Colonies to be called "commonwealths" because our colonies were not dominated as African/Asian/S. American/etc were.
All commonwealths are states, not all states are commonwealths.
It is a term very much grounded in political ideology, and used by separatist states after they gain independence. It's like declaring that your new state is of the people and not of the state or monarchy or oligarchy (let's not debate that last one).
It makes less sense for American states, but a lot more for former British/Russian states.
Short term professional services in any developing countries are pretty much worthless.
Whatever you implement will be undone within days to weeks of leaving. You can't possibly teach the basics of whatever your professional abilities are in less than 6 months, otherwise a local expert could have been found.
If your services can be of use within a short-term stay you are just taking jobs away from locals and not helping the country at all.
If you want to help, some very basic things can be great for seriously impoverished areas. Project H (was on Colbert on monday) makes these long-distance water wheelbarrow things.
Buy a bunch of those and bring them to far-reaching villages. No villager will forget how to carry 2-5 times the water more easily than they ever did before.
Search and Rescue opportunities for recently destroyed Haiti, might have promise. But only if you can stomach turning up rocks to find 5 month old corpses.
Really basic and intermediate books are welcome at schools, orphanages, etc. Take a trip to Ghana, bring a bunch of books and enjoy the surf and beaches.
Uhh. There is no free-market in the US for just about anything. Cellphone companies license spectrum that no one else can use and become defacto monopolies.
I have traveled a bit and only one country that I have been to had a free-market of any kind. Ghana, West Africa.
Ghana has between 4 and 6 cell phone providers that compete with one and another.
Ghana would not give exclusive rights to any cellular company when they first approached the country before there was cellular technology in the country.
Instead Ghana started it's own government-run cell company because no major provider would agree to anything but a monopoly position.
Strangely enough... 6 competing companies are there now making money hand over fist, and the Ghanaian government just sold their old government phone/internet company to Vodacomm.
Privatization does work, in a real free market. We live in a completely socialized state that pretends it is a free-market driven economy.
The part of that case that no one remembers is that McDonalds in particular had been warned on multiple occasions by whatever inspector (health?) for the local gov that it's coffee was too hot.
Hence why they deserved to lose that case.
IIRC it was something over 170 degrees. It was crazy hot.
RNC protesters being arrested got pretty big headlines on all the news networks when it happened. Don't think you need to cite that, assuming your audience are NEWS website goers.
FBI being used to inappropriately investigate people who aren't in line with the party in power is not unusual. Really, watch your damned national and local news if you haven't seen stories about this.
The anti-flag thing is a stupid debate, real conservative republicans have been on the news debunking the idea of making the proper way of getting rid of a flag as stupid, and Scalia (SCOTUS, incase you didn't know), a conservative if you ever met one says it is free speech.
Every single thing this guy said has been covered by all the national news associations, not just idiot bloggers.
Asking for citations on such hugely public events which were covered by multiple news outlets just shows your own ignorance, and is not "+3 insightful"
Plasmodium vivaX <---- BAD MOTHER, does not go away Plasmodium malariae <---- easy to treat Plasmodium ovale <---- not so strong symptoms Plasmodium falciparum <---- can be resistant to treatment, can hit like a 5 ton truck
Had Malaria 8 times. If you know you have it and get treatment (pills or a shot) early, it isn't even as bad as a cold.
Had a resistant form of Malaria once. It sucked balls because treatment would only work for a few days and then the symptoms would come back... harder. Took some stronger medicine and was fine.
Malaria is not a big deal for healthy adults who can sense the symptoms. It is a HUGE deal for children who can not always understand the way they feel, or the elderly who have weak immune systems.
But this isn't capitalism. There is no free market in telecommunications, they are awarded a monopoly on spectrum, and have often been given rights to put up radio towers wherever they want. These companies then take that monopoly advantage and lack of competition to milk consumers for every penny they can.
All the cell carriers have roughly the same price plans for everything, and the costs go up at similar times. There needs to be an investigation into their trust, because I cannot believe that there is not price fixing going on.
Except that the scope of this project is to interface with all aspects of the recovery funds that are doled out. That means tracking thousands upon thousands of projects.
When I was evaluating web-based project tracking software for a quarter billion dollar project using a mildly customized product, we were looking at over 140,000 USD per year.
Given the shear size of the, lets call it "Recovery Project" 3.6 million a year for a customized system with thousands of concurrent viewers that can view and track thousands of different subprojects, yeah I can see 18million.
And here is the fun part: Any of you who say they could do it for cheaper, probably couldn't do it at all, let alone near that price.
Those who have actually done something similar don't see this as being an outrageous price tag.
I had to setup a computer lab at a decently funded school in Ghana. The absolute garbage people donated to us in the states offended me. Companies and individuals would drop boxes off at my Uncle's residence in NY filled with maybe 1-2 pounds of decent equipment and 40-100 of trash which could not be disposed of without paying a fee.
People just assume "It's Africa, they have nothing," but they don't think about what people pay to import the equipment they send, which pretty much inflates the cost of sending what good equipment we get. We spend over 8000 USD a year shipping donated items, and due to simply not having enough funds to have an expert sort through what is good and what isn't, or be told that "it works" only to find that proprietary parts are missing, or it cannot be used on a 220 VAC current.
It's hard not to get angry at people, who out of ignorance, are dumping garbage on us. I have over 100 spare CRTs, which are absolutely useless out here. Why? Because companies save 10-40 USD per CRT they "Donate" to Africa rather than dispose of them properly.
I had to convince my Aunt that we should not take donated computers anymore, simply because the cost of us shipping the garbage isn't worth it. We can buy NEW systems cheaper (mini-itx size) cheaper than shipping "free" donations.
We only work with non-profit computing companies now, and even that can be difficult as frequently the donated systems (thankfully all the same model usually) do not come with hard drives, due to IT dept. security. But at about 25 USD per EIDE HD now, that's not so bad.
Hey, could you list a supplier for your equipment? Or possibly toss me an e-mail evan.jwms@org, I'm about to fly to Ghana to take some measurements for putting in 3-6 KW of solar panels, and am looking for more information.
Ghana Telecom is now destroying competition with their new DSL service. I just got it hooked up to the school im doing a project for and it is not what was advertised as far as speed goes, but is a major improvement over the previous 600 USD a month 64kbps ISDN over radio connection from Africa Online (perhaps the worst provider in Ghana at the moment). We currently pay 90 USD a month for about 300kbps DSL (supposed to be 2mbit, but we aren't in the capital where 2mbit is working, we are 150miles north or so where the service just came out).
Yes we are on the west coast, and are a former British colony with natural resources, but the problems discussed in the article are pretty much standard anywhere in Africa. Lets take a very advanced technology and impliment it before we have roads, reliable water or reliable electrical power. I arrived in Ghana 1 month after load shedding started (due to either poor management/lack of maintenance of the Akosombo Dam, or slight drought conditions the year before), the school I am at has expanded a bit more than it should have, so we had some water problems (although the whole village has had water problems, due to boreholes not being dug deep enough), so I experienced first hand both sides of Mr. Wyler's plight.
Africa Online is the most horrible service I can imagine, their squid transparent proxy cache server has craches several times, their DNS server's barely function, and their routing is faster when their main fibre connection fails and the backup satellite connection is switched to. They have been here for 10 years or so, and charge customers through the nose as they were the only game in town. Now they have a huge amount of competition and will learn very quickly they need to upgrade, repair, and plan new network expansion.
On the other side, getting Ghana Telecom DSL was a massive pain, 3 months after being told "Next week" they would come for installation (this is common, it is referred to as Ghana Maybe time, or GMT for short). But when we finally got it, the service isn't up to spec, but just by having a decent (new) network, and working DNS servers it is a thousand times better, and they do seem to be attempting to fix their problems. Also, saving over 500 USD a month is very nice, over 6000 USD a year.
Now my computer lab has the best internet connection in probably 100 miles or more, and is offering something not really available before to the children. Google Earth functions now, kids can download videos of their favorite hip hop artists on youtube, and can upload art/other stuff to community sites like flickr/deviant art/etc. There is definitely a tech boom here in Ghana.
Now if only I didn't have electricity off tomorrow from 6am to 6pm.
Sadly this comes from always being taught to expect what you read to be true; at least in encyclopedia/textbook form.
Not a single history book in any school in America is correct. There are blatant bias lies in all of them, period. Math textbooks have many mistakes as well. Historical fiction may give people the wrong impression or state the fact incorrectly. Just about everything we see, hear, or read is false in one way or another.
Sorry the burden is on you, and you alone, to figure out what is and is not correct. We disprove theories on physics every few hundred years, biology every few decades, history every day it seems. Get over it, learn to think for yourself.*
*Everything stated in this post may also be false, or it may not, please consult someone who only tells the truth, if you can believe them, to see if it is or is not correct. Then again, maybe it is true. I dunno.
I seem to remember (up to 10 years ago) some Colonel being interviewed about the cost of the military, and that training each Army Soldier was roughly 1 million dollars. This estimate doesn't seem so outlandish as there are many layers of support behind that drill sergeant, the building of the camp, food, the medical care (all the shots, etc given before boot camp), etc, etc.
The equipment cost is pretty much nothing, the development cost is pretty high.
At least a lot of military spending trickles down into civilian life (and the research too).
Slashdot Mirror
The pre-payment was likely for tooling setup costs, and when the tested material did not beat gorilla glass (as it was likely promised it would), the deal unwound and the reimbursement schedule activated. Now you have this company that had multi-billion dollars in future revenue contracts suddenly losing those contracts and in fact having a half billion dollar liability and not enough revenue to keep the lights on and people paid.
That's a great recipe for disaster, or in this case bankruptcy.
Regardless of this not being a Fab, this is Intel highlighting their technology in a factory similar to that of their target customers.
Not participating in a change directly does not preclude one from anticipating its inevitability.
The 80s?
This is brilliant. Intel's current processors (and those in the foreseeable future) beat the snot out of AMD offerings in performance.
They can further get the low end by offering upgradeable CPUs for bargain prices (to Dell, HP, etc) further putting pressure on AMD's margins, then recoup even higher profits by offering users a upgrade path that directly pays intel.
Intel's yields are ridiculous right now, few of their procs are disabled due to defects, but to offer different market segments options.
Stayed in a 500+ year old hotel in Florence, Italy, that had 4 or 5 different phone systems that they never got rid of to maintain historic value (showing the technology progression).
The story at the time was that you needed 2 different systems to call different people/numbers back in the 70s.
Sigh...
It makes less sense for former American Colonies to be called "commonwealths" because our colonies were not dominated as African/Asian/S. American/etc were.
All nations are states.
All commonwealths are states, not all states are commonwealths.
It is a term very much grounded in political ideology, and used by separatist states after they gain independence. It's like declaring that your new state is of the people and not of the state or monarchy or oligarchy (let's not debate that last one).
It makes less sense for American states, but a lot more for former British/Russian states.
Bullshit.
Unless the car is at a full stop, you cannot turn it off by pressing the ignition button.
Short term professional services in any developing countries are pretty much worthless.
Whatever you implement will be undone within days to weeks of leaving. You can't possibly teach the basics of whatever your professional abilities are in less than 6 months, otherwise a local expert could have been found.
If your services can be of use within a short-term stay you are just taking jobs away from locals and not helping the country at all.
If you want to help, some very basic things can be great for seriously impoverished areas. Project H (was on Colbert on monday) makes these long-distance water wheelbarrow things.
Buy a bunch of those and bring them to far-reaching villages. No villager will forget how to carry 2-5 times the water more easily than they ever did before.
Search and Rescue opportunities for recently destroyed Haiti, might have promise. But only if you can stomach turning up rocks to find 5 month old corpses.
Really basic and intermediate books are welcome at schools, orphanages, etc. Take a trip to Ghana, bring a bunch of books and enjoy the surf and beaches.
The Democratic Nat'l Convention had free speech zones in Boston.
The protesters cuffed themselves and put cloth over their heads like detainees in gitmo. Yes, very loud group.
Free Speech Zones are clearly against the constitution and it is not just the fake republicans than use them.
Uhh. There is no free-market in the US for just about anything. Cellphone companies license spectrum that no one else can use and become defacto monopolies.
I have traveled a bit and only one country that I have been to had a free-market of any kind. Ghana, West Africa.
Ghana has between 4 and 6 cell phone providers that compete with one and another.
Ghana would not give exclusive rights to any cellular company when they first approached the country before there was cellular technology in the country.
Instead Ghana started it's own government-run cell company because no major provider would agree to anything but a monopoly position.
Strangely enough... 6 competing companies are there now making money hand over fist, and the Ghanaian government just sold their old government phone/internet company to Vodacomm.
Privatization does work, in a real free market. We live in a completely socialized state that pretends it is a free-market driven economy.
Queue.
The part of that case that no one remembers is that McDonalds in particular had been warned on multiple occasions by whatever inspector (health?) for the local gov that it's coffee was too hot.
Hence why they deserved to lose that case.
IIRC it was something over 170 degrees. It was crazy hot.
RNC protesters being arrested got pretty big headlines on all the news networks when it happened. Don't think you need to cite that, assuming your audience are NEWS website goers.
FBI being used to inappropriately investigate people who aren't in line with the party in power is not unusual. Really, watch your damned national and local news if you haven't seen stories about this.
The anti-flag thing is a stupid debate, real conservative republicans have been on the news debunking the idea of making the proper way of getting rid of a flag as stupid, and Scalia (SCOTUS, incase you didn't know), a conservative if you ever met one says it is free speech.
Every single thing this guy said has been covered by all the national news associations, not just idiot bloggers.
Asking for citations on such hugely public events which were covered by multiple news outlets just shows your own ignorance, and is not "+3 insightful"
4 types
Plasmodium vivaX <---- BAD MOTHER, does not go away
Plasmodium malariae <---- easy to treat
Plasmodium ovale <---- not so strong symptoms
Plasmodium falciparum <---- can be resistant to treatment, can hit like a 5 ton truck
Had Malaria 8 times. If you know you have it and get treatment (pills or a shot) early, it isn't even as bad as a cold.
Had a resistant form of Malaria once. It sucked balls because treatment would only work for a few days and then the symptoms would come back... harder. Took some stronger medicine and was fine.
Malaria is not a big deal for healthy adults who can sense the symptoms. It is a HUGE deal for children who can not always understand the way they feel, or the elderly who have weak immune systems.
But this isn't capitalism. There is no free market in telecommunications, they are awarded a monopoly on spectrum, and have often been given rights to put up radio towers wherever they want. These companies then take that monopoly advantage and lack of competition to milk consumers for every penny they can.
All the cell carriers have roughly the same price plans for everything, and the costs go up at similar times. There needs to be an investigation into their trust, because I cannot believe that there is not price fixing going on.
Except that the scope of this project is to interface with all aspects of the recovery funds that are doled out. That means tracking thousands upon thousands of projects.
When I was evaluating web-based project tracking software for a quarter billion dollar project using a mildly customized product, we were looking at over 140,000 USD per year.
Given the shear size of the, lets call it "Recovery Project" 3.6 million a year for a customized system with thousands of concurrent viewers that can view and track thousands of different subprojects, yeah I can see 18million.
And here is the fun part: Any of you who say they could do it for cheaper, probably couldn't do it at all, let alone near that price.
Those who have actually done something similar don't see this as being an outrageous price tag.
Try 15 to 20.
I had to setup a computer lab at a decently funded school in Ghana. The absolute garbage people donated to us in the states offended me. Companies and individuals would drop boxes off at my Uncle's residence in NY filled with maybe 1-2 pounds of decent equipment and 40-100 of trash which could not be disposed of without paying a fee.
People just assume "It's Africa, they have nothing," but they don't think about what people pay to import the equipment they send, which pretty much inflates the cost of sending what good equipment we get. We spend over 8000 USD a year shipping donated items, and due to simply not having enough funds to have an expert sort through what is good and what isn't, or be told that "it works" only to find that proprietary parts are missing, or it cannot be used on a 220 VAC current.
It's hard not to get angry at people, who out of ignorance, are dumping garbage on us. I have over 100 spare CRTs, which are absolutely useless out here. Why? Because companies save 10-40 USD per CRT they "Donate" to Africa rather than dispose of them properly.
I had to convince my Aunt that we should not take donated computers anymore, simply because the cost of us shipping the garbage isn't worth it. We can buy NEW systems cheaper (mini-itx size) cheaper than shipping "free" donations.
We only work with non-profit computing companies now, and even that can be difficult as frequently the donated systems (thankfully all the same model usually) do not come with hard drives, due to IT dept. security. But at about 25 USD per EIDE HD now, that's not so bad.
Hey, could you list a supplier for your equipment? Or possibly toss me an e-mail evan.jwms@org, I'm about to fly to Ghana to take some measurements for putting in 3-6 KW of solar panels, and am looking for more information.
~Evan
Ghana Telecom is now destroying competition with their new DSL service. I just got it hooked up to the school im doing a project for and it is not what was advertised as far as speed goes, but is a major improvement over the previous 600 USD a month 64kbps ISDN over radio connection from Africa Online (perhaps the worst provider in Ghana at the moment). We currently pay 90 USD a month for about 300kbps DSL (supposed to be 2mbit, but we aren't in the capital where 2mbit is working, we are 150miles north or so where the service just came out).
Yes we are on the west coast, and are a former British colony with natural resources, but the problems discussed in the article are pretty much standard anywhere in Africa. Lets take a very advanced technology and impliment it before we have roads, reliable water or reliable electrical power. I arrived in Ghana 1 month after load shedding started (due to either poor management/lack of maintenance of the Akosombo Dam, or slight drought conditions the year before), the school I am at has expanded a bit more than it should have, so we had some water problems (although the whole village has had water problems, due to boreholes not being dug deep enough), so I experienced first hand both sides of Mr. Wyler's plight.
Africa Online is the most horrible service I can imagine, their squid transparent proxy cache server has craches several times, their DNS server's barely function, and their routing is faster when their main fibre connection fails and the backup satellite connection is switched to. They have been here for 10 years or so, and charge customers through the nose as they were the only game in town. Now they have a huge amount of competition and will learn very quickly they need to upgrade, repair, and plan new network expansion.
On the other side, getting Ghana Telecom DSL was a massive pain, 3 months after being told "Next week" they would come for installation (this is common, it is referred to as Ghana Maybe time, or GMT for short). But when we finally got it, the service isn't up to spec, but just by having a decent (new) network, and working DNS servers it is a thousand times better, and they do seem to be attempting to fix their problems. Also, saving over 500 USD a month is very nice, over 6000 USD a year.
Now my computer lab has the best internet connection in probably 100 miles or more, and is offering something not really available before to the children. Google Earth functions now, kids can download videos of their favorite hip hop artists on youtube, and can upload art/other stuff to community sites like flickr/deviant art/etc. There is definitely a tech boom here in Ghana.
Now if only I didn't have electricity off tomorrow from 6am to 6pm.
Sadly this comes from always being taught to expect what you read to be true; at least in encyclopedia/textbook form.
Not a single history book in any school in America is correct. There are blatant bias lies in all of them, period. Math textbooks have many mistakes as well. Historical fiction may give people the wrong impression or state the fact incorrectly. Just about everything we see, hear, or read is false in one way or another.
Sorry the burden is on you, and you alone, to figure out what is and is not correct. We disprove theories on physics every few hundred years, biology every few decades, history every day it seems. Get over it, learn to think for yourself.*
*Everything stated in this post may also be false, or it may not, please consult someone who only tells the truth, if you can believe them, to see if it is or is not correct. Then again, maybe it is true. I dunno.
I seem to remember (up to 10 years ago) some Colonel being interviewed about the cost of the military, and that training each Army Soldier was roughly 1 million dollars. This estimate doesn't seem so outlandish as there are many layers of support behind that drill sergeant, the building of the camp, food, the medical care (all the shots, etc given before boot camp), etc, etc.
The equipment cost is pretty much nothing, the development cost is pretty high.
At least a lot of military spending trickles down into civilian life (and the research too).