The important thing to note is that countries like the UK, Canada, United States and Sweden have relatively low growth -- below 1%. Even at current levels, their populations will double in approximately 100 years (give or take). Countries like Liberia, Burundi, Afghanistan and East Timor will see their populations double within 20 years. So, much as it's comforting to see people in the comments suggest that *we* stop breeding like rabbits, it won't necessarily stop the global problem. The solution to that one is politically distasteful -- *we* would have to share knowledge, money and education to help the citizens of war-torn and impoverished nations.
The "crazy left" you refer to tend to be very middle of the road. Many of us in other country would term the Democrats "moderate conservatives." Last time I checked, you don't have the Greens or Social Democrats - they've been run out of town as leftist extremists. That said, e constant barrage of attacks against the "crazy left", "socialists" and "liberals" seems to be an effective approach to painting middle-of-the road policies and voters as undesirable and extreme.
As far as raising taxes goes, it seems only rational to conclude that the USA can't keep increasing borrowing forever. At some point, the nation will either have to reduce the deficit or default (hopefully not by triggering a world war and legislating a default). Your taxes don't just magically disappear - they go to pay for operating the county (salaries, construction, defense and federal contracts). And, honestly, you're likely to send the majority of your disposable income out of the country in the form of electronics purchases, fancy German cars and "made in China" purchases.
One of the challenges with modern democracy is that government mandates usually last only 4 or 5 years at most. Any commitments made beyond the current term are essentially meaningless. If peak oil predictions turn out to be true, it might be very difficult for Germany to avoid nuclear power in the 2020s, unless the entire population dramatically reduces power consumption.
I've become a huge fan of our local library in the past couple of years, after discovering that they're part of a network of hundreds of municipal libraries that shares their collection. The result is that I can get my hands on almost anything that is fairly mainstream, as long as I'm willing to wait a few weeks for it to come from a few miles away. Of course, this doesn't work with technical material, so I find myself reading tech stuff on my iPad. I've also noticed that the library is only good for physical books. Borrowing an eBook is a nightmare -- I need a DRM-infested client app, and then I have to place a virtual "hold" and wait in line for someone to check in the book I want.
I don't think religion is an evolved trait. It's more likely to be a byproduct of group socialization. We are wired to form social hierarchies, and many leaders have exploited the human willingness to believe in a "higher purpose" to assert divine right over multiple tribes. As a self-aware animal, it's difficult for humans to understand that perhaps our only purpose on earth is to breed to avoid extinction. So instead we create meaningless social rungs -- serf, scribe, priest, investment banker -- and build pyramids, castles and skyscrapers to assert control over nature. Besides, it seems that many of us seem to be missing whatever gene causes the irrational belief in an omnipotent Santa Claus-like deity floating on a cloud. Perhaps that's also why I don't own a Mac and opt for cheaper generic machines.
Out of interest, why does this story have a Canadian flag icon on the front page? It's true the company's Canadian, but other tech stories aren't flagged (heh) by their country of origin -- I don't see the Stars & Stripes gracing every piece about Apple or Oracle.
The mission was launched from an air base near Ghazi in Pakistan, a distance of under 80 km. The operational challenge was that the team had to fly north west, *away* from the Afghan border. The flight time is around 20 minutes each way, plus time spent on the ground. And you still have the challenge of transporting the body another 1500 km south after the mission to dump it into the Arabian Sea. I assume they had extensive air cover for that secondary mission to prevent Pakistan from responding.
That isn't just Apple, it's every phone. Even the cheap or free flip phones cost significantly more than what you pay for them.
I have an LG Optimus One android phone that cost me $199 without contract. It's on a prepaid service that runs about $25 per month (voice + data), and it's possible to get dozens of quite decent flip phones for under $100. Most of the time I'm within range of an accessible wifi hotspot, so my data use is surprisingly low. After doing the math, I simply can't justify spending an extra $600 or so a year for an iPhone.
Five hundred years from now, archeologists are going to dig through the remnants of our civilization and try to figure out why we started planting millions of acres of switch grass and pine trees instead of proper food.
$752B is a pretty damn good deal. The shuttle program cost about $5B a year to run, and that was nearly all operational and maintenance costs -- the R&D work was done back in the 1970s and most of the engineers who developed the STS are retired or nearing retirement. It's a stellar (har) achievement from our parents' generation.
Keeping shuttles flying is the equivalent of keeping the conglomerate's old COBOL accounting system limping along for a few more years. It works, but it's less than optimal and forces us to train bright young talent on antiquated systems.
Out of necessity, NASA seems to be taking a few cues from the modern software industry and they're funding smaller, younger companies in addition to the old guard (Lockheed Martin & United). Most notably, they've awarded a launch services contract to SpaceX -- at a total budgetary cost of under $1B. They've contracted Orbital Sciences for small payload launches to the tune of $200M. It's not hard to see how far you could stretch the old $5B shuttle budget with this kind of model -- imagine three or four space startups vying to outdo each other. Hopefully, >em>that's the future of our space program.
If you've watched any footage of the SpaceX launch, you'll realize that they're young and giddy space enthusiasts who are absolutely ecstatic about getting to build vehicles that leave the planet -- just like the folks who laid the foundation for NASA in the heady space race of the 1960s.
Long live the Space Transportation System. It's time to try something new. In the meantime, we might as well take seats on the Russian bus to get people to work on the ISS.
1. The 512MB of memory is incorporated on the A5 chip, along with a dual core CPU and GPU. It's a system on a chip that's estimated to cost a mere $28.90. The true magic in iPad is the hardware engineering -- it's all about providing the best user experience on dirt cheap hardware. For the first time in mass market history, the case (including display) costs more to manufacture than the computer it contains.
2. iOS is a compact mobile OS that runs on homogeneous hardware. There are essentially only two different hardware options. Developers know with absolute certainty how their apps perform when they ship and don't need to overspec hardware requirements -- if it runs sluggishly, they need to recode it. Period.
3. Nearly everyone who owns a computer isn't a computer user. They've never compiled code in their lives and haven't got a clue how their machines work. They're not hard-core gamers, either. They just want to connect with others, write a few letters, surf and play cheap games. They don't need a quad core machine with 16GB of RAM and a few terabytes of drive space for that.
Apple's marketing strategy is brilliant. Unlike other companies, they don't release products with incomprehensible names like the KDH-4001. They don't have to address a myriad of OS compatibility issues (for example, A4-based devices are eligible for iOS updates, the older ones aren't). They have streamlined product lines -- one iPad, one iPod Touch, one Apple TV. By reducing choice, they reduce buyer confusion and uncertainty. A side-effect of this zen marketing approach is that it's easy for the press to write about their products. When a new iPad is introduced, we know ahead of time what to expect, with the addition of a few easy-to-explain doodads (camera! Another camera! Faster! Thinner!). That makes for good copy and makes technophobic users feel somewhat comfortable.
That's basically what we ended up doing by releasing files under several different licenses. This is where the the open source hardware definition is important -- it encapsulates a consistent set of use terms for both hardware and software IP.
I run a company that produces what we term open source hardware, and the open hardware definition takes a stab at providing a framework that individuals and companies can use to release a hardware/software project. The key ingredients are (a) that you must provide source code and design files sufficient to allow someone to build/extend your device, (b) that there can be no non-commercial restrictions (for example, "You can build one for yourself, but don't you dare make them for others", and (c) that any devices based on the source code and design files must be released under a similar license.
Up to this point, we've had to license the hardware designs, schematics, and code are provided under the GPL v3, and then release the documentation, schematics, panels, and illustrations under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. It's a mess that doesn't work well with nebulous concepts like case design and control panel layouts.
Given that Foxconn has produced over 1 million iPads a month, I don't see why production wouldn't ramp up a few weeks before an announcement. Staff need to be trained and assembly line glitches need to be resolved before they can deliver flat out. That said, I ordered an Apple TV last November that shipped directly from Shenzhen after a short delay-- it seems that they're not even bothering to warehouse inventory in North America anymore because there is no cost saving when everything has to be air freighted anyway.
By the same token, I've worked with a number of organizations where there was a very strong demand for programmers and IT generalists willing to learn older systems - COBOL, various nasty and quirky Oracle database environments that need to stay running for the next 5 to 10 years, and so on. The truth is that there's a big push to learn and deploy the flavor of the month in IT -- someone gets promoted and all of a sudden everything's being coded by pythons on rails and the entire organization is supposed to live in the clouds. But the truth of the matter is that a lot of our business is very down to earth nuts and bolts stuff -- bills need to be issued every month, reports need to be generated and widgets need to be inventoried. And anyone who is capable of keeping WidgetBill 2000 running is valuable, especially if that person can help the corner office gang migrate WidgetBill to modern hardware and modernize it.
Once upon a time, owning shares in a company entitled you to a portion of the profits in the form of dividends. Most high tech companies don't pay dividends anymore, preferring to re-inject net revenue back into the company to accelerate growth. The end result is that investors commonly buy shares in hot young technology companies in the hope that they will increase in value by an order of magnitude, not because they're anticipating dividends.
Things are somewhat dicier with a high profile company like Facebook, which already has a sky-high value placed on it. The potential upside is severely limited -- Facebook shares simply aren't going to increase in price by ten-fold within the foreseeable future, simply because that would give the company an insane market capitalization of a half trillion dollars (Exxon Mobile is currently the highest valued American company, at $314billion, followed by Apple at $259 billion and the likes of Walmart at just under $200 billion).
My LG Optimus One cost $200 (without contract), runs Android 2.2 and makes phone calls. I think the PMP market is going to be tough to crack, because manufacturers will have to price their handhelds extremely aggressively to make them appealing in a world that is about to be flooded with some fairly impressive Android phones in the iPod Touch price range. Still, it's a sure sign that 2011 will be the Year of The Android.
"Energy" (oil) is only a noticeable part of the picture because you can do minimal processing of it, then pump the result into your car, so you can drive 100 miles every day to your office job that manages reselling Chinese imports"
Actually, the planet's population growth from about 1 billion to 6+ billion can be directly attributed to harnessing the energy in oil. Fossil fuel is vital to sustain mechanized farming, to generating over half the electricity across the united states (which run the server farms that we're so addicted to). Almost everything we see, do or touch requires a massive amount of oil to produce and sustain. The belief that oil is only required to get too and from work is dangerously myopic. We need to for everything we do, and we've built our society on the notion that we must sustain constant growth. More cars, more people, more consumption.
My biggest concern about MSE is that it's released by Microsoft. That makes it a natural target for malware and virus authors -- there's a certain credibility to be earned by writing software that defeats security protection by The Man. I'd prefer to run a less common (but equally effective) anti-virus suite that won't attract as much attention from the black hats.
As it is, running MSE 2.0 feels a bit like pinning a big bulls eye target sign on my back.
... focusing on manual dexterity and spatial awareness instead? Lincoln Logs, Lego, a high quality set of coloring pencils. He's almost old enough to discover the wonders of screwdrivers and simple woodworking. The poor kid doesn't need to sit there mashing on a mouse and buttons, staring unblinking at a little LCD panel a couple of feet from his nose.
You were fine with Open Office when it was a Sun product, right? It's still the same app suite, based on the same code. There's just a different company's name on the splash screen. So get over your past adventures with Oracle and use it. It's free, it was written by smart people, and it's not like using it means that you love Oracle's RDBMS products.
Slashdot Mirror
The important thing to note is that countries like the UK, Canada, United States and Sweden have relatively low growth -- below 1%. Even at current levels, their populations will double in approximately 100 years (give or take). Countries like Liberia, Burundi, Afghanistan and East Timor will see their populations double within 20 years. So, much as it's comforting to see people in the comments suggest that *we* stop breeding like rabbits, it won't necessarily stop the global problem. The solution to that one is politically distasteful -- *we* would have to share knowledge, money and education to help the citizens of war-torn and impoverished nations.
As far as raising taxes goes, it seems only rational to conclude that the USA can't keep increasing borrowing forever. At some point, the nation will either have to reduce the deficit or default (hopefully not by triggering a world war and legislating a default). Your taxes don't just magically disappear - they go to pay for operating the county (salaries, construction, defense and federal contracts). And, honestly, you're likely to send the majority of your disposable income out of the country in the form of electronics purchases, fancy German cars and "made in China" purchases.
One of the challenges with modern democracy is that government mandates usually last only 4 or 5 years at most. Any commitments made beyond the current term are essentially meaningless. If peak oil predictions turn out to be true, it might be very difficult for Germany to avoid nuclear power in the 2020s, unless the entire population dramatically reduces power consumption.
Uh, Canada is a separate country. We don't have the TSA. We don't require fingerprinting, photographs or genital groping to enter the country.
And all this science I don't understand
It's just my job five days a week
I've become a huge fan of our local library in the past couple of years, after discovering that they're part of a network of hundreds of municipal libraries that shares their collection. The result is that I can get my hands on almost anything that is fairly mainstream, as long as I'm willing to wait a few weeks for it to come from a few miles away. Of course, this doesn't work with technical material, so I find myself reading tech stuff on my iPad. I've also noticed that the library is only good for physical books. Borrowing an eBook is a nightmare -- I need a DRM-infested client app, and then I have to place a virtual "hold" and wait in line for someone to check in the book I want.
I don't think religion is an evolved trait. It's more likely to be a byproduct of group socialization. We are wired to form social hierarchies, and many leaders have exploited the human willingness to believe in a "higher purpose" to assert divine right over multiple tribes. As a self-aware animal, it's difficult for humans to understand that perhaps our only purpose on earth is to breed to avoid extinction. So instead we create meaningless social rungs -- serf, scribe, priest, investment banker -- and build pyramids, castles and skyscrapers to assert control over nature. Besides, it seems that many of us seem to be missing whatever gene causes the irrational belief in an omnipotent Santa Claus-like deity floating on a cloud. Perhaps that's also why I don't own a Mac and opt for cheaper generic machines.
Out of interest, why does this story have a Canadian flag icon on the front page? It's true the company's Canadian, but other tech stories aren't flagged (heh) by their country of origin -- I don't see the Stars & Stripes gracing every piece about Apple or Oracle.
The mission was launched from an air base near Ghazi in Pakistan, a distance of under 80 km. The operational challenge was that the team had to fly north west, *away* from the Afghan border. The flight time is around 20 minutes each way, plus time spent on the ground. And you still have the challenge of transporting the body another 1500 km south after the mission to dump it into the Arabian Sea. I assume they had extensive air cover for that secondary mission to prevent Pakistan from responding.
That isn't just Apple, it's every phone. Even the cheap or free flip phones cost significantly more than what you pay for them.
I have an LG Optimus One android phone that cost me $199 without contract. It's on a prepaid service that runs about $25 per month (voice + data), and it's possible to get dozens of quite decent flip phones for under $100. Most of the time I'm within range of an accessible wifi hotspot, so my data use is surprisingly low. After doing the math, I simply can't justify spending an extra $600 or so a year for an iPhone.
Five hundred years from now, archeologists are going to dig through the remnants of our civilization and try to figure out why we started planting millions of acres of switch grass and pine trees instead of proper food.
$752B is a pretty damn good deal. The shuttle program cost about $5B a year to run, and that was nearly all operational and maintenance costs -- the R&D work was done back in the 1970s and most of the engineers who developed the STS are retired or nearing retirement. It's a stellar (har) achievement from our parents' generation.
Keeping shuttles flying is the equivalent of keeping the conglomerate's old COBOL accounting system limping along for a few more years. It works, but it's less than optimal and forces us to train bright young talent on antiquated systems.
Out of necessity, NASA seems to be taking a few cues from the modern software industry and they're funding smaller, younger companies in addition to the old guard (Lockheed Martin & United). Most notably, they've awarded a launch services contract to SpaceX -- at a total budgetary cost of under $1B. They've contracted Orbital Sciences for small payload launches to the tune of $200M. It's not hard to see how far you could stretch the old $5B shuttle budget with this kind of model -- imagine three or four space startups vying to outdo each other. Hopefully, >em>that's the future of our space program.
If you've watched any footage of the SpaceX launch, you'll realize that they're young and giddy space enthusiasts who are absolutely ecstatic about getting to build vehicles that leave the planet -- just like the folks who laid the foundation for NASA in the heady space race of the 1960s.
Long live the Space Transportation System. It's time to try something new. In the meantime, we might as well take seats on the Russian bus to get people to work on the ISS.
You're missing three key things.
1. The 512MB of memory is incorporated on the A5 chip, along with a dual core CPU and GPU. It's a system on a chip that's estimated to cost a mere $28.90. The true magic in iPad is the hardware engineering -- it's all about providing the best user experience on dirt cheap hardware. For the first time in mass market history, the case (including display) costs more to manufacture than the computer it contains.
2. iOS is a compact mobile OS that runs on homogeneous hardware. There are essentially only two different hardware options. Developers know with absolute certainty how their apps perform when they ship and don't need to overspec hardware requirements -- if it runs sluggishly, they need to recode it. Period.
3. Nearly everyone who owns a computer isn't a computer user. They've never compiled code in their lives and haven't got a clue how their machines work. They're not hard-core gamers, either. They just want to connect with others, write a few letters, surf and play cheap games. They don't need a quad core machine with 16GB of RAM and a few terabytes of drive space for that.
Apple's marketing strategy is brilliant. Unlike other companies, they don't release products with incomprehensible names like the KDH-4001. They don't have to address a myriad of OS compatibility issues (for example, A4-based devices are eligible for iOS updates, the older ones aren't). They have streamlined product lines -- one iPad, one iPod Touch, one Apple TV. By reducing choice, they reduce buyer confusion and uncertainty. A side-effect of this zen marketing approach is that it's easy for the press to write about their products. When a new iPad is introduced, we know ahead of time what to expect, with the addition of a few easy-to-explain doodads (camera! Another camera! Faster! Thinner!). That makes for good copy and makes technophobic users feel somewhat comfortable.
That's basically what we ended up doing by releasing files under several different licenses. This is where the the open source hardware definition is important -- it encapsulates a consistent set of use terms for both hardware and software IP.
I run a company that produces what we term open source hardware, and the open hardware definition takes a stab at providing a framework that individuals and companies can use to release a hardware/software project. The key ingredients are (a) that you must provide source code and design files sufficient to allow someone to build/extend your device, (b) that there can be no non-commercial restrictions (for example, "You can build one for yourself, but don't you dare make them for others", and (c) that any devices based on the source code and design files must be released under a similar license.
Up to this point, we've had to license the hardware designs, schematics, and code are provided under the GPL v3, and then release the documentation, schematics, panels, and illustrations under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license. It's a mess that doesn't work well with nebulous concepts like case design and control panel layouts.
Given that Foxconn has produced over 1 million iPads a month, I don't see why production wouldn't ramp up a few weeks before an announcement. Staff need to be trained and assembly line glitches need to be resolved before they can deliver flat out. That said, I ordered an Apple TV last November that shipped directly from Shenzhen after a short delay-- it seems that they're not even bothering to warehouse inventory in North America anymore because there is no cost saving when everything has to be air freighted anyway.
LOL ROTFL *cough*
By the same token, I've worked with a number of organizations where there was a very strong demand for programmers and IT generalists willing to learn older systems - COBOL, various nasty and quirky Oracle database environments that need to stay running for the next 5 to 10 years, and so on. The truth is that there's a big push to learn and deploy the flavor of the month in IT -- someone gets promoted and all of a sudden everything's being coded by pythons on rails and the entire organization is supposed to live in the clouds. But the truth of the matter is that a lot of our business is very down to earth nuts and bolts stuff -- bills need to be issued every month, reports need to be generated and widgets need to be inventoried. And anyone who is capable of keeping WidgetBill 2000 running is valuable, especially if that person can help the corner office gang migrate WidgetBill to modern hardware and modernize it.
Things are somewhat dicier with a high profile company like Facebook, which already has a sky-high value placed on it. The potential upside is severely limited -- Facebook shares simply aren't going to increase in price by ten-fold within the foreseeable future, simply because that would give the company an insane market capitalization of a half trillion dollars (Exxon Mobile is currently the highest valued American company, at $314billion, followed by Apple at $259 billion and the likes of Walmart at just under $200 billion).
My LG Optimus One cost $200 (without contract), runs Android 2.2 and makes phone calls. I think the PMP market is going to be tough to crack, because manufacturers will have to price their handhelds extremely aggressively to make them appealing in a world that is about to be flooded with some fairly impressive Android phones in the iPod Touch price range. Still, it's a sure sign that 2011 will be the Year of The Android.
Actually, the planet's population growth from about 1 billion to 6+ billion can be directly attributed to harnessing the energy in oil. Fossil fuel is vital to sustain mechanized farming, to generating over half the electricity across the united states (which run the server farms that we're so addicted to). Almost everything we see, do or touch requires a massive amount of oil to produce and sustain. The belief that oil is only required to get too and from work is dangerously myopic. We need to for everything we do, and we've built our society on the notion that we must sustain constant growth. More cars, more people, more consumption.
My biggest concern about MSE is that it's released by Microsoft. That makes it a natural target for malware and virus authors -- there's a certain credibility to be earned by writing software that defeats security protection by The Man. I'd prefer to run a less common (but equally effective) anti-virus suite that won't attract as much attention from the black hats. As it is, running MSE 2.0 feels a bit like pinning a big bulls eye target sign on my back.
... focusing on manual dexterity and spatial awareness instead? Lincoln Logs, Lego, a high quality set of coloring pencils. He's almost old enough to discover the wonders of screwdrivers and simple woodworking. The poor kid doesn't need to sit there mashing on a mouse and buttons, staring unblinking at a little LCD panel a couple of feet from his nose.
You were fine with Open Office when it was a Sun product, right? It's still the same app suite, based on the same code. There's just a different company's name on the splash screen. So get over your past adventures with Oracle and use it. It's free, it was written by smart people, and it's not like using it means that you love Oracle's RDBMS products.