As the summer has drug on, I have become more convinced that there is a major problem in this country. Conservative people tend to live in the center of the nation, while liberal people live on the coasts. As a result many, many conservative people have a single liberal friend (or possibly none) and vis-a-versa. As a result most folk' spectrum runs from left to center or right to center and they really don't have any idea where the other side is coming from. Also, anyone of differing beliefs in an area leaves pretty quickly and looks back on their time in the opposite territory as simply awful.
I think 90%+ of Americans are very willing to pay for good education, security, and more or less agree (enoght to come to consensus) on social issues that should be handled by the government. Unfortunatly we're split pretty evenly on how to accomplish these issues). I've seen an increasing number of calls from both sides of the spectrum to work together a bit more rather than constant attacks that have ruled the day since Clinton took office. While Carter and Reagan both had very strident opposition, I think the opposition knew that each really desired to better the country (even if the methods differed), I'm not so sure that the opposition to Clinton and the second Bush, will even give that credit. Since we have had a President from each side, hopefully everyone can see the difference between prior opposition and latter oppositon.
So why doesn't everyone try to seek out and understand the motivations of someone who is diametricly opposed to your political philosophy. I know I've enjoyed discussions (even if we never reach an agreement or consensus) with those I've opposed than with those I agree with.
From what I've seen about what they actually propose to do there is little difference in how much debt either will leave to our children, but on what the money got spent on in the creation of that debt. Security vs health care.
Why couldn't you run mineral oil instead of water in an enclosed system. I ran the numbers and it looked like it should be able to pump about 200W using a 2 Gpm pump. Copper block and radiator sufficent to dispose the heat to ambient (assumes a 10C differential in temp). Has anyone ever tried to run mineral oil through a pump intended for water does the increased viscosity shorten the life, or will it handle it alright? Seems like most of the mineral oil set ups I've seen discribed use immersion which seems like considerable overkill. Mineral oil seems like a fine solution until processor power goes considerably higher. The heat transfer class I took was an aweful long time ago so please point out any errors in my back of the envelope calcs.
First off power consumption for a processor =.5*C*V^2*F where c is capacitance, V is voltage, and F is frequency. So if you can find capacitance you can get a pretty good estimate of the processor's power needs. From Intel's datasheets: P4 90 nm (prescott) 520-550 models 84 W of design power (what Intel recommends the heatsink be able to pull).
550-560 models 115 W of design power.
From AMD's datasheets: design power (measured with max amplitude and nominal voltage) is 89 watts for all power ratings 3000+ to 3700+.
I couldn't find a PPC 970 data sheet at IBM but ee times claims it pulls 97 watts, but speed was not specified. That seems consistent with the water cooling on the G5, my air cooled P4 is plenty loud.
You are correct, that they can benefit from scale, but the gains are considerably smaller (as you have to add employees to boost your capacity). The opposite would be a software company that can basically make as many compies of their software with no real increases in cost. Software companies and banks (probably insurance too) have huge returns to scale (costs rise considerably slower than sales), consultancies have considerably less (there is still some cost savings as you grow, but costs rise roughly in line with sales), while small cap management exhibits a ton (in the range of software) for a short time but unlike large cap money management where the biggest firm is the most effective) once a small cap fund gets to be too big (in the range of half a billion) they have too much difficulty finding enough investments and returns fall (costs rise faster than sales at that point).
Satelite is an oddly regulated business as they should be a closed network but the broadcasters are a powerful enough lobby they have probably done some monkeying with their status. My understanding of the theory behind regulation is that spectrum was seen as a scarce public good which is granted by the government to certain businesses and as a result you aren't supposed to offend people with something you broadcast over the spectrum. However if you set up a closed network you can broadcast anything you want (as anyone recieving the signal got it especially to recieve that signal) which is why CBS got fined for showing a boob, but Skinimax can do it every day if they want and MTV could show the Smack my Bitch Up video. I think satellite is considered to be closed (because it is encrypted) but the payola rules might be propogated by another legal theory (not public ownership of the airwaves).
While there are certainly a lot of businesses with gains to scale, but others have more neutral scale returns (consulting is a good example) or even negative returns to scale (like small cap money management--returns tend to drop after a fund gets above a certain size). Some controls are needed on a market to prevent market failures, but there are better methods of fixing market failures than cost regulation (which is used too frequently).
I paid $100 for an old HP workstation (300 Mhz P2 with a half gig of ram and a SCSI drive) several years ago and it was running Win2k and Office (and would likely run XP withouth the FisherPrice look) just fine. I sold it a year or so ago for about $50 and believe it it still running happily today. I doubt it would run FlightSim 2005 very well, but everything else was quite happy. Outside of gaming (and the SCSI bios boot time) I really haven't noticed much difference between that and my current system (1GHz Duron IDE JBOD), or even my work system (3.2 GHz Prescott SATA drive).
My long term prediction is that both hardware and software will sell at marginal cost. Most hardware is there, but until about 4 years ago I always wondered how software would sell at marginal cost (near zero) now I know and can go back to thinking about other issues.
First of all, I'd argue that Mr. Joy has certainly made the world better through the creation of a good chunk of the software that makes the internet work (or was used in the creation of the software that makes the internet work). No but he clearly has talents that few of us have (visualizing new methods of organizing data) and he spent years of his life refining those talents, to collect on them now. What you plan fails to account for is that some people can do in 10 hours that which others could spend 400 and still not accomplish. Some jobs are interchangable, others are not. By that I am not arguing that every executive who makes more than $500k/yr is one of those people, but some of them certainly are.
Ironic that you would complain about people starving, but also idealize a society that protects us from competition from overseas. If you open up free trade with those overseas those other folks would do a whole lot less starving.
You'd never have car or computers or electricity in your society because no entity could afford to build the resources neccessary to make the factory. We can certainly argue about the relative advantages and disadvantages of these changes (perhaps that is your end goal and that's a fine viewpoint to hold, I'd prefer if you would just attack it directly). Ultimately, why do you want to benefit someone who applies the very minimum to improving their talents and resources at the cost of someone driven to make the very best of them. Take two people Bill and Bob. Bill is a bright fellow who works his tail off all through school to get top marks and become an engineer. After school he develops a solar panel that is considerably more efficent than other panels and there is tremendous demand for the product, his boss would like to reward Bill for this invention but he already used his free royalty on a video game he and some friends make in college. Bob graduated with a D average (he spent every Friday and more than a few Wednesday's drunk) but he made a job where he really doesn't do much so the boss could give Bill his bonus that year, it was a pretty good year and everyone more productive had already been hired. Why would anyone want to beneift Bob under any circumstance? If a job only requires 10 people but the production of those 10 people generates 15 million why should they have to hire people to sit around so they can collect the money they earned? Almost every attempt to bring parity to wages ends up benefitting the lazy over the dilligent, and I don't think that's fair.
Alright how about this. I earn 2x the average wage and save 40% of my salary earning 10% annually. After 30 years of this (assuming 2% wage inflation) I am now earning slightly more than 10x the average wage (even if I retire and begin drawing my annual salary at that wage I wil certainly hit the 10x number before I die. What is fair about punishing me for saving for the future? What if instead of saving monetary resources, I expend time resources building a company from scratch that fills a useful need and produces significantly more value than that? You cannot tell me that Sun has not made its customers better off by signficantly more than the wealth Mr. Joy has made from it. Why shouldn't someone who makes the whole world better be compensated for it?
Wouldn't it be ironic if enough of us were doing that that Bush lost a dark Red state to one of the finge parties. I'm planning to do the same thing in Montana. It would only take about 150 thousand votes for Bush to lose Montana.
I didn't write anything but the single comment preceeding yours and this one. : )
They most certainly do have a monopoly on cable service, deciding if they have a monopoly on video service depends on who is drawing the system lines. It would be trivially easy to call a market something that gave cable total dominance in a region, or to make them competitive on the Herfindahl index. That's really something the government would decide depending on who paid them to benefit from the decision.
On to the more substinative part of the discussion. The franchise right is given for two reasons, first cable service offers considerable network effects, meaning that the biggest competitor is paradoxically the cheapest supplier of the good or service. They also happen to be the most profitable supplier of the good or service. A city generally considers the availability of cable service to be a good, but realizes that allowing anyone to build a cable service in there city will not produce a desirable market (you will end up with one competitor or many competitors who consistently bankrupt themselves trying to become the single compeititor). So to prevent this waste of resources (building several expensive parrallel networks), the city grants an exclusive right to be the cable operator to a company but recieves as a concession the cable company's promise to build their network beyond the most profitable areas. If the cable company had its preferences it would build only to homes that met a hurdle rate of return which is probably >15% annually. The city might get the company to reduce the average to 15% and the cable company would cover several times as many houses.
You are correct in your statement that there is a city mandated monopoly on cable service, but there is a very close substitute (or competitor depending on who decides what the market is) in satellite video service. Also, the phone companies are finally beginning to plan wide scale rollouts of fiber based video services. With three companies vying for your voice, video, and internet dollars expect margins to fall considerably closer to marginal cost. Early bundles of the three are in the $110 range, but it I've heard from CEOs on both sides who think they could probably offer something in the $85-$90 range.
The impressive part is that power generation occurs on such a tiny space, perhaps 1 cm^2. Also keep in mind that the cache is below average in heat generation so effectivly 1/3 of the processor space is generating probably 80% of that heat. That is a truly astounding heat density (several thousand watts/m^2).
Almost all the power used in a processor ends up as heat because there arn't any moving parts (any that move flex and endup wasting energy as friction). There is a minute amount of power in a PC that goes to work (spinning drives and fans up and such) but usually this is considered negligable relative th the amount of power that generates heat. The assumption is that effectivly all power drawn is converted to heat through resistance (like a space heater). Calculations aren't work in the physical sense (application of force over time).
From August sales data and EA's own admission this was one of the better years for Madden from launch to August. It hit 1 million sales faster than last year, and was selling even more units than ESPN Football through August. Unless September was a total disaster this analyst missed the boat.
Ah but in exchange for that monopoly the cable company had to deliver service to areas they wouldn't have rather than having 10 companies stringing cable through the city center providing cheap TV to people who lived in dense apartments and nothing to anyone who lived in less populous neighborhoods.
It seems odd that an open source program would be able to maintain a closed source file format. Sure stranger things have happened, but I think you might get a pleasant surprise if you use your favorite zip utility on an open office file.
Re:McAuliffe likes Nader being in there
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The Nader Factor
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That's one of the few good features of our odd political system. You have to win two grueling matches the first for people at one extreem (you have to convince them that you will work to further their goals) enough to build a ton of resources. Allowing you to move to the second match in which you have to convince the last 20% that you won't push the country too far toward the direction of your base. In that sense we get the candidate we really want (one that doesn't actually do much) as much as people complain about gridlock, I think most Americans prefer it to the alternative.
You should hear the fans on our new Prescott Dells. If you don't run the processor it's pretty quiet, but once utilization goes over 50% on one HT "core" the fan kicks up and continues to speed up until you could hear them from 30 feet away with two doors in between. We demanded and got new fans from Dell (and some crazy heatsinks (5-6" tall heat pipe jobbies) that must have cost Dell more than $20. I can see why they might be having a few problems with heat at 4 GHz.
Who exactly did you think was behind the CD class action suit that sent checks out to everyone this spring? Or more recently the Visa anti-trust case this summer? Ironicly, the "bad guys" in the CD suit were the Tower Records and other small shops who liked that Wal-Mart couldn't undercut them on popular stuff.
Yeah but you only make a profit on them if you own the technology (or license it exclusivly) behind the ink cartridges. In this case the lion's share of the profits go to Lexmark.:)
Tipping at resturants is actually a better method of evaluating wait staff. Think this way, the manager raise food prices, become a non-tipping establishment and could pay say $15/hr and secret shop their waitstaff to ensure good service, but it works better to cut that part of the cost out of prices and let the customer pay for service rendered. The risk of the prior plan is that service could decline rapidly and your customer base is gone too quickly. The truely thrifty don't shop at a single place and spend a ton of time (which they generally have a surplus of) doing pricing research clipping coupons comparing prices at all the stores across town and investing in storage to allow stocking up sales. An example is buying both Christmas and Thanksgiving turkeys at the Thanksgiving sale price and freezing the extra one. Another one is buying butter when it goes on a really good special (say $1/lb) rather than when you need it and the average price might be $3/lb. Shopping only for clothes at end of season clearance sales means buying nicer clothes (that last longer) at Wal-Mart prices.
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As the summer has drug on, I have become more convinced that there is a major problem in this country. Conservative people tend to live in the center of the nation, while liberal people live on the coasts. As a result many, many conservative people have a single liberal friend (or possibly none) and vis-a-versa. As a result most folk' spectrum runs from left to center or right to center and they really don't have any idea where the other side is coming from. Also, anyone of differing beliefs in an area leaves pretty quickly and looks back on their time in the opposite territory as simply awful.
I think 90%+ of Americans are very willing to pay for good education, security, and more or less agree (enoght to come to consensus) on social issues that should be handled by the government. Unfortunatly we're split pretty evenly on how to accomplish these issues). I've seen an increasing number of calls from both sides of the spectrum to work together a bit more rather than constant attacks that have ruled the day since Clinton took office. While Carter and Reagan both had very strident opposition, I think the opposition knew that each really desired to better the country (even if the methods differed), I'm not so sure that the opposition to Clinton and the second Bush, will even give that credit. Since we have had a President from each side, hopefully everyone can see the difference between prior opposition and latter oppositon.
So why doesn't everyone try to seek out and understand the motivations of someone who is diametricly opposed to your political philosophy. I know I've enjoyed discussions (even if we never reach an agreement or consensus) with those I've opposed than with those I agree with.
From what I've seen about what they actually propose to do there is little difference in how much debt either will leave to our children, but on what the money got spent on in the creation of that debt. Security vs health care.
Somebody please mod this up.
Why couldn't you run mineral oil instead of water in an enclosed system. I ran the numbers and it looked like it should be able to pump about 200W using a 2 Gpm pump. Copper block and radiator sufficent to dispose the heat to ambient (assumes a 10C differential in temp). Has anyone ever tried to run mineral oil through a pump intended for water does the increased viscosity shorten the life, or will it handle it alright? Seems like most of the mineral oil set ups I've seen discribed use immersion which seems like considerable overkill. Mineral oil seems like a fine solution until processor power goes considerably higher. The heat transfer class I took was an aweful long time ago so please point out any errors in my back of the envelope calcs.
First off power consumption for a processor = .5*C*V^2*F where c is capacitance, V is voltage, and F is frequency. So if you can find capacitance you can get a pretty good estimate of the processor's power needs.
From Intel's datasheets: P4 90 nm (prescott) 520-550 models 84 W of design power (what Intel recommends the heatsink be able to pull).
550-560 models 115 W of design power.
From AMD's datasheets: design power (measured with max amplitude and nominal voltage) is 89 watts for all power ratings 3000+ to 3700+.
I couldn't find a PPC 970 data sheet at IBM but ee times claims it pulls 97 watts, but speed was not specified. That seems consistent with the water cooling on the G5, my air cooled P4 is plenty loud.
I think the ACLU gave the Ford Foundation's money back because of some even more left leaning requirments the Ford group has for groups it supports.
You are correct, that they can benefit from scale, but the gains are considerably smaller (as you have to add employees to boost your capacity). The opposite would be a software company that can basically make as many compies of their software with no real increases in cost. Software companies and banks (probably insurance too) have huge returns to scale (costs rise considerably slower than sales), consultancies have considerably less (there is still some cost savings as you grow, but costs rise roughly in line with sales), while small cap management exhibits a ton (in the range of software) for a short time but unlike large cap money management where the biggest firm is the most effective) once a small cap fund gets to be too big (in the range of half a billion) they have too much difficulty finding enough investments and returns fall (costs rise faster than sales at that point).
Satelite is an oddly regulated business as they should be a closed network but the broadcasters are a powerful enough lobby they have probably done some monkeying with their status. My understanding of the theory behind regulation is that spectrum was seen as a scarce public good which is granted by the government to certain businesses and as a result you aren't supposed to offend people with something you broadcast over the spectrum. However if you set up a closed network you can broadcast anything you want (as anyone recieving the signal got it especially to recieve that signal) which is why CBS got fined for showing a boob, but Skinimax can do it every day if they want and MTV could show the Smack my Bitch Up video. I think satellite is considered to be closed (because it is encrypted) but the payola rules might be propogated by another legal theory (not public ownership of the airwaves).
While there are certainly a lot of businesses with gains to scale, but others have more neutral scale returns (consulting is a good example) or even negative returns to scale (like small cap money management--returns tend to drop after a fund gets above a certain size). Some controls are needed on a market to prevent market failures, but there are better methods of fixing market failures than cost regulation (which is used too frequently).
I paid $100 for an old HP workstation (300 Mhz P2 with a half gig of ram and a SCSI drive) several years ago and it was running Win2k and Office (and would likely run XP withouth the FisherPrice look) just fine. I sold it a year or so ago for about $50 and believe it it still running happily today. I doubt it would run FlightSim 2005 very well, but everything else was quite happy. Outside of gaming (and the SCSI bios boot time) I really haven't noticed much difference between that and my current system (1GHz Duron IDE JBOD), or even my work system (3.2 GHz Prescott SATA drive).
My long term prediction is that both hardware and software will sell at marginal cost. Most hardware is there, but until about 4 years ago I always wondered how software would sell at marginal cost (near zero) now I know and can go back to thinking about other issues.
First of all, I'd argue that Mr. Joy has certainly made the world better through the creation of a good chunk of the software that makes the internet work (or was used in the creation of the software that makes the internet work). No but he clearly has talents that few of us have (visualizing new methods of organizing data) and he spent years of his life refining those talents, to collect on them now. What you plan fails to account for is that some people can do in 10 hours that which others could spend 400 and still not accomplish. Some jobs are interchangable, others are not. By that I am not arguing that every executive who makes more than $500k/yr is one of those people, but some of them certainly are.
Ironic that you would complain about people starving, but also idealize a society that protects us from competition from overseas. If you open up free trade with those overseas those other folks would do a whole lot less starving. You'd never have car or computers or electricity in your society because no entity could afford to build the resources neccessary to make the factory. We can certainly argue about the relative advantages and disadvantages of these changes (perhaps that is your end goal and that's a fine viewpoint to hold, I'd prefer if you would just attack it directly).
Ultimately, why do you want to benefit someone who applies the very minimum to improving their talents and resources at the cost of someone driven to make the very best of them. Take two people Bill and Bob. Bill is a bright fellow who works his tail off all through school to get top marks and become an engineer. After school he develops a solar panel that is considerably more efficent than other panels and there is tremendous demand for the product, his boss would like to reward Bill for this invention but he already used his free royalty on a video game he and some friends make in college. Bob graduated with a D average (he spent every Friday and more than a few Wednesday's drunk) but he made a job where he really doesn't do much so the boss could give Bill his bonus that year, it was a pretty good year and everyone more productive had already been hired. Why would anyone want to beneift Bob under any circumstance? If a job only requires 10 people but the production of those 10 people generates 15 million why should they have to hire people to sit around so they can collect the money they earned? Almost every attempt to bring parity to wages ends up benefitting the lazy over the dilligent, and I don't think that's fair.
Alright how about this. I earn 2x the average wage and save 40% of my salary earning 10% annually. After 30 years of this (assuming 2% wage inflation) I am now earning slightly more than 10x the average wage (even if I retire and begin drawing my annual salary at that wage I wil certainly hit the 10x number before I die. What is fair about punishing me for saving for the future? What if instead of saving monetary resources, I expend time resources building a company from scratch that fills a useful need and produces significantly more value than that? You cannot tell me that Sun has not made its customers better off by signficantly more than the wealth Mr. Joy has made from it. Why shouldn't someone who makes the whole world better be compensated for it?
Wouldn't it be ironic if enough of us were doing that that Bush lost a dark Red state to one of the finge parties. I'm planning to do the same thing in Montana. It would only take about 150 thousand votes for Bush to lose Montana.
I didn't write anything but the single comment preceeding yours and this one. : )
They most certainly do have a monopoly on cable service, deciding if they have a monopoly on video service depends on who is drawing the system lines. It would be trivially easy to call a market something that gave cable total dominance in a region, or to make them competitive on the Herfindahl index. That's really something the government would decide depending on who paid them to benefit from the decision.
On to the more substinative part of the discussion. The franchise right is given for two reasons, first cable service offers considerable network effects, meaning that the biggest competitor is paradoxically the cheapest supplier of the good or service. They also happen to be the most profitable supplier of the good or service. A city generally considers the availability of cable service to be a good, but realizes that allowing anyone to build a cable service in there city will not produce a desirable market (you will end up with one competitor or many competitors who consistently bankrupt themselves trying to become the single compeititor). So to prevent this waste of resources (building several expensive parrallel networks), the city grants an exclusive right to be the cable operator to a company but recieves as a concession the cable company's promise to build their network beyond the most profitable areas. If the cable company had its preferences it would build only to homes that met a hurdle rate of return which is probably >15% annually. The city might get the company to reduce the average to 15% and the cable company would cover several times as many houses.
You are correct in your statement that there is a city mandated monopoly on cable service, but there is a very close substitute (or competitor depending on who decides what the market is) in satellite video service. Also, the phone companies are finally beginning to plan wide scale rollouts of fiber based video services. With three companies vying for your voice, video, and internet dollars expect margins to fall considerably closer to marginal cost. Early bundles of the three are in the $110 range, but it I've heard from CEOs on both sides who think they could probably offer something in the $85-$90 range.
The impressive part is that power generation occurs on such a tiny space, perhaps 1 cm^2. Also keep in mind that the cache is below average in heat generation so effectivly 1/3 of the processor space is generating probably 80% of that heat. That is a truly astounding heat density (several thousand watts/m^2).
Almost all the power used in a processor ends up as heat because there arn't any moving parts (any that move flex and endup wasting energy as friction). There is a minute amount of power in a PC that goes to work (spinning drives and fans up and such) but usually this is considered negligable relative th the amount of power that generates heat. The assumption is that effectivly all power drawn is converted to heat through resistance (like a space heater). Calculations aren't work in the physical sense (application of force over time).
From August sales data and EA's own admission this was one of the better years for Madden from launch to August. It hit 1 million sales faster than last year, and was selling even more units than ESPN Football through August. Unless September was a total disaster this analyst missed the boat.
Ah but in exchange for that monopoly the cable company had to deliver service to areas they wouldn't have rather than having 10 companies stringing cable through the city center providing cheap TV to people who lived in dense apartments and nothing to anyone who lived in less populous neighborhoods.
It seems odd that an open source program would be able to maintain a closed source file format. Sure stranger things have happened, but I think you might get a pleasant surprise if you use your favorite zip utility on an open office file.
That's one of the few good features of our odd political system. You have to win two grueling matches the first for people at one extreem (you have to convince them that you will work to further their goals) enough to build a ton of resources. Allowing you to move to the second match in which you have to convince the last 20% that you won't push the country too far toward the direction of your base. In that sense we get the candidate we really want (one that doesn't actually do much) as much as people complain about gridlock, I think most Americans prefer it to the alternative.
You should hear the fans on our new Prescott Dells. If you don't run the processor it's pretty quiet, but once utilization goes over 50% on one HT "core" the fan kicks up and continues to speed up until you could hear them from 30 feet away with two doors in between. We demanded and got new fans from Dell (and some crazy heatsinks (5-6" tall heat pipe jobbies) that must have cost Dell more than $20. I can see why they might be having a few problems with heat at 4 GHz.
Who exactly did you think was behind the CD class action suit that sent checks out to everyone this spring? Or more recently the Visa anti-trust case this summer? Ironicly, the "bad guys" in the CD suit were the Tower Records and other small shops who liked that Wal-Mart couldn't undercut them on popular stuff.
Yeah but you only make a profit on them if you own the technology (or license it exclusivly) behind the ink cartridges. In this case the lion's share of the profits go to Lexmark. :)
Tipping at resturants is actually a better method of evaluating wait staff. Think this way, the manager raise food prices, become a non-tipping establishment and could pay say $15/hr and secret shop their waitstaff to ensure good service, but it works better to cut that part of the cost out of prices and let the customer pay for service rendered. The risk of the prior plan is that service could decline rapidly and your customer base is gone too quickly. The truely thrifty don't shop at a single place and spend a ton of time (which they generally have a surplus of) doing pricing research clipping coupons comparing prices at all the stores across town and investing in storage to allow stocking up sales. An example is buying both Christmas and Thanksgiving turkeys at the Thanksgiving sale price and freezing the extra one. Another one is buying butter when it goes on a really good special (say $1/lb) rather than when you need it and the average price might be $3/lb. Shopping only for clothes at end of season clearance sales means buying nicer clothes (that last longer) at Wal-Mart prices.