Re:Small engine, fast cars but what about airplane
on
The Bugatti Veyron
·
· Score: 1
I think Continental still makes some powerplants for older Cesnas planes, generally they are high compression (even for today), but lower RPM (3000 RPM is near redline). General Aviation is sort of undergoing a rebirth after liability suits went out the window, the industry had died until a few years ago. If you pop out to an FBO I'm sure you could find a few pilots who would show you their bird. Honda was working with Textron on some newer engine designs for GA. Cutting edge (for general consumption) internal combustion technology is likely in Japanese speedsters or some of the new European diesels. In a few years (after the R&D is done there should be some interesting stuff coming out of the general aviation industry), although from what I've seen its more focused on the areodynamics and cabin space rather than improving engines.
Generally the cost of proving a new engine reliable to the FAA was prohibitive for all but a few designs. I'd guess there are some experemental craft (homebuilts) with Wenkels but you'd have to be pretty brave to trust your life to a point seal.
VW is going to put a W12 in their Phateon or however it's supposed to be spelled sometime this year or next. Not quite as big, I think the W12 is in the 400 hp range, but the price should be much more reasonable. I don't know if any Audi models will get a W engine. If I were buying a super car I'd get the new Esprit.
Laptops are a wonderful tool that can add signficantly to learning, but they require either reeducation or very, very good teachers. I went to a college that had a program bringing laptops to the classroom. It was the second year of the program. Big things I noticed were we could do complex circuit designs on the fly with logic sims, PSpice, Maple & Matlab, which was really nice for several classes. However, they ended up being a liability in things like Calc, basic Circuits classes, and other foundation classes, where they were more of a distraction. Not that I really minded the screensaver in front of me during calc lectures, but that's a whole other story. The sharp teachers had lecture time and later computer time with the loss of a letter grade if you broke the rule. The less savvy teachers had whole classrooms who were either surfing or playing networked games most of the year. Not that they cared, 1st year of ROTC was a required class for everyone and they broke out classes for all the kids who weren't on scholarships, and met the requirement.
Anyway, unless the teachers are taught how to teach with computers, I fear that the computers will be more of a detriment to learning rather than an enhancement. Lots of kids today can't do arithmatic due to calculators being put in their hands in early grade school, just thing if they all have spell and grammer checking word processors from day one.
I keep these in a folder and burn CDs to pass out to folks who I help with computers. In no real order, winRAR/winZIP, OpenOffice, AdobeAcrobat, Mozilla/Firefox, iTunes, bluelight (I have DSL everyone else wanted a cheap ISP). There is probably another program or two. I could use a fun, uncomplex, free game. There aren't many of who like easyBridge and JaGO and the GNU go server.
The game sort of pushes you to the light side, with Carth and Ballista chiming in when you are about to do a dark side act. You have to have a pretty deep mean streak or love of the darkside to continue with all the ingame remiders.
The only Enron employees who lost their pension deserved what they got, unless they were a recent hire or in some way restricted from trading in their 401k. The only way they lost their pension was if it was entirely in Enron stock. While it's not a good idea to keep all your investments in a single stock, it is a terrible idea to keep it all in the stock of the company you work for (as you will lose both your job and the value of the stock if the company has trouble). Those people either didn't pay any attention to their retirement money or were greedy to get more of the run up that had taken place over the few years prior to the bankruptcy. I doubt even energy or gas funds lost more than 10%-20% of their value when Enron went bankrupt, broader funds likely lost less than 1%.
Because what Baystar wants is Darl gone, the speculators who are betting on the stock at this point think that that would be a positive change for the company. Baystar sees the writing on the wall and wants to begin conserving cash for a long fight.
There is tons of it because the record companies figured out that there is a big (and low cost advert market-we all go to the same place once a week) waiting to be tapped. The passion did very well because it was promoted like crazy in churches. Our pastor saw a prescreening at a conference and when it was released I'd be surprised if less than 80% of the adults in our church did not see it. Christian music has many of the same dynamics (it gets promoted by churches and friends for free a lot of the time). The band that gets me is Creed, in the christian press they hint around being a christian band, in mainstreem press the claim not to be. I don't care which you are (and don't really care for the music) but choose one or the other. I remember an article that credited soundscan's charts for the rise of Christian music from mainstream owned labels.
That is precicly what this is about, everyone realizes that switching costs are high in software, and standardization is really nice for everyone involved. Having control of the standards is a very valuable thing, as you can collect some value from uses (as long as the value is lower than switching costs). The issue is whether MS used their Windows monopoly to extend standards they contol to other markets (in this case media players). That is illegal.
I would guess that that tariffs slapped on Hynix last year might be part of it as well. Between that and surprising PC and server demand recovery last over the last 12 months I'd guess RAM makers might turn a profit sometime soon. Of course they will all use that for loans to build new bigger fabs and start the down cycle again. That is one crazy industry.
The problem with e-voting is that it was adopted too quickly. I think systems were installed in less than a year after Florida. If an organization (private or public) sat back and designed a system to meet secure criteria (for a year) with proper testing e-voting would save a considerable amount of voting staff time. Seems to me that a group of/.ers could form a company and build a system that worked a whole lot better than this.
It would be pretty funny to walk into the voting area and see someone torching their ballot over in their little voting booth. Someone might give a crap about that form of protest, especially after the smoke alarms go off.
It's trouble brewing, and I think Superman moved in a few buildings down where he opens mayo jars for Lois (and likely a few other old ladies in the building).
SUN in addition to JAVA (which can point to the finding of fact from the big anti-trust case proving most of the case) SUN bought the server software from AOL/Netscape, and had a bang up anti-trust case on both attempts to monopolize and predatory pricing/tieng. SUN was suing for 1 billion in damages, but anti-trust cases always award treble (3x) punative damages. So in a sense MS saved the time, risk, and cost of a trial for monetary and 1x punative damages. SUN decided that the bird in hand was worth two in the bush and took the deal.
About 7 years ago IOmega had a product called the Jaz drive that was like a 1GB floppy drive (at the time HDDs were in the low single GB range). It was expensive (as was the media) and was completely beaten by CDRs a few years later. However from what I understand it was much much faster and more reliable than their Zip drives.
There is a white pine tree, and I've heard of snow crab, further checking gives white crab as an alternate name for the ghost crab, it is likely a regional item (from the recipies it appears to be in the South (lots of white crab and crayfish meals).
If Mr. Edison had worked smarter, he wouldn't have sweat so much--Tesla. Edison had a wonderful career managing engineers rather than directly inventing things. However, the investors then just like today wanted a story so he was played up as the inventor of all the products his company patented. He was a business genious like Jobs or Gates rather than the technical brains (like Woz).
I don't think Peugot has sold a car in the states for more than a decade, you still run into a few (either aftermarket imported or old enough to have been bought before the cessation of exports). It's really too bad, the 206 looks to be a sweet car, more fun to hop up than the DSM stuff. No real issue with the other points, but no company would "outsource the executives" rather they will be beaten by Indian companies with homegrown executives.
Athough you will occasionally see deviations:
Gross profit is your profit after your manufacturing or input costs are covered. If we were talking about a PC OEM this would include components in a cheap computer (RAM, HD, mobo, CPU, case, and assembly as well as depreciation on your factory). This ranges from about 15% (grocery stores and PC manufacturers) to 90% (software developers) an average manufacturing gross margin is about 40-50% in decent times. Traditionally this cost has a high portion of fixed costs (costs that do not change with small increments of production).
The next costs taken out are for selling, marketing, administration, and product development. Some companies pull all of their depriciation costs out and put it here as well. This is where most of the paychecks are accounted for on an income statement. Other than ERP systems and office buildings, or the developer's toys, there aren't a lot of fixed costs here (labor is still considered more of a variable cost)which is true for commissioned sales people, but less true for an R&D staff. After these costs are removed what is left is operating profit. Overall averages are about 10-15% nationally, with retail sales operating margins at the low of 3-5% and software development reaching as high as 50%.
Next groups get quite confusing as different companies pull any combination of the following out interest, taxes, or other costs. Once all three have been removed you are left with net profit. Sometimes a preferred stock dividend (an archaic cross between stocks and bonds certain tax laws have largely rendered these a thing of the past, but they are still occasionally used as convertable instruments) is removed and net to common shareholders is quoted but that is fairly rare. In response to the grandparents, Microsoft has never reported more than $4 billion in operating profit in a quarter (about 2.5 billion in net profit) so the first poster (60-80 days of profit) is more correct. Usually daily/monthly rates are applied to cash generation, but that is a lesson for a different time.
I beleive that internally SUN accounts a certain cost for each UltraSPARC used in their systems at an amound that would make the processor division profitable if it were on it's own. We'll have to take their word for it unless you have access to their general ledger. They seem to be getting closer to Fujitsu's SPARC implementation at the mid to high end, as well.
I think you can pack more calls into a given range of the higher frequency spectrum. Nextel is paying some cash with the swap. It has been a very long process, and now the rumbling is starting after they have come close to an agreement.
It's always a surprise when I leave montana and something costs more than the shelf price. If you ever buy anything big in another state, you should be able to avoid the sales tax on it by telling the clerk you are a resident of N.H. They may whine, but they'll do it.
The bricks and morter computer stores only survive today by exercising monopoly power on people who cannot wait for three days shipping or do not know anything about price. Concequently they sell very low volume and make it up on margin. Think of it this way you need to cover $5000 in monthly expenses (rent, salaries, etc). The two ways to do this are to sell 25 units/mo at $250 markup or 200 at $30. If your online competitors are selling it at $5 with another $5 in shipping, you probably can't make enough trying to sell in volume any anything other than a big city (see Fry's). So the remainder fell to one little firm in an area who survives on the low volume/huge mark up model.
Why is it sad, it's an opportunity, you just have to show them why the features of the good product are easily worth the extra price. Kitchen Aid is able to do this quite successfully (compare one of their mixers with a mix master) they usually get several times the cheapo handheld's price. Everyone want's to maximize their spending dollar and if they don't understand the differences they will usually go with the cheap one. The trick lies in getting them to better understand the differences. Companies like Paradigm understand this and don't allow their product to be sold online (where a sales person would have no chance to extol the virtues of the speaker) and all the consumer sees is that one pair of bookshelf units costs $200 and the other is $75. One listen will show most people why, so Paradigm only sells to bricks and morter establishments (who all have similar costs of operation).
Please note, that I agree that consumers are often far too shortsighted in many decisions.
The especially big problem with a retail bookstore is that the major quality differentator for most consumers is availiblity. Since an online retailer has both lower cost and wider availibility they won hands down. This isn't as true with other items (some companies prevent online sales) or limit discounting if their product requires a lot of touch to sell. Books are pretty fungible (once you get the correct title/ISBN) so it's tremendously difficult to compete on anything other than cost. Other items aren't as fungible (fresh produce or meat, for example) and local competition can remain competitive even with higher costs.
Unfortunatly for you most consumers don't have the same preferences as you and prefer to give up the service they had at their local independant bookstore for the selection and price of an Amazon.
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I think Continental still makes some powerplants for older Cesnas planes, generally they are high compression (even for today), but lower RPM (3000 RPM is near redline). General Aviation is sort of undergoing a rebirth after liability suits went out the window, the industry had died until a few years ago. If you pop out to an FBO I'm sure you could find a few pilots who would show you their bird. Honda was working with Textron on some newer engine designs for GA. Cutting edge (for general consumption) internal combustion technology is likely in Japanese speedsters or some of the new European diesels. In a few years (after the R&D is done there should be some interesting stuff coming out of the general aviation industry), although from what I've seen its more focused on the areodynamics and cabin space rather than improving engines.
Generally the cost of proving a new engine reliable to the FAA was prohibitive for all but a few designs. I'd guess there are some experemental craft (homebuilts) with Wenkels but you'd have to be pretty brave to trust your life to a point seal.
VW is going to put a W12 in their Phateon or however it's supposed to be spelled sometime this year or next. Not quite as big, I think the W12 is in the 400 hp range, but the price should be much more reasonable. I don't know if any Audi models will get a W engine. If I were buying a super car I'd get the new Esprit.
Laptops are a wonderful tool that can add signficantly to learning, but they require either reeducation or very, very good teachers. I went to a college that had a program bringing laptops to the classroom. It was the second year of the program. Big things I noticed were we could do complex circuit designs on the fly with logic sims, PSpice, Maple & Matlab, which was really nice for several classes. However, they ended up being a liability in things like Calc, basic Circuits classes, and other foundation classes, where they were more of a distraction. Not that I really minded the screensaver in front of me during calc lectures, but that's a whole other story. The sharp teachers had lecture time and later computer time with the loss of a letter grade if you broke the rule. The less savvy teachers had whole classrooms who were either surfing or playing networked games most of the year. Not that they cared, 1st year of ROTC was a required class for everyone and they broke out classes for all the kids who weren't on scholarships, and met the requirement. Anyway, unless the teachers are taught how to teach with computers, I fear that the computers will be more of a detriment to learning rather than an enhancement. Lots of kids today can't do arithmatic due to calculators being put in their hands in early grade school, just thing if they all have spell and grammer checking word processors from day one.
I keep these in a folder and burn CDs to pass out to folks who I help with computers. In no real order, winRAR/winZIP, OpenOffice, AdobeAcrobat, Mozilla/Firefox, iTunes, bluelight (I have DSL everyone else wanted a cheap ISP). There is probably another program or two. I could use a fun, uncomplex, free game. There aren't many of who like easyBridge and JaGO and the GNU go server.
The game sort of pushes you to the light side, with Carth and Ballista chiming in when you are about to do a dark side act. You have to have a pretty deep mean streak or love of the darkside to continue with all the ingame remiders.
The only Enron employees who lost their pension deserved what they got, unless they were a recent hire or in some way restricted from trading in their 401k. The only way they lost their pension was if it was entirely in Enron stock. While it's not a good idea to keep all your investments in a single stock, it is a terrible idea to keep it all in the stock of the company you work for (as you will lose both your job and the value of the stock if the company has trouble). Those people either didn't pay any attention to their retirement money or were greedy to get more of the run up that had taken place over the few years prior to the bankruptcy. I doubt even energy or gas funds lost more than 10%-20% of their value when Enron went bankrupt, broader funds likely lost less than 1%.
Because what Baystar wants is Darl gone, the speculators who are betting on the stock at this point think that that would be a positive change for the company. Baystar sees the writing on the wall and wants to begin conserving cash for a long fight.
There is tons of it because the record companies figured out that there is a big (and low cost advert market-we all go to the same place once a week) waiting to be tapped. The passion did very well because it was promoted like crazy in churches. Our pastor saw a prescreening at a conference and when it was released I'd be surprised if less than 80% of the adults in our church did not see it. Christian music has many of the same dynamics (it gets promoted by churches and friends for free a lot of the time). The band that gets me is Creed, in the christian press they hint around being a christian band, in mainstreem press the claim not to be. I don't care which you are (and don't really care for the music) but choose one or the other. I remember an article that credited soundscan's charts for the rise of Christian music from mainstream owned labels.
That is precicly what this is about, everyone realizes that switching costs are high in software, and standardization is really nice for everyone involved. Having control of the standards is a very valuable thing, as you can collect some value from uses (as long as the value is lower than switching costs). The issue is whether MS used their Windows monopoly to extend standards they contol to other markets (in this case media players). That is illegal.
I would guess that that tariffs slapped on Hynix last year might be part of it as well. Between that and surprising PC and server demand recovery last over the last 12 months I'd guess RAM makers might turn a profit sometime soon. Of course they will all use that for loans to build new bigger fabs and start the down cycle again. That is one crazy industry.
The problem with e-voting is that it was adopted too quickly. I think systems were installed in less than a year after Florida. If an organization (private or public) sat back and designed a system to meet secure criteria (for a year) with proper testing e-voting would save a considerable amount of voting staff time. Seems to me that a group of /.ers could form a company and build a system that worked a whole lot better than this.
It would be pretty funny to walk into the voting area and see someone torching their ballot over in their little voting booth. Someone might give a crap about that form of protest, especially after the smoke alarms go off.
It's trouble brewing, and I think Superman moved in a few buildings down where he opens mayo jars for Lois (and likely a few other old ladies in the building).
SUN in addition to JAVA (which can point to the finding of fact from the big anti-trust case proving most of the case) SUN bought the server software from AOL/Netscape, and had a bang up anti-trust case on both attempts to monopolize and predatory pricing/tieng. SUN was suing for 1 billion in damages, but anti-trust cases always award treble (3x) punative damages. So in a sense MS saved the time, risk, and cost of a trial for monetary and 1x punative damages. SUN decided that the bird in hand was worth two in the bush and took the deal.
About 7 years ago IOmega had a product called the Jaz drive that was like a 1GB floppy drive (at the time HDDs were in the low single GB range). It was expensive (as was the media) and was completely beaten by CDRs a few years later. However from what I understand it was much much faster and more reliable than their Zip drives.
There is a white pine tree, and I've heard of snow crab, further checking gives white crab as an alternate name for the ghost crab, it is likely a regional item (from the recipies it appears to be in the South (lots of white crab and crayfish meals).
If Mr. Edison had worked smarter, he wouldn't have sweat so much--Tesla. Edison had a wonderful career managing engineers rather than directly inventing things. However, the investors then just like today wanted a story so he was played up as the inventor of all the products his company patented. He was a business genious like Jobs or Gates rather than the technical brains (like Woz).
I don't think Peugot has sold a car in the states for more than a decade, you still run into a few (either aftermarket imported or old enough to have been bought before the cessation of exports). It's really too bad, the 206 looks to be a sweet car, more fun to hop up than the DSM stuff. No real issue with the other points, but no company would "outsource the executives" rather they will be beaten by Indian companies with homegrown executives.
Athough you will occasionally see deviations:
Gross profit is your profit after your manufacturing or input costs are covered. If we were talking about a PC OEM this would include components in a cheap computer (RAM, HD, mobo, CPU, case, and assembly as well as depreciation on your factory). This ranges from about 15% (grocery stores and PC manufacturers) to 90% (software developers) an average manufacturing gross margin is about 40-50% in decent times. Traditionally this cost has a high portion of fixed costs (costs that do not change with small increments of production).
The next costs taken out are for selling, marketing, administration, and product development. Some companies pull all of their depriciation costs out and put it here as well. This is where most of the paychecks are accounted for on an income statement. Other than ERP systems and office buildings, or the developer's toys, there aren't a lot of fixed costs here (labor is still considered more of a variable cost)which is true for commissioned sales people, but less true for an R&D staff. After these costs are removed what is left is operating profit. Overall averages are about 10-15% nationally, with retail sales operating margins at the low of 3-5% and software development reaching as high as 50%.
Next groups get quite confusing as different companies pull any combination of the following out interest, taxes, or other costs. Once all three have been removed you are left with net profit. Sometimes a preferred stock dividend (an archaic cross between stocks and bonds certain tax laws have largely rendered these a thing of the past, but they are still occasionally used as convertable instruments) is removed and net to common shareholders is quoted but that is fairly rare.
In response to the grandparents, Microsoft has never reported more than $4 billion in operating profit in a quarter (about 2.5 billion in net profit) so the first poster (60-80 days of profit) is more correct. Usually daily/monthly rates are applied to cash generation, but that is a lesson for a different time.
I beleive that internally SUN accounts a certain cost for each UltraSPARC used in their systems at an amound that would make the processor division profitable if it were on it's own. We'll have to take their word for it unless you have access to their general ledger. They seem to be getting closer to Fujitsu's SPARC implementation at the mid to high end, as well.
I think you can pack more calls into a given range of the higher frequency spectrum. Nextel is paying some cash with the swap. It has been a very long process, and now the rumbling is starting after they have come close to an agreement.
It's always a surprise when I leave montana and something costs more than the shelf price. If you ever buy anything big in another state, you should be able to avoid the sales tax on it by telling the clerk you are a resident of N.H. They may whine, but they'll do it.
The bricks and morter computer stores only survive today by exercising monopoly power on people who cannot wait for three days shipping or do not know anything about price. Concequently they sell very low volume and make it up on margin. Think of it this way you need to cover $5000 in monthly expenses (rent, salaries, etc). The two ways to do this are to sell 25 units/mo at $250 markup or 200 at $30. If your online competitors are selling it at $5 with another $5 in shipping, you probably can't make enough trying to sell in volume any anything other than a big city (see Fry's). So the remainder fell to one little firm in an area who survives on the low volume/huge mark up model.
Why is it sad, it's an opportunity, you just have to show them why the features of the good product are easily worth the extra price. Kitchen Aid is able to do this quite successfully (compare one of their mixers with a mix master) they usually get several times the cheapo handheld's price. Everyone want's to maximize their spending dollar and if they don't understand the differences they will usually go with the cheap one. The trick lies in getting them to better understand the differences. Companies like Paradigm understand this and don't allow their product to be sold online (where a sales person would have no chance to extol the virtues of the speaker) and all the consumer sees is that one pair of bookshelf units costs $200 and the other is $75. One listen will show most people why, so Paradigm only sells to bricks and morter establishments (who all have similar costs of operation).
Please note, that I agree that consumers are often far too shortsighted in many decisions.
The especially big problem with a retail bookstore is that the major quality differentator for most consumers is availiblity. Since an online retailer has both lower cost and wider availibility they won hands down. This isn't as true with other items (some companies prevent online sales) or limit discounting if their product requires a lot of touch to sell. Books are pretty fungible (once you get the correct title/ISBN) so it's tremendously difficult to compete on anything other than cost. Other items aren't as fungible (fresh produce or meat, for example) and local competition can remain competitive even with higher costs.
Unfortunatly for you most consumers don't have the same preferences as you and prefer to give up the service they had at their local independant bookstore for the selection and price of an Amazon.