To me, the 5.4% classified is improbable. The same defense establishment that kept the $100s of millions stealth fighter secret for five years can certainly keep multi-million dollar computers secret.
Especially because it's so much easier to hide a computer than an airplane. No sightings in area 51....
We have to assume that the state of the art is way past the public data. Cray has a "lousy" $150 MM in yearly revenue. They could be spending 10X that on heavy computing for national security. The government is spending $25BB on intelligence and another $400 BB on defense every year. Cray could be a drop in the bucket, even a red herring. I'd love to know what is going on in the basements at Fort Meade.
China's human rights record is spectacularly bad, on its own merits. Tibet is small potatoes.
Tibet is pretty, and it has many movie stars. So people worry about Tibet.
30 MILLION people died in China during the "great leap forward" and "cultural revolution" because of politically motivated starvation and executions. That's more than the population of Tibet. In fact, it ranks as one of the great tradgedies of human history, with the black plague, AIDs, WWI, and WWII.
Tiannenmen. And friends like North Korea, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
who cares about $200k in loans when your malpractice insurance costs $80k - $200k p.a.?
This is fuzzy thinking. a doctor's net income is the only figure that matters. His office, nurse, receptionist, insurance, licensing, and q-tip costs might be high, but so is his revenue.
Doctors on average are still taking home $200K/year. This masks a range, but doctors can whine about their costs when their incomes drop below six figures.
Terrorists are crazy, not stupid. They know that they will be rushed the next time they hijack a plane.
A determined, practiced, and equipped group of men can absolutely defeat an unprepared, unarmed crowd. Especially a crowd that is approaching one at a time. Remember the battle at Thermopylae.
This is the end of boxcutter and soap bar bomb hijackings, and the beginning of machette and.357 magnum hijackings
Bloat is a false issue. IE loads in less than a second, and responds promptly. It's fast enough.
Download size is even sillier. I've got nearly a gig of MP3s, a web cache of over a gig, and you think I care about 60 Mb vs. 6 MB? Or even 100 MB to 1 MB? 60 MB is.05% of a new 120 GB drive.
And spare me the "Wait.... what if I'm running on my old 386SX-16 Mhz? "
Constitutionally, Japan spends 1% of GDP (40.7 Billion - CIA Fact Book) on defense. 1% of a very big number is still a very big number.
The other question is the role of the military in driving technology. It is not clear that defense spending is a technology negative. Arpanet. More importantly, many new technology companies, in all sorts of boring areas like glue technology and stronger screws get their starts from DARPA grants, not to mention OpenBSD (now I'm trolling). Boeing gets a huge effective development subsidy from defense spending. Examples are all around of military demands driving technology improvements, just as the military benefits from commercial technology.
Why is the US so far ahead in backyard BBQ and swimming pool technology?
Relative cost. Gadgets are relatively cheaper, compared to housing, transportation, and cars.
You can see the same effect in NYC. Why do secretaries buy Prada? If they spent the money on housing in a normal city, they could afford a house. If they spend that money on their apt in NYC, they move up from a 350 to a 375 sq ft studio.
Geography and culture dictate dense cities in Japan, so people will tend to spend relatively more on gadgets and less on housing and cars.
The issue with using game hardware, especially "older" platforms, is that the price can not come down as fast as overall computing performance can increase.
This means that the cheapness of stable platforms can not compete with innovative platforms.
The real question is whether the administration and maintentance benefits of a homogenous and stable platform outweigh the higher cost of processing power.
I suspect that we will see a step function between rapidly and smoothly improving Dell boxes and occassional huge leaps on game platforms.
Communication among non-cheating players is important. One incredible shot is skill. 10 incredible shots in a minute is a cheater. Problem is, opponents only see the one shot. Talking about it helps sort out the skills from the cheaters.
Best way to do it: call incredible shots - "nice shot sChmUcK sNiPP3r! Way to shoot me from behind you in the head while I was jumping from across the map through a crate!"
There are about 5 billion burgers sold each year in the US -- Suggesting a subsidy of $55 Billion.
The total governement agriculture budget in 2002 was $18.6BB, which means the chicken, hog, wheat, and soy bean producers are being completely ripped off!
Heck, McDonalds and Wendy's together have about $4.5 BB in revenue (yahoo finanace), including international sales.
I attended a talk recently by Monte Zweben, COO of Blue Martini. He argued that most business software has been about storing and accessing data. Billing, HR, Inventory, Point of Sale are all essentially database access applications. Database access works. It's cheap, easy, and becoming a commodity.
The dirty secret in the ERP market is that the differences between PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle are relatively trivial. Certainly database access can get half a second faster, run over a tablet instead of a PC, or run on cheaper hardware. But the dramatic gains happened in the nineties when all the information got into the databases in the first place.
Database-centric software is about to become like cars. We have the basic 4-wheel, 3-box, internal combustion model. Some makers squeeze 10% more fuel efficiency out. But the real competition is all hype and price.
Monte argues, and I believe, that growth in software has to come from intelligence. Analytics, engines, and rules need to encode process and real world knowledge. That is where the next opportunity for software is.
Seriously, I think that the persistence of Atari video cartidges and C64 hackers proves that we will have access to this stuff, at least on a hobbyist basis, for a long time.
Virtual is a legitimate business model - Re:worse
on
SCO DOS'ed
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· Score: 1
Rambus in particular created significant value with the research they license - as Sony would attest with their architecture for the PS2, and rumours about the XBOX 2 suggest.
There was a real need, and the big memory companies were simply not nimble enought to get the job done. A small research shop can be effective in this sense. Billion dollar chip fabs are not required to be a legitimate business.
This is not to defend Dr. DOS or Intergraph.
Actual loss: 12.7% Re:Fleecing the poor
on
Which Price is Right?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
In 2002, Providian, which was thought of as one of the selective sub-prime lenders, had a default rate of 12.7% according to Fortune. They lost over $400 Million on the sub-prime market last year.
That is the opposite of price gouging. The were so aggressively low fee/price that they were nearly bankrupted by a minor economic downturn.
I think the article is arguing that pricing is not entirely rational. That doesn't mean it's entirely nuts. People do the best they can, and screw up a lot. But they also tend to get the big moves right on average.
I prefer to be compared directly to Hitler... which brings this conversation to its natural end. LOL
There are a lot of aspects of the history of the American economy that are shameful. Slavery and discrimination clearly the worst of them.
The issue here is about moving forward. Was there a problem with access to finance in 1969? Absolutely. And it was an embarassment 33 years ago.
In practice, our economy has come a long way. I think it is no longer clear that financial services for the poor are more exploitive than financial services to the rich.
Reason (admittedly a bunch of libertarians) argues that there is a legitimate need for this type of service.
I believe that if there is a market, greedy people will rush in.
You are mixing historical and present comparisons. In practice, today, women are free to enter any job in the business world. On a personal level, I look across the street at the law school and the medical schools, and I see women comprising 60% of the classes, while down the road the undergrad ratio is 55% or so.
The opportunities exist. Further, it is in the interest of employers to narrow the gap by prefering low cost labor. Why should there be a need long concerted effort when everyone's intersts are aligned?
Everyone involved wants women to be paid fairly fo the work they do. It's hard to believe there is a conspiracy to pay men more.
A matter of policy -Re:Airline Pricing..and others
on
Which Price is Right?
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· Score: 1
For large companies, it really depends on the agreement between the employer and the airline. Companies have fairly elaborate aggreements with airlines, often guarunteeing a specific volume in exchange for price and service concessions.
For example, IBM had an agreement with United where United provided discounts in exchange for eliminating miles on IBM tickets.
Conversely, many consulting companies explicitly allow employees to keep the miles, as a perk in partial compensation for having to travel.
I agree. No market is perfectly competitive. Most markets fit somehwere on the continuum between perfection and complete regulation.
This has no impact on the arguement at a Micro-Economic level.
Hypothetically, imagine that you are a clever entrepreneur, and start your own restaurant. The restaurant is doing well, so you decide to hire a IT person. You advertise on Monster and get 50 resumes. (In this economy you get 500 resumes). You winnow the list to the 10 qualified applicants, and then discover that 4 of them want 30% less money. Which do you hire?
This decision certainly does not depend on anonymity, identical applicants, or PERFECT competition. It just depends on smart people doing a good job of hiring.
I don't believe that we have a gender gap in productivity or ability. I believe we have a statistics gap.
Speaking as an MBA student, I believe you are radically underestimating exactly how money-grubbing we are. My compatriots, especially the bankers, are willing to go to great lengths to make a buck.
Greed is good. And it drives competition to every level of the economy. In general, if I can make money charging 20% when my competitor charges 25%, I will to gain market share.
At first I read this as a troll. But I think the issue here is that the poster does not recognize that risk costs money.
Financial services to the poor have, all else equal, much higher default risk. And default costs swamp everything else. Consider that the margin over cost of funds for most consumer credit is 2-3%. A default rate of 1% destroys the profitability.
And the proof of this is in the market. Credit companies are neither bashful nor shy. If there was money to make, your friends and Cap One and First USA would divert some of 1 billion or so peices of mail then send. Alliance capital tried and went bankrupt. Cap One tried, but was punished in the stock market for the risk.
The other minor effect is transaction costs. There is a smaller denominator to spread costs across. 1% of an $800 paycheck is different than 1% of a $200,000 mutual fund purchase.
This reminds of the myth about women being paid around 70% of what men are. If true, there must be someone out there hiring only women and killing their competitors with wildly lower labor costs. Ought to be easy, women are around 40% of the labor pool.
Oops. Doesn't seem to be happening. I know I'm willing to try it.
The point is that we do not have a national week of mourning with 76 hours straight of cable news coverage when a tractor trailer crosses into oncoming traffic on the interstate.
Life is full of risks, and the statistical lesson is that we should not panic and stay out of space.
This is the Firestone tires fallacy. A few highly publicized deaths seem to count more than a less-glamorous many. Ford spent $500MM or so fixing tires to prevent 10s of accidents. Imagine if Ford had spent that money on pre-natal care or starving people in Africa. Or even driver safety courses.
Slashdot Mirror
Especially because it's so much easier to hide a computer than an airplane. No sightings in area 51....
We have to assume that the state of the art is way past the public data. Cray has a "lousy" $150 MM in yearly revenue. They could be spending 10X that on heavy computing for national security. The government is spending $25BB on intelligence and another $400 BB on defense every year. Cray could be a drop in the bucket, even a red herring. I'd love to know what is going on in the basements at Fort Meade.
Tibet is pretty, and it has many movie stars. So people worry about Tibet.
30 MILLION people died in China during the "great leap forward" and "cultural revolution" because of politically motivated starvation and executions. That's more than the population of Tibet. In fact, it ranks as one of the great tradgedies of human history, with the black plague, AIDs, WWI, and WWII.
Tiannenmen. And friends like North Korea, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
This is fuzzy thinking. a doctor's net income is the only figure that matters. His office, nurse, receptionist, insurance, licensing, and q-tip costs might be high, but so is his revenue.
Doctors on average are still taking home $200K/year. This masks a range, but doctors can whine about their costs when their incomes drop below six figures.
Terrorists are crazy, not stupid. They know that they will be rushed the next time they hijack a plane. A determined, practiced, and equipped group of men can absolutely defeat an unprepared, unarmed crowd. Especially a crowd that is approaching one at a time. Remember the battle at Thermopylae. This is the end of boxcutter and soap bar bomb hijackings, and the beginning of machette and .357 magnum hijackings
As for memory, it is, as another poster just said, cheap as water. Certainly cheaper than user time. Not configuring another browser saves time too.
Bottomline problem: bloatedness doesn't bother me or most other Windows users. Focus on things like pop-ups that do bother.
The point is, who cares that IE is fat, it is already there and pretty good.
Download size is even sillier. I've got nearly a gig of MP3s, a web cache of over a gig, and you think I care about 60 Mb vs. 6 MB? Or even 100 MB to 1 MB? 60 MB is .05% of a new 120 GB drive.
And spare me the "Wait.... what if I'm running on my old 386SX-16 Mhz? "
Constitutionally, Japan spends 1% of GDP (40.7 Billion - CIA Fact Book) on defense. 1% of a very big number is still a very big number.
The other question is the role of the military in driving technology. It is not clear that defense spending is a technology negative. Arpanet. More importantly, many new technology companies, in all sorts of boring areas like glue technology and stronger screws get their starts from DARPA grants, not to mention OpenBSD (now I'm trolling). Boeing gets a huge effective development subsidy from defense spending. Examples are all around of military demands driving technology improvements, just as the military benefits from commercial technology.
Relative cost. Gadgets are relatively cheaper, compared to housing, transportation, and cars.
You can see the same effect in NYC. Why do secretaries buy Prada? If they spent the money on housing in a normal city, they could afford a house. If they spend that money on their apt in NYC, they move up from a 350 to a 375 sq ft studio.
Geography and culture dictate dense cities in Japan, so people will tend to spend relatively more on gadgets and less on housing and cars.
Can you elaborate on requiring AS for Oracle? Is this just a certification issue, or is there a real problem running the DB on RH 9?
This means that the cheapness of stable platforms can not compete with innovative platforms.
The real question is whether the administration and maintentance benefits of a homogenous and stable platform outweigh the higher cost of processing power.
I suspect that we will see a step function between rapidly and smoothly improving Dell boxes and occassional huge leaps on game platforms.
Best way to do it: call incredible shots - "nice shot sChmUcK sNiPP3r! Way to shoot me from behind you in the head while I was jumping from across the map through a crate!"
There are about 5 billion burgers sold each year in the US -- Suggesting a subsidy of $55 Billion.
The total governement agriculture budget in 2002 was $18.6BB, which means the chicken, hog, wheat, and soy bean producers are being completely ripped off!
Heck, McDonalds and Wendy's together have about $4.5 BB in revenue (yahoo finanace), including international sales.
Bottomline: your statistic makes no sense.
The dirty secret in the ERP market is that the differences between PeopleSoft, SAP, and Oracle are relatively trivial. Certainly database access can get half a second faster, run over a tablet instead of a PC, or run on cheaper hardware. But the dramatic gains happened in the nineties when all the information got into the databases in the first place.
Database-centric software is about to become like cars. We have the basic 4-wheel, 3-box, internal combustion model. Some makers squeeze 10% more fuel efficiency out. But the real competition is all hype and price.
Monte argues, and I believe, that growth in software has to come from intelligence. Analytics, engines, and rules need to encode process and real world knowledge. That is where the next opportunity for software is.
Seriously, I think that the persistence of Atari video cartidges and C64 hackers proves that we will have access to this stuff, at least on a hobbyist basis, for a long time.
There was a real need, and the big memory companies were simply not nimble enought to get the job done. A small research shop can be effective in this sense. Billion dollar chip fabs are not required to be a legitimate business.
This is not to defend Dr. DOS or Intergraph.
That is the opposite of price gouging. The were so aggressively low fee/price that they were nearly bankrupted by a minor economic downturn.
I prefer to be compared directly to Hitler... which brings this conversation to its natural end. LOL
The issue here is about moving forward. Was there a problem with access to finance in 1969? Absolutely. And it was an embarassment 33 years ago.
In practice, our economy has come a long way. I think it is no longer clear that financial services for the poor are more exploitive than financial services to the rich.
Reason (admittedly a bunch of libertarians) argues that there is a legitimate need for this type of service.
I believe that if there is a market, greedy people will rush in.
You are mixing historical and present comparisons. In practice, today, women are free to enter any job in the business world. On a personal level, I look across the street at the law school and the medical schools, and I see women comprising 60% of the classes, while down the road the undergrad ratio is 55% or so.
The opportunities exist. Further, it is in the interest of employers to narrow the gap by prefering low cost labor. Why should there be a need long concerted effort when everyone's intersts are aligned?
Everyone involved wants women to be paid fairly fo the work they do. It's hard to believe there is a conspiracy to pay men more.
For example, IBM had an agreement with United where United provided discounts in exchange for eliminating miles on IBM tickets.
Conversely, many consulting companies explicitly allow employees to keep the miles, as a perk in partial compensation for having to travel.
The IBM policy was pretty unpopular.
This has no impact on the arguement at a Micro-Economic level.
Hypothetically, imagine that you are a clever entrepreneur, and start your own restaurant. The restaurant is doing well, so you decide to hire a IT person. You advertise on Monster and get 50 resumes. (In this economy you get 500 resumes). You winnow the list to the 10 qualified applicants, and then discover that 4 of them want 30% less money. Which do you hire?
This decision certainly does not depend on anonymity, identical applicants, or PERFECT competition. It just depends on smart people doing a good job of hiring.
I don't believe that we have a gender gap in productivity or ability. I believe we have a statistics gap.
Greed is good. And it drives competition to every level of the economy. In general, if I can make money charging 20% when my competitor charges 25%, I will to gain market share.
Financial services to the poor have, all else equal, much higher default risk. And default costs swamp everything else. Consider that the margin over cost of funds for most consumer credit is 2-3%. A default rate of 1% destroys the profitability.
And the proof of this is in the market. Credit companies are neither bashful nor shy. If there was money to make, your friends and Cap One and First USA would divert some of 1 billion or so peices of mail then send. Alliance capital tried and went bankrupt. Cap One tried, but was punished in the stock market for the risk.
The other minor effect is transaction costs. There is a smaller denominator to spread costs across. 1% of an $800 paycheck is different than 1% of a $200,000 mutual fund purchase.
This reminds of the myth about women being paid around 70% of what men are. If true, there must be someone out there hiring only women and killing their competitors with wildly lower labor costs. Ought to be easy, women are around 40% of the labor pool.
Oops. Doesn't seem to be happening. I know I'm willing to try it.
Life is full of risks, and the statistical lesson is that we should not panic and stay out of space.
This is the Firestone tires fallacy. A few highly publicized deaths seem to count more than a less-glamorous many. Ford spent $500MM or so fixing tires to prevent 10s of accidents. Imagine if Ford had spent that money on pre-natal care or starving people in Africa. Or even driver safety courses.
Also, I think it's sort of funny.