It sounds funny, doesn't it
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Strike on Iraq
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· Score: 1
But in five years, when the death toll is deep in the thousands from the festering guerrila resistance to American colonial occupation in the middle east, and the "volunteer" force is a demoralized from spending years as a police force under fire in a hostile and inhospitable environment for what has clearly not been a war for "liberation," and the resignations and awols start coming in droves, all of those vietnam analogies won't be as easy to deride.
No one can predict the future, but we all have to take a decent shot at being judges of character. I'll tell you one thing I'm pretty sure of. If Bush is still in power, and he thinks it will help keep his people on top of that oilbed, he will not hesitate to use the draft.
Other contries complain about it, and individuals do get around it. Do you mistake complaints and exceptions for a trend?
You are arguing in the face of massive, incontrivertible evidence that contries like India, for instance, have no shortage of talented people even for the highest levels of the software and hardware engineering fields. Where's your brain drain? It was a brain loan.
Even if we opened our borders and invited their people to come here, not all of them would; there are bigger trends at work over the long haul. But that doesn't mean you want to encourage the opposite with a stupid policy. If you're self-interested you have to at least try, eh?
Allow me to take the point of view of pure self-interest for the moment.
If we want to try to stave off the end of the domestic technology industry in the United States, we need to eliminate H1B's, open our borders, and offer immediate, permanent citizenship to skilled technology workers. No questions asked. Friendly service at the airport. Maybe even throw in some tax incentives. 50% off for the first year! Give us your rich, your skilled, your ambitious. We'll take them all.
Follow along closely.
If a programmer is going to compete with me from India, they are going to be able to charge 10-20% of what I charge and work remotely. This is a simple fact of the currency market and the cost of living. That is what's happening now. In addition, unlike cars or textiles, there is no way to tarrif the product as it crosses a border. Remote work in a foreign country has problems, but none serious enough to offset an 80% discount. Left unchecked, this will simply end the entire technology industry in the 1st world as we know it.
H1B's exacerbate the problem, because they come with a time limit. They are basically a self-help industrial espionage program for every 3rd world country in the world. An H1B says, come to America. Make (let's be honest here) 80-90% of what a citizen makes. Mingle with America's best and brightest, and learn on the job. Then, in four years, take your newfound skills and experience back home, and go back to charging 10-20% of what Americans charge. Welcome to your home country's new middle class.
H1B's have one purpose. To accelerate the destruction of our domestic technology industry. Just natural forces alone weren't quick enough for Microsoft, IBM and Sun. They needed to speed up the process, and H1B's were how they did it.
If we opened our borders now while our quality of life is still high (at least in a few parts of the country), we could use it to brain-drain the 3rd world, to suck the talent out of where it can charge 10% to here, where it will charge 100%. If we did this 10 years ago, we might have staved off the current tech industry disaster - a disaster which at this point I believe is driven almost entirely from overseas outsourcing (understandably everyone is keeping numbers about this process quiet - so we're all speculating on this issue. Nonetheless, I'm very, very confident I'm going to be bourne out on this one as the figures come to light). Even if we did this tomorrow, we might see very gradual improvement in the tech job market here over the next 5-10 years. Long term, though, it's probably already too late to undo the damage.
So make no mistake. H1B's are the most pernicious thing ever contrived against the American technology worker. Ironically, not many have grasped why.
Now all that said, even as someone who is losing their livelihood (I am already headed back to school to change careers), I don't know if it matters. At the end of the day. I respect anyone who improves their lot through learning and hard work - individuals and nations. The economic game being played that makes it easy to exploit labor in the 3rd world is cynical and certainly contrived, but we are all relatively lucky to be allowed to play when you take it in the context of history. I feel a brotherhood with my colleagues in India and elsewhere, and I cannot help myself from being happy at their success. In the end it may all be for the best.
Averment 86: It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM.
I hope the rest of their case shows the same degree of arrogance and technical ineptitude. IBM would have little to worry about.
I hadn't heard about pine tree fermentation before. That's neat. But I'm not clear - does that cross the sustainability barrier? If it does, then great! You can ignore the rest of this post...
If it doesn't, I guess I don't get the big picture for methanol. You say, "Methanol is more difficult to manufacture than hydrogen." And you go on to describe what I think you're referring to here as plant production: "diret chemical synthesis from CO and H2 is very slightly more complex than direct hydrogen production."
I guess what confuses me is that if it's not sensible to farm it, and it's harder to make in a factory than hydrogen, _and_ it's not as clean burning as hydrogen... aren't these are pretty big reasons not to use it? I see that it would be much easier to transition to methanol, say, than hydrogen, but if the fuel supply never comes together, and it's not as clean... what am I missing?
Your arguments are interesting. I have a question, though. The many times I've gotten into discussions about using Methanol/Ethanol as an alternate energy source on a large scale I meet a lot of people who are very certain that agriculture-supplied fuel is a net loss. The theory being that the energy cost to farm the corn (for instance) exceeds that of the fuel produced. What are your thoughts on this?
FYI, a lot of research in the industry is focused on using engineered and naturally ocurring microorganisms to produce hydrogen "as a waste product." There have been some notable early successes.
Hydrogen may be produced by engineered and naturally ocurring microorganisms as a waste product. This is a big piece of current hydrogen power research efforts.
Keeping it as electricity is well and good, but if you transport it, you lose a lot of it (long-distance power lines lose in the 50-80% range), and if you store it, you lose even more of it (don't get me started on batteries).
So you look for more innovative solutions to transport and store the power. Hydrogen may be one. If its transport and/or storage efficiencies rival your traditional systems, then that's not "throwing it away," is it?
The other thing to consider is biological production methods; i.e. using engineered and naturally occuring bacteria to produce hydrogen. And actually this is a big piece of "hydrogen research."
Yes, it would be nice not to have a middleman. However, you have to have one. Or, you have to use the less efficient automotive IC engine.
I could easily imagine that using a power plant, and then converting, storing, and releasing with some middleman (i.e. hydrogen) is more efficient that conveying the fossil fuel straight to the car and burning it there.
Of course, it will take work to get it right. But that's worth it, eh?
It sounds like you really don't want this to work.
Saying hydrogen is abundant in nature is just meant to get you thinking about the ways we could get it out. It turns out there are some novel ones. I think, since you appear to have some chemistry, that you should know your analogy with diamonds is weak.
This is one set of bacteria and one set of reactions. I'm just saying "think creatively." It's a line of inquiry - don't treat it this way, unless it's your position that it's a dead end?
Even if you don't get a big win like this, there are still (as you suggested, and as and the article goes into this in some detail) configurations like 5th generation nuclear reactors (their example is a pebble-bed modular reactor) and other cleaner "factory" sources of energy that use hydrogen as a transport.
Even if we rely on hydrocarbon factory enery with a hydrogen transport, as I'm sure you know, factory energy is vastly more efficient that using an IC automobile engine... if you can do good things with the efficiencies of the conversion and storage processes involved even that might be a winner.
In my sporadic but sometimes intense investigations of alternate energy sources, I was always the most taken with hydrogen.
It is very clean. It is relatively efficient. I'd prefer a liquid fuel, but then again, I'd prefer a non-volatile, non-toxic fuel, too. You can't always get what you want.
The attractive things about hydrogen are its real abundance. There are so many interesting possibilties for how to make it. I saw a fascinating series of papers (curse me for not being able to find the original links - although you can get familiar with the ideas with some simple google searches, i.e. this conference poster) on the use of genetically engineered bacteria that produce hydrogen when eating various things, even waste products.
"Electric" has massive drawbacks both in storage and distribution, which are both dirty and highly inefficient. Methanol/Ethanol are probably even dirtier, though potentially renewable, but there are questions about how sustainable, for instance, corn power really is. Geothermal and hydro are obviously limited in place and abundance... Solar, wind and tides are ideal but unpredictable and expensive. I'm excited to hear about big improvements in solar power systems, but the big stuff (70%+ efficiencies) still seem a ways away for commercial use.
To me, that leaves good old hydrogen (in combustion? in a fuel cell?) - attractive both for its unparalleled cleanliness and the interesting potential sources. Why not?
I would completely disagree that you should send text as images, vector or otherwise.
I'm glad you mentioned SVG. I haven't used it much yet. I'll be happy with whoever wins the vector race, as long as they're simple, fast, and cross-platform. If it's open, bonus!
To be precise, Flash will send vector information for any used glyphs of a "non-standard" font, and then display the associated text using that "on-demand" font face information as appropriate. I'm not sure if this addresses your concern about sending text as images or not.
Normal text is indexable by search engines and other tools, and can be searched easily within the browser. Copy & paste works fine too. Does all of this work with flash?
Of course, I was thinking of it merely as a replacement for a number of GIFs, which suffer the same or similar limitations (I think you can have an ALT tag on Flash movies, too?). Clearly, anything that's purely text should probably be treated as such, and I'd rather see a really robust, reliable and cross-platform system for being able to render in different fonts, and to transparently send fonts that the client doesn't have. I'm not sure how well this is addressed outside of Flash at the moment. And this leaves aside the other GIF cases (rollovers, simple graphics, simple graphics + text, etc.) that you can address with a format like Flash.
I may have a high-resolution display that is capable of rendering serifs well, so I'd want to subtitute another font for sans-serifs most of the time. CSS allows me to do this, flash does not.
Absolutely true. I'd say this is another good way to think about the dividing line for where Flash is appropriate. Any time such a font substitution would be reasonable, Flash is not appropriate. Any time it is not, you may still consider it.
I have no trouble accepting that there are good uses for flash.
Of course.
The authoring system ~v4 (I can't comment on other versions) is absolutely terrible, yes.
It has not improved much, though the Ecmascript API is stabilizing, and the client-server networking possible is interesting and powerful. My single biggest beef with them is that, over all these years, despite a huge outcry in the developer community, and though it would add only a few bytes to their overhead, they have still not deigned to offer the ability to turn on explicit variable declaration. This one little if-statement in their script engine would save 10-30% on development times for most script-related projects.
This exemplifies one of the many reasons why I hate closed-source tools.
I really hope not. The html wg has only just managed to properly separate content from presentation, it would be madness to glom it all back together again.
I think I was very vague about how I expected Flash to have to change for this to become rational. I think it would have to grow considerably.
Personally, I think that flash could be completely replaced by w3c technologies today, with a massive increase in usability/accessibility/ease-of-development if only the browser support was there. Check out scripted svg, the dom, ecmascript, smil, css, and so on.
I really like the idea; it's good to just have a competing array of specialized systems, mini-APIs floating around for content people to author against and scripters to orchestrate and assemble, all of it based on open standards, and then you'd have commoditized IDE's which allow you to do a lot of the same "easy" tasks.
However, being all too familiar with the systems you mentioned and a few others, I can ruefully say I think this is a ways off. A lot of it comes down to, as you say, browser support. If we're being realistic, it's hard to imagine so many good and necessary and improvements to all these systems by all the competing parties (for whom failing to cooperate well has been one of their chief sources of amusement over the past few years). I mean, among other things we're probably talking about a cross-platform font standard.
Still, perhaps this is really what I was thinking of when I was ruminating in the last paragraph of my previous post. It sounds interesting.
Re:Flash?
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Opencroquet
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· Score: 2, Interesting
All very good points, and thought-provoking.
There are some bright sides to Flash. For example, a tremendous portion of all web-related traffic is simply sending text in bitmap form so a site can look "pretty". Then count in all of the very similar redundant images (in javascript rollovers), and then add in "graphically simple" images... that's a lot of traffic. All of this can, and should be replaced by much smaller and more efficient vector art.
So many people see Flash as, if nothing else, an up and coming replacement for GIF/JPG/PNG for many applications. I wish browsers allowed you to treat it more like an image and less like an "object," so it would integrate better in that role and address your right-click woes. Obviously in this role search engines are not affected.
Flash has grown quite a bit over the years; I've had the misfortune to have to do some absurdly large projects with it. It's very attractive if you want to deliver a self-contained web application (like a game) because the penetration is simply second-to-none (+95% for older versions of Flash, and +75% for the newest version, I believe - i.e., it's included in Windows!), it runs on Linux, and if you have to download it, it's ~300k (hence the former point, I think). Now, it's offering a lot of features while staying quite small... I still think its scripting system and API are abyssmal, but if you're up for abuse you can make it do amazing things.
I think it's important to use it in the right places. If you rip out an entire HTML site and replace it with flash just to make it look nicer, you probably didn't consider the tradeoffs. But on the flipside, I sure am glad it's there for times when you want to do something unconventional or impossible using traditional techniques.
Something like Flash could replace HTML eventually. If Flash evolves in the right direction, and we're willing to reconceive its integration with the browser, and really, reconsider aspects of the web altogether (and most of all, if we forget it's proprietary, which is really a deal-killer on its own). This is a funny dream some Flash proponents have. It's not realistic, but I can see why they think it, and I won't be surprised to see some Flash-like things gain importance in the web's evolution.
Again with the insults. If you haven't realized by now there is a reason personal attacks have nothing to do with a well reasoned, logical response. Had you bothered to read the link I posted or any of the hundreds of other pages a quick trip to the search engine found you would have noted that most of the pages agreed that personal attacks in a debate are but one sign that the attacker simply doesn't have a valid argument. If he had one he wouldn't have to attempt to inflame, but could convince his opponent merely on the basis of his argument. Seeing that you refuse to debate in a rational matter (much less address a very telling point I've brought up several times and challenged you to reply to)(1) I see no point in continuing this conversation.
Drop a line when you've grown up.
Let's tell a story about a person named "Cheviot." He/she came to slashdot, and decided to troll a valid point about a bit of trivia with a plagiarized essay which didn't really apply. When ridiculed by the crowd and questioned on it in detail, he tried to acquit him/herself with a lot of subject-changes, funny math and nonsense. And when people don't show him/her the respect he/she deserves, he gets a little upset, and proud.
Awww, there there, Cheviot. I know, people can be so mean.
That was the point. I was asking if you were really that stupid.
But if you're going to (I chuckle at this) "take the high road," you have to actually keep it up for a few consecutive paragraphs.
No one asked you about the investment, Listen to the questions being debated.
So, it's pretty clear now you're just willfully ignoring the point. I guess I can understand. It's tough to admit you're wrong. Why not just pretend you're not?
Ammortization is the division of a debt or payment into smaller, equal installments over the life of the debt.
I guess in retrospect, defining things in order to cover up your misuse of them is one of your little trademarks, Cheviot. It's kind of cute, I suppose.
You were the one that said that Sony's profit per unit didn't take into account the ammortized cost of their initial investment. The math, which you dismissed out of hand, proves this to be incorrect.
Hmm. Actually, why don't you go back and read what I said. See if it had anything to do with dividing 2 billion by every console sold. Or just pretend it does. I'll be waiting.
I do and always have. This has absolutly nothing to do with the question of Sony's per unit gross profit on consoles.
Of course it doesn't. I never suggested it did.:)
I have always quoted Sony's full production costs ($2 billion)
Yes, just not every time you needed to.
Except no one is talking about Sony's profit on the Playstation line.
I suppose the right way to put it is that you wish no one was talking about Sony's profit on the Playstation line. In fact, I'm sure right now you're divising a way you can somehow insert the word "gross" into my previous posts at various intervals. That will show me.
I'm repeating the section below from my last post. One can only assume since you didn't bother to reply you simply had no answer. Not a wonder, as... well... you're sensitive to being told harsh truths about your writing, so I'll let you draw the obvious conclusion.
-----
You want to compare XBox's total production costs, to Sony's production costs minus a big piece of their initial investment (which you have decided is not relevant in your comparison for some reason). But you don't get to count it out - it's a senseless comparison if you do. Oh yes, it may be better for Sony - it may even have been unwise for their competitors to do things their way. But it doesn't mean they don't all initially take a loss (and they all call it an investment, however it's structured) to provide you with hardware, in hopes that eventually they will get that money back (through whatever means are available).
Uh oh... looks like someone's ego has been a little bruised.:) I was hoping you'd reach deep inside yourself and surprise me with some novel and original insight into all this, but instead, I find your response merely senseless and inflamed. Objectively, it looks as if you are desperate to make a combatitive response, but not very thorough in reasoning it out.
So basically the article you plagiarised admits
Ad Hominem
This kind of error makes you look like you don't really know what you're talking about.
Ad Hominem (also you convienently forgot that my point was correct)
Tragically, you still don't seem to understand. I'll keep trying a little longer. If you need help, show your teacher, parent or guardian, and maybe they can explain it in more detail.
Ad Hominem. (Do you really think you're winning points with slashdot readers with these retorts?)
The essay you plagiarized is BS
Ad Hominem. (Get enough mileage off this one yet?)
You said: [plagiarized an essay claiming Sony doesn't do that].
Ad Hominem. (I guess not.)
But lets move beyond that, shall we.
Obviously you're proud that you've learned a latin term. And I can see where you'd like to pretend the fact that you plagiarized that essay doesn't have any bearing on this, but frankly, that's not true. It hurts your credibility. It makes you look dishonest. I suppose trying to deny and minimize this fact is par for the course, too.
The funny thing is that this credibility issue is really bearing out - you see, you're sporadic, inconsistent, and wrong on your conclusions at a fairly good rate. Go figure. We pay attention to credibility and reputations for a reason. People are often consistent.
Most reputable schools, and quite a few better places of employment would see you summarily dismissed for what you pulled in this forum. So if you plan on pretending to an air of credibility, you should expect to hear about your "mistake" quite a bit. When you're ready to forget you did it, just stop bringing it to my attention. Don't worry, your arguments don't have much to lose from the comparison.
Your point was not correct... your insistence on gross profit was, is, and continues to be specious and misleading, as I have explained at length, and to which you have thus far made no sensible rebuttal.
Are you seriously suggesting that unless Sony sold it's first Playstation 2 for 2 billion dollars that it is selling each unit at a loss until they pay back their R&D expences?
Hmm... just sit back and read this a few times. Savor in it's breathless, misfired-insult idiocy. It's all downhill from here.
Is RCA selling every television it makes at a loss until they pay back their R&D expences?
If you invested a billion dollars in a factory, and then for some reason you didn't sell as many widgets as you expected to sell... so you didn't make back your billion... I suppose you'd have to say... on that investment... you took a loss.
With me so far?
Divide the 2 billion dollar startup cost by the 50 million units sold.
Why don't you divide it by 69, Bill and Ted's favorite number?
It is about as relevant. I will neglect to address the rest of your math springing from this meaningless comparison.
The correct point to draw from this is that (given that we accept the gross profit per console figure) Sony had to sell 20 million playstations to break even on their initial investment. The source you plagiarized made this connection - why not you too?
I said no such thing. I tried to demonstrate how Microsoft and Nintendo (Bob) differ from practically any other company in the world, Sony included (Stan).
Heh. You stopped (I suppose now I should say "paused") in your attempt to force a gross profit comparison down our throats. Instead, you merely asked "who do you want to be?" You already knew my answer - since I started with it. You should know this, because maybe it really isn't sinking in: as you continue to fail to answer a point, you appear to concede it.
Not at all. Even if Sony stopped making Playstation 2 consoles tomorrow they have a massive chip production plant and assembly factories that in and of themselves have considerable value.
Remind me to come back to the issue of how much of the PS2's production investment could be recouped if the PS2 tanked later... when we've dealt with the matter at hand.
Again, not what I said. I asked if you'd rather be the company that makes a gross profit on each unit or the one that doesn't.
In other words, it is what you said.
By selling their products for more than the cost of the labor to assemble them and the cost of the bill of materials all the companies that make the products noted above pay back those startup costs and make a profit.
Now, back to the point, if you have 3 different companies that each make a different initial investment in manufacturing, and each of them has a different gross profit on their product (for two of them, that number is negative, and for the 3rd, the company that made the largest initial investment, it is actually positive), then you can say that the 3rd does not sell its product at a "gross profit" loss... I notice you like to repeat this a lot. It's funny, so I won't discourage you. But it doesn't make it relevant.
Congratulations. #3 spent their billions up front, instead of spreading them out, ammortizing them over a long period of time (you like to imply it will be indefinite). Because they took a bigger risk, they are in the running for a bigger payoff. But until they sell enough units to recoup their initial investment, they are in the same boat as #2 and #1. Probably worse, depending on the sales figures.
Let's see if you're with me on this so far. If Sony had sold 5 million units instead of 50, they would have taken a loss instead of a gain. I know, you're itching to answer it's not the same. Take your time. Think about it carefully.
You want to compare XBox's total production costs, to Sony's production costs minus a big piece of their initial investment (which you have decided is not relevant in your comparison for some reason). But you don't get to count it out - it's a senseless comparison if you do. Oh yes, it may be better for Sony - it may even have been unwise for their competitors to do things their way. But it doesn't mean they don't all initially take a loss (and they all call it an investment, however it's structured) to provide you with hardware, in hopes that eventually they will get that money back (through whatever means are available).
I know, I know. You really want to confuse the issue some more. Don't sweat it. Hey, to some folks, it's just free entertainment.
It might be interesting to speculate on why other players didn't go Sony's route. One hopes they had their reasons.
Well, to be clear, when you say "loss" or "recouped" - it really just means that: this was their investment. Did they make it back (recoup it)? Etc. It doesn't matter if it was borrowed, for the sake of the comparison.
So Sony doesn't even lay out all that much money for the production facilities.
Their initial investment, including facilities, was ~2 billion by one source... And you go on:
the profit from the PREVIOUS consoles later years is used to establish a large portion of the production facilities for the next console.
Yes. Of course, making a fair comparison, whether the money to prepare for a product comes from an OS monopoly, a pokemon franchise, or a previous console system, you still have to consider it an initial investment whose costs must be recouped, and you have to look at net profits for any of it to make sense.
Whether Sony did so well they paid back their few billion in 6 months, I suppose it's possible... By the way, do you have any citations for actual numbers?
I'm not sure whether you're not following along, or you're just trying to change the subject.
I said (among other things): Consoles are initially sold at a loss.
You said: [plagiarized an essay claiming Sony doesn't do that].
I said: That essay is wrong. Here's why.
You said: Well, ok, what I said was complete bullshit. But wouldn't you rather be Sony nonetheless?
And to that I will reply: Obviously - since that was what I've been saying all along.
As an aside, of course, you wouldn't want to be them if they hadn't been "the winner." Their success was a very likely bet, but nonetheless, it was gambling. If you make a much bigger initial investment in manufacturing rather than buy parts, and you lose the race, you lose your entire much bigger initial investment. Elementary.
Tragically, you still don't seem to understand. I'll keep trying a little longer. If you need help, show your teacher, parent or guardian, and maybe they can explain it in more detail.
The accounting principles under which a company's factories have been categorized are unimportant. The gross profit comparison itself is wrong.
Saying, oh yeah, Sony makes a profit on PS2's: it's a "gross profit"... is like saying, oh yeah, I live in my house for free... not counting my mortgage! So what if Nintendo and Microsoft are renting their apartments. They are all paying the cost one way or another. Leaving it out for one and not the other just because of the way their investment was disposed is cheating.
Is it starting to sink in yet? The essay you plagiarized is BS. They guy probably got a hundred emails by now explaining this, but he either can't understand them or simply just doesn't want to admit his little screed was entirely wrong.
Every product, including the XBOX, PS2 and Gamecube, have huge startup costs.
You couldn't be bothered to quote them, because if you did, you would see the startup costs are considerably different; much higher, in fact, when you manufacture more of your own components. Hey, you'll look bad arguing this one, it's covered in the essay you plagiarized.
The profit made on each PS2 console is gross profit, not net.
Your discussion about the politics between suppliers and console vendors is slightly interesting, although it more or less echoes what I originally said ("...but then over time will reap even bigger rewards as their manufacturing investment pays off"); it's also irrelevant to the point.
I just finished dealing with another reply below... pardon me if you're not saying the same thing, but it sounds like you are... See my response to this other poster.
So basically the article you plagiarised admits that every single recent console, from the dreamcast to the gamecube, with the exception of the PS2, has been sold at a loss "at least initially."
Then it goes on to admit that the figures indicating Sony has always made a profit on each playstation are actually not taking into account the ammortized cost of the tooling and facilities that went into playstation 2 production. You see, Sony will build a lot more of their own parts. That means they take an even bigger up-front hit than their rivals, but then over time will reap even bigger rewards as their manufacturing investment pays off. And, in fact, the article you plagiarized goes on to admit that something like 20 million playstations will have to be sold (at what margin the author is vague, but the point is clear) before break-even.
It's the same thing.
Let me sum up.
Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega, etc. outsource their parts, but pay more for them, so they lose money initially, and keep losing it until their suppliers lower their prices.
Sony builds factories of their own, but then those factories produce parts for them at cost. They, too, lose money initially, because you have to consider at least part of their manufacturing investment in the equation if you want a rational comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
But in five years, when the death toll is deep in the thousands from the festering guerrila resistance to American colonial occupation in the middle east, and the "volunteer" force is a demoralized from spending years as a police force under fire in a hostile and inhospitable environment for what has clearly not been a war for "liberation," and the resignations and awols start coming in droves, all of those vietnam analogies won't be as easy to deride.
No one can predict the future, but we all have to take a decent shot at being judges of character. I'll tell you one thing I'm pretty sure of. If Bush is still in power, and he thinks it will help keep his people on top of that oilbed, he will not hesitate to use the draft.
Other contries complain about it, and individuals do get around it. Do you mistake complaints and exceptions for a trend?
You are arguing in the face of massive, incontrivertible evidence that contries like India, for instance, have no shortage of talented people even for the highest levels of the software and hardware engineering fields. Where's your brain drain? It was a brain loan.
Even if we opened our borders and invited their people to come here, not all of them would; there are bigger trends at work over the long haul. But that doesn't mean you want to encourage the opposite with a stupid policy. If you're self-interested you have to at least try, eh?
That in itself is a bit frightening.
Allow me to take the point of view of pure self-interest for the moment.
If we want to try to stave off the end of the domestic technology industry in the United States, we need to eliminate H1B's, open our borders, and offer immediate, permanent citizenship to skilled technology workers. No questions asked. Friendly service at the airport. Maybe even throw in some tax incentives. 50% off for the first year! Give us your rich, your skilled, your ambitious. We'll take them all.
Follow along closely.
If a programmer is going to compete with me from India, they are going to be able to charge 10-20% of what I charge and work remotely. This is a simple fact of the currency market and the cost of living. That is what's happening now. In addition, unlike cars or textiles, there is no way to tarrif the product as it crosses a border. Remote work in a foreign country has problems, but none serious enough to offset an 80% discount. Left unchecked, this will simply end the entire technology industry in the 1st world as we know it.
H1B's exacerbate the problem, because they come with a time limit. They are basically a self-help industrial espionage program for every 3rd world country in the world. An H1B says, come to America. Make (let's be honest here) 80-90% of what a citizen makes. Mingle with America's best and brightest, and learn on the job. Then, in four years, take your newfound skills and experience back home, and go back to charging 10-20% of what Americans charge. Welcome to your home country's new middle class.
H1B's have one purpose. To accelerate the destruction of our domestic technology industry. Just natural forces alone weren't quick enough for Microsoft, IBM and Sun. They needed to speed up the process, and H1B's were how they did it.
If we opened our borders now while our quality of life is still high (at least in a few parts of the country), we could use it to brain-drain the 3rd world, to suck the talent out of where it can charge 10% to here, where it will charge 100%. If we did this 10 years ago, we might have staved off the current tech industry disaster - a disaster which at this point I believe is driven almost entirely from overseas outsourcing (understandably everyone is keeping numbers about this process quiet - so we're all speculating on this issue. Nonetheless, I'm very, very confident I'm going to be bourne out on this one as the figures come to light). Even if we did this tomorrow, we might see very gradual improvement in the tech job market here over the next 5-10 years. Long term, though, it's probably already too late to undo the damage.
So make no mistake. H1B's are the most pernicious thing ever contrived against the American technology worker. Ironically, not many have grasped why.
Now all that said, even as someone who is losing their livelihood (I am already headed back to school to change careers), I don't know if it matters. At the end of the day. I respect anyone who improves their lot through learning and hard work - individuals and nations. The economic game being played that makes it easy to exploit labor in the 3rd world is cynical and certainly contrived, but we are all relatively lucky to be allowed to play when you take it in the context of history. I feel a brotherhood with my colleagues in India and elsewhere, and I cannot help myself from being happy at their success. In the end it may all be for the best.
This alone, from SCO's complaint:
Averment 86: It is not possible for Linux to rapidly reach UNIX performance standards for complete enterprise functionality without the misappropriation of UNIX code, methods or concepts to achieve such performance, and coordination by a larger developer, such as IBM.
I hope the rest of their case shows the same degree of arrogance and technical ineptitude. IBM would have little to worry about.
This has been fascinating. Thank you.
Interesting.
I hadn't heard about pine tree fermentation before. That's neat. But I'm not clear - does that cross the sustainability barrier? If it does, then great! You can ignore the rest of this post...
If it doesn't, I guess I don't get the big picture for methanol. You say, "Methanol is more difficult to manufacture than hydrogen." And you go on to describe what I think you're referring to here as plant production: "diret chemical synthesis from CO and H2 is very slightly more complex than direct hydrogen production."
I guess what confuses me is that if it's not sensible to farm it, and it's harder to make in a factory than hydrogen, _and_ it's not as clean burning as hydrogen... aren't these are pretty big reasons not to use it? I see that it would be much easier to transition to methanol, say, than hydrogen, but if the fuel supply never comes together, and it's not as clean... what am I missing?
Your arguments are interesting. I have a question, though. The many times I've gotten into discussions about using Methanol/Ethanol as an alternate energy source on a large scale I meet a lot of people who are very certain that agriculture-supplied fuel is a net loss. The theory being that the energy cost to farm the corn (for instance) exceeds that of the fuel produced. What are your thoughts on this?
FYI, a lot of research in the industry is focused on using engineered and naturally ocurring microorganisms to produce hydrogen "as a waste product." There have been some notable early successes.
Hydrogen may be produced by engineered and naturally ocurring microorganisms as a waste product. This is a big piece of current hydrogen power research efforts.
Keeping it as electricity is well and good, but if you transport it, you lose a lot of it (long-distance power lines lose in the 50-80% range), and if you store it, you lose even more of it (don't get me started on batteries).
So you look for more innovative solutions to transport and store the power. Hydrogen may be one. If its transport and/or storage efficiencies rival your traditional systems, then that's not "throwing it away," is it?
The other thing to consider is biological production methods; i.e. using engineered and naturally occuring bacteria to produce hydrogen. And actually this is a big piece of "hydrogen research."
Yes, it would be nice not to have a middleman. However, you have to have one. Or, you have to use the less efficient automotive IC engine.
I could easily imagine that using a power plant, and then converting, storing, and releasing with some middleman (i.e. hydrogen) is more efficient that conveying the fossil fuel straight to the car and burning it there.
Of course, it will take work to get it right. But that's worth it, eh?
It sounds like you really don't want this to work.
Saying hydrogen is abundant in nature is just meant to get you thinking about the ways we could get it out. It turns out there are some novel ones. I think, since you appear to have some chemistry, that you should know your analogy with diamonds is weak.
This is one set of bacteria and one set of reactions. I'm just saying "think creatively." It's a line of inquiry - don't treat it this way, unless it's your position that it's a dead end?
Even if you don't get a big win like this, there are still (as you suggested, and as and the article goes into this in some detail) configurations like 5th generation nuclear reactors (their example is a pebble-bed modular reactor) and other cleaner "factory" sources of energy that use hydrogen as a transport.
Even if we rely on hydrocarbon factory enery with a hydrogen transport, as I'm sure you know, factory energy is vastly more efficient that using an IC automobile engine... if you can do good things with the efficiencies of the conversion and storage processes involved even that might be a winner.
Hydrogen is very abundant in nature.
There are many interesting ways people may be able to produce it.
In my sporadic but sometimes intense investigations of alternate energy sources, I was always the most taken with hydrogen.
It is very clean. It is relatively efficient. I'd prefer a liquid fuel, but then again, I'd prefer a non-volatile, non-toxic fuel, too. You can't always get what you want.
The attractive things about hydrogen are its real abundance. There are so many interesting possibilties for how to make it. I saw a fascinating series of papers (curse me for not being able to find the original links - although you can get familiar with the ideas with some simple google searches, i.e. this conference poster) on the use of genetically engineered bacteria that produce hydrogen when eating various things, even waste products.
"Electric" has massive drawbacks both in storage and distribution, which are both dirty and highly inefficient. Methanol/Ethanol are probably even dirtier, though potentially renewable, but there are questions about how sustainable, for instance, corn power really is. Geothermal and hydro are obviously limited in place and abundance... Solar, wind and tides are ideal but unpredictable and expensive. I'm excited to hear about big improvements in solar power systems, but the big stuff (70%+ efficiencies) still seem a ways away for commercial use.
To me, that leaves good old hydrogen (in combustion? in a fuel cell?) - attractive both for its unparalleled cleanliness and the interesting potential sources. Why not?
I would completely disagree that you should send text as images, vector or otherwise.
I'm glad you mentioned SVG. I haven't used it much yet. I'll be happy with whoever wins the vector race, as long as they're simple, fast, and cross-platform. If it's open, bonus!
To be precise, Flash will send vector information for any used glyphs of a "non-standard" font, and then display the associated text using that "on-demand" font face information as appropriate. I'm not sure if this addresses your concern about sending text as images or not.
Normal text is indexable by search engines and other tools, and can be searched easily within the browser. Copy & paste works fine too. Does all of this work with flash?
Of course, I was thinking of it merely as a replacement for a number of GIFs, which suffer the same or similar limitations (I think you can have an ALT tag on Flash movies, too?). Clearly, anything that's purely text should probably be treated as such, and I'd rather see a really robust, reliable and cross-platform system for being able to render in different fonts, and to transparently send fonts that the client doesn't have. I'm not sure how well this is addressed outside of Flash at the moment. And this leaves aside the other GIF cases (rollovers, simple graphics, simple graphics + text, etc.) that you can address with a format like Flash.
I may have a high-resolution display that is capable of rendering serifs well, so I'd want to subtitute another font for sans-serifs most of the time. CSS allows me to do this, flash does not.
Absolutely true. I'd say this is another good way to think about the dividing line for where Flash is appropriate. Any time such a font substitution would be reasonable, Flash is not appropriate. Any time it is not, you may still consider it.
I have no trouble accepting that there are good uses for flash.
Of course.
The authoring system ~v4 (I can't comment on other versions) is absolutely terrible, yes.
It has not improved much, though the Ecmascript API is stabilizing, and the client-server networking possible is interesting and powerful. My single biggest beef with them is that, over all these years, despite a huge outcry in the developer community, and though it would add only a few bytes to their overhead, they have still not deigned to offer the ability to turn on explicit variable declaration. This one little if-statement in their script engine would save 10-30% on development times for most script-related projects.
This exemplifies one of the many reasons why I hate closed-source tools.
I really hope not. The html wg has only just managed to properly separate content from presentation, it would be madness to glom it all back together again.
I think I was very vague about how I expected Flash to have to change for this to become rational. I think it would have to grow considerably.
Personally, I think that flash could be completely replaced by w3c technologies today, with a massive increase in usability/accessibility/ease-of-development if only the browser support was there. Check out scripted svg, the dom, ecmascript, smil, css, and so on.
I really like the idea; it's good to just have a competing array of specialized systems, mini-APIs floating around for content people to author against and scripters to orchestrate and assemble, all of it based on open standards, and then you'd have commoditized IDE's which allow you to do a lot of the same "easy" tasks.
However, being all too familiar with the systems you mentioned and a few others, I can ruefully say I think this is a ways off. A lot of it comes down to, as you say, browser support. If we're being realistic, it's hard to imagine so many good and necessary and improvements to all these systems by all the competing parties (for whom failing to cooperate well has been one of their chief sources of amusement over the past few years). I mean, among other things we're probably talking about a cross-platform font standard.
Still, perhaps this is really what I was thinking of when I was ruminating in the last paragraph of my previous post. It sounds interesting.
All very good points, and thought-provoking.
There are some bright sides to Flash. For example, a tremendous portion of all web-related traffic is simply sending text in bitmap form so a site can look "pretty". Then count in all of the very similar redundant images (in javascript rollovers), and then add in "graphically simple" images... that's a lot of traffic. All of this can, and should be replaced by much smaller and more efficient vector art.
So many people see Flash as, if nothing else, an up and coming replacement for GIF/JPG/PNG for many applications. I wish browsers allowed you to treat it more like an image and less like an "object," so it would integrate better in that role and address your right-click woes. Obviously in this role search engines are not affected.
Flash has grown quite a bit over the years; I've had the misfortune to have to do some absurdly large projects with it. It's very attractive if you want to deliver a self-contained web application (like a game) because the penetration is simply second-to-none (+95% for older versions of Flash, and +75% for the newest version, I believe - i.e., it's included in Windows!), it runs on Linux, and if you have to download it, it's ~300k (hence the former point, I think). Now, it's offering a lot of features while staying quite small... I still think its scripting system and API are abyssmal, but if you're up for abuse you can make it do amazing things.
I think it's important to use it in the right places. If you rip out an entire HTML site and replace it with flash just to make it look nicer, you probably didn't consider the tradeoffs. But on the flipside, I sure am glad it's there for times when you want to do something unconventional or impossible using traditional techniques.
Something like Flash could replace HTML eventually. If Flash evolves in the right direction, and we're willing to reconceive its integration with the browser, and really, reconsider aspects of the web altogether (and most of all, if we forget it's proprietary, which is really a deal-killer on its own). This is a funny dream some Flash proponents have. It's not realistic, but I can see why they think it, and I won't be surprised to see some Flash-like things gain importance in the web's evolution.
Again with the insults. If you haven't realized by now there is a reason personal attacks have nothing to do with a well reasoned, logical response. Had you bothered to read the link I posted or any of the hundreds of other pages a quick trip to the search engine found you would have noted that most of the pages agreed that personal attacks in a debate are but one sign that the attacker simply doesn't have a valid argument. If he had one he wouldn't have to attempt to inflame, but could convince his opponent merely on the basis of his argument. Seeing that you refuse to debate in a rational matter (much less address a very telling point I've brought up several times and challenged you to reply to)(1) I see no point in continuing this conversation.
:)
Drop a line when you've grown up.
Let's tell a story about a person named "Cheviot." He/she came to slashdot, and decided to troll a valid point about a bit of trivia with a plagiarized essay which didn't really apply. When ridiculed by the crowd and questioned on it in detail, he tried to acquit him/herself with a lot of subject-changes, funny math and nonsense. And when people don't show him/her the respect he/she deserves, he gets a little upset, and proud.
Awww, there there, Cheviot. I know, people can be so mean.
That was the point. I was asking if you were really that stupid.
But if you're going to (I chuckle at this) "take the high road," you have to actually keep it up for a few consecutive paragraphs.
No one asked you about the investment, Listen to the questions being debated.
So, it's pretty clear now you're just willfully ignoring the point. I guess I can understand. It's tough to admit you're wrong. Why not just pretend you're not?
Ammortization is the division of a debt or payment into smaller, equal installments over the life of the debt.
I guess in retrospect, defining things in order to cover up your misuse of them is one of your little trademarks, Cheviot. It's kind of cute, I suppose.
You were the one that said that Sony's profit per unit didn't take into account the ammortized cost of their initial investment. The math, which you dismissed out of hand, proves this to be incorrect.
Hmm. Actually, why don't you go back and read what I said. See if it had anything to do with dividing 2 billion by every console sold. Or just pretend it does. I'll be waiting.
I do and always have. This has absolutly nothing to do with the question of Sony's per unit gross profit on consoles.
Of course it doesn't. I never suggested it did.
I have always quoted Sony's full production costs ($2 billion)
Yes, just not every time you needed to.
Except no one is talking about Sony's profit on the Playstation line.
I suppose the right way to put it is that you wish no one was talking about Sony's profit on the Playstation line. In fact, I'm sure right now you're divising a way you can somehow insert the word "gross" into my previous posts at various intervals. That will show me.
I'm repeating the section below from my last post. One can only assume since you didn't bother to reply you simply had no answer. Not a wonder, as... well... you're sensitive to being told harsh truths about your writing, so I'll let you draw the obvious conclusion.
-----
You want to compare XBox's total production costs, to Sony's production costs minus a big piece of their initial investment (which you have decided is not relevant in your comparison for some reason). But you don't get to count it out - it's a senseless comparison if you do. Oh yes, it may be better for Sony - it may even have been unwise for their competitors to do things their way. But it doesn't mean they don't all initially take a loss (and they all call it an investment, however it's structured) to provide you with hardware, in hopes that eventually they will get that money back (through whatever means are available).
Ad Hominem
This kind of error makes you look like you don't really know what you're talking about.
Ad Hominem (also you convienently forgot that my point was correct)
Tragically, you still don't seem to understand. I'll keep trying a little longer. If you need help, show your teacher, parent or guardian, and maybe they can explain it in more detail.
Ad Hominem. (Do you really think you're winning points with slashdot readers with these retorts?)
The essay you plagiarized is BS
Ad Hominem. (Get enough mileage off this one yet?)
You said: [plagiarized an essay claiming Sony doesn't do that].
Ad Hominem. (I guess not.)
But lets move beyond that, shall we.
Obviously you're proud that you've learned a latin term. And I can see where you'd like to pretend the fact that you plagiarized that essay doesn't have any bearing on this, but frankly, that's not true. It hurts your credibility. It makes you look dishonest. I suppose trying to deny and minimize this fact is par for the course, too.
The funny thing is that this credibility issue is really bearing out - you see, you're sporadic, inconsistent, and wrong on your conclusions at a fairly good rate. Go figure. We pay attention to credibility and reputations for a reason. People are often consistent.
Most reputable schools, and quite a few better places of employment would see you summarily dismissed for what you pulled in this forum. So if you plan on pretending to an air of credibility, you should expect to hear about your "mistake" quite a bit. When you're ready to forget you did it, just stop bringing it to my attention. Don't worry, your arguments don't have much to lose from the comparison.
Your point was not correct... your insistence on gross profit was, is, and continues to be specious and misleading, as I have explained at length, and to which you have thus far made no sensible rebuttal.
Are you seriously suggesting that unless Sony sold it's first Playstation 2 for 2 billion dollars that it is selling each unit at a loss until they pay back their R&D expences?
Hmm... just sit back and read this a few times. Savor in it's breathless, misfired-insult idiocy. It's all downhill from here.
Is RCA selling every television it makes at a loss until they pay back their R&D expences?
If you invested a billion dollars in a factory, and then for some reason you didn't sell as many widgets as you expected to sell... so you didn't make back your billion... I suppose you'd have to say... on that investment... you took a loss.
With me so far?
Divide the 2 billion dollar startup cost by the 50 million units sold.
Why don't you divide it by 69, Bill and Ted's favorite number?
It is about as relevant. I will neglect to address the rest of your math springing from this meaningless comparison.
The correct point to draw from this is that (given that we accept the gross profit per console figure) Sony had to sell 20 million playstations to break even on their initial investment. The source you plagiarized made this connection - why not you too?
I said no such thing. I tried to demonstrate how Microsoft and Nintendo (Bob) differ from practically any other company in the world, Sony included (Stan).
Heh. You stopped (I suppose now I should say "paused") in your attempt to force a gross profit comparison down our throats. Instead, you merely asked "who do you want to be?" You already knew my answer - since I started with it. You should know this, because maybe it really isn't sinking in: as you continue to fail to answer a point, you appear to concede it.
Not at all. Even if Sony stopped making Playstation 2 consoles tomorrow they have a massive chip production plant and assembly factories that in and of themselves have considerable value.
Remind me to come back to the issue of how much of the PS2's production investment could be recouped if the PS2 tanked later... when we've dealt with the matter at hand.
Again, not what I said. I asked if you'd rather be the company that makes a gross profit on each unit or the one that doesn't.
In other words, it is what you said.
By selling their products for more than the cost of the labor to assemble them and the cost of the bill of materials all the companies that make the products noted above pay back those startup costs and make a profit.
Now, back to the point, if you have 3 different companies that each make a different initial investment in manufacturing, and each of them has a different gross profit on their product (for two of them, that number is negative, and for the 3rd, the company that made the largest initial investment, it is actually positive), then you can say that the 3rd does not sell its product at a "gross profit" loss... I notice you like to repeat this a lot. It's funny, so I won't discourage you. But it doesn't make it relevant.
Congratulations. #3 spent their billions up front, instead of spreading them out, ammortizing them over a long period of time (you like to imply it will be indefinite). Because they took a bigger risk, they are in the running for a bigger payoff. But until they sell enough units to recoup their initial investment, they are in the same boat as #2 and #1. Probably worse, depending on the sales figures.
Let's see if you're with me on this so far. If Sony had sold 5 million units instead of 50, they would have taken a loss instead of a gain. I know, you're itching to answer it's not the same. Take your time. Think about it carefully.
You want to compare XBox's total production costs, to Sony's production costs minus a big piece of their initial investment (which you have decided is not relevant in your comparison for some reason). But you don't get to count it out - it's a senseless comparison if you do. Oh yes, it may be better for Sony - it may even have been unwise for their competitors to do things their way. But it doesn't mean they don't all initially take a loss (and they all call it an investment, however it's structured) to provide you with hardware, in hopes that eventually they will get that money back (through whatever means are available).
I know, I know. You really want to confuse the issue some more. Don't sweat it. Hey, to some folks, it's just free entertainment.
It might be interesting to speculate on why other players didn't go Sony's route. One hopes they had their reasons.
Well, to be clear, when you say "loss" or "recouped" - it really just means that: this was their investment. Did they make it back (recoup it)? Etc. It doesn't matter if it was borrowed, for the sake of the comparison.
Hmm. You say,
So Sony doesn't even lay out all that much money for the production facilities.
Their initial investment, including facilities, was ~2 billion by one source... And you go on:
the profit from the PREVIOUS consoles later years is used to establish a large portion of the production facilities for the next console.
Yes. Of course, making a fair comparison, whether the money to prepare for a product comes from an OS monopoly, a pokemon franchise, or a previous console system, you still have to consider it an initial investment whose costs must be recouped, and you have to look at net profits for any of it to make sense.
Whether Sony did so well they paid back their few billion in 6 months, I suppose it's possible... By the way, do you have any citations for actual numbers?
I'm not sure whether you're not following along, or you're just trying to change the subject.
I said (among other things): Consoles are initially sold at a loss.
You said: [plagiarized an essay claiming Sony doesn't do that].
I said: That essay is wrong. Here's why.
You said: Well, ok, what I said was complete bullshit. But wouldn't you rather be Sony nonetheless?
And to that I will reply: Obviously - since that was what I've been saying all along.
As an aside, of course, you wouldn't want to be them if they hadn't been "the winner." Their success was a very likely bet, but nonetheless, it was gambling. If you make a much bigger initial investment in manufacturing rather than buy parts, and you lose the race, you lose your entire much bigger initial investment. Elementary.
Tragically, you still don't seem to understand. I'll keep trying a little longer. If you need help, show your teacher, parent or guardian, and maybe they can explain it in more detail.
The accounting principles under which a company's factories have been categorized are unimportant. The gross profit comparison itself is wrong.
Saying, oh yeah, Sony makes a profit on PS2's: it's a "gross profit"... is like saying, oh yeah, I live in my house for free... not counting my mortgage! So what if Nintendo and Microsoft are renting their apartments. They are all paying the cost one way or another. Leaving it out for one and not the other just because of the way their investment was disposed is cheating.
Is it starting to sink in yet? The essay you plagiarized is BS. They guy probably got a hundred emails by now explaining this, but he either can't understand them or simply just doesn't want to admit his little screed was entirely wrong.
No, it is entirely the same thing.
Every product, including the XBOX, PS2 and Gamecube, have huge startup costs.
You couldn't be bothered to quote them, because if you did, you would see the startup costs are considerably different; much higher, in fact, when you manufacture more of your own components. Hey, you'll look bad arguing this one, it's covered in the essay you plagiarized.
The profit made on each PS2 console is gross profit, not net.
A dictionary definition for net profit. A dictionary definition for gross profit. Drawing the gross/net profit distinction is specious - holding aside "taxes, interest, depreciation, and other expenses" doesn't matter. This kind of error makes you look like you don't really know what you're talking about.
Your discussion about the politics between suppliers and console vendors is slightly interesting, although it more or less echoes what I originally said ("...but then over time will reap even bigger rewards as their manufacturing investment pays off"); it's also irrelevant to the point.
I just finished dealing with another reply below... pardon me if you're not saying the same thing, but it sounds like you are... See my response to this other poster.
So basically the article you plagiarised admits that every single recent console, from the dreamcast to the gamecube, with the exception of the PS2, has been sold at a loss "at least initially."
Then it goes on to admit that the figures indicating Sony has always made a profit on each playstation are actually not taking into account the ammortized cost of the tooling and facilities that went into playstation 2 production. You see, Sony will build a lot more of their own parts. That means they take an even bigger up-front hit than their rivals, but then over time will reap even bigger rewards as their manufacturing investment pays off. And, in fact, the article you plagiarized goes on to admit that something like 20 million playstations will have to be sold (at what margin the author is vague, but the point is clear) before break-even.
It's the same thing.
Let me sum up.
Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega, etc. outsource their parts, but pay more for them, so they lose money initially, and keep losing it until their suppliers lower their prices.
Sony builds factories of their own, but then those factories produce parts for them at cost. They, too, lose money initially, because you have to consider at least part of their manufacturing investment in the equation if you want a rational comparison.