First, Common Lisp does have a standard packaging/module mechanism. Moreover, there are a ton of libraries available for Common Lisp, as well as interfaces to C libraries.
FB-DIMMs have tremendous bandwidth, and are the best way to get large amounts of memory into a system. In any case, AMD's 4x4 system isn't really in the running here, since it doesn't support ECC. ECC, bandwidth, and lots of memory don't matter for games, but for many pro apps, they're tremendously important.
Do those SLI "rigs" have dual Xeons, quad-channel ECC FB-DIMM memory, etc? The Mac Pro is a workstation, and probably about the cheapest quad-core Xeon machine you're going to find. The 7300GT is a perfectly adequate graphics card for such a machine. You don't need anything more to do development, photoshop, final cut pro, etc, and 3D users are going to upgrade to a $1500+ Quadro anyway.
In any case, there is no real gamer machine in the Apple lineup. The reason is likely because Apple doesn't think it can attract any gamers. Gaming isn't like many other markets. games are constantly changing, and if you want to attract gamers, you've got to not only have a wide variety of games, but you need to have the games they want to play. Why should a gamer switch, and risk the fact that the next hit-RTS might not run on the Mac? Also, there is a lot of churn in the gaming software market. If you're a scientist, you can see that Matlab is ported, and switch, and be happy. If you're a graphics guy, you can see that Maya is ported, and be happy. Even if the ports happen six months later than the PC version is released, that doesn't stop you from getting your work done. However, for a gamer, things are different. Just because Quake gets ported, doesn't mean you can switch. What about the next version of Quake, or the hit new RTS? And if the port happens six months later, well, then its worthless, because by then you've already played that game.
I think he's not afraid of a little blank space, which is something I think many designers are. I think we're so used to seeing every little bit used by something, that it shocks us to see empty space. But honestly, is there any reason to fill that space? It needs to be there because the computer is using the space behind it, and the speakers are just fine where they are, so why not have a blank part of the bezel? I think it works with the iMacs clean lines much better than a speaker-grille would.
As for the CD/DVD, there is probably a pratical reason for this. The iMac isn't deep enough to support a CD/DVD placed along the depth of the case. Moreover, since the iMac is vented at the top, you can't run it within a cubby anyway, for cooling reasons, so putting the CD/DVD on the side doesn't cost you anything.
I've got three machines. One is a PC running Ubuntu/GNOME. The other two are a PowerMac and a MacBook. In the year or so that I've used Macs as my primary machines*, I've discovered that Apple pays a tremendous amount of attention to substance.
Let's use the Macbook as an example. On the outside, it's got a white polycarbonate shell. Sure, it looks pretty, but its also extremely durable. You can abuse it, and trust it not to crack, fracture, etc. You can grab it by a corner, and not feel any flexing of the material. You can put it in your bag, and not worry that the flexing of the top-half is going to damage the LCD. It's also remarkable in how clean the exterior is. There is nothing sticking out, just a few ports on one side. This means that you can just throw it in your bag, without worrying about anything catching. You can just plug devices in, without opening little rubber covers that inevitably fall off. The screen hinge is large and robust, not the silly little plastic ones you often see on laptops.
On the inside, the Macbook is covered in a tactile rubber, which feels a whole lot nicer than the hard plastic I've encountered in any other notebook. The whole thing is designed to be very easy to clean. There are no crevices or recessed lines on either the inside or outside. You can clean the keyboard just by wiping a paper towel across it. All the buttons are designed to resist crumbs getting in-between or underneath. Adequate clearance is left between the keyboard and the LCD, so unlike my old Dell, you don't get the keyboard scuffing the LCD. The trackpad is huge, so you can reach it from anywhere on the keyboard. There is no latch to break off, just a magnetic closure. And of course, don't forget MagSafe.
The Macbook replaced a Dell laptop I used to own. That machine always felt to me like it was designed by someone who'd never actually dragged a laptop around an airport. The MacBook felt like it was designed by someone who'd dragged my Dell around airports, encountered all the problems I'd encountered with it, and built a laptop that didn't have those problems.
Once you move out of the realm of hardware into software, you realize that OS X is about way more than being pretty. Its about doing things efficiently, and with minimal cognitive load. I used KDE for several years, and the interface was literally tiring to use. The layout was just too cluttered, and the design had no coherence. What I've noticed of good Apple software (though they do produce some duds, ie: the Finder), is that it always feels like there is a proper design to the software. That its not just a collection of features mashed together into a UI, but that somebody actually layed out basic principles of what the software should do, and built around those. The resulting software is predictable, it has patterns that can be anticipated, and its easy and efficient to use. OS X software works with me, KDE always felt like it was fighting me. GNOME is considerably better in this regard. It's not as pretty as OS X, but it gets a lot of the core principles correct. However, the breadth of good, HIG compliant GNOME software is considerably less than the breadth of good, HIG-compliant OS X software. For example, I use an SVN client called ZigVersion that I like quite a bit. There is no equivalent piece of software on Linux. There are SVN clients that have roughly the same features, sure, but nothing that behaves like a properly HIG compliant GNOME app.
*) For decidedly un-frou-frou tasks like coding and running Matlab...
The new iMac makes a great developer machine. They're very fast (they run GCC as fast as the quad-G5), they can take plenty of RAM, and they've got big hard drives with FW800 ports for very fast external disks. They've also got great screens and are extremely quiet. The fact that they can run all three major OSs (Windows, Linux, OS X) within a very affordable virtualization environment (Parallels) is just icing on the cake.
In any case, Apple has bigger issues with regards to having gamers switch than upgradability. The biggest being, of course, the fact that there are no games on OS X.
It's not semantic nonsense at all. At the design level, it removes the focus from the means, and puts it in the ends, where it should be.
Let me use an analogy. What do you say to someone who says "I need a car?" Very few people want a car. Cars are expensive, they require expensive gasoline, regular maintainence, insurance, etc. No, what people want is to go places. If somebody invented cheap teleportation tomorrow, the sales of cars would drop to nothing, because almost nobody really wants a car.
So now, if you're a designer looking for a solution to a problem, focusing on the ends is crucial. It might change your goal from "how do I design a better car?", to "how do I design a better way to get around?" Its a matter of coming up with a good solution to the problem, rather than working on solving problems with a particular, non-optimal solution. It's a trap engineers often fall into (I do it all the time), but one that they strive to avoid.
Because outside the geek community, nobody upgrades their motherboard.
And an all-in-one design can be enormously useful. We have an iMac in our study, and it fits the decor perfectly. A PC, with a box sitting on the floor and all the cables trailing off would've been an eye-sore in an otherwise beautiful room. And the design is also tremendously functional. With a tower, if you place it on your desk, you waste desk space. If you place it on the floor, you're constantly having to reach down to insert CDs, USB cables, etc, not to mention that you're still wasting floor space.
There is no statistical reason for why that would be truel. It all depends on whether a sample size of 10 is statistically significant for the population in question. For a classroom, it may be. For the universe? Likely not.
IBM didn't spend a lot of money designing the G5. They just took Power4, which already had a self-sufficient market in high-end servers, and replaced the SMP fabric with an elastic-IO bus. Then they almost completely neglected to maintain/update it for three years.
Except IBM doesn't have any 3GHz G5s that get over 1000 SPECint/GHz while sucking down only 80 watts. The top 970MP, which is less than a year old, hits 2.5GHz, with 575 SPECint/GHz, and sucks down 100 watts.
That's actually 2.65x better SPECint/watt on the Core 2 side.
The iSeries is Power5. The PPC970 is a castrated Power4.
A chronology might help:
Power4: Moderately crappy core, great system architecture/SMP fabric PPC970: Power4 minus the great system architecture/SMP fabric plus shitty high-latency chipset. Power5: Redesigned Power4 fixing many instances of crappiness, with even better system architecture.
Compared to my 2500 Quad G5, I agree Quad Xeon workstation works 30% faster even with multiple tests. It is not what I talk about, if a company claims their new model is 5x faster, or gives the impression it is not a company to be taken serious.
Why? It's the truth. The previous Xserve was using a CPU that had essentially the same core, and only a 15% higher clockspeed, than the original G5s released in 2003. The new Xserve is using a contemporary CPU (with a brand new architecture), and is using twice as many CPUs. A 5x increase is not surprising at all.
Did you ever see Tyan, IBM, Sun attack their previous models while shipping a new one?
Tyan's, IBM's, and Sun's previous-gen products never held them back as much as Apple's PowerPC-based ones did.
Well, why didn't they offer dual core G5 for servers?
Because IBM didn't make any until late last year. And a quad G5 would've never made it into the Xserve formfactor. Core 2's energy efficiency is a huge step forward in this regard, enabling quad-core in a form factor that previous topped out at dual-core.
Why they didn't implement ECC?
Because custom R&D costs money, and on the Intel side, Apple gets ECC and a bunch of other chipset features for free. Moreover, they *did* implement ECC in the dual-core machines.
Lets say they move to AMD next year,what will stop them claiming Intel was 5x slower or how horrible and drop the second hand value of server grade machines to floor?
Because it wouldn't be factually true, unlike these current comparisons about the G5. The G5 just isn't a good chip for server tasks. I own a 2.3 GHz 970MP machine, and for integer code, its at 1.6 GHz Opteron level. That was the mid-range Opteron when the line launched in early 2003.
The whole point Apple is trying to drive home is that the end of PowerPC on the desktop represents a new era for Apple. One in which the machines are both competitive in performance and in price. So far, Apple has been delivering that in a way PowerPC never alowed them to. I don't see the problem in them pointing out as much.
He was implying that spending $1bn+ designing and fabbing an agressive design like Cell is only possible if you have some high-volume consumer product to put it in. Otherwise, it'd just be too expensive.
5x faster is actually pretty close to the mark. Woodcrest (at 3 GHz) runs at a 30% faster clockspeed than the 2.3 GHz G5s in the Xserve. It's about 75% more efficient per clock cycle in integer code (which is what matters for servers), and oh, there are twice as many cores in the new Xserve.
Nobody makes million dollar server purchases using PPC970s. Power4 wasn't a CPU that people bought for the core, which is itself quite mediocre in performance. They bought it because of the huge systems (with gobs of memory and I/O bandwidth) that it came in. A G5 is all the bad parts of Power4 (including all the things that IBM fixed in Power5 resulting in a 40% increase in per clock integer performance), without any of the good parts of Power4.
The idle-process is just an organizational thing. Even if you have no code to run, you still have to tell the CPU to do something, and the system idle process is a way of taking that special-case code out of the scheduler. These days, the system idle process just executes HLT instructions, which pause the CPU until the next interrupt.
To save on space, I agree with your point that America is very priviledged, but it's a wasted point.
The point isn't just that Americans are privledged, but that this privelege isn't really due to some inherent factors, but rather the luck of living in the particular period of time in which we do. There is nothing about us that entitles us to this privelge, and if we lose it, complaining about it is kinda hollow.
It seems to me that all you're advocating is, in my mind at least, nothing more than work-force socialism on a globalized scale.
I'm not "advocating" anything. Advocating globalization is like advocating gravity. There is no point, its going to happen whether we like it or not, and the only thing we can do is deal with it. Moreover, how is globalization like socialism? Socialism would be the government giving jobs to Indians because they are worse off than we are. That's not what is happening. What is happening is that work is going offshore because the barriers for doing so have become incredibly low, given our modern communications technologies. Outsourcing is indeed the exact opposite of socialism. It's the application of free market principles to the labor market. It's what happens when consumers of labor (businesses), look at what sources of labor have the highest cost-benefit ratio, and purchasing those sources of labor. It's the exact same thing I do when I go to NewEgg to buy a hard drive, instead of paying a huge markup to shop at CompUSA.
My take on outsourcing, plain and simple, is that I'm tired of seeing companies trying to UNNECESSARILY save money by taking jobs away from QUALIFIED Americans and handing them over to "qualified" foreigners just because they can work for a fraction of the cost that an American can work for. I don't care how you spin it, it's not right to penalize Americans simply because they were born in America.
It has nothing to do with penalizing anybody for anything. Indeed, it has to do with not giving Americans special consideration, just because they happen to be born in America. It's a matter of needing a 250GB hard drive (to continue my metaphor), and going to the place that can sell it to me the cheapest.
There is a point to be made, in that the costs of outsourcing is higher than many bean-counters realize. In particular, there is a hidden cost in what happens when the outsourcing contract expires and that foreign employee leaves, taking his skills and knowledge with him. That's not a problem with outsourcing per se, but rather a flaw in the cost-benefit analysis conducted by the managers. The same flaw is often seen with regards to, for example, the hiring of contractors, for example. As more experience is gained in outsourcing, you'll see the cost/benefit start to take these other factors into consideration.
Learn to read dude. In idiomatic English, when one says "it might not work for X, but it'll work for Y", it means the same thing as "it won't work for X, but at least it will work for Y". It doesn't mean "it may or may not work for X...".
I presume that's the "600 tons of hardened sludge". Remember, a lot of waste (in fact, a lot of anything), is primarily water, so if 3000 tons of material create 600 tons of sludge, a large percentage of that remaining 2400 tons is going to be the steam for the aforementioned tropicana plant.
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How is 'do' any more obscure than '(0..5).to_a'. What the hell does the latter even mean?
First, Common Lisp does have a standard packaging/module mechanism. Moreover, there are a ton of libraries available for Common Lisp, as well as interfaces to C libraries.
FB-DIMMs have tremendous bandwidth, and are the best way to get large amounts of memory into a system. In any case, AMD's 4x4 system isn't really in the running here, since it doesn't support ECC. ECC, bandwidth, and lots of memory don't matter for games, but for many pro apps, they're tremendously important.
Do those SLI "rigs" have dual Xeons, quad-channel ECC FB-DIMM memory, etc? The Mac Pro is a workstation, and probably about the cheapest quad-core Xeon machine you're going to find. The 7300GT is a perfectly adequate graphics card for such a machine. You don't need anything more to do development, photoshop, final cut pro, etc, and 3D users are going to upgrade to a $1500+ Quadro anyway.
In any case, there is no real gamer machine in the Apple lineup. The reason is likely because Apple doesn't think it can attract any gamers. Gaming isn't like many other markets. games are constantly changing, and if you want to attract gamers, you've got to not only have a wide variety of games, but you need to have the games they want to play. Why should a gamer switch, and risk the fact that the next hit-RTS might not run on the Mac? Also, there is a lot of churn in the gaming software market. If you're a scientist, you can see that Matlab is ported, and switch, and be happy. If you're a graphics guy, you can see that Maya is ported, and be happy. Even if the ports happen six months later than the PC version is released, that doesn't stop you from getting your work done. However, for a gamer, things are different. Just because Quake gets ported, doesn't mean you can switch. What about the next version of Quake, or the hit new RTS? And if the port happens six months later, well, then its worthless, because by then you've already played that game.
I think he's not afraid of a little blank space, which is something I think many designers are. I think we're so used to seeing every little bit used by something, that it shocks us to see empty space. But honestly, is there any reason to fill that space? It needs to be there because the computer is using the space behind it, and the speakers are just fine where they are, so why not have a blank part of the bezel? I think it works with the iMacs clean lines much better than a speaker-grille would.
As for the CD/DVD, there is probably a pratical reason for this. The iMac isn't deep enough to support a CD/DVD placed along the depth of the case. Moreover, since the iMac is vented at the top, you can't run it within a cubby anyway, for cooling reasons, so putting the CD/DVD on the side doesn't cost you anything.
This always comes up, and its really not true.
I've got three machines. One is a PC running Ubuntu/GNOME. The other two are a PowerMac and a MacBook. In the year or so that I've used Macs as my primary machines*, I've discovered that Apple pays a tremendous amount of attention to substance.
Let's use the Macbook as an example. On the outside, it's got a white polycarbonate shell. Sure, it looks pretty, but its also extremely durable. You can abuse it, and trust it not to crack, fracture, etc. You can grab it by a corner, and not feel any flexing of the material. You can put it in your bag, and not worry that the flexing of the top-half is going to damage the LCD. It's also remarkable in how clean the exterior is. There is nothing sticking out, just a few ports on one side. This means that you can just throw it in your bag, without worrying about anything catching. You can just plug devices in, without opening little rubber covers that inevitably fall off. The screen hinge is large and robust, not the silly little plastic ones you often see on laptops.
On the inside, the Macbook is covered in a tactile rubber, which feels a whole lot nicer than the hard plastic I've encountered in any other notebook. The whole thing is designed to be very easy to clean. There are no crevices or recessed lines on either the inside or outside. You can clean the keyboard just by wiping a paper towel across it. All the buttons are designed to resist crumbs getting in-between or underneath. Adequate clearance is left between the keyboard and the LCD, so unlike my old Dell, you don't get the keyboard scuffing the LCD. The trackpad is huge, so you can reach it from anywhere on the keyboard. There is no latch to break off, just a magnetic closure. And of course, don't forget MagSafe.
The Macbook replaced a Dell laptop I used to own. That machine always felt to me like it was designed by someone who'd never actually dragged a laptop around an airport. The MacBook felt like it was designed by someone who'd dragged my Dell around airports, encountered all the problems I'd encountered with it, and built a laptop that didn't have those problems.
Once you move out of the realm of hardware into software, you realize that OS X is about way more than being pretty. Its about doing things efficiently, and with minimal cognitive load. I used KDE for several years, and the interface was literally tiring to use. The layout was just too cluttered, and the design had no coherence. What I've noticed of good Apple software (though they do produce some duds, ie: the Finder), is that it always feels like there is a proper design to the software. That its not just a collection of features mashed together into a UI, but that somebody actually layed out basic principles of what the software should do, and built around those. The resulting software is predictable, it has patterns that can be anticipated, and its easy and efficient to use. OS X software works with me, KDE always felt like it was fighting me. GNOME is considerably better in this regard. It's not as pretty as OS X, but it gets a lot of the core principles correct. However, the breadth of good, HIG compliant GNOME software is considerably less than the breadth of good, HIG-compliant OS X software. For example, I use an SVN client called ZigVersion that I like quite a bit. There is no equivalent piece of software on Linux. There are SVN clients that have roughly the same features, sure, but nothing that behaves like a properly HIG compliant GNOME app.
*) For decidedly un-frou-frou tasks like coding and running Matlab...
The new iMac makes a great developer machine. They're very fast (they run GCC as fast as the quad-G5), they can take plenty of RAM, and they've got big hard drives with FW800 ports for very fast external disks. They've also got great screens and are extremely quiet. The fact that they can run all three major OSs (Windows, Linux, OS X) within a very affordable virtualization environment (Parallels) is just icing on the cake.
Why do I have a feeling that you're a gamer?
Maybe the 50+ world run-on sentence.
In any case, Apple has bigger issues with regards to having gamers switch than upgradability. The biggest being, of course, the fact that there are no games on OS X.
We're talking about the iMac, right? At least my iMac has a Mini-DVI connector for plugging in monitors, TVs, etc.
It's not semantic nonsense at all. At the design level, it removes the focus from the means, and puts it in the ends, where it should be.
Let me use an analogy. What do you say to someone who says "I need a car?" Very few people want a car. Cars are expensive, they require expensive gasoline, regular maintainence, insurance, etc. No, what people want is to go places. If somebody invented cheap teleportation tomorrow, the sales of cars would drop to nothing, because almost nobody really wants a car.
So now, if you're a designer looking for a solution to a problem, focusing on the ends is crucial. It might change your goal from "how do I design a better car?", to "how do I design a better way to get around?" Its a matter of coming up with a good solution to the problem, rather than working on solving problems with a particular, non-optimal solution. It's a trap engineers often fall into (I do it all the time), but one that they strive to avoid.
Because outside the geek community, nobody upgrades their motherboard.
And an all-in-one design can be enormously useful. We have an iMac in our study, and it fits the decor perfectly. A PC, with a box sitting on the floor and all the cables trailing off would've been an eye-sore in an otherwise beautiful room. And the design is also tremendously functional. With a tower, if you place it on your desk, you waste desk space. If you place it on the floor, you're constantly having to reach down to insert CDs, USB cables, etc, not to mention that you're still wasting floor space.
There is no statistical reason for why that would be truel. It all depends on whether a sample size of 10 is statistically significant for the population in question. For a classroom, it may be. For the universe? Likely not.
IBM didn't spend a lot of money designing the G5. They just took Power4, which already had a self-sufficient market in high-end servers, and replaced the SMP fabric with an elastic-IO bus. Then they almost completely neglected to maintain/update it for three years.
Except IBM doesn't have any 3GHz G5s that get over 1000 SPECint/GHz while sucking down only 80 watts.
The top 970MP, which is less than a year old, hits 2.5GHz, with 575 SPECint/GHz, and sucks down 100 watts.
That's actually 2.65x better SPECint/watt on the Core 2 side.
The iSeries is Power5. The PPC970 is a castrated Power4.
A chronology might help:
Power4: Moderately crappy core, great system architecture/SMP fabric
PPC970: Power4 minus the great system architecture/SMP fabric plus shitty high-latency chipset.
Power5: Redesigned Power4 fixing many instances of crappiness, with even better system architecture.
Compared to my 2500 Quad G5, I agree Quad Xeon workstation works 30% faster even with multiple tests. It is not what I talk about, if a company claims their new model is 5x faster, or gives the impression it is not a company to be taken serious.
Why? It's the truth. The previous Xserve was using a CPU that had essentially the same core, and only a 15% higher clockspeed, than the original G5s released in 2003. The new Xserve is using a contemporary CPU (with a brand new architecture), and is using twice as many CPUs. A 5x increase is not surprising at all.
Did you ever see Tyan, IBM, Sun attack their previous models while shipping a new one?
Tyan's, IBM's, and Sun's previous-gen products never held them back as much as Apple's PowerPC-based ones did.
Well, why didn't they offer dual core G5 for servers?
Because IBM didn't make any until late last year. And a quad G5 would've never made it into the Xserve formfactor. Core 2's energy efficiency is a huge step forward in this regard, enabling quad-core in a form factor that previous topped out at dual-core.
Why they didn't implement ECC?
Because custom R&D costs money, and on the Intel side, Apple gets ECC and a bunch of other chipset features for free. Moreover, they *did* implement ECC in the dual-core machines.
Lets say they move to AMD next year,what will stop them claiming Intel was 5x slower or how horrible and drop the second hand value of server grade machines to floor?
Because it wouldn't be factually true, unlike these current comparisons about the G5. The G5 just isn't a good chip for server tasks. I own a 2.3 GHz 970MP machine, and for integer code, its at 1.6 GHz Opteron level. That was the mid-range Opteron when the line launched in early 2003.
The whole point Apple is trying to drive home is that the end of PowerPC on the desktop represents a new era for Apple. One in which the machines are both competitive in performance and in price. So far, Apple has been delivering that in a way PowerPC never alowed them to. I don't see the problem in them pointing out as much.
The Cell processors are the same. Cell already supports ECC in the caches and in the XDR memory.
Sony is the primary customer of Cell, but IBM's doing the development. They're doing the Linux port, compiler port, etc.
I'm not sure if this is a joke or what.
He was implying that spending $1bn+ designing and fabbing an agressive design like Cell is only possible if you have some high-volume consumer product to put it in. Otherwise, it'd just be too expensive.
5x faster is actually pretty close to the mark. Woodcrest (at 3 GHz) runs at a 30% faster clockspeed than the 2.3 GHz G5s in the Xserve. It's about 75% more efficient per clock cycle in integer code (which is what matters for servers), and oh, there are twice as many cores in the new Xserve.
Nobody makes million dollar server purchases using PPC970s. Power4 wasn't a CPU that people bought for the core, which is itself quite mediocre in performance. They bought it because of the huge systems (with gobs of memory and I/O bandwidth) that it came in. A G5 is all the bad parts of Power4 (including all the things that IBM fixed in Power5 resulting in a 40% increase in per clock integer performance), without any of the good parts of Power4.
The idle-process is just an organizational thing. Even if you have no code to run, you still have to tell the CPU to do something, and the system idle process is a way of taking that special-case code out of the scheduler. These days, the system idle process just executes HLT instructions, which pause the CPU until the next interrupt.
Because nobody gives a fuck about you personally?
To save on space, I agree with your point that America is very priviledged, but it's a wasted point.
The point isn't just that Americans are privledged, but that this privelege isn't really due to some inherent factors, but rather the luck of living in the particular period of time in which we do. There is nothing about us that entitles us to this privelge, and if we lose it, complaining about it is kinda hollow.
It seems to me that all you're advocating is, in my mind at least, nothing more than work-force socialism on a globalized scale.
I'm not "advocating" anything. Advocating globalization is like advocating gravity. There is no point, its going to happen whether we like it or not, and the only thing we can do is deal with it. Moreover, how is globalization like socialism? Socialism would be the government giving jobs to Indians because they are worse off than we are. That's not what is happening. What is happening is that work is going offshore because the barriers for doing so have become incredibly low, given our modern communications technologies. Outsourcing is indeed the exact opposite of socialism. It's the application of free market principles to the labor market. It's what happens when consumers of labor (businesses), look at what sources of labor have the highest cost-benefit ratio, and purchasing those sources of labor. It's the exact same thing I do when I go to NewEgg to buy a hard drive, instead of paying a huge markup to shop at CompUSA.
My take on outsourcing, plain and simple, is that I'm tired of seeing companies trying to UNNECESSARILY save money by taking jobs away from QUALIFIED Americans and handing them over to "qualified" foreigners just because they can work for a fraction of the cost that an American can work for. I don't care how you spin it, it's not right to penalize Americans simply because they were born in America.
It has nothing to do with penalizing anybody for anything. Indeed, it has to do with not giving Americans special consideration, just because they happen to be born in America. It's a matter of needing a 250GB hard drive (to continue my metaphor), and going to the place that can sell it to me the cheapest.
There is a point to be made, in that the costs of outsourcing is higher than many bean-counters realize. In particular, there is a hidden cost in what happens when the outsourcing contract expires and that foreign employee leaves, taking his skills and knowledge with him. That's not a problem with outsourcing per se, but rather a flaw in the cost-benefit analysis conducted by the managers. The same flaw is often seen with regards to, for example, the hiring of contractors, for example. As more experience is gained in outsourcing, you'll see the cost/benefit start to take these other factors into consideration.
Learn to read dude. In idiomatic English, when one says "it might not work for X, but it'll work for Y", it means the same thing as "it won't work for X, but at least it will work for Y". It doesn't mean "it may or may not work for X...".
I presume that's the "600 tons of hardened sludge". Remember, a lot of waste (in fact, a lot of anything), is primarily water, so if 3000 tons of material create 600 tons of sludge, a large percentage of that remaining 2400 tons is going to be the steam for the aforementioned tropicana plant.