I'd have to second this. I'm still amazed that C and C++ are still used for any software of importance. The small increase in ease of use because they are so flexible (read sloppy), is more than offset by the huge amount of time spent scrubbing out all the stuff static analyzers are needed to find.
Use the same 20 step solution to the Lawyer and Doctor shortage 1. Pay More 2. Pay More 3. Pay More 4. Pay More 5. Pay More 6. Pay More 7. Pay More 8. Pay More 9. Pay More 10. Pay More 11. Pay More 12. Pay More 13. Pay More 14. Pay More 15. Pay More 16. Pay More 17. Pay More 18. Pay More 19. Pay More 20. Pay More
The free market works. That's why our best and brighest are leaving Science. Dumbsh|ts!
You're missing the point here. Imagine enough of these to give 24x7 coverage. Now imagine them to enforce air superiority. Not missle defense. Each one of the muthers can sweep the other guy's airforce from the sky for a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The existance of these weapons renders the posession of an airforce pointless for most 3rd world nations and quite a few of the first rank.
Airborne lasers are every Mil pilot's worst nightmare. The few incidents w/ the sovs are still the source of lots of odd practices today. Pilots never look at a target for long or with both eyes! Now imagine a fleet of these eyeball busters wandering the skys.
View this as pulling threads in a woven cloth
on
Linux Spurs MS Price Cuts
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The net impact on MS's bottom line from a few sites holding out for discounts will be negligible. The precident this sets _could_ be monumental. Hidden in the pricing of any product is the message that the product is worth the price. Any time the seller fiddles with a price, they erode the value of the product. If 1% of the population gets the product at 50% off, and everyone else knows it, most of the population will see the product as overpriced for its value.
One of the hidden messages in the Linux Meme is that the retail price of world class operating systems, and office suites is $0/copy. Imagine the price erosion on cars if there were free ones available.
The existance of Linux/Lindows has pulled at a thread. MS's cash cows are OS's and Office Suites. (kinda funny how this is the area of recent attack by the Open Source Community:-).
If MS's margin of profit on these two areas falls, then all their business plans are threatened. If these areas are only marginally profitable, the natural condition in a competative market, then there is little cash left over to preditate other areas. If cash is tight, them MS can't afford the current level of post sales support. That will hurt in the long run. If their cash reserves are depleted in the fight, then their stock price could fall. If the stock price falls, then the options which they pay their employees becone worthless/or employees, a ~40% fraction of their shareholders start dumping stock. All employees who don't dump fall back to the middle class. Big time employee dissatisfaction.
Here's the Meme, the talking point: The fair market price of world class OS's, Office suites, web servers, Mail Servers, RDBMS;s etc is $0/copy.
Time for gas turbines 101. Here's the biggest difference betwen Gas turbines and Diesels. A diesel can idle on almost no fuel whatsoever, that's why you hear them idling all the time. The fuel/wear and tear it takes to start them vastly outweighs the fuel needed to run them for an hour or eight. Because they use a reciprocating compressor, and a reciprocating compressor maintains is efficiency accross its speed and horsepower band (actually dropping off at the top end) you can turn them down to zero HP out and the fuel going in drops to 1-5% of max power.
GT's have a compressor which relies on the velocities of the compressor blades and the air mass flowing through the compressor to make its magic happen. You dump all the vibrating, clanking, and flailing parts of a recip engine and rely on the momentum/dynamics of the working fluid to get a gizmo which takes 14.4 PSI air at the front and shoves 200-300 psi air out the back with one moving part which is in perfect rotary balance.
The problem is: It only performs this miracle in a small RPM range. Slow down by 10% and the efficiency goes to pot. Long story short, GTEs have only one fuel flow setting, ON. that's why the military was working on an APU for the M1 Abrahms tank. IT would keep the housekeeping electrical systes running without throwing all the fuel away!
There have been advancements in GTEs. Variable inlet stators allow them to have a somewhat broader band of acceptable efficiency. I would not be surprised to see that this engine has intercoolers between the compressors stages. This is a BIG help to efficiency (less HP needed to crank the compressor). This is not done in AC engines because intercoolers are bulky, but not heavy. The second thing you COULD do in a train is to use a recuperator. The takes the nice cool compressed air, and heats it with the exhaust air. Saves on fuel big time, reduces the noise and and the thermal plume of the engine. Again bulky but not heavy.
Modern, digitally controlled, intercooled, rucuperated, gas turbine engines are bone head simple to operate and basically have squat for moving parts and maintenance needs. And they're light. Damn light. Mostly air in fact.
Modern Turbochanred intercooled diesels are damn efficient too. Comfortably close to Carnot efficiency. BUT the massize engine block needed to take the reciprocating pistons is god auful heavy. Damn near a solid block of iron.
Modern diesel freight engines need to be heavy because they need lots of traction to get moving. A passenger train hauls mostly air and aluminum. People weigh squat next to 100 ton freights. That's why passenger cars are so long. They're full of air. Its posible for this type of passenger train to weigh 1/20-1/100 of a freight train with the same HP. A lightweight engine will impose much smaller dynamic loads on the track system.
A big limiting factor is the engine weight. Modern high speed/non electric passenger trains have big fat engines up front. In europe, they offload the engine by using overhead electric power. This is an interesting solution to the speed problem. I hope it works.
Can you say Chernobyl? That is what happens when you sufer from lack of sleep.
Any software company which gets itself into this mess is SERIOUSLY SCREWED. If they were that far off on their software estimates, there have to be LOTS of other places where they have no clue. Like their current financial position go work for someone with a clue.
The i960 line was Intel's line of embedded RISC processors. Compared to the x86 procs available at the time they offered stunning price/performance. Ran in the 20-50Mhz speed range. This was in the late 80's when they came out. There were several varriants from $20/part 80960ka w/o floating point to the ~$1000/part 80960mx/mm which was mil spec FPU/PMMU/and all sorts of security acronym compliant. Sometime between then and now, Intel decided that they didn't want to be players in the embeded market (price competetion was wicked) and they did not want the military market either. They dropped mil spec support in the mid/late 90's and all sorts of mil projects freaked!
The i960mx/mm was wicked bad when first announced. Beautiful RISC design. Serious x86 butt kicker. Had to be killed. Now it's a museum piece. 33 MHx clock I think.
The use of technology like this in Mil systems is a real crisis. The military spec/design/implement/field/support life is soooo long that parts are long out of production before the systems they are in are ever fielded. AC like the V-22 are on their 3rd or 4th generation of Mission Computer proc and heve never been fielded. F-22 is in same boat.
They took a chance which insured their deaths and probably saved the lives of hundreds, or thousands, because their aircraft did not hit its intended target.
There is an empty crypt at the tomb of the unknown soldier. Remains from flight 93 should go there. They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
I wanted to sell my house and did not want to pay a Realtor(tm). It was obvious that the net was the way to go so I built IndyFSBO.com. FSBO stands for For Sale By Owner. We've sold $136 Million in real estate since then. We've taken almost $10 million out of the Realtor's pockets in saved commissions. If there's a better search system than ours I haven't seen it.
Like Taco, I sold out about two years ago and still own a piece and run the tech side of the site.
Few if any people actually BUY online but most buyers use the net heavily to sift and sort the potential homes. We also offer a system which notifies buyers when new listings match their search criteria. We've been doing that for over 3 years. Most folks go through two stages in the search. First they use the search system to look at the existing listings to see if they find anything they like. Then they switch over to a mode where they focus on the new listings. We add about 5-10 listings per day.
Most folks agree that anyone with the title of Broker, Agent, or Dealer will be a vanishing breed. These middlemen used to have total control of the market because they controlled the information.
There are lots of sites that have tried to make FSBO work. One of the big national sites, Owners.com, went under May 1st. They offered three levels of service $150, $80 and free. All but a few went with free. Because the listing werefree there was no barrier to keep junk or trial listings off of the site so it was full of junk listings. Junk listings made it useless to search the site so the buyers stayed away. We focus on just Indy for now. Having a hundred listings is useless if there are just 2 in each state. You must have a critical mass to succeed.
We charge $239. Only serious sellers put their home on our site. For that fee we can advertise, pay our staff, make Sharp looking signs, and do all the other things which keep our success rate at or above that for the local Agents and we never refuse a listing. Ever. We also offer contract, consulting, and mortgage services for those who want help.
I sold my last house through the site last May. It was just a little harder than selling a car. We saved $11,000. Hell yes! I'm willing to put in a little effort to save that much. You can't save that much clipping coupons in a lifetime! Selling on the web, without an agent, is actually easier since you show the home far fewer times. This is because our listings have 5-6 photos and you don't show the house to people who are going to take one step inside and go "I HATE that [fill in the blank]!" They already looked at it online and didn't waste your time. Our buyer was in a town 60 miles away when she found our house. Arranged the showing over the phone and made an offer within 10 days. At full price. An agent might show your house 50-100 times to get ONE offer. That's fifty times you have to Clean the place from top to bottom and drag the kids out. I have toddlers and that's a HUGE pain.
The feedback we get usually follows that model. I've had customers say they that they want one call and one showing per offer. One some houses we get VERY close to that ratio. It is the greatest rush to get a message from a seller saying that they just saved enough to send their kids to COLLEGE! There are some neighborhoods where people don't list with agents anymore. They've seen all their neighbors succeed with us. (go to the site and do a keyword search for "old stone")
I could go on for hours. Running IndyFSBO/Homeyeah has been a real eye-opener for me. Lots of folks with the Broker/Agent/Dealer title make a pile of money doing what most consumers could themselves.
This is probably the contents of several communications thry classes... But think about these issues.
What is the average bandwidth of each node in the net?
What is the number of nodes in the net?
What are the measueres of the interconnectivity of the net?
Average packet size and latency? (the truck has huge size and latency).
I heard somewhere that the planetary bandwidth was tripling every 12 months. This was attributed to the linear growth in the milage (meterage) of cabling, and Moores law impacting the performance of the nodes at each end of every cable/fiber.
I wonder, as the internet (TCP/IP protocol networking) becomes universal, will the 16 hop time to die be a problem? Does IP6 address this, along with the less than one IP per human on this planet issue? (yes I DO think everyone have an IP!, prefferably stamped on forehead at birth)
These companies took longer than 20 years, but they had large physical installed bases.
If someone mailed out Linux CD'slike AOL mailed out coasters. If OEM offered Linux/BSD at a lower cost than Win98/NT. MS's cash cow would be dead in the middle of the road.
Microsoft is one car or airplane acident from being led by Steve Balmer. Think about it.
Thirty mumble percent of outstanding MS stock was given to employees as incentives. That's the highest percentage of any large company. If the employees decide that $148/share is the right time to cash out, the downward pressure on MS stock would be immense. That could start a complete collapse of it market value. One of MS's big plusses now is it huge market capitolization. If that starts to erode, they would become extremely suseptable to FUD. Just like Apple was when it's stock was at salvage value and Jogs took over.
If, for some insane reason Gates would be forced out of control, no other leader could manage anything more than an orderly dismemberment of MS.
I interviewed with BMG (Bertlesman(sp?)) here in Indy last Jan. They needed some C++ pounders to fix some system they had out sourced and could not maintain (read get running). The system was a part of their card processing operation which, in short, received the PLEASE DON'T SEND MY THIS CRAP card from sucker^h^h^h^h^h customers, which were then sent by container to a third world country for scaning/data entry. The card data was then sent back to their US order processing plant in east Indy.
At one point in the Interview, while talking to some mid level Mgr. I asked "Why don't you just dump all this gyrating and sell CDs on a website at a discount?" Her answer went somthing along the lines of "The profit margin on the club format is far higher then retail sales because we can depend on customer mistakes when they don't send in the card on time" I was stupid enough to clarify her answer. "You mean there's more money to be made from people being careless or dumb enough to sign up than by operting a straight forward retail sales operation". "Yes You've got it!"
I don't believe in any deities but I do think there is a special hell for businessmen who systematically rely on the carelessness or gulibility of their customers.
At that moment I had just touched my hand to the door to that hell and the shock I received was strong enough to convince me that being unemployed with a Mortgage and two mouths to feed was preferable to working for these soulless ghouls.
The smugness with which BMG viewed its customers was amazing. Every employee in the place knew that their product, a record club, was entirely based on the foolishnes of their customers. To these people, the concept of open source is anathma. They're like deer caught in the headlights of the oncoming Internet revolution. The mental attitude which allows them to run a record club makes it impossible for them to actually accept the coming of the age of MP3.
Should we honk the horn, stopm the brakes, and give them a fighting chance? Or fry 'em up for breakfast?
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to second this. I'm still amazed that C and C++ are still used for any software of importance. The small increase in ease of use because they are so flexible (read sloppy), is more than offset by the huge amount of time spent scrubbing out all the stuff static analyzers are needed to find.
Use the same 20 step solution to the Lawyer and Doctor shortage
1. Pay More
2. Pay More
3. Pay More
4. Pay More
5. Pay More
6. Pay More
7. Pay More
8. Pay More
9. Pay More
10. Pay More
11. Pay More
12. Pay More
13. Pay More
14. Pay More
15. Pay More
16. Pay More
17. Pay More
18. Pay More
19. Pay More
20. Pay More
The free market works. That's why our best and brighest are leaving Science. Dumbsh|ts!
You're missing the point here. Imagine enough of these to give 24x7 coverage. Now imagine them to enforce air superiority. Not missle defense. Each one of the muthers can sweep the other guy's airforce from the sky for a radius of hundreds of kilometers. The existance of these weapons renders the posession of an airforce pointless for most 3rd world nations and quite a few of the first rank.
Airborne lasers are every Mil pilot's worst nightmare. The few incidents w/ the sovs are still the source of lots of odd practices today. Pilots never look at a target for long or with both eyes! Now imagine a fleet of these eyeball busters wandering the skys.
The net impact on MS's bottom line from a few sites holding out for discounts will be negligible. The precident this sets _could_ be monumental. Hidden in the pricing of any product is the message that the product is worth the price. Any time the seller fiddles with a price, they erode the value of the product. If 1% of the population gets the product at 50% off, and everyone else knows it, most of the population will see the product as overpriced for its value.
/or employees, a ~40% fraction of their shareholders start dumping stock. All employees who don't dump fall back to the middle class. Big time employee dissatisfaction.
One of the hidden messages in the Linux Meme is that the retail price of world class operating systems, and office suites is $0/copy. Imagine the price erosion on cars if there were free ones available.
The existance of Linux/Lindows has pulled at a thread. MS's cash cows are OS's and Office Suites. (kinda funny how this is the area of recent attack by the Open Source Community:-).
If MS's margin of profit on these two areas falls, then all their business plans are threatened. If these areas are only marginally profitable, the natural condition in a competative market, then there is little cash left over to preditate other areas. If cash is tight, them MS can't afford the current level of post sales support. That will hurt in the long run. If their cash reserves are depleted in the fight, then their stock price could fall. If the stock price falls, then the options which they pay their employees becone worthless
Here's the Meme, the talking point: The fair market price of world class OS's, Office suites, web servers, Mail Servers, RDBMS;s etc is $0/copy.
Find a loose thread, pull it.
Sigh,
Time for gas turbines 101. Here's the biggest difference betwen Gas turbines and Diesels. A diesel can idle on almost no fuel whatsoever, that's why you hear them idling all the time. The fuel/wear and tear it takes to start them vastly outweighs the fuel needed to run them for an hour or eight. Because they use a reciprocating compressor, and a reciprocating compressor maintains is efficiency accross its speed and horsepower band (actually dropping off at the top end) you can turn them down to zero HP out and the fuel going in drops to 1-5% of max power.
GT's have a compressor which relies on the velocities of the compressor blades and the air mass flowing through the compressor to make its magic happen. You dump all the vibrating, clanking, and flailing parts of a recip engine and rely on the momentum/dynamics of the working fluid to get a gizmo which takes 14.4 PSI air at the front and shoves 200-300 psi air out the back with one moving part which is in perfect rotary balance.
The problem is: It only performs this miracle in a small RPM range. Slow down by 10% and the efficiency goes to pot. Long story short, GTEs have only one fuel flow setting, ON. that's why the military was working on an APU for the M1 Abrahms tank. IT would keep the housekeeping electrical systes running without throwing all the fuel away!
There have been advancements in GTEs. Variable inlet stators allow them to have a somewhat broader band of acceptable efficiency. I would not be surprised to see that this engine has intercoolers between the compressors stages. This is a BIG help to efficiency (less HP needed to crank the compressor). This is not done in AC engines because intercoolers are bulky, but not heavy. The second thing you COULD do in a train is to use a recuperator. The takes the nice cool compressed air, and heats it with the exhaust air. Saves on fuel big time, reduces the noise and and the thermal plume of the engine. Again bulky but not heavy.
Modern, digitally controlled, intercooled, rucuperated, gas turbine engines are bone head simple to operate and basically have squat for moving parts and maintenance needs. And they're light. Damn light. Mostly air in fact.
Modern Turbochanred intercooled diesels are damn efficient too. Comfortably close to Carnot efficiency. BUT the massize engine block needed to take the reciprocating pistons is god auful heavy. Damn near a solid block of iron.
Modern diesel freight engines need to be heavy because they need lots of traction to get moving. A passenger train hauls mostly air and aluminum. People weigh squat next to 100 ton freights. That's why passenger cars are so long. They're full of air. Its posible for this type of passenger train to weigh 1/20-1/100 of a freight train with the same HP. A lightweight engine will impose much smaller dynamic loads on the track system.
A big limiting factor is the engine weight. Modern high speed/non electric passenger trains have big fat engines up front. In europe, they offload the engine by using overhead electric power.
This is an interesting solution to the speed problem. I hope it works.
Can you say Chernobyl? That is what happens when you sufer from lack of sleep.
Any software company which gets itself into this mess is SERIOUSLY SCREWED. If they were that far off on their software estimates, there have to be LOTS of other places where they have no clue. Like their current financial position go work for someone with a clue.
The i960 line was Intel's line of embedded RISC processors. Compared to the x86 procs available at the time they offered stunning price/performance. Ran in the 20-50Mhz speed range. This was in the late 80's when they came out. There were several varriants from $20/part 80960ka w/o floating point to the ~$1000/part 80960mx/mm which was mil spec FPU/PMMU/and all sorts of security acronym compliant.
Sometime between then and now, Intel decided that they didn't want to be players in the embeded market (price competetion was wicked) and they did not want the military market either. They dropped mil spec support in the mid/late 90's and all sorts of mil projects freaked!
The i960mx/mm was wicked bad when first announced. Beautiful RISC design. Serious x86 butt kicker. Had to be killed. Now it's a museum piece. 33 MHx clock I think.
The use of technology like this in Mil systems is a real crisis. The military spec/design/implement/field/support life is soooo long that parts are long out of production before the systems they are in are ever fielded. AC like the V-22 are on their 3rd or 4th generation of Mission Computer proc and heve never been fielded. F-22 is in same boat.
They took a chance which insured their deaths and probably saved the lives of hundreds, or thousands, because their aircraft did not hit its intended target.
There is an empty crypt at the tomb of the unknown soldier. Remains from flight 93 should go there. They made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
Like Taco, I sold out about two years ago and still own a piece and run the tech side of the site.
Few if any people actually BUY online but most buyers use the net heavily to sift and sort the potential homes. We also offer a system which notifies buyers when new listings match their search criteria. We've been doing that for over 3 years. Most folks go through two stages in the search. First they use the search system to look at the existing listings to see if they find anything they like. Then they switch over to a mode where they focus on the new listings. We add about 5-10 listings per day.
Most folks agree that anyone with the title of Broker, Agent, or Dealer will be a vanishing breed. These middlemen used to have total control of the market because they controlled the information.
There are lots of sites that have tried to make FSBO work. One of the big national sites, Owners.com, went under May 1st. They offered three levels of service $150, $80 and free. All but a few went with free. Because the listing werefree there was no barrier to keep junk or trial listings off of the site so it was full of junk listings. Junk listings made it useless to search the site so the buyers stayed away. We focus on just Indy for now. Having a hundred listings is useless if there are just 2 in each state. You must have a critical mass to succeed.
We charge $239. Only serious sellers put their home on our site. For that fee we can advertise, pay our staff, make Sharp looking signs, and do all the other things which keep our success rate at or above that for the local Agents and we never refuse a listing. Ever. We also offer contract, consulting, and mortgage services for those who want help.
I sold my last house through the site last May. It was just a little harder than selling a car. We saved $11,000. Hell yes! I'm willing to put in a little effort to save that much. You can't save that much clipping coupons in a lifetime! Selling on the web, without an agent, is actually easier since you show the home far fewer times. This is because our listings have 5-6 photos and you don't show the house to people who are going to take one step inside and go "I HATE that [fill in the blank]!" They already looked at it online and didn't waste your time. Our buyer was in a town 60 miles away when she found our house. Arranged the showing over the phone and made an offer within 10 days. At full price. An agent might show your house 50-100 times to get ONE offer. That's fifty times you have to Clean the place from top to bottom and drag the kids out. I have toddlers and that's a HUGE pain.
The feedback we get usually follows that model. I've had customers say they that they want one call and one showing per offer. One some houses we get VERY close to that ratio. It is the greatest rush to get a message from a seller saying that they just saved enough to send their kids to COLLEGE! There are some neighborhoods where people don't list with agents anymore. They've seen all their neighbors succeed with us. (go to the site and do a keyword search for "old stone")
I could go on for hours. Running IndyFSBO/Homeyeah has been a real eye-opener for me. Lots of folks with the Broker/Agent/Dealer title make a pile of money doing what most consumers could themselves.
This is probably the contents of several communications thry classes... But think about these issues.
What is the average bandwidth of each node in the net?
What is the number of nodes in the net?
What are the measueres of the interconnectivity of the net?
Average packet size and latency? (the truck has huge size and latency).
I heard somewhere that the planetary bandwidth was tripling every 12 months. This was attributed to the linear growth in the milage (meterage) of cabling, and Moores law impacting the performance of the nodes at each end of every cable/fiber.
I wonder, as the internet (TCP/IP protocol networking) becomes universal, will the 16 hop time to die be a problem? Does IP6 address this, along with the less than one IP per human on this planet issue? (yes I DO think everyone have an IP!, prefferably stamped on forehead at birth)
If someone mailed out Linux CD'slike AOL mailed out coasters. If OEM offered Linux/BSD at a lower cost than Win98/NT. MS's cash cow would be dead in the middle of the road.
Microsoft is one car or airplane acident from being led by Steve Balmer. Think about it.
Thirty mumble percent of outstanding MS stock was given to employees as incentives. That's the highest percentage of any large company. If the employees decide that $148/share is the right time to cash out, the downward pressure on MS stock would be immense. That could start a complete collapse of it market value. One of MS's big plusses now is it huge market capitolization. If that starts to erode, they would become extremely suseptable to FUD. Just like Apple was when it's stock was at salvage value and Jogs took over.
If, for some insane reason Gates would be forced out of control, no other leader could manage anything more than an orderly dismemberment of MS.
I interviewed with BMG (Bertlesman(sp?)) here in Indy last Jan. They needed some C++ pounders to fix some system they had out sourced and could not maintain (read get running). The system was a part of their card processing operation which, in short, received the PLEASE DON'T SEND MY THIS CRAP card from sucker^h^h^h^h^h customers, which were then sent by container to a third world country for scaning/data entry. The card data was then sent back to their US order processing plant in east Indy.
At one point in the Interview, while talking to some mid level Mgr. I asked "Why don't you just dump all this gyrating and sell CDs on a website at a discount?" Her answer went somthing along the lines of "The profit margin on the club format is far higher then retail sales because we can depend on customer mistakes when they don't send in the card on time" I was stupid enough to clarify her answer. "You mean there's more money to be made from people being careless or dumb enough to sign up than by operting a straight forward retail sales operation". "Yes You've got it!"
I don't believe in any deities but I do think there is a special hell for businessmen who systematically rely on the carelessness or gulibility of their customers.
At that moment I had just touched my hand to the door to that hell and the shock I received was strong enough to convince me that being unemployed with a Mortgage and two mouths to feed was preferable to working for these soulless ghouls.
The smugness with which BMG viewed its customers was amazing. Every employee in the place knew that their product, a record club, was entirely based on the foolishnes of their customers. To these people, the concept of open source is anathma. They're like deer caught in the headlights of the oncoming Internet revolution. The mental attitude which allows them to run a record club makes it impossible for them to actually accept the coming of the age of MP3.
Should we honk the horn, stopm the brakes, and give them a fighting chance? Or fry 'em up for breakfast?