Nader should run, but Bill O'Reilly is best choice
on
Nader Off Virginia Ballot
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Like all other American citizens, Ralph is entitled to run for president. Anyone who demands that he quit is un-American and simply refuses to accept the great Western tradition of democracy.
By the way, none of the current candidates are worth a hoot.
I recommend that you write the following protest vote.
Though they cannot win because they have not registered for candidacy by the rules of most states, if enough people vote for O'Reilly and Bruce, they will have a profound "Perot Effect". Though Ross Perot did not win, he did force the Republicans to adopt most of his ideas in the "Contract with America".
If you support the ideas that O'Reilly and Bruce espouse, then please write them on the ballot.
Feel free to pass this message to as many people as possible.
The reality of China is that it is the software piracy capital of the world. China has a piracy rate of about 92%.
In other words, nearly 100% of of the Microsoft applications running in China is stolen. So, of course, Microsoft and other software companies have severe trouble in using the Chinese market to grow their revenue and profits.
The problem is none a governmental problem. The problem is Chinese culture.
These days, operating systems like both Linux and Windows XP have too many bells and whistles that I simply do not need. Unfortunately, these bells and whistles drastically increase the amount of space that I need on my hard drive.
Adding a database layer to Gnome sounds like using another 300 megabytes of storage on my hard drive. I simply do not need the database.
If the FSF/GNU folks really want to do something revolutionary, they should fork Linux+Gnome into 2 distinct paths: minimalist and maximalist. The maximalist is what we have now. The minimalist is a minimally featured Linus+Gnome distribution. It is the bare minimum in functionality that we need to have a decent operating system and desktop.
Into this minimalist installation, I will then add the applications (e.g. MatLab) that I use daily.
The iMac G5 is a full-blown workstation in its own right. It runs UNIX on top of a Power4-based microprocessor. Furthermore, its performance is competitive with the very best desktops based on the new 64-bit x86 processors.
Instead of focusing so much on styling, the marketing droids should show us some stats indicating the percentage of the engineering market that the G5 Macs have. I suspect that the G5 Macs have the highest percentage of the engineering workstation market after the x86 boxes.
The only speed that counts is how fast you can grow the market for your product. In that category, AMD wins.
AMD appears to be on a roll these days. In the latest quarter, the Opteron (AMD) outshipped the Itanium (Intel) by a ratio of 10 to 1. AMD shipped 60,000 units, and Intel shipped 5665 units.
Apparently, the survivors of the microprocessor wars in the 1990s are the PowerPC architecture and the IA32-X64 architecture. The Itanium architecture will survive, but it will be relegated to a high-performance graphics engine.
The real problem with airport security is that too many politicans (hounded by Islamic pressure groups) think that nationality profiling is "racist". There is nothing racist about (1) checking the bags and bodies of all non-American citizens from the USA and (2) performing a less intensive check of American citizens. The threat is from the Middle Easterner, not the average American.
Unfortunately, because nationality profiling is considered "racist", the TSA has contrived an insane screening process whereby a handicapped American citizen, who could never be a threat to anyone, is subjected to an intensive check of all body cavities. At the same time, the airport screeners are forbidden, by TSA regulations, from intensively checking more than 2 Middle Easterners (i.e. without American citizenship) per flight.
Insane? Yep. You can blame the spineless politicians who refuse to stand up to Islamic pressure groups, La Raza, etc.
Don't forget companies that are seeking to reap the maximum
reward before Microsoft clobbers them. Examples of such
companies include Google and VMWare.
Hot off the press is this news article: "Sources:
Google Seeks Banks to Lead IPO". The search-engine business
is going to consolidate. Microsoft and Yahoo will be two survivors. Google
won't be because it lacks the revenue to invest in the R&D needed
to build the best search engine. What Google has right now
can be easily duplicated by either Microsoft and Yahoo. Google also has the issue of appearing to favor H-1B workers over American workers; in a period of 9% unemployment in Silicon Valley, Google just can't seem to find enough qualified Americans to fill its list of unfilled job positions that are advertised month after month. Google also practices age discrimination: "Google, in its intense effort to hire employees, is focusing on 'getting 25-year-old [employees]'.
If you buy into the Google IPO, you are shooting yourself in the foot as its stock will be worthless after 2 years. Moreover, you are enriching the pockets of people who turn their backs on the older, unemployed Americans. You ask yourself, "Is Google ethical?"
As well, you can be sure that VMWare is running to the IPO
finish line. Microsoft has built a virtual machine monitor (VMM)
that is as good as VMWare's best product.
The article, "Google and VMWare Take Microsoft Very Seriously", posted to Slashdot itself correctly predicted that Google is working rapidly towards an IPO. Google has about 1 year before Microsoft's own search engine clobbers it. Microsoft is busily enhancing its search engine to meet or exceed Google's capabilities, and Microsoft has the R&D might to succeed.
If anyone buys into Google's IPO, then that person is a fool. The shares will be worthless after about 2 years.
The other issue is an ethical one: should Americans buy into Google to reward its founders even though the shares will ultimately be worthless? NO! Why? An employee of Google wrote an article to Slashdot and suggested that Google favors H-1B workers over Americans. During a period 9% unemployment in Silicon Valley, Google claims that it cannot find enough American workers to fill job positions and resorts to H-1B workers.
Sun Microsystems (SUNW) is being rapidly forced off the desktop.
SUNW has no intention of hanging around in the workstation
market because SUNW does not make a competitive product. Athlon64
and Prescott have and will, respectively, lockup the workstation
market. PowerPC970 (in G5) is the wild card and can capture
a nice 20+% of the market if Steve Jobs were not so clueless.
SUNW recently purchased Afara. It supplies processors for low-end
servers. SUNW will still try to maintain a presence there.
Unfortunately, with the SPARC64 going to 4 cores per die and
2 threads per core, the processor from Afara is starting to
look less and less competitive. SUNW will exit the market
for even low-end servers by 2007.
The announcement of Power5,
with its SMT capabilities, is tantamount to announcing a starship
for intergalatic space travel when all the spacecraft in the
Federation can only travel within the solar system. Power5
and, to a lesser extent, SPARC64 basically killed the UltraSPARC
line and the entire hardware business of the Sun Microsystems.
By the way, Professor Susan Eggers of the University of Washington must be tickled pink because she development most of the technology for simultaneous multithreading. IBM, with its Power5, proved that her ideas were all right. The Draper prize in engineering should be going her way.
Scott McNealy is taking the advice indicated in "SPARC64:
Quick Fix for Sun's Problems", an article posted on Slashdot itself. The SPARC64-V
and its followup, SPARC64-VI, easily outperform the UltraSPARC III
and upcoming UltraSPARC IV.
The originally proposed quick fix is to simply redesign the
the Sun servers to accept the SPARC64-V. An even better
proposal, now leaked by the press, is to simply discontinue
the Sun-designed servers and to sell re-branded Fujitsu
designed servers. The latter proposal is a much faster
path to solving the server-performance problem at Sun
but leads to lower profit margins. Clearly, the situation
at Sun is dire, so you can be assured that one of these
proposals will be adopted. (Please read
"Sun
posts deeper loss for quarter". Having
lower profit margins is better than having no profit margins.
Right now, the second proposal
appears to be winning.
Sun Microsystems will most likely fire more than 50% of its
processor development team. The single biggest cause of Sun
losing marketshare so rapidly is the UltraSPARC III. It has
horrible performance. Check "SPEC"
and "TPC".
How does this deal help Fujitsu? It can now sell more servers
and get more cash. Fujitsu has the upperhand and should force
Sun to accept the second proposal: Sun exits the highend server
market and sells rebranded Fujitsu-designed servers. To avoid
being dependent on Sun, Fujitsu should move rapidly to jettisoning
the Solaris OS in favor Linux. Fujitsu is rapidly being shaped
into a company like IBM: high-performance servers and
computing services are the mainstays of the business.
As a side note, Fujitsu rejects hiring foreign workers (the
equivalent of H-1Bs). Their SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI were
designed and built almost exclusively by native talent. When
Fujitsu hires workers, Fujitsu most values the quality of
"willingness to work", not "best match of skills";
Fujitsu will take the time to train its employee. Fujitsu
is a traditional Japanese company that emulates most of the values
that once characterized traditional American companies. Sun,
by contrast, encourages the employment of H-1Bs; the UltraSPARC III
and the UltraSPARC IV were built substantially by former or
current H-1B workers. Sun seeks only "best match of skills" and,
along with Intel, claims that they absolutely need H-1B worker
even during a period of 8% unemployment among native Americans
in Silicon Valley.
Hopefully, Steve Jobs is listening to all the praise being heaped upon the G5. That the G5 is a component of one of the fastest supercomputers in the world should be a "super" big hint for Jobs to start producing a workstation version of the G5. Call it the "G5-W", packed with error-correcting code (ECC) memory. It runs either MacOS-X or Linux. Linux is the default.
Target the G5 at the consumer market. Target the G5-W at the engineering/high-performance market.
Amazingly, thanks to Apple, the PowerPC architecture has the best chance of capturing a sizeable share of the workstation market, obliterating any remaining UltraSPARC workstations. Apple has a damned good chance if only Steve Jobs doesn't blow it.
Microsoft is not the only company that is bundling stuff (software, services, etc.) in a single package. Microsoft is merely the most high-profile culprit.
Despite the ranting and raving by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems is also bunding software into a single package. According to "Sun eyes application server market", Sun is bundling server application software into its Solaris OS. Sun is deliberately trying to destroy BEA Systems.
Remember. If we attack Microsoft for bundling stuff into its OS, then we should attack Sun for doing likewise.
The laser-beam technologies will be critical to the defense
of the USA in the next decades. We, as Westerners, must
do our best to safeguard those technologies. In the past,
several culprits have stolen technologies from the network
of Lawrence laboratories and given them to Beijing. Most
of the spies for Beijing have come from the Taiwan.
It is imperative that we expel all laboratory employees
who were born or grew up in Taiwan. It is already a matter of
national policy that persons born or raised in mainland
China are denied employment at American weapons labs. This
policy should be extended to include person born or raised
in Taiwan. The facts at "Reality of Taiwan"
further elaborate on the security risk posed by Taiwanese.
Note that a Taiwanese
gave American neutron-bomb technology to Beijing. The Justice
Department has classified Taiwan as security threat to the USA.
To reiterate what the "Wall Street Journal" reported,
the majority of spies who steal American technology to give
to Beijing were born or raised in Taiwan. We should treat
people from Taiwan in the same way that we treat people from
mainland China. They should be denied employment in any
sensitive job in the American government. The alternative
is to risk the security of the free world.
Sun Microsystems is indifferent to the x86 Solaris. Sun just posted a loss of $290 million for the last quarter. On an annual basis, the loss amounts to $1.2 billion.
The managers at Sun have seen the writing on the wall: the future is Linux.
It is unlikely that Sun will do anything to optimize Solaris for x86 here in the USA. There may be some optimization work at Sun's R&D center in India, but basically in the USA, Sun is conceding to Linux. Linux is backed by IBM, and IBM and Linus are cooperating to make Linux a rock-solid product that meets 6-sigma reliability. Right now, Linus is concentrating on making Linux as stable as possible instead of adding more widgets and gadgets.
Sun Microsystems has many problems, but the single biggest problem
is the UltraSPARC III. All its competitors easily outperform it.
Some of the competitors are the Power4, Power4+, Madison, Pentium 4,
and SPARC64-V. Just look at the performance statistics at SPEC and TPC.
However, this single biggest problem also has an easy solution.
Sun merely needs to jettison its SPARC processor R&D team
and to adopt the SPARC64-V
and the SPARC64-VI. The latter is a dual-core chip just like the
well-regarded Power4. Sun could easily redesign its server
boards within a month to accept the SPARC64 chips.
The SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI are radically different from the
UltraSPARC III. The former were designed and built almost
exclusively by native talent (i. e. Japanese citizens). The UltraSPARC III
was built by H-1B workers because Sun, Intel, and other
companies claim that they cannot find enough
native talent (i. e. American citizen) who are good enough --
even during a period 8% unemployment in Silicon Valley.
The issue here is mismanagement at Sun. Specifically, the
management up to Scott McNealy himself refuses to adopt the
SPARC64-V/VI. Why would any company refuse to adopt a processor
that outperforms its own processor, that is readily available,
that executes an identical instruction set,
and that would immediately boost the performance of all the
servers sold by said company? Why? The answer is deliberate
mismanagement at Sun.
We can easily conclude that China's space
program is a threat by simply looking
at the facts. First, China is still an impoverished country,
and boatloads of Chinese attempt to sneak into San Francisco
harbor several times annually. Why would the Chinese spend
billions of dollars on a space program when the living
standard of so many Chinese is desperately pathetic? That
money would be better spent on health programs,
education, etc.
The only conceivable reason that the Chinese (which includes
the people in Taiwan province and Hong Kong) are developing
their space program is to advance their military technology
and their special brand of nationalism, which is based on race.
(Another name for this nationalism is fascism.)
In addition, there is a moral crisis
in China. According to "China
Detains Health Official for Publicizing AIDS Coverup", the
Chinese arrested (and possibly tortured) a
person for revealing that Chinese officials had
attempted to sell AIDS-tainted blood products to
Americans in the USA. Further, the Chinese still practice
female infanticide and abortions targetting female fetuses.
The ratio of male babies to female babies is 1.15 and has resulted in a dire shortage of marriage-age females. Responding to this shortage,
Chinese men resort to kidnapping Vietnamese women to
force them into marriage. When they try to escape, the
men cut their achilles tendon, according to the "Wall Street Journal"
(1999).
The billions of dollars wasted on China's military-based
space program would be better spent on educating
the Chinese about Western notions of right and wrong.
There is simply a bankruptcy of values in China.
What is becoming clear is that the platform of choice in
the engineering community is
Linux running on top of either x86 chips or Power chips. The
GNU community could help AMD by restricting the GNU compilers to
using only an efficient subset of the x86 instruction set when
they generate code. The compilers specially developed by
Intel do just that in order to speed applications.
The benefit here is that AMD can focus on performance-boosting
only those instructions that the GNU compilers will use. The
new K9 only needs to be able to execute the remainder of the
instruction set, regardless of speed.
AMD has a tough task. The K9 must execute the legacy x86 instructions,
the MMX instructions, the SSE/SSE2 instructions, the 3DNOW!
instructions, and the x86-64 instructions. This will be a debugging
nightmare.
The Taiwanese transferred key technologies to mainland China and enabled the Chinese to achieve their first manned space flight. Much of China's aerospace work comes from Taiwan's IDF (indigenous defense fighter).
The Taiwanese have a history of transferring sensitive/military technology to mainland China.
Unfortunately, porting MacOS X to x86 brings MacOS into direct competition against Linux on x86,
and MacOS offers no significant value over and above Linux. Both operating systems (OSes) are UNIX variants. Sure. The graphical user interface (GUI) of MacOS is better than the GUIs available for Linux, but the latter is improving. It has an army of programmers and beta testers that MacOS developers simply cannot match. Further, the support of IBM for Linux guarantees that, in the foreseeable future, Linux will operate in a fashion that is rock solid.
What Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, needs to do is to add ECC (error correction code) memory to the G5 to create a variant of the G5 and call it "G5-W". The G5-W would essentially be a workstation. Then Jobs should work with IBM and RedHat Linux to certify that RedHat Linux runs on the G5-W. Apple can be the de facto workstation division of IBM. Apple retains the original G5 for consumers but enters the more lucrative market for workstations. Margins for workstations are significantly higher than they are for mere personal computers.
Moreover IBM has been wanting to do a tour-de-force in the workstation market, but there are all these pesky Pentium 4 boxes in that market. With the G5, IBM can sell at machine that is competitive with the very best Pentium boxes. The floating-point unit of the PPC970 should make those engineering calculations really fly.
Selling a significant number of processors in the workstation market helps to amortize the cost (on the order of billions of dollars) of processor development. The success of the G5 actually helps IBM's processor division.
Of course, the implicit observation here is that Sun Microsystems is dead meat. Sun is expected to lose about $300 million for the 1st quarter of FY2004, according to "Sun warns of hefty loss". The Power4 and variants (Power4+, PowerPC970, etc.) are killing Sun at the market's high end (for both workstations and servers), where Sun has traditionally obtained most of its profits.
Linux and other open-source software
have a good chance of beating out Windows
and commercial software
in the Brazilian market simply because Windows
and other commercial software is not free there. According to "Tracking
Software Piracy Around the World", the rate of
software piracy in Brazil is 50%. Half of the
copies of Windows and other commercial software
installed on machines in
Brazil were actually paid by the user.
By contrast, the rate of software piracy in China
(which includes Taiwan province
and Hong Kong) is about 93%. In short, the Chinese
simply steal any software that they do not wish to buy.
The adoption rate of Linux and
open-source software in Brazil will be much
higher than the rate in China. IBM has made a
good strategic move by investing in Brazil. Other
American companies should follow suit: divert
investments away from China and into Brazil.
News that IBM is opening a Linux Competency Center in Russia
comes a day before Moody's Investors Service upgrades
Russia's foreign debt to investment grade, according to
"Russia
Earns Investment-Grade Status". These developments are
wonderful news for Russia and the West.
Russia certainly has many flaws: there are signs that civil rights
are being abridged in Russia under the Putin government. However,
Russia is far ahead of China in human rights, civil rights, and
basic decency. Consider the recent atrocity described in "China
Detains Health Official for Publicizing AIDS Coverup". The
Chinese arrested (and possibly tortured) a person for revealing
that Chinese officials had attempted to sell AIDS-tainted blood
products to Americans in the USA.
It is a no-brainer as to which country deserves American support.
American companies should bypass China and put all
their investments
into Russia and Eastern Europe. American consumers can
encourage the American companies to do so by boycotting any
product or service that is "Made in China" (which includes
"Made in Hong Kong" or "Made in Taiwan"). Furthermore,
we should pull our money out of mutual funds that invest
in any company located in China (which includes Hong Kong
and Taiwan).
It is imperative (for the preservation of Western society)
that Russia outperforms China economically. The Russian
value system shares much more in common with the American
value system than the Chinese value system.
The idea of identifying terrorist web sites is excellent
as long as the American government is consistent in its policies.
The list of terrorist groups should also include the web
sites for the following organization.
The "China People's Daily" is run by the Beijing government
and is the mouthpiece of the Chinese government. It has conducted
a number of terrorist activities in Tibet. You can find some
descriptions at Tibet Online
and Amnesty International.
Further,
operatives of the "China People's Daily" were stationed at the
Chinese embassy in Serbia in 1999 when the embassed was hit
by American bombs. The majority of people in China
(which includes
Taiwan
Province and Hong Kong) supported the Serbian military aggression
against the Kosovars. The Serbians executed thousands of men,
women, and children in Kosovar in an attempt to remove them from
Kosovo: the Serbia military raped the women and slit the throats
of the children. The Americans sent military forces to Serbia
in an attempt to stop the genocide. At the time, Chinese
operatives of the "China People's Daily" operated secretly from
the relative safety of the embassy and relayed communications
to the Serbian army and helped the Serbians to defeat American
electronic warfare. (reference: "NATO
hit embassy on purpose")
The Serbian aggression against the Kosovars was strongly supported
by the Chinese and is the first major case of genocide after
the genocide of the Cambodians by Pol Pot. The Chinese also
supported Pol Pot.
There are only 4 combinations of possibilities concerning
the issue of foreign labor. Below are the 4 combinations.
no offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
no offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment
offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment
To eliminate some combinations that are impossible, we
first consider whether we can eliminate offshoring.
Offshoring occurs from the moment that Americans engage
in trade with any foreign country. For example,
if we buy apples grown in Thailand, then we are
engaging in offshoring because the foreign labor grew
those apples. Can we eliminate foreign trade? No.
The stickier question is whether offshoring eliminates
jobs. According to the "The
misery of manufacturing", "The
Economist" says, "No." The USA is a big market, and
manufacturers locate engineering and design centers in
the market in which they have a significant presence. For example,
Hyundai is now building a factory and design center in the
USA, according to "Speed Kills"
by "Forbes".
Therefore, we cannot eliminate offshoring, and it is neither
bad nor good. It is neutral. We are left with only option #3 (offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment) and option #4 (offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment).
Can we eliminate H-1B/L-1 employment? Absolutely yes. Since
companies can offshore their R&D work, they
can build an R&D center in India and hire all the engineers
that they claim to need. Each engineer hired in India will
cost only 1/10 of the cost of an H-1B/L-1 engineer.
Supporters of H-1B/L-1 employment say that an Indian employed
as an H-1B worker in the USA will spend his $100,000 salary
in the USA, thus creating more jobs. That observation
is bogus. If the Indian wants to work for an American
company, he should go back to India to work at $5,000
at the American site in Bangalore. The American company
will then save $95,000. That money does not simply sit idly in
the bank. The American company will re-invest that $95,000
into the domestic facilities and hire an American citizen.
Furthermore, when Hyundai sets up its design center in the USA,
the Indian will be in India, and the jobs at the design center
will go to American citizens.
In short, option #3 (offshoring but no H-1B/L-1 employment)
is the best scenario. In fact, offshoring defeats the
strongest bogus argument supporting H-1B/L-1 employment.
When a company like Google
says that it absolutely needs to hire H-1B/L-1 workers
because Americans are not good enough, then we say, "Fine.
Set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."
Please read "H-1B
Myths". Contact your representative in Washington and
tell them to terminate the H-1B/L-1 program. Do not wait
for the person sitting at the next computer terminal to do your
civic duty. Move your ass. Do the your job.
Scientific freedom has its limits. Suppose that an applied
physicist wishes to research how to build a better bazooka.
Is the physicist allowed to build a working bazooka in his
laboratory without restriction or interference from the federal
government?
The issue with Thomas Butler is that he lied to FBI agents
about how he disposed of samples of the plague.
In terms of
deadliness, the plague is far worse than any bazooka.
So, the FBI agents justifiably arrested him. The
government is entitled to protect its citizens.
Nonetheless, Dr. Peter Agre deserves his Nobel prize. He
is a fine example of native talent (not foreign talent like
H-1B workers) at its best. We need not worry about
diminishing the quality of American research if the government
were to restrict -- or even, completely eliminate --
foreign workers who enter the USA to work at its scientific
labs.
Our suspicions are confirmed. According to
"Apple
Eyes UNIX Market with Panther", Apple is positioning the Mac OS-X 10.3
as an operating system for workstations. Apple is expected
to take a sizeable chunk of the market for workstation --
both Windows and UNIX. Apple will likely hurt Sun Microsystems
the most.
Steve Jobs is really amazing. He will be the first
person to successfully establish a non-x86 processor
as a viable alternative to the x86 processors.
The entire ill-fated consortium called the Advanced Computing Environment (which promoted MIPS R2000), backed by professors from Stanford University, could not do it. The gang (which promoted the PowerPC) of IBM, Motorola, and Apple (under the old CEO) could not do it.
Now, here comes Steve Jobs. Apple, under his leadership, manages to do it. How does he do it? What's his secret? You can be sure that ECC memory for the G5 is on its way.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, none of the current candidates are worth a hoot.
I recommend that you write the following protest vote.
president: Bill O'Reilly
vice-president: Tammy Bruce
Though they cannot win because they have not registered for candidacy by the rules of most states, if enough people vote for O'Reilly and Bruce, they will have a profound "Perot Effect". Though Ross Perot did not win, he did force the Republicans to adopt most of his ideas in the "Contract with America".
If you support the ideas that O'Reilly and Bruce espouse, then please write them on the ballot.
Feel free to pass this message to as many people as possible.
In other words, nearly 100% of of the Microsoft applications running in China is stolen. So, of course, Microsoft and other software companies have severe trouble in using the Chinese market to grow their revenue and profits.
The problem is none a governmental problem. The problem is Chinese culture.
Adding a database layer to Gnome sounds like using another 300 megabytes of storage on my hard drive. I simply do not need the database.
If the FSF/GNU folks really want to do something revolutionary, they should fork Linux+Gnome into 2 distinct paths: minimalist and maximalist. The maximalist is what we have now. The minimalist is a minimally featured Linus+Gnome distribution. It is the bare minimum in functionality that we need to have a decent operating system and desktop.
Into this minimalist installation, I will then add the applications (e.g. MatLab) that I use daily.
Instead of focusing so much on styling, the marketing droids should show us some stats indicating the percentage of the engineering market that the G5 Macs have. I suspect that the G5 Macs have the highest percentage of the engineering workstation market after the x86 boxes.
The only speed that counts is how fast you can grow the market for your product. In that category, AMD wins. AMD appears to be on a roll these days. In the latest quarter, the Opteron (AMD) outshipped the Itanium (Intel) by a ratio of 10 to 1. AMD shipped 60,000 units, and Intel shipped 5665 units. Apparently, the survivors of the microprocessor wars in the 1990s are the PowerPC architecture and the IA32-X64 architecture. The Itanium architecture will survive, but it will be relegated to a high-performance graphics engine.
The real problem with airport security is that too many politicans (hounded by Islamic pressure groups) think that nationality profiling is "racist". There is nothing racist about (1) checking the bags and bodies of all non-American citizens from the USA and (2) performing a less intensive check of American citizens. The threat is from the Middle Easterner, not the average American.
Unfortunately, because nationality profiling is considered "racist", the TSA has contrived an insane screening process whereby a handicapped American citizen, who could never be a threat to anyone, is subjected to an intensive check of all body cavities. At the same time, the airport screeners are forbidden, by TSA regulations, from intensively checking more than 2 Middle Easterners (i.e. without American citizenship) per flight.
Insane? Yep. You can blame the spineless politicians who refuse to stand up to Islamic pressure groups, La Raza, etc.
Hot off the press is this news article: "Sources: Google Seeks Banks to Lead IPO". The search-engine business is going to consolidate. Microsoft and Yahoo will be two survivors. Google won't be because it lacks the revenue to invest in the R&D needed to build the best search engine. What Google has right now can be easily duplicated by either Microsoft and Yahoo. Google also has the issue of appearing to favor H-1B workers over American workers; in a period of 9% unemployment in Silicon Valley, Google just can't seem to find enough qualified Americans to fill its list of unfilled job positions that are advertised month after month. Google also practices age discrimination: "Google, in its intense effort to hire employees, is focusing on 'getting 25-year-old [employees]'.
If you buy into the Google IPO, you are shooting yourself in the foot as its stock will be worthless after 2 years. Moreover, you are enriching the pockets of people who turn their backs on the older, unemployed Americans. You ask yourself, "Is Google ethical?"
As well, you can be sure that VMWare is running to the IPO finish line. Microsoft has built a virtual machine monitor (VMM) that is as good as VMWare's best product.
If anyone buys into Google's IPO, then that person is a fool. The shares will be worthless after about 2 years.
The other issue is an ethical one: should Americans buy into Google to reward its founders even though the shares will ultimately be worthless? NO! Why? An employee of Google wrote an article to Slashdot and suggested that Google favors H-1B workers over Americans. During a period 9% unemployment in Silicon Valley, Google claims that it cannot find enough American workers to fill job positions and resorts to H-1B workers.
Now, SUNW is conceding the market for high-end servers.
SUNW recently purchased Afara. It supplies processors for low-end servers. SUNW will still try to maintain a presence there. Unfortunately, with the SPARC64 going to 4 cores per die and 2 threads per core, the processor from Afara is starting to look less and less competitive. SUNW will exit the market for even low-end servers by 2007.
The announcement of Power5, with its SMT capabilities, is tantamount to announcing a starship for intergalatic space travel when all the spacecraft in the Federation can only travel within the solar system. Power5 and, to a lesser extent, SPARC64 basically killed the UltraSPARC line and the entire hardware business of the Sun Microsystems.
By the way, Professor Susan Eggers of the University of Washington must be tickled pink because she development most of the technology for simultaneous multithreading. IBM, with its Power5, proved that her ideas were all right. The Draper prize in engineering should be going her way.
The originally proposed quick fix is to simply redesign the the Sun servers to accept the SPARC64-V. An even better proposal, now leaked by the press, is to simply discontinue the Sun-designed servers and to sell re-branded Fujitsu designed servers. The latter proposal is a much faster path to solving the server-performance problem at Sun but leads to lower profit margins. Clearly, the situation at Sun is dire, so you can be assured that one of these proposals will be adopted. (Please read "Sun posts deeper loss for quarter". Having lower profit margins is better than having no profit margins. Right now, the second proposal appears to be winning.
Sun Microsystems will most likely fire more than 50% of its processor development team. The single biggest cause of Sun losing marketshare so rapidly is the UltraSPARC III. It has horrible performance. Check "SPEC" and "TPC".
How does this deal help Fujitsu? It can now sell more servers and get more cash. Fujitsu has the upperhand and should force Sun to accept the second proposal: Sun exits the highend server market and sells rebranded Fujitsu-designed servers. To avoid being dependent on Sun, Fujitsu should move rapidly to jettisoning the Solaris OS in favor Linux. Fujitsu is rapidly being shaped into a company like IBM: high-performance servers and computing services are the mainstays of the business.
As a side note, Fujitsu rejects hiring foreign workers (the equivalent of H-1Bs). Their SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI were designed and built almost exclusively by native talent. When Fujitsu hires workers, Fujitsu most values the quality of "willingness to work", not "best match of skills"; Fujitsu will take the time to train its employee. Fujitsu is a traditional Japanese company that emulates most of the values that once characterized traditional American companies. Sun, by contrast, encourages the employment of H-1Bs; the UltraSPARC III and the UltraSPARC IV were built substantially by former or current H-1B workers. Sun seeks only "best match of skills" and, along with Intel, claims that they absolutely need H-1B worker even during a period of 8% unemployment among native Americans in Silicon Valley.
Target the G5 at the consumer market. Target the G5-W at the engineering/high-performance market.
Amazingly, thanks to Apple, the PowerPC architecture has the best chance of capturing a sizeable share of the workstation market, obliterating any remaining UltraSPARC workstations. Apple has a damned good chance if only Steve Jobs doesn't blow it.
Despite the ranting and raving by Scott McNealy, Sun Microsystems is also bunding software into a single package. According to "Sun eyes application server market", Sun is bundling server application software into its Solaris OS. Sun is deliberately trying to destroy BEA Systems.
Remember. If we attack Microsoft for bundling stuff into its OS, then we should attack Sun for doing likewise.
It is imperative that we expel all laboratory employees who were born or grew up in Taiwan. It is already a matter of national policy that persons born or raised in mainland China are denied employment at American weapons labs. This policy should be extended to include person born or raised in Taiwan. The facts at "Reality of Taiwan" further elaborate on the security risk posed by Taiwanese.
Note that a Taiwanese gave American neutron-bomb technology to Beijing. The Justice Department has classified Taiwan as security threat to the USA.
To reiterate what the "Wall Street Journal" reported, the majority of spies who steal American technology to give to Beijing were born or raised in Taiwan. We should treat people from Taiwan in the same way that we treat people from mainland China. They should be denied employment in any sensitive job in the American government. The alternative is to risk the security of the free world.
It is unlikely that Sun will do anything to optimize Solaris for x86 here in the USA. There may be some optimization work at Sun's R&D center in India, but basically in the USA, Sun is conceding to Linux. Linux is backed by IBM, and IBM and Linus are cooperating to make Linux a rock-solid product that meets 6-sigma reliability. Right now, Linus is concentrating on making Linux as stable as possible instead of adding more widgets and gadgets.
The penguin shall rule the world!
However, this single biggest problem also has an easy solution. Sun merely needs to jettison its SPARC processor R&D team and to adopt the SPARC64-V and the SPARC64-VI. The latter is a dual-core chip just like the well-regarded Power4. Sun could easily redesign its server boards within a month to accept the SPARC64 chips.
The SPARC64-V and SPARC64-VI are radically different from the UltraSPARC III. The former were designed and built almost exclusively by native talent (i. e. Japanese citizens). The UltraSPARC III was built by H-1B workers because Sun, Intel, and other companies claim that they cannot find enough native talent (i. e. American citizen) who are good enough -- even during a period 8% unemployment in Silicon Valley.
The issue here is mismanagement at Sun. Specifically, the management up to Scott McNealy himself refuses to adopt the SPARC64-V/VI. Why would any company refuse to adopt a processor that outperforms its own processor, that is readily available, that executes an identical instruction set , and that would immediately boost the performance of all the servers sold by said company? Why? The answer is deliberate mismanagement at Sun.
The only conceivable reason that the Chinese (which includes the people in Taiwan province and Hong Kong) are developing their space program is to advance their military technology and their special brand of nationalism, which is based on race. (Another name for this nationalism is fascism.)
In addition, there is a moral crisis in China. According to "China Detains Health Official for Publicizing AIDS Coverup", the Chinese arrested (and possibly tortured) a person for revealing that Chinese officials had attempted to sell AIDS-tainted blood products to Americans in the USA. Further, the Chinese still practice female infanticide and abortions targetting female fetuses. The ratio of male babies to female babies is 1.15 and has resulted in a dire shortage of marriage-age females. Responding to this shortage, Chinese men resort to kidnapping Vietnamese women to force them into marriage. When they try to escape, the men cut their achilles tendon, according to the "Wall Street Journal" (1999).
The billions of dollars wasted on China's military-based space program would be better spent on educating the Chinese about Western notions of right and wrong. There is simply a bankruptcy of values in China.
The benefit here is that AMD can focus on performance-boosting only those instructions that the GNU compilers will use. The new K9 only needs to be able to execute the remainder of the instruction set, regardless of speed.
AMD has a tough task. The K9 must execute the legacy x86 instructions, the MMX instructions, the SSE/SSE2 instructions, the 3DNOW! instructions, and the x86-64 instructions. This will be a debugging nightmare.
The Taiwanese have a history of transferring sensitive/military technology to mainland China.
What Steve Jobs, if he had any sense, needs to do is to add ECC (error correction code) memory to the G5 to create a variant of the G5 and call it "G5-W". The G5-W would essentially be a workstation. Then Jobs should work with IBM and RedHat Linux to certify that RedHat Linux runs on the G5-W. Apple can be the de facto workstation division of IBM. Apple retains the original G5 for consumers but enters the more lucrative market for workstations. Margins for workstations are significantly higher than they are for mere personal computers.
Moreover IBM has been wanting to do a tour-de-force in the workstation market, but there are all these pesky Pentium 4 boxes in that market. With the G5, IBM can sell at machine that is competitive with the very best Pentium boxes. The floating-point unit of the PPC970 should make those engineering calculations really fly.
Selling a significant number of processors in the workstation market helps to amortize the cost (on the order of billions of dollars) of processor development. The success of the G5 actually helps IBM's processor division.
Of course, the implicit observation here is that Sun Microsystems is dead meat. Sun is expected to lose about $300 million for the 1st quarter of FY2004, according to "Sun warns of hefty loss". The Power4 and variants (Power4+, PowerPC970, etc.) are killing Sun at the market's high end (for both workstations and servers), where Sun has traditionally obtained most of its profits.
By contrast, the rate of software piracy in China (which includes Taiwan province and Hong Kong) is about 93%. In short, the Chinese simply steal any software that they do not wish to buy.
The adoption rate of Linux and open-source software in Brazil will be much higher than the rate in China. IBM has made a good strategic move by investing in Brazil. Other American companies should follow suit: divert investments away from China and into Brazil.
News that IBM is opening a Linux Competency Center in Russia comes a day before Moody's Investors Service upgrades Russia's foreign debt to investment grade, according to "Russia Earns Investment-Grade Status". These developments are wonderful news for Russia and the West.
Russia certainly has many flaws: there are signs that civil rights are being abridged in Russia under the Putin government. However, Russia is far ahead of China in human rights, civil rights, and basic decency. Consider the recent atrocity described in "China Detains Health Official for Publicizing AIDS Coverup". The Chinese arrested (and possibly tortured) a person for revealing that Chinese officials had attempted to sell AIDS-tainted blood products to Americans in the USA.
It is a no-brainer as to which country deserves American support. American companies should bypass China and put all their investments into Russia and Eastern Europe. American consumers can encourage the American companies to do so by boycotting any product or service that is "Made in China" (which includes "Made in Hong Kong" or "Made in Taiwan"). Furthermore, we should pull our money out of mutual funds that invest in any company located in China (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan).
It is imperative (for the preservation of Western society) that Russia outperforms China economically. The Russian value system shares much more in common with the American value system than the Chinese value system.
The "China People's Daily" is run by the Beijing government and is the mouthpiece of the Chinese government. It has conducted a number of terrorist activities in Tibet. You can find some descriptions at Tibet Online and Amnesty International.
Further, operatives of the "China People's Daily" were stationed at the Chinese embassy in Serbia in 1999 when the embassed was hit by American bombs. The majority of people in China (which includes Taiwan Province and Hong Kong) supported the Serbian military aggression against the Kosovars. The Serbians executed thousands of men, women, and children in Kosovar in an attempt to remove them from Kosovo: the Serbia military raped the women and slit the throats of the children. The Americans sent military forces to Serbia in an attempt to stop the genocide. At the time, Chinese operatives of the "China People's Daily" operated secretly from the relative safety of the embassy and relayed communications to the Serbian army and helped the Serbians to defeat American electronic warfare. (reference: "NATO hit embassy on purpose")
The Serbian aggression against the Kosovars was strongly supported by the Chinese and is the first major case of genocide after the genocide of the Cambodians by Pol Pot. The Chinese also supported Pol Pot.
To eliminate some combinations that are impossible, we first consider whether we can eliminate offshoring. Offshoring occurs from the moment that Americans engage in trade with any foreign country. For example, if we buy apples grown in Thailand, then we are engaging in offshoring because the foreign labor grew those apples. Can we eliminate foreign trade? No.
The stickier question is whether offshoring eliminates jobs. According to the "The misery of manufacturing", "The Economist" says, "No." The USA is a big market, and manufacturers locate engineering and design centers in the market in which they have a significant presence. For example, Hyundai is now building a factory and design center in the USA, according to "Speed Kills" by "Forbes".
Therefore, we cannot eliminate offshoring, and it is neither bad nor good. It is neutral. We are left with only option #3 (offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment) and option #4 (offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment).
Can we eliminate H-1B/L-1 employment? Absolutely yes. Since companies can offshore their R&D work, they can build an R&D center in India and hire all the engineers that they claim to need. Each engineer hired in India will cost only 1/10 of the cost of an H-1B/L-1 engineer.
Supporters of H-1B/L-1 employment say that an Indian employed as an H-1B worker in the USA will spend his $100,000 salary in the USA, thus creating more jobs. That observation is bogus. If the Indian wants to work for an American company, he should go back to India to work at $5,000 at the American site in Bangalore. The American company will then save $95,000. That money does not simply sit idly in the bank. The American company will re-invest that $95,000 into the domestic facilities and hire an American citizen.
Furthermore, when Hyundai sets up its design center in the USA, the Indian will be in India, and the jobs at the design center will go to American citizens.
In short, option #3 (offshoring but no H-1B/L-1 employment) is the best scenario. In fact, offshoring defeats the strongest bogus argument supporting H-1B/L-1 employment. When a company like Google says that it absolutely needs to hire H-1B/L-1 workers because Americans are not good enough, then we say, "Fine. Set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."
Please read "H-1B Myths". Contact your representative in Washington and tell them to terminate the H-1B/L-1 program. Do not wait for the person sitting at the next computer terminal to do your civic duty. Move your ass. Do the your job.
The issue with Thomas Butler is that he lied to FBI agents about how he disposed of samples of the plague. In terms of deadliness, the plague is far worse than any bazooka. So, the FBI agents justifiably arrested him. The government is entitled to protect its citizens.
Nonetheless, Dr. Peter Agre deserves his Nobel prize. He is a fine example of native talent (not foreign talent like H-1B workers) at its best. We need not worry about diminishing the quality of American research if the government were to restrict -- or even, completely eliminate -- foreign workers who enter the USA to work at its scientific labs.
Steve Jobs is really amazing. He will be the first person to successfully establish a non-x86 processor as a viable alternative to the x86 processors. The entire ill-fated consortium called the Advanced Computing Environment (which promoted MIPS R2000), backed by professors from Stanford University, could not do it. The gang (which promoted the PowerPC) of IBM, Motorola, and Apple (under the old CEO) could not do it.
Now, here comes Steve Jobs. Apple, under his leadership, manages to do it. How does he do it? What's his secret? You can be sure that ECC memory for the G5 is on its way.