It USED To have Core memory when it first started flying, it's all solid state now. The Shuttle does not have a lot of computing power, it really doesn't need that much to get to/from orbit. It's not trivial, but your desktop processor could certainly handle it.
I checked Google and Yahoo, your sources (such as Greenpeace) are not very valid. They all have an axe to grind with the oil & gas industry (as you do as well). You also are not supporting Freedom for the Iraqi people, reduction in Terrorism and stability in the Middle East.
Leasing for less than the land is worth, that's silly, WHO ELSE would want the land? What something is worth is what a willing buyer will give for it. Nothing more.
ALL Industries get tax relief for investment in Research. In the case of the oil business, would you rather we got more oil from Foreign Nations? The "Depletion Tax Credit" from the Tax Relief Act of 1986 has been very good for drilling in the USA and has stimulated investment in O&G exploration. As for taxes, Just for example, the state of Wyoming taxes every barrel of oil at 4-6% of market price.
The Government also subsidizes coal, Ethanol, Nuclear, HydroElectric and other types of energy production. Oh, and by the way, MAJOR oil producing nations such as those in the Gulf and Africa (Nigeria), Mexico, and Venezuala (sp) subsidize or OWN the oil business in thier countries. And they do it to a larger extent than the USA.
Cleanup? The "Superfund" exists to cleanup past mistakes. Bonds posted by energy companies help fund this. Exxon spent $2.1B to cleanup the Valdez spill, and oil companies clean-up problems all the time, else they get sued by Landowners.
Basically you are just a typical left-wing enviro-wacko who really doesn't know a damn thing about the energy business, taxes and Government.
If consumers hated rebates and coupons they mfgs and stores would quit offering them and just offer the "lowest price". The auto companies tried this recently and it didn't seem to work. I know there have been many studies done on the effect of rebates and they always seem to come out for keeping them. Consumers are always either positive thinkers or suckers depending on your view. Any business SHOULD take advantage of that mindset, but they should also pay the rebates. I've had no problem getting my rebates, and some have been for $100 or more on a big ticket item. Of course I had to wait 6 to 8 weeks!
Not a CPA but I'm pretty sure rebates have to be booked at time of Sale (it's been a while since Financial Accting..and the rules always seem to change once you know them!). This really bites people like GM/Ford who offer them all the time. Sales look better one quarter then the Balance Sheet gets hammered the next.
Fry's does it. Circuit City does it. They are called "in-store" rebates.
I've filed for several rebates, got them all but one. Some of them were for like $100 on a laptop.
Gasoline production is NOT subsidized by the Gov't. Where did you get that crazy idea? Gasoline is TAXED to the tune of about 75 cents to a dollar a gallon for "Road Funds". Government vehicles don't pay that tax by the way, nor do military vehicles. Nor do many farm vehicles such as tractor, pickups, and combines. The Government gets money FROM the oil companies for the property they lease for production. Who do you think gets the lease $$ and royalty percentages from the North Slope and the Gul of Mexico??? The US (and to some extent the State) Treasury!
So Sun let's MS TAKE Java just because MS wanted some new features for the "desktop"? Now jump ahead 5 yra and MS has "server" software you don't think they would be pushing "their" Java on that if they had it?? News flash, there is ANOTHER market out there called the SERVER market that Sun and IBM dominate. Sun did the right thing for it's long-term future. That was NOT stupid.
Take it from an MBA Grad of a top 20 school IMHO are only about 2/3 right but certainly on the right track...
Breakage - yes it occurs but it's getting easier for the consumer to file rebates and with lots of new laws protecting consumer rights it's not as big a deal as you think it is. In-store rebates are also common where the retailer "files" for you but you get the discount then and there.
Accounting, i.e. "managing earnings" that is most certainly done but rebates are accrued as a liability when the product is sold. So they don't really help earnings out until the rebates expire and some of the liability is reduced by it becoming an expense the next quarter. The long term effect on earnings is small. However the point you made in your last paragraph about items soon to be obsoleted is very much done. Better to get some sucker to buy it at a (maybe) discounted price than to eat the whole cost of the item when it becomes obsolete. That DOES help manage earnings by creating Sales that would not have been there if they had just let the product sit on the shelf until the retailer kicked it back.
Marketing/Positioning..THIS is the big area of benefit. It DRIVES Sales by giving the product positive exposure over competing products not offering a rebate. Joe Schmo isn't looking at the price BEFORE the rebate he is looking at the AFTER price. So the rebated product appears to be a better value, which can also build brand loyalty. Oh yea, and consumers LOVE Rebates. The retailers do benefit as you said by making the manufacturer take the discount not the store. It also brings in customers who may buy other things (i.e. the old idea of a "loss leader").
It's multi-pronged and complex, but it's not going away soon as there are far too many benefits to the business and consumers like it!
Flash forward a few years and Microsoft now has a completely different technology that replaces Java. It's slick, works well, and it is useful for creating both desktop and server software.
Slick, works well, useful? Then why are about 70-80% of the SERIOUS business related Internet applications written in Java? With more to come..NET is not all it's cracked up to be and it for SURE only works on MS Operating Systems where as Java works on Solaris, Windows, AIX, BSD, HP-UX, VxWorks, etc.
Sun sued MS for breaking the model of write once run anywhere by adding extensions and doing just as you said in your last paragraph. Sure there would have been LOTS of Java code out there, MS-Java. Sun did the right thing. As much as you seem to love the M$ stuff are you sure you aren't a MS Employee?
FALSE, FALSE, FALSE
A Business Mandate is to MAXIMIZE PROFIT for their Shareholders within the ethical, social and moral constraints of society. Go read "Profit maximization: The ethical mandate of business" by Patrick Primeaux and John Stieber. The authors propose a model for business ethics which arises directly from business practice. This model is based on a behavioral definition of the economic theory of profit maximization and situates business ethics within opportunity costs. Within that context, they argue that good business and good ethics are synonymous, that ethics is at the heart and center of business, that profits and ethics are intrinsically related.
John Steiber was my EconomicsProfessor for my MBA. I think his theory is RIGHT, but is applied far too often.
Because If they did M$ would take it and screw Sun. They would try the same tactics they did the first time around, except sneakier. Look what they have done with XML adding the proprietary extensions (like encyprted sections where only M$ software can read it) and then trying to get those included as part of the base specification.
Java is very extensible, what's NOT there you can certainly add. The BNF for Java is published I think, and IIRC Java is built on C++ so you COULD write your own.
Maybe if there were to become ANSI/ISO Java (such as was done with C) then opening it up would not hurt and the "core" language would be strictly specified.
That's true of a lot of Sun software. However, you WILL need support if you run an Data Center of any size. Solaris 10 has a lot of new things, and IIRC if you don't buy support you don't get tech help, patches, upgrades, etc. Of course you can get those in other ways...
It might not be the best strategy to force moves to Solaris 10 but it is coming. Newer Sun H/W (i.e. Niagra, Galaxy) will support only Solaris 10 so as your Sun equipment is EOLed that too will force you to move or go unsupported or make a lifetime buy and support yourself.
I assume you are not running a large organization with 100's or 1000's of users where the performance hit would mean something. If your apps are resource intensive you might need bigger hardware might be the downside of doing Linux under Solaris. What apps do you have that are not able to be ported as binaries or recompiled to take advantage of Solaris 10?
Stick with an OS (Solaris 8) that is approaching EOL? That might be OK from a sysadmin perspective but not from a business perspective. Plus, Solaris 10 is going to support your Solaris 8 apps and most of the scripts even. It is also a lot faster, more secure as well as what you mentioned. The BIG issue is that a lot of small-to-medium ISVs have not "qualifed" thier apps with Solaris 10 and will certify they work which is something that concerns a lot of IT Managers. Expect the pace of certs to increase.
Doublespeak? Sun SUPPORTS Linux on it's hardware, but it does not PROMOTE Linux. How is that doublespeak? If someone wants Linux instead of Solaris they are supported. But for my $$$, I would run OpenSolaris which is rock steady if I was low budget, or Solaris 10 if I wanted all the features like Dtrace, etc. and could afford the licenses. Solaris 10 is a very solid UNIX OS with 20 years of history behind it, and it runs any other Solaris binaries for the same platform. You can't say that about Linux. Last I looked something that ran on RHEL wasn't going to work on SUSE or other distros.
Eh? Why would you want to do that? Solaris 10 performs so much better than Linux and gives you Dtrace to figure out what is going on when things dont run well. You would not realize the performance gains if you ran Linux as a Container under Solaris 10 and then ran Linux binaries.
They have to be careful pooling patents, they can open themselves up to collusion, price fixing and anti-competition lawsuits. It would be the same as with Microsoft, just with a group of companies controlling what does/does not get into the free patent group. Nothing in this agreement is binding on other parts of the companies, Sony is a HUGE company as is IBM. So if they want to sue each other over patents OUTSIDE the common pool they can still do so.
Thanks for the clarification, Orbital Mechanics is obviously NOT my strong area! If you are going to need the much fission fuel why not just land on the damn thing, setup a drill and drop a nuke in there to crack it open? If we can drive Mars Rovers we should be able to do this operation. Or perhaps it is enough to dentonate the nuke on the surface to nudge the 'roid just a hair and make it miss. Even though I'm not sure you can use nukes with that kind of precision and predictability,that sounds easier then trying to hold station 20 yrs. And if it doesn't work then you can try again or try the way this article espouses.
Wouldn't that would be 10^8 Newtons of force pulling the spacecraft toward the asteriod? The asteriod is much more massive and would have a gravity well of it's own. Wouldn't that attractice force have to be overcome for 20 yrs, plus a slight acceleration in the direction the asteroid needed to move? The 20 ton spacecraft would have a higher force of gravity on the 'roid than that of the Sun for 20 yrs (or however long the tractor lasts) so it could gradually change to orbit, How do we make things that can stay in space for 20 yrs w/o repair? How do you get that much fuel on-board? Solar Cells are not an option that far from the Sun. A nuclear reactor maybe but they would have all sorts of issues there, even if the "tractor" was not launched from Earth, the fission elements would have to be launched as I don't think you find Uranium just floating in space. And heaven forbid someone mis-calculates and they push it onto a collission course..they it takes another 20 yrs to fix that! This article sure makes a LOT of assumptions and figure on new ideas/technologies we don't have. It is a neat idea but IMHO it belongs under the topic of Science Fiction not in a journal like Nature.
Yep, JVMs are darn near ubiqitous. You can even get the JVM for DSPs. Now whether or not Java is the RIGHT choice for a very tight embedded system is a different discussion. The GP should have his Geek card suspended.
Sounds to me a whole lot like RSS just from IBM. RSS has been around a while and works pretty good. For those who don't know:
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.
Slashdot Mirror
It USED To have Core memory when it first started flying, it's all solid state now. The Shuttle does not have a lot of computing power, it really doesn't need that much to get to/from orbit. It's not trivial, but your desktop processor could certainly handle it.
I checked Google and Yahoo, your sources (such as Greenpeace) are not very valid. They all have an axe to grind with the oil & gas industry (as you do as well). You also are not supporting Freedom for the Iraqi people, reduction in Terrorism and stability in the Middle East.
Leasing for less than the land is worth, that's silly, WHO ELSE would want the land? What something is worth is what a willing buyer will give for it. Nothing more.
ALL Industries get tax relief for investment in Research. In the case of the oil business, would you rather we got more oil from Foreign Nations? The "Depletion Tax Credit" from the Tax Relief Act of 1986 has been very good for drilling in the USA and has stimulated investment in O&G exploration. As for taxes, Just for example, the state of Wyoming taxes every barrel of oil at 4-6% of market price.
The Government also subsidizes coal, Ethanol, Nuclear, HydroElectric and other types of energy production. Oh, and by the way, MAJOR oil producing nations such as those in the Gulf and Africa (Nigeria), Mexico, and Venezuala (sp) subsidize or OWN the oil business in thier countries. And they do it to a larger extent than the USA.
Cleanup? The "Superfund" exists to cleanup past mistakes. Bonds posted by energy companies help fund this. Exxon spent $2.1B to cleanup the Valdez spill, and oil companies clean-up problems all the time, else they get sued by Landowners.
Basically you are just a typical left-wing enviro-wacko who really doesn't know a damn thing about the energy business, taxes and Government.
Yep, but I'm not about to wade thru FASB documents to find out! :) They pay CPAs to know that shit!
If consumers hated rebates and coupons they mfgs and stores would quit offering them and just offer the "lowest price". The auto companies tried this recently and it didn't seem to work. I know there have been many studies done on the effect of rebates and they always seem to come out for keeping them. Consumers are always either positive thinkers or suckers depending on your view. Any business SHOULD take advantage of that mindset, but they should also pay the rebates. I've had no problem getting my rebates, and some have been for $100 or more on a big ticket item. Of course I had to wait 6 to 8 weeks!
Not a CPA but I'm pretty sure rebates have to be booked at time of Sale (it's been a while since Financial Accting..and the rules always seem to change once you know them!). This really bites people like GM/Ford who offer them all the time. Sales look better one quarter then the Balance Sheet gets hammered the next.
Fry's does it. Circuit City does it. They are called "in-store" rebates. I've filed for several rebates, got them all but one. Some of them were for like $100 on a laptop.
Gasoline production is NOT subsidized by the Gov't. Where did you get that crazy idea? Gasoline is TAXED to the tune of about 75 cents to a dollar a gallon for "Road Funds". Government vehicles don't pay that tax by the way, nor do military vehicles. Nor do many farm vehicles such as tractor, pickups, and combines. The Government gets money FROM the oil companies for the property they lease for production. Who do you think gets the lease $$ and royalty percentages from the North Slope and the Gul of Mexico??? The US (and to some extent the State) Treasury!
So Sun let's MS TAKE Java just because MS wanted some new features for the "desktop"? Now jump ahead 5 yra and MS has "server" software you don't think they would be pushing "their" Java on that if they had it?? News flash, there is ANOTHER market out there called the SERVER market that Sun and IBM dominate. Sun did the right thing for it's long-term future. That was NOT stupid.
Take it from an MBA Grad of a top 20 school IMHO are only about 2/3 right but certainly on the right track...
Breakage - yes it occurs but it's getting easier for the consumer to file rebates and with lots of new laws protecting consumer rights it's not as big a deal as you think it is. In-store rebates are also common where the retailer "files" for you but you get the discount then and there.
Accounting, i.e. "managing earnings" that is most certainly done but rebates are accrued as a liability when the product is sold. So they don't really help earnings out until the rebates expire and some of the liability is reduced by it becoming an expense the next quarter. The long term effect on earnings is small. However the point you made in your last paragraph about items soon to be obsoleted is very much done. Better to get some sucker to buy it at a (maybe) discounted price than to eat the whole cost of the item when it becomes obsolete. That DOES help manage earnings by creating Sales that would not have been there if they had just let the product sit on the shelf until the retailer kicked it back.
Marketing/Positioning..THIS is the big area of benefit. It DRIVES Sales by giving the product positive exposure over competing products not offering a rebate. Joe Schmo isn't looking at the price BEFORE the rebate he is looking at the AFTER price. So the rebated product appears to be a better value, which can also build brand loyalty. Oh yea, and consumers LOVE Rebates. The retailers do benefit as you said by making the manufacturer take the discount not the store. It also brings in customers who may buy other things (i.e. the old idea of a "loss leader").
It's multi-pronged and complex, but it's not going away soon as there are far too many benefits to the business and consumers like it!
Flash forward a few years and Microsoft now has a completely different technology that replaces Java. It's slick, works well, and it is useful for creating both desktop and server software. Slick, works well, useful? Then why are about 70-80% of the SERIOUS business related Internet applications written in Java? With more to come. .NET is not all it's cracked up to be and it for SURE only works on MS Operating Systems where as Java works on Solaris, Windows, AIX, BSD, HP-UX, VxWorks, etc.
Sun sued MS for breaking the model of write once run anywhere by adding extensions and doing just as you said in your last paragraph. Sure there would have been LOTS of Java code out there, MS-Java. Sun did the right thing. As much as you seem to love the M$ stuff are you sure you aren't a MS Employee?
FALSE, FALSE, FALSE A Business Mandate is to MAXIMIZE PROFIT for their Shareholders within the ethical, social and moral constraints of society. Go read "Profit maximization: The ethical mandate of business" by Patrick Primeaux and John Stieber. The authors propose a model for business ethics which arises directly from business practice. This model is based on a behavioral definition of the economic theory of profit maximization and situates business ethics within opportunity costs. Within that context, they argue that good business and good ethics are synonymous, that ethics is at the heart and center of business, that profits and ethics are intrinsically related. John Steiber was my EconomicsProfessor for my MBA. I think his theory is RIGHT, but is applied far too often.
Because If they did M$ would take it and screw Sun. They would try the same tactics they did the first time around, except sneakier. Look what they have done with XML adding the proprietary extensions (like encyprted sections where only M$ software can read it) and then trying to get those included as part of the base specification. Java is very extensible, what's NOT there you can certainly add. The BNF for Java is published I think, and IIRC Java is built on C++ so you COULD write your own. Maybe if there were to become ANSI/ISO Java (such as was done with C) then opening it up would not hurt and the "core" language would be strictly specified.
That's true of a lot of Sun software. However, you WILL need support if you run an Data Center of any size. Solaris 10 has a lot of new things, and IIRC if you don't buy support you don't get tech help, patches, upgrades, etc. Of course you can get those in other ways...
It might not be the best strategy to force moves to Solaris 10 but it is coming. Newer Sun H/W (i.e. Niagra, Galaxy) will support only Solaris 10 so as your Sun equipment is EOLed that too will force you to move or go unsupported or make a lifetime buy and support yourself.
I assume you are not running a large organization with 100's or 1000's of users where the performance hit would mean something. If your apps are resource intensive you might need bigger hardware might be the downside of doing Linux under Solaris. What apps do you have that are not able to be ported as binaries or recompiled to take advantage of Solaris 10?
Stick with an OS (Solaris 8) that is approaching EOL? That might be OK from a sysadmin perspective but not from a business perspective. Plus, Solaris 10 is going to support your Solaris 8 apps and most of the scripts even. It is also a lot faster, more secure as well as what you mentioned. The BIG issue is that a lot of small-to-medium ISVs have not "qualifed" thier apps with Solaris 10 and will certify they work which is something that concerns a lot of IT Managers. Expect the pace of certs to increase.
Doublespeak? Sun SUPPORTS Linux on it's hardware, but it does not PROMOTE Linux. How is that doublespeak? If someone wants Linux instead of Solaris they are supported. But for my $$$, I would run OpenSolaris which is rock steady if I was low budget, or Solaris 10 if I wanted all the features like Dtrace, etc. and could afford the licenses. Solaris 10 is a very solid UNIX OS with 20 years of history behind it, and it runs any other Solaris binaries for the same platform. You can't say that about Linux. Last I looked something that ran on RHEL wasn't going to work on SUSE or other distros.
Eh? Why would you want to do that? Solaris 10 performs so much better than Linux and gives you Dtrace to figure out what is going on when things dont run well. You would not realize the performance gains if you ran Linux as a Container under Solaris 10 and then ran Linux binaries.
They have to be careful pooling patents, they can open themselves up to collusion, price fixing and anti-competition lawsuits. It would be the same as with Microsoft, just with a group of companies controlling what does/does not get into the free patent group. Nothing in this agreement is binding on other parts of the companies, Sony is a HUGE company as is IBM. So if they want to sue each other over patents OUTSIDE the common pool they can still do so.
Thanks for the clarification, Orbital Mechanics is obviously NOT my strong area! If you are going to need the much fission fuel why not just land on the damn thing, setup a drill and drop a nuke in there to crack it open? If we can drive Mars Rovers we should be able to do this operation. Or perhaps it is enough to dentonate the nuke on the surface to nudge the 'roid just a hair and make it miss. Even though I'm not sure you can use nukes with that kind of precision and predictability,that sounds easier then trying to hold station 20 yrs. And if it doesn't work then you can try again or try the way this article espouses.
Wouldn't that would be 10^8 Newtons of force pulling the spacecraft toward the asteriod? The asteriod is much more massive and would have a gravity well of it's own. Wouldn't that attractice force have to be overcome for 20 yrs, plus a slight acceleration in the direction the asteroid needed to move? The 20 ton spacecraft would have a higher force of gravity on the 'roid than that of the Sun for 20 yrs (or however long the tractor lasts) so it could gradually change to orbit, How do we make things that can stay in space for 20 yrs w/o repair? How do you get that much fuel on-board? Solar Cells are not an option that far from the Sun. A nuclear reactor maybe but they would have all sorts of issues there, even if the "tractor" was not launched from Earth, the fission elements would have to be launched as I don't think you find Uranium just floating in space. And heaven forbid someone mis-calculates and they push it onto a collission course..they it takes another 20 yrs to fix that! This article sure makes a LOT of assumptions and figure on new ideas/technologies we don't have. It is a neat idea but IMHO it belongs under the topic of Science Fiction not in a journal like Nature.
Yep, JVMs are darn near ubiqitous. You can even get the JVM for DSPs. Now whether or not Java is the RIGHT choice for a very tight embedded system is a different discussion. The GP should have his Geek card suspended.
Sounds to me a whole lot like RSS just from IBM. RSS has been around a while and works pretty good. For those who don't know:
RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.
Gotcha..I can attest that they are alive and well. I start work for them next week :)
Don't forget the famous quote at the end of that scence from the AirCav Colonel...
"I love the smell of Napalm in the Morning..it smells like VICTORY"