That's silly American self centeredness. You apparently glossed over the part in my previous post where I said the Russians have built enough modules in the ISS that if they were to undock them from the U.S. parts they would still have a fully functional space station. Without the Russian built modules the U.S. has nothing.
They would have to go back to rockets for attitude control, since the gyro based system is U.S. built but they could live with that. There could be an ownership dispute over one of the Russian built modules, because NASA paid for it through Boeing but its a Russian design and Russian built.
The other obvious thing you gloss over is that since the Columbia disaster the Russians have carried 100% of the burden, at their expense to change crews and resupply the station.
Minor partner indeed. The only way you could cubbyhole them as minor is if you are counting the massive sums of money the U.S. has squandered on the ISS over the last 30 years, but that counts for nothing other than to prove how pathetic the U.S. manned space program and politics are.
"yet we're totally committed to a huge presence in space"
About 2010 when the shuttle is retired the U.S. will have NO manned presence in space unless its at the good will of the Russians. The U.S. will have no manned launch vehicle until the CEV in 2014 at the earliest. Committed indeed.
If there wasn't anything worth rebutting how come you are wasting so much time REBUTTING it, badly.
I think its a pretty legitimate question what the motives of Battlestar Galatica's producers are in mixing so much 9/11 exploitation in to their series. Since according to one post they have produced a documentary for school kids on the use of "fear and propaganda" in the series it sure sounds like they are thinking about the "fear and propganda" angle in producing it.
If you aren't interested in discussing the topic why are you?
Needless to say not having seen these episodes I'm at a disadvantage.
I didn't really start this thread talking about the religious angle anyway. The problem I've had it with it so far in the early episodes was purely the series fixation on terrorism, paranoia and humanity being threatened, and things like hijacked spaceships trying to crash in to the fleet that are is a fairly blatant exploitation of 9/11.
Most religions have a suffering component, Islam included. Shia muslims self flaggelate themselves with knives and chains as part of annual rituals, to the point that their backs are a bloody pulp.
Maybe because the only religion you seem to know is Christianity you are reading everything in Christian terms.
The tinfoil hat BS is exceptionally lame everytime someone uses it and its used way to often. If you can't make a coherent arguement to the contrary I guess its a lot easier to just trot it out and pretend like somehow it proves the post you're use it on is crazy and you are somehow superior for having trotted it out. It doesn't. Its pointless waste of bandwidth because it doesn't say anything substantive.
That is so cool. Thanks for PROVING what I suspected. Propaganda is exactly what they are doing, they are just being kind of blatant about it.
When you have a hijacked space ship about to crash in to the fleet in one of the opening episodes its pretty obvious they are exploiting 9/11.
OK so its nice of them to do a documentary openly admitting they are doing "fear" and "propaganda" and TARGETING school children. If they are making captive school kids watch this stuff that makes it even MORE scary.
"The religious allegory would likely make most of the US Christian right livid: monotheistic robots who believe in a forgiving single God are the ones who attacked and wiped out a largely lapsed, but fundamentally polytheistic pagan culture"
I haven't seen much of the religion episodes yet, I think the UK has seen more of it than the U.S.
If thats they way they play the religion angle I could see how that is awkward but just based on your description I'm not sure I'd spin the Cylons as the Christians. Islam is monotheistic too and a key component of their Jihad is to wipe out "paganistic", immoral westerners. Are you sure you aren't confusing the Cylon religion with Christianity when in fact its Islam. Down the road you could just as easily see all the pagan humans, see the light, find religion and end up with a Christian versus Cylon(Islam) crusade.
"where everything done by the civilian leadership or military command was portrayed as incontrovertably good"
Didn't say "civilian leadership or military command", I was refering to the classic fighter jocks RULE mentality that pervades the show.
Its not very aggressive considering its going to be a tin can that probably wont even be close to what a manned vehicle would require and its probably launching on existing boosters, variants of Titan, Delta or Atlas. Chances are they are going to be underpowered for doing much past LEO. They sure aren't a Saturn V or the kind of heavy lifter you could get out of the Shuttle stack if you throw away the Shuttle and replace it with a big cargo module.
Me personally I'd like to see them just launch a shuttle external tank in to LEO and get it there half full of Hydrogen and Oxygen, hang a couple nozzles and a credit card swiper on it and turn it in to a gas station in space. Then put a simple, reusable space tug up there, a couple engines, two tanks and frame, that refuels in space and round trips to the moon and the L points on a weekly basis and NEVER reenters the atmosphere.
The CEV is also not very aggressive considering it will be another 6 years before it does anything even remotely useful assuming it isn't axed before then. Whats wrong with that picture, 3+ years to first flight and 9+ until a flight that actually does something. It stinks.
"When NASA gets the kind of funding it did during the 60's "
If the Russian Space Agency gets the kind of funding NASA is getting today they will do some wonderful things. An obvious example is they have already settled on one design and are bending metal on a full scale mockup. Don't think Boeing or Lockheed are past the computer generated fantasy stage.
Half of the money and time going in to the CEV flyoff is probably throw away unless they use parts of both designs which almost never happens.
I hate to break it to you but you are NEVER going to throw enough money at anything to keep NASA, Boeing and Lockheed happy. The more money you throw the more they will devour. ISS, the B-2 and the F-22 have all proven then. In the Apollo era there were lots of idealists in the space business, now there are a lot of bureaucrats building empires, and contractors trying to pad their bottom lines.
A lean budget probably ends up being faster and more efficient since it keeps the project from being a towering pile of bureaucracy and waste. Kelly Johnson and Burt Rutan both succeed by ruthlessly keeping the number of people working on the project to the essential minimum. Unfortunately Lockheed and Boeing will probably just produce and underfunded towering pile of bureaucracy, just based on track record.
Forgot to add "The Passion" is a "FRIGGING MOVIE" and look what kind of vehicle the religious right has turned it in to force feed Christianity to every one.
"Read my post....it's a FRIGGIN TV SHOW! Put your damn politics away and watch the show."
Get a clue, the best propaganda is a "FRIGGING TV SHOW". If it was a political lecture no one would watch it.
First you say its a "FRIGGIN TV SHOW" and then you start admitting that in fact is it taking all its story lines from current events, mixing in right wing political slant, and putting in them in a semi entertaining format so people left, right and naive will drink it in.
I think its about time to start screaming "THE MEDIA HAS A RIGHT WING BIAS". Maybe if we start screaming that OVER and OVER again for the next ten years we will manage to swing it back to the center or left. Its a strategy thats worked great for the right.
I think the parent was mostly complaining that it was vacuous because it was short on science and creative fiction. That kind of meshes with my post. As nearly as I can tell the people in Rupert's right wing empire started thinking right after 9/11 that they needed to make a series to exploit 9/11. They needed a series where civilization was fighting for its survival against a relentless, evil enemy. Battlestar Galactica no doubt sprung in to someones head.
Then they had writers go to town mixing in 9/11 exploitation, terrorism, nukes, pro military hero worship, and paranoia. I'd be real curious if planning for this series started about two weeks after 9/11.
Not sure, have they done chemical and biological weapons yet? They've had at least two episodes with nukes in the mix just to be even more on topic today. They thought there was a nuke in the hijacked ship they destroyed, (just like the dilemna we face of shooting down a hijacked airliner today), how close is that to just ripping of Fox News to write your scripts. Another episode that was on in the last week had the psycho, Cylon controlled scientist asking for a nuke to make a phony cylon detector so we can no doubt look forward to more WMD obsession in episodes to come.
Battlestar Galactica is vacuous as far as being science fiction. Is is bulging at the seems with propaganda, politics and now apparently religion. I hope as they do religion they aren't to blatant about Christian good, Cylon(Islam) evil.
" NASA is looking at commercial options for resupply of the International Space Station."
I think the Russians are way ahead of NASA on both keeping the ISS going, and on the CEV.
The Russians are going to be showing a full scale model of their Kliper reusable capsule at the Paris air show this June.
This is their planned replacement for the venerable Soyuz. It will carry 6 astronauts or 700 kilos of cargo. The article sounds like they are a little cagey on the schedule, it just says a few years. I'll bet you they have a manned launch about 5 years sooner than the CEV.
If they hang one of these on the ISS as an emergency vehicle they will enable bringing the ISS up to nearly its planned manning level, and might actually allow people to do research on the thing, instead of spending all their time maintaining as the 2-3 man crews have been doing.
Kind of looks to me like Russia is planning to go it alone when the U.S. gives up on the ISS and the shuttle. The other source of friction is that since Russia is trading with Iran and the U.S. has embargoed Iran NASA is officially forbidden from having any financial relationship with the Russian Space agency. I wonder if they will have to paint a white line down the middle of the ISS and have a U.S. half and a Russian half:) Or more realisticly the Russians can just undock the modules they built and control from the NASA tidbits and let them burn up. Their modules are a full, self contained space station, a Mir2 if you will and they don't actually require the American parts.
For comparison to Kliper, the CEV is going to have Lockheed and Boeing launched an unmanned, half baked prototype in 2008, pick a winner between the two and wont have a manned launch, probably just to LEO, before 2014 at the earliest.
By contrast NASA went from a nearly standing start to putting a man on the moon in way less than 10 years in the '60's when it had never been done before. In summary, NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are today, officially pathetic. As nearly as I can tell the CEV, and the Bush Moon/Mars initiative is mostly just an excuse to pump money in to the pockets of Boeing and Lockheed and put the milestones that count so far out there it will be a miracle if they program isn't killed before they actually have to do anything serious for the subsidies.
I'm confused. The U.S. is spending like $8 billion dollars a year on Missile Defense and I hear it was just declared operational. That must make all these threats from North Korea meaningless, right?
Oh wait, I forgot, the Bush administration is declaring the system operational even though the last test failed, and the didn't interceptor didn't even launch, in fact several of the very few carefully controlled tests have failed miserably. In the last test the busses to the control system overloaded and it started dropping messages. Their fix was to chang the threshold so the missile can overload and drop data and it just wont count as a fualt any more. I really want a missile with an overloaded control system flying around.
And, of course, a nation launching an attack on the U.S. can throw some relatively cheap missiles without nukes in them at the defense first and swamp it, then send in the nukes, and maybe put in decoys next to the real warheads, or do as the Russians are now doing and build warheads that can manuever and dodge the kill vehicle to defeat it. Building Maginot Lines, which is what Bushes missile defense, was pretty much discredited when the Germans just rolled around it in to France in World War II.
And of course if you are rogue nation with nukes you can probably just smuggle one in to the U.S. on a tramp steamer, submarine or along American's massively porous borders. There are coyotes and drug smugglers that can probably smuggle anything in to the U.S. for the right price.
Somebody needs to hit the White House with a clue stick and point out to them that if they are going to rely on a defense system like this, and squander all this money on it, they at least need to con the world in to thinking that it works so its a real deterant. If it fails test after test and you make it operational anyway your enemies are just going to laugh at it and you.
Not sure North Korea even has any nukes in the first place. Until they light one off for the world to see, it could just as easily be bluffing because they know the one and only way to discourage the Bush administration from invading you, for no particular reason, is to say you have nukes. If you have problems actually developing a real nuke, just say you do and no one can prove you wrong. Its the flip side of Iraq, Bush said Iraq did have WMD's and it was impossible for Iraq to prove they didn't. North Korea can say they have WMD's and no one can prove they don't, until they decide to actually set one off and prove the do.
The Bush administration has done a really great job of giving an incentive to every nation we don't like to rush to develop or acquire nukes, or failing that just claim they already have them.
You hit the nail on the head. Its thinly veiled post 9/11 propaganda. I believe Sky One is one of the producers which is a part of Rupert Murdoch's Fox right wing empires which makes this fact not particularly surprising.
Its main objectives are:
- Use Cylon's as bad stand in for Al Qaeda. Humanity and our very way of life are danger, be afraid!!!!! The script is practicly out of the Republican convention, our children and grandchildren will surely die if you don't keep us in power. - In the episode a couple of days ago they didn't even use Cylons, they had an actual "terrorist" taking over the prison ship, psycho's shooting hostages and gratuitous lines about "Freedom and Democracy" - And of course there was the hijacked space ship trying to ram the fleet which isn't even thinly veiled 9/11 exploitation, its blatant - Its non stop paranoid, the cyclons(Muslims) are among us and we can't tell, suspect everyone, fear everyone!!!!! - Its a massive hero worship of the military and pilots as heroes, which you can forgive because thats been a mainstay of SciFi forever. It is designed to instill in kids the desire to be a pilot and defend civilization from those nasty Muslims... errr... Cylons.
All in all there is enough 9/11 obsession and paranoia in the real world, don't really need it completing taking over supposed entertainment and fiction. You have to wonder how much its going to bend the heads of naive kids and geeks, who don't recognize it for what it is. If you recall during the Reagan years, propaganda posing as entertainment took the form of "Red Dawn". Its pretty much the same thing just more modern and a little more thinly veiled. They clevery hijacked an old series so they can insist its not post 9/11 obsession but that is still what it is.
I knew this was what it was before I'd even seen it because Twirlip of the Mists was singing praises of it precisely because of the post 9/11 paranoia, our very way of life is threatened, and you wont find anyone on slashdot who is more obsessed with 9/11, our very way of life being threatened and paranoid delusion.
Just curious what you base your assertion on, since I doubt you have a clue what their position really is on the subject.
It would seem to me like stem cell based therapies are an exceptionally poor fit for drug companies, since I don't think they are going to be mass producing any drugs using stem cells anytime soon. I almost wish they would just to see how ballistic you and your fellow pro life fanatics would go if Eli Lily or Pfizer were to start grinding up embryos from abortions to mass produce some stem cell based miracle drug.
The techniques that seem most likely initially would probably be a better fit for research hospitals which will use stems cells implants to treat things like Parkinson's or to repair spinal cord injuries. They are medical procedures, probably involving surgery, not drugs.
You can be sure that the first person or institution who does use embryonic stem cells to treat humans is going to be pummeled by the religious right who've decided that they run this country, and can dictate their morality to everyone else, and thanks to the New Republican party pretty much can. Any U.S. institution which does attempt an embryonic stem cell treatment will almost certainly regret it and I doubt the business people who run it will even allow it due to the probable backlash.
Its likely that this field will be added to a growing list where the breakthroughs happen outside the U.S. because fundementalist Christians are pushing the U.S. back in to the Dark Ages.
"The administration is spending a lot of money on scientific research, specifically the trips to the moon and mars."
The Bush administration is spending next to nothing in going to the Moon and in reality nothing at all on going to Mars. When he proposed the new initiative he said NASA would get a 5% increase in spending in the 2006 budget, they are getting 2.5% in the document released this week.
CEV funding is up to $1 billion in the 2006 budget from $500 million this year, and much of that money is probably going to be split between Boeing and Lockheed in duplicated effort so you get half as much as you would if there were one team.
By comparison missile defense gets something like $8 billion a year. Tsunami aid is going to see about as much money as CEV. The War in Iraq spends a billion dollars in a few days. No don't con anyone in to think Bush is a champion of the sciences or space explanation. He is throwing crumbs at it, most probably as payoffs to Boeing and Lockheed more than any interest in space exploration.
Project Prometheus is cancelled in the 2006 budget, which may or may not be a good thing, it is bad if you are a fan of nuclear propulsion.
So the only thing new Bush is funding while he is actually in office are the two unmanned prototype CEV launches presumably in to LEO by Boeing and Lockheed in 2008 at the end of his term if they don't slip. They are likely to be exceptionally lame tin cans sitting on top of existing expendable launchers. Its unlikely there will be anything new or leading edge about them. Boeing is pushing its Titan Heavy Lifter apparently and it ain't no Saturn V. In 2008, assuming one or both prototypes actually work they pick a winner and then there are no launches for another 6 years, if they stay on schedule, so there MAY be a manned CEV in 2014, 6 years after Bush is out of office. Boeing and Lockheed are going to make a lot of money for doing relatively little on CEV for a long time.
By contrast the Russian Space Agency is taking a full scale model of their Kliper reusable capsule to the Paris Air show in June. It will carry 6 astronauts to the ISS or possibly the moon. There schedule is vague, "a few years" but it would be really hard for it to take longer than the ridiculously slow CEV schedule. In the second race to the Moon by money is on Russia to win this time. It appears a near certainty that they are going to achieve something NASA has completely failed to do and get the ISS up to six people so they can do some science instead of just barely keeping up on maintainance. With Kliper it also appears likely they will be ready to go it alone resupplying the ISS after NASA abandons it and the shuttle.
NASA went from Kennedy's speech, and a nearly standing start to the moon in much less than 10 years. This time around it appears it will take 10 years just to get the first manned capsule in to LEO and just get back to where we were around 1965, 50 years later.
No, its OK for executives to be extravagant. The only thing that is not OK is for the company's stock price to be going down relative to its peers.
Carly's main mistake was a disasterous merger with Compaq, that and, like I said, if you've ever heard babble about the centerpiece of HP's strategy, "Adaptive Enterprise" you realize she has no clue what she's talking about. Its OK to have a clueless MBA running a tech company but there needs to be someone directly beneath her who has a clue about technology and apparently there are no such people in HP's senior management, or if they are they had no influence on Carly.
If you have Windows desktops switch everyone you can to Linux, ideally thin clients. You're probably screwed here if you have tons of internal apps that are using ActiveX plugins and are totally tied to IE. If thats the case fire everyone who made you business dependent on this mess and divert their salaries in to getting rid of it.
The down side is if you no longer have all your IT people running from desk to desk repairing hosed and infected Windows desktops your CIO will probably be able to can half the IT staff.
If telecomm is in your IT department get an Asterisk PBX especially if you are paying a fortune for your PBX from places like Avaya or you have multiple offices and tons of long distance bills.
http://www.asterisk.org/
If you have broadband connections to your other offices move everyone to VoIP. Telecommunications is usually a massive IT expense, and its money going out of the company, and not in to employees wages so its less plan than slashing the IT staff.
"Does it always have to be cutting costs in IT? How about, for once, in other departments?"
This is hitting the nail on the head and grabbing the third rail at the same time. Next time a company hits a major round of belt tightening suggest they should start cutting in the executive suite and set an example. Of course you will probably be fired at that point.
A short list:
- Executive salaries - Options - Optional travel, especially for party trips - perks
As best I recall for example, Carly Fiorina had a private fleet of jets to fly herself and senior executives around, I'm thinking she should try coach and maybe it would have taken some of the edge off her arrogant, superior attitude. Maybe she would have had a chance to sit next to the little people and hear what they think of her printers and computers. If she got real lucky she might have sat next to someone who had heard her babble about "Adaptive Enterprise" and who could have politely explained to her how she sounded like a clueless MBA babbling buzzwords every time she tried, and failed to explain it. I can see a jet for Warrent Buffett, Bill Gates or Jim Clark. Carly having a private jet to fly her around to babble was just making a net negative faster and more efficient.
As I also recall she had a personal assistant who in particular specialized in making sure her hair, jewelry and wardrobe were just so, and that she was well fed. Me thinks a senior executive should be able to dress and feed themselves or they shouldn't be running a giant company.
EVERY tech company I've worked for has squandered massive sums on travel, though it might have been reined in some lately. Instead of staying at 5 star hotels try having your salesforce and execs stay in an economy hotel/motel, especially if they aren't entertaining potential customers or partners at their hotel. If they do need that impressing them with their style in travel accommodations is about as likely to impress them with how much money you are wasting and that that money will be coming out of their pockets if they buy your product.
I once went to a convention, rooms were hard to come by but we did have reservations near the convention center. The company President's executive assistance decided the hotel wasn't up to the company's 5 star standards so cancelled everyone's reservations at the last minute and everyone got moved to a worse hotel a 40 minute drive from the convention turned the whole thing in to a nightmare. She didn't understand what was wrong with her 5 star standard in travel accommodations.
I'm no fan of PDA's or all in one cell phones. I would and do use a laptop for everything. If its simple I use kcalc and if its involved or I want to save the calculation for posterity I'd use a spreadsheet.
Not sure I can see any reason to be building calculators in this day and age. Lots of people still do so its a crowded market and the margins are probably terrible. Besides which you can write a software calculator and put it on a cell phone, PDA, or laptop and they do other stuff too, you know like spreadsheets, which is where most people do their calculating these days anyway.
Calculators had their place but it was years ago before we had general purpose handhelds and laptops. Just because you are nostalgic or resist change doesn't really make much of a justification for a corprate business strategy.
This is a reply of a previous slashdot post but its such a classic:
Companies are like a tree full of monkeys.
If you are sitting in the top of the tree you look down and see nothing but smiling faces.
If you are sitting in the bottom you look up and see nothing but assholes about to shit on you.
If you are sitting in the top of the tree and you get knocked off, you float to the ground on a golden parachute and the landing is positively wonderful.
If you are sitting in the bottom of the tree and you get knocked off you break your ass when you hit the ground.
I'm inclined to say that at this point Wall Street, and the CxO's who feed it, have pretty much reached the end of their useful life. It is a good vehicle for raising capital and rewarding innovators like the founders of Google but in nearly every other respect its become such a corrupted system that it is overall officially counterproductive. Maybe its because an organization is no better than the people that make it up and the people who make up the U.S. corporate community today are just through and through rotten to the core. Wall Streets always had crooks and thieves, and many of them got real rich at it, but today it seems EVERYONE in the upper echelons of corporate America has gone bad.
A few data points:
- According to a recent speech by Eliot Spitzer executive compensation has risen nearly 10X in the last twenty or so years. Executives were making 20-40X what the average employee made in the 80's, Now they make 300-500X.
- EVERY company on Wall Street is playing a game where all they have to do is make quarterly projections that look good and then meet or exceed those projections. Worse Wall Street doesn't even use the company's estimate, and is using whisper numbers which are rumors of what the quarter will yield. Company after company has pretty good quarters but if they miss the whisper number by a penny the stock is hammered for no reason.
- Companies who are in fact doing terrible business and are a terrible investment can reap huge windfalls for their executives stock options merely by bending or outright breaking the rules to fabricate their quarterly results just to keep then in line with Wall Street projections. There is a huge incentive for executives to lie, cheat and steal and amazingly they are, on a huge scale, Enron and WorldCom just being two of the worst that ultimately got caught because their deciept was so massive the house of cards eventually collapsed. Microsoft has used shady accounting practices throughout its history to always make their numbers, though when you have a monopoly its pretty hard to miss them in the first place.
To my thinking there are two kinds of companies today, and two kinds of people running them.
- There is one kind that is out to make a quick killing and make their FU money. They will go public, and make their killing on Wall Street, and they could care less about the long term health of their company as long as it holds together and they can talk it up until they've cashed out.
- If you actually want to build a company that lasts, treats customers with respect, creates innovative products, and turns a tidy profit, but never yields any windfalls you are going to keep your company privately held and give Wall Street the finger. Unfortunately ever aspect of Capitalism, especially as practiced in the U.S., works against good people building good companies that last. These good people are just going to be labeled as suckers.
Why work hard to produce good products for a fair price when you can lie, cheat, steal, merge, layoff, pump, outsource, exort money from customers and otherwise screw everyone in sight and make 400 times more money doing it.
Here is another attempt clarify the concept and a point I made on the stock trading example in my first post.
For a online stock trade you login in to your brokers web site. At this point it works about the same as most low end ecommerce or web sites. HTTP transfers go to to a PHP app to setup the stock trade. If you are buying something from a low end web site when you hit the Buy Now button the PHP app goes straight to the database and logs the purchase and confirms it to the customer with more HTTP traffic.
For a stock trade however when you hit Buy Now button and your broker's server confirms the trade, chances are your stock purchase request goes in to a message queue either directly or indirectly which connects your broker to the exchange involved. All the brokers are watching all the buy and sell messages going in to the exchange and if one of them wants to sell you the stock at the price you want they send a message to the exchange with the buy request. Once their sell message is matched up to your buy message the brokerage has to send more messages, one to your broker, and one to the broker of the seller. A message also has to go to the broker of the company whose's stock was traded informing them of the change in shareholders so they can pay dividends and send the new shareholder a prospectus and shareholder notices.
The key point is once the HTTP transaction happens confirming your desire to make a trade you've started a process involving multiple messages, between multiple servers in multiple locations an all the messages have to get to each place with 100% reliablity, which mean no message gets lost even if comm links or servers go down or the system gets overloaded.
If the comm link goes down to your broker before you initiate the transaction there is no message queue in the loop and you just have to wait and retry the HTTP puts.
A low end web site is like this all the way through. If you don't have a message queue between your customer and your database and the database goes down you lose sales until its back up.
Needless to say say there are lots of message queue implementatio in the world in different languages and with varying levels of sophistication. I imagine J.P. Morgan is talking about one that has been battle tested in a high volume, very demanding environment where high reliability is mandatory. I think they are talking about one you could risk a multibillion dollar company on with a fair chance of not having it put you out of business if it goes down or loses vital data.
Message queues are more transient than a database and they are also more likely to be focused around comm links. A message queue is often used to initiate a database transaction but that is not necessarily so. You can have message queues without a database. You can have a database without a comm pipe or a message queue.
As the other reply to your post suggests, message queues have to deal with:
- comm links that go up and down, have variable data rates, and may at times not have the bandwidth to handle the message load - they have to deal with high variability in load and store messages on the sending end until the backlog clears. I imagine they need a substantial transient storage component to store a potentially large volume of messages if there is a long down time in the comm link or central server - they need to work the their administrators to warn them if part of the system like the comm link or central servers go down, or when load is starting to exceed capacity on a continuing basis, so they can upgrade the bottleneck before there is a catastrophic failure and lost data - they have to never lose a message
If for example the database is swamped and getting behind on processing the messages and putting them in the database, the message queue has to absorb the latency and queue the messages until the database server catches up. If the database goes down, the message queue has to absorb and log all the incoming messages until it comes up again and then resume sendin the backlog. The system as a whole has to gracefully handle the surge that comes when the system comes back on lines and potentially thousands of stores start sending their backlog all at once.
Message queues are the shock absorbers in high volume distributed systems. In a place like Walmart with 3500 some U.S. stores and 5000 some worldwide there is a really huge volume of message traffic, very high variability in load and a requirement for 100% uptime and 0% data loss. Same goes for stock exchanges, banks and brokers.
In a documentary I saw on Walmart their system tells them so much about buying patterns in their stores that they can, without looking at weather reports, tell which of their stores are in the predicted path of a hurricane because there is a surge in buying of pop tarts among other things. They in turn have to insure there is surge in inventory resupply to get more pop tarts to their stores in time for people to buy them before the hurricane hits, but avoid sending their trucks in to the actual hurricane.
The efficiencies you get in retailing with computerization at the level Walmart does it would have been unheard of 20-30 years ago. It is one of many reasons they can destroy their competition and have such low prices. Their inventory control is an incredibly well oiled machine, they are almost never out of stock or over stocked and really are the definition of "just in time".
I imagine JP Morgan developed their message queue to send stock or other financial transactions from one place to another, for example from customer, to broker, to exchange and back again. I imagine if you've bought stocks online it was all done through message queue transactions and its unlikely there was ever a human in the loop. If that is the context the environment they are using it in it has to both be extremely reliable, since large quantities of money are involved, and it has to handle potentially very large and variable loads.
Another example would be Walmart. Everytime you buy something in one of their stores the cash register is sending message is sent to a gigantic computer system in Arkansas which tracks everything sold. Every distribution center also sends messages when trucks arrive with new inventory or trucks leave for a store to restock a store that is running low on stuff, and the message(s) describe all the inventory taken off of or put on the truck. If they ever manage to RFID tag everything as is their desire then RFID tag readers will generate most of the messages automaticly when things move and there will be even fewer people in the loop.
Walmart's messaging system allows them to know exactly what inventory is in every store(aside from shoplifting), every distribution center and every in transit truck. When a store gets low on something I imagine its nearly automatic for a distribution center to put the needed items on a truck and restock the store with minimal human intervention.
Walmart's system also allows all of their suppliers to track, on a store by store basis, and near real-time, how their products are selling in every store so they know whats selling, whats not and how much of which products they will need to produce and have ready to deliver to Walmart, just in time.
If you want to run a very high volume, high profit distributed business, with very high efficiency chances are you will have some very fast, high volume, reliable, and powerful message queues in the heart of it.
You are confused. Americans are buying that debt now. Thats where ALL of the rather large Social Security surplus is going. That was my point. Privatizing Socialist Security is going to dramaticly reduce the amount of money going from payroll taxes in to government debt and someone is going to have to make up the new shortfall.
The President's plan is going to move a significant percentage, if not all of the payroll taxes going to private accounts, that moves the money from subsidizing government debt to subsidizing corprate debt and equity. It remains to be seen what kind of investment vehicles they mandate for private accounts but its almost a given that stocks are going to be the preferred high return vehicle, that is going to be money going to corporations not government debt subsidy. Bush said the accounts may include bonds too so its possible those might be government bonds, but they could just as easily be corporate bonds. I'm at a loss as to why Social Security can't get the same return as private accounts if they are just going in to T bills so I really doubt much money in private accounts will go to government debt. Its an issue I need to study but I assume the government is screwing people on Social Security investment. They should at a minimum be putting out money in long term T bills which I think would yield substantially better returns than the 1-2% return they keep quoting for Social Security so I assume they are intentionally screwing working by giving them an artificially low return, because they want the money to spend or to fund tax cuts.
The privatization plan almost certainly will lead to a surge in stock prices because there will be a big influx in new money going in to the stock market, and maybe that will be a boon the economy. It might also be a boon to unscrupulous banks and investment companies who will let private account money run up the stocks they own, dump them and let the private accounts take the losses.
But it is pretty much inevitable that there will be one less big buyer for government debt when the Social Security surplus dissapears. It was going to disappear by 2018 anyway but I think Bush and Co. are going to wipe it out much sooner than that and put even more pressure on financing the deficits.
Slashdot Mirror
"Russia is a minor partner in the ISS"
That's silly American self centeredness. You apparently glossed over the part in my previous post where I said the Russians have built enough modules in the ISS that if they were to undock them from the U.S. parts they would still have a fully functional space station. Without the Russian built modules the U.S. has nothing.
They would have to go back to rockets for attitude control, since the gyro based system is U.S. built but they could live with that. There could be an ownership dispute over one of the Russian built modules, because NASA paid for it through Boeing but its a Russian design and Russian built.
The other obvious thing you gloss over is that since the Columbia disaster the Russians have carried 100% of the burden, at their expense to change crews and resupply the station.
Minor partner indeed. The only way you could cubbyhole them as minor is if you are counting the massive sums of money the U.S. has squandered on the ISS over the last 30 years, but that counts for nothing other than to prove how pathetic the U.S. manned space program and politics are.
"yet we're totally committed to a huge presence in space"
About 2010 when the shuttle is retired the U.S. will have NO manned presence in space unless its at the good will of the Russians. The U.S. will have no manned launch vehicle until the CEV in 2014 at the earliest. Committed indeed.
If there wasn't anything worth rebutting how come you are wasting so much time REBUTTING it, badly.
I think its a pretty legitimate question what the motives of Battlestar Galatica's producers are in mixing so much 9/11 exploitation in to their series. Since according to one post they have produced a documentary for school kids on the use of "fear and propaganda" in the series it sure sounds like they are thinking about the "fear and propganda" angle in producing it.
If you aren't interested in discussing the topic why are you?
Needless to say not having seen these episodes I'm at a disadvantage.
I didn't really start this thread talking about the religious angle anyway. The problem I've had it with it so far in the early episodes was purely the series fixation on terrorism, paranoia and humanity being threatened, and things like hijacked spaceships trying to crash in to the fleet that are is a fairly blatant exploitation of 9/11.
Most religions have a suffering component, Islam included. Shia muslims self flaggelate themselves with knives and chains as part of annual rituals, to the point that their backs are a bloody pulp.
Maybe because the only religion you seem to know is Christianity you are reading everything in Christian terms.
The tinfoil hat BS is exceptionally lame everytime someone uses it and its used way to often. If you can't make a coherent arguement to the contrary I guess its a lot easier to just trot it out and pretend like somehow it proves the post you're use it on is crazy and you are somehow superior for having trotted it out. It doesn't. Its pointless waste of bandwidth because it doesn't say anything substantive.
That is so cool. Thanks for PROVING what I suspected. Propaganda is exactly what they are doing, they are just being kind of blatant about it.
When you have a hijacked space ship about to crash in to the fleet in one of the opening episodes its pretty obvious they are exploiting 9/11.
OK so its nice of them to do a documentary openly admitting they are doing "fear" and "propaganda" and TARGETING school children. If they are making captive school kids watch this stuff that makes it even MORE scary.
"The religious allegory would likely make most of the US Christian right livid: monotheistic robots who believe in a forgiving single God are the ones who attacked and wiped out a largely lapsed, but fundamentally polytheistic pagan culture"
I haven't seen much of the religion episodes yet, I think the UK has seen more of it than the U.S.
If thats they way they play the religion angle I could see how that is awkward but just based on your description I'm not sure I'd spin the Cylons as the Christians. Islam is monotheistic too and a key component of their Jihad is to wipe out "paganistic", immoral westerners. Are you sure you aren't confusing the Cylon religion with Christianity when in fact its Islam. Down the road you could just as easily see all the pagan humans, see the light, find religion and end up with a Christian versus Cylon(Islam) crusade.
"where everything done by the civilian leadership or military command was portrayed as incontrovertably good"
Didn't say "civilian leadership or military command", I was refering to the classic fighter jocks RULE mentality that pervades the show.
Its not very aggressive considering its going to be a tin can that probably wont even be close to what a manned vehicle would require and its probably launching on existing boosters, variants of Titan, Delta or Atlas. Chances are they are going to be underpowered for doing much past LEO. They sure aren't a Saturn V or the kind of heavy lifter you could get out of the Shuttle stack if you throw away the Shuttle and replace it with a big cargo module.
Me personally I'd like to see them just launch a shuttle external tank in to LEO and get it there half full of Hydrogen and Oxygen, hang a couple nozzles and a credit card swiper on it and turn it in to a gas station in space. Then put a simple, reusable space tug up there, a couple engines, two tanks and frame, that refuels in space and round trips to the moon and the L points on a weekly basis and NEVER reenters the atmosphere.
The CEV is also not very aggressive considering it will be another 6 years before it does anything even remotely useful assuming it isn't axed before then. Whats wrong with that picture, 3+ years to first flight and 9+ until a flight that actually does something. It stinks.
"When NASA gets the kind of funding it did during the 60's "
If the Russian Space Agency gets the kind of funding NASA is getting today they will do some wonderful things. An obvious example is they have already settled on one design and are bending metal on a full scale mockup. Don't think Boeing or Lockheed are past the computer generated fantasy stage.
Half of the money and time going in to the CEV flyoff is probably throw away unless they use parts of both designs which almost never happens.
I hate to break it to you but you are NEVER going to throw enough money at anything to keep NASA, Boeing and Lockheed happy. The more money you throw the more they will devour. ISS, the B-2 and the F-22 have all proven then. In the Apollo era there were lots of idealists in the space business, now there are a lot of bureaucrats building empires, and contractors trying to pad their bottom lines.
A lean budget probably ends up being faster and more efficient since it keeps the project from being a towering pile of bureaucracy and waste. Kelly Johnson and Burt Rutan both succeed by ruthlessly keeping the number of people working on the project to the essential minimum. Unfortunately Lockheed and Boeing will probably just produce and underfunded towering pile of bureaucracy, just based on track record.
Forgot to add "The Passion" is a "FRIGGING MOVIE" and look what kind of vehicle the religious right has turned it in to force feed Christianity to every one.
"Read my post....it's a FRIGGIN TV SHOW! Put your damn politics away and watch the show."
Get a clue, the best propaganda is a "FRIGGING TV SHOW". If it was a political lecture no one would watch it.
First you say its a "FRIGGIN TV SHOW" and then you start admitting that in fact is it taking all its story lines from current events, mixing in right wing political slant, and putting in them in a semi entertaining format so people left, right and naive will drink it in.
I think its about time to start screaming "THE MEDIA HAS A RIGHT WING BIAS". Maybe if we start screaming that OVER and OVER again for the next ten years we will manage to swing it back to the center or left. Its a strategy thats worked great for the right.
I think the parent was mostly complaining that it was vacuous because it was short on science and creative fiction. That kind of meshes with my post. As nearly as I can tell the people in Rupert's right wing empire started thinking right after 9/11 that they needed to make a series to exploit 9/11. They needed a series where civilization was fighting for its survival against a relentless, evil enemy. Battlestar Galactica no doubt sprung in to someones head.
Then they had writers go to town mixing in 9/11 exploitation, terrorism, nukes, pro military hero worship, and paranoia. I'd be real curious if planning for this series started about two weeks after 9/11.
Not sure, have they done chemical and biological weapons yet? They've had at least two episodes with nukes in the mix just to be even more on topic today. They thought there was a nuke in the hijacked ship they destroyed, (just like the dilemna we face of shooting down a hijacked airliner today), how close is that to just ripping of Fox News to write your scripts. Another episode that was on in the last week had the psycho, Cylon controlled scientist asking for a nuke to make a phony cylon detector so we can no doubt look forward to more WMD obsession in episodes to come.
Battlestar Galactica is vacuous as far as being science fiction. Is is bulging at the seems with propaganda, politics and now apparently religion. I hope as they do religion they aren't to blatant about Christian good, Cylon(Islam) evil.
" NASA is looking at commercial options for resupply of the International Space Station."
:) Or more realisticly the Russians can just undock the modules they built and control from the NASA tidbits and let them burn up. Their modules are a full, self contained space station, a Mir2 if you will and they don't actually require the American parts.
I think the Russians are way ahead of NASA on both keeping the ISS going, and on the CEV.
The Russians are going to be showing a full scale model of their Kliper reusable capsule at the Paris air show this June.
This is their planned replacement for the venerable Soyuz. It will carry 6 astronauts or 700 kilos of cargo. The article sounds like they are a little cagey on the schedule, it just says a few years. I'll bet you they have a manned launch about 5 years sooner than the CEV.
If they hang one of these on the ISS as an emergency vehicle they will enable bringing the ISS up to nearly its planned manning level, and might actually allow people to do research on the thing, instead of spending all their time maintaining as the 2-3 man crews have been doing.
Kind of looks to me like Russia is planning to go it alone when the U.S. gives up on the ISS and the shuttle. The other source of friction is that since Russia is trading with Iran and the U.S. has embargoed Iran NASA is officially forbidden from having any financial relationship with the Russian Space agency. I wonder if they will have to paint a white line down the middle of the ISS and have a U.S. half and a Russian half
For comparison to Kliper, the CEV is going to have Lockheed and Boeing launched an unmanned, half baked prototype in 2008, pick a winner between the two and wont have a manned launch, probably just to LEO, before 2014 at the earliest.
By contrast NASA went from a nearly standing start to putting a man on the moon in way less than 10 years in the '60's when it had never been done before. In summary, NASA, Boeing and Lockheed are today, officially pathetic. As nearly as I can tell the CEV, and the Bush Moon/Mars initiative is mostly just an excuse to pump money in to the pockets of Boeing and Lockheed and put the milestones that count so far out there it will be a miracle if they program isn't killed before they actually have to do anything serious for the subsidies.
I'm confused. The U.S. is spending like $8 billion dollars a year on Missile Defense and I hear it was just declared operational. That must make all these threats from North Korea meaningless, right?
Oh wait, I forgot, the Bush administration is declaring the system operational even though the last test failed, and the didn't interceptor didn't even launch, in fact several of the very few carefully controlled tests have failed miserably. In the last test the busses to the control system overloaded and it started dropping messages. Their fix was to chang the threshold so the missile can overload and drop data and it just wont count as a fualt any more. I really want a missile with an overloaded control system flying around.
And, of course, a nation launching an attack on the U.S. can throw some relatively cheap missiles without nukes in them at the defense first and swamp it, then send in the nukes, and maybe put in decoys next to the real warheads, or do as the Russians are now doing and build warheads that can manuever and dodge the kill vehicle to defeat it. Building Maginot Lines, which is what Bushes missile defense, was pretty much discredited when the Germans just rolled around it in to France in World War II.
And of course if you are rogue nation with nukes you can probably just smuggle one in to the U.S. on a tramp steamer, submarine or along American's massively porous borders. There are coyotes and drug smugglers that can probably smuggle anything in to the U.S. for the right price.
Somebody needs to hit the White House with a clue stick and point out to them that if they are going to rely on a defense system like this, and squander all this money on it, they at least need to con the world in to thinking that it works so its a real deterant. If it fails test after test and you make it operational anyway your enemies are just going to laugh at it and you.
Not sure North Korea even has any nukes in the first place. Until they light one off for the world to see, it could just as easily be bluffing because they know the one and only way to discourage the Bush administration from invading you, for no particular reason, is to say you have nukes. If you have problems actually developing a real nuke, just say you do and no one can prove you wrong. Its the flip side of Iraq, Bush said Iraq did have WMD's and it was impossible for Iraq to prove they didn't. North Korea can say they have WMD's and no one can prove they don't, until they decide to actually set one off and prove the do.
The Bush administration has done a really great job of giving an incentive to every nation we don't like to rush to develop or acquire nukes, or failing that just claim they already have them.
Technicly North Korea is on China's southern border though that part of their border is in the north end of their territory
You hit the nail on the head. Its thinly veiled post 9/11 propaganda. I believe Sky One is one of the producers which is a part of Rupert Murdoch's Fox right wing empires which makes this fact not particularly surprising.
... errr ... Cylons.
Its main objectives are:
- Use Cylon's as bad stand in for Al Qaeda. Humanity and our very way of life are danger, be afraid!!!!! The script is practicly out of the Republican convention, our children and grandchildren will surely die if you don't keep us in power.
- In the episode a couple of days ago they didn't even use Cylons, they had an actual "terrorist" taking over the prison ship, psycho's shooting hostages and gratuitous lines about "Freedom and Democracy"
- And of course there was the hijacked space ship trying to ram the fleet which isn't even thinly veiled 9/11 exploitation, its blatant
- Its non stop paranoid, the cyclons(Muslims) are among us and we can't tell, suspect everyone, fear everyone!!!!!
- Its a massive hero worship of the military and pilots as heroes, which you can forgive because thats been a mainstay of SciFi forever. It is designed to instill in kids the desire to be a pilot and defend civilization from those nasty Muslims
All in all there is enough 9/11 obsession and paranoia in the real world, don't really need it completing taking over supposed entertainment and fiction. You have to wonder how much its going to bend the heads of naive kids and geeks, who don't recognize it for what it is. If you recall during the Reagan years, propaganda posing as entertainment took the form of "Red Dawn". Its pretty much the same thing just more modern and a little more thinly veiled. They clevery hijacked an old series so they can insist its not post 9/11 obsession but that is still what it is.
I knew this was what it was before I'd even seen it because Twirlip of the Mists was singing praises of it precisely because of the post 9/11 paranoia, our very way of life is threatened, and you wont find anyone on slashdot who is more obsessed with 9/11, our very way of life being threatened and paranoid delusion.
Just curious what you base your assertion on, since I doubt you have a clue what their position really is on the subject.
It would seem to me like stem cell based therapies are an exceptionally poor fit for drug companies, since I don't think they are going to be mass producing any drugs using stem cells anytime soon. I almost wish they would just to see how ballistic you and your fellow pro life fanatics would go if Eli Lily or Pfizer were to start grinding up embryos from abortions to mass produce some stem cell based miracle drug.
The techniques that seem most likely initially would probably be a better fit for research hospitals which will use stems cells implants to treat things like Parkinson's or to repair spinal cord injuries. They are medical procedures, probably involving surgery, not drugs.
You can be sure that the first person or institution who does use embryonic stem cells to treat humans is going to be pummeled by the religious right who've decided that they run this country, and can dictate their morality to everyone else, and thanks to the New Republican party pretty much can. Any U.S. institution which does attempt an embryonic stem cell treatment will almost certainly regret it and I doubt the business people who run it will even allow it due to the probable backlash.
Its likely that this field will be added to a growing list where the breakthroughs happen outside the U.S. because fundementalist Christians are pushing the U.S. back in to the Dark Ages.
"The administration is spending a lot of money on scientific research, specifically the trips to the moon and mars."
The Bush administration is spending next to nothing in going to the Moon and in reality nothing at all on going to Mars. When he proposed the new initiative he said NASA would get a 5% increase in spending in the 2006 budget, they are getting 2.5% in the document released this week.
CEV funding is up to $1 billion in the 2006 budget from $500 million this year, and much of that money is probably going to be split between Boeing and Lockheed in duplicated effort so you get half as much as you would if there were one team.
By comparison missile defense gets something like $8 billion a year. Tsunami aid is going to see about as much money as CEV. The War in Iraq spends a billion dollars in a few days. No don't con anyone in to think Bush is a champion of the sciences or space explanation. He is throwing crumbs at it, most probably as payoffs to Boeing and Lockheed more than any interest in space exploration.
Project Prometheus is cancelled in the 2006 budget, which may or may not be a good thing, it is bad if you are a fan of nuclear propulsion.
So the only thing new Bush is funding while he is actually in office are the two unmanned prototype CEV launches presumably in to LEO by Boeing and Lockheed in 2008 at the end of his term if they don't slip. They are likely to be exceptionally lame tin cans sitting on top of existing expendable launchers. Its unlikely there will be anything new or leading edge about them. Boeing is pushing its Titan Heavy Lifter apparently and it ain't no Saturn V. In 2008, assuming one or both prototypes actually work they pick a winner and then there are no launches for another 6 years, if they stay on schedule, so there MAY be a manned CEV in 2014, 6 years after Bush is out of office. Boeing and Lockheed are going to make a lot of money for doing relatively little on CEV for a long time.
By contrast the Russian Space Agency is taking a full scale model of their Kliper reusable capsule to the Paris Air show in June. It will carry 6 astronauts to the ISS or possibly the moon. There schedule is vague, "a few years" but it would be really hard for it to take longer than the ridiculously slow CEV schedule. In the second race to the Moon by money is on Russia to win this time. It appears a near certainty that they are going to achieve something NASA has completely failed to do and get the ISS up to six people so they can do some science instead of just barely keeping up on maintainance. With Kliper it also appears likely they will be ready to go it alone resupplying the ISS after NASA abandons it and the shuttle.
NASA went from Kennedy's speech, and a nearly standing start to the moon in much less than 10 years. This time around it appears it will take 10 years just to get the first manned capsule in to LEO and just get back to where we were around 1965, 50 years later.
No, its OK for executives to be extravagant. The only thing that is not OK is for the company's stock price to be going down relative to its peers.
Carly's main mistake was a disasterous merger with Compaq, that and, like I said, if you've ever heard babble about the centerpiece of HP's strategy, "Adaptive Enterprise" you realize she has no clue what she's talking about. Its OK to have a clueless MBA running a tech company but there needs to be someone directly beneath her who has a clue about technology and apparently there are no such people in HP's senior management, or if they are they had no influence on Carly.
If you have Windows desktops switch everyone you can to Linux, ideally thin clients. You're probably screwed here if you have tons of internal apps that are using ActiveX plugins and are totally tied to IE. If thats the case fire everyone who made you business dependent on this mess and divert their salaries in to getting rid of it.
The down side is if you no longer have all your IT people running from desk to desk repairing hosed and infected Windows desktops your CIO will probably be able to can half the IT staff.
If telecomm is in your IT department get an Asterisk PBX especially if you are paying a fortune for your PBX from places like Avaya or you have multiple offices and tons of long distance bills.
http://www.asterisk.org/
If you have broadband connections to your other offices move everyone to VoIP. Telecommunications is usually a massive IT expense, and its money going out of the company, and not in to employees wages so its less plan than slashing the IT staff.
"Does it always have to be cutting costs in IT? How about, for once, in other departments?"
This is hitting the nail on the head and grabbing the third rail at the same time. Next time a company hits a major round of belt tightening suggest they should start cutting in the executive suite and set an example. Of course you will probably be fired at that point.
A short list:
- Executive salaries
- Options
- Optional travel, especially for party trips
- perks
As best I recall for example, Carly Fiorina had a private fleet of jets to fly herself and senior executives around, I'm thinking she should try coach and maybe it would have taken some of the edge off her arrogant, superior attitude. Maybe she would have had a chance to sit next to the little people and hear what they think of her printers and computers. If she got real lucky she might have sat next to someone who had heard her babble about "Adaptive Enterprise" and who could have politely explained to her how she sounded like a clueless MBA babbling buzzwords every time she tried, and failed to explain it. I can see a jet for Warrent Buffett, Bill Gates or Jim Clark. Carly having a private jet to fly her around to babble was just making a net negative faster and more efficient.
As I also recall she had a personal assistant who in particular specialized in making sure her hair, jewelry and wardrobe were just so, and that she was well fed. Me thinks a senior executive should be able to dress and feed themselves or they shouldn't be running a giant company.
EVERY tech company I've worked for has squandered massive sums on travel, though it might have been reined in some lately. Instead of staying at 5 star hotels try having your salesforce and execs stay in an economy hotel/motel, especially if they aren't entertaining potential customers or partners at their hotel. If they do need that impressing them with their style in travel accommodations is about as likely to impress them with how much money you are wasting and that that money will be coming out of their pockets if they buy your product.
I once went to a convention, rooms were hard to come by but we did have reservations near the convention center. The company President's executive assistance decided the hotel wasn't up to the company's 5 star standards so cancelled everyone's reservations at the last minute and everyone got moved to a worse hotel a 40 minute drive from the convention turned the whole thing in to a nightmare. She didn't understand what was wrong with her 5 star standard in travel accommodations.
I'm no fan of PDA's or all in one cell phones. I would and do use a laptop for everything. If its simple I use kcalc and if its involved or I want to save the calculation for posterity I'd use a spreadsheet.
Not sure I can see any reason to be building calculators in this day and age. Lots of people still do so its a crowded market and the margins are probably terrible. Besides which you can write a software calculator and put it on a cell phone, PDA, or laptop and they do other stuff too, you know like spreadsheets, which is where most people do their calculating these days anyway.
Calculators had their place but it was years ago before we had general purpose handhelds and laptops. Just because you are nostalgic or resist change doesn't really make much of a justification for a corprate business strategy.
This is a reply of a previous slashdot post but its such a classic:
Companies are like a tree full of monkeys.
If you are sitting in the top of the tree you look down and see nothing but smiling faces.
If you are sitting in the bottom you look up and see nothing but assholes about to shit on you.
If you are sitting in the top of the tree and you get knocked off, you float to the ground on a golden parachute and the landing is positively wonderful.
If you are sitting in the bottom of the tree and you get knocked off you break your ass when you hit the ground.
I'm inclined to say that at this point Wall Street, and the CxO's who feed it, have pretty much reached the end of their useful life. It is a good vehicle for raising capital and rewarding innovators like the founders of Google but in nearly every other respect its become such a corrupted system that it is overall officially counterproductive. Maybe its because an organization is no better than the people that make it up and the people who make up the U.S. corporate community today are just through and through rotten to the core. Wall Streets always had crooks and thieves, and many of them got real rich at it, but today it seems EVERYONE in the upper echelons of corporate America has gone bad.
A few data points:
- According to a recent speech by Eliot Spitzer executive compensation has risen nearly 10X in the last twenty or so years. Executives were making 20-40X what the average employee made in the 80's, Now they make 300-500X.
- EVERY company on Wall Street is playing a game where all they have to do is make quarterly projections that look good and then meet or exceed those projections. Worse Wall Street doesn't even use the company's estimate, and is using whisper numbers which are rumors of what the quarter will yield. Company after company has pretty good quarters but if they miss the whisper number by a penny the stock is hammered for no reason.
- Companies who are in fact doing terrible business and are a terrible investment can reap huge windfalls for their executives stock options merely by bending or outright breaking the rules to fabricate their quarterly results just to keep then in line with Wall Street projections. There is a huge incentive for executives to lie, cheat and steal and amazingly they are, on a huge scale, Enron and WorldCom just being two of the worst that ultimately got caught because their deciept was so massive the house of cards eventually collapsed. Microsoft has used shady accounting practices throughout its history to always make their numbers, though when you have a monopoly its pretty hard to miss them in the first place.
To my thinking there are two kinds of companies today, and two kinds of people running them.
- There is one kind that is out to make a quick killing and make their FU money. They will go public, and make their killing on Wall Street, and they could care less about the long term health of their company as long as it holds together and they can talk it up until they've cashed out.
- If you actually want to build a company that lasts, treats customers with respect, creates innovative products, and turns a tidy profit, but never yields any windfalls you are going to keep your company privately held and give Wall Street the finger. Unfortunately ever aspect of Capitalism, especially as practiced in the U.S., works against good people building good companies that last. These good people are just going to be labeled as suckers.
Why work hard to produce good products for a fair price when you can lie, cheat, steal, merge, layoff, pump, outsource, exort money from customers and otherwise screw everyone in sight and make 400 times more money doing it.
Here is another attempt clarify the concept and a point I made on the stock trading example in my first post.
For a online stock trade you login in to your brokers web site. At this point it works about the same as most low end ecommerce or web sites. HTTP transfers go to to a PHP app to setup the stock trade. If you are buying something from a low end web site when you hit the Buy Now button the PHP app goes straight to the database and logs the purchase and confirms it to the customer with more HTTP traffic.
For a stock trade however when you hit Buy Now button and your broker's server confirms the trade, chances are your stock purchase request goes in to a message queue either directly or indirectly which connects your broker to the exchange involved. All the brokers are watching all the buy and sell messages going in to the exchange and if one of them wants to sell you the stock at the price you want they send a message to the exchange with the buy request. Once their sell message is matched up to your buy message the brokerage has to send more messages, one to your broker, and one to the broker of the seller. A message also has to go to the broker of the company whose's stock was traded informing them of the change in shareholders so they can pay dividends and send the new shareholder a prospectus and shareholder notices.
The key point is once the HTTP transaction happens confirming your desire to make a trade you've started a process involving multiple messages, between multiple servers in multiple locations an all the messages have to get to each place with 100% reliablity, which mean no message gets lost even if comm links or servers go down or the system gets overloaded.
If the comm link goes down to your broker before you initiate the transaction there is no message queue in the loop and you just have to wait and retry the HTTP puts.
A low end web site is like this all the way through. If you don't have a message queue between your customer and your database and the database goes down you lose sales until its back up.
Needless to say say there are lots of message queue implementatio in the world in different languages and with varying levels of sophistication. I imagine J.P. Morgan is talking about one that has been battle tested in a high volume, very demanding environment where high reliability is mandatory. I think they are talking about one you could risk a multibillion dollar company on with a fair chance of not having it put you out of business if it goes down or loses vital data.
Message queues are more transient than a database and they are also more likely to be focused around comm links. A message queue is often used to initiate a database transaction but that is not necessarily so. You can have message queues without a database. You can have a database without a comm pipe or a message queue.
As the other reply to your post suggests, message queues have to deal with:
- comm links that go up and down, have variable data rates, and may at times not have the bandwidth to handle the message load
- they have to deal with high variability in load and store messages on the sending end until the backlog clears. I imagine they need a substantial transient storage component to store a potentially large volume of messages if there is a long down time in the comm link or central server
- they need to work the their administrators to warn them if part of the system like the comm link or central servers go down, or when load is starting to exceed capacity on a continuing basis, so they can upgrade the bottleneck before there is a catastrophic failure and lost data
- they have to never lose a message
If for example the database is swamped and getting behind on processing the messages and putting them in the database, the message queue has to absorb the latency and queue the messages until the database server catches up. If the database goes down, the message queue has to absorb and log all the incoming messages until it comes up again and then resume sendin the backlog. The system as a whole has to gracefully handle the surge that comes when the system comes back on lines and potentially thousands of stores start sending their backlog all at once.
Message queues are the shock absorbers in high volume distributed systems. In a place like Walmart with 3500 some U.S. stores and 5000 some worldwide there is a really huge volume of message traffic, very high variability in load and a requirement for 100% uptime and 0% data loss. Same goes for stock exchanges, banks and brokers.
In a documentary I saw on Walmart their system tells them so much about buying patterns in their stores that they can, without looking at weather reports, tell which of their stores are in the predicted path of a hurricane because there is a surge in buying of pop tarts among other things. They in turn have to insure there is surge in inventory resupply to get more pop tarts to their stores in time for people to buy them before the hurricane hits, but avoid sending their trucks in to the actual hurricane.
The efficiencies you get in retailing with computerization at the level Walmart does it would have been unheard of 20-30 years ago. It is one of many reasons they can destroy their competition and have such low prices. Their inventory control is an incredibly well oiled machine, they are almost never out of stock or over stocked and really are the definition of "just in time".
I imagine JP Morgan developed their message queue to send stock or other financial transactions from one place to another, for example from customer, to broker, to exchange and back again. I imagine if you've bought stocks online it was all done through message queue transactions and its unlikely there was ever a human in the loop. If that is the context the environment they are using it in it has to both be extremely reliable, since large quantities of money are involved, and it has to handle potentially very large and variable loads.
Another example would be Walmart. Everytime you buy something in one of their stores the cash register is sending message is sent to a gigantic computer system in Arkansas which tracks everything sold. Every distribution center also sends messages when trucks arrive with new inventory or trucks leave for a store to restock a store that is running low on stuff, and the message(s) describe all the inventory taken off of or put on the truck. If they ever manage to RFID tag everything as is their desire then RFID tag readers will generate most of the messages automaticly when things move and there will be even fewer people in the loop.
Walmart's messaging system allows them to know exactly what inventory is in every store(aside from shoplifting), every distribution center and every in transit truck. When a store gets low on something I imagine its nearly automatic for a distribution center to put the needed items on a truck and restock the store with minimal human intervention.
Walmart's system also allows all of their suppliers to track, on a store by store basis, and near real-time, how their products are selling in every store so they know whats selling, whats not and how much of which products they will need to produce and have ready to deliver to Walmart, just in time.
If you want to run a very high volume, high profit distributed business, with very high efficiency chances are you will have some very fast, high volume, reliable, and powerful message queues in the heart of it.
You are confused. Americans are buying that debt now. Thats where ALL of the rather large Social Security surplus is going. That was my point. Privatizing Socialist Security is going to dramaticly reduce the amount of money going from payroll taxes in to government debt and someone is going to have to make up the new shortfall.
The President's plan is going to move a significant percentage, if not all of the payroll taxes going to private accounts, that moves the money from subsidizing government debt to subsidizing corprate debt and equity. It remains to be seen what kind of investment vehicles they mandate for private accounts but its almost a given that stocks are going to be the preferred high return vehicle, that is going to be money going to corporations not government debt subsidy. Bush said the accounts may include bonds too so its possible those might be government bonds, but they could just as easily be corporate bonds. I'm at a loss as to why Social Security can't get the same return as private accounts if they are just going in to T bills so I really doubt much money in private accounts will go to government debt. Its an issue I need to study but I assume the government is screwing people on Social Security investment. They should at a minimum be putting out money in long term T bills which I think would yield substantially better returns than the 1-2% return they keep quoting for Social Security so I assume they are intentionally screwing working by giving them an artificially low return, because they want the money to spend or to fund tax cuts.
The privatization plan almost certainly will lead to a surge in stock prices because there will be a big influx in new money going in to the stock market, and maybe that will be a boon the economy. It might also be a boon to unscrupulous banks and investment companies who will let private account money run up the stocks they own, dump them and let the private accounts take the losses.
But it is pretty much inevitable that there will be one less big buyer for government debt when the Social Security surplus dissapears. It was going to disappear by 2018 anyway but I think Bush and Co. are going to wipe it out much sooner than that and put even more pressure on financing the deficits.