The story I heard is that Commodore paid a one-time fee to use Microsoft Basic (Version 2.0) essentially forever with no further payments to Microsoft. This was very early in the development of the industry and Bill got what he thought was big bucks for the transaction. Turns out that Commodore got a huge bargain compared to what Microsoft was later able to charge everybody else (on a per computer sold basis). That was a hunk of the reason computers like the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 could be considerably cheaper than other computers of the era. Unfortunately it also made it difficult for Commodore to come up with improved versions of Basic without giving up that cost advantage.
Bottom line: Jack Tramiel (then head of Commodore) was one of the few people in the computer industry to outsnooker Bill Gates on a business deal, and Vic-20/Commodore 64 owners used Microsoft Basic while contributing essentially nothing to the Microsoft empire.
Prediction $15 barrel oil in 5 years
on
Out of Gas
·
· Score: 1
This discussion is remarkably like the ones I remember from the late 70s. Essentially industrial civilization had ten to twenty years to go before oil ran out and most of us starved, according to very authoritative sources back then. Didn't happen then, and it probably won't in my lifetime or yours.
The tricky thing about energy is that both supply and demand are very inelastic (they don't respond much to price increases) in the short term, but very elastic in the mid-to-long term. As a result, energy supply cycles between gluts and shortages.
How does that work? Let's take gasoline for example: The price of gas goes way up. Demand initially goes down a little as people do less unnecessary driving, but it doesn't go down much. People figure it's just another blip and they keep doing what they're doing. If prices stay higher though, people buy Metros and Hybrids instead of SUVs. As that change works through the fleet of vehicles, demand drops more and more. If that isn't enough to cause prices to stabilize, in the longer term people react to the higher prices by taking lower-paying jobs closer to home because the high gas prices cancel out the higher wages. Those drops in demand take a while but when they come they come with a vengeance, and they don't go away for quite a while--it takes a while for people to start buying gas guzzlers again, and then it takes a while for the new cars to replace the existing fleet.
Supply reacts the same way. Want to find investors in a tar sands oil extraction process that will only pay back their initial investment if oil is at $40 a barrel? Won't get many takers when oil is at $30 a barrel. Won't get many takers when oil spikes to $40 a barrel and then drops to $35 in a month or two. If oil goes to $45 and looks like it's going to stay there, you're going to get a lot of investment. Once that initial investment gets made though, the supply from tar sands may well keep coming. The initial investment's already been made now, so they'll keep cranking oil out until they start losing money on every barrel as opposed to just not making back their initial investment.
The example of tar sands is just one of many possiblities for increased supply. Even before the recent runup, solar cell manufacturers were pushing aggressively into market niches that formerly used gas-fire generators. The solar cell industry has grown 25% or more per year for a lot of year. It's still minuscule compared to the oil industry, but if shortages push energy costs higher, that makes rapidly expanding solar cell production capacity more profitable, and that pushes per unit costs of the cells down in and of itself. Those bigger, better solar cell plants don't go away when the price of energy drops a little. They may not even go away when the price of energy drops a lot because the companies that own them have already made the capital investment and have presumably put some of their profits during the high-price time into increased R&D which should reduce cost of production.
The bottom line is that a reasonably prolonged (two to four years) period of high energy prices results in reduced energy demand and additional supply for the next five to ten years, with some of the impact continuing beyond ten years. That's why the price of oil dropped so far and so fast in the 80s, and why it will drop again after a few years if the price rises much further and stays there long enough for people to decide they have to adapt.
I actually think an X-Prize for a Hubble rescue mission has potential. (enough that I'm delurking here for the first time after several months of lurking) The big problems would be (a) Getting NASA to back off and let someone else come to the rescue (big blow to the prestige), and (b) Liability. If someone tried to do a rescue and failed and then Hubble came down and damaged something, the lawyers would have a field day--even though it was coming down anyway.
We might jump through those hoops with enough political pressure and creative insurance arrangements, but who would put up the X-Prize? Pass the hat among space enthusiasts? Maybe make exclusive use of Hubble the prize? That would be worth some bucks. I don't know if it would pay for the mission though. I know: Some news network sets up the prize in exchange for exclusive rights to footage from the rescue and maybe the leadin to it. I could see Fox News or MSNBC doing that. Better yet: the Science Fiction channel puts up the prize for the same rights, plus maybe resale rights to a certain percentage of time on the telescope. Ah--maybe do an extra special Junkyard Wars. (Okay I'm not serious about that one) A mission would probably be more expensive than the average TV series, but I'm guessing that a rescue effort wouldn't be too awfully much bigger budget than some of the bigger budget movies--somewhere between $100 million and $500 million as an order of magnitude guess. If a Cable Network put up the money, they could do a series of little blurbs playing up the race between the X-prize contestants and the race against time.
Actually, I like the pure X-prize model best, but if it couldn't raise enough money to make the competition work, the other options might do it.
One other option, maybe as one of the contestants for the Hubble Rescue X-Prize: Try an Open Source model to design the mission. Obviously someone would have to actually build the thing, but the design work and maybe some of the simulation/calculation could be done on an Open SOurce model. To be honest I'm skeptical about the Open Source model working on something physical like this, but then again I was very skeptical about it as applied to software and that skepticism seems to have been misplaced.
Looks like there is another chain of comments on this. Somebody else came up with the idea of an X-prize to save Hubble and posted it about 4 hours before I did. (And I thought it was such an original idea) Oh well. I'll move further comments down to that chain.
You know, Hubble Rescue might be a good subject for an X-Prize. I'd be willing to bet that there are companies out there that would be willing to give it a shot if they had a chance at $70-80 million--or maybe the prize could be ownership or operating rights to Hubble itself. Hmm. Liability would be a problem though. If something went haywire and Hubble landed on someone's SUV--Not good. What do think? Any potential here?
Slashdot Mirror
The story I heard is that Commodore paid a one-time fee to use Microsoft Basic (Version 2.0) essentially forever with no further payments to Microsoft. This was very early in the development of the industry and Bill got what he thought was big bucks for the transaction. Turns out that Commodore got a huge bargain compared to what Microsoft was later able to charge everybody else (on a per computer sold basis). That was a hunk of the reason computers like the Vic-20 and the Commodore 64 could be considerably cheaper than other computers of the era. Unfortunately it also made it difficult for Commodore to come up with improved versions of Basic without giving up that cost advantage. Bottom line: Jack Tramiel (then head of Commodore) was one of the few people in the computer industry to outsnooker Bill Gates on a business deal, and Vic-20/Commodore 64 owners used Microsoft Basic while contributing essentially nothing to the Microsoft empire.
This discussion is remarkably like the ones I remember from the late 70s. Essentially industrial civilization had ten to twenty years to go before oil ran out and most of us starved, according to very authoritative sources back then. Didn't happen then, and it probably won't in my lifetime or yours. The tricky thing about energy is that both supply and demand are very inelastic (they don't respond much to price increases) in the short term, but very elastic in the mid-to-long term. As a result, energy supply cycles between gluts and shortages. How does that work? Let's take gasoline for example: The price of gas goes way up. Demand initially goes down a little as people do less unnecessary driving, but it doesn't go down much. People figure it's just another blip and they keep doing what they're doing. If prices stay higher though, people buy Metros and Hybrids instead of SUVs. As that change works through the fleet of vehicles, demand drops more and more. If that isn't enough to cause prices to stabilize, in the longer term people react to the higher prices by taking lower-paying jobs closer to home because the high gas prices cancel out the higher wages. Those drops in demand take a while but when they come they come with a vengeance, and they don't go away for quite a while--it takes a while for people to start buying gas guzzlers again, and then it takes a while for the new cars to replace the existing fleet. Supply reacts the same way. Want to find investors in a tar sands oil extraction process that will only pay back their initial investment if oil is at $40 a barrel? Won't get many takers when oil is at $30 a barrel. Won't get many takers when oil spikes to $40 a barrel and then drops to $35 in a month or two. If oil goes to $45 and looks like it's going to stay there, you're going to get a lot of investment. Once that initial investment gets made though, the supply from tar sands may well keep coming. The initial investment's already been made now, so they'll keep cranking oil out until they start losing money on every barrel as opposed to just not making back their initial investment. The example of tar sands is just one of many possiblities for increased supply. Even before the recent runup, solar cell manufacturers were pushing aggressively into market niches that formerly used gas-fire generators. The solar cell industry has grown 25% or more per year for a lot of year. It's still minuscule compared to the oil industry, but if shortages push energy costs higher, that makes rapidly expanding solar cell production capacity more profitable, and that pushes per unit costs of the cells down in and of itself. Those bigger, better solar cell plants don't go away when the price of energy drops a little. They may not even go away when the price of energy drops a lot because the companies that own them have already made the capital investment and have presumably put some of their profits during the high-price time into increased R&D which should reduce cost of production. The bottom line is that a reasonably prolonged (two to four years) period of high energy prices results in reduced energy demand and additional supply for the next five to ten years, with some of the impact continuing beyond ten years. That's why the price of oil dropped so far and so fast in the 80s, and why it will drop again after a few years if the price rises much further and stays there long enough for people to decide they have to adapt.
I actually think an X-Prize for a Hubble rescue mission has potential. (enough that I'm delurking here for the first time after several months of lurking) The big problems would be (a) Getting NASA to back off and let someone else come to the rescue (big blow to the prestige), and (b) Liability. If someone tried to do a rescue and failed and then Hubble came down and damaged something, the lawyers would have a field day--even though it was coming down anyway. We might jump through those hoops with enough political pressure and creative insurance arrangements, but who would put up the X-Prize? Pass the hat among space enthusiasts? Maybe make exclusive use of Hubble the prize? That would be worth some bucks. I don't know if it would pay for the mission though. I know: Some news network sets up the prize in exchange for exclusive rights to footage from the rescue and maybe the leadin to it. I could see Fox News or MSNBC doing that. Better yet: the Science Fiction channel puts up the prize for the same rights, plus maybe resale rights to a certain percentage of time on the telescope. Ah--maybe do an extra special Junkyard Wars. (Okay I'm not serious about that one) A mission would probably be more expensive than the average TV series, but I'm guessing that a rescue effort wouldn't be too awfully much bigger budget than some of the bigger budget movies--somewhere between $100 million and $500 million as an order of magnitude guess. If a Cable Network put up the money, they could do a series of little blurbs playing up the race between the X-prize contestants and the race against time. Actually, I like the pure X-prize model best, but if it couldn't raise enough money to make the competition work, the other options might do it. One other option, maybe as one of the contestants for the Hubble Rescue X-Prize: Try an Open Source model to design the mission. Obviously someone would have to actually build the thing, but the design work and maybe some of the simulation/calculation could be done on an Open SOurce model. To be honest I'm skeptical about the Open Source model working on something physical like this, but then again I was very skeptical about it as applied to software and that skepticism seems to have been misplaced.
Looks like there is another chain of comments on this. Somebody else came up with the idea of an X-prize to save Hubble and posted it about 4 hours before I did. (And I thought it was such an original idea) Oh well. I'll move further comments down to that chain.
You know, Hubble Rescue might be a good subject for an X-Prize. I'd be willing to bet that there are companies out there that would be willing to give it a shot if they had a chance at $70-80 million--or maybe the prize could be ownership or operating rights to Hubble itself. Hmm. Liability would be a problem though. If something went haywire and Hubble landed on someone's SUV--Not good. What do think? Any potential here?