The comments here make it seem like we're selling out our government to the highest bidder. It's an ad, folks, and it's probably the same kind of ad you'll see in a subway station or at a bus stop - both government facilities. If it helps NASA deliver more services and saves the taxpayer some money, what's the problem? I think it's a good idea. Maybe if the DMV put some ads on their walls and website, they could hire another gnome behind the counter and I wouldn't have to wait so long to get anything done.
"Single threaded gaming performance is, as we mentioned in the first article, no different than the single core Pentium 4 of the same clock speed. And as we know from all of our previous comparisons, the Athlon 64 is the clear choice for single threaded gaming performance."
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2389&p=6
Your question shows that you don't understand competitive advantage. If company A writes some software to improve order processing in their company, and nobody else has it, now they have a competitive advantage in the industry because they can process orders better than anyone else. Do you think they're going to just give that away to company B,C,and D within their industry? Yeah, right.
No, what happens is that B,C,and D are going to spend the exact same amount of money to close the gap. After that, nobody has a competitive advantage, because they all have the same order processing ability now. This is the whole point of Nicholas Carr's book by the way, "IT Doesn't Matter".
So maybe A,B,and C should collaborate on an order processing system, then D's left out of the game. Except then D would sue A,B,and C for anti-trust violations and win the cost of the order processing system plus punitive damages. Bottom line - companies are supposed to compete, not collaborate.
So then maybe A,B,C, and D should all buy the order processing software from the same company, and that company could spread the costs across it's customers. Well, they do, and it's called SAP. But SAP spends $1.2b on R&D a year, so I don't see them giving away their stuff for free.
We can already build something that would do a better job than voyager and overtake it. If we put something together with an Ion engine it would zip past Voyager in a couple years. Save the money from voyager and put it towards something newer and better.
The problem is that we're not going to build anything newer and better. We know where this $4m is going - to help cut the deficit caused by a two-year Iraq occupation and trillion dollar tax cut.
People are missing the obvious. Companies lease because they don't want to pay a lot of cash up front. Why drop $1.2m on 1000 computers when they can lease them all for at $40k a month for three years? It's the same reason people finance their cars.
And yes, leasing is financing. Don't be fooled by the accounting treatment. When you lease, you make a promise to pay X for Y months, and then give back an asset worth Z. X*Y+Z is the cost of the asset plus some interest.
Companies have two main financing alternatives if they want to buy an asset. They can sell stock or issue debt. The problem is, those two actions show up on the balance sheet and weaken the company's financial picture. Leasing doesn't show up on the balance sheet (also called off-balance sheet debt) and they get a tax savings for whatever they buy, and interest rates are usually good (because it's a real asset), so leasing's become the third, and typically the best, alternative for acquiring a capital asset.
--
Tristan Yates, author of IT Leader
Slashdot Mirror
The comments here make it seem like we're selling out our government to the highest bidder. It's an ad, folks, and it's probably the same kind of ad you'll see in a subway station or at a bus stop - both government facilities. If it helps NASA deliver more services and saves the taxpayer some money, what's the problem? I think it's a good idea. Maybe if the DMV put some ads on their walls and website, they could hire another gnome behind the counter and I wouldn't have to wait so long to get anything done.
The Architect is being sued for patent infringement, and Neo, Morpheus, and the Oracle for violations of the DMCA.
"Single threaded gaming performance is, as we mentioned in the first article, no different than the single core Pentium 4 of the same clock speed. And as we know from all of our previous comparisons, the Athlon 64 is the clear choice for single threaded gaming performance." http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx? i=2389&p=6
No, what happens is that B,C,and D are going to spend the exact same amount of money to close the gap. After that, nobody has a competitive advantage, because they all have the same order processing ability now. This is the whole point of Nicholas Carr's book by the way, "IT Doesn't Matter".
So maybe A,B,and C should collaborate on an order processing system, then D's left out of the game. Except then D would sue A,B,and C for anti-trust violations and win the cost of the order processing system plus punitive damages. Bottom line - companies are supposed to compete, not collaborate.
So then maybe A,B,C, and D should all buy the order processing software from the same company, and that company could spread the costs across it's customers. Well, they do, and it's called SAP. But SAP spends $1.2b on R&D a year, so I don't see them giving away their stuff for free.
We can already build something that would do a better job than voyager and overtake it. If we put something together with an Ion engine it would zip past Voyager in a couple years. Save the money from voyager and put it towards something newer and better.
The problem is that we're not going to build anything newer and better. We know where this $4m is going - to help cut the deficit caused by a two-year Iraq occupation and trillion dollar tax cut.
People are missing the obvious. Companies lease because they don't want to pay a lot of cash up front. Why drop $1.2m on 1000 computers when they can lease them all for at $40k a month for three years? It's the same reason people finance their cars. And yes, leasing is financing. Don't be fooled by the accounting treatment. When you lease, you make a promise to pay X for Y months, and then give back an asset worth Z. X*Y+Z is the cost of the asset plus some interest. Companies have two main financing alternatives if they want to buy an asset. They can sell stock or issue debt. The problem is, those two actions show up on the balance sheet and weaken the company's financial picture. Leasing doesn't show up on the balance sheet (also called off-balance sheet debt) and they get a tax savings for whatever they buy, and interest rates are usually good (because it's a real asset), so leasing's become the third, and typically the best, alternative for acquiring a capital asset. -- Tristan Yates, author of IT Leader