They're suppressing competition by undercutting prices. This is easy to do if you've got a low cost labor pool and government backing (both overt in the form of subsidies and covert in the form of silent ownership by senior Chinese government officials). All the better that you can seek (and probably get) tax breaks from the government of the very country who's industry you're looking to hobble with your low prices.
That said, there's nothing wrong with buying Chinese generators if they meet quality and price requirements. But I think this is a case where the US government has lost sight of the football here. Assisting a foreign power with the task of gutting an industry that was pioneered in the US and that may be important in future green energy markets around the world seems extremely foolish and short sighted.
I've been wondering if/when Google would make some sort of effort to deal with the problem. You'd think that a company that's gone out of their way to hire brainiacs could come up with *some* sort of solution. I'm a little surprised they've let it spin this far off into the weeds.
Most of my non-server machines only use about 40-50gb of disk space, even though the hard drives have gradually grown from 20 to 40 to 120 to 500 to 1500GB over the last few years. Each time I build a system, I tend to throw in whatever drive costs about $100-125 when I order my parts. So based on my past usage model, I'd have no problem switching over to SSD if I can get say...128GB of storage for $100-125. On those occasions where I need a big chunk of permanent storage, I'll just get some sort of external hard disk that will undoubtedly continue to plummet in price.
Would it make more sense to subsidize options like small scale solar in order to encourage homes/businesses to "go greener" and to take some load off the central grid?
OR
Does it make more sense to spend that money fixing the current rickety grid and then put all that green capacity in places that actually get a lot of sunlight all year?
In the solar sail case, you've got a star at the beginning of the journey to provide acceleration and theoretically you're going to venture to another star which should provide the "fuel" for deceleration. In between, I am assuming that you don't lose any speed since you're traveling in a vacuum.
If they want to operate in China, they've got to comply with Chinese laws. If they don't comply, the Chinese government has all sorts of levers to apply (fines, jail, blocking their site, etc).
Personally, I would just choose to not do business in China until such time as there is even a hint of transparency in the business and legal environments, but that's just me.
Part of the reason that several of my past companies/clients drifted away from Microsoft was due to the incredibly complex licensing. You can do XYZ for this price, but only if you have up to N seats. After N+1 seats, you pay using an entirely new cost schedule (could be higher...could be lower)....etc. It got to the point where our "Microsoft sales rep" literally had to periodically visit us and attempt to explain how we could do a project with their tools while not running afoul of some obscure CAL fee that nobody even knew about. Combine that with the never ending upgrade merry-go-round and it is easy to see why companies just throw up their hands and look for a way out.
You think the US immigration process is more of a hassle than China's? Hell, they made it MORE difficult to get a tourist visa after getting the Olympic nod.
I think the immigration process had little to do with the decision.
You'd think a company like Nvidia would be a bit more careful given their CEO's penchant for bold claims and harping on any perceived gaffe by competitors.
I suspect this "announcement" was very rushed after AMD's recent announcement of their new DirectX 11 part that seems to outperform anything Nvidia has out at the moment and at a lower price point. Combine that with Intel's snub on producing chipsets for new/relevant PC platforms and one can imagine that Nvidia was anxious to appear competitive. Nvidia is in for a VERY tough slog.
Re:Treat ain't worth the paper its written on
on
Iran's Nuclear Ambitions
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
To be honest, I'm rather ambivalent about the constant bickering/fighting/posturing between certain countries and Israel. However, based what I've seen of Israel's reaction to overt threats in the past, I can't imagine that they'll allow this to go on for much longer. I suspect the US has been putting an enormous amount of pressure on them to not conduct an air raid(s) to take out the various facilities. That's not going to be enough to prevent a confrontation for much longer.
I'm not an expert, but the news reports seem to indicate that this new facility (at a military base) doesn't have the capacity to produce a useful quantity of enriched fuel for a power plant, but could potentially produce enough for 1-2 bombs per year.
Combine that with the fact that Iran flares enough natural gas daily to more than meet its internal energy generation requirements, pardon me for being a bit skeptical about their motives.
Nvidia seems to be between a rock and hard place. AMD is nudging it out of the limelight in the graphics marketplace and Intel and AMD are nudging it out of the market for motherboard chipsets...with Intel doing so more aggressively.
My take away from the reviews is that it is significantly cheaper than Nvidia's current top of the line single-card solution while offering slightly better performance with a more modest power draw. In another year or two, we'll all be able to play Crysis with all the eye candy turned on.:)
I'm also the parent of an autistic child and I can relate. Our son has also managed to sneak out of the house in the wee hours of the night (without triggering the home alarm) and is a master of defeating any lock/fastener. We've also had the bolting issue at school and at public places. Finding a way to keep it attached seems like the real challenge.
Something along the lines of a medic alert tag with this functionality that I could semi-permanently attach to something like his shoe (and with a longer recharge cycle) would be more useful for me.
The Japanese and Norwegians are already working on freeing up all that oil trapped in Minke whales in the ocean (purely for research purposes, of course).:P
And the other $100k built the non-impressive looking "facility."
You don't get major politicos (he preceded Cheney as the Secretary of Defense and is a former National Security Advisor) like Carlucci as your "chairman emeritus" without throwing them a serious bone. I guess they've got designs on some government boondoggle or they would have used that money on Aeron chairs.
If turning waste plastic into fuel was cost effective, they'd be doing it already.
Everyone who reads slashdot isn't an OSX ween and has no idea what "Grand Central Dispatch" is. Perhaps a sentence or two describing why it is important/useful would save users from following the link which doesn't provide that info either.
Fat chance. The US and Western Europe are indeed addicted to the unsustainably cheap supply of Chinese credit and cheap labor. We effectively wink at them gobbling up global resources so they can be churned through a cheap labor pool and nonexistent health/safety regimens in order to satiate our desire for a high standard of living at minimal cost. China never had any real intention to abide by the WTO's rules and viewed membership as a national pride issue. Don't hold your breath waiting for China to alter its behavior even if the WTO adds some stank to their toothless regulations.
Exactly. Deposit the truly gnarly nuclear waste into a subduction zone. Over time, the Earth reclaims it and it spends the next few tens of millions of years being recycled in the Earth's mantle where it can't irradiate anyone or supply naughty people with fissile material.
I guess that's the new code word for batteries. You know, those environmentally unfriendly things made out of relatively expensive (and soon to be rare) Lithium or relatively cheap heavy metals (Cadmium/Lead/etc).
I'm all for solar/wind power, but the original poster is correct. They just don't scale.
Slashdot Mirror
They're suppressing competition by undercutting prices. This is easy to do if you've got a low cost labor pool and government backing (both overt in the form of subsidies and covert in the form of silent ownership by senior Chinese government officials). All the better that you can seek (and probably get) tax breaks from the government of the very country who's industry you're looking to hobble with your low prices.
That said, there's nothing wrong with buying Chinese generators if they meet quality and price requirements. But I think this is a case where the US government has lost sight of the football here. Assisting a foreign power with the task of gutting an industry that was pioneered in the US and that may be important in future green energy markets around the world seems extremely foolish and short sighted.
I've been wondering if/when Google would make some sort of effort to deal with the problem. You'd think that a company that's gone out of their way to hire brainiacs could come up with *some* sort of solution. I'm a little surprised they've let it spin this far off into the weeds.
What self respecting Neanderthal wouldn't bend over Daryl Hannah?
Most of my non-server machines only use about 40-50gb of disk space, even though the hard drives have gradually grown from 20 to 40 to 120 to 500 to 1500GB over the last few years. Each time I build a system, I tend to throw in whatever drive costs about $100-125 when I order my parts. So based on my past usage model, I'd have no problem switching over to SSD if I can get say...128GB of storage for $100-125. On those occasions where I need a big chunk of permanent storage, I'll just get some sort of external hard disk that will undoubtedly continue to plummet in price.
"Isn't that double dipping? How is that even legal?"
Palpatine: I'll MAKE it legal.
The spreadsheet cell for sentencing recommendations for jaywalking is next to the one for murder 1.
The real question is:
Would it make more sense to subsidize options like small scale solar in order to encourage homes/businesses to "go greener" and to take some load off the central grid?
OR
Does it make more sense to spend that money fixing the current rickety grid and then put all that green capacity in places that actually get a lot of sunlight all year?
In the solar sail case, you've got a star at the beginning of the journey to provide acceleration and theoretically you're going to venture to another star which should provide the "fuel" for deceleration. In between, I am assuming that you don't lose any speed since you're traveling in a vacuum.
Wonder how many chairs Neelie had to duck before they "reached an agreement".....
If they want to operate in China, they've got to comply with Chinese laws. If they don't comply, the Chinese government has all sorts of levers to apply (fines, jail, blocking their site, etc).
Personally, I would just choose to not do business in China until such time as there is even a hint of transparency in the business and legal environments, but that's just me.
Part of the reason that several of my past companies/clients drifted away from Microsoft was due to the incredibly complex licensing. You can do XYZ for this price, but only if you have up to N seats. After N+1 seats, you pay using an entirely new cost schedule (could be higher...could be lower)....etc. It got to the point where our "Microsoft sales rep" literally had to periodically visit us and attempt to explain how we could do a project with their tools while not running afoul of some obscure CAL fee that nobody even knew about. Combine that with the never ending upgrade merry-go-round and it is easy to see why companies just throw up their hands and look for a way out.
You think the US immigration process is more of a hassle than China's? Hell, they made it MORE difficult to get a tourist visa after getting the Olympic nod.
I think the immigration process had little to do with the decision.
You'd think a company like Nvidia would be a bit more careful given their CEO's penchant for bold claims and harping on any perceived gaffe by competitors.
I suspect this "announcement" was very rushed after AMD's recent announcement of their new DirectX 11 part that seems to outperform anything Nvidia has out at the moment and at a lower price point. Combine that with Intel's snub on producing chipsets for new/relevant PC platforms and one can imagine that Nvidia was anxious to appear competitive. Nvidia is in for a VERY tough slog.
To be honest, I'm rather ambivalent about the constant bickering/fighting/posturing between certain countries and Israel. However, based what I've seen of Israel's reaction to overt threats in the past, I can't imagine that they'll allow this to go on for much longer. I suspect the US has been putting an enormous amount of pressure on them to not conduct an air raid(s) to take out the various facilities. That's not going to be enough to prevent a confrontation for much longer.
Thinly disguised? About as "thinly disguised" as Divine's "woman costume." :)
I'm not an expert, but the news reports seem to indicate that this new facility (at a military base) doesn't have the capacity to produce a useful quantity of enriched fuel for a power plant, but could potentially produce enough for 1-2 bombs per year.
Combine that with the fact that Iran flares enough natural gas daily to more than meet its internal energy generation requirements, pardon me for being a bit skeptical about their motives.
Nvidia seems to be between a rock and hard place. AMD is nudging it out of the limelight in the graphics marketplace and Intel and AMD are nudging it out of the market for motherboard chipsets...with Intel doing so more aggressively.
Where do you see Nvidia 3-5 years down the line?
My take away from the reviews is that it is significantly cheaper than Nvidia's current top of the line single-card solution while offering slightly better performance with a more modest power draw. In another year or two, we'll all be able to play Crysis with all the eye candy turned on. :)
I'm also the parent of an autistic child and I can relate. Our son has also managed to sneak out of the house in the wee hours of the night (without triggering the home alarm) and is a master of defeating any lock/fastener. We've also had the bolting issue at school and at public places. Finding a way to keep it attached seems like the real challenge.
Something along the lines of a medic alert tag with this functionality that I could semi-permanently attach to something like his shoe (and with a longer recharge cycle) would be more useful for me.
The Japanese and Norwegians are already working on freeing up all that oil trapped in Minke whales in the ocean (purely for research purposes, of course). :P
And the other $100k built the non-impressive looking "facility."
You don't get major politicos (he preceded Cheney as the Secretary of Defense and is a former National Security Advisor) like Carlucci as your "chairman emeritus" without throwing them a serious bone. I guess they've got designs on some government boondoggle or they would have used that money on Aeron chairs.
If turning waste plastic into fuel was cost effective, they'd be doing it already.
Everyone who reads slashdot isn't an OSX ween and has no idea what "Grand Central Dispatch" is. Perhaps a sentence or two describing why it is important/useful would save users from following the link which doesn't provide that info either.
I want those 5 seconds back! :)
Fat chance. The US and Western Europe are indeed addicted to the unsustainably cheap supply of Chinese credit and cheap labor. We effectively wink at them gobbling up global resources so they can be churned through a cheap labor pool and nonexistent health/safety regimens in order to satiate our desire for a high standard of living at minimal cost. China never had any real intention to abide by the WTO's rules and viewed membership as a national pride issue. Don't hold your breath waiting for China to alter its behavior even if the WTO adds some stank to their toothless regulations.
Exactly. Deposit the truly gnarly nuclear waste into a subduction zone. Over time, the Earth reclaims it and it spends the next few tens of millions of years being recycled in the Earth's mantle where it can't irradiate anyone or supply naughty people with fissile material.
"proper energy retention"
I guess that's the new code word for batteries. You know, those environmentally unfriendly things made out of relatively expensive (and soon to be rare) Lithium or relatively cheap heavy metals (Cadmium/Lead/etc).
I'm all for solar/wind power, but the original poster is correct. They just don't scale.