In many cases that is true, and why? Because there is no more efficient way to do it. The obvoius industrial need that you are overlooking is called "the competitive edge". If you can produce something cheaper than your rival, you beat him on price and prolong the success of your company. If
gee whiz you're right, now all you need to do is find investors who will front you the trillion dollar startup cost so you can start making CPUs cheaper than we can today in china. seriously, the ROI (if any) would be so far out that no private investor would ever bother with this. even the private companies in the space field today are talking about cheaper satellite launches, no one is talking about space factories.
Solar energy on the moon is a completely different creature. You can get GOBS of power from it because there is no obstructive atmosphere
this is a function of the efficiency of your panels, not the availability of solar energy - 8 exajoules of it hit the earth every day.
blah, the rest of your post indicates that you should finish high school before debating serious science.
humanity is not leaving earth. saying we are leaving earth is like saying your hand is going to go to pittsburgh while the rest of your body goes to atlanta.
think about it. we already know space is deadly to us. this is not "to be determined". it is solved science. so you are not going to be living in open space, ever (unless you download your mind into something that can thrive in open space, but you can't do that either). you need to live on a planet that can support life. where? which one? how do you keep a human body alive for the thousands of years required to get to where you are going? you can't. forget scifi movies, there is no "warp drive" that will zap you to the hydra cluster. and don't think you will be living on mars. living on mars would be so costly for people still on earth (who would have to be your lifeline) that it would not be worth it. lets be clear - there is no concept of colonizing mars. there is only people who are residing in such a place while people on earth keep them alive, and its not even clear if this is possible - do we really know about everything in our biospehere that keeps us alive? no. and why would you want to live on mars anyway? just move to the mojave desert. same terrain, just as crowded, costs a lot less to get there.
but lets presume you do invent warp drive. how do you keep your crew from going insane and killing each other? you are going to be alone with these people for a very long time. but lets say you get past this. now you have to be able to manage in an entirely new biosphere that humanity has never sampled. you can't rely on science, science needs experimentation. how many crew members can you spare?
something may leave this planet one day, maybe an advanced form of artificial life that can survive open space for thousands of years, but it isn't us.
being first in a product space matters. google literally reinvented search a few years back and they were as a result, "first" into a reborn market. this has given them a huge advantage. likewise, yahoo mail and hotmail were on the scene much earlier than gmail, and have copied most of gmail's key advances (namely, huge diskspace), so many users don't care to switch.
but therein lies the point: most users don't care. if something works, they will use it until it disappoints them. this is why being first matters. look at maps - mapquest is still by far the dominant player, yet has the lamest tools. but for most people, it is good enough. you have to take yourself outside of the tech mindset to see how most users think. consider motor oil. you use it every day. do you think that much about the brand you use? are you really sure it is the best? do you even know what is the best? this is how most users see web services.
in any case, the take-away here is that most of these services have become low-margin commodities anyway. its not clear how much money is to be made for any new entrant.
interesting notes, but until most people can't find what they are looking for, there is no ROI in doing massive relevance engine upgrades, in fact such upgrades may be ROI negative if it breaks expected behavior. this is why i don't expect search to move much in the next five years. there will be tweaks and improvements, but i don't sense a sea-change until there is a large pile of unclaimed money available.
everyone use Active(perl,python) raise your hand. i don't see many hands.
i like activestate, their hearts are totally in the right place, but they have been eclipsed (pun totally intended) by free tools and decent windows ports from the default code branches.
they gave it a good go, some quality code and good tools, but their tools never reached the penetration that would create a self-sustaining market.
your post is dead on. too bad for larry he has let this issue completely define him. he's missed a lot of markets because he was obsessively chasing microsoft. in any case it seems every two or three years larry makes some claim to the meme du jour - corba, application service providers (asp), java, linux, soa, etc and tries to redefine the industry based on this so-called vision. but oracle has never been able to move the industry in this way no matter how hard they try, which is usually not very hard. larry has a critical dilemma - his core product is being rapidly commoditized and he has not been able to transform his company into something with greater future value. oracle isn't going away - those database installations will be paying his jet fuel bills until he dies, but oracle's days as a growth story are long gone.
Not just for solar, but for alternative energy in general. With our oil supply set to become uneconomical within forty years, we are literally in a sprint to find a replacement for fossil fuels wherever we use them today, and if we don't our society is going to hit the reset button for about a century or longer. Our entire economy is based on cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, ALL OF IT. Our commitment to alternatives so far is a joke in the US. $53 million isn't even a rounding error on what we need to be dedicating to this effort, which is likely already ten years late.
The clean slate never stays clean for long.
Sooner or later you get weak NAPs, preferential treatment at peers, crappy colos, blah blah blah, these issues will just emerge in the "new" network once it goes live (and then someone else will want to start "clean" all over again!).
Meanwhile the "old" internet will continue to use market forces to make the changes people really demand, even if it results in "uncleanliness".
In any case Internet2 was supposed to provide this by now...it was always intended to be for "everyone", jsut students and profs first. What happened?
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gee whiz you're right, now all you need to do is find investors who will front you the trillion dollar startup cost so you can start making CPUs cheaper than we can today in china. seriously, the ROI (if any) would be so far out that no private investor would ever bother with this. even the private companies in the space field today are talking about cheaper satellite launches, no one is talking about space factories.
Solar energy on the moon is a completely different creature. You can get GOBS of power from it because there is no obstructive atmosphere
this is a function of the efficiency of your panels, not the availability of solar energy - 8 exajoules of it hit the earth every day.
blah, the rest of your post indicates that you should finish high school before debating serious science.
humanity is not leaving earth. saying we are leaving earth is like saying your hand is going to go to pittsburgh while the rest of your body goes to atlanta.
think about it. we already know space is deadly to us. this is not "to be determined". it is solved science. so you are not going to be living in open space, ever (unless you download your mind into something that can thrive in open space, but you can't do that either). you need to live on a planet that can support life. where? which one? how do you keep a human body alive for the thousands of years required to get to where you are going? you can't. forget scifi movies, there is no "warp drive" that will zap you to the hydra cluster. and don't think you will be living on mars. living on mars would be so costly for people still on earth (who would have to be your lifeline) that it would not be worth it. lets be clear - there is no concept of colonizing mars. there is only people who are residing in such a place while people on earth keep them alive, and its not even clear if this is possible - do we really know about everything in our biospehere that keeps us alive? no. and why would you want to live on mars anyway? just move to the mojave desert. same terrain, just as crowded, costs a lot less to get there.
but lets presume you do invent warp drive. how do you keep your crew from going insane and killing each other? you are going to be alone with these people for a very long time. but lets say you get past this. now you have to be able to manage in an entirely new biosphere that humanity has never sampled. you can't rely on science, science needs experimentation. how many crew members can you spare?
something may leave this planet one day, maybe an advanced form of artificial life that can survive open space for thousands of years, but it isn't us.
being first in a product space matters. google literally reinvented search a few years back and they were as a result, "first" into a reborn market. this has given them a huge advantage. likewise, yahoo mail and hotmail were on the scene much earlier than gmail, and have copied most of gmail's key advances (namely, huge diskspace), so many users don't care to switch.
but therein lies the point: most users don't care. if something works, they will use it until it disappoints them. this is why being first matters. look at maps - mapquest is still by far the dominant player, yet has the lamest tools. but for most people, it is good enough. you have to take yourself outside of the tech mindset to see how most users think. consider motor oil. you use it every day. do you think that much about the brand you use? are you really sure it is the best? do you even know what is the best? this is how most users see web services.
in any case, the take-away here is that most of these services have become low-margin commodities anyway. its not clear how much money is to be made for any new entrant.
interesting notes, but until most people can't find what they are looking for, there is no ROI in doing massive relevance engine upgrades, in fact such upgrades may be ROI negative if it breaks expected behavior. this is why i don't expect search to move much in the next five years. there will be tweaks and improvements, but i don't sense a sea-change until there is a large pile of unclaimed money available.
everyone use Active(perl,python) raise your hand. i don't see many hands. i like activestate, their hearts are totally in the right place, but they have been eclipsed (pun totally intended) by free tools and decent windows ports from the default code branches. they gave it a good go, some quality code and good tools, but their tools never reached the penetration that would create a self-sustaining market.
There are already far too many forums on the web that discuss stocks.
your post is dead on. too bad for larry he has let this issue completely define him. he's missed a lot of markets because he was obsessively chasing microsoft. in any case it seems every two or three years larry makes some claim to the meme du jour - corba, application service providers (asp), java, linux, soa, etc and tries to redefine the industry based on this so-called vision. but oracle has never been able to move the industry in this way no matter how hard they try, which is usually not very hard. larry has a critical dilemma - his core product is being rapidly commoditized and he has not been able to transform his company into something with greater future value. oracle isn't going away - those database installations will be paying his jet fuel bills until he dies, but oracle's days as a growth story are long gone.
that the economist would debase itself by printing such hysterical garbage is itself telling how entrenched the google cult has become.
This is just moronic. Its a compliance test.
Not just for solar, but for alternative energy in general. With our oil supply set to become uneconomical within forty years, we are literally in a sprint to find a replacement for fossil fuels wherever we use them today, and if we don't our society is going to hit the reset button for about a century or longer. Our entire economy is based on cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, ALL OF IT. Our commitment to alternatives so far is a joke in the US. $53 million isn't even a rounding error on what we need to be dedicating to this effort, which is likely already ten years late.
The clean slate never stays clean for long. Sooner or later you get weak NAPs, preferential treatment at peers, crappy colos, blah blah blah, these issues will just emerge in the "new" network once it goes live (and then someone else will want to start "clean" all over again!). Meanwhile the "old" internet will continue to use market forces to make the changes people really demand, even if it results in "uncleanliness". In any case Internet2 was supposed to provide this by now...it was always intended to be for "everyone", jsut students and profs first. What happened?