Several people have pointed out that electric cars simply shift the point where pollution is generated from the car to the power plant. But there's a big difference between electric and hydrogen in this regard: Hydrogen can be shipped.
With wall-powered electric cars, the power generation has to occur relatively nearby - say, within a few hundred miles. With hydrogen, the power generation can occur anywhere in the world. Hydrogen canisters can be transported via container shipping.
What this means is that if the U.S. were to convert to hydrogen power, it would allow all the power generation (and therefore pollution) to be moved offshore. In essence, all the pollution from the U.S. automotive fleet could be shipped to the Third World, in exchange for hard currency - which is the traditional method used for getting rid of the rest of the "not in my backyard" unpleasant underside of the affluent U.S. (and for that matter Western European) lifestyle.
Economically, it's a win all round - though of course environmentalists will probably disagree.
-Graham
Re:Simple Explanation
on
Lineo near Death
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Uhhh..wait. I don't think this is all that far above market rates for Class A office space in that area, particularly if they have any facilities for a server room, break room, etc. How much do you think office space in California is supposed to cost?
Bullshit. There are numerous official repercussions to taking a public anti-government position. You can legally be denied a security clearance. You can legally be detained for questioning. You can legally be denied visas, passports, and (if not a citizen) naturalization or work permits.
And if you want to talk about being put to death, consider this. According to Amnesty International there are 86 countries whose governments regularly put people to death, and 109 that do not. In these 109 countries you can be said to have the inalienable right to life. As a simple matter of fact, not opinion, on which of these lists is the U.S. registered?
Yes, the U.S. is a free country. It scores a 1 (the top score) on the Freedom House survey. But so do 28 other nations. 45% of the world's population is free. Freedom is in no way uniquely or even especially an American characteristic.
Think of the Billy Crystal character from The Princess Bride: "It's only mostly digital. There's a big difference between mostly digital, and all digital."
However, the notion that the bits themselves are somehow "dirty" is still hogwash.
More interestingly, why should software be treated any differently than other intellectual property when it comes to tax laws?
If you create a tax at the point of creation of intellectual property, then the tax applies whenever you create anything of value through the expression of thought into written or electronic form. If software creation is a tax-incurring activity, then so is (or should be) the creation of the written word, music, speech, jokes, etc.
In other words, suppose I have a conversation with a friend of mine, and we both put intellectual effort into choosing our words. Not only have we have each created intellectual property, we have also demonstrated its value by engaging in a barter transaction. Suppose we talk for two hours, and it can be claimed that a professional conversationalist would earn $20/hour. We have created $80 worth of intellectual property at prevailing market rates; and, if we are located in Washington State, we each owe the government perhaps $5 to $10.
Note that this might already be the case under current IRS code! If intellectual property is "goods" then we have created and exchanged "goods for hire" through a barter arrangement. Imagine that over the course of a year my friend and I spend 500 hours talking to each other. We have each created "goods" worth $10,000 and exchanged them as barter - so we have to file Form 1099s on each other, pay an extra $3,000 (or so) income tax, and we will probably face legal action for our failure to withhold payroll and Social Security taxes from each other!
The scary thing is, this is probably a valid legal argument.
10 million frequent flyer miles does not equal 10 million actual traveled miles. You get all kinds of bonuses, double points for certain segments, points for staying in a hotel, points for renting a car, etc, etc. I have met sales reps with accounts in the millions of points. I don't think I've ever seen anyone with 10 million but it's less than an order of magnitude out.
(1) You don't have to pass a credit check, but you can still behave like a "normal" business traveler. This is a big deal for people with bad credit histories who nevertheless want to work professional jobs with a lot of travel.
(2) The line of credit on the company card is intended to be used for company purposes, so you aren't using any of your own lines of credit financing the company's operations. This is a big deal for people who have their credit cards maxed out, or people who travel so much that the amount of credit required is excessive.
If you are an infrequent traveler with lots of available credit, then getting a corporate charge card is not a big deal for you. Not all people fit into this category.
When a single missing '=' can cause a root exploit in code that's generally considered well-written, who are these people that actually entertain the idea that C is the right language to do coding in?
Windows hasn't had a paradigm shift since, roughly, 1989. Some might say 1995. The latest must-have new version of Windows is generally a batch of bug fixes wrapped around some superficial user interface changes.
Also, Windows is far better than Linux in terms of binary backwards compatibility. I can take pretty much any binary written for pretty much any version of DOS or Windows, and run it on my current Windows machine. Linux distributions typically care more about source compatibility, and are much more willing to break binary compatibility.
So in the case of Loki games, consider this: I can buy a binary-only game for Windows today, and if the company that makes it goes out of business, I can be reasonably certain that I can continue to play it for several more years. However, if I buy a binary-only game for Linux today, I can be reasonably certain that within a year, I will have to start adding non-default cruft to my Red Hat install for it to still work, and within two years it will probably become hopeless. Three at the outside.
Think about it: Suppose you have a binary that was developed for Red Hat 5.2 or 6.0 today? What can you really do with it except demand that the vendor recompile for 7.2? On the other hand, do you expect Windows software from 1998 to run on your current box?
This would not cause a significant overpopulation problem. We can assume that these treatments will not be available to the poor, so any population increase would be among the rich. The rich do not reproduce at a rate capable of sustaining their numbers. So the result would be a higher rate of increase in the rich population, perhaps not sufficient to offset the decrease already taking place.
Having a limited time-span within which wealth can be accumulated is one of the few limits on the ability of the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. This technology removes that limit, thereby contributing to economic inequity. Inequity is widely believed to be a root cause of political and military instability.
So, long-term, widespread extreme longevity at high cost would result in an even more comfortable existence for Americans and Western Europeans, accompanied by a commensurate increase in September 11 type incidents.
This is already the path we find ourselves on. Move along, nothing to see here.
No, actually, the be-all and end-all for stability and maintainability is Ada.
Which should come as no surprise to anyone.
-Graham
Re:If only Transmeta would release a different CPU
on
Via One-ups Transmeta
·
· Score: 2
Well, yes, that makes sense from a business perspective. Undoubtedly x86 is where the money is, for now and for a while to come. Transmeta is correct to play mostly in the x86 space.
So what's the point of code morphing?
I mean, if they're just going to be a low-power x86 clone, surely the resources (engineering, space on the die, whatever) taken up by code morphing could be put to better use as...nothing. Just make an x86-only design. AMD did, and theirs is better. Presumably because they focused all their effort on making a low-power x86, and not on code morphing.
Seriously. Either develop some useful capability from the code morphing tech, or abandon it.
When did paperbacks become "mass-market" paperbacks? What other kind of paperback is there? Why aren't people happy just saying a book is a paperback any more?
Economics dictates that in a perfectly competitive market, price must equal marginal cost. Marginal cost is the cost of making one more unit. If you have already pressed a run of ten thousand CDs, making one more costs what, about three cents?
So perhaps you can make money on friction; e.g. profit from the fact that no market is actually perfectly competitive. A blank CD costs $0.50, and finding and ripping a bunch of songs costs an hour or two of your time. All protestations of ethics aside, at what price would Trailer Park Joe consider a prepackaged CD a better deal than copying from a friend?
Last but not least, there's price elasticity. If you cut the price in half, will you double sales volume? If not, it isn't worth doing.
Symbols translated, what he's saying is: If they found a linear-time solution to NP, then NP problems would be solvable in linear time.
O(n) *means* linear time.
The actual quest is to prove that P=NP (or that P != NP), meaning any/all NP problems can be solved in O(P) where P represents any polynomial equation. Not O(n), whatever the article may say.
Just out of curiosity, are you insane? Desktop hard drives are designed to go into PCs that most people turn off every night. They can and do withstand tens of thousands of spin up/down cycles over the course of a normal lifetime.
What we have here is a situation where an economically competitive market exists, but is being officially suppressed by government fiat.
In an economically competitive market, price equals marginal cost. Period. In other words, goods and services sell for the full cost of producing the last unit. In the case of software, this means: the cost of duplicating a CD, a box, a manual, and the minimum possible amount of money such that the shareholders in the software company do not choose to take their money elsewhere. Or in other words, probably about $20 a box. Regardless, for the most part, of the cost or difficulty of developing the CD that goes in the box. None of that is *marginal* cost.
This is all microeconomics 101 stuff. Straight out of the textbook. Little or no interpretation is required. Also note that this does *not* mean all the content companies go out of business, it just means that they start delivering frugal profit margins that make them about as exciting as cement fabricators from an investor point of view.
In the real world, first-run retail boxed software titles can sell for hundreds of dollars. Software producers have been claiming excess profit (some people call it 'economic rent' and have described a whole new category of economic actor called a 'rent seeker'). This will not continue forever.
In every case (*every* case) where a market otherwise subject to economic competition has been forced into an excess-profit situation by government fiat, the result is a black market. Software piracy is simply this black market. Yes, there will be violent official crackdowns. But it won't work in the long run. It never does.
What you're saying is true, as far as it goes. There have been many examples of people claiming that something is impossible, only to have it eventually achieved. But there have also been many examples of people claiming that something is possible, only to have it eventually understood not to be. For example, Newtonian mechanics was a revolutionary change to our understanding of the world; conceptually, it led to a 'clockwork universe' where, if you could only know the position and velocity of all particles, you would be able to project backwards and forwards and know everything about the past and future; in other words, all information about all past and future states of the universe is contained within the current state. It was therefore reasonable to suppose, and many educated people *did* suppose, that within some reasonable amount of time, we would be able to view or even travel to the past or the future - H. G. Wells' time machine is firmly rooted in this tradition.
Then came the 20th century; Einstein, Heisenburg, etc. In our new understanding of the world, there is no such thing as 'the state of the universe' and certainly no expectation that you can look forwards or backwards into the future or the past, or even look at the present with any great degree of certainty. As a result, nobody seriously suggests that time travel is possible any more.
It is a logical fallacy to argue that because many similar propositions have been shown to be false, that *this* proposition will turn out to be false. The feasibility or lack of same involved in heavier-than-air flight, human cloning, and neural-computer interfaces are totally independent of each other.
As usual, the interesting technological possibilities that we "can't quite do" turn out to be wrapped around deep philosophical questions. In this case, prior to establishing a neural-computer interface that truly 'reads our thoughts' you would have to identify exactly where thoughts come from, how they occur, and so forth - incidentally proving or disproving the existence of the soul in the process, most likely. Do you really think this will happen?
For most types of application development, yes, you certainly can lock down the developers' boxes and still maintain productivity and effectiveness. This is done in regulated industries (pharmaceuticals, financial services, aviation, etc) all the time. In this sort of environment, stereotypical "I must express my creativity through code or I will die" programmers will not thrive. They will quit and you will be left with a more assembly-line, less creative team who deliver mediocre but functional applications consistently on-time and on-budget. If this is what you want, by all means lock down the boxes. Just make sure your recruiting practices select people who will fit this sort of culture; i.e. people who will be happy with a locked-down box.
On the other hand, if you're doing bleeding-edge work, or writing hardware drivers, or developing system software that needs to perform privileged operations, then you really can't do this. Or, even if your development work doesn't _strictly_ require root/administrator access but you nevertheless want to maintain a creatively charged group - i.e. if you want to write a killer app that will change the world, and you need people who are as much visionaries as they are programmers - then you absolutely must work hard to remove all barriers to accomplishment from their environment. (You must also remove any sharp objects or dangerous items; for example, scissors, staplers or any access to production servers.)
In practice, the majority of development shops need more of the former, less of the latter. But in the cases where you do need visionaries, you really need them. And they are very hard to find, very hard to keep, and very very hard to keep focused on a task. The last thing you need with these people is another headache, so just let them do whatever with their own machines and hope to hell nobody ever audits their licensing compliance. Try to remember that if you can't get a straight answer out of them, an external auditor will most likely be totally baffled. You can hope, anyway.
If you make your money in something other than software, and your programmers act like prima donnas, get different programmers. Internal-use software development never requires this kind of visionary status. Whatever your current staff may be telling you, you can build a decent development team using nine-to-five, do what they're told staffers. And you can do it with locked down boxes.
This was one of the things I found surprising about my own little foray into open source development. Once my project gained popularity, I started to get RFPs from big companies. These are typically a lengthy questionnaire, or a detailed set of requirements describing a document to be put together. The attitude that comes through in these things is, "jump through our hoops or we'll go with someone else."
Typically these days I respond with an e-mail that nicely and politely explains the situation, and declines to bid on the RFP/RFQ. I sometimes suggest that if the individual is interested in using the software, that they treat it as an internal project for bidding purposes; i.e. they can put together their own internal proposal to be considered alongside the other vendor proposals. This seems to work pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
Several people have pointed out that electric cars simply shift the point where pollution is generated from the car to the power plant. But there's a big difference between electric and hydrogen in this regard: Hydrogen can be shipped.
With wall-powered electric cars, the power generation has to occur relatively nearby - say, within a few hundred miles. With hydrogen, the power generation can occur anywhere in the world. Hydrogen canisters can be transported via container shipping.
What this means is that if the U.S. were to convert to hydrogen power, it would allow all the power generation (and therefore pollution) to be moved offshore. In essence, all the pollution from the U.S. automotive fleet could be shipped to the Third World, in exchange for hard currency - which is the traditional method used for getting rid of the rest of the "not in my backyard" unpleasant underside of the affluent U.S. (and for that matter Western European) lifestyle.
Economically, it's a win all round - though of course environmentalists will probably disagree.
-Graham
Uhhh..wait. I don't think this is all that far above market rates for Class A office space in that area, particularly if they have any facilities for a server room, break room, etc. How much do you think office space in California is supposed to cost?
Bullshit. There are numerous official repercussions to taking a public anti-government position. You can legally be denied a security clearance. You can legally be detained for questioning. You can legally be denied visas, passports, and (if not a citizen) naturalization or work permits.
And if you want to talk about being put to death, consider this. According to Amnesty International there are 86 countries whose governments regularly put people to death, and 109 that do not. In these 109 countries you can be said to have the inalienable right to life. As a simple matter of fact, not opinion, on which of these lists is the U.S. registered?
Yes, the U.S. is a free country. It scores a 1 (the top score) on the Freedom House survey. But so do 28 other nations. 45% of the world's population is free. Freedom is in no way uniquely or even especially an American characteristic.
-Graham
Think of the Billy Crystal character from The Princess Bride: "It's only mostly digital. There's a big difference between mostly digital, and all digital."
However, the notion that the bits themselves are somehow "dirty" is still hogwash.
-Graham
More interestingly, why should software be treated any differently than other intellectual property when it comes to tax laws?
If you create a tax at the point of creation of intellectual property, then the tax applies whenever you create anything of value through the expression of thought into written or electronic form. If software creation is a tax-incurring activity, then so is (or should be) the creation of the written word, music, speech, jokes, etc.
In other words, suppose I have a conversation with a friend of mine, and we both put intellectual effort into choosing our words. Not only have we have each created intellectual property, we have also demonstrated its value by engaging in a barter transaction. Suppose we talk for two hours, and it can be claimed that a professional conversationalist would earn $20/hour. We have created $80 worth of intellectual property at prevailing market rates; and, if we are located in Washington State, we each owe the government perhaps $5 to $10.
Note that this might already be the case under current IRS code! If intellectual property is "goods" then we have created and exchanged "goods for hire" through a barter arrangement. Imagine that over the course of a year my friend and I spend 500 hours talking to each other. We have each created "goods" worth $10,000 and exchanged them as barter - so we have to file Form 1099s on each other, pay an extra $3,000 (or so) income tax, and we will probably face legal action for our failure to withhold payroll and Social Security taxes from each other!
The scary thing is, this is probably a valid legal argument.
-Graham
10 million frequent flyer miles does not equal 10 million actual traveled miles. You get all kinds of bonuses, double points for certain segments, points for staying in a hotel, points for renting a car, etc, etc. I have met sales reps with accounts in the millions of points. I don't think I've ever seen anyone with 10 million but it's less than an order of magnitude out.
There are two things "in it" for the employee.
(1) You don't have to pass a credit check, but you can still behave like a "normal" business traveler. This is a big deal for people with bad credit histories who nevertheless want to work professional jobs with a lot of travel.
(2) The line of credit on the company card is intended to be used for company purposes, so you aren't using any of your own lines of credit financing the company's operations. This is a big deal for people who have their credit cards maxed out, or people who travel so much that the amount of credit required is excessive.
If you are an infrequent traveler with lots of available credit, then getting a corporate charge card is not a big deal for you. Not all people fit into this category.
-Graham
When a single missing '=' can cause a root exploit in code that's generally considered well-written, who are these people that actually entertain the idea that C is the right language to do coding in?
Windows hasn't had a paradigm shift since, roughly, 1989. Some might say 1995. The latest must-have new version of Windows is generally a batch of bug fixes wrapped around some superficial user interface changes.
Also, Windows is far better than Linux in terms of binary backwards compatibility. I can take pretty much any binary written for pretty much any version of DOS or Windows, and run it on my current Windows machine. Linux distributions typically care more about source compatibility, and are much more willing to break binary compatibility.
So in the case of Loki games, consider this: I can buy a binary-only game for Windows today, and if the company that makes it goes out of business, I can be reasonably certain that I can continue to play it for several more years. However, if I buy a binary-only game for Linux today, I can be reasonably certain that within a year, I will have to start adding non-default cruft to my Red Hat install for it to still work, and within two years it will probably become hopeless. Three at the outside.
Think about it: Suppose you have a binary that was developed for Red Hat 5.2 or 6.0 today? What can you really do with it except demand that the vendor recompile for 7.2? On the other hand, do you expect Windows software from 1998 to run on your current box?
-Graham
This would not cause a significant overpopulation problem. We can assume that these treatments will not be available to the poor, so any population increase would be among the rich. The rich do not reproduce at a rate capable of sustaining their numbers. So the result would be a higher rate of increase in the rich population, perhaps not sufficient to offset the decrease already taking place.
Having a limited time-span within which wealth can be accumulated is one of the few limits on the ability of the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. This technology removes that limit, thereby contributing to economic inequity. Inequity is widely believed to be a root cause of political and military instability.
So, long-term, widespread extreme longevity at high cost would result in an even more comfortable existence for Americans and Western Europeans, accompanied by a commensurate increase in September 11 type incidents.
This is already the path we find ourselves on. Move along, nothing to see here.
No, actually, the be-all and end-all for stability and maintainability is Ada.
Which should come as no surprise to anyone.
-Graham
Well, yes, that makes sense from a business perspective. Undoubtedly x86 is where the money is, for now and for a while to come. Transmeta is correct to play mostly in the x86 space.
So what's the point of code morphing?
I mean, if they're just going to be a low-power x86 clone, surely the resources (engineering, space on the die, whatever) taken up by code morphing could be put to better use as...nothing. Just make an x86-only design. AMD did, and theirs is better. Presumably because they focused all their effort on making a low-power x86, and not on code morphing.
Seriously. Either develop some useful capability from the code morphing tech, or abandon it.
-Graham
When did paperbacks become "mass-market" paperbacks? What other kind of paperback is there? Why aren't people happy just saying a book is a paperback any more?
Or more to the point, *dividing* Microsoft by any rational number will also fail to return a rational result. :-)
-1, incorrect placement of [/RANT] tag...
It won't work.
Economics dictates that in a perfectly competitive market, price must equal marginal cost. Marginal cost is the cost of making one more unit. If you have already pressed a run of ten thousand CDs, making one more costs what, about three cents?
So perhaps you can make money on friction; e.g. profit from the fact that no market is actually perfectly competitive. A blank CD costs $0.50, and finding and ripping a bunch of songs costs an hour or two of your time. All protestations of ethics aside, at what price would Trailer Park Joe consider a prepackaged CD a better deal than copying from a friend?
Last but not least, there's price elasticity. If you cut the price in half, will you double sales volume? If not, it isn't worth doing.
-Graham
I'm guessing you were at DragonCon this year, in Atlanta. Am I right?
Symbols translated, what he's saying is: If they found a linear-time solution to NP, then NP problems would be solvable in linear time.
O(n) *means* linear time.
The actual quest is to prove that P=NP (or that P != NP), meaning any/all NP problems can be solved in O(P) where P represents any polynomial equation. Not O(n), whatever the article may say.
-Graham
Just out of curiosity, are you insane? Desktop hard drives are designed to go into PCs that most people turn off every night. They can and do withstand tens of thousands of spin up/down cycles over the course of a normal lifetime.
No. Well, yes, but no.
What we have here is a situation where an economically competitive market exists, but is being officially suppressed by government fiat.
In an economically competitive market, price equals marginal cost. Period. In other words, goods and services sell for the full cost of producing the last unit. In the case of software, this means: the cost of duplicating a CD, a box, a manual, and the minimum possible amount of money such that the shareholders in the software company do not choose to take their money elsewhere. Or in other words, probably about $20 a box. Regardless, for the most part, of the cost or difficulty of developing the CD that goes in the box. None of that is *marginal* cost.
This is all microeconomics 101 stuff. Straight out of the textbook. Little or no interpretation is required. Also note that this does *not* mean all the content companies go out of business, it just means that they start delivering frugal profit margins that make them about as exciting as cement fabricators from an investor point of view.
In the real world, first-run retail boxed software titles can sell for hundreds of dollars. Software producers have been claiming excess profit (some people call it 'economic rent' and have described a whole new category of economic actor called a 'rent seeker'). This will not continue forever.
In every case (*every* case) where a market otherwise subject to economic competition has been forced into an excess-profit situation by government fiat, the result is a black market. Software piracy is simply this black market. Yes, there will be violent official crackdowns. But it won't work in the long run. It never does.
-Graham
What you're saying is true, as far as it goes. There have been many examples of people claiming that something is impossible, only to have it eventually achieved. But there have also been many examples of people claiming that something is possible, only to have it eventually understood not to be. For example, Newtonian mechanics was a revolutionary change to our understanding of the world; conceptually, it led to a 'clockwork universe' where, if you could only know the position and velocity of all particles, you would be able to project backwards and forwards and know everything about the past and future; in other words, all information about all past and future states of the universe is contained within the current state. It was therefore reasonable to suppose, and many educated people *did* suppose, that within some reasonable amount of time, we would be able to view or even travel to the past or the future - H. G. Wells' time machine is firmly rooted in this tradition.
Then came the 20th century; Einstein, Heisenburg, etc. In our new understanding of the world, there is no such thing as 'the state of the universe' and certainly no expectation that you can look forwards or backwards into the future or the past, or even look at the present with any great degree of certainty. As a result, nobody seriously suggests that time travel is possible any more.
It is a logical fallacy to argue that because many similar propositions have been shown to be false, that *this* proposition will turn out to be false. The feasibility or lack of same involved in heavier-than-air flight, human cloning, and neural-computer interfaces are totally independent of each other.
As usual, the interesting technological possibilities that we "can't quite do" turn out to be wrapped around deep philosophical questions. In this case, prior to establishing a neural-computer interface that truly 'reads our thoughts' you would have to identify exactly where thoughts come from, how they occur, and so forth - incidentally proving or disproving the existence of the soul in the process, most likely. Do you really think this will happen?
-Graham
You claim to be able to build an equivalent system for 25% to 33% of the price Dell charges?
Back that up.
-Graham
On the other hand, if you're doing bleeding-edge work, or writing hardware drivers, or developing system software that needs to perform privileged operations, then you really can't do this. Or, even if your development work doesn't _strictly_ require root/administrator access but you nevertheless want to maintain a creatively charged group - i.e. if you want to write a killer app that will change the world, and you need people who are as much visionaries as they are programmers - then you absolutely must work hard to remove all barriers to accomplishment from their environment. (You must also remove any sharp objects or dangerous items; for example, scissors, staplers or any access to production servers.)
In practice, the majority of development shops need more of the former, less of the latter. But in the cases where you do need visionaries, you really need them. And they are very hard to find, very hard to keep, and very very hard to keep focused on a task. The last thing you need with these people is another headache, so just let them do whatever with their own machines and hope to hell nobody ever audits their licensing compliance. Try to remember that if you can't get a straight answer out of them, an external auditor will most likely be totally baffled. You can hope, anyway.
If you make your money in something other than software, and your programmers act like prima donnas, get different programmers. Internal-use software development never requires this kind of visionary status. Whatever your current staff may be telling you, you can build a decent development team using nine-to-five, do what they're told staffers. And you can do it with locked down boxes.
-Graham
This was one of the things I found surprising about my own little foray into open source development. Once my project gained popularity, I started to get RFPs from big companies. These are typically a lengthy questionnaire, or a detailed set of requirements describing a document to be put together. The attitude that comes through in these things is, "jump through our hoops or we'll go with someone else."
Typically these days I respond with an e-mail that nicely and politely explains the situation, and declines to bid on the RFP/RFQ. I sometimes suggest that if the individual is interested in using the software, that they treat it as an internal project for bidding purposes; i.e. they can put together their own internal proposal to be considered alongside the other vendor proposals. This seems to work pretty well.
-Graham
No. Make peace, like Hitler should have done.
It has really come to that.
-Graham