"Can't really rationalize buying a dvd player so I can watch movies on my pc."
Neither can I at this juncture, however, I will buy a DVD-RW & a DVD/CD drive (*optimized for DVD ripping) when the technology is cheap and available in the US.
Also. I've heard of DVD-R/RW drives in Japan (*sold only in Japan, Grrrr) getting up to 18 Gigs of storage on a double sided disk. Compare this to 650 MB w/ CD-R/RW.
For now thou, the only people using DVD-R in the US is the Film Industry (to burn prior disks prior to sending them to the factory). There's really no other market (*that I know of) who's willing to pay $5000-7000 for a DVD writer, at least in America.
As far as buying a stand alone, play only player. Why bother when a lot of the new 3D cards have TV outs installed? Just buy a DVD/mpeg2 encoder card and a cable and no need to spend another couple hundred on a VCR-like DVD *unless you have your TV far away from your computer*.
You see Science Fiction is alive and kicking. It is finally getting some main stream respect and attention, and there are some damn fine authors out there.
Some of the Masters & their best (in my opionion) works:
Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon
Spider Robinson - Mindkiller
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Theodore Sturgeon - Godbody
Larry Niven - Lucifer's Hammer
Harry Harrison - Ssssssssssss Rat!(early series)
The list goes on and on and on. Sci Fi is by no means obsolete, however some authors have strayed off the beaten path (or indeed have never been on the path). Sci Fi is about Ideas, not gagets, it's about telling a story, inspiring people who are stuck in their current, and often unpleasant realities. It's about the potential of mankind, and our probable extinction. Sci Fi is Literature for neophyles (people who embrace change), unfortunately neo-phobic establishment ideas about what qualifies as literature often marginalize great works, and therefore they go out of print, and nobody reads them. Or the public is only exposed to the mornic, serialized, pre-fab drivel that fills the Sci-fi section bookshelves at the local B. Dalton.
Regarding Idoru yes it is garbage, and Gibson is obsolete. He never really knew about technology from the start, which enabled him to write Neuromancer and give birth to an interesting movement, the so called cyberpunk movement. However, he is out of steam and flailing around in fictional universe that can only be described as a pseudo-intellectual/postmodern cartoon. For example, here's an excerpt about Gibson's new book, All Tomorrow's Parties from Wired Magazine's October 1999 Issue:
"All the heroes in All Tomorrow's Parties wield knives. Chevette, the onetime bike messenger and second-best thing in William Gibson's 1993 Virtual Light, has one hammered from a motorcycle drive chain. Rydell, former cop, night watchman, and now convenience store security guy, sports a lightweight ceramic knife, although he doesn't much like its balance. And the mysterious Konrad, the man who kills without fuss or muss, brandishes the deadliest blade, the one "that sleeps head down, like a vampire bat."
As you can see, the plot could easily be converted into a saturday morning cartoon, perhaps as ''Tenage Mutant Ninja Idoru-Bots with their super special knives and chains (OMG)." Also, the character Chevette is a blatant rip of of Hiro Protagonist from Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash.
I think when you take Internet stocks, the overall P/E ratio is inflated past 14-18. For instance, the Yahoo IPO injected massive amounts of capital into a company with no real revenues, besides what they generate from banner adds. Banner adds do not pay in the billions.
...markets returning 20-30% when the average return is around 8%...
It wasn't too long ago that the stock market was at 6,000, now it's pushing 10,000. What this 20-30% return equates to is a speculative bubble, which will eventually burst.
If the stock market were to drop back down to 6,000 a lot of capitol would vanish over night, and a lot of companies will be forced to lay people off. In turn these people will no longer be able to pay off their own debt, and as a result, the bankruptcy rate will rise exponentially. Commercial banks, already stretched thin by lending and their own stock market speculation (and the smug assurance that the Fed will bail them out, as it did with the trillion dollar hedge fund fiasco earlier this year), will not be prepaired to lose this major soruce of revenue (consumer loans) while simultaneously suffering massive losses in the stock market. The fed will have to step in, but IMHO, the Fed is full of IOUs, not real cash, so who knows how it's supposed to bail out hundreds of banks?
What is missing in my previous analysis is a triggering mechanisim. Unfortunately, Y2K, a huge FUD catalyst is only a couple months away, and should people decide to panic, they will pull out of the stock market in droves in December. And as Bruce Sterling pointed out in one of his repsponses above, "... It's all about stockholder dominance now."
" Well actually US companies are leveraged less than their international counterparts. Debt is not a bad thing for a corportation."
How many 10-Ks have you looked at recently? I've read over dozen this month alone. Blue chip companies. And all of them are in debt. They still post profits, but these profits pale in comparison to how much debt all of them are carrying. In good financial times this isn't an unhealthy thing, but my projection isn't based on good times.
"Well, this is again technically true, but there are several measures of how much money is out there, and I'm not sure which one you are using. M1 is cash out there, M2 is things that can be converted to cash quickly and easily (checking accounts, etc..)"
I was speaking of M1. Conversion of checking/savings to cash is easy when an average number of people are making the same withdrawl. However, should there be a run on the banks after a crash, there wouldn't be enough currency to convert all the checking and savings accounts, as M1 is only around 8% of the federal reserve. And, as I mentioned above, the Fed won't be able to bail out the banks, as they don't have the actual capitol to do so.
"If despite this you still think the economy is going to collapse, would you like to give me those useless pieces of paper with dead presidents on them that you have? "
Heh!
The Crash of the Millennium by Ravi Batra, is a useful reference, if you're interested in exploring this subject further.
Oh? It's already happened eh? Do me a favor and go to pricewatch and do a search on DVD recorder and then tell me how DVD is already supplanting CD-R/RW as a storage solution.
getting moderated down in from 2 back to one in the space of 5 minutes has given me some impetus to continue:
Ahrm, where was I. Ah. The collapse of the American economy:
1) P/E ratios: the ratio between the valuation of a stock, or variable "P" price, and the variable "E" earnings. Economists believe that P/E ratios over 16 increase the probability of a stock market crash exponentially. The current P/E ratio for the American Stock markets is over 30.
2) Leveraging. Most US corporations are up to their eyeballs in debt. They operate under the same conglomerate ITT type model that became common practice in the 1980s. The philosophy behind this model can be likened to primitive species evolutionary behavior, specifically pack animals/fish schools travelling in larger numbers so as to be less pervious to predators. Or in this instance, acquire enough companies so that you are less susceptible to hostile takeovers. The end result of this process is massive debt, and very little actual capitol, as it takes enormous sums of money to buy another company/corporation (e.g. MCI buying Sprint for 100 Billion Dollars this week.
3) The mysterious Federal Reserve Note: Contrary to popular belief, only 8%, or so of the US currency is *actually* in the form of dollars. The other 92% of the US currency is in the form of electronic cash and IOUs to various foreign powers. Should there be a run on the banks due to a highly likely stock market crash, there would be a printed currency shortage, much the same as there was in the 1930s.
*I wouldn't be betting on the DVD being around very long."
Hrmmm. Once Japan decides on a standard for DVD-R, the technology will perpetuate itself especially when you take into account the fact that the DVD encryption algorythm has already been broken, according to . So, perhaps theory of American's economic collapse due to Chinese software piracy would have been lent a higher degree of credibility had you included DVD movie piracy in the mix...
..however, IMHO, the American economy will collapse for entirely different reasons that intellectual property rights abuses. However, this isn't the time for grim analyses.
Adding to this, here's an excerpt from Thomas Sowell's new book Barbarians Inside the Gates:
"Apparently it is wrong to know things that would upset the liberals' [media's] picture of the world--whether the particular issue involves abortion, Anita Hill, homosexuals or the homeless...Perhaps a classic example of preventing the public from knowing things considered wrong to know was the media treatment of David Brock's book, The Real Anita Hill, when it was published a few years ago. The question is not whether one agrees or disagrees with what the book says. The question is whether the public should be allowed to know what the book says..."
Janes essentially crossed this line by allowing a public forum to take on some of the Media's burden of Omniscience. This event, while seemingly unremarkable [slashdot collaborative writing with Jane's], does set somewhat of a disturbing president from the perspective of the media elite. It quantifies the fact that the public often know more about news than they do. Add to this the Internet, which scares the media to death. This is mostly do to the rapid, and progressive decline in the sale of magazines and newspapers, as an increasingly disgusted public turns to alternative means of information dissemination, free of the politically correct filters or "official" media organizations such as PBS.
Adding to this, here's an excerpt from Thomas Sowell's new book Barbarians Inside the Gates:
"Appearently it is wrong to know things that would upset the liberals' [media's] picture of the world--whether the particular issue involves abortion, Anita Hill, homosexuals or the homesless...Perhaps a classic example of preventing the public from knowing things considered wrong to know was the media treatment of David Brock's book, The Real Anita Hill, when it was published a few years ago. The question is not whether one agrees or disagrees with what the book says. The question is whether the public should be allowed to know what the book says..."
Janes essentially crossed this line by allowing a public forum to take on some of the Media's burden of Omniscience. This event, while seemingly unremarkable [slashdot collaborative writing with Jane's], does set somewhat of a disturbing president from the perspetive of the media elite. It quantifies the fact that the public often know more about news than they do. Add to this the Internet, which scares the media to death. This is mostly do to the rapid, and progressive decline in the sale of magizines and newspapers, as an increasingly disgusted public turns to alternative means of information dissemination, free of the politically correct filters or "official" media organizations such as PBS.
PBS, as demonstrated by their uncovered an ill concealed sharing of donor lists with the Democratic party, is hardly in a position to hurl stones at the "nerdrati" especially as we do more than "read Slashdot" we write it.
You really have to ask yourself, do you want to go and start inviting elitist journalist types who look down on us? I think the conceit of the media will be the only thing that keeps slashdot from turning into zdnet.
What's to prevent Government Agents from Seizing ISP records that link their client bases' MAC address & Billing/personal information? This is already possible under provisions of the National Security Act, which supercedes laws requiring warrants prior to search and seizure.
If your MAC address is embeded in your IP number, and the the Domain name of your IP address is also embedded in your IP address, how could it be any easier to trace you?
For all you AC posters, how bout same agents seizing all the sys logs of/. which_already_record your IP address.
Imagine for a moment that a catastrophe destroyed *all* the memory production capacity except that from a single company. By your logic, that one company's prices shouldn't be affected by the disaster. Of course, that cannot be.
I think you misunderstand. The point of my last point was to establish that the earthqake was not the sole cause of the sharp spike in SDRAM prices. I think that point was made. I cited micron as an example because Micron DRAM was, is, and has been available in abundance, so it serves as a useful indicator.
There are obviously a lot more issues at work here, and a lot more foreign companies making DRAM besides the US and Taiwan. NEC is in Japan, and Samsung is in Korea for instance.
The reality of markets is, of course, far more complicated than your argument (and mine) would have it be. Even a credible prediction of a quake in Taiwan would affect prices in the markets in which Taiwan is a major player.
I wasn't my intention to do a full analysis of the market forces that led to the exponential rise in DRAM prices. I was meerly offering the results of a small case study. If you look further in this thread, the myriad reasons for the DRAM price increases are addressed.
4. Micron's aquisition of Texas Instruments 5. Tariff wall erected against Taiwanese DRAM 6. Micron's Monopoly over US DRAM market 7. Taiwan's frequent power outages (3 total before quake)
The reason the prices got so high this year was because of the quake in Taiwan.
Not so. I was following the market closely before during and after the quake. I used corsair PC 133 128 MB as a marker, as it uses Micron DRAM which is not produced in Taiwan, and in no way would be effected by the quake (it also happend to be the brand I choose and now own, due to it's superior quality). Here is a timeline of the price spikes:
I chose direct.multiwave.com (wholesaler) as my test bed.
Monday (prior to quake): $297
Sept 22nd (day of the quake, wednesday): $297
Sept 24th $297
Sept 29th: $358
Oct 7th: $372
So you see, the prices were already at $300 before the quake. The subsequent rises could be attributed to Micron raising the price of DRAM to over $16 after the 22th, the day of the quake.
Hopefully SDRAM prices will drop as a result of this, as a lot of companies stopped fabricating DRAM back in June as a result of the overabundance of cheap Taiwanese DRAM selling at $4. I'd personally like to see SDRAM fall back to somewhat more reasonable level as $360 is not a fair price IMHO for a 128 MB DIMM when the production cost is marginally less (300%).
However. SDRAM won't suffice forever as it can't (disclaimer: as far as I know) be overclocked much higher than it already is (140 MHz is the highest I've read about before stability issues arise). RDRAM on the other hand can run up to 800 MHz. The heat sync looks rather cute, but the memory is tragically flawed by it's miniscule 16 bit bus (as opposed to the 64 bit SDRAM bus to the front side system bus).
Rambus really needs to go back to the drawing board on this before they bring it back to market, if it is ever given another chance. Intel in partnering with Rambus was seeing Large dollar signs in an unending stream of royalty payments on every future RDRAM RIMM sold for many years to come. Chalk it up to another case of greed overriding sensibility.
I'd be happy if they'd just settle on a standard connector, and lower quality LCD prices so I can stop buying CRTs.
OpenLDI? Fine buy an SGI 1600SW and a lousy #9 Rev IV with a 3D chipset that gets in the neighborhood of 16 fps in Q3 test 1024x768.. oh wait will the drivers even work with OpenGL in windows 9x? good question, not worth 3k to find out if the 3D hardware reviewers are playing practical jokes.
DVI? Great, lemme go out and buy a Sony 18" for 4K and run it on a leadtek GeForce for another $400, oh by the way, here's your eviction notice, and Visa called to say that the police will be arriving any minute to escort you to debtor's prison.
Anderson will be the new Shelly Stringfield (ER quitter), and Ducovny will be the new David Caruso (NYPD Blue quitter). Neither of these two had any success after they quit, and their careers are for all intensive purposes, dead (and no, made for TV movies don't count Shelly).
If Anderson & Ducovny were smart they'd stick around and do another X-files movie. At least that way they wouldn't have to work again. But now people are going to be pissed off at them for forcing the show to end. And, IMHO it is still the only show in the wasteland of TV worth watching, despite what people say about it getting old.
Novell (3.x & 4.x) is a super stable network OS, however, they made the mistake of using Groupwise for their e-mail system (not sure if they still do). The problem with groupwise is it's not an enterprise wide email system, like POP3 or IMAP.
Groupwise uses (at least 2 years ago when I was involved with it) a number post offices, which means a number of seperate computers (often unsuited to the task of processing large volums of mail) located in different parts of a domain. All these post offices process mail for their domain, which can include a number of file servers. The mail is then sent to a primary post office SMTP machine and out to the internet... In order to send mail out to another DNS, you'd also have to address it with an internet: or i: prefix.
So the problems start when individual post offices crash or bog down. When this happens mail from a domain queues up in a LAN queue. The size of the queue (number of e-mails pileing up) gives the groupwise admin an idea whether or not that PO is processing email to the centeral PO, or whether it's down, or if it needs some help. With multiple queues and machines (post offices) the margin for error is much higher than with a single enterprise send mail server.
Talking with friends, I hear that Groupwise is still alive and kicking, for instance, the University of Maryland just put in a groupwise system. I was also not surprised to hear the horror stories already appearing: professor: "How come I can't get my mail now?!?".
Personally I like POP3, as I can read my mail anywhere (with the exception of firewall issues) through Netscape, and it's very stable.
I'm just getting into Linux now, and I'm very excited about it. A couple years ago, I was looking into CNE (Novell) certification however, it seems like M$ NT is eating up too much of Novell's market share to make this worth the cost. The good news is that Linux Admin Certification looks like it's about to take off, so I'm studying for it now on my own:)
I never said SCSI wasn't the best solution for current file/web/e-mail servers, as it clearly is. And I_would_rather_have a 10,000 rpm SCSI RAID setup for my new machine, but it's not cost effective for me. I don't really need RAID anyhow. All I need is a nice 18 gig hard drive, and a CD-RW burner for archiving. I know about the limitations of IDE, however, I don't plan on buying a controller so that isn't an issue. The main board I plan on buying will have an integrated UDMA/66 controller - but even if I did want or need to buy a controller, they are very cheap. Promise controllers wholesale at $40-50 (versus $150+ for SCSI). By the same token, I would love an SMP set up, but as I'm not planning on doing massive CPU intensive tasks all the time (e.g. renders in 3DS), it would be impracticle, and a waste of money.
Zdnet is not worth posting on, however I do think I have something to contribute here, a perspective different from yours perhaps, but still informed. Btw, I have worked on file servers (not just PCs), and helped admin 2 Novell trees with 200+ file servers.
Hrm, I too get tired of people slamming Microsoft constantly. For all their faults, they are a blue chip American company, and when they do well they generate jobs and wealth and help fuel the economy...
But, I do think that Microsoft should change it's business practices, and perhaps a little less of the diversity training and a little more ethics training is in order, hmmmm?
On linux and the complexity of the command line interface. In last month's issue of Linux Magazine there was an interview with Alan Cox, and he said the following about the future of Linux:
"...the user interface is going to be as easy to use as Windows. But that isn't good enough. Windows is still the Black and Decker power tools of the computing world. We need to have something much simpler than that. A lot of people don't want to learn how to use the computer: you shouldn't ever have to read a manual. You shouldn't have to deal with file managers. Why should you have to understand all this file stuff?"
So, clearly, there's going to be a movement away from the command line interface, thou I'm sure it'll still be an option to run Linux with no GUI...
The thing that kills me on/. is how the sys admin/programmer/IT types are so out of touch with what the average user wants and needs. On different threads I've had to deal with at least two, "APG 4x Isn't Important!" claims that I found somewhat astonishing. That is until I realized that there was something larger at work here: that IT types are out of touch with the market.
You see I'm not in the IT industry anymore, I was for a few years, but to tell you the truth, it kind of sucks, and I stopped enjoying using my computer(s) at home. At the time, I had built a P233 with an Adaptec SCSI controller, a SCSI CD-ROM 4x, and a 2.0 gig SCSI drive. All of this is now dated technology, and it is not upgradeable to my next system. How much did I spend on this fiasco? $150 for the controller (plain 40 Mb/sec SCSI) $200 for the drive, $200 for the CD ROM. That's a total of $550 for a bunch of equipment that is not worth $100 only 2 short years later... Now had I been smart and opted for IDE, I would have spent a lot less, gotten more storage space for my money, and felt a lot less foolish now that I had wasted all that money on equipment that I can not transfer to the new workstation I am now building.
Sure if you're some hot shot WAN admin, you're used to throwing around someone else's cash on a daily basis, and for you buying massive Ultra SCSI 3 RAID arrays is no problem. You know that the whole thing will be upgraded in a year or 2 on the companies dime and written off as a business expense -- money that would have gone to taxes anyway.
But you see, 99.999999999999% of Americans aren't big shot sys admins and therefore we don't have million dollar annual technology budgets. Instead, in this increasingly annoying cycle of hardware obsolescence, we are forced to make wise, cost effective decisions and if you take my example of my experience with SCSI in the previous paragraph, you might come to the same conclusion I did: that SCSI is nice, but not worth the money especially when you can get comparable performance at %300 lower cost. I mean come on, there's really not all that much difference between 66 Mb/sec and 80 Mb/sec.
So no, SCSI won't die tomorrow, but it will get more expensive as more and more average consumers turn away from it to more cost effective alternatives like UDMA 66 (the less units you sell = smaller production cycles = higher unit cost).
You completely lost me in your logic of USB... I don't know anyone of connecting phones, speakers, scanners, etc. to SCSI.
Hrm, let's see what peripheral SCSI devices are on sale today at www.pricewatch.com...
1) SCSI Scanners
2) SCSI JAZZ Drives 1 & 2 gig
3) SCSI Magneto Optical Drives
Then here's a comparable list of USB peripherals on Pricewatch:
1) USB keyboards
2) USB Mouse's
3) USB game controllers (joysticks, wheels, etc)
4) USB hubs
5) USB scanners
6) USB Printers
7) USB digital cameras
8) USB modems
9) USB Network cards
Granted there nobody's buying SCSI peripherals anymore, however this isn't due to the lack of products, because before USB the only peripherial connectors offered were SCSI, Serial & Parallel. So why are there so few peripheral SCSI devices today, hmmm? Because everyone's now buying USB peripherials. You know what's really sad? I went to Pinnacle's web site recently, and tried to click on a link to their MO Jukebox section, and it was a dead link. I mean they can't be selling any MO drives anymore if their web site doesn't even link to one of their core product lines. It's sad, but you know what, I trust the decisions of the market more than any individual. The market likes USB, because it's integrated and you don't need IRQ settings, the speed is negligible as most people are used to slow parallel and serial connected peripherals anyhow.
So what's left? SCSI is only useful now, as you said yourself for hard drives. But what is the wholesale price of a Ultra SCSI 3 drive? How bout a Compaq 34.4 gig SCSI3 drive? $1550. Now why in the hell would I buy one of these when I can buy more storage for $3-400 between two 20 gig UDMA 66 drives? The price difference may be small to a corporation, but to the average Joe, that's a big screen TV. Hence, SCSI is pricing itself out of the marketplace, and will therefore eventually wither and die.
IMHO the coup de gras will delivered to SCSI when solid state RAM drive prices drop to the point where they are a cost effective solution.
Having actually been to the post office and having seen the people (read: bureacratic moron class A) I would pay the extra $15 for Fed-Ex rather than have one of these nitwits open my mail and attempt to scan it.
Slashdot Mirror
Neither can I at this juncture, however, I will buy a DVD-RW & a DVD/CD drive (*optimized for DVD ripping) when the technology is cheap and available in the US.
Also. I've heard of DVD-R/RW drives in Japan (*sold only in Japan, Grrrr) getting up to 18 Gigs of storage on a double sided disk. Compare this to 650 MB w/ CD-R/RW.
For now thou, the only people using DVD-R in the US is the Film Industry (to burn prior disks prior to sending them to the factory). There's really no other market (*that I know of) who's willing to pay $5000-7000 for a DVD writer, at least in America.
As far as buying a stand alone, play only player. Why bother when a lot of the new 3D cards have TV outs installed? Just buy a DVD/mpeg2 encoder card and a cable and no need to spend another couple hundred on a VCR-like DVD *unless you have your TV far away from your computer*.
Some of the Masters & their best (in my opionion) works:
The list goes on and on and on. Sci Fi is by no means obsolete, however some authors have strayed off the beaten path (or indeed have never been on the path). Sci Fi is about Ideas, not gagets, it's about telling a story, inspiring people who are stuck in their current, and often unpleasant realities. It's about the potential of mankind, and our probable extinction. Sci Fi is Literature for neophyles (people who embrace change), unfortunately neo-phobic establishment ideas about what qualifies as literature often marginalize great works, and therefore they go out of print, and nobody reads them. Or the public is only exposed to the mornic, serialized, pre-fab drivel that fills the Sci-fi section bookshelves at the local B. Dalton.
Regarding Idoru yes it is garbage, and Gibson is obsolete. He never really knew about technology from the start, which enabled him to write Neuromancer and give birth to an interesting movement, the so called cyberpunk movement. However, he is out of steam and flailing around in fictional universe that can only be described as a pseudo-intellectual/postmodern cartoon. For example, here's an excerpt about Gibson's new book, All Tomorrow's Parties from Wired Magazine's October 1999 Issue:
"All the heroes in All Tomorrow's Parties wield knives. Chevette, the onetime bike messenger and second-best thing in William Gibson's 1993 Virtual Light, has one hammered from a motorcycle drive chain. Rydell, former cop, night watchman, and now convenience store security guy, sports a lightweight ceramic knife, although he doesn't much like its balance. And the mysterious Konrad, the man who kills without fuss or muss, brandishes the deadliest blade, the one "that sleeps head down, like a vampire bat."
As you can see, the plot could easily be converted into a saturday morning cartoon, perhaps as ''Tenage Mutant Ninja Idoru-Bots with their super special knives and chains (OMG)." Also, the character Chevette is a blatant rip of of Hiro Protagonist from Neal Stephenson's book Snow Crash.
It wasn't too long ago that the stock market was at 6,000, now it's pushing 10,000. What this 20-30% return equates to is a speculative bubble, which will eventually burst.
If the stock market were to drop back down to 6,000 a lot of capitol would vanish over night, and a lot of companies will be forced to lay people off. In turn these people will no longer be able to pay off their own debt, and as a result, the bankruptcy rate will rise exponentially. Commercial banks, already stretched thin by lending and their own stock market speculation (and the smug assurance that the Fed will bail them out, as it did with the trillion dollar hedge fund fiasco earlier this year), will not be prepaired to lose this major soruce of revenue (consumer loans) while simultaneously suffering massive losses in the stock market. The fed will have to step in, but IMHO, the Fed is full of IOUs, not real cash, so who knows how it's supposed to bail out hundreds of banks?
What is missing in my previous analysis is a triggering mechanisim. Unfortunately, Y2K, a huge FUD catalyst is only a couple months away, and should people decide to panic, they will pull out of the stock market in droves in December. And as Bruce Sterling pointed out in one of his repsponses above, "... It's all about stockholder dominance now."
" Well actually US companies are leveraged less than their international counterparts. Debt is not a bad thing for a corportation."
How many 10-Ks have you looked at recently? I've read over dozen this month alone. Blue chip companies. And all of them are in debt. They still post profits, but these profits pale in comparison to how much debt all of them are carrying. In good financial times this isn't an unhealthy thing, but my projection isn't based on good times.
"Well, this is again technically true, but there are several measures of how much money is out there, and I'm not sure which one you are using. M1 is cash out there, M2 is things that can be converted to cash quickly and easily (checking accounts, etc..)"
I was speaking of M1. Conversion of checking/savings to cash is easy when an average number of people are making the same withdrawl. However, should there be a run on the banks after a crash, there wouldn't be enough currency to convert all the checking and savings accounts, as M1 is only around 8% of the federal reserve. And, as I mentioned above, the Fed won't be able to bail out the banks, as they don't have the actual capitol to do so.
"If despite this you still think the economy is going to collapse, would you like to give me those useless pieces of paper with dead presidents on them that you have? "
Heh!
The Crash of the Millennium by Ravi Batra, is a useful reference, if you're interested in exploring this subject further.
Ahrm, where was I. Ah. The collapse of the American economy:
1) P/E ratios: the ratio between the valuation of a stock, or variable "P" price, and the variable "E" earnings. Economists believe that P/E ratios over 16 increase the probability of a stock market crash exponentially. The current P/E ratio for the American Stock markets is over 30.
2) Leveraging. Most US corporations are up to their eyeballs in debt. They operate under the same conglomerate ITT type model that became common practice in the 1980s. The philosophy behind this model can be likened to primitive species evolutionary behavior, specifically pack animals/fish schools travelling in larger numbers so as to be less pervious to predators. Or in this instance, acquire enough companies so that you are less susceptible to hostile takeovers. The end result of this process is massive debt, and very little actual capitol, as it takes enormous sums of money to buy another company/corporation (e.g. MCI buying Sprint for 100 Billion Dollars this week.
3) The mysterious Federal Reserve Note: Contrary to popular belief, only 8%, or so of the US currency is *actually* in the form of dollars. The other 92% of the US currency is in the form of electronic cash and IOUs to various foreign powers. Should there be a run on the banks due to a highly likely stock market crash, there would be a printed currency shortage, much the same as there was in the 1930s.
So there you have it.
Hrmmm. Once Japan decides on a standard for DVD-R, the technology will perpetuate itself especially when you take into account the fact that the DVD encryption algorythm has already been broken, according to . So, perhaps theory of American's economic collapse due to Chinese software piracy would have been lent a higher degree of credibility had you included DVD movie piracy in the mix...
"Apparently it is wrong to know things that would upset the liberals' [media's] picture of the world--whether the particular issue involves abortion, Anita Hill, homosexuals or the homeless...Perhaps a classic example of preventing the public from knowing things considered wrong to know was the media treatment of David Brock's book, The Real Anita Hill, when it was published a few years ago. The question is not whether one agrees or disagrees with what the book says. The question is whether the public should be allowed to know what the book says..."
Janes essentially crossed this line by allowing a public forum to take on some of the Media's burden of Omniscience. This event, while seemingly unremarkable [slashdot collaborative writing with Jane's], does set somewhat of a disturbing president from the perspective of the media elite. It quantifies the fact that the public often know more about news than they do. Add to this the Internet, which scares the media to death. This is mostly do to the rapid, and progressive decline in the sale of magazines and newspapers, as an increasingly disgusted public turns to alternative means of information dissemination, free of the politically correct filters or "official" media organizations such as PBS.
"Appearently it is wrong to know things that would upset the liberals' [media's] picture of the world--whether the particular issue involves abortion, Anita Hill, homosexuals or the homesless...Perhaps a classic example of preventing the public from knowing things considered wrong to know was the media treatment of David Brock's book, The Real Anita Hill, when it was published a few years ago. The question is not whether one agrees or disagrees with what the book says. The question is whether the public should be allowed to know what the book says..."
Janes essentially crossed this line by allowing a public forum to take on some of the Media's burden of Omniscience. This event, while seemingly unremarkable [slashdot collaborative writing with Jane's], does set somewhat of a disturbing president from the perspetive of the media elite. It quantifies the fact that the public often know more about news than they do. Add to this the Internet, which scares the media to death. This is mostly do to the rapid, and progressive decline in the sale of magizines and newspapers, as an increasingly disgusted public turns to alternative means of information dissemination, free of the politically correct filters or "official" media organizations such as PBS.
You really have to ask yourself, do you want to go and start inviting elitist journalist types who look down on us? I think the conceit of the media will be the only thing that keeps slashdot from turning into zdnet.
If your MAC address is embeded in your IP number, and the the Domain name of your IP address is also embedded in your IP address, how could it be any easier to trace you?
For all you AC posters, how bout same agents seizing all the sys logs of /. which_already_record your IP address.
- mourning the late great 4th Amendment.
I think you misunderstand. The point of my last point was to establish that the earthqake was not the sole cause of the sharp spike in SDRAM prices. I think that point was made. I cited micron as an example because Micron DRAM was, is, and has been available in abundance, so it serves as a useful indicator.
There are obviously a lot more issues at work here, and a lot more foreign companies making DRAM besides the US and Taiwan. NEC is in Japan, and Samsung is in Korea for instance.
The reality of markets is, of course, far more complicated than your argument (and mine) would have it be. Even a credible prediction of a quake in Taiwan would affect prices in the markets in which Taiwan is a major player.
I wasn't my intention to do a full analysis of the market forces that led to the exponential rise in DRAM prices. I was meerly offering the results of a small case study. If you look further in this thread, the myriad reasons for the DRAM price increases are addressed.
- Considering moving to Switzerland to an account on this groovy DNS.
4. Micron's aquisition of Texas Instruments
5. Tariff wall erected against Taiwanese DRAM
6. Micron's Monopoly over US DRAM market
7. Taiwan's frequent power outages (3 total before quake)
Not so. I was following the market closely before during and after the quake. I used corsair PC 133 128 MB as a marker, as it uses Micron DRAM which is not produced in Taiwan, and in no way would be effected by the quake (it also happend to be the brand I choose and now own, due to it's superior quality). Here is a timeline of the price spikes:
I chose direct.multiwave.com (wholesaler) as my test bed.
Monday (prior to quake): $297
Sept 22nd (day of the quake, wednesday): $297
Sept 24th $297
Sept 29th: $358
Oct 7th: $372
So you see, the prices were already at $300 before the quake. The subsequent rises could be attributed to Micron raising the price of DRAM to over $16 after the 22th, the day of the quake.
However. SDRAM won't suffice forever as it can't (disclaimer: as far as I know) be overclocked much higher than it already is (140 MHz is the highest I've read about before stability issues arise). RDRAM on the other hand can run up to 800 MHz. The heat sync looks rather cute, but the memory is tragically flawed by it's miniscule 16 bit bus (as opposed to the 64 bit SDRAM bus to the front side system bus).
Rambus really needs to go back to the drawing board on this before they bring it back to market, if it is ever given another chance. Intel in partnering with Rambus was seeing Large dollar signs in an unending stream of royalty payments on every future RDRAM RIMM sold for many years to come. Chalk it up to another case of greed overriding sensibility.
uhh, inside joke.
OpenLDI? Fine buy an SGI 1600SW and a lousy #9 Rev IV with a 3D chipset that gets in the neighborhood of 16 fps in Q3 test 1024x768.. oh wait will the drivers even work with OpenGL in windows 9x? good question, not worth 3k to find out if the 3D hardware reviewers are playing practical jokes.
DVI? Great, lemme go out and buy a Sony 18" for 4K and run it on a leadtek GeForce for another $400, oh by the way, here's your eviction notice, and Visa called to say that the police will be arriving any minute to escort you to debtor's prison.
If Anderson & Ducovny were smart they'd stick around and do another X-files movie. At least that way they wouldn't have to work again. But now people are going to be pissed off at them for forcing the show to end. And, IMHO it is still the only show in the wasteland of TV worth watching, despite what people say about it getting old.
Groupwise uses (at least 2 years ago when I was involved with it) a number post offices, which means a number of seperate computers (often unsuited to the task of processing large volums of mail) located in different parts of a domain. All these post offices process mail for their domain, which can include a number of file servers. The mail is then sent to a primary post office SMTP machine and out to the internet... In order to send mail out to another DNS, you'd also have to address it with an internet: or i: prefix.
So the problems start when individual post offices crash or bog down. When this happens mail from a domain queues up in a LAN queue. The size of the queue (number of e-mails pileing up) gives the groupwise admin an idea whether or not that PO is processing email to the centeral PO, or whether it's down, or if it needs some help. With multiple queues and machines (post offices) the margin for error is much higher than with a single enterprise send mail server.
Talking with friends, I hear that Groupwise is still alive and kicking, for instance, the University of Maryland just put in a groupwise system. I was also not surprised to hear the horror stories already appearing: professor: "How come I can't get my mail now?!?".
Personally I like POP3, as I can read my mail anywhere (with the exception of firewall issues) through Netscape, and it's very stable.
I'm just getting into Linux now, and I'm very excited about it. A couple years ago, I was looking into CNE (Novell) certification however, it seems like M$ NT is eating up too much of Novell's market share to make this worth the cost. The good news is that Linux Admin Certification looks like it's about to take off, so I'm studying for it now on my own :)
Zdnet is not worth posting on, however I do think I have something to contribute here, a perspective different from yours perhaps, but still informed. Btw, I have worked on file servers (not just PCs), and helped admin 2 Novell trees with 200+ file servers.
But, I do think that Microsoft should change it's business practices, and perhaps a little less of the diversity training and a little more ethics training is in order, hmmmm?
On linux and the complexity of the command line interface. In last month's issue of Linux Magazine there was an interview with Alan Cox, and he said the following about the future of Linux:
"...the user interface is going to be as easy to use as Windows. But that isn't good enough. Windows is still the Black and Decker power tools of the computing world. We need to have something much simpler than that. A lot of people don't want to learn how to use the computer: you shouldn't ever have to read a manual. You shouldn't have to deal with file managers. Why should you have to understand all this file stuff?"
So, clearly, there's going to be a movement away from the command line interface, thou I'm sure it'll still be an option to run Linux with no GUI...
You see I'm not in the IT industry anymore, I was for a few years, but to tell you the truth, it kind of sucks, and I stopped enjoying using my computer(s) at home. At the time, I had built a P233 with an Adaptec SCSI controller, a SCSI CD-ROM 4x, and a 2.0 gig SCSI drive. All of this is now dated technology, and it is not upgradeable to my next system. How much did I spend on this fiasco? $150 for the controller (plain 40 Mb/sec SCSI) $200 for the drive, $200 for the CD ROM. That's a total of $550 for a bunch of equipment that is not worth $100 only 2 short years later... Now had I been smart and opted for IDE, I would have spent a lot less, gotten more storage space for my money, and felt a lot less foolish now that I had wasted all that money on equipment that I can not transfer to the new workstation I am now building.
Sure if you're some hot shot WAN admin, you're used to throwing around someone else's cash on a daily basis, and for you buying massive Ultra SCSI 3 RAID arrays is no problem. You know that the whole thing will be upgraded in a year or 2 on the companies dime and written off as a business expense -- money that would have gone to taxes anyway.
But you see, 99.999999999999% of Americans aren't big shot sys admins and therefore we don't have million dollar annual technology budgets. Instead, in this increasingly annoying cycle of hardware obsolescence, we are forced to make wise, cost effective decisions and if you take my example of my experience with SCSI in the previous paragraph, you might come to the same conclusion I did: that SCSI is nice, but not worth the money especially when you can get comparable performance at %300 lower cost. I mean come on, there's really not all that much difference between 66 Mb/sec and 80 Mb/sec.
So no, SCSI won't die tomorrow, but it will get more expensive as more and more average consumers turn away from it to more cost effective alternatives like UDMA 66 (the less units you sell = smaller production cycles = higher unit cost).
You completely lost me in your logic of USB... I don't know anyone of connecting phones, speakers, scanners, etc. to SCSI.
Hrm, let's see what peripheral SCSI devices are on sale today at www.pricewatch.com...
1) SCSI Scanners
2) SCSI JAZZ Drives 1 & 2 gig
3) SCSI Magneto Optical Drives
Then here's a comparable list of USB peripherals on Pricewatch:
1) USB keyboards
2) USB Mouse's
3) USB game controllers (joysticks, wheels, etc)
4) USB hubs
5) USB scanners
6) USB Printers
7) USB digital cameras
8) USB modems
9) USB Network cards
Granted there nobody's buying SCSI peripherals anymore, however this isn't due to the lack of products, because before USB the only peripherial connectors offered were SCSI, Serial & Parallel. So why are there so few peripheral SCSI devices today, hmmm? Because everyone's now buying USB peripherials. You know what's really sad? I went to Pinnacle's web site recently, and tried to click on a link to their MO Jukebox section, and it was a dead link. I mean they can't be selling any MO drives anymore if their web site doesn't even link to one of their core product lines. It's sad, but you know what, I trust the decisions of the market more than any individual. The market likes USB, because it's integrated and you don't need IRQ settings, the speed is negligible as most people are used to slow parallel and serial connected peripherals anyhow.
So what's left? SCSI is only useful now, as you said yourself for hard drives. But what is the wholesale price of a Ultra SCSI 3 drive? How bout a Compaq 34.4 gig SCSI3 drive? $1550. Now why in the hell would I buy one of these when I can buy more storage for $3-400 between two 20 gig UDMA 66 drives? The price difference may be small to a corporation, but to the average Joe, that's a big screen TV. Hence, SCSI is pricing itself out of the marketplace, and will therefore eventually wither and die.
IMHO the coup de gras will delivered to SCSI when solid state RAM drive prices drop to the point where they are a cost effective solution.
heh!