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A long time ago I met a guy from IBM who explained to me that sun invented java because at the time hardware was getting cheaper and cheaper and faster and faster, and soon you’d be able to buy a dell for $200 that would run all the current day software rather well.
Java fixed that alright.
Today I heard about Websphere 6 introducing the concept of “Core Groups” and I realize that Websphere is IBM’s solution to the same problem.
I just had this neat idea.
Everybody’s all mad about the 50 million dollar jet that citibank ordered despite all the handouts they’re getting from the government.
That and all the bonuses being paid to retain the best talent (you know, the ones that lost us all of our money, that talent.)
Well, I have a really simple solution.
The banks beg for money, the government comes up with some dollar amount that they’re willing to give to a given bank. Then, somebody from the government goes through the books of said bank and tallies up all the excesses.
Who’s to decide what the excess is? The government. It is after all their (our) money.
They tally up all the jets and bonuses and company funded weekend jaunts and subtract that from the agreed amount they were going to give to the bank.
Then the bank can decide whether to go out of business or to sell the jet.
And if they can keep the jet and stay in business, obviously the government gave them too much money to begin with. They can take note of that for next time.
It occurred to me a number of years ago that we americans no longer possess the ability to put a man on the moon. And have them come back and still be alive.
Why? Because in the good old days mechanical designs and machinery were simpler. They operated on more basic scientific prinicipals and a LOT of resources were dumped into making it work.
Nowadays if anybody was tasked with getting a man on the moon, they’d use off the shelf parts, plug them into each other, skip over a lot of the basic rigorous end-to-end testing and while it should all work, it would not. Some part would fail, some badly written software would not handle an error condition correctly.
If we were to use the same design plans as we did in the 60’s we could make it work, but nobody in their sane mind would do that nowadays. We’ve come so far. We have computers and better alloys and greater understanding of space, certainly there would be shortcuts to take.
There’s no law of physics that says space travel has to be as easy as the movies make it out to be, and it’s not. You have to do a lot of over engineering if you don’t want something to fail. Given the money that would be available, and the culture of cutting corners to make it cheaper, I am pretty certain that a manned mission to the moon would fail.
I’m a software programmer by trade and I see how it is in my industry. Nobody dies when email is not delivered, nobody’s hand gets chopped off if an error message shows up on the screen. But in space travel, there’s not a lot of room for error, unless you overengineer a lot, and that wouldn’t happen.
There would be a lot of software on any spaceship made nowadays and it would have lots of buggy software on it.
Certainly you’ve heard the story about the ship that went sailing into mars (I think it was mars) because one group did specs in metric and another group used english units? And nobody talked to each other? That wasn’t even a software failure, all the software was correct. That was a project management failure.
Certainly plenty of those to be had in such a complex project as a manned moon mission.
Here’s another example I came across today. Remember the TRS-80 model 100? It was a little portable computer built in 1983, it ran on 4 AA batteries, and had a full qwerty keyboard. It had a little word processor built in (among other things) and you could do your typing for 6-8 hours on on set of 4 AA batteries.
Nowadays, we have laptops that require lots more battery and don’t last nearly as long because they’re ‘better’. Basically, we can no longer in 2009 do what we did in 1983.
I had this neat thought today.
Like everything else in the world, banks are expected to live forever. Because really, the earth is going to exist forever, and so are humans in general and if individual people die, well they can hand off their interest in assets and whatnot to the next generation, but the people will always be there.
The sun is never going to burn out, we’ll never overpopulate the planet, all these things will keep going on forever.
But banks are interesting. Banks create money.
I’ve never started a bank or any other business, but I expect it works something like this:
A group of people take out a loan or hit up some venture capitalists for money to open a retail outlet and hire some people and get carpeting, and have some extra cash left over to lend out as starting money.
People off the street open savings accounts where they get 1% on their deposits, and the bank lends out some number times the amount of deposits and charges 5-10% for use of their money.
Except of course they don’t have that money, the created it.
So as long as the bank does okay, and there’s no runs on the bank everything works fine. This has been going on for hundreds of years at thousands of banks.
But what if you wanted to close your bank. You can’t. In order to close your bank, you’d have to collect all the money you loaned out and give back all the money that was deposited.
Unless you have enough profit to cover giving back all the money in the savings accounts, or plan years ahead so that you stop giving out new loans and wait for them all to come due, you can’t close your doors.
You can, however fail. The FDIC makes it easy, just run your business badly, you go into bankruptcy and the FDIC bails out all your depositors and worries (or not) about the outstanding loans due.
Why is it that all the toothpaste makers that I’ve seen always think they’re getting one over on us. I’ve noticed without fail (though I can’t say I’ve tried every toothpaste in my life) that when you first open the tube and squeeze, some toothpaste comes out, but behind it is a lot of air.
I can imagine some kind of excuse about leaving room for pressure equalization based on the packaging plant and your house being at different altitudes, but somehow I don’t think so.
I think they just want to give you less product in a bigger package.
They’re not fooling me. I know it’s a conspiracy.
I don’t know about other religions but being jewish really means you live somewhere on the line of ‘how jewish you are’. The level of jewocity you are is linear up to a point.
If you are, or consider yourself jewish you appear on the line somewhere.
Anybody to the left of you on the line (less religious) is by your standards not really jewish and anybody to the right of you on the line is crazy.
Once you get into the ultra orthodox/hassidic arena, the line forks out into many lines where groups can be
differentiated by how they wear they hats.
All of them are crazy and they think that nobody else is really jewish except them.
Everybody’s got a view, why not me.
National health care won’t work. It won’t work simply because by definition it has to be worse than what we have now, and what we have now obviously isn’t working.
It’s a lot like the recent economic bubbles, we’re leveraging against our future with the current system and it’s like running so fast your legs can’t keep up with your body and you eventually fall over. At the current rate, the existing system will collapse soon enough. (universities seem to be having this problem as well)
The reason I say it has to be worse than the existing system, is because if the government were to take over the health care system, they’d have to play ball with the current health insurance infrastructure. They’d have to, simply because the health insurance companies aren’t going to just say “okay, it was fun, we’ll go out of business now, since you’ve got a handle on it.”
No, they’re going to fight to the death to maintain their existence. And what we’ll be left with is the government instituting a system of health care, that involves the extra wasted layer of infrastructure that the health insurance companies bring to the table. They’re not needed, since the government will be providing the services that they now currently perform (thus ‘nationalizing’ health care) but they will be there sucking up administrative costs all the same.
So what we’ll end up with is a system more expensive than what we have now and I think we all see that the system we have now is already too expensive.
I imagine what the health insurance companies want is for the government just to pay all the bills. Right. And it’s in who’s best interest not to pad all the bills? After all the government is paying.
We’d need to create a system where it is in everybody’s best interest to try and do things cheaper, and I hate to say it, but competition is probably the best option.
I had a novel idea about making the car companies profitable…
Get rid of the unions.
Just the overhead of the unions themselves…. if all the employees stopped paying union dues, the car
companies could lower their salaries by the same amount saving a ton of money, and nobody would see a pay cut.
How about that? ohhhhhh nooooooooooo… you can’t get rid of the UNIONS oh no… who would protect the
workers from the big bad company. Yeah, well, honda and toyota are doing just fine, so I daresay in this case, the unions are more of a problem than a help. When the pendulum swings the other way and big corporations start abusing employees again, then you can form another union, but in the slow times, it’s just a waste of moeny. And it’s helping to kill the car companies.
So when the big three go out of business, you can lay some of the blame on the unions.
You guys heard about the worm fossil looking thing they found on mars? They say it looks like a tortellini or some other italian noodle. At first I was skeptical, they just want something to
get excited about, but after some thought I realized they’re really off their knocker.
Life on this planet started out with plants. There were forests of green thousands if not millions of years before the first slug crawled the earth. Plants are far simpler forms of life.
So why they hell would anybody even suggest that there might be some animal-type life on mars when there’s no evidence there was ever plant life. Let alone a fossil near the surface.
Please.
In the future we will forget the details of what happened, but 6 months ago, the price of gas at the pump was over $4.00 and heating oil was over $5.00
It is now December 2008 and gas is $2.10 and heating oil around $2.90.
Oh and the markets are all tanking.
So if you ever thought for a moment that the price of oil isn’t set by a cartel of some kind, this should give you food for thought.