shingen
Born on December 14, 2011•1341 Karma
You can get a dual E5-2609 with 32gb of ram + bandwidth from a good host like WebNX for $369 / month.
And if you wanted to spend $1k per month, you can get a dual e5-2687W (16 cores @ 3.1ghz) with 128gb ram; with a 4x SAS RAID 10, plus a 120gb ssd drive, plus a 2tb backup freebie, plus 100mbps unmetered bandwidth (30tb). That literally blows the doors off Softlayer.
Looking over your comments on HN, that latest comment seems to be the peak of your contribution here. In over two years you've picked up 394 karma points. I'm going with the assumption that all of those karma points are from being a pedant about the English language. You're such a valuable member of this community! Rock on.
The likes of Clark, Andreesen & jwz built an idea in 1995 that will not die. it just wont. they can lose their nsf funding, aol can buy up the remains and then discard it; google can use it as advertising space and then go elsewhere, they can take 5 years between netscape 4.0 and mozilla 1.0, but they will not die.
It's nice when one of the giants has skin in the game on the good side of the table.
Perfect a highly efficient system, then charge others for access to the same technology.
Or if this is just a play to keep the KIVA system to themselves and provide a competitive advantage. They obviously didn't need to buy KIVA to get access to the system, so it strikes me that it's one of those two possible reasons.
They're already doing it: http://www.amazonservices.com/content/fulfillment-by-amazon....
So they'll continue to add to the stock pile of cash most likely. By 2015, under this plan, they'll have perhaps $135 to $150 billion in cash, unless they increase the buy-backs or dividend further, and that's assuming their annual profit stops growing.
Apple is not allowed to spend its $100 billion buying companies, even if it wanted to. For example, they could buy HP and Dell and shut them down (maybe all PC manufacturers in fact, just with cash); such would not pass anti-trust concerns. They could buy Facebook with cash + stock; again, that wouldn't make it through anti-trust review. And so on.
Even though they're not formally regulated under anti-trust just yet as, say, Microsoft was - their actions are indeed strictly limited by what the government will allow them to do.
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=brudgers+di...
Disney would actually brighten Apple's halo, they have a devoted customer base which would accept the merger, and produce the most salable content in the world.
Why take a risk on the downside of creating content when you can charge a 30% toll across all of it? Also a different type of business and model. It would also leave them in conflict with the other media companies.
What I could see is buying Netflix, but Apple would be in a better position to just build that from scratch with better terms (again, the toll for accessing the Apple ecosystem/platform/whatever-you-want-to-call-it).
The other one is Akamai - Apple has been a long-term customer (probably one of the largest), they are delivering a lot of content (and ever increasing) but don't have any real hardcore infrastructure in the way Google and Microsoft do.
Purchasing Disney isn't primarily driven by the fact that they are a movie studio. The purchase makes sense because of Disney's existing media portfolio and the worldwide demographic which their properties attract.
Apple could buy any one of them, either through friendly or hostile means. Not a single one of those would make it through anti-trust. Shareholders for Cisco would love to get $200 billion for their company; the US Government would never allow it in a million years. Shareholders for Amazon would love to get $200 billion, and they'd likely outvote Bezos' family holdings to agree to the purchase. Larry Ellison would sell Oracle for $300 billion in a heartbeat, and all shareholders would agree. Intel shareholders would instantly take a $300 billion bid; the US Government would never allow that purchase either. Apple also would never be allowed to gobble up either of the telecom monsters; AT&T shareholders would take a cash + $250 billion in shares deal, and Verizon shareholders would easily sign off on a $200 billion deal.
I think Apple would love to own their own telecom network, given their love of all things integrated. The things they could probably do in owning something like Verizon's network would be astounding. It would never be allowed.
Applying that test to all of those companies doesn't give Apple supplier control, extensive pricing control or monopoly power in any market.
for eg. even acquiring HP would be total 'PC' market share of ~25%. The only one that may be a concern is ARM, but that doesn't mean mergers are stopped, it just means that agreements are reached (for eg. as with Google and ITAR)
Instead he's killing himself running multiple ground breaking companies, directly challenging near government monopolies in GM / Ford / Boeing / Lockheed (protected by massive lobbying, deep political ties going back decades, and regulation designed to protect them from competition).
If America could get a few more Elon Musks, we might start to get our mojo back. Hey there immigration policy.
Respectfully, can you please cite a source for this assertion?
Emphasis in italics is mine:
"The loans are part of the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, which provides incentives to new and established automakers to build more fuel-efficient vehicles. Created in 2007 and appropriated in September 2008, the $25 billion ATVM aims to reduce America's dangerous dependence on foreign oil and create "green collar" jobs. The program is entirely unrelated to the stimulus package or the so-called "bailout" funds that General Motors and Chrysler have received." [1]
[1] http://www.teslamotors.com/about/press/releases/tesla-gets-l...
Also see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailout
I disagree with this, because the funds available under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing (ATVM) loan program are not related to the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). They are entirely different programs, under different government departments: ATVM is under the Department of Energy, while TARP is under the Department of the Treasury.
"You could argue that Tesla was more deserving of government funds than Detroit auto [...]"
One "Detroit auto" company did participate in the ATVM loan program: Ford Motor Company [1].
Only if you assess the value to your business of peace, educated citizens, roads, safe food, etc. at zero.
Fortunately I doubt the taxpayer will lose billions on the Tesla loan, unlike the GM bailout fiasco.
I suspect we'd have been in the hole for a lot more than $10-15 billion.
I just seemed so elegant and efficient, the kind of thing that could only have come from the mind of private industry that is so mindful of cost and efficiency, unlike the government which only build monstrosities at ridiculous expense (to the taxpayer).
Similarly, if you ask anyone at SpaceX they would tell you it's difficult to underestimate how much they owe to the old grey-beards from NASA who are still around and who helped them get up to speed quickly, avoiding many hundreds of thousands, indeed millions of dollars of blind alleys and reinventing the wheel.
SpaceX is a wonderful example of good engineers - old nasa ones and fresh graduates, united by a common mindset, with enlightened (for which private is often but not strictly a prerequisite) management. That's where they succeed, I think. They look at where they are now, where they want to be, and keep the string taught between the two. But don't think SpaceX could have done this in a vacuum (hohoho). Of the several SpaceXers I've met, including Elon Musk himself back when he had time to give talks at SEDS conferences, none would make such a claim, certainly.
Ah yes... but what did the second stage have?
Not more F-1's, but J-2's, which did not even use the same fuel! Compare this with the route SpaceX is taking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine)#Revision...
Again I think this is where the strength of SpaceX lies (modulo the obvious like hiring smart and/or very experienced people) - they are quite free of all this nonsense, their PMs and designers and fabricators are all under once roof and can close the loop on design and manufacturing feedback and iteration. It's very much like skunkworks back in the day.
Having said all that, they're not immune to interference. Dealing with NASA and the ISS means you have to renormalise what constitutes 'exciting' and 'newsworthy' so where in the early days we had things about engines tests and re-entry tests, now we get releases beginning with sentences like 'Today, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) announced it has successfully completed the preliminary design review...'[1]. I've worked on projects with which NASA or ESA have suddenly got involved and I've seen first hand how the innocence get lost, you go from running to wading through treacle, and you have a bizarre out of body experience where you sit in on one of the meetings and wonder how it has taken three hours for them to agree that a decision should be made about something (but not actually make a decision).
If you've not read skunkworks, I'd highly recommend it. A lot of it details how one of Kelly Johnson's key strengths was being rather brutal to his 'customers' (DoD usually) to prevent their incompetence, expense and geological timescales leaking into his outfit. I can quite understand this offensive form of defence, having seen what government tentacles can do to an otherwise good project.
So basically the Saturn V used LOX/RP-1 in the first stage but LOX/LH2 in the second and third because that was the best configuration, but SpaceX is using LOX/RP-1 in all of them because it's simpler but it gets the job done. (note that SpaceX is apparently considering developing LOX/LH2 upper stage engine for heavier loads: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_(rocket_stage) )