Posts by I ain't Spartacus

Re: When can we see the apologies?

Chris Miller,

There's nothing wrong with honest speculation. But rolling out the supposed 'experts' to say that we've been warning all the time against your rocket motors, within hours of an unexplained crash is unacceptable.

There's nothing wrong with saying that such warnings were issues. So long as you make it clear that the cause is unknown. And also make it clear that engine explosions aren't the only reason planes crash. An airframe can only take a certain amount of stress, and can catastrophically fail at those kinds of speeds, if something goes wrong. As appears to have happened here.

The articles in the Guardian and Telegraph that I read were clearly trying to insinuate that Virgin and Scaled Composites were taking huge risks, that they'd been warned against, and doing it anyway. And using experts I've not heard of to back themselves up, while not explaining who those people were, or what their standing was. As against Scaled Composites.

As it turns out, the engines don't look to be to blame. Not that this still might not be down to negligence, or rushing to meet a deadline. But perhaps some evidence might be in order first?

Re: Why are these guys even in charge?

Erm, sorry, what point are you trying to make? I can't make head-nor-tail of your post.

The safety board have come out and said that they've found the engine and fuel tanks roughly intact. So an engine explosion is unlikely. But that the first look at the telemetry suggests the tail moved into its re-entry configuration while the rocket was still firing. The cockpit video shows the co-pilot unlocked the tail controls, but didn't command it's deployment.

So the initial guess might be that the craft broke up due to aerodynamic forces it wasn't designed to cope with. But there's still loads to look at. Is the telemetry correct, did the tail deploy? Was there a problem with controls, software or maintenance? Does design need to be changed, so the tail can't be deployed by mistake? Or is this just a co-incidence, and something else happened?

So they'll try to correlate the telemetry with the configuration of the pieces they pick up from the ground. Then try and work out what was going on from that. They'll have tons of information to go through. Telemetry, physical examination of the wreck, manufacturing logs, maintenance logs (I guess roughly the same as this is the only prototype), whatever recorders the craft carried itself, and tons of other stuff.

It is rocket science.

Re: @Spartacus

Reread my comment. I did not suggest that they could avoid compliance by blocking their IP range. There is no inherent contradiction between compliance with the law and choosing who wish to offer your services to.

Adam 1,

This is true. However your comment did have the whiff of the Kevin the teenager "it's not fair" about it. Something I often see in commentary on legal disputes between internet companies and the law. And sometimes those comments come from the internet companies' bosses themselves...

There's obviously a lack of trust in politics at the moment. Which puts lawmakers at a PR disadvantage. Also, I don't think society has yet fully decided what the internet is for, and therefore what should be allowed and what should be banned. We're still in the internet wild west phase. Things are changing much too quickly for society, law or politics to keep up.

There's also a lot of utopianism out there. The kind that leads people to say things like, "information wants to be free", or "the internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it". That was all very well when the internet was young, full of academics and a small group of relatively well-off young-ish people. But the internet is big business now. And everyone can be on it. Which means crooks, children, little old ladies, global mega-corps, teenagers, advertising account executives, the whole lot. Will people put up with it being a total free-for-all? I doubt it. Will people demand regulation? I'm sure. Will other people complain about that regulation? That's politics. But the penalties of going mainstream are that the whole of society takes an interest, and then everyone wants their pound of flesh.

Finally, I find it hard to feel sympathy for Google. I don't understand the free-ride that some people seem to give them. Here we have a corporation that makes $10 billion a year. And yet their attitude to the law sometimes seems to be that it doesn't apply to us because... Internet. Like it's a magic word.

They've done lots of things that are good for society. And been well financially rewarded for it. The system has broadly worked in that sense. But their actions have had consequences. Some of those just to competitors. But sometimes effects on real people's privacy. Those people may need some kind of protection. Balancing the competing needs of different groups in society is what politics and the law are about. This whole area of law is going to be a problem for years.

For example, what are we going to do about the millions of teened kids who've posted compromising stuff on the internet, when they come to apply for jobs? Are we going to condemn them to have blighted careers so Facebook and Google can continue to have an easy life? Or are we going to ban companies from looking online when they hire? Those are the 3 choices I can see being available. Now in 20 years, this may be a moot point. Many HR people will have their own compromising pictures in their own past, and probably won't care. But HR people now aren't from that generation, and so didn't grow up with the internet - so their attitudes may not be so generous. That could leave us with a potentially huge social problem that either employers, the internet giants or governments will have to solve. So far the internet giants' attitude seems to be, we've got all your data and it's now ours to do with as we please. I can't see that lasting forever. If they don't cut back on the levels of hubris, then I foresee a painful reckoning, either with the politicians, the customers, or both.

Re: Geo-location?

If I was Google I would drop all connections from ECJ offices in protest. Or pummel them with random massive streams of data through JavaScript to fill their pipe.

Or, I dunno, Google could just obey the law? Like the rest of us have to.

They're perfectly entitled to lobby to get it changed. Also like the rest of us. The difference being they've got squillions of dollars, and a big old collection of media and academic cheerleaders to back them (not all of whom they pay for themselves).

Re: European ruling

In the end, you follow the money. The EU can easily rule on what happens under European domains. In the end, if some foreign company ignores your jurisdiction, you take their domain away. As that is within range of your courts.

At the other extreme, a company operating entirely outside of your jurisdiction and using a foreign domain is pretty hard to get at.

But the EU is a huge market of 500 million people. And Google makes much money selling advertising to companies that want to reach them. Many of these companies are in Europe. So there's a nice revenue stream for the legislators and courts to get at. Also Google employs many people here.

So Google is perfectly happy to ignore North Korea's instructions on what websites it can link to. There's no money or corporate presence. They pulled out of mainland China, to avoid the hassle of censorship. But China doesn't tell them what to put on Google.com, they simply (try to) block it at the border. Their leverage was limited, because Google didn't make that much cash in China.

In Europe, Google makes tens of billions a year. So it'll pay more taxes if it has to, and it'll comply with laws it doesn't like, if it's forced to. Because there's gold in them thar hills.

I guess the compromise may be that Google are forced to have a European version of their .com to go with their country specific domains. Which means you can get round it with a non-EU proxy.

Re: Wallops is out of action

But what a picture. What a photograph.

Re: Relative

Tim,

I don't see the problem with oxidisation. So your statue turns a nice pink colour. Lovely.

Obviously the price is a bit more of an issue. But if you're going to be the global scandium monopolist, then you need to make a dramatic gesture. Lowering the price might create more demand, so it's up to you to go and find more sources of the stuff. Then turn it into a nice statue, laugh your diabolical laugh... Profit.

Re: Development is Uneven

thames,

Africa is getting much richer already. For example quite a few countries haven't employed sufficient economists. So they've been guessing their GDP based on surveying a few big companies, and then guessing the rest. This was based on the idea of having this level of subsistence agriculture that only supported limited services, and basically hadn't changed much in years/decades/centuries. Several countries have now re-assessed this, Nigeria being one big example, and discovered that they now have a lot more trade going on than they thought.

For example lots of goods (sometimes second hand from the West) like clothes and mobile phones now get right to even the remotest villages. This is why whenever you see documentaries that take cameras into the middle of rainforests, loads of people are wearing the same Chinese, Vietnamese and Banglasdeshi made tshirts as everyone else in the world.

Globalisation is still going. Not that it won't be a bumpy ride. If the next door country suddenly becomes rich, and your repressive government is seen not to be letting you join the party, then revolution looks attractive. But revolution doesn't always lead to a better government. The French are on their 5th Republic, plus having had 3 Empires and an ancien regime - all since the 1780s. Just going from memory, they went through serveral revolutions and 15 different constitutions between 1789 and 1870.

On the other hand, only a few countries have managed to jump into the "1st World" camp in the last 50 years. Not that anyone calls it that anymore. Lots have got into the middle-income group though. Which is a much nicer place to be than the other alternative. It'll be interesting to see if globalisation will improve things for them, or leave them where they are. Countries like Chile, Brazil, Argentina (who are the only one I can think of to drop out of the top group last century), Thailand etc.

Re: Transport costs

Remember that Germany is the world's second biggest exporter of stuff, and yet has some of the highest environmental and employment standards.

I suspect that economies of scale and the network effects of having an industry in once place, and therefore support services, hit the law of diminishing returns at a certain point. So any reasonably sized industry is able to have more than one base of operations, without much loss in efficiency.

The relevant factors are changing so fast that it's hard to keep track. Cost of dealing with difficult governments, wages, transport, environmental standards, availability of sufficiently educated staff etc.

Remember though that not everything is transported. People always sneer at the services sector. I guess because they think of waiters and call centres. But services can also be incredibly high value. I speak to building design people in the Middle East all the time, even though our company is based in South East England. This is because most of their architecture and building engineering is done by British and American companies. They've even outsoursed the building regulations. I don't think the Saudis or UAE even bother with building regs, they simply specify on the contract that the building conform to US or UK regs, depending on the company that gets the job. To my eternal shame, I did some of the design for one the Eurovision venues...

Remember the caveat on equalisation was that it would be more like pre-industrial revolution equality. Where no part of the world was more than say 5 times better off than any other. As opposed to the 50 times that happened over the preceeding couple of centuries.

This rought equality might mean the average wage in every country being no lower than say $5k - $10k, in today's prices. Which is achieveable much more easily than getting every country in the world up to Western standards of living. That's what, Western living standards from the 50s and 60s?

At which point transport and set-up costs come into things at least as much as wage costs. But specialisation is likely to happen, at least in some industries. Take Silicon Valley for example. Wages can be incredibly high there, even compared to just moving down the road within California, or to another state. But there's an infrastructure of universities, lawyers, venture capitalists and specialist services. Plus people who've done it before, and an expectation that you can start your own company. Or London and insurance. Or Malaysia and hard disk manufacture.

It doesn't mean you'll necessarily end up with just one place in the whole world where an industry specialises. But it might be just a few areas, and so everyone else will outsource to one of those.

Re: I disagree

When you sell your company to shareholders, you lose some of the right to choose how you measure success. The shareholders who now own the company get the right to tell you to make profits. In order to compensate them for the vast amounts of money you chose to take from them in exchange for selling shares.

A majority of those shareholders even have the power to sack you, or change the objectives of the company.

Re: Really?

Monkeyman,

Amazon somewhat gives the lie to constantly-repeated saying that the markets can't cope with long-term investment.

However, it's the shareholders' company. In the end they have to be rewarded for their investment. If Bezos wanted a personal plaything with which to do cool stuff, then he should have kept control of the company. But he didn't. He sold it. and probably became rather wealthy in the process. With that transaction comes the nast responsibility to other people, whose money you are now custodian of.

Not that investment in the future is a bad thing. It's important. But selling shares is the alternative to borrowing money. That's one of the reasons these tech company structures are so bad. There should be a downside to doing an IPO and getting rich. And it's the loss of total control over your pet project.

Google needs another revenue stream, or two. They still make more than 80% of their cash from online advertising (that figure's from memory though).

Now I believe they're making cash on Android, and they've invested hugely into that. And that might start them making decent money from the Play store - not just in software but also films/books/audio. But then it might not.

But the advertising market is very cyclical. And quite fickle. Maybe online advertising will fall out of fashion, given how ineffective it seems to be. And how some browser maker could just decide to kill it at a stroke. Maybe search might start working in a different way, that doesn't allow for the same level of profit for Google.

Google aren't shy of chucking huge amounts of cash after long-term bets. See Android for details. They probably blew well over $10 billion on that before it turned a profit. And it's now part of Google's core business. The question isn't whether cloud is part of Google's core business now, but whether Google management thinks it will be soon.

As a quick thought-experiment: I think smartphones are now massively over-priced. When a Motorola G or Lumia 730 is well under £150. Can there still be much room to pay £500, except for specialist customers? I don't think for much longer. Except maybe for Apple. So who's going to make the money off this market? The manufacturers will turn into commodity sellers, fighting over scraps, just like the PC market. Maybe the people who design the software, if they can get people to want theirs. But there's going to be a big market in data. Who's going to manage my photos, email, important documents, e-tickets etc? Now I might say, me. But 95% of the population aren't currently capable of it. And I know just as many young people who don't understand computers, even if they use Facebook and Skype more. That's a lot of small, but regular cash, along with some quite juicy personal data. But requires huge infrastructure and a trusted brand. I personally think Google are risking their brand by being too creepy, but they're currently still a well-loved brand with a few detractors. Like Apple.

Re: Blame the investors

If they have positive cashflow and they're investing their money in stuff that has value, then things look different. So if I can tell my auditor that I just spent $1bn on an asset that's still worth $1bn - they aren't going to get angry with me, and do horrible things to me. What they might tell me to do is to close or sell loss-making parts of the business.

At which point standard procedure, from my experience, is that you go out for a nice dinner (which the auditors pay for) and have a polite but bitter argument about it all. Then you come back and decide that they will sign off on your books, because that bit they told you to close is expected to make a profit in future, honest guv. The auditors then go back to their office, and send you an invoice for the cost of their time checking up on you, and telling you how to run your company, and adding a charge on for the dinner, which is about twice the cost of the meal.

In our case we'd just spent several million opening a couple of new shops, and the auditor informed us that as they weren't yet making profits, they should be shut down 6 months later! Although they did have a fair point about store number 3, which never seemed to make any profits at all.

It would be interesting to see if the shareholders ever revolt though. Assuming they're allowed to. A lot of these modern tech companies have stupid share structures, where the bosses own such high percentages of the voting stock, that they can pretty much do what the hell they like. I seem to remember that Zuckerberg has 51% of the Facebook voting stock, but owns less than 10% of the company.

the $14Bn they are making selling electronics.

Yet Another Anonymous coward,

You mistake turnover for profits. Something I am beiginning so suspect that Jeff Bezos may be doing too. They don't make $14bn on sales of electronics. They buy about $14bn of electronics from other people, and sell them for hopefully a higher number. That difference is their gross profit. From which you take their costs to work out how much cash they have left to blow on winning market share in other markets.

They may have mostly killed the large book and music chains, but that doesn't mean they can massively up their prices. There are plenty of other online companies around, and as Amazon proved, it's much easier and cheaper to set up online, so they'll never be safe from competition.

So I'm sure they can outspend Rackspace, but not Google or Microsoft. Remember Google and MS have to have huge datacentres already, to do the other that makes them profits. So they are only adding to infrastructure they've already built and must maintain to survive.

Amazon make losses (or sometimes break even) every quarter, and say it's because they keep re-investing it into new bits of the company. MS and Google also invest lots of money in bits of the company and yet they make profits each quarter. MS about $5bn, Google about half that.

Which means that either of them could invest as much money as Amazon does on cloud infrastructure again, and still be making healthy profits, despite the fact they already invest as much or more than Amazon do.

One certainty is that Amazon cannot outspend them. And that's to ignore IBM, Oracle, HP and I suppose even Apple. Any of those could afford to blow a few billion a quarter on datacentres if they want to.

Re: A two to five year ROI?

Ben 50,

That's not the ROI though. $50 x 50,000 = $2.5m. So that pays for your domain. Now you need some servers, some staff, an office, perhaps a call centre. Then you have to add in the cost of your capital, which you could probably get 5% sticking into corporate bonds. Or of course, you may have to borrow it, in which case it's costing you 5% + the opportunity cost of not investing it in something else.

I suspect that's one reason why it's not worth buying just one. There's a large risk of having zero registrants. Remeber .tel? Nobody else does.

However if you've registered a few tens/hundreds of these, and some pay off, then it's only one lot of infrastructure to run them. After all, the ones that fail will put almost no load on your system, as you watch your initial investment evaporate away.

Re: A .realty terrible waste of money

I was even more confused. I persistently read the word as reality - probably because I don't use the US term realtor. And I was trying to work out who'd pay for a .reality address. God? Stephen Hawking?

I got an email this week offering our company the prime opportunity to register yet another version of our addresses. In this case it was .xyz - which is apparently for those who don't want to be tied down by being an org, a me, a com or any of the other myriad options.

I wonder how much I'd have to pay to become registrar for .bugger-off! And how many people I could get to register with me?