My Thoughts on .NET

I received a love letter from Comcast when I arrived home yesterday…  Basically after being a loyal customer for over 6 years, Comcast has decided to cancel my $99/month cable/internet service. Their new and improved equivalent service will now be $140/month, or $130/month with their triple play phone/TV/internet offer.

So today I signed up for Verizon FIOS Triple Play service for $99/month with a discount to $70/month for the first 6 months. Unfortunately, with mandatory equipment rental my monthly bill will still be about $130/month, but I will save about $40/month on my landline phone service.  I’ve been on the fence about switching, but Comcast finally helped me to make a decision.

May the Comcast MBAs choke on the flood of customer service cancellations !

Adios Comcast…

Recently, my account on Facebook was hacked. A person claiming to be me was soliciting my friends for cash by claiming that I was stuck in London and needed cash to get home to Sarasota. Fortunately, my brother was informed by my niece and then told me after having a short conversation with the asshole. I immediately deleted my Facebook account.

Turns out that the developers of Facebook provide unlimited access to all of your personal information to anyone who is writing the Games, Contests and Quizes that everyone partakes of and shares. So you have no idea who knows what about you - not just your 'friends'. Think twice and then again about whether or not to post about illness, travel plans, purchases or any other social information that you would share with your friends but not with the whole world. As soon as you post it on Facebook it is in the hands of everyone - not just your 'friends'.

Would you really trust two Harvard dropouts to have your best interests at heart ?

Once upon a time, I was invited to the White House for a private  dinner with the President. I am a respected businessman, with a factory that produces memory chips for computers and portable electronics. There was some talk that my industry was being scrutinized by the administration, but I paid it no mind. I live in a free country. There's nothing that the government can do to me if I've broken no laws. My wealth was earned honestly, and an invitation to dinner with an American President is an honor.

I checked my coat, was greeted by the Chief of Staff, and joined the President in a yellow dining room. We sat across from each other at a table draped in white linen. The Great Seal was embossed on the china. Uniformed staff served our dinner.

The meal was served, and I was startled when my waiter suddenly  reached out, plucked a dinner roll off my plate, and began nibbling it as he walked back to the kitchen.

"Sorry about that," said the President. "Andrew is very hungry."

"I don't appreciate..." I began, but as I looked into the calm  brown eyes across from me, I felt immediately guilty and petty. It was just a dinner roll.

"Of course," I concluded, and reached for my glass. Before I could, however, another waiter reached forward, took the glass away and swallowed the wine in a single gulp.

"And his brother Eric is very thirsty." said the President.

I didn't say anything. The President is testing my compassion, I  thought. I will play along. I don't want to seem unkind.

My plate was whisked away before I had tasted a bite.

"Eric's children are also quite hungry."

With a lurch, I crashed to the floor. My chair had been pulled out from under me. I stood, brushing myself off angrily, and watched as it was carried from the room.

"And their grandmother can't stand for long."

I excused myself, smiling outwardly, but inside feeling like a fool. Obviously I had been invited to the White House to be sport for some game. I reached for my coat, to find that it had been taken. I turned back to the President.

"Their grandfather doesn't like the cold."

I wanted to shout- that was my coat! But again, I looked at the placid smiling face of my host and decided I was being a poor sport. I spread my hands helplessly and chuckled. Then I felt my hip pocket and realized my wallet was gone. I excused myself and walked to a phone on an elegant side table. I learned shortly that my credit cards had been maxed out, my bank accounts emptied, my retirement and equity portfolios had vanished, and my wife had been thrown out of our home. Apparently, the waiters and their families were moving in. The President hadn't moved or spoken as I learned all this, but finally I lowered the phone into its cradle and turned to face him.

"Andrew's whole family has made bad financial decisions. They haven't planned for retirement, and they need a house. They recently defaulted on a subprime mortgage. I told them they could have your home. They need it more than you do."

My hands were shaking. I felt faint. I stumbled back to the table and knelt on the floor. The President cheerfully cut his meat, ate his steak and drank his wine. I lowered my eyes and stared at the small grey circles on the tablecloth that were water drops.

"By the way," He added, "I have just signed an Executive Order nationalizing your factories. I'm firing you as head of your business. I'll be operating the firm now for the benefit of all mankind. There's a whole bunch of Erics and Andrews out there and they can't come to you for jobs groveling like beggars."

I looked up. The President dropped his spoon into the empty ramekin which had been his creme brulee. He drained the last drops of his wine. As the table was cleared, he lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. He stared at me. I clung to the edge of the table as if were a ledge and I were a man hanging over an abyss. I thought of the years behind me, of the life I had lived. The life I had earned with a lifetime of work, risk and struggle.

Why was I punished? How had I allowed it to be taken? What game had I played and lost? I looked across the table and noticed with some surprise that there was no game board between us.

What had I done wrong?

As if answering the unspoken thought, the President suddenly cocked his head, locked his empty eyes to mine, and bared a million teeth, chuckling wryly as he folded his hands.

"You should have stopped me at the dinner roll," he said.

I had a Windows XP MCE 2005 system at home as my DVR. Basically worked fine for many years although if you turned it off, it was unable to automatically reacquire the wireless connection via the Linksys PCI card. Service packs and driver updates never corrected the problem, so I resorted to leaving the system on all the time. I had won a free copy of Vista Ultimate at the Sarasota .NET Developers meeting a couple of months ago and decided to give it a try. I bought a new 1TB hard drive so that I could keep my XP MCE image intact in case I wanted or had to go back.

Well – it only took about 6 hours to install. Missing drivers for the Linksys wireless card, Microsoft Wireless keyboard and mouse, Hauppage dual TV tuner card, and although it’s a 3.2GHz system, with only 512MB of RAM it was paging like a mother calling her sons. It installed 86 updates – and that didn’t include Vista SP1. After the ordeal, it seemed to work although it was still thrashing.

Bought and installed 4G of RAM and it seemed a lot happier – Vista is a P.I.G. pig. Took a couple of days to tune the power and permission settings so that it worked like an appliance should – no keyboard / mouse interaction required to use it as a DVR.

Started seeing an interesting problem with the MCE remote though. After coming out of standby the remote behaved like keys were stuck – continuously scrolling the guide or screen icons after the first button was pushed. Hard resetting the Vista machine corrected the problem – now it’s no longer a DVR but yet another half-baked Microsoft computer.

Researching the problem on the Web it seems that this is a known problem – addressed in Vista SP1 – but not entirely. And there is a hotfix available, but it’s not clear whether or not this is required if you install SP1 – it reads like you still have to manually parse and edit the registry to add entries to force desired USB devices to be reset after coming out of standby.  So while I have now installed SP1 with no cure I still have this onerous task ahead. Meanwhile I have also discovered that re-plugging the MCE remote receiver corrects the problem. As the plug is accessible by reaching the back of the computer behind the entertainment center this is doable and I guess I will find out the life expectancy of the USB connectors.

Needless to say this has decreased the WAF significantly as she just wants to turn on the TV and PC and watch it – not mess with cables in order to do so.

Verizon FIOS with their DVR is looking better and better.

UPDATE:

Have installed all of the latest service packs and hotfixes. Performed the requisite registry edits. Still broken. The best workaround that I've found is to install a powered USB hub between the Microsoft remote and the Media Center PC. The hub's power is provided by a wall wart connected to the computer's UPS. This has reduced the number of failures to about twice a week.

We (ACS) design and build embedded industrial controllers for a living. So we use several dozen different software tools, compilers, IDEs, logic synthesis, logic simulation and Computer Assisted Engineering (CAE) tools for printed circuit board design layout. All of these tools have quirks and bugs – some more serious than others.

When I first started this career, printed circuit boards were hand-designed on mylar sheets, one per layer, at a 2:1 scale using stick on pads and various widths of tape to lay down traces. Improvements came with red and blue transparent tape that minimized the number of mylar sheets required as two layers of circuitry could be placed on a single sheet – improving registration.

In the mid to late 80’s Computer Assisted Engineering for circuit board layout became popular – although the tools were expensive. Over time, the number of vendors increased, the PC became the target platform and the prices dropped. Goodbye mylar sheets of artwork. My brother and I initially invested in Design Computation software 20 years ago, and later, when the DOS based tools weren’t up to the task and that company disappeared, we switched to Protel.

We've used Protel Schematic Capture v3.4 and Protel PCB Design v2.8 to design several hundred boards - mainly double-sided, mixed SMT and through-hole, some with hundreds of parts, all sizes - no problems. You build up a library of trusted components that are physically verified by their use in designs, and you learn the quirks and anamolies of the tools.

About 10 years ago, Protel ran a special and we purchased an upgrade seat of their flagship product at that time – Protel99SE. It was expensive – even when discounted, but we had had mostly good luck with their existing software and had a large investment in learning curves and libraries. The new product stayed on the shelf for several years with day-to-day pressures precluding taking on the new learning curve. Finally, frustrated with the PCB v2.8 tool’s problems with split power planes on a new 4-layer design, I moved the board to the new tool and was able to produce a product that we’re still shipping today. 

I recently did our second 4-layer PCB with Protel99SE SP6. Just received the prototypes back. When building the first board by hand, two components were on the schematic,  but not on the PCB. Bringing up the board in Protel and jumping to the component by name, the missing components were off the board, and off the screen – perhaps with a negative Y coordinate. No ratsnest wires, the router indicated that the board was 100% routed, no Design Rule Check (DRC) errors - sweet.

Did a select outside the board area, move selection, and surprise - the missing two components moved into the visible area - ratsnest wires appeared indicating where they were supposed to be connected and now the board is no longer 100% routed - it's magic !

I don't know how the two components got 'placed' off of the viewable screen, or why a zoom all didn't show them, or why the autorouter All Routes command didn't complain, or why the DRC passed...

I can no longer trust Protel99SE to produce a board that matches the schematic. This was a fundamental trust item that the tool violated with serious repercussions. I'm glad that these are just a handful of prototypes, and I can tack these two missing components on by hand. Imagine if I had made a simple change to a production board and then found missing parts and/or connections with 1000 of them in manufacturing.

Of course, this tool is now 10 years old. The company has changed it’s name – Altium – and has moved on. They are again offering a special purchase of an upgrade version…

And so it goes…

Having downloaded and installed Windows 7 Beta back in January, I was eager to try the new Release Candidate 1. What a long strange trip it’s been…

Evidently the only way to legitimately download the RC is by using the Akamai Download Manager provided by clicking on the Download button. All well and fine – but on my Intel 975XBX Quad Core machine running XP SP3 with IE8, the download manager never runs and crashes the browser.

Tried clearing the browser cache, disabling pop-ups, removing the Google toolbar, clearing the Java cache, etc.  Nothing worked.  E-mails to Akamai went unanswered. Searches on Google revealed that I’m not the only one experiencing this problem.

Finally found the workaround – went to my trusty Win2K server sitting in the corner, started up IE6 and went through the same download registration sequence and then clicked the download button. Voila – the Download Manager worked, the download started and is progressing as I write this.

I guess I’ll have to keep this older technology around for when the new magic breaks…

Recent network outages in the Bay Area as well as others around the nation have revealed the flaw in letting the Telecom carriers provide and manage an increasingly important global resource.

This is not your father's internet anymore. The network is no longer structured as it was originally designed - to survive these type of disruptions. The network is now solely at the whim of the carriers who are only interested in 'billable events'. More and more the carriers are deciding whose bits are special and whose aren't worth the effort to transport. As they continue to construct their tariffed fiefdoms, more of these network chokepoints and bottlenecks will be put in place. Poorer service and increased outages will result - but hey - at least the @#$% MBA in the corner office made his quarterly numbers.

Until we remove the telecoms from the internet scenario, we are forever doomed to live within their limited vision of what a global network should be.

Read more at:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=16136

and about the increasing Telecom crisis at:

http://frankston.com/

There have been some rumblings around the office about the future of this company, and more specifically, your job. As you know, the economy has changed for the worse and presents many challenges. However, the good news is this: The economy doesn't pose a threat to your job. What does threaten your job however, is the changing political landscape in this country. However, let me tell you some little tidbits of fact which might help you decide what is in your best interests.

First, while it is easy to spew rhetoric that casts employers against employees, you have to understand that for every business owner there is a Back Story. This back story is often neglected and overshadowed by what you see and hear. Sure, you see me park my Mercedes outside. You've seen my big home at last years Christmas party. I'm sure; all these flashy icons of luxury conjure up some idealized thoughts about my life.

However, what you don't see is the BACK STORY :

I started this company 28 years a go. At that time, I lived in a 300 square foot studio apartment for 3 years. My entire living apartment was converted into an office so I could put forth 100% effort into building a company, which by the way, would eventually employ you.

My diet consisted of Ramen Pride noodles because every dollar I spent went back into this company. I drove a rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission. I didn't have time to date. Often times, I stayed home on weekends, while my friends went out drinking and partying. In fact, I was married to my business -- hard work, discipline, and sacrifice.

Meanwhile, my friends went to their jobs. They worked 40 hours a week and made a modest $50K a year and spent every dime they earned. They drove flashy cars and lived in expensive homes and wore fancy designer clothes. Instead of hitting the Nordstrom's for the latest hot fashion item, I was trolling through the discount store extracting any clothing item that didn't look like it was birthed in the 70's. My friends refinanced their mortgages and lived a life of luxury. I, however, did not. I put my time, my money, and my life into a business with a vision that eventually, some day, I too, will be able to afford these luxuries my friends supposedly had.

So, while you physically arrive at the office at 9am, mentally check in at about noon, and then leave at 5pm, I don't. There is no "off" button for me. When you leave the office, you are done and you have a weekend all to yourself. I unfortunately do not have the freedom. I eat, and breathe this company every minute of the day. There is no rest. There is no weekend. There is no happy hour. Every day this business is attached to my hip like a 1 year old special-needs child. You, of course, only see the fruits of that garden -- the nice house, the Mercedes, the vacations... you never realize the Back Story and the sacrifices I've made.

Now, the economy is falling apart and I, the guy that made all the right decisions and saved his money, have to bail-out all the people who didn't. The people that overspent their paychecks suddenly feel entitled to the same luxuries that I earned and sacrificed a decade of my life for. Yes, business ownership has its benefits but the price I've paid is steep and not without wounds.

Unfortunately, the cost of running this business, and employing you, is starting to eclipse the threshold of marginal benefit and let me tell you why:

I am being taxed to death and the government thinks I don't pay enough. I have state taxes. Federal taxes. Property taxes. Sales and use taxes. Payroll taxes. Workers compensation taxes. Unemployment taxes. Taxes on taxes. I have to hire a tax man to manage all these taxes and then guess what? I have to pay taxes for employing him. Government mandates and regulations and all the accounting that goes with it, now occupy most of my time. On Oct 15th, I wrote a check to the US Treasury for $288,000 for quarterly taxes. You know what my "stimulus" check was? Zero. Nada. Zilch.

The question I have is this: Who is stimulating the economy? Me, the guy who has provided 14 people good paying jobs and serves over 2,200,000 people per year with a flourishing business? Or, the single mother sitting at home, pregnant with her fourth child, waiting for her next welfare check? Obviously, government feels the latter is the economic stimulus of this country.

The fact is, if I deducted (Read: Stole) 50% of your paycheck, you'd quit and you wouldn't work here. I mean, why should you? That's nuts. Who wants to get rewarded only 50% of their hard work? Well, I agree which is why your job is in jeopardy. Here is what many of you don't understand ... To stimulate the economy, you need to stimulate what runs the economy. Had suddenly government mandated to me that I didn't need to pay taxes, guess what? Instead of depositing that $288,000 into the Washington black-hole, I would have spent it, hired more employees, and generated substantial economic growth. My employees would have enjoyed the wealth of that tax cut in the form of promotions and better salaries. But you can forget it now.

When you have a comatose man on the verge of death, you don't defibrillate and shock his thumb thinking that will bring him back to life, do you? Or, do you defibrillate his heart? Business is at the heart of America and always has been. To restart it, you must stimulate it, not kill it. Suddenly, the power brokers in Washington believe the poor of America are the essential drivers of the American economic engine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this is the type of change you can keep.

So where am I going with all this? It's quite simple.

If any new taxes are levied on me, or my company, my reaction will be swift and simple. I fire you. I fire your co-workers. You can then plead with the government to pay for your mortgage, your SUV, and your child's future. Frankly, it isn't my problem any more.

Then, I will close this company down, move to another country, and retire. You see, I'm done. I'm done with a country that penalizes the productive and gives to the unproductive. My motivation to work and to provide jobs will be destroyed, and with it, will be my citizenship.

So, if you lose your job, it won't be at the hands of the economy; it will be at the hands of a political hurricane that swept through this country, steamrolled the constitution, and will have changed its landscape forever. If that happens, you can find me sitting on a beach, retired, and with no employees to worry about...

Signed, THE BOSS

Yes – it’s not Exxon/Mobile or Shell or what you’d expect…

It’s Investment Bankers (aka Crooks) who drove up the Oil prices last year. Your dollars didn’t go the the Arab Mullahs but to Wall Street:

Part 1:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO6HUwlIS_Y

Part 2:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9dA8pUpeV8&feature=related

From Clusterstock:

http://clusterstock.alleyinsider.com/2009/1/ayn-rand-for-treasury-secretary

“The most popular article in the Wall Street Journal this morning is Stephen Moore's editorial applauding the brilliant economic policies of Ayn Rand. As we recall, Atlas Shrugged was Alan Greenspan's favorite book, too.

We doubt that abolishing the income tax and firing all government workers is the quickest way out of our fix, but it might not be the slowest, either. In any event, you'll enjoy Moore's summary:

WSJ: The current economic strategy is right out of "Atlas Shrugged": The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you. That's the justification for the $2 trillion of subsidies doled out already to keep afloat distressed insurance companies, banks, Wall Street investment houses, and auto companies -- while standing next in line for their share of the booty are real-estate developers, the steel industry, chemical companies, airlines, ethanol producers, construction firms and even catfish farmers. With each successive bailout to "calm the markets," another trillion of national wealth is subsequently lost. Yet, as "Atlas" grimly foretold, we now treat the incompetent who wreck their companies as victims, while those resourceful business owners who manage to make a profit are portrayed as recipients of illegitimate "windfalls."

When Rand was writing in the 1950s, one of the pillars of American industrial might was the railroads. In her novel the railroad owner, Dagny Taggart, an enterprising industrialist, has a FedEx-like vision for expansion and first-rate service by rail. But she is continuously badgered, cajoled, taxed, ruled and regulated -- always in the public interest -- into bankruptcy. Sound far-fetched? On the day I sat down to write this ode to "Atlas," a Wall Street Journal headline blared: "Rail Shippers Ask Congress to Regulate Freight Prices."

In one chapter of the book, an entrepreneur invents a new miracle metal -- stronger but lighter than steel. The government immediately appropriates the invention in "the public good." The politicians demand that the metal inventor come to Washington and sign over ownership of his invention or lose everything.

The scene is eerily similar to an event late last year when six bank presidents were summoned by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson to Washington, and then shuttled into a conference room and told, in effect, that they could not leave until they collectively signed a document handing over percentages of their future profits to the government. The Treasury folks insisted that this shakedown, too, was all in "the public interest."

Economist Ayn's fix? Abolish the income tax:

One memorable moment in "Atlas" occurs near the very end, when the economy has been rendered comatose by all the great economic minds in Washington. Finally, and out of desperation, the politicians come to the heroic businessman John Galt (who has resisted their assault on capitalism) and beg him to help them get the economy back on track. The discussion sounds much like what would happen today:

Galt: "You want me to be Economic Dictator?"

Mr. Thompson: "Yes!"

"And you'll obey any order I give?"

"Implicitly!"

"Then start by abolishing all income taxes."

"Oh no!" screamed Mr. Thompson, leaping to his feet. "We couldn't do that . . . How would we pay government employees?"

"Fire your government employees."

"Oh, no!"

”

A strong recommendation to subscribe and peruse Charles Hugh Smith’s blog: “OfTwoMinds”. Charles is an author of several works of fiction as well as a visionary for today’s reality.

If you’re a reader, I strongly recommend reading (or re-reading) Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged”. Written in the late fifties, it’s almost prescient in it’s parallels to today’s economic reality. Indeed, you can read a few pages, then pick up the newspaper and almost read the same thing – scary.

Over on The Big Picture Blog, a post giving 150 ways to drive oil prices higher... basically an outline of US Energy policy for the last 50 years:

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/05/how-to-drive-oi.html

At the New York Times, op-ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman writes about the huge transfer of wealth and power that is shaping the future ( or lack thereof) of America:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/opinion/21friedman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

"There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.

Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.

It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our “addiction to oil.”

The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.

If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could “potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.”

But that’s not all. Two compelling new books have just been published that describe two other big power shifts: “The Post-American World,” by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, and “Superclass” by David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment.

Mr. Zakaria’s central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, “the rise of the rest” — the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors — is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm. “Today, India has 18 all-news channels of its own,” notes Zakaria. “And the perspectives they provide are very different from those you will get in the Western media. The rest now has the confidence to present its own narrative, where it is at the center.”

For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.

“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game,” he said. If we don’t fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.”

Mr. Rothkopf’s book argues that on many of the most critical issues of our time, the influence of all nation-states is waning, the system for addressing global issues among nation-states is more ineffective than ever, and therefore a power void is being created. This void is often being filled by a small group of players — “the superclass” — a new global elite, who are much better suited to operating on the global stage and influencing global outcomes than the vast majority of national political leaders.

Some of this new elite “are from business and finance,” says Rothkopf. “Some are members of a kind of shadow elite — criminals and terrorists. Some are masters of new or traditional media; some are religious leaders, and a few are top officials of those governments that do have the ability to project their influence globally.”

The next president will have to manage these new rising states and these new rising individuals and networks, while wearing the straightjacket left in the Oval Office by Mr. Bush.

“Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels. "

Nobody in Congress has the balls to place a significant use tax on gasoline - one that would cause people to demand and embrace alternatives. So instead, let's institute rationing. Can't get to work with your ration ?  Time for a new job, more efficient car or maybe mass transit.

Basically we've done nothing to wean ourselves off of the oil teat - even with a 50 year warning from the Admiral and the oil embargo wake-up call in the 70's. We're paying the price now - literally. The greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world is happening right now as dollars stream to China for crap and Saudi Arabia for oil. The USA is exporting nothing comparable. Of course the joke may soon be on them (and ourselves) as the dollar becomes worthless.

Hope is dimming for any chance of survival through a period of runaway inflation and drastic decline in the standard of living. Colonies on the moon ? Trip to Mars ?  Forget about it. Watch as the USA becomes a third world nation when all of our grandiose infrastructure comes crashing down due to the end of low-cost energy.

And I don't mean diesel engines either - bring back the steam powered locomotives that burn coal.

The airlines are dying, and the price is rapidly becoming unaffordable. At least the trains ran on time (or so I've been told) and we have plenty of coal.

Maybe if everybody can see the tons of pollution being spewed by their travel activities they might take an interest in researching alternatives...

This is great !  Now Japan is experiencing the decline of Engineering - next China and then India !

High-Tech Japanese, Running Out of Engineers

"After years of fretting over coming shortages, the country is actually facing a dwindling number of young people entering engineering and technology-related fields.

Universities call it “rikei banare,” or “flight from science.” The decline is growing so drastic that industry has begun advertising campaigns intended to make engineering look sexy and cool, and companies are slowly starting to import foreign workers, or sending jobs to where the engineers are, in Vietnam and India.

It was engineering prowess that lifted this nation from postwar defeat to economic superpower. But according to educators, executives and young Japanese themselves, the young here are behaving more like Americans: choosing better-paying fields like finance and medicine, or more purely creative careers, like the arts, rather than following their salaryman fathers into the unglamorous world of manufacturing. "

. . .

Read it and weep - too bad our elected officials can't read:

The Hirsch Report on Peak Oil

Back in March 2008 I bought two Seagate 500GB SATA drives and installed them - one at work, and one at home.

Yesterday, the drive at home failed to boot Windows XP, missing several files. I was unable to repair the installation by booting from the Windows CD. Running Seagate's SeaTools for DOS found several hundred errors on the drive.

Yea - it's got a 5 year warranty, but a 50% failure rate in 2 months ?  Come on !

I hope that this isn't a fall out from the Maxtor acquisition. The only time that I've experienced a higher failure rate was with the ill fated IBM Deathstar 75G drives - which were so bad that there was a class action lawsuit.

I see that the price has dropped 8 percent in the 2 months since I've purchased them...

Over on DSP Design Line, Dan O'Dowd talks trash about Embedded Linux:

http://www.dspdesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207501083

"Embedded Linux is the most hyped embedded operating system ever. It is promoted as inexpensive, high quality, high productivity, reliable, widely available, and well supported. It is none of these things, as two of its greatest proponents have recently pointed out. Wind River Systems and MontaVista Software, companies that each describe themselves as "the leader" in embedded Linux, have both initiated marketing campaigns touting the horrors of using embedded Linux.

In the January/February 2008 issue of Military Embedded Systems, Jim Ready, the founder and chief technology officer of MontaVista, says "a [develop-it-yourself] embedded Linux distribution [is] a significant investment (read 'big bucks') in time and money." He estimates the three-year cost of a large scale embedded Linux deployment at $19,623,750. Here are some other quotes from the article:

"To keep abreast of the changes occurring on a daily basis a developer needs to monitor the email traffic of 11 different and unsynchronized open source projects... up to 5,000 messages a day with 1,000 of these being patches that need to be evaluated and possibly applied to the source base. Simply ignoring the traffic, figuring that the system in use seems to be working well enough, can lead to disastrous consequences later.

"A recent security patch that took all of 13 lines of code to implement against an embedded Linux system would have taken more than 800k lines of source patches to implement, if the previous trail of patches had been ignored. It's a classic case of pay now or really pay later.

"If there ever were a situation where the 'software money pit' could really take hold, it's in owning 30 million lines of constantly changing source code. Even in the simplest case, the development costs are typically in the millions of dollars."

Wind River delivers the same message in a recent full-page advertisement. It asks: "Choosing Linux as your next device operating system?" It answers: "CHAOS" in large crooked letters, followed by "fatal error," "system crash," "game over," and "panic."

Even the greatest critics of embedded Linux have never been so harsh. The experts say that embedded Linux is "CHAOS" and "a money pit." With friends like these, who needs enemies?

One would expect Wind River and MontaVista to tout the advantages of their embedded Linux support, but why trash the product on which their business is based? If they are being unfair to embedded Linux, the Linux community will rise up to denounce them, destroying their embedded Linux support business.

It's more likely that Wind River and MontaVista are telling it as they see it--for marketing purposes. Marketing usually puts forward a problem (bad breath, headaches) that many potential customers will relate to, and then promises a solution. Why would Wind River and MontaVista put forward the problem of embedded Linux nightmares in marketing materials unless they think many potential customers have experienced those nightmares and need a solution? Wind River and MontaVista are certainly in a position to know how hard it is to use embedded Linux, because they are using it, supporting it, and selling it. And since their business is trying to pick up the pieces for companies that have already failed with embedded Linux, they have heard plenty of horror stories.

Wind River and MontaVista each say that they can tame the embedded Linux monster and make it work for customers. But can they? Trying to fix embedded Linux for eight years, MontaVista is reported to have lost over $60,000,000, going through five rounds of venture capital, three rounds of layoffs, and three CEOs in the last two years. Since jumping on the Linux bandwagon, Wind River has gone from profitability to losses, recently announcing a layoff of 7% of their staff.

So why are Wind River and MontaVista bashing embedded Linux? Each year, Embedded System Design magazine carries out a survey of embedded systems developers. Over a two year period from 2005 to 2007, the percentage of developers using embedded Linux and the percentage planning to use embedded Linux have both declined. And even more important, the percentage not interested in embedded Linux has nearly doubled.

According to ESD's analysis, most of those who are reasonable targets for embedded Linux (those with PC-like applications) have already adopted it. The rest have learned it is not appropriate and are moving on. See the article "Annual study uncovers the embedded market" (Richard Nass, www.embedded.com/design/opensource/201803499?pgno=2) for details of survey.

It seems clear what is happening: Wind River and MontaVista are trying to get the dwindling number of disenchanted embedded Linux users to pay them "big bucks" to escape the embedded Linux nightmare. They hope that if they can get enough customers signed up, they will finally get enough money to tame the beast.

But what happens if they cannot? There are indications that they may have exhausted the market. If Wind River fails to stem the tide, they will need to drop their support for embedded Linux to return to profitability. And if MontaVista doesn't show some sign of stemming their losses soon, their investors will pull the plug. When Wind River and MontaVista abandon embedded Linux, their customers will have to live the embedded Linux nightmare that Wind River and MontaVista are telling them--all too clearly--that they will have.

This embedded Linux bashing from embedded Linux's strongest proponents should give pause to those who are thinking through their embedded operating system strategy. If embedded Linux champions are saying that embedded Linux is terrible, why would anyone want to risk their products or their company on it?

Why would anyone use a product that its proponents say is awful? Would you buy a car from a salesman who admitted the car was a piece of junk just because he said he had a great service department? That's what embedded Linux's friends suggest that you do. With friends like these, who needs enemies?"

Over on the Huffington Post, Joe Lauria writes about WW-III:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-lauria/the-coming-war-with-iran_b_96428.html

"World civilization is based on oil. The world is running out of oil. The oil companies and governments are not telling the truth about how close we are to the end. Dick Cheney knew about peak oil back in 1999 when he spoke to the London Petroleum Institute as Halliburton CEO. He predicted it would come in 2010. After that it's just a matter of years before it runs out. Whoever controls the remaining oil determines who lives and who dies.

Sixty percent of this oil is under a triangular area of the Middle East the size of Kansas. In that speech Cheney said: "The Middle East with two thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

This small Middle East triangle encompasses the northeast of Saudi Arabia, all of Iraq and the southwestern part of Iran, along with Kuwait, Qatar and the Emirates. The US controls Iraq. It has friendly governments in the other states.

Iran is the exception. The US now surrounds Iran.

Controlling an area the size of Kansas shouldn't be a problem for the U.S. military, except that it is heavily populated and many people in the triangle don't want the Americans there and are willing to fight.

It's been known for at least thirty years that America needs alternative energy sources. But instead of an alternative energy plan we got the invasion of Iraq by oilmen wedded to a dying business, willing to kill hundreds of thousands to cling to the last drop. The US is never leaving the region or withdrawing from Iraq. McCain is right about staying, but 100 years is too long. The oil won't last that long.

Iran is next. Lieberman set up Petraeus to testify last week that Iranian-backed groups are murdering hundreds of American servicemen in Iraq. On Friday Gates called Iran's influence in Iraq "malign" and Bush said if Iran keeps meddling in Iraq "then we'll deal with them." They are building their case for war with resolutions in the Senate and at the UN. It's only western Iran, from the Iraq border to 150 miles inside the country that the U.S. will have to occupy. That's where Iran's oil is. But the U.S. will have a nasty battle on their hands in Iran even if they restore a Shah-like puppet in Tehran 30 years after the revolution.
The Saudis would not mind seeing the Iranian regime go. But the Saudis may also be on the list. The US may have to destabilize and control Saudi Arabia some day too. The Wall Street Journal a few years ago revealed that in the 1970s under Nixon, Kissinger had plans drawn up for the US invasion and occupation of the Saudi oil fields. Those plans can be dusted off.

The American oil wars are being launched out of weakness, not strength. The American economy is teetering and without control of the remaining oil it will collapse. There will be massive chaos in any case, when only enough oil remains for the American elite and whomever they choose to share it with.

That will leave an oil-starved China and India, both with nuclear weapons, with no alternative but to bow to America or go to war.

It's not about greed any more. It's about survival. Because the leadership of this country was initially too greedy to switch from oil to solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable alternatives, it may now be too late. Had the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into the invasion and occupation of Iraq been put into alternative energy the world might have had a fighting chance. Now that is far from certain.

What is certain is that these wars are not about democracy. They are not about WMD. The coming one will not even be about Iran's nuclear weapons project. It's about the oil, stupid."

Over on the Huffington Post, Raymond Learsy writes on the rapidly approaching death of America:

As Oil Touches All Time Highs, Our Deparment of Energy Takes Us For Fools

"Our oil whiz, Secretary Bodman of the Department of Energy, perhaps a distant cousin of "Great Job Brownie" of Katrina fame, wrote a letter to the New York Times 3.30.08 rebutting points in an editorial "Pain at the Pump and Beyond" 3.25.08, proceeding I would imagine on the assumption that everyone is as much out of the loop on oil issues as he is.

. . .

But it doesn't stop there. Mr. Bodman and his Department of Energy, certainly at the behest of their (our?) President and Vice President, have sat idly on their hands as the price of oil escalated by some $85 a barrel (from around $25/bbl to over$110/bbl) during the last seven plus years. This nation consumes about 21 million barrels of oil a day and now the additional cascade of American wealth flowing into the pockets of oil interests both here and abroad is approximately $1.78 billion a day ($85/bbl x 21 million barrels) or $564 billion a year. Not to speak of the trillions that have already been transferred to oil patch interests over the last seven years due to escalating oil prices given the benign tolerance of the hacks at the Department of Energy and our Administration. Money that could have been used to expand our fleet of hybrid cars, pay for a major conversion to electric cars (please see "An Essential and Viable Energy Fix and the Renaissance of Detroit" 04.04.08), developing hydrogen powered vehicles , expand wind power and clean coal technology, seriously revisit nuclear power and on Where is the outrage, where is the push back when OPEC President Chakib Khelil pronounces as he did on Tuesdy, with oil prices at $109 a barrel, that "there is no need for OPEC to pump more oil"?

Well don't despair. As referenced above, our Administration and its factotums at the Department of Energy have over the years set aside $12 billion to deal with this issue of existential importance to the nation's future. Given their largesse we are asked no to look too closely at the extra trillions going to the oil industry. After all this administration knows who their friends are."

Over on Manufacturing.net Michael Collins discusses off-shoring and in-shoring:

http://www.manufacturing.net/Articles-What-Is-Going-On-Here.aspx

"From 1994 to 2004, U.S. companies invested more than $48 billion in China, exported $200 billion in goods to China, and imported a staggering $1 trillion from China. Although China is the most popular source, South America, Mexico, India, Canada, Russia, and the Eastern European countries are all increasing their exports to the U.S.

American companies see sourcing from foreign countries as a good solution for lowering their costs.

On the other hand, foreign companies have invested $40 billion in assets in the U.S. and now employ 6 million workers. This is called “in-shoring.”

. . .

Foreign manufacturers have learned that the best reason to inshore or build plants in the United States is to be close to their customers and the markets. They can avoid all of the problems of shipping products into America, plus they can monitor the customer’s wants and needs. Market proximity is a big advantage and everyone seems to have figured that out but American manufacturers.

If other countries are so successful at building plants in North America and have proved that they can do it with our employees, taxes regulations, and suppliers, why can’t American manufacturers do the same thing?"