The overwhelming issues with latency aside, a 1.5TB (native not compressed) LTO drive will set you back ~1800 USD and you'll need an extra ~100-150 for a SAS controller that can drive it. For that price you can by yourself 24TB of HDD storage (12 x 2TB) with enough money left over for a decent SATA/SAS RAID controller. If you setup a RAID 10 array you'll have 12TB exponentially faster access times and better data security (unless you make copies of every tape).

The F-22 is ultimately meant to protect our AWACS planes. If the AWACS are taking out, the USAF loses their view of the airspace and controlling it becomes much more difficult. The F-22 are meant to loiter a distance away from the AWACS and take their targeting instructions from them. The enemy aircraft get popped and if it's done right the F-22 are still hidden.

If they know its going to be a true dog fight, they're going to send in the F-15s which have proven time and again that it can hold it's own (b/c despite their size, they were designed to be close in knife fighters). The F-15's won't always maintain this superiority and newer Mig's and Sukohi's have closed much or all of the gap... but it's still one of the best out their.

Anyway, using a ground based analogy... the F-22 is meant to a sniper, supporting the F-15's and F/A-18's are the grunts who will be doing the close in work.

Your servers have never gone down? Amazing, how much to get you to admin my systems?

I see a lot of comments here about how this is all a dodge to get around income taxes with capital gains taxes.

1. This is a Chinese CEO in Hong Kong, not the U.S.
2. Carter _decreased_ capital gains tax rates, Reagan _increased_ them and Clinton _decreased them (to be fair, Bush Jr. decreased them even more).
3. Capital gains are taxed at a higher rate based on your income (again to be fair, people with a lower income can't take advantage the same way).

Capital gains taxes have a place, the idea is to encourage investment, which is why long term capital gains taxes are lower than income taxes rates but short term capital gains taxes pretty much mirror income tax rates.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_gains_tax#United_States
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Maximum_Federal_Tax_Rate_on_Long_Term_Capital_Gains_(1972_-_2012).jpg

The logistics don't work quite like this. First, for companies like HP, Apple and Nintendo, they work with their logistics provider to setup a Customs pipeline months before the product actually ships. U.S. Customs has a process for this and FedEx and UPS have departments dedicated to just setting it up. The end result is a rubber stamp process that clears the product through in hours, not days or weeks. Also, ships aren't practical for shipping small electronics. A 747 or 777 can carry a metric crap load of iPhones and the shipping costs distributed over all those phones is a fractional part of the overall cost. You need to get up to something where the packaging is the size of a TV for ships to become the better option.

Finally, as many have pointed out.. this is just assembly of parts made else were. For the just in time assembly to work as you described, your still going to have to have a large volume the parts on hand to avoid shortages, which means if the product doesn't sell you going to be setting on an overstock of parts instead of final products. Many of those parts (screens, batteries, logic boards) are customized for your product and have no practical resale value.

There are a lot of people who have put a lot of thought into trimming the cost (and risk is a cost) of this entire process and off-shoring remains the cheapest and most practical option. Changes in the world economy will eventually shift this around (just as it dictated the US the world's produce in decades past).

Celebrities (which is a superset of Politician). And yes... a large portion of the population bases their decisions/vote off of what someone says simply because they look good on TV... and before that b/c they sound good on radio... and before that b/c they wrote what they wanted to hear.

$70 pre-order for "expected" delivery next year. Article short on details, long on promises. A website where many of the pages don't function. I think I'm better off buying a 2-3 shares of Facebook.

Yes... but everyone knows Apple revolutionized idiots and everyone else is just copying. (lovingly posted from my iMac)

My g/f's from Japan and when we went to visit recently I noticed a lot of homes had toilets with a sink built into the top of the toilet tank. When you flushed, the water to fill the tank came out a faucet and you could wash your hands with it. Not only recycles but saves room in a 1/2 bath... a simple little thing we should see more of here in the states. As an example...

Durring the Great Depression, gangsters and bank robbers were pop-icons and even cult hero's in the U.S because they were perceived as sticking it to "the man". This is strikingly similar, we have a group of thieves trying to cast their actions as being for the "greater good".

Stratfor guys pop up occasionally on Coast to Coast AM and Alex Jones. At one point Alex Jones was accused of being part of Stratfor. Feel free to draw your own conclusions based on that.

You already know that it's a tangled mess. You need to map that tangle throughly before you start fixing/replacing/retiring anything. The conversation you do not want to have with your superiors is why retiring system X (which costs $5,000/month) took down system Y (which makes $100,000/month). You need to map out both the business processes (which systems they touch) and the system dependencies (trust no one, log network data and look at the traffic between boxes). Do not start pulling strings until you know what they're connected to.

You're not going to do this by yourself... at the very least you're going to need someone who knows the business side throughly. I've walked into a situation like this before for a very, very large company and I swear it took years off of my life but I learned a whole hell of a lot from the experience. Best of luck.

FTA (and the summary): The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture. Loongsoon is a family of chips... just like Core 2's, Bulldozer's, etc. They are MIPs based, not Alpha based.

Loongson is a licensed MIPs implementation. Apparently early versions even made sure to clear of patent issues by not implementing a few instructions. So the accusation of being an Alpha "rip-off" is 100% wrong.