According to this article, HPaq has announced it will stop offering desktop workstations based on Intel's Itanicium processor. Reportedly customers just aren't buying them, preferring AMD64-based workstations instead.
HPaq intends to continue (for now) offering Itanicium-based servers.
Some numbers gleaned from today's issue of BusinessWeek while sitting in the dentist's waiting-room shed some revealing light on the Bush administration's claims of an economic recovery.
Contrary to White House press releases asserting that the economy is strong and improving, what the numbers have to say is that it's in deep trouble. Even after the Bush administration passed the largest economic stimulus package in US history, annual GDP growth has been only 3.4% since 2001, compared with an average of 5% over the previous six business cycles. Job growth is the slowest since the Great Depression; real wage and salary disbursements have risen less than 1% per year since 2001, compared to the norm of 4% during previous recoveries. Real wages for production and non-supervisory staff have actually declined. The real buying power of the minimum wage is at a 40-year low, and wages are the lowest percentage of GDP they have been since 1929.
Additionally, 5.2 million Americans have lost their health insurance coverage since 2001, bringing the total to 45 million -- one sixth of the US population. The percentage of companies with under 200 employees who offer health coverage to their workers has dropped from 68% to 63%, and among small businesses the rate has dropped from 57% to 50%. Health insurance premiums rose 11.2% last year, the fourth consecutive year of double-digit price increases; a typical family's health insurance now costs $9,950 per year. That same typical family now has $1,500 less in real wages than in 2001.
About the only thing that's booming is offshoring. The temporary H1-B visa cap extension of 195,000 H1-B visas per year recently expired, dropping the quota back to 65,000 per year. US companies burned through that 65,000-visa limit for fiscal 2004 by April; never to let mere legislative limits stop them from laying off more Americans, obtained permission to start early on the fiscal 2005 H1-B allocation. Fiscal 2005 starts on October 1, 2004; by the beginning of September, US businesses had burned through 47,000 of the 65,000 H1-Bs allocated for 2005.
Arguably, the Bush administration economic stimulus package has helped keep the recession from being worse than it is. (Many would debate whether the package actually helped anyone but the rich. lacking hard numbers, I leave analysis of that as an exercise for the reader.) Given the above numbers, it's pretty hard to deny that it hasn't helped enough; and we can't do it again. The Bush administration's fiscal policies have driven the US in four years from the largest budget surplus in US history to the largest budget deficit; the money just isn't there.
Now to make it perfectly clear, I'm not asserting that the Bush administration caused the recession. It grew directly out of the hyper-inflated tech stock bubble of the end of the 90s, driven by the greed of Wall Street investors who ignored risk, lack of product, and in many cases even lack of anything resembling a solid business plan, throwing caution to the winds for the lure of extravagant promises of return on investment with no basis in reality.
What I am asserting, on the other hand, is that the continuing Bush administration claims of economic recovery are a pack of self-serving lies that simply do not reflect the real state of the economy. And while this administration did not create the recession, lying about recovery (while insurance costs skyrocket, and businesses ship cheap H1-B workers in and jobs out) isn't making it any better.
KRYPTONITE OFFERS FREE PRODUCT EXCHANGES TO ALL CURRENT OWNERS OF KRYPTONITE TUBULAR CYLINDER LOCKS
If you currently own a Kryptonite tubular cylinder lock and are concerned about the security of this lock, Kryptonite will exchange this lock for you with a comparable non-tubular cylinder lock.
See the link above for details and the lock exchange form. (I know I have at least one Kryptonite tubular cylinder lock. I don't remember whether my disc lock is Kryptonite, Cycle Pro, or something else altogether.)
Scaled Composites is currently accepting applications for all Engineering disciplines. Please submit resumes to careers@scaled.com in MS Word or Adobe pdf format. Resumes are entered into our database and kept active for two years.
Only applications from U.S. citizens can be considered.
Bah.
The DelawareOnline.com NewsJournal reports that red-light cameras increase rear-end accidents. No shit? You don't say?
According to the article, "A 2001 study commissioned by city officials in Charlotte, N.C., indicated rear-end crashes went up by 16 percent over a three-year period after cameras were installed in 1998." A 2002 study commissioned by San Diego showed a 37% increase in rear-end collisions.
Any increase in rear-end collisions will be outweighed by a decrease in right-angle collisions that usually cause more-serious injuries, said Charles Trainor, [Philadelphia]'s chief traffic engineer.
"Would you rather somebody bump you in the rear, or would you rather somebody enter your driver's compartment at 40 miles per hour? That's a no-brainer," said Maury Hannigan, a vice president of Affiliated Computer Services, of Dallas, a bidder to install the Philadelphia system.
Is it still a no-brainer if the rear-end collision shunts you into the intersection and you STILL get hit by the same cross traffic as if you'd run the light anyway? You're more likely to be hit by crossing trafic a couple of seconds after the change than immediately after the light changes, because in the latter case, the cross traffic usually hasn't started moving yet. And then you presumably get ticketed by the camera as well, making it a triple whammy....
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