You know, never fails to amaze me how people are not looking at the larger picture of "services" offered by any provider, but especially by the cable companies. FTR, I used to work in business broadband sales for a major cable player, so I've seen the industry from just after the days where cable modems got installed until the dot-com boom from the inside.
The cable companies, as we speak, are caught in a precarious situation. Several factors came into play at the same time, which has limited their ability to make huge improvements, but, if they're lucky, they might come out on top.
So history: when cable modems first arrived on the scene, in the early-to-mid 90's, the technology was largely unproven and had tremendous issues, both technically and from a service delivery perspective. Much like the early days of DSL, the cable companies were essentially forced to re-wire infrastructure that had been in place for over a decade, sometimes up to 2 decades. Because of the technical issues, many cable executives didn't see the cost-benefit ratio of rewiring tens of thousands of miles of cities to be able to provide the service.
Plus, if you know anything about cost, doing so was a multi-million dollar effort, cumulatively probably costing in the billions.
However, with the advent of the dot-com boom and other highly profitable interactive services, the cable company PHB's finally got the picture and started rewiring and running fiber for the new cable plants.
Unfortunately, this was between 95-98, just before the internet boom really got underway, and well before DSL put any pressure on them.
As such, they did a reasonable job of getting the major metropolitan areas wired for a more modern infrastructure.
However, they failed in one major respect: they didn't have a crystal ball, and most, if not all, the cable companies put in the minimum infrastructure to support digital services. They didn't, however, put in overcapacity.
Now, if you swing forward 4-7 years, its pretty obvious that the cost-differential of putting in FTTP (or at least overcapacity of fiber to the neighborhood) would have been the smart thing to do. But at the time, wth DSL being crap, and no other real competition, they missed the boat. This wasn't maliciouos. They just did what they thought would be adequate.
Now, look at cable services today. On most cable infrastructure, the highest percentage of bandwidth (out of the 1000mhz available on the plant) goes to analog TV. Those 30-50 channels take up nearly have the space, each analog channel taking 6mhz of bandwidth.
This log-gain, low-profit bandwidth hog is the biggest impediment to modern services as they reside on the existing cable facilities.
And now there's another problem in the works: how to handle changes in Digital Broadcasting, DOCSIS 3, and PacketCable services, especially with HD programming getting more and more relevant.
While DOCSIS 3 has been out for over a year now, from the insiders I know its still a bit spotty on the internal side, and since many of the operators use Cisco (who fought DOCSIS 3 tooth and nail to get their own standard), they'd love to do it but are still unsure of quality. Not only that, but at least one smaller cable operator where I know the CIO is truly looking at how to deliver everything over PacketCable (TV, Phone, Data, etc.) rather than just make the leap to DOCSIS 3.
These aren't inconsequential issues, as the decisions made now will have some serious impact on the structure of Cable services for a long time.
And finally, when you add in the cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and copper plant, along with the huge increases in programming costs to the cable companies, along with the not-insiginificant support and CPE equipment costs of moving to Digital services, DOCSIS 3, or other advanced services, its not much wonder why the cable companies are moving a bit slowly. An error in judgement now could be fatally costly over the lon
No matter what the medium, service, or object, there has always been piracy, and always been people who will copy anything.
Counterfeiting is big business. As are knock-offs of Gucci and Chanel.
I've been using computers for nearly 30 years now, and since the day I started programming, I've seen piracy. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of any protection scheme that hasn't failed. From early software anti-copying measures, to serial numbers, to DRM, to DVD encryption, its all failed miserably to stop the determined.
I've often wondered what the actual cost of these measures truly is to the companies that use them. If they create them internally, there's the development cost. If they license them, they end up paying per-use, I would guess. Either way, it seems to me that this is one of the ultimate excersizes in futility. I've often wondered if this was due to stubborness or simply stupidity. Either way, it ends up being a burden to the legitimate user, and hasn't, as far as I can tell, stopped the illegitimate users.
Take copy protection. When I was a 13 year old using an Apple IIe, everyone I knew was pirating software. We did it because there was no way we could afford to buy it, for the most part. While I acknowledge it was stealing, at the end of the day, it wasn't a loss, because we wouldn't have done it if we could a) afford it, or b) live without it.
So what did copy protection accomplish? It simply stopped people who bought it from making backups of legitimately purchased software. I remember once when I school I went to had a bad drive, and through stupidity ended up destroying multiple copies of AppleWorks trying to get it working on a machine. A "friend" of mine attempted to make duplicates of legitimate software so they had enough to go around for classes. Because of the copy protection, he ended up using cracked software to make copies so they could teach class for the two weeks it took to get Apple to acknowledge they owned the software and to ship it out to them.
As far as my own personal views, I can see the motivation for someone who is young and poor to make illegitimate copies of digital property. Mainly because you can't afford it. I know a few years ago, $20 made a differenc between eating or not. I sure didn't have it to spend on (software, CD's, etc.).
Now, however, I buy what I need to use. When I could afford it, I went and bought CD's to replace all the cassette copies of my favorite bands. I can afford it, and I recognize that if my favorite (artist, author, software company) doesn't sell their work, they won't make more for me to enjoy. Could I suck down my favorite albums off a Torrent? Sure. But I don't have a single desire to do so. I want that struggling band to sell enough CD's that they'll make the next one.
So, does any sort of copy protection benfit anyone at all? Maybe the guys who write/license it.
But everyone else loses, in the end.
Hopefully the negative feedback inherent in this system will rip it apart. One can only hope.
Of course, if they could somehow get some good drugs into them, that might be an incentive. Maybe just form an alliance with "No-Doz"...you could pop off that extra "Windows" key for late night coding...
I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think it comes back to economies of scale. When you factor in maintenance costs for ocean-based vessels, on top of the fact that many land-based data centers are now being built in areas with many cost advantages (being built near large quantities of dark fiber, being built on cheap land, built near energy sources or near areas where renewable energy sources are/will be available, being built to minimize maintenance costs on the infrastructure itself, etc.) I'm not sure that a floating data center is going to be cost-effective.
Not only that, but the vulnerabilities on a floating data center are going to be, at a minimum, the exact same if not higher. The data connections are going to be exposed, no matter what you do. At least in a land-based data center the fiber is buried, and less obvious. Not only that, but physical security can be made (and is made) relatively difficult in a land based data center, at least directly surrounding it. A floating entity would have a far higher risk of approach due to the traffic that occurs on the water near a port.
As far as exposure to attack on fiber, well, I can tell you the exact man-hole in the city where I live that you can toss an IED and take down virtually every carrier in the market. Those don't exist simply at data centers, but everywhere, due to decisions decades ago that have caused choke points in fiber distibution.
I'd also question the ready availability of dark fiber at a port from multiple carriers. While I don't know as I've never looked at it, it seems to me that ports, being quasi-government facilities, probably weren't wired with fiber with multiple carriers, let alone all the big carriers, as most major data centers are. You might have 2 or 3, but I'd guess that's under contract and the number of directly available carriers is still low. This is a disadvantage for a vendor-neutral data-center that would likely want/need connectivity to all the big boys to entice customers. This might not be true if the port is a launch point for inter-continental fiber, but certainly that's not the case at most ports.
It just seems that this type of setup will be vulnerable to all sorts of environmental and physical damage that a land-based data center wouldn't be. For instance, the physical connection to fiber would be very vulnerable to vandalism, environmental damage, and even just plain human stupidity. Depending on the port, environmentals could be quite tricky as well.
Not only that, but how would you get true redundancy? Sure, power could be done, but when it comes to multiple paths for data connections, ports might not lend for the best setup.
I can see in cities where real estate is overwhelmingly valuable that there might be some economies of scale, but it seems to me that many data centers are now being built in areas where there is tons of existing dark fiber, and land is relatively cheap. Not sure if this truly makes economic sense when it doesn't make a damn bit of difference where your server/data/systems are located. A millesecond or two in lag is all but irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
I'd imagine that putting this on the Wii has some damned interesting possibilities for motion sensing and cooking, including multi-player head to head competition.
But the problem isn't how reliable they are. The problem arises from the need to change their products and grow. Since HP will stop selling the Alpha in the future, they have a decision to make. Not only that, but when you are talking about hundreds of servers (that's after they decommissioned 300+ last year) support costs are a huge financial drain. And development costs are increasing as VMS coding skills get more and more rare and specialized. So, overall, they don't have much of a choice but to look for ways to mitigate those issues and look for better ways to run *EVERYTHING*, not just the product sets running on Alpha infrastructure.
It's not always that they are managing 100 systems badly. In some cases, there were very real reasons for multiple system types, and multiple platforms. Companies often develop products separately, especially if those products were developed a decade or more ago. Alpha, for instance, was a great platform for this company, and they were making heavy investment in them, up until they received a whole crapload of them in 2006, only to have HP tell them "Sorry, EOL" a few months later.
This company also has discrete systems running on Sparc/Solaris, Windows, and Linux. The reason behind this was the fact that some of these products were developed 10-20 years ago, when such separate development made sense and they picked best of breed systems for that time, or because they have acquired various companies over the last decade that brought products in-house which were on different platforms.
That worked great, until you get to the point where you have 3-4 divisions each supporting different platforms in the same datacenter, each one continually upgrading and expanding. Because of the diversity, they were unable to share *ANY* resource (including networking infrastructure, for reasons which I won't get into, but this includes world-wide data center connectivity, and is partly political, partly contractual, and partly just doing things in the same way to not rock the boat, so to speak).
A few years ago they made the decision to get away from disk storage and move to SANs. It was a good move for them. This was the first step to virtualization, and a major one.
But it has become increasingly unwieldy to continue in this model. Virtualization makes a lot of sense for them, and will scale back all sorts of costs and support contracts, some of it to the tune of $10m per year in old hardware/OS support.
For them, going to virtualization makes sense. It will generate millions of dollars per year in saving, and untangle many complex problems, such as development issues. Its also something they are not approaching stupidly, as it is a 5-10 year project for them. They're not rushing it.
My company works with several shops that are working on large-scale virtualization and common platform projects. I would say the biggest single issue is simply politics, because much of the initial work is affecting older platforms that are the biggest win technically and financially to replace. For instance, one shop has a significant investment in Alpha systems, and still has production servers that are 15+ years old running a huge chunk of their revenue producing systems. The folks working directly on the Alpha servers have considerable clout, since they've been the golden children for many, many years. Their bosses know how to play politics, and, considering that Alpha/VMS experience is one of those IT areas where there is little new blood from younger IT staff members, they are quite adept at finding reasons why it won't work to serve their own ends.
Not only that, but virtualization will result in lost jobs at some point. Many IT staffers are afraid, whether rightly or wrongly, of losing their jobs. In a sense, they are outsourcing a good chunk of their day-to-day duties. I remember when this particular company went to SAN's over the last half-decade, and you would have thought, from the way the Alpha guys were fighting it, that the world was ending. They created road-block after road-block about how they wouldn't be able to keep the systems running, how it wouldn't work in "their" environment, etc, etc.
And, because of the compartmentalization that often occurs in large enterprise, many of these guys have very little idea about anything outside their own box. I know guys who have architected corporate platform migrations who are so narrow in their focus that they have *NO* experience outside their box, be it a particular OS, a server type, a network type, whatever. When the box becomes a cloud of equipment, they are lost and often have little or no ability to work with the other layers involved. Learning new troubleshooting skills in these environments is a painstaking process, and not one that many people are comfortable with.
In the end, these various factors are creating far larger artificial roadblocks for implementing virtualization than any technical challenges. To top it off, much of this is being driven by financials. The CFO and CTO are desparately trying to find ways to cut costs. By the time this message percolates down to the workers, they feel threatened rather than empowered, and have little incentive (and generally no training, either) to be complicit in what they feel is a threat.
The writers at Eurogamer were found to have neither Journalism or Business degrees, and were thereby incapable of understanding business, marketing, or how to ask a really good question of the Nintendo PR flacks on why they might do this...
Many film critics are given films (even brand new ones) on DVD, rather than having to watch multiple films at a theater, whch is obviously more time consuming. Considering how out of touch some film critics seem to be sometimes, especially when it comes to comedies, it seems to follow that a critic watching a movie alone in his house would have a very different experience than going and seeing it in a crowded theater.
Now film critics are starting to make more sense...
Bill
Can we inject some monetary reality here?
on
What If Yoda Ran IBM?
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· Score: 5, Informative
Okay, look at the reality of what this guy is asking for:
Sales time. Believe it or not, good sales people cost a lot of money. You have the choice of hiring a bad salesperson, who doesn't know what he's talking about or doing, or a good one. So a salesperson will run you, even in a crappy small company, $60k per year (plus 20% for bennies and taxes). Now, IBM needs someone who is, shall we say, better than good. They have lots of products, and they have to be able to deal with everyone from an analyst to a CIO. Not only that, but they have team behind them, usually comprised of some inside people and a sales engineer or two, to answer questions.
So, realistically, you have about $500,000 in salaries, commissions, and benefits in a small sales team.
Let's divide that by $25k. 25/500 = 20. That means that the sales guy, just to cover his costs, has to sell 20 deals a year to small businesses to make a living. Oh, wait. That's not the case. He needs to make a decent profit, as well. Lets put it at 25% or so, conservatively. So we're up to $625,000, or 25 deals a year.
Oh, wait. That doesn't include the salaries of the engineer who does the work. Tack on an extra $150k or so for a top notch "Jedi Master". And that would be cheap. So were' up to $650k plus 25% margin, or $812,500. Or about 32.5 deals per year.
Now, we all know that even a lightsabre wielding Jedi Master sales guy won't close every deal. So lets say, which is a huge gimme, that he can close 50% of the deals he is given. So he must now, conservatively, talk to 65 customers a year, bare minimum, to earn back his money and make a little profit.
Oh, shit, we forgot expenses. You know, office space, cell phones, internet, computers, support, travel, lunches, dinners, visits to strip clubs.
Tack on another $50k per year for that. Or 2 more deals closed (we're up to 34.5, if you were paying attention) or 69 customers talked to if he was lucky.
That means we're averaging more than a deal closed per week, and, let me tell you, it doesn't happen that way.
And we haven't even scratched the surface of expenses, including things like marketing, customer acquisition costs, back end support costs.
The reason that IBM doesn't do this isn't because they don't want to. Its because they *CAN NOT*. This is not their business. They have a defined business plan. I can guarantee you that nowhere in that plan do they deal directly with SMB's for $25k deals.
Instead, they have a very established partner network to deal with this. And some of those partners are quite good, quite knowledgeable, and employ guys with as much if not more experience than some of those IBM engineers. Sure, there are bozos. But if you do due dilegence in selecting a partner, you should be able to eliminate those quickly and quietly, especially if you have big business experience.
Note: all of the big boys have a partner network. IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco. Plus all the others. Every single one. Some of them have gone to the extent of putting their top partners into their traditional stronghold space of Fortune 1000. Cisco is notable for having put partners into their Named Accounts many years ago.
As full disclosure, I work for a company that has, at one time or the other, partnered with every one of those guys. Some of those partnerships were great. Some were a disaster. In every single one, we had highly qualified engineers with decades of experience in multi-discipline IT skills supporting our customers. In fact, one of those partners (won't name them but their one of the biggest of the big) used to slip us business on the side when the customer was unwilling to pay their rates (~$350/hour, travel exclusive) because they knew we could do the same job at less than half the cost.
The point of being a small IT specialty business is to be able to provide a service to a completely different kind of customer. My company has ~25 full time employees in house. We have 450 or so on-sit
Amazon is putting them on the website as they get shipments, as are Best Buy and, I've heard, others. I just had a tab open in my browser and refreshed every little bit. One minute it was $425-$600 on Amazon, the next minute it was $249.xx, no sales tax, no shipping. From what I could tell, the units lasted about 30 minutes, and the word hit the Internet on forums and message boards damn fast.
Of course, it was over $500 on Amazon Resellers this morning.
Same for DDR and Guitar Hero, which are apparently incredibly rare games for no apparent reason that I can see. One minute DDR was $168, the next it was $69.99. What's amusing is seeing how fast the Amazon resellers react and adjust their prices.
First off, I'm a little puzzled by the statement that they would make it cheaper for cable competitors (satellite and telcos), to purchase programming. So, Satellite pays $1.00, telco's pay $.50, and a cable company pays $2.00, just to throw out numbers? I'm not entirely clear I understand the rationale of the government price fixing on behalf of large industry.
Secondly, this is a little disturbing because of some of the other subisidies in these industries, and the fact that the FCC really appears to want to treat them equally, when, in fact, they are all on very different playing fields and games.
Telco's get massive subisidies and monies to maintain "universal access" and also provide government services, such as 911. As such, it puts them ahead of the game when it comes to maintaining the physical infrastructure.
The satellite providers have a much lower cost of maintenance (short of a bird frying), because they do not have a physical plant to maintain. The local cable company had over 7,000 miles of plant in my metro area alone.
And as far as programming goes, the truth is that 98% of the cost of programming to cable companies is charged by a few providers. Disney will force several channels down the throat of a cable company by telling them they have to carry those channels if they want ESPN. And then they'll ask for an extra $.05 or $.10 per subcriber per month just to carry ESPN. When you see programming of those channels you don't watch, the reason is that generally those are incredibly cheap to carry, and don't add much cost.
So the amount a consumer ends up paying, as a percentage, for all those channels they don't care about, is pretty much irrelevant in the larger scheme of things compared to the organized system of bribery that a few media providers are using, such as Disney, HBO, TW, and GE, and the like.
Which brings us back to this attempt by the FCC. Seems to me that treating all TV signal providers, regardless of the radically different issues each faces in providing a signal is shortsighted and counterproductive. As someone else commented, this smacks of letting the Telco's provide more service more cheaply at the expense of other types of providers is just another way of abusing the system.
For full disclosure, I worked for my local Cable company for several years.
Bill
Diminishing sales equals diminishing use?
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The Dying PC Market
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I wonder if this is true or if we are just at a place where many casual users don't need to upgrade as often? Many of the advances of the last few years have been pretty incremental, or don't affect your average end user too much. If they can browse the web, send email, and run a few apps like Word Processing and Spreadsheets, that's all they need.
The advances of the last few years have gotten to the point where many people are satisfied and don't need to buy a new one. The only excpetion to this is the Gamer market, and I can see why gadget-crazy Japan might prefer Sony PS3 and Wii's to pc gaming.
I wonder if the people looking purely at sales are making a pretty basic error here, though.
The other problem with this comparison is that this is only looking at contractor pay, not full-time employee salaries. As full disclosure, I work for a firm that provides IT Staffing as one of its services. Yes, certain in-demand skill sets are getting big bucks. Where I work locally, there have been so many positions posted for various C programmers that we simply can't find anymore, and the ones who will move for a short term or mid-term project are asking and, by and large, getting ridiculous salaries.
But when we do full-time placements, I'm not seeing a big increase. Not only that, but the majority of positions we filled this year were full-time placements.
So I think saying they are at an all-time high needs to be qualified: for certain contractors, which are the jobs where companies like Yoh are most likely to be placing candidates.
When APC sold them the power, we were contracted to go in there and install a lot of the infrastructure. One of my co-workers actually did a lot of the work. It's a pretty cool place, according to him, and apparently the guy got it dirt-cheap compared to having to actually build the physical infrastructure himself. One of the NOC's we work at in St. Louis cost something like $80m, and this was a small fraction of that, with definite advantages over a traditional above ground data center.
It's an impressive place. And while having EMP shielding might be a bit stupid (do you need your servers up *AFTER* everyone is dealing with a nuke strike, truly?) having things like seismic shocks, already laid multiple fiber paths directly connected to major providers, redundant path power and water, that sort of thing if pretty damn hard to get when you build it yourself. This guy waltzed in with all that ready to go.
You're starting a business. Unless that business is selling POS systems, why would you delay the start up of your business by waiting for a POS system to get coded? Even based on some of the Open Source ones currently available, you're likely to spend far more than $2k-5k on hardware, coding, modifications, and figuring out how to use the thing. Not only that, but what happens if it fails? Or if a bug costs you money somehow?
Seems to me that if you are starting a business, you should figure out the best model for that business, instead of diluting your time and effort (which, by all accounts, will likely occupy 200% of your time just starting your business) by reaching for something which doesn't exist.
Seems to me, having been an IT director in the past, that the "bias" we see in IT has more to do with deeper cultural issues than anything specific to the IT industry, and could be applied to many hands-on fields, and even to your average corporation and management selection.
Our built-in selection criteria for "better" IT employees, which is cultural and psychological, is related to several factors. Dedication being one of the major ones that I used to look for. Because IT employees generally are exposed to so many concepts, ideas, and a breadth of knowledge that can be staggering, men, who are more likely (from a cultural and possibly genetic standpoint) to be willing to dedicate higher percentages of their lives to immersion in the culture end up being better employees. This isn't specific to the IT industry.
It also strikes me that being "adventurous" is definitely a plus in IT. The willingness to figure things out, to go way beyond the required knowledge, is something that lends itself to the male-stereotype of being adventurous and exploring. My old *nix admin used to "explore", by which I mean he build image after image, broke things, changed things, generally just messed with crap to see how it worked. This is a trait more in line with male psychology than female.
As someone who's responsibilities included help desk support, I was always looking for good female employees. Abusive users were far less likely to get beligerent with a woman than a man, and the problem I always faced was finding women with the skills, attitude and abilities to be a part of our group. We were a meritocracy. I had 11 people running an ISP, and there was no room for people who couldn't produce, who couldn't keep up, or needed to be directed. I never hired for experience (one of my best finds was a manager at a gas station who didn't own a computer the day he started; a month later he had build his own linux system (hardware and OS) from the ground up. I also had a woman who eventually became my help desk manager, as she was willing to learn, taught herself HTML, etc. She was good with customers and didn't have to be hand-held or babied.
While I understand what TBL was saying about publication issues, I think that the underlying factors in IT gender-bias are as much cultural and applicable to many industries, rather than just IT.
I think that the final assessment, that they picked the wrong person to do this because of a lack of familiarity with games, is dead on.
Why can't someone get a better reviewer to do this? Cory Doctorow? Orson Scott Card? Bruce Sterling? Dan Simmons?
I'm a bit confused as to why, if Dirda's 16 year old son finished it, why didn't he ask for help? Seems to me this implies he really wasn't that into the experiment himself. Surely there's directions someplace on the basics? RTFM?
I think the real challenge is to get some serious "artists", be they of books, music, movies, or whatever, to play the games and give their impressions.
A better analogy for the person they picked would be to take my grandparents (who can barely use the MS Works that came pre-installed on a computer) and ask them to do a review of OpenOffice vs. MS Office 2007. Without the basic minimum skill threshold, the whole thing is tainted anyway.
I think one thing that is really overlooked/not mentioned here is what about employees of ISP's? As a former director of IT at 3 different ISP's in the 90's, there is/was a huge grey area for what is ethical and what is not regarding personal information being stored/used in on an ISP's servers.
Although it is largely a moot point today, at my ISP's we had shell servers and FTP servers with personal storage. Our AUP made it painfully evident that those servers belonged to us, and that the user had no privacy or expectation of privacy on those systems. Can't tell you how many times I had to deal with an idiot chmod'ing his FTP home directory to 777 and then putting pictures of his wife on it. I even had an employee that we fired because he was sucking down questionable pornography and putting on his 777'ed *WORK* account to download from home. (Plus he was sexually harassing co-workers and co-workers wives...).
We also had the issues of usenet porn to deal with. I had a script that delivered me statistics on the NNTP server, and every single week at least one (if not more) of the top 10 highest volume groups on our servers were child-porn groups. We removed them as fast as we found them, and even had at least 2 subpeona's from the FBI related to child-porn and our shell servers.
Then there were the bounced emails. I'm amazed today how many users we had who had no issues at all sending naked pictures of themselves or their wives to anyone on the Internet. But what really shocked me were how many didn't bother to type in the correct email address and they ended up in our bounced spool. At the time, we had a policy of assisting end users in retrieving emails sent to them incorrectly, which meant I'd end up going through 1300 hundred emails a day sometimes trying to find one for someone that was really important.
We even had an end-user who was subscribed to a porn email list, who would regularly call my help desk when his mail spool got too big (downloading 30mb on a 9600 baud modem...uh huh, that will work, right!) and ask them to go through them and delete the ones he already had.
I'm unaware of any ISP that doesn't state that traffic/information flowing over the Internet, especially their portion of it, is completely private. And at any given ISP, there has to be tens if not hundreds of workers with the ability/access to packets, files, and other ephemra on their network. Its a very fine line between what the ISP owns and what the end-user owns. Just ask the guy who called up asking us to delete a newsgroup (yes, in its entirety, from the internet) after a camera was stolen from his house with pictures of his wife on it and posted to Usenet.
Add to that 802.11, and it gets uglier and uglier.
A code of ethics would be invaluable for 2 reasons: 1) it would give IT professionals the ability to self-police in a sane and rational manner, and 2) it would give the IT community itself a voice in the creation and wording of such policies. I shudder at the thought of a bunch of PHB's and lawyers trying to put together ethics for the IT profession. Leaving the choices presented in these ethical questions/dilemma's to individuals is a bad idea, because everyone has a different personal moral canvas. I just don't see how a 21 year old help desk geek would have the maturity and capability to make the right decisions on what needs to be done. And I'll bet these decisons get faced every day.
You know, I read the thing twice. I didn't see any agony. I didn't see any ecstasy.
What I saw were a few fairly vague suggestions and one piece of advice (know your market) repeated over and over. There wasn't any real research. There weren't any statistics. I'm sure my second reading was a waste of time and electrons, and the more I think about it, the first one was too.
As someone else mentioned, there are still end-user problems regarding linux in the mass market. A user wants something that works. Especially John Q. Public, who doesn't give a darn what its running underneath. What he wants is the stuff he clicks on (in the OS or in the Web Browser or Application) to work. That means when you go to YouTube, the movie plays and the sound works. When he wastes time on a web games site, the games play. When he needs some software for some idiotic reason, its easily available, easy to install, and after he installs it he clicks on the icon and it works.
I've run Linux as an only OS in the past. 10 years ago, when I started doing that, there were many challenges to running it day to day, from corporate compatibility to application bugs. The reality for me is that many of those issues simply haven't been resolved yet.
When I think of the masses and Linux, I think about my family. I have a range of people there who span from retirees to teenagers. I don't think a single one is capable, or, perhaps more importantly, has any desire to switch. I don't think I could even convince my 20 something step daughter, who grew up with computers, to switch, even though she needs a cheap computer and Linux would let her get a fairly decent machine for very little.
In some ways, Linux strikes me as being 95% of the way there. The problem is, that last 5% may well be the most difficult part. The remaining issues are ones that will prevent mass adoption. For instance, I see the issue of video. The end user couldn't care less about Codecs. What they care about is the fact that when someone sends them a video file (most likely created in Windows), can they click on it and it plays with sound? As long as there are Window's proprietary video adn audio formats, that may be enough to keep a good portion of the userbase on Windows.
Not only that, but I can't imagine what support issues must be like. Even with good customer support, if you try to sell to anyone other than a geek or semi-geek, the phone support has to be pretty deep. Like my video playing example above, what happens when someone emails some inane audio clip and it won't play? What if Uncle Leonard needs to install drivers for a USB device?
Even for me, the thought of it to the masses is overwhelming. That final 5% is just a bear of a mountain to climb, and there isn't any easy way to get over it.
I also think the author of the article misses something in his targeting of customers. Remember, you've locked out so many segments of the customer base, who is left? Gamers are out, especially casual ones. Gramma and Grandpa are out, they won't switch to save their lives. Anyone who has some favorite Windows application is probably out, even if Wine supports it. Do you really think the average user is going to want to know how to get Wine running (even with top notch support?), let alone figure out how to upgrade it each time a new version comes out?
I'm sorry, I just don't see how this article addressed anything that anyone who has even thought about setting up a business shouldn't have thought about 2 minutes after they get the idea.
I have kids spanning 3 to 24 years old. As parents, my wife and I are very involved with our kids. We have dinner together the majority of the time. We do family events every week. We talk to our kids, and we limit TV and all the stuff you'd expect.
However, that doesn't mean that I can watch my kids 24/7/365. I use the V-Chip/content filter on my PVR on a regular basis. For instance, my 11 year old has sleepovers with friends, on a fairly regular basis. I cannot stay up all night in the same room with them and make sure they don't flip from Nickelodeon to HBO or even TNT. As such, I simply flip on the V-Chip and I can get some sleep. Is this perfect? Nope. But at the end of the day, it is far better than nothing.
As a person who has used technology for the overwhelming majority of my life, I consider this a tool, much as I use a firewall or AV software on my computers. Do those tools filter everything? Are they perfect? Heck no. But they serve a purpose.
And as far as content filtering: my kids only have access to the internet on a computer that is in our living room and that faces the entire room. They rarely have access to it when an adult isn't around. But do me a favor. Type in "girl scout" or "girl scouts" in Google. See what happens by the 2nd or 3rd page. I have a content filter not because I'm a bad parent, or because I don't know what my kids are doing, but because the reality is that its far too easy for them to accidentally click on an innocent link that leads to things they aren't ready for me to explain to them yet. My wife has covered sex and puberty with my eleven year old. I still don't consider her ready for me to explain huge breasted girls dressed in slutty girl scout uniforms having *ANY* kind of sex right now.
I don't object to anyone helping create tools to assist me. The reality is that I can't protect them from everything, even if I do everything right. Those tools assist me, just like my firewall and AV software keep my personal machine safe, even though I haven't had a virus since 1989.
Bill
Not just DRM...all protection is useless...
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The DRM Scorecard
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As someone who might have...had friends...who spent time in the 80's attempting to circumvent copy protection on Apple II software, I've always wondered why companies have even bothered in the first place. Back in the 80's there were many companies utilizing all kinds of crazy software techniques to keep the pirates from copying software. As far as I know, there wasn't any software on the Apple II that didn't get cracked. Heck, I even see some of the stuff my friends cracked still imaged on the internet in places.
Now its over 20 years later, and companies are still trying to find a way to stop copying. And to top it off, they're still spending big bucks to stop copying media, where any device with an output is a potential way to digitize the media. As we've seen, there are people out there who will take the time and effort to circumvent and digitize *ANYTHING*. Have you seen some of the crap on Usenet lately? I can't believe someone bought it, let alone took the hours to digitize and upload some of that crap.
I noticed some of this arguments on this thread that DRM wasn't meant to stop everyone, just the common guy. However, that argument falls far short when we have a generation of kids who are raised on computers and have no money. As a teen, I spent a lot of time copying albums and CD's and tapes onto tape. As an adult, I now realize that, if I had had the money, most of it I would have bought. These days, I don't bother to steal things because I don't have time to sift through Usenet or BitTorrent for crap, and because I can afford them. I also buy the music I like, the games I want to play, the books I like. I do this for a simple reason: I want to hear the artisans (of any type) make more music. Like the system or not, I buy CD's and books and software because without that money, the people making those things can't do it without the support of my money. I'm voting with my dollars, so to speak.
I'm also surpised that no one has made a fuss about sneakernets. I've heard of far too many people who have burned CD's for their friends and family. Seems to me, this was extremely common at one point, although probably less so in the IPod generation of today.
I'll bet money that any protection scheme will fail. Never underestimate collective human ingenuity, even as we bash the collective stupidity that has brought us infinite copyright and lawsuits over downloaded music against people without computers.
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You know, never fails to amaze me how people are not looking at the larger picture of "services" offered by any provider, but especially by the cable companies. FTR, I used to work in business broadband sales for a major cable player, so I've seen the industry from just after the days where cable modems got installed until the dot-com boom from the inside.
The cable companies, as we speak, are caught in a precarious situation. Several factors came into play at the same time, which has limited their ability to make huge improvements, but, if they're lucky, they might come out on top.
So history: when cable modems first arrived on the scene, in the early-to-mid 90's, the technology was largely unproven and had tremendous issues, both technically and from a service delivery perspective. Much like the early days of DSL, the cable companies were essentially forced to re-wire infrastructure that had been in place for over a decade, sometimes up to 2 decades. Because of the technical issues, many cable executives didn't see the cost-benefit ratio of rewiring tens of thousands of miles of cities to be able to provide the service.
Plus, if you know anything about cost, doing so was a multi-million dollar effort, cumulatively probably costing in the billions.
However, with the advent of the dot-com boom and other highly profitable interactive services, the cable company PHB's finally got the picture and started rewiring and running fiber for the new cable plants.
Unfortunately, this was between 95-98, just before the internet boom really got underway, and well before DSL put any pressure on them.
As such, they did a reasonable job of getting the major metropolitan areas wired for a more modern infrastructure.
However, they failed in one major respect: they didn't have a crystal ball, and most, if not all, the cable companies put in the minimum infrastructure to support digital services. They didn't, however, put in overcapacity.
Now, if you swing forward 4-7 years, its pretty obvious that the cost-differential of putting in FTTP (or at least overcapacity of fiber to the neighborhood) would have been the smart thing to do. But at the time, wth DSL being crap, and no other real competition, they missed the boat. This wasn't maliciouos. They just did what they thought would be adequate.
Now, look at cable services today. On most cable infrastructure, the highest percentage of bandwidth (out of the 1000mhz available on the plant) goes to analog TV. Those 30-50 channels take up nearly have the space, each analog channel taking 6mhz of bandwidth.
This log-gain, low-profit bandwidth hog is the biggest impediment to modern services as they reside on the existing cable facilities.
And now there's another problem in the works: how to handle changes in Digital Broadcasting, DOCSIS 3, and PacketCable services, especially with HD programming getting more and more relevant.
While DOCSIS 3 has been out for over a year now, from the insiders I know its still a bit spotty on the internal side, and since many of the operators use Cisco (who fought DOCSIS 3 tooth and nail to get their own standard), they'd love to do it but are still unsure of quality. Not only that, but at least one smaller cable operator where I know the CIO is truly looking at how to deliver everything over PacketCable (TV, Phone, Data, etc.) rather than just make the leap to DOCSIS 3.
These aren't inconsequential issues, as the decisions made now will have some serious impact on the structure of Cable services for a long time.
And finally, when you add in the cost of maintaining hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber and copper plant, along with the huge increases in programming costs to the cable companies, along with the not-insiginificant support and CPE equipment costs of moving to Digital services, DOCSIS 3, or other advanced services, its not much wonder why the cable companies are moving a bit slowly. An error in judgement now could be fatally costly over the lon
No matter what the medium, service, or object, there has always been piracy, and always been people who will copy anything.
Counterfeiting is big business. As are knock-offs of Gucci and Chanel.
I've been using computers for nearly 30 years now, and since the day I started programming, I've seen piracy. In fact, I'm having a hard time coming up with an example of any protection scheme that hasn't failed. From early software anti-copying measures, to serial numbers, to DRM, to DVD encryption, its all failed miserably to stop the determined.
I've often wondered what the actual cost of these measures truly is to the companies that use them. If they create them internally, there's the development cost. If they license them, they end up paying per-use, I would guess. Either way, it seems to me that this is one of the ultimate excersizes in futility. I've often wondered if this was due to stubborness or simply stupidity. Either way, it ends up being a burden to the legitimate user, and hasn't, as far as I can tell, stopped the illegitimate users.
Take copy protection. When I was a 13 year old using an Apple IIe, everyone I knew was pirating software. We did it because there was no way we could afford to buy it, for the most part. While I acknowledge it was stealing, at the end of the day, it wasn't a loss, because we wouldn't have done it if we could a) afford it, or b) live without it.
So what did copy protection accomplish? It simply stopped people who bought it from making backups of legitimately purchased software. I remember once when I school I went to had a bad drive, and through stupidity ended up destroying multiple copies of AppleWorks trying to get it working on a machine. A "friend" of mine attempted to make duplicates of legitimate software so they had enough to go around for classes. Because of the copy protection, he ended up using cracked software to make copies so they could teach class for the two weeks it took to get Apple to acknowledge they owned the software and to ship it out to them.
As far as my own personal views, I can see the motivation for someone who is young and poor to make illegitimate copies of digital property. Mainly because you can't afford it. I know a few years ago, $20 made a differenc between eating or not. I sure didn't have it to spend on (software, CD's, etc.).
Now, however, I buy what I need to use. When I could afford it, I went and bought CD's to replace all the cassette copies of my favorite bands. I can afford it, and I recognize that if my favorite (artist, author, software company) doesn't sell their work, they won't make more for me to enjoy. Could I suck down my favorite albums off a Torrent? Sure. But I don't have a single desire to do so. I want that struggling band to sell enough CD's that they'll make the next one.
So, does any sort of copy protection benfit anyone at all? Maybe the guys who write/license it.
But everyone else loses, in the end.
Hopefully the negative feedback inherent in this system will rip it apart. One can only hope.
Bill
Why would you eat the keys?
Of course, if they could somehow get some good drugs into them, that might be an incentive. Maybe just form an alliance with "No-Doz"...you could pop off that extra "Windows" key for late night coding...
BIll
I agree with you to a certain extent, but I think it comes back to economies of scale. When you factor in maintenance costs for ocean-based vessels, on top of the fact that many land-based data centers are now being built in areas with many cost advantages (being built near large quantities of dark fiber, being built on cheap land, built near energy sources or near areas where renewable energy sources are/will be available, being built to minimize maintenance costs on the infrastructure itself, etc.) I'm not sure that a floating data center is going to be cost-effective.
Not only that, but the vulnerabilities on a floating data center are going to be, at a minimum, the exact same if not higher. The data connections are going to be exposed, no matter what you do. At least in a land-based data center the fiber is buried, and less obvious. Not only that, but physical security can be made (and is made) relatively difficult in a land based data center, at least directly surrounding it. A floating entity would have a far higher risk of approach due to the traffic that occurs on the water near a port.
As far as exposure to attack on fiber, well, I can tell you the exact man-hole in the city where I live that you can toss an IED and take down virtually every carrier in the market. Those don't exist simply at data centers, but everywhere, due to decisions decades ago that have caused choke points in fiber distibution.
I'd also question the ready availability of dark fiber at a port from multiple carriers. While I don't know as I've never looked at it, it seems to me that ports, being quasi-government facilities, probably weren't wired with fiber with multiple carriers, let alone all the big carriers, as most major data centers are. You might have 2 or 3, but I'd guess that's under contract and the number of directly available carriers is still low. This is a disadvantage for a vendor-neutral data-center that would likely want/need connectivity to all the big boys to entice customers. This might not be true if the port is a launch point for inter-continental fiber, but certainly that's not the case at most ports.
Bill
It just seems that this type of setup will be vulnerable to all sorts of environmental and physical damage that a land-based data center wouldn't be. For instance, the physical connection to fiber would be very vulnerable to vandalism, environmental damage, and even just plain human stupidity. Depending on the port, environmentals could be quite tricky as well.
Not only that, but how would you get true redundancy? Sure, power could be done, but when it comes to multiple paths for data connections, ports might not lend for the best setup.
I can see in cities where real estate is overwhelmingly valuable that there might be some economies of scale, but it seems to me that many data centers are now being built in areas where there is tons of existing dark fiber, and land is relatively cheap. Not sure if this truly makes economic sense when it doesn't make a damn bit of difference where your server/data/systems are located. A millesecond or two in lag is all but irrelevant in the larger scheme of things.
Bill
Then I thought, "Wii!".
I'd imagine that putting this on the Wii has some damned interesting possibilities for motion sensing and cooking, including multi-player head to head competition.
Bill
But the problem isn't how reliable they are. The problem arises from the need to change their products and grow. Since HP will stop selling the Alpha in the future, they have a decision to make. Not only that, but when you are talking about hundreds of servers (that's after they decommissioned 300+ last year) support costs are a huge financial drain. And development costs are increasing as VMS coding skills get more and more rare and specialized. So, overall, they don't have much of a choice but to look for ways to mitigate those issues and look for better ways to run *EVERYTHING*, not just the product sets running on Alpha infrastructure.
Bill
It's not always that they are managing 100 systems badly. In some cases, there were very real reasons for multiple system types, and multiple platforms. Companies often develop products separately, especially if those products were developed a decade or more ago. Alpha, for instance, was a great platform for this company, and they were making heavy investment in them, up until they received a whole crapload of them in 2006, only to have HP tell them "Sorry, EOL" a few months later.
This company also has discrete systems running on Sparc/Solaris, Windows, and Linux. The reason behind this was the fact that some of these products were developed 10-20 years ago, when such separate development made sense and they picked best of breed systems for that time, or because they have acquired various companies over the last decade that brought products in-house which were on different platforms.
That worked great, until you get to the point where you have 3-4 divisions each supporting different platforms in the same datacenter, each one continually upgrading and expanding. Because of the diversity, they were unable to share *ANY* resource (including networking infrastructure, for reasons which I won't get into, but this includes world-wide data center connectivity, and is partly political, partly contractual, and partly just doing things in the same way to not rock the boat, so to speak).
A few years ago they made the decision to get away from disk storage and move to SANs. It was a good move for them. This was the first step to virtualization, and a major one.
But it has become increasingly unwieldy to continue in this model. Virtualization makes a lot of sense for them, and will scale back all sorts of costs and support contracts, some of it to the tune of $10m per year in old hardware/OS support.
For them, going to virtualization makes sense. It will generate millions of dollars per year in saving, and untangle many complex problems, such as development issues. Its also something they are not approaching stupidly, as it is a 5-10 year project for them. They're not rushing it.
Bill
My company works with several shops that are working on large-scale virtualization and common platform projects. I would say the biggest single issue is simply politics, because much of the initial work is affecting older platforms that are the biggest win technically and financially to replace. For instance, one shop has a significant investment in Alpha systems, and still has production servers that are 15+ years old running a huge chunk of their revenue producing systems. The folks working directly on the Alpha servers have considerable clout, since they've been the golden children for many, many years. Their bosses know how to play politics, and, considering that Alpha/VMS experience is one of those IT areas where there is little new blood from younger IT staff members, they are quite adept at finding reasons why it won't work to serve their own ends.
Not only that, but virtualization will result in lost jobs at some point. Many IT staffers are afraid, whether rightly or wrongly, of losing their jobs. In a sense, they are outsourcing a good chunk of their day-to-day duties. I remember when this particular company went to SAN's over the last half-decade, and you would have thought, from the way the Alpha guys were fighting it, that the world was ending. They created road-block after road-block about how they wouldn't be able to keep the systems running, how it wouldn't work in "their" environment, etc, etc.
And, because of the compartmentalization that often occurs in large enterprise, many of these guys have very little idea about anything outside their own box. I know guys who have architected corporate platform migrations who are so narrow in their focus that they have *NO* experience outside their box, be it a particular OS, a server type, a network type, whatever. When the box becomes a cloud of equipment, they are lost and often have little or no ability to work with the other layers involved. Learning new troubleshooting skills in these environments is a painstaking process, and not one that many people are comfortable with.
In the end, these various factors are creating far larger artificial roadblocks for implementing virtualization than any technical challenges. To top it off, much of this is being driven by financials. The CFO and CTO are desparately trying to find ways to cut costs. By the time this message percolates down to the workers, they feel threatened rather than empowered, and have little incentive (and generally no training, either) to be complicit in what they feel is a threat.
Bill
The writers at Eurogamer were found to have neither Journalism or Business degrees, and were thereby incapable of understanding business, marketing, or how to ask a really good question of the Nintendo PR flacks on why they might do this...
More at 11:57:32.1pm...
Bill
Seriously.
Many film critics are given films (even brand new ones) on DVD, rather than having to watch multiple films at a theater, whch is obviously more time consuming. Considering how out of touch some film critics seem to be sometimes, especially when it comes to comedies, it seems to follow that a critic watching a movie alone in his house would have a very different experience than going and seeing it in a crowded theater.
Now film critics are starting to make more sense...
Bill
Okay, look at the reality of what this guy is asking for:
Sales time. Believe it or not, good sales people cost a lot of money. You have the choice of hiring a bad salesperson, who doesn't know what he's talking about or doing, or a good one. So a salesperson will run you, even in a crappy small company, $60k per year (plus 20% for bennies and taxes). Now, IBM needs someone who is, shall we say, better than good. They have lots of products, and they have to be able to deal with everyone from an analyst to a CIO. Not only that, but they have team behind them, usually comprised of some inside people and a sales engineer or two, to answer questions.
So, realistically, you have about $500,000 in salaries, commissions, and benefits in a small sales team.
Let's divide that by $25k. 25/500 = 20. That means that the sales guy, just to cover his costs, has to sell 20 deals a year to small businesses to make a living. Oh, wait. That's not the case. He needs to make a decent profit, as well. Lets put it at 25% or so, conservatively. So we're up to $625,000, or 25 deals a year.
Oh, wait. That doesn't include the salaries of the engineer who does the work. Tack on an extra $150k or so for a top notch "Jedi Master". And that would be cheap. So were' up to $650k plus 25% margin, or $812,500. Or about 32.5 deals per year.
Now, we all know that even a lightsabre wielding Jedi Master sales guy won't close every deal. So lets say, which is a huge gimme, that he can close 50% of the deals he is given. So he must now, conservatively, talk to 65 customers a year, bare minimum, to earn back his money and make a little profit.
Oh, shit, we forgot expenses. You know, office space, cell phones, internet, computers, support, travel, lunches, dinners, visits to strip clubs.
Tack on another $50k per year for that. Or 2 more deals closed (we're up to 34.5, if you were paying attention) or 69 customers talked to if he was lucky.
That means we're averaging more than a deal closed per week, and, let me tell you, it doesn't happen that way.
And we haven't even scratched the surface of expenses, including things like marketing, customer acquisition costs, back end support costs.
The reason that IBM doesn't do this isn't because they don't want to. Its because they *CAN NOT*. This is not their business. They have a defined business plan. I can guarantee you that nowhere in that plan do they deal directly with SMB's for $25k deals.
Instead, they have a very established partner network to deal with this. And some of those partners are quite good, quite knowledgeable, and employ guys with as much if not more experience than some of those IBM engineers. Sure, there are bozos. But if you do due dilegence in selecting a partner, you should be able to eliminate those quickly and quietly, especially if you have big business experience.
Note: all of the big boys have a partner network. IBM, HP, EMC, Cisco. Plus all the others. Every single one. Some of them have gone to the extent of putting their top partners into their traditional stronghold space of Fortune 1000. Cisco is notable for having put partners into their Named Accounts many years ago.
As full disclosure, I work for a company that has, at one time or the other, partnered with every one of those guys. Some of those partnerships were great. Some were a disaster. In every single one, we had highly qualified engineers with decades of experience in multi-discipline IT skills supporting our customers. In fact, one of those partners (won't name them but their one of the biggest of the big) used to slip us business on the side when the customer was unwilling to pay their rates (~$350/hour, travel exclusive) because they knew we could do the same job at less than half the cost.
The point of being a small IT specialty business is to be able to provide a service to a completely different kind of customer. My company has ~25 full time employees in house. We have 450 or so on-sit
Amazon is putting them on the website as they get shipments, as are Best Buy and, I've heard, others. I just had a tab open in my browser and refreshed every little bit. One minute it was $425-$600 on Amazon, the next minute it was $249.xx, no sales tax, no shipping. From what I could tell, the units lasted about 30 minutes, and the word hit the Internet on forums and message boards damn fast.
Of course, it was over $500 on Amazon Resellers this morning.
Same for DDR and Guitar Hero, which are apparently incredibly rare games for no apparent reason that I can see. One minute DDR was $168, the next it was $69.99. What's amusing is seeing how fast the Amazon resellers react and adjust their prices.
Bill
First off, I'm a little puzzled by the statement that they would make it cheaper for cable competitors (satellite and telcos), to purchase programming. So, Satellite pays $1.00, telco's pay $.50, and a cable company pays $2.00, just to throw out numbers? I'm not entirely clear I understand the rationale of the government price fixing on behalf of large industry.
Secondly, this is a little disturbing because of some of the other subisidies in these industries, and the fact that the FCC really appears to want to treat them equally, when, in fact, they are all on very different playing fields and games.
Telco's get massive subisidies and monies to maintain "universal access" and also provide government services, such as 911. As such, it puts them ahead of the game when it comes to maintaining the physical infrastructure.
The satellite providers have a much lower cost of maintenance (short of a bird frying), because they do not have a physical plant to maintain. The local cable company had over 7,000 miles of plant in my metro area alone.
And as far as programming goes, the truth is that 98% of the cost of programming to cable companies is charged by a few providers. Disney will force several channels down the throat of a cable company by telling them they have to carry those channels if they want ESPN. And then they'll ask for an extra $.05 or $.10 per subcriber per month just to carry ESPN. When you see programming of those channels you don't watch, the reason is that generally those are incredibly cheap to carry, and don't add much cost.
So the amount a consumer ends up paying, as a percentage, for all those channels they don't care about, is pretty much irrelevant in the larger scheme of things compared to the organized system of bribery that a few media providers are using, such as Disney, HBO, TW, and GE, and the like.
Which brings us back to this attempt by the FCC. Seems to me that treating all TV signal providers, regardless of the radically different issues each faces in providing a signal is shortsighted and counterproductive. As someone else commented, this smacks of letting the Telco's provide more service more cheaply at the expense of other types of providers is just another way of abusing the system.
For full disclosure, I worked for my local Cable company for several years.
Bill
I wonder if this is true or if we are just at a place where many casual users don't need to upgrade as often? Many of the advances of the last few years have been pretty incremental, or don't affect your average end user too much. If they can browse the web, send email, and run a few apps like Word Processing and Spreadsheets, that's all they need.
The advances of the last few years have gotten to the point where many people are satisfied and don't need to buy a new one. The only excpetion to this is the Gamer market, and I can see why gadget-crazy Japan might prefer Sony PS3 and Wii's to pc gaming.
I wonder if the people looking purely at sales are making a pretty basic error here, though.
The other problem with this comparison is that this is only looking at contractor pay, not full-time employee salaries. As full disclosure, I work for a firm that provides IT Staffing as one of its services. Yes, certain in-demand skill sets are getting big bucks. Where I work locally, there have been so many positions posted for various C programmers that we simply can't find anymore, and the ones who will move for a short term or mid-term project are asking and, by and large, getting ridiculous salaries.
But when we do full-time placements, I'm not seeing a big increase. Not only that, but the majority of positions we filled this year were full-time placements.
So I think saying they are at an all-time high needs to be qualified: for certain contractors, which are the jobs where companies like Yoh are most likely to be placing candidates.
Bill
When APC sold them the power, we were contracted to go in there and install a lot of the infrastructure. One of my co-workers actually did a lot of the work. It's a pretty cool place, according to him, and apparently the guy got it dirt-cheap compared to having to actually build the physical infrastructure himself. One of the NOC's we work at in St. Louis cost something like $80m, and this was a small fraction of that, with definite advantages over a traditional above ground data center.
It's an impressive place. And while having EMP shielding might be a bit stupid (do you need your servers up *AFTER* everyone is dealing with a nuke strike, truly?) having things like seismic shocks, already laid multiple fiber paths directly connected to major providers, redundant path power and water, that sort of thing if pretty damn hard to get when you build it yourself. This guy waltzed in with all that ready to go.
Bill
You're starting a business. Unless that business is selling POS systems, why would you delay the start up of your business by waiting for a POS system to get coded? Even based on some of the Open Source ones currently available, you're likely to spend far more than $2k-5k on hardware, coding, modifications, and figuring out how to use the thing. Not only that, but what happens if it fails? Or if a bug costs you money somehow?
Seems to me that if you are starting a business, you should figure out the best model for that business, instead of diluting your time and effort (which, by all accounts, will likely occupy 200% of your time just starting your business) by reaching for something which doesn't exist.
Bill
Seems to me, having been an IT director in the past, that the "bias" we see in IT has more to do with deeper cultural issues than anything specific to the IT industry, and could be applied to many hands-on fields, and even to your average corporation and management selection.
Our built-in selection criteria for "better" IT employees, which is cultural and psychological, is related to several factors. Dedication being one of the major ones that I used to look for. Because IT employees generally are exposed to so many concepts, ideas, and a breadth of knowledge that can be staggering, men, who are more likely (from a cultural and possibly genetic standpoint) to be willing to dedicate higher percentages of their lives to immersion in the culture end up being better employees. This isn't specific to the IT industry.
It also strikes me that being "adventurous" is definitely a plus in IT. The willingness to figure things out, to go way beyond the required knowledge, is something that lends itself to the male-stereotype of being adventurous and exploring. My old *nix admin used to "explore", by which I mean he build image after image, broke things, changed things, generally just messed with crap to see how it worked. This is a trait more in line with male psychology than female.
As someone who's responsibilities included help desk support, I was always looking for good female employees. Abusive users were far less likely to get beligerent with a woman than a man, and the problem I always faced was finding women with the skills, attitude and abilities to be a part of our group. We were a meritocracy. I had 11 people running an ISP, and there was no room for people who couldn't produce, who couldn't keep up, or needed to be directed. I never hired for experience (one of my best finds was a manager at a gas station who didn't own a computer the day he started; a month later he had build his own linux system (hardware and OS) from the ground up. I also had a woman who eventually became my help desk manager, as she was willing to learn, taught herself HTML, etc. She was good with customers and didn't have to be hand-held or babied.
While I understand what TBL was saying about publication issues, I think that the underlying factors in IT gender-bias are as much cultural and applicable to many industries, rather than just IT.
Bill
I think that the final assessment, that they picked the wrong person to do this because of a lack of familiarity with games, is dead on.
Why can't someone get a better reviewer to do this? Cory Doctorow? Orson Scott Card? Bruce Sterling? Dan Simmons?
I'm a bit confused as to why, if Dirda's 16 year old son finished it, why didn't he ask for help? Seems to me this implies he really wasn't that into the experiment himself. Surely there's directions someplace on the basics? RTFM?
I think the real challenge is to get some serious "artists", be they of books, music, movies, or whatever, to play the games and give their impressions.
A better analogy for the person they picked would be to take my grandparents (who can barely use the MS Works that came pre-installed on a computer) and ask them to do a review of OpenOffice vs. MS Office 2007. Without the basic minimum skill threshold, the whole thing is tainted anyway.
Bill
I think one thing that is really overlooked/not mentioned here is what about employees of ISP's? As a former director of IT at 3 different ISP's in the 90's, there is/was a huge grey area for what is ethical and what is not regarding personal information being stored/used in on an ISP's servers.
Although it is largely a moot point today, at my ISP's we had shell servers and FTP servers with personal storage. Our AUP made it painfully evident that those servers belonged to us, and that the user had no privacy or expectation of privacy on those systems. Can't tell you how many times I had to deal with an idiot chmod'ing his FTP home directory to 777 and then putting pictures of his wife on it. I even had an employee that we fired because he was sucking down questionable pornography and putting on his 777'ed *WORK* account to download from home. (Plus he was sexually harassing co-workers and co-workers wives...).
We also had the issues of usenet porn to deal with. I had a script that delivered me statistics on the NNTP server, and every single week at least one (if not more) of the top 10 highest volume groups on our servers were child-porn groups. We removed them as fast as we found them, and even had at least 2 subpeona's from the FBI related to child-porn and our shell servers.
Then there were the bounced emails. I'm amazed today how many users we had who had no issues at all sending naked pictures of themselves or their wives to anyone on the Internet. But what really shocked me were how many didn't bother to type in the correct email address and they ended up in our bounced spool. At the time, we had a policy of assisting end users in retrieving emails sent to them incorrectly, which meant I'd end up going through 1300 hundred emails a day sometimes trying to find one for someone that was really important.
We even had an end-user who was subscribed to a porn email list, who would regularly call my help desk when his mail spool got too big (downloading 30mb on a 9600 baud modem...uh huh, that will work, right!) and ask them to go through them and delete the ones he already had.
I'm unaware of any ISP that doesn't state that traffic/information flowing over the Internet, especially their portion of it, is completely private. And at any given ISP, there has to be tens if not hundreds of workers with the ability/access to packets, files, and other ephemra on their network. Its a very fine line between what the ISP owns and what the end-user owns. Just ask the guy who called up asking us to delete a newsgroup (yes, in its entirety, from the internet) after a camera was stolen from his house with pictures of his wife on it and posted to Usenet.
Add to that 802.11, and it gets uglier and uglier.
A code of ethics would be invaluable for 2 reasons: 1) it would give IT professionals the ability to self-police in a sane and rational manner, and 2) it would give the IT community itself a voice in the creation and wording of such policies. I shudder at the thought of a bunch of PHB's and lawyers trying to put together ethics for the IT profession. Leaving the choices presented in these ethical questions/dilemma's to individuals is a bad idea, because everyone has a different personal moral canvas. I just don't see how a 21 year old help desk geek would have the maturity and capability to make the right decisions on what needs to be done. And I'll bet these decisons get faced every day.
Bill
You know, I read the thing twice. I didn't see any agony. I didn't see any ecstasy.
What I saw were a few fairly vague suggestions and one piece of advice (know your market) repeated over and over. There wasn't any real research. There weren't any statistics. I'm sure my second reading was a waste of time and electrons, and the more I think about it, the first one was too.
As someone else mentioned, there are still end-user problems regarding linux in the mass market. A user wants something that works. Especially John Q. Public, who doesn't give a darn what its running underneath. What he wants is the stuff he clicks on (in the OS or in the Web Browser or Application) to work. That means when you go to YouTube, the movie plays and the sound works. When he wastes time on a web games site, the games play. When he needs some software for some idiotic reason, its easily available, easy to install, and after he installs it he clicks on the icon and it works.
I've run Linux as an only OS in the past. 10 years ago, when I started doing that, there were many challenges to running it day to day, from corporate compatibility to application bugs. The reality for me is that many of those issues simply haven't been resolved yet.
When I think of the masses and Linux, I think about my family. I have a range of people there who span from retirees to teenagers. I don't think a single one is capable, or, perhaps more importantly, has any desire to switch. I don't think I could even convince my 20 something step daughter, who grew up with computers, to switch, even though she needs a cheap computer and Linux would let her get a fairly decent machine for very little.
In some ways, Linux strikes me as being 95% of the way there. The problem is, that last 5% may well be the most difficult part. The remaining issues are ones that will prevent mass adoption. For instance, I see the issue of video. The end user couldn't care less about Codecs. What they care about is the fact that when someone sends them a video file (most likely created in Windows), can they click on it and it plays with sound? As long as there are Window's proprietary video adn audio formats, that may be enough to keep a good portion of the userbase on Windows.
Not only that, but I can't imagine what support issues must be like. Even with good customer support, if you try to sell to anyone other than a geek or semi-geek, the phone support has to be pretty deep. Like my video playing example above, what happens when someone emails some inane audio clip and it won't play? What if Uncle Leonard needs to install drivers for a USB device?
Even for me, the thought of it to the masses is overwhelming. That final 5% is just a bear of a mountain to climb, and there isn't any easy way to get over it.
I also think the author of the article misses something in his targeting of customers. Remember, you've locked out so many segments of the customer base, who is left? Gamers are out, especially casual ones. Gramma and Grandpa are out, they won't switch to save their lives. Anyone who has some favorite Windows application is probably out, even if Wine supports it. Do you really think the average user is going to want to know how to get Wine running (even with top notch support?), let alone figure out how to upgrade it each time a new version comes out?
I'm sorry, I just don't see how this article addressed anything that anyone who has even thought about setting up a business shouldn't have thought about 2 minutes after they get the idea.
Bill
I have kids spanning 3 to 24 years old. As parents, my wife and I are very involved with our kids. We have dinner together the majority of the time. We do family events every week. We talk to our kids, and we limit TV and all the stuff you'd expect.
However, that doesn't mean that I can watch my kids 24/7/365. I use the V-Chip/content filter on my PVR on a regular basis. For instance, my 11 year old has sleepovers with friends, on a fairly regular basis. I cannot stay up all night in the same room with them and make sure they don't flip from Nickelodeon to HBO or even TNT. As such, I simply flip on the V-Chip and I can get some sleep. Is this perfect? Nope. But at the end of the day, it is far better than nothing.
As a person who has used technology for the overwhelming majority of my life, I consider this a tool, much as I use a firewall or AV software on my computers. Do those tools filter everything? Are they perfect? Heck no. But they serve a purpose.
And as far as content filtering: my kids only have access to the internet on a computer that is in our living room and that faces the entire room. They rarely have access to it when an adult isn't around. But do me a favor. Type in "girl scout" or "girl scouts" in Google. See what happens by the 2nd or 3rd page. I have a content filter not because I'm a bad parent, or because I don't know what my kids are doing, but because the reality is that its far too easy for them to accidentally click on an innocent link that leads to things they aren't ready for me to explain to them yet. My wife has covered sex and puberty with my eleven year old. I still don't consider her ready for me to explain huge breasted girls dressed in slutty girl scout uniforms having *ANY* kind of sex right now.
I don't object to anyone helping create tools to assist me. The reality is that I can't protect them from everything, even if I do everything right. Those tools assist me, just like my firewall and AV software keep my personal machine safe, even though I haven't had a virus since 1989.
Bill
As someone who might have...had friends...who spent time in the 80's attempting to circumvent copy protection on Apple II software, I've always wondered why companies have even bothered in the first place. Back in the 80's there were many companies utilizing all kinds of crazy software techniques to keep the pirates from copying software. As far as I know, there wasn't any software on the Apple II that didn't get cracked. Heck, I even see some of the stuff my friends cracked still imaged on the internet in places.
Now its over 20 years later, and companies are still trying to find a way to stop copying. And to top it off, they're still spending big bucks to stop copying media, where any device with an output is a potential way to digitize the media. As we've seen, there are people out there who will take the time and effort to circumvent and digitize *ANYTHING*. Have you seen some of the crap on Usenet lately? I can't believe someone bought it, let alone took the hours to digitize and upload some of that crap.
I noticed some of this arguments on this thread that DRM wasn't meant to stop everyone, just the common guy. However, that argument falls far short when we have a generation of kids who are raised on computers and have no money. As a teen, I spent a lot of time copying albums and CD's and tapes onto tape. As an adult, I now realize that, if I had had the money, most of it I would have bought. These days, I don't bother to steal things because I don't have time to sift through Usenet or BitTorrent for crap, and because I can afford them. I also buy the music I like, the games I want to play, the books I like. I do this for a simple reason: I want to hear the artisans (of any type) make more music. Like the system or not, I buy CD's and books and software because without that money, the people making those things can't do it without the support of my money. I'm voting with my dollars, so to speak.
I'm also surpised that no one has made a fuss about sneakernets. I've heard of far too many people who have burned CD's for their friends and family. Seems to me, this was extremely common at one point, although probably less so in the IPod generation of today.
I'll bet money that any protection scheme will fail. Never underestimate collective human ingenuity, even as we bash the collective stupidity that has brought us infinite copyright and lawsuits over downloaded music against people without computers.
Bill
This month's wired features several articles about Hyperlocality and geospatial interfacing between the web and the world:
_ maps
c al
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/ff
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15-07/lo
Bill