How many other companies are expected to maintain 10+ year old software, even after TWO new releases (Vista, Win7) are available?
Off the top of my head:
Every aerospace company that makes software
Every military contractor that makes software
Most banking software
Lots of software that runs on a mainframe (AS/400, etc)
Point of sale systems
Healthcare equipment
CNC machining equipment
Accounting systems
Just to name a few. There is software out there which demands support periods measured in decades. LOTS of companies are expected to maintain support for old software.
Building in a little safety net may not be the best for your business, but it's the best for me.
Actually it isn't best for either the company or for you. If you really are valuable, it won't be because you've hoarded information. It will be because you are contributing something truly useful and valuable to the company. If you aren't doing something valuable, then you are a liability and should take whatever skills you have elsewhere. I would fire you in a heartbeat if you were hoarding information or sandbagging on your performance.
There is a solution for your insecurity. If you don't want to be replaced, start your own company. Prove that you can take the risks and have the skills to succeed. Get your own Mercedes.
If you let your staff horde information and don't actually pay for cross-training time, it's not their fault there's a single-point-of-failure, it it?
You are correct that what you describe are both failures of management with similar results. However the solutions are very different because the causes are different.
The information hoarder is putting the organization at risk through his/her own actions. They are attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the organization. That is an ethics problem and the solution is (usually) to fire the information hoarder.
If management does not invest in cross training then that is obviously not the workers fault. If anyone is fired for that mistake it should be management. More commonly the answer is simply to start cross training. Better late than never.
What's with people escalating to the max at the first hint of trouble?
Who said anything about "escalating to the max"? We're talking generalities here and each circumstance is unique. That said, generally speaking, if someone shows that they intend to ensure their job security by hoarding information and cannot be (very quickly) shown the error of their ways, I would not hesitate to fire them. That is someone who is not looking out for the interests of the organization. That is a problem of ethics, not a problem of skills or training. Keeping someone like that around puts the organization and its members at risk.
If workers weren't so damn cheap, disposable and replaceable, you'd quickly change your attitude.
Workers AREN"T cheap or disposable, though usually they are replaceable with considerable effort and expense. If you think people are easy or cheap to replace, you probably haven't ever hired anyone and certainly haven't fired anyone. A typical worker costs tens of thousands of dollars to train for all but the simplest tasks. Companies don't want to fire anyone. Firing someone means something went wrong.
I seriously doubt that MBA managers make these kinds of efforts when they take charge of companies.
That's an AWFULLY broad brush you are painting with there. A MBA is a college degree. Nothing more. People with MBAs go into finance, accounting, marketing, sales, engineering (yes, engineering), and of course management. Having a MBA is not an automatic ticket to management either. At best it might get you some interviews you might not get without the degree much like an engineering degree can open a few doors. After that it is up to the talent of the individual. Futhermore, lots of people get MBA degrees AFTER they already are in charge (see executive MBA programs) because they seek to do their job better. Management has a skillset much like engineering, and many (though not remotely all) of those skills can be learned in school.
The dominant ethos of that profession appears to be to run a company by the numbers just long enough to move on to a higher paid position.
A MBA is a college degree, not a profession. There are good managers with MBA degrees and bad managers with MBA degrees. The degree is just training. It is in no way, shape or form a profession.
Most that I have met have little to no underlying understanding of the businesses they are being paid handsomely to operate.
That would be true of many people regardless of whether they possess a degree in business administration.
This beggers belief, the IT department of a major law firm don't keep a single harddrive as backup and don't have a standby system in place for just such an eventuality as a failed harddrive..
I wouldn't be shocked by this at all. I've seen several companies keep all their financial records on a 10+ year old PC with NO backups of any kind. This sort of behavior is not uncommon. You would be shocked at how many companies (even big ones) are playing a game of Russian roulette with their IT systems.
The flip side to being "one deep" is you are more valuable. I would lean towards hoarding knowledge and being on-call. I don't WANT my employer to be comfortable functioning without me.
Business is a team sport and you are definitely NOT being a team player. I have fired people for doing exactly what you are suggesting. It doesn't make you more valuable, it makes you a liability. You are putting the organization at risk for your own gain. If you make everything dependent on you and then you get hit by the proverbial bus, your selfishness has endangered everyone who depends on you. Single point of failure is a bad thing and information hoarding makes you a single point of failure. If the people you work for tolerate that kind of behavior from you, they are extremely foolish.
You want to look for factors that can forecast a certain type of event or events before they occur. If you find the right ones you can take action to prevent undesirable outcomes.
The problem is proving that it works. I used to do simulation of manufacturing systems for my day job about a decade ago. The problem with it was that if you build a good model which avoided a cost, only rarely could you actually prove that the money spent on the model was worthwhile. After all, if you never incur a cost (or a crime), how do you know what the ROI on the analytic model was? Very difficult to prove most of the time since you can't prove a negative. An organization like the FBI or maybe the NYPD *might* be able to justify it but most police organizations simply would not find the ROI to be acceptable.
That's not to say simulation modeling is a bad idea. It does work and can be very powerful. But it is VERY easy to misapply it even if the analytic models are correct and validated. It also tends to be extremely expensive hire the analysts and buy the software so you have to be sure the problem is of sufficient scale to justify the expense. Then of course there is the problem of actually building the model. There is a truism that "all models are wrong - some models are useful". Getting a useful model is not always an easy thing to do. A bad (very wrong) model can sometimes be worse than no model at all.
I generally tell people that if they can solve a problem without a complicated computer simulation, they should. Most uses I've seen for simulation are somewhat like duck hunting with a howitzer. For all but the most complicated and intractable problems with lots of variables and high risk of a negative outcome there is a strong chance that there are much simpler and cheaper solutions available.
"MAKE Magazine is making that case that any 'maker' who builds, buys or creates electronics should learn (Mandarin) Chinese.
MAKE has no idea what they are talking about. I DO manufacture electronics (electronic data harnesses primarily) for a living and fairly little of the parts we make come from China and most of what we buy is commodity parts. (wire, terminals, connectors, etc) Lots of it comes from Japan and much of it is made here in the US. Sure there are some parts from China but it isn't as much as one might think. The manufacture of many of these products is highly automated and China has no cost significant cost advantage.
Furthermore, virtually all sales of commodity electronic components are done through distributors. You simply are NOT going to buy direct from China unless you are a purchaser for a manufacturing company. Distributors have customer service representatives, most of whom do not speak a word of any Chinese dialect. And even if for some reason you did need to contact someone in China directly, there are a HUGE number of English speakers there. I've been to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chengdu and other places in China. It is NOT hard to find someone who speaks rather good English.
source of just about everything we buy in the USA.
The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and most of that stuff we make is also sold here in the US. In 2010 the US imported $364 BILLION in goods from China or roughly 10% of what the US makes itself. A big number to be sure, but nowhere close to "just about everything".
I wonder if they train people to be this ignorant? Or could places that sell cables for this price just attract people who buy into the BS?
You were arguing with someone who has a financial interest in selling the more expensive cable. You wasted your time even discussing it with him. He may or may not have believed what he said but you certainly weren't going to convince him of anything.
I actually have some admittedly juvenile fun sometimes with these clowns when they try to sell me an overpriced cable. I run a company that manufactures data cables. We make cables like these and harnesses that are much more complicated. I like to let them spew for a bit and then ask them very sweetly "what do I do for a living?" Of course they have no idea. I ask them if they have an engineering degree. Invariably they do not. At that point I let them know that I both make these cables and have an engineering degree. I then point out that until they know something about the person to whom they are lecturing, they probably should keep their mouth shut lest they reveal they have no idea what they are talking about.
Except, as has been substantially covered here on Slashdot, the US telecom companies get sizable government subsidies and other public assistance to carry out such work.
I presume you are talking about the Universal Service Fund. That fund is drawn directly from the revenues of telecom companies to build infrastructure where there would otherwise be none because there is NO economic case for it. It is impossible to justify the expense of serving many of the rural and even semi-rural areas of the US. That is not a government subsidy, that is regulated reapportionment of telecom revenues for specific purposes. True, it is not a black and white case for urban versus rural but the basic argument of population density stands on its merit. It IS more expensive to serve a typical rural customer than an urban one. Population density is a critical factor in any discussion of service availability.
I can't speak much to ROI, except to point out that telecom companies elsewhere, some of them in significantly less densely populated countries and facing much more and fiercer competition, still manage to turn a profit.
It's not just turn a profit. The telecoms are private companies and their management has a fiduciary duty (an obligation with legal force) to maximize profits for their shareholders. They could easily serve a lot more customers (or serve existing customers better) without the constraint of trying to maximize profit. Profit maximization is a function of revenue and cost to serve customers, both of which are heavily influenced by population density.
I lived in Tokyo for three years. Moved back to the US, to California, and naively expected the cost of living to be lower.
California is the 3rd most expensive state in the US behind only Hawaii and Alaska. Try moving to somewhere that actually is inexpensive to live. I live in the midwest and it is FAR less expensive. My house would cost 4-5X as much anywhere remotely close to one of the bigger California cities. If you were looking for a place in the US to compare with Japan you could hardly have picked a worse example.
It's not about population density, it's about profit margins, and what regulators and the competitive environment will allow.
You say that as if you think profit margins and population density are somehow unrelated. While there are highly dense areas, the phone companies have to expend capital to cover the not dense areas too. If you spend the money to improve connections in the high density areas you necessarily are taking it away from the less populated areas. Furthermore there is the issue of return on investment. Presumably with enough cash they could make incredibly reliable connections but would they see a return on that investment in a competitive environment? Maybe, but anyone who claims to be certain of that is delusional. Population density is by no means the only important factor but it IS important.
Don't forget that inflation helps fixed debts (like a 30-year mortgage) become less important.
Only if your income growth outpaces inflation. If inflation is 3% per year, your income has to grow by at least 3% per year or your buying power has actually declined. If your income remains constant for 30 years, it doesn't matter what inflation is with respect to your mortgage.
My parent's actually experienced what you are talking about. Their mortgage when they first took it out really stretched them. $350/month was a lot of money in those days. Fast forward 25 years and it wasn't much of a problem at all. But the reason is because their income rose faster than inflation. Had their income remained constant, they would have realized no advantage.
The real expense isn't actually the cost of the service. The real expense is the LOST PRODUCTIVITY. That does not get compensated in form by any vendor. Frankly they could offer it for free for a year and not cover the cost of the lost productivity for a single day for a heavy office application user. 99.9% reliability means 8.76 hours of downtime per year. Someone making $20/hour would cost $175. Add in the fact that they presumably are there because their services are more valuable than their salary (otherwise why hire them?) and you can add on even more cost. Our at breakeven our company brings in revenue of about $100,000 per employee per year which for 240 working days works about to about $416/day. A seat of LibreOffice or even Microsoft Office is cheap compared with lost productivity.
Furthermore no matter how reliable a "cloud" services vendor might be, they can never be more reliable than the internet and power connections of the customer. Getting an uptime guarantee from the ISP is not cheap and you also have to have backup power to ensure computers function when the lights go out. I've had outages where I live of several hours at least 3 times in the past 12 months.
Cloud computing has its advantages but the economic advantages are still pretty unclear for most of us.
Internet forefather Vint Cerf has a simple answer for this potential problem: Increase bandwidth exponentially
Yes, it is a conceptually simple solution. But economically and logistically it is incredibly difficult. There has to be a paying customer for that bandwidth and it isn't as simple as "build it and they will come". The long term solution for most bandwidth congestion is normally more bandwidth but that doesn't mean it is easy or cheap to do it.
You can pay tax in BTC the same way you can pay tax in euros... simple conversion... Anyone who tried to claim euros are worthless because form 1040 requires dollars would be laughed at.
Sure you can convert bitcoins. However you also are exposing yourself to significant exchange rate risk and probably liquidity risk. I can exchange any currency but not every currency is equally desirable. Just because I can use bitcoins doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. Euro's aren't worthless because they require exchanging but there is a very real cost and some very real risks to exchanging currencies.
What exactly backs bitcoin besides "Some guy" in an IRC channel?
The only thing that backs ANY currency is the belief that it has value. While I think bitcoins are ridiculous, ill-concieved and overhyped concept, they have as much value as people believe they do in exactly the same way as the dollar or the euro. A currency is useful because we believe others will accept it as a proxy good that can be easily exchanged for other good. There are very good reasons to believe that the dollar or the euro will continue to be valued by others (including network effects and taxing authority among others) but at the end of the day any value they have comes down to confidence.
I do not advocate that people speculate on bitcoins.
Which matters not the tiniest bit. Speculation inevitably occurs with any and every commodity, including currencies. Speculation is inevitable.
As liquidity increases transaction costs decrease. If there was already an appropriate clearing house in place, a merchant would be able to automatically accept bitcoins and liquidate them to dollars.
There is more to transaction costs than mere liquidity. Furthermore he neatly avoids the problem of exchange rate risk.
Gold is not a currency in my mind. It is a store of value. I would not want to go to buy bread from my local store and shave off some gold from a bullion and take out a scale and wait for an acid test to be performed. Gold is backed by real world properties.
??? Talk about a strawman. I don't think anyone was claiming gold was a currency, and even if it was the ONLY thing that gives ANYTHING value is the belief by both parties in an exchange that it does have value. If people believe bitcoins or gold or US dollar have value then they do. If they do not believe they have value then they do not. Bitcoin is little different than any other secondary market commodity. I can conduct transactions using Magic The Gathering cards as currency if the other party will accept them.
Sending funds abroad is time consuming, expensive and difficult. Recently I tried sending funds to a Polish bank from the UK- the bank was closed and I waited until Monday. Requiring me to be in person at the bank, the woman was unable to enter the Polish L looking character into her terminal. I had to aquire an internet banking code to do it online. Waited 3 days, logged in and the internet banking form didn't work. In the end, I ended using a friend to aquire Bitcoins and use the Polish exchange bitomat (we never use Britcoin ourself).
Individuals almost never can exchange currencies more economically efficiently than a bank. Banks have transaction volume and can reap economies of scale. He made the transfer more efficient but made the currency exchanges much less efficient AND exposed the counter-party to significant exchange rate and liquidity risk. Whoever the counter-party was to this transaction was, they were an idiot.
Decentralized
Which can be a serious disadvantage when there are economic problems. I seriously doubt this fellow has any idea how bitcoin would escape a liquidity trap.
No bank holidays
No banks either which is most likely not actually a good thing. Despite their problems banks are invaluable for getting capital where and when it is needed. This is not to say that there aren't other mechanisms that can serve the function of a bank but bitcoin is in no way, shape or form an obvious improvement. There also is no lender of last resort if things go really wrong as they inevitably will.
International
Having traveled extensively internationally, I can assure you that there are lots of commodities including the US dollar that are accepted around the world.
No concept of borders
Borders have their advantages too. Doing away with them comes with some pretty significant problems.
Divisible
I can divide any other currency too. No improvement here.
True micro-transactions possible (new markets feasible)
Unproven. Any transaction has frictional costs and it bitcoin has not established a way it can avoid these. It might reduce some but they still exist and likely bitcoin would increase other costs.
New privacy model New does not imply better or worse. There needs to be an actual advantage.
Rerip all your CDs, this time to FLAC, since disk is now cheap as hell.
Probably not a problem for unemployed teenagers still living with their parents who have nothing but time on their hands. The rest of us will get on with having having a life and doing non-pointless things with it.
The first Michael Keaton Batman was great, and still holds up fairly well today.
I actually have been liking it less and less. It's certainly far better than the later abominations in the series. (Batman & Robin and Batman Forever are two of the worst movies ever IMO) But it's not far enough away from the campy TV version for my tastes. Plus it is too obvious that everything was done on a sound stage. Michael Keaton was fairly forgettable in the title role for me. He just didn't dominate the screen the way he did in other films. Jack Nicholson made a valiant effort for the time but didn't really capture the Joker. The Joker is supposed to be rather frightening and his version just wasn't. Tim Burton does fun scary (Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, etc) but to work Batman needs a bit of scary scary and a good dose of real world. Tim Burton's Batman feels like a Broadway play put on the big screen.
Unclear how well the Nolan versions will stand the test of time but for me they are FAR better movies than any of the previous 4 and presently among my very favorites.
And yet every data cap we've seen is pathetically low.
No argument from me on that. Experience tells us that they are not likely to be implemented appropriately. For reasons I detail below, data caps are never a friendly policy.
If their pipes are clogged, then you throttle traffic from the people that have used the most data in the last time epoch (for whatever time duration you choose - one hour, one day, one week, one month).
Your solution is a perfectly sane and reasonable means of traffic management but you haven't addressed the economic problem of opportunity cost for the carrier. You are thinking of it only from the customer perspective. Whether you throttle traffic or not, there is a cost to someone being forced to wait. If the carrier doesn't provision enough services, quality of service will be impacted negatively and customers will (when possible) seek out competing services. However provisioning more services costs very significant amounts of capital. The carrier doesn't actually want customers that use huge amounts of bandwidth. They would rather these heavy use customers go away. Most businesses have customers like this - a small percentage of your revenue but a huge percentage of your headaches. Data caps are one way to, ahem... encourage, these customers to take their business elsewhere.
Bear in mind that I'm not remotely arguing that data caps are desirable or good policy for consumers, merely that they aren't actually without reason. Honestly they are *exactly* the response I would expect from the carrier. Raising rates on a few problem customers is a LOT cheaper solution than building infrastructure. I guarantee you the telecoms have done the cost/benefit analysis and the results speak for themselves.
It has nothing to do with network neutrality.
Sure it does. There is the supply side of network neutrality (affecting content providers) but there is also the demand side affecting consumers. We're talking about the demand side here. Any time a carrier shapes traffic they are necessarily choosing to prioritize one customer's data over another customer's data. The only difference is the party affected. By your logic we since Google sends the most data, we should throttle data from Google if there is saturation of the pipe. The logic is the same but you have to consider both the sender AND the receiver of any data.
Data cap still don't make any sense. If you've hit your cap, but want to use the network at night when the pipes aren't running at full capacity, then there's something wrong going on.
Depends entirely on how high the data cap is. A properly calculated data cap will be so high that few users will ever run into it. You are only considering bandwidth that goes unused but you also have to consider bandwidth that is not available for use because the pipe is full.
IF there is a scarcity of bandwidth due to some users using a lot of bandwidth, the fact that they aren't causing that scarcity at all times is irrelevant. You quite rightly mention that bits that aren't used are gone forever. However bits that are needed at a given moment but not available are also gone forever. Someone had to wait. That is an opportunity cost which needs to be assigned somehow and the logical group of customers to pay for that opportunity cost is those who use the most data. If it is valuable to them they should be willing to pay some amount for it. Data caps are one way of doing this without discriminating between different types of traffic. Maybe not the best way but they are a rational way IF there is actual scarcity of bandwidth.
Deprioritization of traffic for people making bulk transfers is the proper way of handling things.
And how do you decide that Customer A's traffic is more important than Customer B's? You are basically arguing against network neutrality. You might be willing to wait for your data but not everyone is so considerate.
Slashdot Mirror
How many other companies are expected to maintain 10+ year old software, even after TWO new releases (Vista, Win7) are available?
Off the top of my head:
Just to name a few. There is software out there which demands support periods measured in decades. LOTS of companies are expected to maintain support for old software.
In the end I resigned and started at a different company simply because I felt I was stuck being an expert in one area they'd never let me leave.
If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. Truer words were never spoken.
Building in a little safety net may not be the best for your business, but it's the best for me.
Actually it isn't best for either the company or for you. If you really are valuable, it won't be because you've hoarded information. It will be because you are contributing something truly useful and valuable to the company. If you aren't doing something valuable, then you are a liability and should take whatever skills you have elsewhere. I would fire you in a heartbeat if you were hoarding information or sandbagging on your performance.
There is a solution for your insecurity. If you don't want to be replaced, start your own company. Prove that you can take the risks and have the skills to succeed. Get your own Mercedes.
If you let your staff horde information and don't actually pay for cross-training time, it's not their fault there's a single-point-of-failure, it it?
You are correct that what you describe are both failures of management with similar results. However the solutions are very different because the causes are different.
The information hoarder is putting the organization at risk through his/her own actions. They are attempting to enrich themselves at the expense of the organization. That is an ethics problem and the solution is (usually) to fire the information hoarder.
If management does not invest in cross training then that is obviously not the workers fault. If anyone is fired for that mistake it should be management. More commonly the answer is simply to start cross training. Better late than never.
What's with people escalating to the max at the first hint of trouble?
Who said anything about "escalating to the max"? We're talking generalities here and each circumstance is unique. That said, generally speaking, if someone shows that they intend to ensure their job security by hoarding information and cannot be (very quickly) shown the error of their ways, I would not hesitate to fire them. That is someone who is not looking out for the interests of the organization. That is a problem of ethics, not a problem of skills or training. Keeping someone like that around puts the organization and its members at risk.
If workers weren't so damn cheap, disposable and replaceable, you'd quickly change your attitude.
Workers AREN"T cheap or disposable, though usually they are replaceable with considerable effort and expense. If you think people are easy or cheap to replace, you probably haven't ever hired anyone and certainly haven't fired anyone. A typical worker costs tens of thousands of dollars to train for all but the simplest tasks. Companies don't want to fire anyone. Firing someone means something went wrong.
I seriously doubt that MBA managers make these kinds of efforts when they take charge of companies.
That's an AWFULLY broad brush you are painting with there. A MBA is a college degree. Nothing more. People with MBAs go into finance, accounting, marketing, sales, engineering (yes, engineering), and of course management. Having a MBA is not an automatic ticket to management either. At best it might get you some interviews you might not get without the degree much like an engineering degree can open a few doors. After that it is up to the talent of the individual. Futhermore, lots of people get MBA degrees AFTER they already are in charge (see executive MBA programs) because they seek to do their job better. Management has a skillset much like engineering, and many (though not remotely all) of those skills can be learned in school.
The dominant ethos of that profession appears to be to run a company by the numbers just long enough to move on to a higher paid position.
A MBA is a college degree, not a profession. There are good managers with MBA degrees and bad managers with MBA degrees. The degree is just training. It is in no way, shape or form a profession.
Most that I have met have little to no underlying understanding of the businesses they are being paid handsomely to operate.
That would be true of many people regardless of whether they possess a degree in business administration.
This beggers belief, the IT department of a major law firm don't keep a single harddrive as backup and don't have a standby system in place for just such an eventuality as a failed harddrive ..
I wouldn't be shocked by this at all. I've seen several companies keep all their financial records on a 10+ year old PC with NO backups of any kind. This sort of behavior is not uncommon. You would be shocked at how many companies (even big ones) are playing a game of Russian roulette with their IT systems.
The flip side to being "one deep" is you are more valuable. I would lean towards hoarding knowledge and being on-call. I don't WANT my employer to be comfortable functioning without me.
Business is a team sport and you are definitely NOT being a team player. I have fired people for doing exactly what you are suggesting. It doesn't make you more valuable, it makes you a liability. You are putting the organization at risk for your own gain. If you make everything dependent on you and then you get hit by the proverbial bus, your selfishness has endangered everyone who depends on you. Single point of failure is a bad thing and information hoarding makes you a single point of failure. If the people you work for tolerate that kind of behavior from you, they are extremely foolish.
You want to look for factors that can forecast a certain type of event or events before they occur. If you find the right ones you can take action to prevent undesirable outcomes.
The problem is proving that it works. I used to do simulation of manufacturing systems for my day job about a decade ago. The problem with it was that if you build a good model which avoided a cost, only rarely could you actually prove that the money spent on the model was worthwhile. After all, if you never incur a cost (or a crime), how do you know what the ROI on the analytic model was? Very difficult to prove most of the time since you can't prove a negative. An organization like the FBI or maybe the NYPD *might* be able to justify it but most police organizations simply would not find the ROI to be acceptable.
That's not to say simulation modeling is a bad idea. It does work and can be very powerful. But it is VERY easy to misapply it even if the analytic models are correct and validated. It also tends to be extremely expensive hire the analysts and buy the software so you have to be sure the problem is of sufficient scale to justify the expense. Then of course there is the problem of actually building the model. There is a truism that "all models are wrong - some models are useful". Getting a useful model is not always an easy thing to do. A bad (very wrong) model can sometimes be worse than no model at all.
I generally tell people that if they can solve a problem without a complicated computer simulation, they should. Most uses I've seen for simulation are somewhat like duck hunting with a howitzer. For all but the most complicated and intractable problems with lots of variables and high risk of a negative outcome there is a strong chance that there are much simpler and cheaper solutions available.
"MAKE Magazine is making that case that any 'maker' who builds, buys or creates electronics should learn (Mandarin) Chinese.
MAKE has no idea what they are talking about. I DO manufacture electronics (electronic data harnesses primarily) for a living and fairly little of the parts we make come from China and most of what we buy is commodity parts. (wire, terminals, connectors, etc) Lots of it comes from Japan and much of it is made here in the US. Sure there are some parts from China but it isn't as much as one might think. The manufacture of many of these products is highly automated and China has no cost significant cost advantage.
Furthermore, virtually all sales of commodity electronic components are done through distributors. You simply are NOT going to buy direct from China unless you are a purchaser for a manufacturing company. Distributors have customer service representatives, most of whom do not speak a word of any Chinese dialect. And even if for some reason you did need to contact someone in China directly, there are a HUGE number of English speakers there. I've been to Shanghai, Hong Kong, Chengdu and other places in China. It is NOT hard to find someone who speaks rather good English.
source of just about everything we buy in the USA.
The US has a $3.7 TRILLION manufacturing sector and most of that stuff we make is also sold here in the US. In 2010 the US imported $364 BILLION in goods from China or roughly 10% of what the US makes itself. A big number to be sure, but nowhere close to "just about everything".
None of the competitors of Apple have any kind of cash hoard.
Bullshit
Google is sitting on $36B in cash, Microsoft has $50B, Nokia has $11.5B, HP has $12B, Dell has $14.4B.
Apple's doing well but they are hardly the only one sitting on a big pile of cash.
I wonder if they train people to be this ignorant? Or could places that sell cables for this price just attract people who buy into the BS?
You were arguing with someone who has a financial interest in selling the more expensive cable. You wasted your time even discussing it with him. He may or may not have believed what he said but you certainly weren't going to convince him of anything.
I actually have some admittedly juvenile fun sometimes with these clowns when they try to sell me an overpriced cable. I run a company that manufactures data cables. We make cables like these and harnesses that are much more complicated. I like to let them spew for a bit and then ask them very sweetly "what do I do for a living?" Of course they have no idea. I ask them if they have an engineering degree. Invariably they do not. At that point I let them know that I both make these cables and have an engineering degree. I then point out that until they know something about the person to whom they are lecturing, they probably should keep their mouth shut lest they reveal they have no idea what they are talking about.
Except, as has been substantially covered here on Slashdot, the US telecom companies get sizable government subsidies and other public assistance to carry out such work.
I presume you are talking about the Universal Service Fund. That fund is drawn directly from the revenues of telecom companies to build infrastructure where there would otherwise be none because there is NO economic case for it. It is impossible to justify the expense of serving many of the rural and even semi-rural areas of the US. That is not a government subsidy, that is regulated reapportionment of telecom revenues for specific purposes. True, it is not a black and white case for urban versus rural but the basic argument of population density stands on its merit. It IS more expensive to serve a typical rural customer than an urban one. Population density is a critical factor in any discussion of service availability.
I can't speak much to ROI, except to point out that telecom companies elsewhere, some of them in significantly less densely populated countries and facing much more and fiercer competition, still manage to turn a profit.
It's not just turn a profit. The telecoms are private companies and their management has a fiduciary duty (an obligation with legal force) to maximize profits for their shareholders. They could easily serve a lot more customers (or serve existing customers better) without the constraint of trying to maximize profit. Profit maximization is a function of revenue and cost to serve customers, both of which are heavily influenced by population density.
I lived in Tokyo for three years. Moved back to the US, to California, and naively expected the cost of living to be lower.
California is the 3rd most expensive state in the US behind only Hawaii and Alaska. Try moving to somewhere that actually is inexpensive to live. I live in the midwest and it is FAR less expensive. My house would cost 4-5X as much anywhere remotely close to one of the bigger California cities. If you were looking for a place in the US to compare with Japan you could hardly have picked a worse example.
It's not about population density, it's about profit margins, and what regulators and the competitive environment will allow.
You say that as if you think profit margins and population density are somehow unrelated. While there are highly dense areas, the phone companies have to expend capital to cover the not dense areas too. If you spend the money to improve connections in the high density areas you necessarily are taking it away from the less populated areas. Furthermore there is the issue of return on investment. Presumably with enough cash they could make incredibly reliable connections but would they see a return on that investment in a competitive environment? Maybe, but anyone who claims to be certain of that is delusional. Population density is by no means the only important factor but it IS important.
Don't forget that inflation helps fixed debts (like a 30-year mortgage) become less important.
Only if your income growth outpaces inflation. If inflation is 3% per year, your income has to grow by at least 3% per year or your buying power has actually declined. If your income remains constant for 30 years, it doesn't matter what inflation is with respect to your mortgage.
My parent's actually experienced what you are talking about. Their mortgage when they first took it out really stretched them. $350/month was a lot of money in those days. Fast forward 25 years and it wasn't much of a problem at all. But the reason is because their income rose faster than inflation. Had their income remained constant, they would have realized no advantage.
The real expense isn't actually the cost of the service. The real expense is the LOST PRODUCTIVITY. That does not get compensated in form by any vendor. Frankly they could offer it for free for a year and not cover the cost of the lost productivity for a single day for a heavy office application user. 99.9% reliability means 8.76 hours of downtime per year. Someone making $20/hour would cost $175. Add in the fact that they presumably are there because their services are more valuable than their salary (otherwise why hire them?) and you can add on even more cost. Our at breakeven our company brings in revenue of about $100,000 per employee per year which for 240 working days works about to about $416/day. A seat of LibreOffice or even Microsoft Office is cheap compared with lost productivity.
Furthermore no matter how reliable a "cloud" services vendor might be, they can never be more reliable than the internet and power connections of the customer. Getting an uptime guarantee from the ISP is not cheap and you also have to have backup power to ensure computers function when the lights go out. I've had outages where I live of several hours at least 3 times in the past 12 months.
Cloud computing has its advantages but the economic advantages are still pretty unclear for most of us.
Internet forefather Vint Cerf has a simple answer for this potential problem: Increase bandwidth exponentially
Yes, it is a conceptually simple solution. But economically and logistically it is incredibly difficult. There has to be a paying customer for that bandwidth and it isn't as simple as "build it and they will come". The long term solution for most bandwidth congestion is normally more bandwidth but that doesn't mean it is easy or cheap to do it.
Exposed, non-wiping contacts would be expected to fail quite quickly.
Define quickly. If the value is greater than 5 years when used on a laptop it probably doesn't matter much.
You can pay tax in BTC the same way you can pay tax in euros... simple conversion... Anyone who tried to claim euros are worthless because form 1040 requires dollars would be laughed at.
Sure you can convert bitcoins. However you also are exposing yourself to significant exchange rate risk and probably liquidity risk. I can exchange any currency but not every currency is equally desirable. Just because I can use bitcoins doesn't necessarily make it a good idea. Euro's aren't worthless because they require exchanging but there is a very real cost and some very real risks to exchanging currencies.
What exactly backs bitcoin besides "Some guy" in an IRC channel?
The only thing that backs ANY currency is the belief that it has value. While I think bitcoins are ridiculous, ill-concieved and overhyped concept, they have as much value as people believe they do in exactly the same way as the dollar or the euro. A currency is useful because we believe others will accept it as a proxy good that can be easily exchanged for other good. There are very good reasons to believe that the dollar or the euro will continue to be valued by others (including network effects and taxing authority among others) but at the end of the day any value they have comes down to confidence.
I do not advocate that people speculate on bitcoins.
Which matters not the tiniest bit. Speculation inevitably occurs with any and every commodity, including currencies. Speculation is inevitable.
As liquidity increases transaction costs decrease. If there was already an appropriate clearing house in place, a merchant would be able to automatically accept bitcoins and liquidate them to dollars.
There is more to transaction costs than mere liquidity. Furthermore he neatly avoids the problem of exchange rate risk.
Gold is not a currency in my mind. It is a store of value. I would not want to go to buy bread from my local store and shave off some gold from a bullion and take out a scale and wait for an acid test to be performed. Gold is backed by real world properties.
??? Talk about a strawman. I don't think anyone was claiming gold was a currency, and even if it was the ONLY thing that gives ANYTHING value is the belief by both parties in an exchange that it does have value. If people believe bitcoins or gold or US dollar have value then they do. If they do not believe they have value then they do not. Bitcoin is little different than any other secondary market commodity. I can conduct transactions using Magic The Gathering cards as currency if the other party will accept them.
Sending funds abroad is time consuming, expensive and difficult. Recently I tried sending funds to a Polish bank from the UK- the bank was closed and I waited until Monday. Requiring me to be in person at the bank, the woman was unable to enter the Polish L looking character into her terminal. I had to aquire an internet banking code to do it online. Waited 3 days, logged in and the internet banking form didn't work. In the end, I ended using a friend to aquire Bitcoins and use the Polish exchange bitomat (we never use Britcoin ourself).
Individuals almost never can exchange currencies more economically efficiently than a bank. Banks have transaction volume and can reap economies of scale. He made the transfer more efficient but made the currency exchanges much less efficient AND exposed the counter-party to significant exchange rate and liquidity risk. Whoever the counter-party was to this transaction was, they were an idiot.
Decentralized
Which can be a serious disadvantage when there are economic problems. I seriously doubt this fellow has any idea how bitcoin would escape a liquidity trap.
No bank holidays
No banks either which is most likely not actually a good thing. Despite their problems banks are invaluable for getting capital where and when it is needed. This is not to say that there aren't other mechanisms that can serve the function of a bank but bitcoin is in no way, shape or form an obvious improvement. There also is no lender of last resort if things go really wrong as they inevitably will.
International
Having traveled extensively internationally, I can assure you that there are lots of commodities including the US dollar that are accepted around the world.
No concept of borders
Borders have their advantages too. Doing away with them comes with some pretty significant problems.
Divisible
I can divide any other currency too. No improvement here.
True micro-transactions possible (new markets feasible)
Unproven. Any transaction has frictional costs and it bitcoin has not established a way it can avoid these. It might reduce some but they still exist and likely bitcoin would increase other costs.
New privacy model
New does not imply better or worse. There needs to be an actual advantage.
Rerip all your CDs, this time to FLAC, since disk is now cheap as hell.
Probably not a problem for unemployed teenagers still living with their parents who have nothing but time on their hands. The rest of us will get on with having having a life and doing non-pointless things with it.
The first Michael Keaton Batman was great, and still holds up fairly well today.
I actually have been liking it less and less. It's certainly far better than the later abominations in the series. (Batman & Robin and Batman Forever are two of the worst movies ever IMO) But it's not far enough away from the campy TV version for my tastes. Plus it is too obvious that everything was done on a sound stage. Michael Keaton was fairly forgettable in the title role for me. He just didn't dominate the screen the way he did in other films. Jack Nicholson made a valiant effort for the time but didn't really capture the Joker. The Joker is supposed to be rather frightening and his version just wasn't. Tim Burton does fun scary (Nightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, etc) but to work Batman needs a bit of scary scary and a good dose of real world. Tim Burton's Batman feels like a Broadway play put on the big screen.
Unclear how well the Nolan versions will stand the test of time but for me they are FAR better movies than any of the previous 4 and presently among my very favorites.
And yet every data cap we've seen is pathetically low.
No argument from me on that. Experience tells us that they are not likely to be implemented appropriately. For reasons I detail below, data caps are never a friendly policy.
If their pipes are clogged, then you throttle traffic from the people that have used the most data in the last time epoch (for whatever time duration you choose - one hour, one day, one week, one month).
Your solution is a perfectly sane and reasonable means of traffic management but you haven't addressed the economic problem of opportunity cost for the carrier. You are thinking of it only from the customer perspective. Whether you throttle traffic or not, there is a cost to someone being forced to wait. If the carrier doesn't provision enough services, quality of service will be impacted negatively and customers will (when possible) seek out competing services. However provisioning more services costs very significant amounts of capital. The carrier doesn't actually want customers that use huge amounts of bandwidth. They would rather these heavy use customers go away. Most businesses have customers like this - a small percentage of your revenue but a huge percentage of your headaches. Data caps are one way to, ahem... encourage, these customers to take their business elsewhere.
Bear in mind that I'm not remotely arguing that data caps are desirable or good policy for consumers, merely that they aren't actually without reason. Honestly they are *exactly* the response I would expect from the carrier. Raising rates on a few problem customers is a LOT cheaper solution than building infrastructure. I guarantee you the telecoms have done the cost/benefit analysis and the results speak for themselves.
It has nothing to do with network neutrality.
Sure it does. There is the supply side of network neutrality (affecting content providers) but there is also the demand side affecting consumers. We're talking about the demand side here. Any time a carrier shapes traffic they are necessarily choosing to prioritize one customer's data over another customer's data. The only difference is the party affected. By your logic we since Google sends the most data, we should throttle data from Google if there is saturation of the pipe. The logic is the same but you have to consider both the sender AND the receiver of any data.
Data cap still don't make any sense. If you've hit your cap, but want to use the network at night when the pipes aren't running at full capacity, then there's something wrong going on.
Depends entirely on how high the data cap is. A properly calculated data cap will be so high that few users will ever run into it. You are only considering bandwidth that goes unused but you also have to consider bandwidth that is not available for use because the pipe is full.
IF there is a scarcity of bandwidth due to some users using a lot of bandwidth, the fact that they aren't causing that scarcity at all times is irrelevant. You quite rightly mention that bits that aren't used are gone forever. However bits that are needed at a given moment but not available are also gone forever. Someone had to wait. That is an opportunity cost which needs to be assigned somehow and the logical group of customers to pay for that opportunity cost is those who use the most data. If it is valuable to them they should be willing to pay some amount for it. Data caps are one way of doing this without discriminating between different types of traffic. Maybe not the best way but they are a rational way IF there is actual scarcity of bandwidth.
Deprioritization of traffic for people making bulk transfers is the proper way of handling things.
And how do you decide that Customer A's traffic is more important than Customer B's? You are basically arguing against network neutrality. You might be willing to wait for your data but not everyone is so considerate.