You don't have a right to make money; so if you're selling an intangible product, you need to add value that makes purchasing the product attractive. In the past, when EA was "Electronic Arts", they took an approach where they treated developers like talent, and put their names and pictures in boxes and printed manuals. Packaging was creative and attractive, and the manuals, maps, etc included with the product had a certain value.
The cost was alot less as well. $30 was probably the average cost for a new computer game. Now, in an age where almost all technology-related costs have plummeted, games are easily double that.
IMO if you want to make money, you either need to add intangible value-adds, like packaging, manuals, maps, stickers, comic books or have online subscription or expansion options that allow you to pull down revenue for an extended period of time.
As someone who has managed a few mail migrations for government agencies, and I probably could guess the reason why GMail isn't in use in DC: Calendaring. I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted over this bs.
Typical problem: you cannot instantaneously migrate GB's of email. But once you migrate the accounting department, they won't be able to see free/busy status for the garbagemen, which is essential for some reason. Or worse, the conference room!
So instead of using the secretaries to actually do something (government office still have them), they wait for a magic, half-baked technical solution.
Sometime in the late 60's/early 70's, economists and politicians began to see honest growth based on adding value and fair trade as something that would slow the growth of the US economy, and leave the country unable to pay for the massive military and social programs that we are committed to. How many trillions of dollars were invested in ICBM silos? Strategic Air Command bombers and tankers that are still flying today by the grandchildren of the original pilots because they were never needed in the first place?
We made the switch from scientific and industrial powerhouse to empire. Instead of building factories, we build relationships with dictators. Instead of employing citizens in manufacturing, we exploit peasants in East Asia. I live in Albany, NY. Thanks to government, this area is pretty prosperous. But as you drive west through once-thriving cities like Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, you are a witness to economic devastation as the region declines to a shadow of its former self.
We live in an age of false prosperity, where our chief export is the wealth of the nation.
The piece of paper that says "we reserve the right to search you" means nothing. Neither does the sign next to the pool that says "you swim at your own risk".
I visited a big tech company once where they shoved an NDA and some bs consent to search agreement at us upon arrival. I ripped it in half and we marched out. Some SVP came out to apologize and we had our meetings, sans NDA and without being frisked. We negotiated a hell of a deal too.
That's the same specious argument that politicians use when writing draconian anti-privacy laws. Except they talk about child molesters and rapists.
If you go to a court and establish that you're a victim of systematic harassment that gives you a specific reason to feel there is a clear and present danger to your personal safety, that's one thing. But that isn't what happened here.
This is a potential libel/defamation case or a way for someone who desires to be in the public eye to get on Page 6 again -- that's it. Unlike the UK, where libel can be used as a club by those with money, libel cases are not open and shut in the US.
Economies of scale make things cheaper when the suppliers of a commodity have the ability to "scale" -- (ie. produce additional supply to meet demand) The point of this system is to create optimial cost structures for the data center operators -- not the grid as a whole.
The high cost of electricity in many places is a result of peak demand -- the cost to deliver the first 85% of electricity supply is lower than the final 15%.
Why? Power plants are expensive to shut down and startup, so most coal/hydro/nuclear plants run as close to capacity as possible -- enough to meet about 80% of demand. When demand starts peaking, small-scale (and expensive) natural gas generators start up and power is shipped in.
New York City is a great example. The density of the NY metro area makes it impossible to site significant new generation in the metro area. So to meet demand, power is shipped in from hydro projects in Canada. The problem is, over HALF of that energy is lost in transit!
Shifting demand on a large scale is going to screw up the economics of power supply.
We use system serial number to generate the hostname during the sysprep phase. This is a great scheme imo because naming is based on something burned into the bios, making asset management much easier and it discourages the use of workstations as ersatz servers.
We've cycled about 250,000 workstations through this system since 1999, and haven't had a name collision yet with HP, Dell or IBM
The end result of these sorts of schemes is that large companies will increase local demand and local electricity prices. The big users will get rebates and concessions, while small users, particularly residential customers, will get hosed.
At the end of the day, once a few large players do this, the benefits will be marginal for them, as electricity costs are mostly driven by peak load.
Having lived in the US my impression is that this is a cultural difference: Americans value convenience much more than Canadians (which probably explains why the US has somewhat higher productivity than Canada) and that the bellicosity of American culture has normalized intimidation and bullying as a means of social interaction, so American businesses are more likely to try to bully customers into giving up inappropriate information, and individual Americans are more likely to go the convenient route and give that information up.
Sorry to break it to you, my passive-aggressive Canadian friend, but you're wrong. This has nothing to do with the reasons that SSNs have become a prevalent form of identification.
In the past, US states had a far larger measure of autonomy than they do today, and were unwilling or unable to exchange information with each other. Even things like mailing addresses were and are non standard -- most of Brooklyn in NYC has a mailing address of "Brooklyn, NY", while in Queens, NYC, mailing addresses are the names of the original towns! (Maspeth, Flushing, Astoria, etc)
One side effect of this was the US Banks and other institutions were local or regional. (Which is why US banks have generally been smaller than European banks, which are national banks) This was fine until the early 20th century, because people tended to stay in the same area. But in the post-WW1 era, people became more mobile, which led to problems.
If you had lots of debt and bounced a bunch of checks in New York, you could setup shop in Virginia and essentially start with a clean slate. Or if you lost your driver's license in New York, you could get one in Vermont, etc. The SSN was really the only way to establish that Frank Smith in NY who bounced a check or had a criminal record was the same Frank Smith in Virginia.
Today, computers and interstate compacts are linking state records, so a speeding ticket in Maine is known to cops in California. Most border states also have compacts with Canadian provinces, because US truck drivers would get Canadian drivers licenses after getting DWIs in the US. (and vice versa).
Today, a business can protect itself against fraud in many cases without an SSN. But this was not the case in the past, and past practices take a long time to fade away.
SSNs aren't guaranteed unique either -- thousands of people and providers use incorrect SSNs. When I worked with Medicaid systems, we had 0.5% collision rate. That sounds small, but when you're talking about 100,000,000 claims and 2,000,000 people, there are literally billions of opportunities for incorrect information.
Very true, but folks and motorcycles and bikes don't seem the factor in the risks involved in doing some of the things that they do.
A guy in front of my office building on a bike broke his collarbone when he tried to squeeze between parked cars and a cab... and was thrown 10 feet when the passenger popped the door open in front of him.
Focus on usability and rapid deployment rather than wide-ranging featuresets that sit on the shelf for a decade. Nearly all products in this space really, really suck.
The notion of a "town hall" at the Federal level is bunk. The comments or pithy videos selected will likely be produced or pushed by interested parties anyway, so the notion that poor people are being disenfranchised is irrelevant, since all citizens lack franchise in the propaganda state.
The government that the Democratic majority and presidency is practicing is the type of behavior that is common in the legislatures of states like New York. The "leadership" provides plums in the form of committee assignments, jobs for relatives and cash in exchange for voting as ordered. If you don't follow the leader, you lose the privileges.
This obviously isn't a phenomenon unique to democrats, but it is especially effective since 2/3 branches of government and soon all three will be controlled by the same people.
Information Science programs are often a joint venture between the library science, computer science and business departments. The skills they provide the students are questionable at best... in my experience based on the people that I have interviewed is that it's an easy path to get a degree that is more about "IT" than science.
Here are a few 400-level Information Science courses at a local state school: "Networking Essentials", "Fundamentals of Information Technology", "Hardware and Software Essentials". You don't want to talk to people taking BS classes like this senior year.
If you want people who can think logically & program, look for someone with a degree in hard science. If you can't afford a hard science go for more "raw material" -- people with really good grades in subjects like philosophy or history who know how to analyze things. You're better off immersing someone with a brain in programming than dealing with a know-it-all know-nothing.
A contract is essentially a law that applies to you. Since cell phone service is not an entitlement, the company can opt to do business with you, or not.
Since your credit history is a good indicator of your propensity to pay your bill, and holding large deposits in escrow is a pain in the ass, you are unlikely to have much success entering in a revolving credit agreement without providing your SSN.
So WTF are you complaining about? You can muck around with your prepaid calling cards and recharges, which are most likely funded by a credit or debit card. You had to provide your SSN to the bank anyway, unless you only buy recharge cards with cash.
I use my mobile phone all day for business and pleasure. To me, setting up a credit line and not having to check to replenish my balances is the preferred way to do business.
I've worked for government, small businesses and Fortune 50 corporations. In my experience, government is just as screwed up as a big corporation. The only difference is that most big corporations purge some people every year, and government tends to have more overhead of workers doing little/nothing.
It works out to be about the same. 15-20% of corporate people are busy sucking up to the boss and 15-20% of government people are making paper airplanes or whatever.
Government generally has professional staff who have some sort of clue, just like in the corporate world. The difference is that there is another layer(s) of management about the professional managers and directors -- political appointees. Usually the political types know they are dumb and stay out of the way, but sometimes they decide to flex their power -- resulting in many a dilbert moment.
OMFG, you've figured it out! All of these years we've been supporting all of these complex systems, and all we had to do all of this time is avoid the complexities! You're a genius!
So, Kreskin, what do you do when one of the unions that represent a good chunk of your employees brings you to Federal court and wins a judgement requiring you to give workers employed between June 5, 1989 and December 31, 1994 who were on maternity leave a pension credit and healthcare refund equal to 8% of their average pension contribution during that period, paid in 104 bi-weekly portions?
Stuff like that happens all of the time. What are you going to do? Go to jail for contempt of court?
You still need the ERP. It's not like you get together a box with all of the goofy union contracts and agreements, court-ordered judgements, and byzantine business rules, fedex it to ADP, and magically get your paychecks to come out the other end.
Actually, you're on crack. I have a cell tower on my property; it has a battery and fuel-cell backup power source that gives it approximately 48 hours of backup power. We lost power for two weeks a couple of years ago from a blizzard, and the POTS phones worked like a champ for the entire ordeal. The cell phones did not.
Additionally, state law and contracts with electric companies generally require priority power restoration for telephone infrastructure. In several instances that I am personally aware of, telephone switching facilities have a restoration priority higher than the hospitals in the region.
Clueless people always trot out Amtrak as the poster child for government waste. But let's think about this for a second...
Hmm... Amtrak consolidated failing passenger rail companies after... - The government spent trillions of dollars building a "free" interstate highway system with features like 30,000 bridges that need to be replaced within 35 years of construction. (ie. now) - Tax policy encouraged and subsidized suburban development at the expense of the cities and close suburbs best served by mass transit - Local government invested billions to build airports in those suburbs
Amtrak does an amazing job at providing a service giving the funding challenges and the political maze that they have to traverse to continue operating. Amtrak is only an example of "hurting consumers in the long run" in the same sense that the highway system and resulting sprawl is.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have a right to make money; so if you're selling an intangible product, you need to add value that makes purchasing the product attractive. In the past, when EA was "Electronic Arts", they took an approach where they treated developers like talent, and put their names and pictures in boxes and printed manuals. Packaging was creative and attractive, and the manuals, maps, etc included with the product had a certain value.
The cost was alot less as well. $30 was probably the average cost for a new computer game. Now, in an age where almost all technology-related costs have plummeted, games are easily double that.
IMO if you want to make money, you either need to add intangible value-adds, like packaging, manuals, maps, stickers, comic books or have online subscription or expansion options that allow you to pull down revenue for an extended period of time.
Nice, now when's Duke Nukem Forever going to be released?
You're very right.
As someone who has managed a few mail migrations for government agencies, and I probably could guess the reason why GMail isn't in use in DC: Calendaring. I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted over this bs.
Typical problem: you cannot instantaneously migrate GB's of email. But once you migrate the accounting department, they won't be able to see free/busy status for the garbagemen, which is essential for some reason. Or worse, the conference room!
So instead of using the secretaries to actually do something (government office still have them), they wait for a magic, half-baked technical solution.
Sometime in the late 60's/early 70's, economists and politicians began to see honest growth based on adding value and fair trade as something that would slow the growth of the US economy, and leave the country unable to pay for the massive military and social programs that we are committed to. How many trillions of dollars were invested in ICBM silos? Strategic Air Command bombers and tankers that are still flying today by the grandchildren of the original pilots because they were never needed in the first place?
We made the switch from scientific and industrial powerhouse to empire. Instead of building factories, we build relationships with dictators. Instead of employing citizens in manufacturing, we exploit peasants in East Asia. I live in Albany, NY. Thanks to government, this area is pretty prosperous. But as you drive west through once-thriving cities like Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, you are a witness to economic devastation as the region declines to a shadow of its former self.
We live in an age of false prosperity, where our chief export is the wealth of the nation.
The piece of paper that says "we reserve the right to search you" means nothing. Neither does the sign next to the pool that says "you swim at your own risk".
I visited a big tech company once where they shoved an NDA and some bs consent to search agreement at us upon arrival. I ripped it in half and we marched out. Some SVP came out to apologize and we had our meetings, sans NDA and without being frisked. We negotiated a hell of a deal too.
That's the same specious argument that politicians use when writing draconian anti-privacy laws. Except they talk about child molesters and rapists.
If you go to a court and establish that you're a victim of systematic harassment that gives you a specific reason to feel there is a clear and present danger to your personal safety, that's one thing. But that isn't what happened here.
This is a potential libel/defamation case or a way for someone who desires to be in the public eye to get on Page 6 again -- that's it. Unlike the UK, where libel can be used as a club by those with money, libel cases are not open and shut in the US.
Doesn't it feel a little ghetto to swipe a credit card to park for 20 minutes? Seems pretty dumb to me.
Economies of scale make things cheaper when the suppliers of a commodity have the ability to "scale" -- (ie. produce additional supply to meet demand) The point of this system is to create optimial cost structures for the data center operators -- not the grid as a whole.
The high cost of electricity in many places is a result of peak demand -- the cost to deliver the first 85% of electricity supply is lower than the final 15%.
Why? Power plants are expensive to shut down and startup, so most coal/hydro/nuclear plants run as close to capacity as possible -- enough to meet about 80% of demand. When demand starts peaking, small-scale (and expensive) natural gas generators start up and power is shipped in.
New York City is a great example. The density of the NY metro area makes it impossible to site significant new generation in the metro area. So to meet demand, power is shipped in from hydro projects in Canada. The problem is, over HALF of that energy is lost in transit!
Shifting demand on a large scale is going to screw up the economics of power supply.
We use system serial number to generate the hostname during the sysprep phase. This is a great scheme imo because naming is based on something burned into the bios, making asset management much easier and it discourages the use of workstations as ersatz servers.
We've cycled about 250,000 workstations through this system since 1999, and haven't had a name collision yet with HP, Dell or IBM
The end result of these sorts of schemes is that large companies will increase local demand and local electricity prices. The big users will get rebates and concessions, while small users, particularly residential customers, will get hosed.
At the end of the day, once a few large players do this, the benefits will be marginal for them, as electricity costs are mostly driven by peak load.
Sorry to break it to you, my passive-aggressive Canadian friend, but you're wrong. This has nothing to do with the reasons that SSNs have become a prevalent form of identification.
In the past, US states had a far larger measure of autonomy than they do today, and were unwilling or unable to exchange information with each other. Even things like mailing addresses were and are non standard -- most of Brooklyn in NYC has a mailing address of "Brooklyn, NY", while in Queens, NYC, mailing addresses are the names of the original towns! (Maspeth, Flushing, Astoria, etc)
One side effect of this was the US Banks and other institutions were local or regional. (Which is why US banks have generally been smaller than European banks, which are national banks) This was fine until the early 20th century, because people tended to stay in the same area. But in the post-WW1 era, people became more mobile, which led to problems.
If you had lots of debt and bounced a bunch of checks in New York, you could setup shop in Virginia and essentially start with a clean slate. Or if you lost your driver's license in New York, you could get one in Vermont, etc. The SSN was really the only way to establish that Frank Smith in NY who bounced a check or had a criminal record was the same Frank Smith in Virginia.
Today, computers and interstate compacts are linking state records, so a speeding ticket in Maine is known to cops in California. Most border states also have compacts with Canadian provinces, because US truck drivers would get Canadian drivers licenses after getting DWIs in the US. (and vice versa).
Today, a business can protect itself against fraud in many cases without an SSN. But this was not the case in the past, and past practices take a long time to fade away.
SSNs aren't guaranteed unique either -- thousands of people and providers use incorrect SSNs. When I worked with Medicaid systems, we had 0.5% collision rate. That sounds small, but when you're talking about 100,000,000 claims and 2,000,000 people, there are literally billions of opportunities for incorrect information.
That's retarded. It takes about 5 minutes to figure out the best way to get to I-95 or I-81.
Very true, but folks and motorcycles and bikes don't seem the factor in the risks involved in doing some of the things that they do.
A guy in front of my office building on a bike broke his collarbone when he tried to squeeze between parked cars and a cab... and was thrown 10 feet when the passenger popped the door open in front of him.
It's good that we have people like you. If there's a real crisis, you'll perish quickly.
Focus on usability and rapid deployment rather than wide-ranging featuresets that sit on the shelf for a decade. Nearly all products in this space really, really suck.
The notion of a "town hall" at the Federal level is bunk. The comments or pithy videos selected will likely be produced or pushed by interested parties anyway, so the notion that poor people are being disenfranchised is irrelevant, since all citizens lack franchise in the propaganda state.
The government that the Democratic majority and presidency is practicing is the type of behavior that is common in the legislatures of states like New York. The "leadership" provides plums in the form of committee assignments, jobs for relatives and cash in exchange for voting as ordered. If you don't follow the leader, you lose the privileges.
This obviously isn't a phenomenon unique to democrats, but it is especially effective since 2/3 branches of government and soon all three will be controlled by the same people.
Information Science programs are often a joint venture between the library science, computer science and business departments. The skills they provide the students are questionable at best... in my experience based on the people that I have interviewed is that it's an easy path to get a degree that is more about "IT" than science.
Here are a few 400-level Information Science courses at a local state school: "Networking Essentials", "Fundamentals of Information Technology", "Hardware and Software Essentials". You don't want to talk to people taking BS classes like this senior year.
If you want people who can think logically & program, look for someone with a degree in hard science. If you can't afford a hard science go for more "raw material" -- people with really good grades in subjects like philosophy or history who know how to analyze things. You're better off immersing someone with a brain in programming than dealing with a know-it-all know-nothing.
A contract is essentially a law that applies to you. Since cell phone service is not an entitlement, the company can opt to do business with you, or not.
Since your credit history is a good indicator of your propensity to pay your bill, and holding large deposits in escrow is a pain in the ass, you are unlikely to have much success entering in a revolving credit agreement without providing your SSN.
So WTF are you complaining about? You can muck around with your prepaid calling cards and recharges, which are most likely funded by a credit or debit card. You had to provide your SSN to the bank anyway, unless you only buy recharge cards with cash.
I use my mobile phone all day for business and pleasure. To me, setting up a credit line and not having to check to replenish my balances is the preferred way to do business.
I've worked for government, small businesses and Fortune 50 corporations. In my experience, government is just as screwed up as a big corporation. The only difference is that most big corporations purge some people every year, and government tends to have more overhead of workers doing little/nothing.
It works out to be about the same. 15-20% of corporate people are busy sucking up to the boss and 15-20% of government people are making paper airplanes or whatever.
Government generally has professional staff who have some sort of clue, just like in the corporate world. The difference is that there is another layer(s) of management about the professional managers and directors -- political appointees. Usually the political types know they are dumb and stay out of the way, but sometimes they decide to flex their power -- resulting in many a dilbert moment.
OMFG, you've figured it out! All of these years we've been supporting all of these complex systems, and all we had to do all of this time is avoid the complexities! You're a genius!
So, Kreskin, what do you do when one of the unions that represent a good chunk of your employees brings you to Federal court and wins a judgement requiring you to give workers employed between June 5, 1989 and December 31, 1994 who were on maternity leave a pension credit and healthcare refund equal to 8% of their average pension contribution during that period, paid in 104 bi-weekly portions?
Stuff like that happens all of the time. What are you going to do? Go to jail for contempt of court?
You still need the ERP. It's not like you get together a box with all of the goofy union contracts and agreements, court-ordered judgements, and byzantine business rules, fedex it to ADP, and magically get your paychecks to come out the other end.
Actually, you're on crack. I have a cell tower on my property; it has a battery and fuel-cell backup power source that gives it approximately 48 hours of backup power. We lost power for two weeks a couple of years ago from a blizzard, and the POTS phones worked like a champ for the entire ordeal. The cell phones did not.
Additionally, state law and contracts with electric companies generally require priority power restoration for telephone infrastructure. In several instances that I am personally aware of, telephone switching facilities have a restoration priority higher than the hospitals in the region.
Clueless people always trot out Amtrak as the poster child for government waste. But let's think about this for a second...
Hmm... Amtrak consolidated failing passenger rail companies after...
- The government spent trillions of dollars building a "free" interstate highway system with features like 30,000 bridges that need to be replaced within 35 years of construction. (ie. now)
- Tax policy encouraged and subsidized suburban development at the expense of the cities and close suburbs best served by mass transit
- Local government invested billions to build airports in those suburbs
Amtrak does an amazing job at providing a service giving the funding challenges and the political maze that they have to traverse to continue operating. Amtrak is only an example of "hurting consumers in the long run" in the same sense that the highway system and resulting sprawl is.