Yeah, by any rational measure, shorting Tesla should be a safe bet. There is understandably a lot of excitement around getting a half million preorders for the Model 3. That's cool!
But all of the top selling models sell more than that every year - not over a several year period, as Tesla plans. Ford sells over a million of their F series light pickup trucks every year. Makers like Ford, Toyota and VW would probably consider cancelling a small car that didn't move 50k units per year. Tesla didn't move 30k cars last year, in total.
Shorting a company that is priced above these giant multinationals even though even their aspirational numbers are not a significant percentage of the big carmakers certainly seems to make sense.
Which is why investing in stocks is so hard. What people do very often fails to make sense.
Hell, from a TCO point of view, a Model S can be cheaper than a Leaf after a sufficiently long distance driven (if you're, say, a professional driver), if the difference between gasoline price and electricity price is large enough since the Model S will pay for itself completely ($6/gal vs. $0.1/kWh in case of my country).
I don't really see how a Model S could be cheaper than a Leaf, or how a Model S could possibly pay for itself completely.
Even at $6 per gallon for gas, that means a sedan that gets 30 mpg costs $20k in gas per 100k miles. So even if electricity was free, you'd still need to drive a half a million miles just to pay for the Tesla, not including any electric infrastructure you need, like a charging station or electric box upgrades, and not accounting for interest on your $100k up front, as opposed to over a few years. And the Model S battery isn't going to last a half-million miles.
Numbers on the true life of a Model S battery and the true cost of replacement seem to be all over the place. But a replacement looks to be at least $20k - as much as 100k miles worth of gas at $6 per gallon, and a lifetime of no more than 150k miles.. maybe 200k miles. And that low estimate of $20k could be more like $45k if you believe other sources... and at that price you could never catch the gas sedan. It costs less to buy the gas than the replacement battery, even at $6 per gallon.
The 1st Amendment disagrees. There are no cases where you must be truthful except one: under legal oath. I'll be the first to tell anyone, liars suck shit. But the 1st protects them from answering for their lies, at least while they're on this plane of existence. It does not, however, protect them from karma.
That's just not true. You can't just lie about someone (or some company) and be protected by the first amendment. Libel and Slander are actually things in the US, even with the first amendment protecting freedom of speech.
What you can do is share your opinion - any opinion - even if it is a stupid opinion, or even if it is a bad faith opinion. That's fully protected.
So you can say "Tesla makes crappy cars" and you are fine. But you can't say "Tesla cars are made from the bones of aborted fetuses". At least not seriously. But you could say that as a joke. And then it is protected speech again.
Perhaps you were thinking about criminality? You cannot generally be prosecuted for lying - unless it is under oath or to a government official. Perjury is a pretty serious crime, although relatively rarely prosecuted. And lying to government officials can be a big deal - the FBI is famous for using their interviews to get their mark for the procedural crime of obstructing their investigation by lying, even if it is an immaterial lie.
For anyone following along, I saw the perfect answer to this once. Only once. But it was a cool way of doing things.
These guys were starting a business from the ground up. In this case it was a mortgage business. So they went out and found the best of breed software for doing mortgages and designed all of their business processes around how the software works, figuring that many decades of experience across many dozens of companies was packed into that software.
So they did the whole thing "out of the box". Sales, accounting, finance, you name it. No customization costs. No clashes of ill-thought-out business rules. They even bought their telephone system based on the recommendation of their software vendor. So all of the integrations were ready to go right out of the box.
They were able to build and grow their business amazingly fast because of that decision. They told me that it saved them immeasurably in the "growing pains" that a startup would usually have.
It isn't a solution that is available to everyone, but if there is a best of breed ERP or CRM for your business, maybe that's the way to go.
late to your response, but I hope someone sees this anyway...
This is precisely the attitude that causes failure. People view IT as a service and a cost, separate from the business. This is the way to failure.
IT is not separate from the business, any more than sales, accounting, finance, manufacturing... it is all a team. Anyone who doesn't get that is an anchor dragging the company down. Unfortunately, lots of people still don't get this.
I have been in a situation where I loudly preached integration to both my employees and to the business unit. And it worked great. We all sell widgets. This guy might do it on the phone with customers, that guy does it by editing the contracts, and my team does it by building business systems. It worked great. We all fought for the best way of accomplishing the goal of selling widgets.
I've also been in the situation where people think "I work for them", as you say. My team of highly experienced technical people are merely service providers, competing with outsourced development teams on price and "customer satisfaction". That was a disaster. That attitude leads to a world where some sales manager is now the "IT Expert" who is going to design how the systems should work and look. You end up with something that is the equivalent of a skyscraper built out of cardboard but with a lovely gold-leaf façade. And productivity plummets.
They got rid of an IT team that had more experience and knowledge of the industry than anyone in the business unit. A team that could tell them "that didn't work when we tried it 10 years ago, and here is why". All because they enjoyed having a relationship with IT that went "I ask, they build".
They were pretty happy with themselves. They built a system based on a "workflow" tool, so they could make changes themselves. The custom screens we built for the prior system that predicted exactly what an employee needed to be doing and presented exactly what they needed to accomplish the task were gone. The automated call routing based on exactly who among 7 or 8 different groups needed to speak with the customer was gone. The outbound predictive dialing based on dozens of criteria across multiple job functions... gone. The automation of all activity onto the accounting subledger and then to the GL...gone.
But they did get "wizards" that helped with training. So instead of having one screen specific to the task that presented exactly what information was needed and exactly what should be collected, they got 8 or 15 screens in a script that walked them through collecting the data. So if they just needed to add a birthday to a person's file, they had to step through 15 screens, instead of just one screen with the missing fields prominently displayed.
I don't know if they ever figured out that productivity had plummeted because of their choices. I don't think they ever connected the fact that they had to hire almost twice as many support staff under the new IT system with the fact that they deployed the new IT system. Managers were happy because they had control, and nobody to tell them "we tried it that way before, it doesn't work because of X". They just said "Ok, here's your work order to sign off on".
The way to run a business properly is to realize that everyone is a part of a team that is pushing for the same goal. This view values the input of the clerk, the shipping guy, the accountant, the IT guys, everyone. A good IT department is where this attitude lives, because they touch every aspect of the business.
A senior executive can discount the impact of lots of jobs. The IT business systems team can't. They need to know exactly what that staff accountant does. They need to know what that clerk does with the file that ends up on her desk. You can't handwave away a part of the business when you are building the systems that people will use. It doesn't work like that. You have to know all of the steps. So an intelligent executive will highly value his IT team's expertise and input, because they will likely know more details about the overall business than anyone else in the building.
Not "is messing up", but "could mess up in the future" in that very specific way, should CO2 trends continue.
The idea is that food crops will grow faster and pack on more sugars (starches) in their seed, thereby diluting the amount of nutrients per calorie. They tested this by pumping in additional CO2 and confirmed their theory, grains grown in enhanced CO2 environments have greater yields with more calories per hectare, but less nutrients per calorie.
This all assumes a static set of strains, with no action taken by farmers and seed producers to create different varieties that better exploit the conditions, and that grains are important for providing things beyond their core starches.
That is exactly the kind of scenario where a knowledgeable in-house IT staff will make a big difference. Because not only will they know that the guys on the loading dock need things organized by vehicle, they will know that the guys pulling stock need it in order by location - so they'll recommend two different versions of the same list on tablets with barcode scanners.
The guy in shipping wouldn't know or care about that. And the guy in fulfilment wouldn't know or care about the guy in shipping's issues.
But the IT guy would know that accounting really wants to keep track of inventory and needs to move items on the GL as soon as they are put in the truck. So they'll talk to accounting about automating that pull list onto a subledger.
Expert in-house staff is worth a lot more money than any perceived extra costs.
This is the nut of the problem. It always comes down to people, and the most productive teams are going to rub some people the wrong way because often times the most productive way of getting something done is to say "no".
I've worked with the "just give them what they ask for" crowd. It is just awful.
It works for a while. They are sooooo happy! You gave them that stupid thing that will never work in a million years! Then after a while, things are a mess and they still blame the dev team.
The only way that I've found to work with them is to have the backing of their superiors when you look them in the eye and tell them no. Anything less than the full backing from the top levels ends in disaster - methodology be damned.
This is why outsourcing can be so bad. You need the institutional knowledge that a good group of developers will have. And you need an executive team that has confidence in their developers so that when they push back against some dumb initiative they will have their backs.
I can't tell you how many times I've had near mutiny when I explained why something was stupid and had the CEO tell me to do it anyway, just to keep someone happy. No competent developer wants to waste his time building something he knows isn't going to work. But at least I was able to tell them that their concerns were heard and why they were dismissed. (and at least they knew I wasn't crazy, and their CEO wasn't crazy... or stupid)
Absent that connection, I don't know how things can work, long term. With good managers and executives, you could make outsourcing work. But eventually that guy who just doesn't get it is going to come along and insist on his vanity project. And the guys from India are just going to say "Ok, here's the bill". Maybe they fire the local PM when the whole things goes to crap. Or change development companies. But will they even be able to see that the problem was the idea behind the vanity project wasn't any good from the start? Often it is the dev team that is uniquiely positioned to know this, because they've had years of experience with all of the company's business rules and past mistakes.
So if there is no mechanism for continuity of business knowledge and no respect for that knowledge at the top.... well, I don't see how it could possibly succeed, long term.
Breaking things into the smallest increments and getting the most productive ones out into the hands of the users quickly is really important.
When I was working for a small startup, we released changes "as soon as they were ready". Sometimes we'd have multiple releases in one day. Managers ran into issues where they needed a new feature and we built it, right away.
Later, as the company became a big, publicly traded company, this became more difficult. We implemented SDLC controls, signoffs, treining, etc. Releases became monthly.
Nobody on the development team liked it. All kinds of crap kept getting stuffed into monthly releases. Things that they knew were not going to be used - manager's pet projects.
Agile came along and rescued them. The small teams were able to push back against managers with ideas that didn't match how people work - getting features that lower level employees needed to do their jobs implemented quickly.
Those small changes add up quickly to be major changes. And they can be rolled out without much disruption, unlike big, three month long projects with lots of changes.
It requires people who can think like that... taking a long term strategy and breaking it up into tiny, incremental steps. And especially making each step a productive change. There are a lot of people who don't think like that.
I think what he might be referring to is the old problem of "urgent but unimportant" stuff getting done before "not urgent, but important" stuff.
I had an executive who was particularly "imaginative" in his development requests. He was enamored of whatever he saw elsewhere an wanted one for himself. His requests were so fast and varied that he became frustrated that he couldn't have everything... so I made him give me his "top 3" list. Give me 3 things, and we'll work on those first.
So his team gets together and after more than a month of planning, they come up with a 7 item "top 3" list. And we start work on the top 3. Every week we were going to have a progress report. So they come to the first progress report meeting all excited. They have a new project... the most important one. It needed to go to the top of the list. So I named it "project zero", since it came before project number one.
A year later the executive was under some pressure and was angry that none of his "top three" requests of a year earlier had been finished. So I showed up at a meeting with the CEO and COO with a stack of change requests... 50 of them, one from each weekly meeting, where he signed off on "don't work on those things, work on this new request". Somehow he still didn't understand that he was the one makeing the decision not to work on his "top three" items.
He was the embodiment of the "ooh, shiny" approach to decision making.
Working with that guy in an agile environment really didn't make any difference. The only thing that would have worked for him was to have unlimited resources. That way he could have a whole new CRM every month, new websites on a weekly basis, new accounting packages every other month, etc. Surely that would have worked out for his team, right?
They actually have really cool forms that are built from bricks of insulating foam and plastic connecters. They are left in place and provide the insulation for the home. A shell built with this technology can be cheaper, stronger, and faster than a regular home, with great thermal properties. Still, it isn't the most popular technology out there.
Here's a Wikipedia article about the tech that reveals that it has been around a long time, even though I only recall seeing it popularized in the 90's.
Interestingly, the FBI is currently alleging that the use of communications platforms with encryption such as WhatsApp amounts to obstruction of justice and evidence of criminal intent when used to communicate with people who might eventually become witnesses - even if they are witnesses for the defense.
So all of you folks who poo-poo the slippery slope argument... well, there you go. They are also all over companies like Apple for building encryption into their phones and have used the fact that devices are encrypted as evidence of criminal intent.
England is currently living out the argumentum ad absurdum from the gun control debate - having outlawed guns and the sorts of knives used for hunting or defense and finding that people are still violent, they are now talking about banning kitchen knives with pointed ends.
Give the government and inch, and they'll use that inch against you.
Yeah, I had a few friends recommend "Lost" very highly. By the time I finished the first season I had them all on the "don't ever take advice from that guy again" list. It should have been clear to everyone pretty quickly that the only purpose of the mysteries was to have mysteries. They kept changing it from science to supernatural to alien to whatever.... It was a mess.
Well, that and the nonsensical style of dialog. Characters would just stop talking in the middle of an argument for no apparent reason an then walk away... plot exposition having been accomplished. It was weird and off-putting.
Unfortunately my wife was convinced that our friends had to be on to something, so we kept watching for a couple of additional seasons. She kept expecting for things to be revealed, even though I kept arguing that they were just sitting around the writer's room making stuff up. "No, wait... let's put a polar bear on the island. It will look sooooo coo!!"
The "public information" is "a car with this license plate is in this intersection right now". Anybody can look and see.
The thing that is new (and privately held) is the ability to have a gigantic list of every car that drives through a long list of intersections at any point in time over the last five years. In years gone by that would have required paying someone to sit at all of those intersections writing down license plates and times. But now a computer can do it tirelessly for very little cost. So something that has always been "public" suddenly takes on a new character when collated and stored like this.
The list may be privately held and available for rent, but it is a list of "public" information in that sense. You can't say "Hey! You aren't allowed to notice that I drove past the courthouse today!" And the privately held list is publicly available in the sense that if you are willing to pay, you can have a peek. It isn't secret in any other sense.
And thanks for that link... there's a lot of action on this front right now. These checkpoints are not an issue where I live, even though I'm in a border zone. But I do know that people in western border zones feel that they are being used for more nefarious purposes. A checkpoint 100 miles from the nearest border is pretty sketchy to begin with, and I've seen a lot of activists who are suspecting that they are being used more for pretexts to other kinds of arrests - like drug interdiction, weapons charges, etc. I've seen quite a few videos from activists attempting to assert those supreme court rulings and being subjected to prolonged stops when they refuse unrelated questions like "where are you going? Where are you coming from?" and simply provide proof of citizenship. Like anything, there's the theory and then there's the reality. These are like Terry stops - ostensibly for one purpose, but in reality used for entirely different reasons.
Well then you are just wrong. It is that simple. If you are walking down a public street, anyone can take your picture. You haven't got a leg to stand on. If they can see it with their own eyes from a public place, you cannot expect it to be private. Not only is this patently obvious, it is settled law.
The only thing that made it even contentious was the fact that the state had decided you couldn't take pictures of their operatives in public. So police making an arrest would arrest people for videoing the encounter. And the politicians supported them. But the courts slapped them down. You have an absolute right to record things you see in public.
There was a whole movement to fix that bit of overreach by the state - a lot of which is documented over at PhotographyIsNotACrime. Quite a few people went to jail fighting to make sure that you continue to enjoy your first amendment rights to record public officials in public spaces. And even though it is now settled law, the state continues to try to violate these rights (as is well documented by the nutty "right to photograph" crowd over at PINAC.)
As for whether the state has the power to collect all this data..... well, anyone who would like to follow the 9th, 10th and 14th amendments would probably have to say no way. There's no grant of mass surveillance powers to the state in the constitution, so absent an amendment granting that power, it would seem that they lack that power. But as you clearly well understand....that ship has sailed. The 9th and 10th are dead as doornails and the 14th is rarely used to rein in state powers these days.
ICE has extremely broad authority. They can stop any vehicle in a "border zone" and search it without probable cause. Which makes sense at a border crossing, right?
But what is a "border zone"? Get ready... this one is a doozy. Everything within 100 miles of a border is a "border zone". Do you live in a border zone?
All of Florida, Almost all of Michigan, almost all of New York, most of New England and a majority of the US population lives in a border zone.
They have also asserted authority over the areas around "border crossings", not just along the border. What's that? Airports, principally. So a 100 mile radius around every airport with international flights. So that would cover pretty much everyone else.
So I really doubt that using publicly available information to find illegals is going to be found unconstitutional. Not if you can make pretty much anyone in most all of the US prove their citizenship without even probable cause. I know the court loves to pick their preferred outcome and back-fill the legal logic to get there, but this one would be quite a stretch. I think it is going to take some legislative action to alter this issue.
I don't even think the government requires a warrant for taking pictures of vehicles on public streets. Actually, I know they don't. Nobody does. There is no expectation of privacy in public.
Many states already have networks of license plate readers, both for law enforcement purposes and for things like toll enforcement. They use that data to track known criminals - like estranged parents who kidnap their own children.
If they want to place a tracker on your car, they have to get a warrant. If they want to put you under heavy surveillance, they have to get a warrant. But just checking 'who is this" by running a plate doesn't require a warrant.
What the database does is blur the lines between those last two scenarios, since checking the plates of everyone passing several points throughout a city ends up building up a database that amounts to almost the same thing as tracking an individual all the time.
It would be weird and illogical to conclude that such databases are illegal. It would also be weird and illogical to conclude that our privacy rights can suddenly be eliminated because databases, cameras and text recognition became cheap.
There's no easy and obvious answer to this one. Someone's rights are going to end up being stepped on either way.
I actually think Nvidia has a bit of a point here, even if their "program" has some serious problems.
If I build a brand of graphics cards based on Nvidia chips... let's call it BlazeX... and I spend years building brand loyalty to BlazeX as the fastest cards available, Nvidia is hidden behind that brand. They'd like for people to associate BlazeX only with Nvidia chips, so when the BlazeX Value comes out, it has an Nvidia chipset and not an AMD or Intel chipset. In that scenario, the Nvidia-built reputation is selling AMD and Intel chips. Of course Nvidia finds that annoying.
This program would also provide Nvidia some room to breath if AMD happened to leapfrog them in one of the chipset cycles and come out with a much faster product. BlazeX would still have the cache of being the fastest and they'd still sell a lot of Nvidia chips while they played catchup.
Which of course explains why the manufacturers don't want to do things this way. They want people to associate their brand with "the best", not the chipset. That way you will always buy from them, even if they switch to Intel chips at a later date.
They had a chromebook for roughly the same price at the time. It was a little smaller, but it had a touch screen and a better build quality. Slower ARM processor though.
Comparing the windows version with a chromebook - the windows netbook feels more cramped, but has more flexibility in the software that it runs, since it is a full-on windows PC. I'd say Microsoft is trying to make their city bus into an economy car by shoving windows into this niche, but it does work OK. If they really slimmed it down like google did with ChromeOS, they'd have something.
Super cheap. Lightweight plastic body that is really thin and light... and probably not the most durable thing in the world.
No touch screen, but otherwise a good netbook. My only real complaint other than the storage is the big trackpad that is right where your palms rest.... but you kinda get used to it. As long as you recognize that this is built to be really cheap and grade on a curve for that, you'll be happy.
I haven't gotten around to moving everything around so I can try Mint, but I hear it runs pretty well.
A quick google search shows they are running anywhere from $140 to $200+ online at the moment. Still pretty cheap, but not the crazy deal that I got.
I am posting from a cheap windows netbook that I picked up for under a hundred bucks at Wal-mart. It does the job perfectly - provides a nice screen and good connectivity for browsing, web apps, email and video streaming. It has nice long battery life. And no hard drive. Just a tiny 32 gig "solid state drive". It does have an SD slot, but that gets treated as removable media, so installing stuff there is limited.
This means that after the first update to Windows downloaded the entire drive was full. I had to do some hoop-jumping just to get it completed. It has since pared itself down enough that I have 5 gigs free. Trimming 2 more gigs would be a great thing.
There is a hole in the liability system in this sort of case.
There is no bonus for "our cars are better drivers, so we saved thousands of lives and tens of thousands of injuries". There is only a penalty for "Aunt Sophie got run over".
So if 5 years from now Volkwagon sells a million cars in Europe that drive themselves and they cause 23 accidental deaths, they will be hit with a class-action style lawsuit for selling a defective product that killed almost two dozen people.
They probably won't even be able to argue that by being safer cars, they saved 87 lives, for a net of 65 people saved. It will just be "your product kills people!" And that will be that.
It is an interesting and complex problem that isn't handled at all by our legal and insurance framework as it exists.
Moving the risk to the manufacturer's insurance makes sense in this context. The problem with all self-driving robots being only under the manufacturer's liability would come in the "class action" type lawsuit, where some lawyer finds everyone who had an accident in that car and sues the manufacturer for creating a bad product.
In that world there is no way to have a calculus for "but we reduced the total number of accidents by 50%". Currently the calculus would be "Car company X caused 3,000 deaths." And then they go bankrupt. They wouldn't get any credit for "they saved a net of 3,000 lives". Drug company liability works like this - those weight loss drugs that caused heart valve damage might have saved a ton of lives and improved health overall through the prevention of heart disease, diabetes, etc. (not saying this is true... no idea) But nobody is putting that in their calculator. It was "this drug caused this problem, they are liable for all damages".
It would be really tough to move to a calculus based on the overall effect on all people. Moving all claims to the manufacturer would make that possible - but only if you removed 3rd party liabilities from the chain. (AKA the driver). If that is where we are headed, the transition is going to be really, really difficult.
The HD vinyl process involves converting audio digitally to a 3D topographic map. Lasers are then used to inscribe the map onto the "stamper,"
Or.. now hear me out on this one... or... we could just, you know, send the digitally converted audio, you know, without converting it back into a bumpy piece of plastic.
I know this might sound radical, but it seems to me that converting analog sound to digital format then to a digital 3d map then to a laser-cut stamper then to a piece of bumpy vinyl then to a vibrating stylus and into a varying electrical current to drive an amplification system to run the speakers that you listen to might just be a little more complicated than just taking the digital format for storage and transport and converting that back into analog sound at playback.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, by any rational measure, shorting Tesla should be a safe bet. There is understandably a lot of excitement around getting a half million preorders for the Model 3. That's cool!
But all of the top selling models sell more than that every year - not over a several year period, as Tesla plans. Ford sells over a million of their F series light pickup trucks every year. Makers like Ford, Toyota and VW would probably consider cancelling a small car that didn't move 50k units per year. Tesla didn't move 30k cars last year, in total.
Shorting a company that is priced above these giant multinationals even though even their aspirational numbers are not a significant percentage of the big carmakers certainly seems to make sense.
Which is why investing in stocks is so hard. What people do very often fails to make sense.
Hell, from a TCO point of view, a Model S can be cheaper than a Leaf after a sufficiently long distance driven (if you're, say, a professional driver), if the difference between gasoline price and electricity price is large enough since the Model S will pay for itself completely ($6/gal vs. $0.1/kWh in case of my country).
I don't really see how a Model S could be cheaper than a Leaf, or how a Model S could possibly pay for itself completely.
Even at $6 per gallon for gas, that means a sedan that gets 30 mpg costs $20k in gas per 100k miles. So even if electricity was free, you'd still need to drive a half a million miles just to pay for the Tesla, not including any electric infrastructure you need, like a charging station or electric box upgrades, and not accounting for interest on your $100k up front, as opposed to over a few years. And the Model S battery isn't going to last a half-million miles.
Numbers on the true life of a Model S battery and the true cost of replacement seem to be all over the place. But a replacement looks to be at least $20k - as much as 100k miles worth of gas at $6 per gallon, and a lifetime of no more than 150k miles.. maybe 200k miles. And that low estimate of $20k could be more like $45k if you believe other sources... and at that price you could never catch the gas sedan. It costs less to buy the gas than the replacement battery, even at $6 per gallon.
That's just not true. You can't just lie about someone (or some company) and be protected by the first amendment. Libel and Slander are actually things in the US, even with the first amendment protecting freedom of speech.
What you can do is share your opinion - any opinion - even if it is a stupid opinion, or even if it is a bad faith opinion. That's fully protected.
So you can say "Tesla makes crappy cars" and you are fine. But you can't say "Tesla cars are made from the bones of aborted fetuses". At least not seriously. But you could say that as a joke. And then it is protected speech again.
Perhaps you were thinking about criminality? You cannot generally be prosecuted for lying - unless it is under oath or to a government official. Perjury is a pretty serious crime, although relatively rarely prosecuted. And lying to government officials can be a big deal - the FBI is famous for using their interviews to get their mark for the procedural crime of obstructing their investigation by lying, even if it is an immaterial lie.
For anyone following along, I saw the perfect answer to this once. Only once. But it was a cool way of doing things.
These guys were starting a business from the ground up. In this case it was a mortgage business. So they went out and found the best of breed software for doing mortgages and designed all of their business processes around how the software works, figuring that many decades of experience across many dozens of companies was packed into that software.
So they did the whole thing "out of the box". Sales, accounting, finance, you name it. No customization costs. No clashes of ill-thought-out business rules. They even bought their telephone system based on the recommendation of their software vendor. So all of the integrations were ready to go right out of the box.
They were able to build and grow their business amazingly fast because of that decision. They told me that it saved them immeasurably in the "growing pains" that a startup would usually have.
It isn't a solution that is available to everyone, but if there is a best of breed ERP or CRM for your business, maybe that's the way to go.
late to your response, but I hope someone sees this anyway...
This is precisely the attitude that causes failure. People view IT as a service and a cost, separate from the business. This is the way to failure.
IT is not separate from the business, any more than sales, accounting, finance, manufacturing... it is all a team. Anyone who doesn't get that is an anchor dragging the company down. Unfortunately, lots of people still don't get this.
I have been in a situation where I loudly preached integration to both my employees and to the business unit. And it worked great. We all sell widgets. This guy might do it on the phone with customers, that guy does it by editing the contracts, and my team does it by building business systems. It worked great. We all fought for the best way of accomplishing the goal of selling widgets.
I've also been in the situation where people think "I work for them", as you say. My team of highly experienced technical people are merely service providers, competing with outsourced development teams on price and "customer satisfaction". That was a disaster. That attitude leads to a world where some sales manager is now the "IT Expert" who is going to design how the systems should work and look. You end up with something that is the equivalent of a skyscraper built out of cardboard but with a lovely gold-leaf façade. And productivity plummets.
They got rid of an IT team that had more experience and knowledge of the industry than anyone in the business unit. A team that could tell them "that didn't work when we tried it 10 years ago, and here is why". All because they enjoyed having a relationship with IT that went "I ask, they build".
They were pretty happy with themselves. They built a system based on a "workflow" tool, so they could make changes themselves. The custom screens we built for the prior system that predicted exactly what an employee needed to be doing and presented exactly what they needed to accomplish the task were gone. The automated call routing based on exactly who among 7 or 8 different groups needed to speak with the customer was gone. The outbound predictive dialing based on dozens of criteria across multiple job functions... gone. The automation of all activity onto the accounting subledger and then to the GL...gone.
But they did get "wizards" that helped with training. So instead of having one screen specific to the task that presented exactly what information was needed and exactly what should be collected, they got 8 or 15 screens in a script that walked them through collecting the data. So if they just needed to add a birthday to a person's file, they had to step through 15 screens, instead of just one screen with the missing fields prominently displayed.
I don't know if they ever figured out that productivity had plummeted because of their choices. I don't think they ever connected the fact that they had to hire almost twice as many support staff under the new IT system with the fact that they deployed the new IT system. Managers were happy because they had control, and nobody to tell them "we tried it that way before, it doesn't work because of X". They just said "Ok, here's your work order to sign off on".
The way to run a business properly is to realize that everyone is a part of a team that is pushing for the same goal. This view values the input of the clerk, the shipping guy, the accountant, the IT guys, everyone. A good IT department is where this attitude lives, because they touch every aspect of the business.
A senior executive can discount the impact of lots of jobs. The IT business systems team can't. They need to know exactly what that staff accountant does. They need to know what that clerk does with the file that ends up on her desk. You can't handwave away a part of the business when you are building the systems that people will use. It doesn't work like that. You have to know all of the steps. So an intelligent executive will highly value his IT team's expertise and input, because they will likely know more details about the overall business than anyone else in the building.
Not "is messing up", but "could mess up in the future" in that very specific way, should CO2 trends continue.
The idea is that food crops will grow faster and pack on more sugars (starches) in their seed, thereby diluting the amount of nutrients per calorie. They tested this by pumping in additional CO2 and confirmed their theory, grains grown in enhanced CO2 environments have greater yields with more calories per hectare, but less nutrients per calorie.
This all assumes a static set of strains, with no action taken by farmers and seed producers to create different varieties that better exploit the conditions, and that grains are important for providing things beyond their core starches.
This guy gets it!
That is exactly the kind of scenario where a knowledgeable in-house IT staff will make a big difference. Because not only will they know that the guys on the loading dock need things organized by vehicle, they will know that the guys pulling stock need it in order by location - so they'll recommend two different versions of the same list on tablets with barcode scanners.
The guy in shipping wouldn't know or care about that. And the guy in fulfilment wouldn't know or care about the guy in shipping's issues.
But the IT guy would know that accounting really wants to keep track of inventory and needs to move items on the GL as soon as they are put in the truck. So they'll talk to accounting about automating that pull list onto a subledger.
Expert in-house staff is worth a lot more money than any perceived extra costs.
In fairness I've heard that about just about every management strategy I can think of.
This is the nut of the problem. It always comes down to people, and the most productive teams are going to rub some people the wrong way because often times the most productive way of getting something done is to say "no".
I've worked with the "just give them what they ask for" crowd. It is just awful.
It works for a while. They are sooooo happy! You gave them that stupid thing that will never work in a million years! Then after a while, things are a mess and they still blame the dev team.
The only way that I've found to work with them is to have the backing of their superiors when you look them in the eye and tell them no. Anything less than the full backing from the top levels ends in disaster - methodology be damned.
This is why outsourcing can be so bad. You need the institutional knowledge that a good group of developers will have. And you need an executive team that has confidence in their developers so that when they push back against some dumb initiative they will have their backs.
I can't tell you how many times I've had near mutiny when I explained why something was stupid and had the CEO tell me to do it anyway, just to keep someone happy. No competent developer wants to waste his time building something he knows isn't going to work. But at least I was able to tell them that their concerns were heard and why they were dismissed. (and at least they knew I wasn't crazy, and their CEO wasn't crazy... or stupid)
Absent that connection, I don't know how things can work, long term. With good managers and executives, you could make outsourcing work. But eventually that guy who just doesn't get it is going to come along and insist on his vanity project. And the guys from India are just going to say "Ok, here's the bill". Maybe they fire the local PM when the whole things goes to crap. Or change development companies. But will they even be able to see that the problem was the idea behind the vanity project wasn't any good from the start? Often it is the dev team that is uniquiely positioned to know this, because they've had years of experience with all of the company's business rules and past mistakes.
So if there is no mechanism for continuity of business knowledge and no respect for that knowledge at the top.... well, I don't see how it could possibly succeed, long term.
This is spot on.
Breaking things into the smallest increments and getting the most productive ones out into the hands of the users quickly is really important.
When I was working for a small startup, we released changes "as soon as they were ready". Sometimes we'd have multiple releases in one day. Managers ran into issues where they needed a new feature and we built it, right away.
Later, as the company became a big, publicly traded company, this became more difficult. We implemented SDLC controls, signoffs, treining, etc. Releases became monthly.
Nobody on the development team liked it. All kinds of crap kept getting stuffed into monthly releases. Things that they knew were not going to be used - manager's pet projects.
Agile came along and rescued them. The small teams were able to push back against managers with ideas that didn't match how people work - getting features that lower level employees needed to do their jobs implemented quickly.
Those small changes add up quickly to be major changes. And they can be rolled out without much disruption, unlike big, three month long projects with lots of changes.
It requires people who can think like that ... taking a long term strategy and breaking it up into tiny, incremental steps. And especially making each step a productive change. There are a lot of people who don't think like that.
I agree.
I think what he might be referring to is the old problem of "urgent but unimportant" stuff getting done before "not urgent, but important" stuff.
I had an executive who was particularly "imaginative" in his development requests. He was enamored of whatever he saw elsewhere an wanted one for himself. His requests were so fast and varied that he became frustrated that he couldn't have everything... so I made him give me his "top 3" list. Give me 3 things, and we'll work on those first.
So his team gets together and after more than a month of planning, they come up with a 7 item "top 3" list. And we start work on the top 3. Every week we were going to have a progress report. So they come to the first progress report meeting all excited. They have a new project... the most important one. It needed to go to the top of the list. So I named it "project zero", since it came before project number one.
A year later the executive was under some pressure and was angry that none of his "top three" requests of a year earlier had been finished. So I showed up at a meeting with the CEO and COO with a stack of change requests... 50 of them, one from each weekly meeting, where he signed off on "don't work on those things, work on this new request". Somehow he still didn't understand that he was the one makeing the decision not to work on his "top three" items.
He was the embodiment of the "ooh, shiny" approach to decision making.
Working with that guy in an agile environment really didn't make any difference. The only thing that would have worked for him was to have unlimited resources. That way he could have a whole new CRM every month, new websites on a weekly basis, new accounting packages every other month, etc. Surely that would have worked out for his team, right?
They actually have really cool forms that are built from bricks of insulating foam and plastic connecters. They are left in place and provide the insulation for the home. A shell built with this technology can be cheaper, stronger, and faster than a regular home, with great thermal properties. Still, it isn't the most popular technology out there.
Here's a Wikipedia article about the tech that reveals that it has been around a long time, even though I only recall seeing it popularized in the 90's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Interestingly, the FBI is currently alleging that the use of communications platforms with encryption such as WhatsApp amounts to obstruction of justice and evidence of criminal intent when used to communicate with people who might eventually become witnesses - even if they are witnesses for the defense.
So all of you folks who poo-poo the slippery slope argument... well, there you go. They are also all over companies like Apple for building encryption into their phones and have used the fact that devices are encrypted as evidence of criminal intent.
England is currently living out the argumentum ad absurdum from the gun control debate - having outlawed guns and the sorts of knives used for hunting or defense and finding that people are still violent, they are now talking about banning kitchen knives with pointed ends.
Give the government and inch, and they'll use that inch against you.
Yeah, I had a few friends recommend "Lost" very highly. By the time I finished the first season I had them all on the "don't ever take advice from that guy again" list. It should have been clear to everyone pretty quickly that the only purpose of the mysteries was to have mysteries. They kept changing it from science to supernatural to alien to whatever.... It was a mess.
Well, that and the nonsensical style of dialog. Characters would just stop talking in the middle of an argument for no apparent reason an then walk away... plot exposition having been accomplished. It was weird and off-putting.
Unfortunately my wife was convinced that our friends had to be on to something, so we kept watching for a couple of additional seasons. She kept expecting for things to be revealed, even though I kept arguing that they were just sitting around the writer's room making stuff up. "No, wait... let's put a polar bear on the island. It will look sooooo coo!!"
The "public information" is "a car with this license plate is in this intersection right now". Anybody can look and see.
The thing that is new (and privately held) is the ability to have a gigantic list of every car that drives through a long list of intersections at any point in time over the last five years. In years gone by that would have required paying someone to sit at all of those intersections writing down license plates and times. But now a computer can do it tirelessly for very little cost. So something that has always been "public" suddenly takes on a new character when collated and stored like this.
The list may be privately held and available for rent, but it is a list of "public" information in that sense. You can't say "Hey! You aren't allowed to notice that I drove past the courthouse today!" And the privately held list is publicly available in the sense that if you are willing to pay, you can have a peek. It isn't secret in any other sense.
And thanks for that link... there's a lot of action on this front right now. These checkpoints are not an issue where I live, even though I'm in a border zone. But I do know that people in western border zones feel that they are being used for more nefarious purposes. A checkpoint 100 miles from the nearest border is pretty sketchy to begin with, and I've seen a lot of activists who are suspecting that they are being used more for pretexts to other kinds of arrests - like drug interdiction, weapons charges, etc. I've seen quite a few videos from activists attempting to assert those supreme court rulings and being subjected to prolonged stops when they refuse unrelated questions like "where are you going? Where are you coming from?" and simply provide proof of citizenship. Like anything, there's the theory and then there's the reality. These are like Terry stops - ostensibly for one purpose, but in reality used for entirely different reasons.
Well then you are just wrong. It is that simple. If you are walking down a public street, anyone can take your picture. You haven't got a leg to stand on. If they can see it with their own eyes from a public place, you cannot expect it to be private. Not only is this patently obvious, it is settled law.
The only thing that made it even contentious was the fact that the state had decided you couldn't take pictures of their operatives in public. So police making an arrest would arrest people for videoing the encounter. And the politicians supported them. But the courts slapped them down. You have an absolute right to record things you see in public.
There was a whole movement to fix that bit of overreach by the state - a lot of which is documented over at PhotographyIsNotACrime. Quite a few people went to jail fighting to make sure that you continue to enjoy your first amendment rights to record public officials in public spaces. And even though it is now settled law, the state continues to try to violate these rights (as is well documented by the nutty "right to photograph" crowd over at PINAC.)
As for whether the state has the power to collect all this data..... well, anyone who would like to follow the 9th, 10th and 14th amendments would probably have to say no way. There's no grant of mass surveillance powers to the state in the constitution, so absent an amendment granting that power, it would seem that they lack that power. But as you clearly well understand... .that ship has sailed. The 9th and 10th are dead as doornails and the 14th is rarely used to rein in state powers these days.
ICE has extremely broad authority. They can stop any vehicle in a "border zone" and search it without probable cause. Which makes sense at a border crossing, right?
But what is a "border zone"? Get ready... this one is a doozy. Everything within 100 miles of a border is a "border zone". Do you live in a border zone?
All of Florida, Almost all of Michigan, almost all of New York, most of New England and a majority of the US population lives in a border zone.
They have also asserted authority over the areas around "border crossings", not just along the border. What's that? Airports, principally. So a 100 mile radius around every airport with international flights. So that would cover pretty much everyone else.
So I really doubt that using publicly available information to find illegals is going to be found unconstitutional. Not if you can make pretty much anyone in most all of the US prove their citizenship without even probable cause. I know the court loves to pick their preferred outcome and back-fill the legal logic to get there, but this one would be quite a stretch. I think it is going to take some legislative action to alter this issue.
I don't even think the government requires a warrant for taking pictures of vehicles on public streets. Actually, I know they don't. Nobody does. There is no expectation of privacy in public.
Many states already have networks of license plate readers, both for law enforcement purposes and for things like toll enforcement. They use that data to track known criminals - like estranged parents who kidnap their own children.
If they want to place a tracker on your car, they have to get a warrant. If they want to put you under heavy surveillance, they have to get a warrant. But just checking 'who is this" by running a plate doesn't require a warrant.
What the database does is blur the lines between those last two scenarios, since checking the plates of everyone passing several points throughout a city ends up building up a database that amounts to almost the same thing as tracking an individual all the time.
It would be weird and illogical to conclude that such databases are illegal. It would also be weird and illogical to conclude that our privacy rights can suddenly be eliminated because databases, cameras and text recognition became cheap.
There's no easy and obvious answer to this one. Someone's rights are going to end up being stepped on either way.
I actually think Nvidia has a bit of a point here, even if their "program" has some serious problems.
If I build a brand of graphics cards based on Nvidia chips... let's call it BlazeX... and I spend years building brand loyalty to BlazeX as the fastest cards available, Nvidia is hidden behind that brand. They'd like for people to associate BlazeX only with Nvidia chips, so when the BlazeX Value comes out, it has an Nvidia chipset and not an AMD or Intel chipset. In that scenario, the Nvidia-built reputation is selling AMD and Intel chips. Of course Nvidia finds that annoying.
This program would also provide Nvidia some room to breath if AMD happened to leapfrog them in one of the chipset cycles and come out with a much faster product. BlazeX would still have the cache of being the fastest and they'd still sell a lot of Nvidia chips while they played catchup.
Which of course explains why the manufacturers don't want to do things this way. They want people to associate their brand with "the best", not the chipset. That way you will always buy from them, even if they switch to Intel chips at a later date.
They had a chromebook for roughly the same price at the time. It was a little smaller, but it had a touch screen and a better build quality. Slower ARM processor though.
Comparing the windows version with a chromebook - the windows netbook feels more cramped, but has more flexibility in the software that it runs, since it is a full-on windows PC. I'd say Microsoft is trying to make their city bus into an economy car by shoving windows into this niche, but it does work OK. If they really slimmed it down like google did with ChromeOS, they'd have something.
It is an HP Stream 14. Model X7S52UA#ABA
Super cheap. Lightweight plastic body that is really thin and light... and probably not the most durable thing in the world.
No touch screen, but otherwise a good netbook. My only real complaint other than the storage is the big trackpad that is right where your palms rest.... but you kinda get used to it. As long as you recognize that this is built to be really cheap and grade on a curve for that, you'll be happy.
I haven't gotten around to moving everything around so I can try Mint, but I hear it runs pretty well.
A quick google search shows they are running anywhere from $140 to $200+ online at the moment. Still pretty cheap, but not the crazy deal that I got.
I am posting from a cheap windows netbook that I picked up for under a hundred bucks at Wal-mart. It does the job perfectly - provides a nice screen and good connectivity for browsing, web apps, email and video streaming. It has nice long battery life. And no hard drive. Just a tiny 32 gig "solid state drive". It does have an SD slot, but that gets treated as removable media, so installing stuff there is limited.
This means that after the first update to Windows downloaded the entire drive was full. I had to do some hoop-jumping just to get it completed. It has since pared itself down enough that I have 5 gigs free. Trimming 2 more gigs would be a great thing.
There is a hole in the liability system in this sort of case.
There is no bonus for "our cars are better drivers, so we saved thousands of lives and tens of thousands of injuries". There is only a penalty for "Aunt Sophie got run over".
So if 5 years from now Volkwagon sells a million cars in Europe that drive themselves and they cause 23 accidental deaths, they will be hit with a class-action style lawsuit for selling a defective product that killed almost two dozen people.
They probably won't even be able to argue that by being safer cars, they saved 87 lives, for a net of 65 people saved. It will just be "your product kills people!" And that will be that.
It is an interesting and complex problem that isn't handled at all by our legal and insurance framework as it exists.
Moving the risk to the manufacturer's insurance makes sense in this context. The problem with all self-driving robots being only under the manufacturer's liability would come in the "class action" type lawsuit, where some lawyer finds everyone who had an accident in that car and sues the manufacturer for creating a bad product.
In that world there is no way to have a calculus for "but we reduced the total number of accidents by 50%". Currently the calculus would be "Car company X caused 3,000 deaths." And then they go bankrupt. They wouldn't get any credit for "they saved a net of 3,000 lives". Drug company liability works like this - those weight loss drugs that caused heart valve damage might have saved a ton of lives and improved health overall through the prevention of heart disease, diabetes, etc. (not saying this is true... no idea) But nobody is putting that in their calculator. It was "this drug caused this problem, they are liable for all damages".
It would be really tough to move to a calculus based on the overall effect on all people. Moving all claims to the manufacturer would make that possible - but only if you removed 3rd party liabilities from the chain. (AKA the driver). If that is where we are headed, the transition is going to be really, really difficult.
Or.. now hear me out on this one... or ... we could just, you know, send the digitally converted audio, you know, without converting it back into a bumpy piece of plastic.
I know this might sound radical, but it seems to me that converting analog sound to digital format then to a digital 3d map then to a laser-cut stamper then to a piece of bumpy vinyl then to a vibrating stylus and into a varying electrical current to drive an amplification system to run the speakers that you listen to might just be a little more complicated than just taking the digital format for storage and transport and converting that back into analog sound at playback.