There are several problems with companies chasing the cheapest solution via outsourcing:
1. They don't save as much as they think due to increased costs of management due to communication problems and high turnover. However, these are harder to bean count, so they often don't figure into the picture. This is a major flaw of American business: if you can't quantify it, it's insignificant. Tell that to Gateway who used to be the largest PC manufacturer, but lost that when their customers bailed due to poor customer service.
2. You now have much of your intellectual capital in a foreign country with different laws, and in the case of ones like China, laws that can be changed when it suites the leaders. So when your cheap labor decides they can compete with you cheaper, courtesy of you who paid to train them and grow them enough to be a threat, you're screwed. Most of the jobs being outscored are for companies that could just as well be owned and operated from India!
That 50 dollar tool? It's just so much more pollution, and wasted energy.
Yes, bur for cordless tools, the battery won't last 5 years no matter how much you pay. So, might as well get the cheap one. Batteries for either will cost more than getting a whole new tool. (I've had this happen several times, even with nearly $200 tools.) Our economy is set up to be resource inefficient because labor is so expensive, even if made in China. It's just cheaper to toss everything that breaks and buy new due to the huge economies of scale.
I'm probably somewhat rare in that I try to recycle anything I can, but most stuff you just can't without PAYING to do so. Not worth it.
If this is a cordless tool, it really doesn't matter how long it lasts. The batteries of any power tool, made in China, US or anywhere else, will be dead in two years tops. At that point, its' cheaper to buy another drill. So the cheap power tool is actually matched to last as long as the batteries. My brother, a licensed contractor, bought the made in the US $500 drill. While it was an awesome drill, the batteries just don't last either. Maybe somewhat longer than the cheap brand, but certainly not twice as long.
A larger problem is that people purchased based on initial cost only, not life cycle cost. (Otherwise, there would be no Microsoft or Chrysler for that matter.) Replacement parts cost more than a new unit because people just don't fix stuff or purchase based on what will be cheapest to fix. No batteries are going to last 5 years in a power tool.
Now I do try to stay away from "made in China" because it is mostly junk, but nearly all cordless drills are made there or somewhere similar. Even the once stout Milwaukee's drills are made in China with the possible exception of their $500 models. (Now that they are owned by the same parent that makes Ryobi, the crappiest power tools on the market.) DeWalt? Made in China. Makita? Same.
Well, the gimmicky gadgets are part of what makes R&C so fun. They've had quite a few clever ones over the years, but they support game play, not detract from it.
Yes, I picked up a copy of Blinx and it was what I thought about when I first read this article. However, R&C games are very well done (having played all of them) and very fun. I'm totally looking forward to this one.
My wife had a Palm Treo with Windows Mobile. It was the worst, most pathetic attempt at an OS I've ever seen.
It locked up constantly, got to where you could not actually make calls, ran out of memory, etc. Settings scattered through like 17 different sub-panels, combined with a ton of completely useless settings. Doing anything required far too many clicks. Bluetooth? Forget about reliability. It would just refused to connect to the headset after a while until one power cycled it. Email was painfully slow, particularly when you had attachments or images. And the need to manually delete stuff when it ran out of memory was just crazy. And audio would sometimes just stop working. No ringing, no voice, nothing.
But my favorite was how it handled text messages. Every now and then, she'd need to delete a bunch of them because it ran out of memory (a user should never have to worry about this, IMHO.) Deleting all of the messages took at least half an hour. No exaggeration. I've never seen anything that lame. It's like they were deleting the first, moving all the others down in memory, rewriting them to flash, then repeating.
Even trying to turn the thing of was nearly impossible to figure out. To reboot, it was faster to just pop out battery.
She returned one and got another, no better. She then got an iPhone and loves it.
I got a PS3 for basically the same reasons: Bluray and a few cool games. I'm not really into FPS, just too repetitive and generally not fun. I did like the latest Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction which was very fun and not really a shooter (although you shoot a lot, but more of a platformer.) I wish they'd come out with more platformers for the PS3. The LEGO games aren't half bad, albeit easy.
Of course, with work, gym, wife and other hobbies, my play time is very, very sporadic.
I have personally received such a warning from Verizon. While they may not actually monitor BT, they certainly will enforce complaints from "copyright holders".
And I'm guessing we'll see TiVo support that around 2034, no open computers will support it and since the cable companies have no real incentive to offer it, it's pretty much just an exercise in politics.
Don't know, but I have Verizon FiOS and the FireWire port has NEVER worked. Always "reserved for a future update." And I think they only require SD, not HD, so it's almost useless with large screen TVs the norm these days.
Same with the Verizon FiOS DVR. It's completely crap. You hit play, and it sometimes freezes, screen goes black and you need to unplug it to restart. That and it has a tiny hard drive and you can't filter out channels you don't subscribe to, since they figure if you see them all the time, you'll eventually want them enough to pay $350/mo to get all of them. Right.
Indeed, the WSJ is one of the very, very few decent news sources available. All the others are just shills for either the left or the right. It's just too bad Murdoch controls it.
Man, that's the one that ticks me off the most. I can't believe how bad Word is at doing something so basic. Even copy and pasting text between Microsoft applications will be screwed up 80% of the time. I can't even fathom how messed up it is.
I think a lot of issues come to how it tags formatting to the end-of-paragraph marker. If you delete the paragraph break by hitting delete from a previous paragraph, it will reformat your previous paragraph to be whatever the next paragraph is. That's just confusing and never what I want.
Anymore, I do most of my light word processing in Text Edit on the Mac. I just don't do much, so it's fine for an occasional letter or todo list.
Of course, the/. comment editor makes Word look well-designed... Paragraphs with NO spacing between them? Come on!
Indeed, I've come to like asio. I started using it before it became part of Boost, and it just works. Very minimal code, particularly coupled with Boost's threading. Works on Linux and Mac OS, which is all I care about.
Way, way better than Open Transport on the Mac. That was just horrible in every way imaginable.
I've had Comcast in three different cities. They were great in one, and sucked unbelievably in the two others. I finally had to cancel where I am now because they couldn't get me a static-free picture or more than 128 kbps Internet. They sent 7 technicians out, none of whom were authorized to actually fix anything. I have Verizon FIOS now and I'm relatively happy, other than their pact with satan (i.e. MPAA / RIAA) and the three strikes policy.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several problems with companies chasing the cheapest solution via outsourcing:
1. They don't save as much as they think due to increased costs of management due to communication problems and high turnover. However, these are harder to bean count, so they often don't figure into the picture. This is a major flaw of American business: if you can't quantify it, it's insignificant. Tell that to Gateway who used to be the largest PC manufacturer, but lost that when their customers bailed due to poor customer service.
2. You now have much of your intellectual capital in a foreign country with different laws, and in the case of ones like China, laws that can be changed when it suites the leaders. So when your cheap labor decides they can compete with you cheaper, courtesy of you who paid to train them and grow them enough to be a threat, you're screwed. Most of the jobs being outscored are for companies that could just as well be owned and operated from India!
That 50 dollar tool? It's just so much more pollution, and wasted energy.
Yes, bur for cordless tools, the battery won't last 5 years no matter how much you pay. So, might as well get the cheap one. Batteries for either will cost more than getting a whole new tool. (I've had this happen several times, even with nearly $200 tools.) Our economy is set up to be resource inefficient because labor is so expensive, even if made in China. It's just cheaper to toss everything that breaks and buy new due to the huge economies of scale.
I'm probably somewhat rare in that I try to recycle anything I can, but most stuff you just can't without PAYING to do so. Not worth it.
If this is a cordless tool, it really doesn't matter how long it lasts. The batteries of any power tool, made in China, US or anywhere else, will be dead in two years tops. At that point, its' cheaper to buy another drill. So the cheap power tool is actually matched to last as long as the batteries. My brother, a licensed contractor, bought the made in the US $500 drill. While it was an awesome drill, the batteries just don't last either. Maybe somewhat longer than the cheap brand, but certainly not twice as long.
A larger problem is that people purchased based on initial cost only, not life cycle cost. (Otherwise, there would be no Microsoft or Chrysler for that matter.) Replacement parts cost more than a new unit because people just don't fix stuff or purchase based on what will be cheapest to fix. No batteries are going to last 5 years in a power tool.
Now I do try to stay away from "made in China" because it is mostly junk, but nearly all cordless drills are made there or somewhere similar. Even the once stout Milwaukee's drills are made in China with the possible exception of their $500 models. (Now that they are owned by the same parent that makes Ryobi, the crappiest power tools on the market.) DeWalt? Made in China. Makita? Same.
Well, the gimmicky gadgets are part of what makes R&C so fun. They've had quite a few clever ones over the years, but they support game play, not detract from it.
Yes, I picked up a copy of Blinx and it was what I thought about when I first read this article. However, R&C games are very well done (having played all of them) and very fun. I'm totally looking forward to this one.
My wife had a Palm Treo with Windows Mobile. It was the worst, most pathetic attempt at an OS I've ever seen.
It locked up constantly, got to where you could not actually make calls, ran out of memory, etc. Settings scattered through like 17 different sub-panels, combined with a ton of completely useless settings. Doing anything required far too many clicks. Bluetooth? Forget about reliability. It would just refused to connect to the headset after a while until one power cycled it. Email was painfully slow, particularly when you had attachments or images. And the need to manually delete stuff when it ran out of memory was just crazy. And audio would sometimes just stop working. No ringing, no voice, nothing.
But my favorite was how it handled text messages. Every now and then, she'd need to delete a bunch of them because it ran out of memory (a user should never have to worry about this, IMHO.) Deleting all of the messages took at least half an hour. No exaggeration. I've never seen anything that lame. It's like they were deleting the first, moving all the others down in memory, rewriting them to flash, then repeating.
Even trying to turn the thing of was nearly impossible to figure out. To reboot, it was faster to just pop out battery.
She returned one and got another, no better. She then got an iPhone and loves it.
I got a PS3 for basically the same reasons: Bluray and a few cool games. I'm not really into FPS, just too repetitive and generally not fun. I did like the latest Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction which was very fun and not really a shooter (although you shoot a lot, but more of a platformer.) I wish they'd come out with more platformers for the PS3. The LEGO games aren't half bad, albeit easy.
Of course, with work, gym, wife and other hobbies, my play time is very, very sporadic.
I have personally received such a warning from Verizon. While they may not actually monitor BT, they certainly will enforce complaints from "copyright holders".
And I'm guessing we'll see TiVo support that around 2034, no open computers will support it and since the cable companies have no real incentive to offer it, it's pretty much just an exercise in politics.
Don't know, but I have Verizon FiOS and the FireWire port has NEVER worked. Always "reserved for a future update." And I think they only require SD, not HD, so it's almost useless with large screen TVs the norm these days.
And if you have Verizon or Comcast, they'll monitor that and shut of your Internet access. What next, dialup?
Same with the Verizon FiOS DVR. It's completely crap. You hit play, and it sometimes freezes, screen goes black and you need to unplug it to restart. That and it has a tiny hard drive and you can't filter out channels you don't subscribe to, since they figure if you see them all the time, you'll eventually want them enough to pay $350/mo to get all of them. Right.
Indeed, the WSJ is one of the very, very few decent news sources available. All the others are just shills for either the left or the right. It's just too bad Murdoch controls it.
Fonts get continually screwed up.
Man, that's the one that ticks me off the most. I can't believe how bad Word is at doing something so basic. Even copy and pasting text between Microsoft applications will be screwed up 80% of the time. I can't even fathom how messed up it is.
I think a lot of issues come to how it tags formatting to the end-of-paragraph marker. If you delete the paragraph break by hitting delete from a previous paragraph, it will reformat your previous paragraph to be whatever the next paragraph is. That's just confusing and never what I want.
Anymore, I do most of my light word processing in Text Edit on the Mac. I just don't do much, so it's fine for an occasional letter or todo list.
Of course, the /. comment editor makes Word look well-designed... Paragraphs with NO spacing between them? Come on!
Ah, a case of the cure worse than the disease! That doesn't sound pleasant.
Yes, but ammonia isn't marketed as something you snort or drink. Zicam is indeed marketed as a nasal spray.
Indeed, I've come to like asio. I started using it before it became part of Boost, and it just works. Very minimal code, particularly coupled with Boost's threading. Works on Linux and Mac OS, which is all I care about.
Way, way better than Open Transport on the Mac. That was just horrible in every way imaginable.
I've had Comcast in three different cities. They were great in one, and sucked unbelievably in the two others. I finally had to cancel where I am now because they couldn't get me a static-free picture or more than 128 kbps Internet. They sent 7 technicians out, none of whom were authorized to actually fix anything. I have Verizon FIOS now and I'm relatively happy, other than their pact with satan (i.e. MPAA / RIAA) and the three strikes policy.
Would that be Aethernet?
More here
Same here. Reloading did work. Thankfully, I'm clean!
...to drive up those advertisement dollars? "But look at how many people posted in April! Clearly our user growth is astounding!"
It's not like TPB could have a sense of humor, or anything. Pirates are all very serious.
I was thinking a better story would be that Microsoft bought slashdot and replaces all the moderators, except kdawson.
Wow, the place you worked was being ripped off. We pay much less than that per transaction and nothing if the card is rejected for any reason.
I'm thinking that people who need such a warning probably can't read. Perhaps some gory pictograph would be more appropriate?
So that's how Obama keeps his new Presidential Blackberry so secure!