This is coming from a cable company. Their primary product is television. If ever there was an industry stuck in the dark ages it's television.
"We're in the business of delivering what consumers want..." - That is laughable to say the least. What they are really in the business of is extracting every last dime from consumers that they can get away with. Cable companies are in a semi-monopoly position and the service shows it. As better entertainment options continue to surface, cable cutting continues.
Google is the Steam Engine, Time Warner is the horse and buggy. TW is stubbornly clinging to yesterday's cash cow while Google continues to explore the future.
If I had the option of gigabit internet in my neighborhood I would jump on it in an instant. So would many other people I suspect.
I was impressed with WebOS. It seems very well thought out and smooth. I was less impressed with the selection of WebOS Apps available though. About half of them seemed to be designed for a phone rather than a tablet so all you saw was this tiny window instead of a full screen program. Cyanogenmod (the Linux OS you are referring to) runs really well although you have to jump through a few hoops to get it to work with Google Play. Once that is working, all the Android Apps are available to you. The issue with the camera appears to have been fixed.
WebOS is a really good OS. I grabbed one of those HP Touchpads and was very impressed by the OS. But...there aren't any good Apps for it. And I don't see why anyone would want to start writing them. At this point it's basically a two horse race - iOS and Android. It would be nice to see a WebOS update for my Touchpad but I'm not holding my breath.
I'd have to get my hands on one to try it out but for $169 it's not a bad deal. Yes, the video resolution is a bit weak but it's got Android 4.1 and expandable SD storage and Beats Audio. I snagged one of the 32GB Touchpads and the audio on that is terrific. The expandable storage option alone makes it worthy of consideration.
I've tried those cheap Chinese made tablets and the touch screens on them are universally horrible. You're having to hit the same icon 3 or 4 times before it works right. On an iPad or good Android tablet you can see the difference immediately. That will be the test for the HP tablet. If it has a good touchscreen, with the proper level of sensitivity, then I think it will sell well.
If you compare it to the Nexus 7 it's got a chance. The Nexus 7 comes with 16GB for $199. You can upgrade to 32GB for $249. For about $200 (the HP tablet plus a $30 SD card) you'll have a tablet with 40GB of storage.
The downside for the Slate may prove to be the (relatively) crappy screen. The screen on the Nexus 7 is nothing short of phenomenal.
That's pretty much how it worked for me. I would switch jobs about every 2 years and every time I would get a substantial raise, not the 3% BS that employees are supposed to be happy to get. I've seen too many people stagnate in their jobs waiting for their boss to die so they can get a promotion. The cold hard facts are that management doesn't want to promote you if you are good at your current job. Your replacement might not work out.
Newsflash - your boss doesn't care about your career..he cares about his career. Sure, he might throw you a bone now and again but make no mistake...he will fire you at the drop of a hat to save his own ass. So with that sort of loyalty why stick around unless it benefits you? Pension? Please...those went the way of the Dodo bird. Benefits? Two weeks vacation (if you can get permission to use it) and medical benefits (well, up until Obama care kicks in fully, then we'll see who is still offering that). Big fucking deal.
"Heck, even if you don't want to leave your current job, telling them you're about to leave (after 2-3yrs of tenure) is the only way to get them to give a real raise." - I was with you until there. If you tell them you are leaving you're probably going to get fired or first in line at the next layoff. My advice? Don't threaten to leave - just leave. Thank them for everything and move on. Line up another job, make sure you're getting more money, give them 2 weeks notice, and split.
I fell for that crap the last time I worked for a big company. They promised me 4 weeks vacation plus sick time. Sounded great. The problem was that whenever I tried to use the vacation I was always told that "the project needs you now". Unused vacation could be carried over "at management's discretion". In other words, you might be able to carry over your vacation time - time that was awarded to you as part of your employment agreement - but only if some asshole in management says that it's ok. Otherwise it's gone and you get no compensation for it.
So what did I do? I started calling in sick (conveniently, for me, on Fridays and Mondays to stretch out the weekend). Then I set in place a plan to resign before the end of the year. That way, the company HAS to pay me for unused vacation time by law.
That was when I started contracting...and I never looked back.
Moral of the story? Don't trust big companies. They are out to screw you. When you contract you get paid for every hour you work.
"If the customers don't know what they want, you teach them" - Umm...if the customer doesn't know what they want then the project is in deep and immediate trouble. It is the customers business to run and if they don't know what they want they had damn well better figure it out before they spend a boatload of money on a team of consultants.
I have worked on many large projects, some with government agencies some with large private companies, and the most successful ones have a common thread. The common thread is that the critical project decisions are a collaborative effort, not simply punted to the consultants to say "here, you figure it out". If a company has management that is unwilling or unable to make decisions that company will fail. I don't care how many consultants you bring in, if the management cannot articulate how the business is currently run and what the future goals are the project will fail.
Are there shitty consultants out there? Sure. Just like there are company executives that have no business running a lemonade stand, never mind a multi-billion dollar company or large government office. To succeed you need talent on both sides.
Some of the government IT systems that I have been exposed to are arcane, to say the least. Often they have little or no documentation and are extremely complex. Many of the agencies are under funded and under staffed. Talent and motivation, frankly, are sometimes lacking. Basically it's a difficult environment to work in.
Really big projects like this have a high failure rate. There are a multitude of reasons, some of them above. I suspect that both sides share in the blame.
I don't think anyone has a problem with him cashing out his shares. He was a founder, he's entitled to do what he wants with his shares. It's just a little alarming - at least to me - to see someone completely divest themselves from a company they helped found so quickly. Particularly since it's right when Blackberry is at a very crucial point. It sends a message that he has lot faith in the company. Some investors might be left to wonder if he knows something they don't.
He starts out by saying that people should not rely on the government for everything then proceeds to lay out all sorts of objectives that...guess what...set up government so that people rely on it. For example...
1) Universal Preschool education - nice idea...who's going to pay for it? 2) Build up the infrastructure - another nice idea but wasn't that what the Tarp funds were supposed to do, at least in part? What, exactly, did we get for all those billions of dollars that were supposed to be directed towards "shovel ready" projects? 3) Tax reform - let's make the rich pay again. When the Republicans agreed to the recent tax increases the Democrat part of the deal was to agree to reduce spending. I'm still waiting for the reduce spending part. I watched the entire speech and I don't recall a single word mentioned about cutting spending. 4) $9/hr minimum wage - Sounds good but it's a job killer. Companies will simply not hire people. They already have the Affordable Care Act (Obama-care) to deal with. 5) Corporate Tax Reform - He wants to go after corporate profits offshore. Sounds good until you become an American expat. Then they will go after YOUR money too. Think you can escape taxes by living abroad? Think again. Currently the only legal way to do that is to renounce your US citizenship. The number of people taking this route has grown dramatically over the past few years. Laws passed that were intended to go after drug money are now being used to tax US citizens that no longer live or work in the US. 6) Immigration reform - He wants a "path to citizenship" for the estimated 13 million illegal immigrants (not "undocumented workers"...illegal immigrants - let's call a spade a spade). To his credit he did mention "securing the border" although there were no details to how that would be done. To me there is a very simple solution that is already in place: make the eVerify system mandatory. Currently it's optional. If you prevent people from working illegally in the US they will have no incentive to come here in the first place. No fences or "boots on the ground" are necessary beyond what is there now. 7) Gun Control - Very sticky issue since it flies in the face of the second amendment to the US constitution. And it's not just Republicans that will fight this. Democrats in pro gun states are that facing reelection (unlike Obama, in his last term) will have a tough sell. My prediction is that we get some sort of watered down assault weapon ban (similar to the one passed before that was allowed to lapse) that will contain all sorts of exclusions allowing some automatic weapons but not others. I admire him for trying but I just don't see anything with any real teeth coming from it.
Yes you make a good point about the corruption in the Philippines. The new president has tried to institute some changes but the problem is that it's top to bottom. Everyone is on the take there. Bribes, big and small, are the lubricant of the Philippine economy. It's simply how you get things done. So it will be very difficult to unravel. Part of the problem is that people on the lower end (police, government workers, etc.) are paid a very low salary. They look at a bribe the same way we would look at a bonus. When faced with the choice of not taking a bribe or feeding your family it's no longer a morality call. You take the bribe.
At the higher end, Philippine politics are dominated by a handful of very powerful families. Marcos, Lopez, Aquino, Tan, Ayala...those are a few of them. These families own vast amounts of land and control virtually every facet of the economy. They are also deeply embedded in the political structure. Their goal is to pass laws to keep themselves, and their families, in power. It's one of the main reasons that the poverty level has stayed the same for so many years.
Having visited the Philippines I can say that, for a Westerner, it is virtually impossible to imagine the gap between rich and poor in that country without seeing it first hand. At the high end there are people driving bullet proof Rolls Royces living in walled mansions. At the low end are people living on a dollar a day, or less. Over there you are either very rich or very poor, with very little in between. That is changing a bit now with a middle class emerging but there is still an enormous amount of poverty.
The Philippines apparently has a huge problem with child pornography. Dirt bags the world over go there to take advantage of young children from mostly very poor families. The government tried to pass a law to punish those producing and consuming child pornography but went a little too far with some of the broad definitions they put in place. One of those definitions was around "slander". Personally I think the government was going in the right direction just too far on the slander bit. Hopefully they can come up with something that is stiff tough but more fair to the general population.
Exactly right and it helps to illustrate my point. Google Apps is alright for small companies but there are some trade-offs. It just doesn't have the power of the full Microsoft office suite of products (once you add on Exchange, Sharepoint and Active Directory) but it's pretty good if you can live with the reduced functionality.
On top of that, almost every Fortune 500 company (I'm willing to bet ALL) have some sort of ERP system to manage their Payroll, Financials, Inventory, etc. SAP and Oracle are the big players in that area. These systems run in the background and most people never see them but they are critical for these large businesses. It's one thing to lose email for a day but losing your ERP system can be devastating to a large company. The majority of these systems are deployed in house. Some companies will pay to have them "hosted" but that's not the same as a cloud solution. I might be wrong but I just don't see any of these big companies going to "cloud" solutions for business critical applications.
I've been around long enough to see fads come and go. This "cloud" crap that we keep hearing about is just that...another fad. I can see some small and even medium sized companies embracing cloud computing...for a limited set of tasks. I work almost exclusively with large companies and none of them, and i mean none, are ready to dump their internal IT staff to just throw it up into the "cloud" and hope everything works out. There is simply too much at stake for them.
With any cloud based software you are trading power for convenience. You simply cannot customize cloud software the same way you can on premise software. Nearly every big company I have worked with does things a little bit differently than the next big company. So when it comes to mission critical applications, they are either going to build it in house or they will buy something that they can customize to fit their needs. And if it means they have to spend a lot of money to do that then so be it...shit needs to get done.
Riddle me this: if you were the CIO of Huge-Company-X would you be willing to risk the entire business, not to mention your career and reputation, to some flavor of the month cloud solution? No fucking way. If it's me I'm keeping my data in house where I have control of data security and things are done on MY schedule, not the vendor's schedule.
I'm not an Apple fanboi...I simply used the iPad as an example of a tablet with better battery life. I've actually got a Nexus tablet and that has better battery life than the Surface as well. Back around Christmas time I saw one of the Microsoft tablets (not the Surface, the other one) in a Best Buy and decided to give it a try. It was listed for $599 and had the worst screen of any tablet on display (iPad, Nexus, Samsung, B&N, Amazon, Asus, Lenovo). The price was higher than most of them as well.
I'm not rooting against Microsoft. As I posted the other day, I'm running Windows 8 and to my surprise I'm liking it. I just think that the only way anyone is going to take market share away from Apple is to price their tablets lower. To me, $899 seems outrageously expensive. When you add the poor battery life and heat issues it just doesn't add up to a winner in my eyes. Time will tell but I'm betting they don't sell a lot of them, at least at this price.
If they can find a way to get 4-5 hours of battery life, make it run cooler, and bring the price down a few hundred they might have a winner on their hands.
My view of Apple hardware is surely objective. I know people that have had problems with their Apple devices. In my case, they have performed flawlessly. One thing I would point out is that in surveys I have read Apple consistently scores at or near the top in both customer satisfaction (very high) and device failures/returns (very low).
Your point on desktop hardware is well taken. While I like the iMac it does have some deficiencies, chiefly the difficulty in upgrading them. Upgrading memory is easy (at least on mine...newer ones not so sure). Upgrading the hard drive was quite a challenge. I swapped out the slow HDD with a fast SDD and it made a world of difference. But it took me about an hour to do it and it's not for the faint of heart.
Ever hear that old joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee? Surface is the new horse. It's not quite a tablet, it's not quite a laptop, it's not quite...I don't know what the hell it is I just know I don't want one. It's too hot, it's too heavy, the battery life sucks (compared to an iPad anyhow), and it's way too expensive. If I wanted to run old Windows programs then why not just get a laptop at about half the price and not have to deal with the overheating issues? This thing is DOA.
Well, if you compare the two laptops simply at the hardware level then I would fully agree with you. I own two Apple computers but I also have Windows computers and sometimes I run Linux on my iMac so I'm not a fanboi in the traditional sense ( i.e. all Apple all the time). They all have their merits. But I have to say that Apply makes damn good hardware. The iMac is 5 years old and the MacBook Pro is 4 years old. Neither one has ever given me a problem. Neither one of them has ever crashed. Both of them run pretty much as well as the day I got them.
Is Apple's hardware overpriced? Probably. But the OS is very slick and it's kind of nice having UNIX running underneath it. You can build a Hackintosh for a fraction of the cost of equivalent Apple hardware.
Would I buy another Apple desktop/laptop? Probably not. At the time I got mine I rather liked the OS and the direction it was going in. Now, not so much. About a month ago I made a decision to dual boot my MacBook Pro with Windows 8 and I have to say that I like it. Yes, it has it's flaws but overall it's responsive and stable.
Eventually Apple will stop supporting Snow Leopard (the version that I'm running). At that point I'll probably just turn my old Apple hardware into Windows boxes. Linux is fine but, for me, it's not 100% suitable for work use.
So iOS has it's good and bad points, just like the other OS's. Sure, the Apple stuff costs more but it's a very well made machine. Just a matter of individual choice really.
Dell - the company and the person - are taking a very big gamble here. The company has been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, for the past several years to get a foothold in the service business. By most measures they have not done very well. Part of that probably stems from their terrible reputation in PC support in the consumer market. Perhaps they feel shackled by the PC business and quarterly reports and Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. And those are valid concerns.
But...Michael Dell is still going to be in charge. And they are going to have a lot of debt. And PC sales still make up a majority of their profits. In the short term it will probably mean lots of layoffs...particularly for people in the non-service sector of the company.
The BB unveiling was streamed live on CNBC and I watched it. Some observations...
1) The CEO - Thorsten Heins - has absolutely zero charisma. I understand that English probably isn't his first language but he didn't look very comfortable during the presentation. Yeah, we're there to see the phone but getting someone with some presentation skills would have helped. 2) All that aside, they have done a very nice job on the phone. True multitasking. Personal and Business sandboxes. Full encryption. Nice screen. BBM now has a video client similar to Skype. 3) BBM video - was it just me or was the audio not working for the guy in London? The video looked fine but I don't recall hearing him say anything. 4) Apps - I'm tired of hearing about "apps" all time time. Look - no matter what phone you get you're going to have access to more apps than you can shake a stick at. Everyone (Apple, Android, Microsoft, Blackberry) has a collection of about 50 apps that most people want or need. The rest of it is a combination of copies of those 50, niche products, and utter shit. Everyone has Angry Birds, Skype, WhatsApp, Evernote, Dropbox, etc. Just get the phone you like and don't worry about the apps. 5) Good move releasing a phone with and without a physical keyboard. Having had a BB in the past I have to admit that having a physical keyboard is a nice feature. If you don't type on it that much you probably don't need it. 6) I think they said it was going to cost $149. That undercuts Apple and Samsung by $50. 7) No mention of memory, storage, processor, camera specs, etc. I think that was a mistake. That kind of stuff is important to a lot of people (well, me anyway). It would be nice to know if it has an SD card. How does it stack up against the iPhone or Galaxy 3? If they want people to switch they have to show why the BB is a better phone.
Overall it looks like a great phone and I hope they do well with it.
Well said Smash. Frankly I'm surprised that more PC makers don't copy it. You don't need to be a fan of OSX to appreciate some of the really clever innovations that Apple has made. The magnetic power cord is really nice as well. I can't tell you how many times that thing has saved me from having it yanked out of my lap in an office or an airport because of someone tripping over the power cord. It just pops out and you plug it back in - brilliant. I've seen the back lit keyboard on a few PC's but not many. Again, another really nice feature.
Having said that, I'm on record here for criticizing the soldered-to-the-board memory that the new MacBooks have. Absolutely terrible idea. When I buy a laptop I want the ability to upgrade things on it as my needs evolve.
The only trackpad I've been able to use efficiently is the trackpad on the MacBook. On Windows laptops, the trackpads I have used have been universally useless. Too small and they have those stupid little buttons. The trackpad on the ChromeBook seemed pretty good mainly because it's a decent copy of the the MacBook trackpad.
Dell and Microsoft have had a long and close business relationship. If Dell ends up going private equity then Microsoft wants a seat at the table, so to speak. My feeling is that Dell has quietly conceded the consumer market to Apple and Samsung. Sure, they still sell in that market but their bread and butter is the corporate market. Just like Microsoft. So Microsoft wants to protect that partnership by having some influence in the direction of a private equity led Dell.
1) Don't carry fancy luggage. It attracts attention and tells a potential thief that you have money and are likely carrying valuable items. 2) Try and find a hard sided suitcase rather than a soft one. A pocket knife will slice through the more common soft sided luggage with ease. A hard case makes the thief have to work a bit harder and probably skip the effort all together. 3) Make photocopies of your vital documents and carry the originals on your person and put the copies in your luggage. If your luggage gets stolen it makes it easier to identify you as the owner - assuming of course that you actually ever see it again:-) 4) If you are carrying something valuable in your luggage then try not to open it in public. Take it in the bathroom and watch to make sure you are not followed. 5) If you can afford a private cabin get one. The door has a lock on it so you're less likely to have to worry about theft. 6) If you're carrying a laptop in the carry on luggage then encrypt the hard drive. Truecrypt is free and works probably as well as anything else. At a minimum, create an encrypted volume on the hard drive and put your critical files in there. Better yet, encrypt the whole drive. 7) Put a password on your cellphone. Android and Blackberry allows you to encrypt the contents of the phone and it's password protected. Not sure if iPhone offers something similar but I suspect it does. 8) Don't put your home address on luggage tags. If someone steals your luggage they now know where you live and also know that you're not home. Best case they break into your house and loot it. Worst case your family is home when they break in. I just put my name and a phone number.
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This is coming from a cable company. Their primary product is television. If ever there was an industry stuck in the dark ages it's television.
"We're in the business of delivering what consumers want..." - That is laughable to say the least. What they are really in the business of is extracting every last dime from consumers that they can get away with. Cable companies are in a semi-monopoly position and the service shows it. As better entertainment options continue to surface, cable cutting continues.
Google is the Steam Engine, Time Warner is the horse and buggy. TW is stubbornly clinging to yesterday's cash cow while Google continues to explore the future.
If I had the option of gigabit internet in my neighborhood I would jump on it in an instant. So would many other people I suspect.
I was impressed with WebOS. It seems very well thought out and smooth. I was less impressed with the selection of WebOS Apps available though. About half of them seemed to be designed for a phone rather than a tablet so all you saw was this tiny window instead of a full screen program. Cyanogenmod (the Linux OS you are referring to) runs really well although you have to jump through a few hoops to get it to work with Google Play. Once that is working, all the Android Apps are available to you. The issue with the camera appears to have been fixed.
Yes and it works really well on my Touchpad too. That was the saving grace and kept it from becoming a digital photo frame :-)
WebOS is a really good OS. I grabbed one of those HP Touchpads and was very impressed by the OS. But...there aren't any good Apps for it. And I don't see why anyone would want to start writing them. At this point it's basically a two horse race - iOS and Android. It would be nice to see a WebOS update for my Touchpad but I'm not holding my breath.
I'd have to get my hands on one to try it out but for $169 it's not a bad deal. Yes, the video resolution is a bit weak but it's got Android 4.1 and expandable SD storage and Beats Audio. I snagged one of the 32GB Touchpads and the audio on that is terrific. The expandable storage option alone makes it worthy of consideration.
I've tried those cheap Chinese made tablets and the touch screens on them are universally horrible. You're having to hit the same icon 3 or 4 times before it works right. On an iPad or good Android tablet you can see the difference immediately. That will be the test for the HP tablet. If it has a good touchscreen, with the proper level of sensitivity, then I think it will sell well.
If you compare it to the Nexus 7 it's got a chance. The Nexus 7 comes with 16GB for $199. You can upgrade to 32GB for $249. For about $200 (the HP tablet plus a $30 SD card) you'll have a tablet with 40GB of storage.
The downside for the Slate may prove to be the (relatively) crappy screen. The screen on the Nexus 7 is nothing short of phenomenal.
That's pretty much how it worked for me. I would switch jobs about every 2 years and every time I would get a substantial raise, not the 3% BS that employees are supposed to be happy to get. I've seen too many people stagnate in their jobs waiting for their boss to die so they can get a promotion. The cold hard facts are that management doesn't want to promote you if you are good at your current job. Your replacement might not work out.
Newsflash - your boss doesn't care about your career..he cares about his career. Sure, he might throw you a bone now and again but make no mistake...he will fire you at the drop of a hat to save his own ass. So with that sort of loyalty why stick around unless it benefits you? Pension? Please...those went the way of the Dodo bird. Benefits? Two weeks vacation (if you can get permission to use it) and medical benefits (well, up until Obama care kicks in fully, then we'll see who is still offering that). Big fucking deal.
"Heck, even if you don't want to leave your current job, telling them you're about to leave (after 2-3yrs of tenure) is the only way to get them to give a real raise." - I was with you until there. If you tell them you are leaving you're probably going to get fired or first in line at the next layoff. My advice? Don't threaten to leave - just leave. Thank them for everything and move on. Line up another job, make sure you're getting more money, give them 2 weeks notice, and split.
I fell for that crap the last time I worked for a big company. They promised me 4 weeks vacation plus sick time. Sounded great. The problem was that whenever I tried to use the vacation I was always told that "the project needs you now". Unused vacation could be carried over "at management's discretion". In other words, you might be able to carry over your vacation time - time that was awarded to you as part of your employment agreement - but only if some asshole in management says that it's ok. Otherwise it's gone and you get no compensation for it.
So what did I do? I started calling in sick (conveniently, for me, on Fridays and Mondays to stretch out the weekend). Then I set in place a plan to resign before the end of the year. That way, the company HAS to pay me for unused vacation time by law.
That was when I started contracting...and I never looked back.
Moral of the story? Don't trust big companies. They are out to screw you. When you contract you get paid for every hour you work.
"If the customers don't know what they want, you teach them" - Umm...if the customer doesn't know what they want then the project is in deep and immediate trouble. It is the customers business to run and if they don't know what they want they had damn well better figure it out before they spend a boatload of money on a team of consultants.
I have worked on many large projects, some with government agencies some with large private companies, and the most successful ones have a common thread. The common thread is that the critical project decisions are a collaborative effort, not simply punted to the consultants to say "here, you figure it out". If a company has management that is unwilling or unable to make decisions that company will fail. I don't care how many consultants you bring in, if the management cannot articulate how the business is currently run and what the future goals are the project will fail.
Are there shitty consultants out there? Sure. Just like there are company executives that have no business running a lemonade stand, never mind a multi-billion dollar company or large government office. To succeed you need talent on both sides.
Some of the government IT systems that I have been exposed to are arcane, to say the least. Often they have little or no documentation and are extremely complex. Many of the agencies are under funded and under staffed. Talent and motivation, frankly, are sometimes lacking. Basically it's a difficult environment to work in.
Really big projects like this have a high failure rate. There are a multitude of reasons, some of them above. I suspect that both sides share in the blame.
I don't think anyone has a problem with him cashing out his shares. He was a founder, he's entitled to do what he wants with his shares. It's just a little alarming - at least to me - to see someone completely divest themselves from a company they helped found so quickly. Particularly since it's right when Blackberry is at a very crucial point. It sends a message that he has lot faith in the company. Some investors might be left to wonder if he knows something they don't.
When one of the founders bails you know the ship is sinking.
Some observations...
He starts out by saying that people should not rely on the government for everything then proceeds to lay out all sorts of objectives that ...guess what...set up government so that people rely on it. For example...
1) Universal Preschool education - nice idea...who's going to pay for it?
2) Build up the infrastructure - another nice idea but wasn't that what the Tarp funds were supposed to do, at least in part? What, exactly, did we get for all those billions of dollars that were supposed to be directed towards "shovel ready" projects?
3) Tax reform - let's make the rich pay again. When the Republicans agreed to the recent tax increases the Democrat part of the deal was to agree to reduce spending. I'm still waiting for the reduce spending part. I watched the entire speech and I don't recall a single word mentioned about cutting spending.
4) $9/hr minimum wage - Sounds good but it's a job killer. Companies will simply not hire people. They already have the Affordable Care Act (Obama-care) to deal with.
5) Corporate Tax Reform - He wants to go after corporate profits offshore. Sounds good until you become an American expat. Then they will go after YOUR money too. Think you can escape taxes by living abroad? Think again. Currently the only legal way to do that is to renounce your US citizenship. The number of people taking this route has grown dramatically over the past few years. Laws passed that were intended to go after drug money are now being used to tax US citizens that no longer live or work in the US.
6) Immigration reform - He wants a "path to citizenship" for the estimated 13 million illegal immigrants (not "undocumented workers"...illegal immigrants - let's call a spade a spade). To his credit he did mention "securing the border" although there were no details to how that would be done. To me there is a very simple solution that is already in place: make the eVerify system mandatory. Currently it's optional. If you prevent people from working illegally in the US they will have no incentive to come here in the first place. No fences or "boots on the ground" are necessary beyond what is there now.
7) Gun Control - Very sticky issue since it flies in the face of the second amendment to the US constitution. And it's not just Republicans that will fight this. Democrats in pro gun states are that facing reelection (unlike Obama, in his last term) will have a tough sell. My prediction is that we get some sort of watered down assault weapon ban (similar to the one passed before that was allowed to lapse) that will contain all sorts of exclusions allowing some automatic weapons but not others. I admire him for trying but I just don't see anything with any real teeth coming from it.
Yes you make a good point about the corruption in the Philippines. The new president has tried to institute some changes but the problem is that it's top to bottom. Everyone is on the take there. Bribes, big and small, are the lubricant of the Philippine economy. It's simply how you get things done. So it will be very difficult to unravel. Part of the problem is that people on the lower end (police, government workers, etc.) are paid a very low salary. They look at a bribe the same way we would look at a bonus. When faced with the choice of not taking a bribe or feeding your family it's no longer a morality call. You take the bribe.
At the higher end, Philippine politics are dominated by a handful of very powerful families. Marcos, Lopez, Aquino, Tan, Ayala...those are a few of them. These families own vast amounts of land and control virtually every facet of the economy. They are also deeply embedded in the political structure. Their goal is to pass laws to keep themselves, and their families, in power. It's one of the main reasons that the poverty level has stayed the same for so many years.
Having visited the Philippines I can say that, for a Westerner, it is virtually impossible to imagine the gap between rich and poor in that country without seeing it first hand. At the high end there are people driving bullet proof Rolls Royces living in walled mansions. At the low end are people living on a dollar a day, or less. Over there you are either very rich or very poor, with very little in between. That is changing a bit now with a middle class emerging but there is still an enormous amount of poverty.
The Philippines apparently has a huge problem with child pornography. Dirt bags the world over go there to take advantage of young children from mostly very poor families. The government tried to pass a law to punish those producing and consuming child pornography but went a little too far with some of the broad definitions they put in place. One of those definitions was around "slander". Personally I think the government was going in the right direction just too far on the slander bit. Hopefully they can come up with something that is stiff tough but more fair to the general population.
Exactly right and it helps to illustrate my point. Google Apps is alright for small companies but there are some trade-offs. It just doesn't have the power of the full Microsoft office suite of products (once you add on Exchange, Sharepoint and Active Directory) but it's pretty good if you can live with the reduced functionality.
On top of that, almost every Fortune 500 company (I'm willing to bet ALL) have some sort of ERP system to manage their Payroll, Financials, Inventory, etc. SAP and Oracle are the big players in that area. These systems run in the background and most people never see them but they are critical for these large businesses. It's one thing to lose email for a day but losing your ERP system can be devastating to a large company. The majority of these systems are deployed in house. Some companies will pay to have them "hosted" but that's not the same as a cloud solution. I might be wrong but I just don't see any of these big companies going to "cloud" solutions for business critical applications.
+1
I've been around long enough to see fads come and go. This "cloud" crap that we keep hearing about is just that...another fad. I can see some small and even medium sized companies embracing cloud computing...for a limited set of tasks. I work almost exclusively with large companies and none of them, and i mean none, are ready to dump their internal IT staff to just throw it up into the "cloud" and hope everything works out. There is simply too much at stake for them.
With any cloud based software you are trading power for convenience. You simply cannot customize cloud software the same way you can on premise software. Nearly every big company I have worked with does things a little bit differently than the next big company. So when it comes to mission critical applications, they are either going to build it in house or they will buy something that they can customize to fit their needs. And if it means they have to spend a lot of money to do that then so be it...shit needs to get done.
Riddle me this: if you were the CIO of Huge-Company-X would you be willing to risk the entire business, not to mention your career and reputation, to some flavor of the month cloud solution? No fucking way. If it's me I'm keeping my data in house where I have control of data security and things are done on MY schedule, not the vendor's schedule.
I'm not an Apple fanboi...I simply used the iPad as an example of a tablet with better battery life. I've actually got a Nexus tablet and that has better battery life than the Surface as well. Back around Christmas time I saw one of the Microsoft tablets (not the Surface, the other one) in a Best Buy and decided to give it a try. It was listed for $599 and had the worst screen of any tablet on display (iPad, Nexus, Samsung, B&N, Amazon, Asus, Lenovo). The price was higher than most of them as well.
I'm not rooting against Microsoft. As I posted the other day, I'm running Windows 8 and to my surprise I'm liking it. I just think that the only way anyone is going to take market share away from Apple is to price their tablets lower. To me, $899 seems outrageously expensive. When you add the poor battery life and heat issues it just doesn't add up to a winner in my eyes. Time will tell but I'm betting they don't sell a lot of them, at least at this price.
If they can find a way to get 4-5 hours of battery life, make it run cooler, and bring the price down a few hundred they might have a winner on their hands.
My view of Apple hardware is surely objective. I know people that have had problems with their Apple devices. In my case, they have performed flawlessly. One thing I would point out is that in surveys I have read Apple consistently scores at or near the top in both customer satisfaction (very high) and device failures/returns (very low).
Your point on desktop hardware is well taken. While I like the iMac it does have some deficiencies, chiefly the difficulty in upgrading them. Upgrading memory is easy (at least on mine...newer ones not so sure). Upgrading the hard drive was quite a challenge. I swapped out the slow HDD with a fast SDD and it made a world of difference. But it took me about an hour to do it and it's not for the faint of heart.
Ever hear that old joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee? Surface is the new horse. It's not quite a tablet, it's not quite a laptop, it's not quite...I don't know what the hell it is I just know I don't want one. It's too hot, it's too heavy, the battery life sucks (compared to an iPad anyhow), and it's way too expensive. If I wanted to run old Windows programs then why not just get a laptop at about half the price and not have to deal with the overheating issues? This thing is DOA.
Well, if you compare the two laptops simply at the hardware level then I would fully agree with you. I own two Apple computers but I also have Windows computers and sometimes I run Linux on my iMac so I'm not a fanboi in the traditional sense ( i.e. all Apple all the time). They all have their merits. But I have to say that Apply makes damn good hardware. The iMac is 5 years old and the MacBook Pro is 4 years old. Neither one has ever given me a problem. Neither one of them has ever crashed. Both of them run pretty much as well as the day I got them.
Is Apple's hardware overpriced? Probably. But the OS is very slick and it's kind of nice having UNIX running underneath it. You can build a Hackintosh for a fraction of the cost of equivalent Apple hardware.
Would I buy another Apple desktop/laptop? Probably not. At the time I got mine I rather liked the OS and the direction it was going in. Now, not so much. About a month ago I made a decision to dual boot my MacBook Pro with Windows 8 and I have to say that I like it. Yes, it has it's flaws but overall it's responsive and stable.
Eventually Apple will stop supporting Snow Leopard (the version that I'm running). At that point I'll probably just turn my old Apple hardware into Windows boxes. Linux is fine but, for me, it's not 100% suitable for work use.
So iOS has it's good and bad points, just like the other OS's. Sure, the Apple stuff costs more but it's a very well made machine. Just a matter of individual choice really.
Dell - the company and the person - are taking a very big gamble here. The company has been trying, mostly unsuccessfully, for the past several years to get a foothold in the service business. By most measures they have not done very well. Part of that probably stems from their terrible reputation in PC support in the consumer market. Perhaps they feel shackled by the PC business and quarterly reports and Sarbanes-Oxley, etc. And those are valid concerns.
But...Michael Dell is still going to be in charge. And they are going to have a lot of debt. And PC sales still make up a majority of their profits. In the short term it will probably mean lots of layoffs...particularly for people in the non-service sector of the company.
The BB unveiling was streamed live on CNBC and I watched it. Some observations...
1) The CEO - Thorsten Heins - has absolutely zero charisma. I understand that English probably isn't his first language but he didn't look very comfortable during the presentation. Yeah, we're there to see the phone but getting someone with some presentation skills would have helped.
2) All that aside, they have done a very nice job on the phone. True multitasking. Personal and Business sandboxes. Full encryption. Nice screen. BBM now has a video client similar to Skype.
3) BBM video - was it just me or was the audio not working for the guy in London? The video looked fine but I don't recall hearing him say anything.
4) Apps - I'm tired of hearing about "apps" all time time. Look - no matter what phone you get you're going to have access to more apps than you can shake a stick at. Everyone (Apple, Android, Microsoft, Blackberry) has a collection of about 50 apps that most people want or need. The rest of it is a combination of copies of those 50, niche products, and utter shit. Everyone has Angry Birds, Skype, WhatsApp, Evernote, Dropbox, etc. Just get the phone you like and don't worry about the apps.
5) Good move releasing a phone with and without a physical keyboard. Having had a BB in the past I have to admit that having a physical keyboard is a nice feature. If you don't type on it that much you probably don't need it.
6) I think they said it was going to cost $149. That undercuts Apple and Samsung by $50.
7) No mention of memory, storage, processor, camera specs, etc. I think that was a mistake. That kind of stuff is important to a lot of people (well, me anyway). It would be nice to know if it has an SD card. How does it stack up against the iPhone or Galaxy 3? If they want people to switch they have to show why the BB is a better phone.
Overall it looks like a great phone and I hope they do well with it.
Well said Smash. Frankly I'm surprised that more PC makers don't copy it. You don't need to be a fan of OSX to appreciate some of the really clever innovations that Apple has made. The magnetic power cord is really nice as well. I can't tell you how many times that thing has saved me from having it yanked out of my lap in an office or an airport because of someone tripping over the power cord. It just pops out and you plug it back in - brilliant. I've seen the back lit keyboard on a few PC's but not many. Again, another really nice feature.
Having said that, I'm on record here for criticizing the soldered-to-the-board memory that the new MacBooks have. Absolutely terrible idea. When I buy a laptop I want the ability to upgrade things on it as my needs evolve.
The only trackpad I've been able to use efficiently is the trackpad on the MacBook. On Windows laptops, the trackpads I have used have been universally useless. Too small and they have those stupid little buttons. The trackpad on the ChromeBook seemed pretty good mainly because it's a decent copy of the the MacBook trackpad.
Dell and Microsoft have had a long and close business relationship. If Dell ends up going private equity then Microsoft wants a seat at the table, so to speak. My feeling is that Dell has quietly conceded the consumer market to Apple and Samsung. Sure, they still sell in that market but their bread and butter is the corporate market. Just like Microsoft. So Microsoft wants to protect that partnership by having some influence in the direction of a private equity led Dell.
1) Don't carry fancy luggage. It attracts attention and tells a potential thief that you have money and are likely carrying valuable items. :-)
2) Try and find a hard sided suitcase rather than a soft one. A pocket knife will slice through the more common soft sided luggage with ease. A hard case makes the thief have to work a bit harder and probably skip the effort all together.
3) Make photocopies of your vital documents and carry the originals on your person and put the copies in your luggage. If your luggage gets stolen it makes it easier to identify you as the owner - assuming of course that you actually ever see it again
4) If you are carrying something valuable in your luggage then try not to open it in public. Take it in the bathroom and watch to make sure you are not followed.
5) If you can afford a private cabin get one. The door has a lock on it so you're less likely to have to worry about theft.
6) If you're carrying a laptop in the carry on luggage then encrypt the hard drive. Truecrypt is free and works probably as well as anything else. At a minimum, create an encrypted volume on the hard drive and put your critical files in there. Better yet, encrypt the whole drive.
7) Put a password on your cellphone. Android and Blackberry allows you to encrypt the contents of the phone and it's password protected. Not sure if iPhone offers something similar but I suspect it does.
8) Don't put your home address on luggage tags. If someone steals your luggage they now know where you live and also know that you're not home. Best case they break into your house and loot it. Worst case your family is home when they break in. I just put my name and a phone number.