For $12 a month VOD you have to *pay for cable* (AFAIK, anyway), which is a very significant base cost.
I'm in Canada, and I think Netflix is awesome. I'm very happy with it. I'm not the sort of person who has to watch "show x" every week, so I couldn't care less that it's not on Netflix. I just go on, find something I want to watch, and watch it.
I can rent/buy whatever the heck I want on iTunes, and I'll still never come close to what I was paying for satellite TV before.
Why not? I do. I make sure they're bundled up properly with the right gear, and I check on them regularly to ensure their comfort and safety. I make sure they're having fun so that it's a good experience for my two little girls. Cross-country skiing, hiking, tobogganing, skating and snowshoeing are all activities that are possible at night in the snow, with the right gear and a careful attitude toward safety.
Of course you need to live somewhere where the activities are practically available, but that's a different problem.
I don't have a philosophical argument with UBB as a concept. However, its implementation by Bell/Rogers/etc. was a cash grab and a way to stifle market innovation by choking out resellers. I wrote a bit about it a few months ago, if you or anyone actually cares.
IIRC, Bell's per GB overage charges were over a thousand times their actual costs. No matter how you slice that, it's anti-consumer and anti-competitive. Additionally, in a fair system I'd expect to see the base cost of an internet connection go down for the vast majority of lower-than-average users. Of course that wasn't going to happen.
Over the last couple months I've averaged about 280GB per month on my home DSL. Of course I think I should pay more than the average user for that. However, I think the excess charges should be in line with costs plus reasonable profit.
Good point. I didn't mention CO2 emissions in my post, but I can see how the two would be conflated. I said "pollution" to try to differentiate the two concepts, but then I also used the word "emissions".
We could also substantially reduce our emissions by buying fewer goods from overseas. One cargo ship emits the equivalent pollution of 50 million cars (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/09/shipping-pollution). Here's another way of putting it from the article:
Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars.
Making more of an effort to produce items more locally is sort of the same as "living closer to where we work", but it has benefits far beyond a shorter commute. Additionally, where most of us live we probably have stricter environmental controls, which would mean that what IS produced is produced more cleanly. This would likely drive up the costs of goods, forcing us to buy fewer items of higher quality and own them longer, which would provide further environmental (and, dare I say, social) benefits. Overall, it seems like a good plan.
I have 12,079 messages in my main GMail inbox. All my email inboxes combined contain 26,369 messages. This only goes back to November 2005 as I have never gotten around to importing my emails dating back to the early '90s.
I don't find this number of messages unwieldy at all. I've set up a few (7) smart mailboxes for different clients, but I use Apple Mail's search feature to take care of the rest of my needs.
To make the classic car analogy, it is like when Honda started selling rebadged Isuzu Troopers (Honda Passport). They didn't do it to make money, they did it so they had a "me too!" product on their lot during the peak of the SUV wars while they scrambled to make the real product (the CR-V and then the Pilot).
This is OT, but the Isuzu Trooper was rebadged as the Acura SLX. The Isuzu Rodeo was rebadged as the Honda Passport.
I agreee with the GP. I'm going to generalise a bit here, but if you're one of the "significantly above average" workers when it comes to productivity, creativity, and getting along with others, you'll have no problem getting and holding a good job, and being recognised for the work you do.
If you're a very capable individual and you're at a job where you're not recognised, you'll likely be able to move and find a better job. Do that, work your 8 hours and be twice as productive, and be recognised and compensated for it.
Sure, if you want to work hard for two hours and then slack off for the rest of the day, you can work for a crappy employer and/or stay in your current job and get passed over for promotions and keep doing what you're doing until you're laid off or you retire. To each his/her own.
I live in Canada but I've been looking for a job in Europe. Mostly I'm interested in continental western Europe but I've looked at some jobs in the UK as well. I'm really shocked at how little many IT jobs in England pay. Here in Canada a job that would likely pay around C$75-90k (~£48-57k) will probably be advertised at around £35-50k in most of England.
Factor in Canada's overall lower cost of living and better economy, and I have to wonder why people in the UK enter the IT profession to begin with. In more senior positions (i.e. once you hit maybe £70,000 p/a), pay gets equitable with Canada, and there's generally more vacation time and other benefits. However, you've got to slog through your time in the trenches and rise to the top before you can reasonably expect to get one of the better jobs.
I'm going to make myself sound foolish here, but what the heck. I had a fax machine a few years ago. I hadn't used it in a few years, but I needed it so I dug it out and plugged it in. I tried everything I could think of, and I couldn't get it to work. Finally, after trying for quite a while I gave up on it. I was going to throw it out but a friend of mine asked me for it so I gave it to him.
It turns out I just had the phone line plugged into the "line out" jack instead of the "line in" jack.
Maybe I unconsciously assumed the jacks were interchangeable. Who knows. I felt pretty stupid. The point is that, to some extent, technology seems familiar to us because we use it. To me, a fax machine was just something I had to use, but resented, and therefore I suppose had no interest figuring it out. However, I can spend hours taking apart a computer or troubleshooting a strange network connectivity issue that would make the average traditional fax user's head explode. To each, his or her own domain.
How many kids do you have? Good luck trying to get your 18 month old to "contribute positively to your conversations". Way to be both obnoxiously rude and out of touch at the same time.
The GP wasn't suggesting that this is ALWAYS the appropriate response, but that it's a good tool. I've done this with my kids too. Maybe one out of every 15-20 times I take the kids to a restaurant. I would venture to say that most people would consider this to be reasonable.
Others have responded to your comments too, but I'll add a couple points. First of all, you can't really just remove "sub-prime victims". They make up a significant portion of the US market. Actually, according to http://strikelawyer.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/us-mortgage-default-rates/ (I just looked up a random source), "it appears that default rates are running at an average of about 25% nationwide on typical residential mortgage loans." In this context, I don't think a 75% non-default rate can be referred to as "the vast majority".
Also, in my opinion, the subprime mortgage crisis is indicitave of the American viewpoint towards credit and debt. When I lived in the US, I heard from so many people, "I can afford this new truck", or "I can afford this TV", when really what they meant was that they had the credit rating to support borrowing the money to make the purchase. In a tradtional economy, "I can afford" means "I possess the money and have no critical need for it". This is why many of us are alarmed about the American, and other, governments spinning wildly out of control with their borrowing. It seems irresponsible in the extreme, and it appears that the American government and people are heading towards the same fate as many sub-prime mortgage buyers: out of credit and out of options.
Apple is not (much of) a hardware MANUFACTURING company. However, I'm not sure how you can intelligently take the position that hardware does not make up a significant portion of the company's focus. Look at the hardware they design, have custom made, sell, support, and yes, market.
I wish people would accept that a company can be a hardware company, a software company, AND a company that takes design and marketing seriously.
The article didn't cover Amazon SimpleDB (http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/). SimpleDB is part of Amazon AWS, so it's cloud-only. However, if you're planning to deploy on AWS anyway, it makes for a formidable option.
You can run a variety of OSs in VMs. For example, you might have 3 Windows Server VMs running, and 2 CentOS VMs. This way you can standardize on Hyper-V and not worry, "what if I need some Linux VMs too"?
I have a hard time understanding how this could be news to anyone who has travelled with children in the last few years. While travelling from Canada through London to Amsterdam last year, our then 7 month old girl was given a patdown (at LHR IIRC). It was pretty comical, really. My wife stood her up, and my daughter stood there looking a little confused, like babies do, while some woman patted her down. I guess if I'd been a blogger with a sense of self importance, I'd have taken a photo and informed the world about it.
I'm sure ours can't have been an isolated occurrence. There must have been thousands of little kids given a patdown by now. Maybe it's not news because it didn't happen In America.
I was in a similar situation out of university back in 1996. I had a degree in Civil Engineering from a top-tier university, but no desire to be a civil engineer. I took the first 9 months out of university to learn to program better. I took any contract job I could find, including one where we were writing a search engine where I was going into work every day and literally being paid nothing at all. I spent most of the time living on my dad's farm, but also headed from Ontario Canada to Arkansas for 2 months to do some Perl coding (again, for no pay except food & boarding), and finally moved to California (I took a chance with no job waiting for me) where I got my first "real job" on the technical side of "technical support", doing client integrations for an e-commerce pioneer. By then, though, I had 9 months of demonstrable coding experience and a clear desire to succeed in the field.
So yes, it's certainly possible to obtain demonstrable coding experience. I had a 5 year university degree but I considered the following year after school to be part of my education, and I went and got the experience that I was missing from my formal education. Financially it hurt, but then so does going to school. It was an investment and it's paid off, both financially and in allowing me to enter the career path I want to be in.
Maybe you store your passwords in your huge brain, but if you're using something like KeePass or 1Password on your computer, you're still storing your passwords on the internet. Granted, they're not in an amalgamated "hack me" target like LastPass, but it's not like they're securely offline, taped to your monitor.
Here's an example. I just released Bullhive. It uses cloud-based computers to provide on-demand CPU cycles for financial modeling. As a startup, we COULD have gone out and spent all our lunch money on a huge rack of computers, and spent a bunch more time configuring and managing them instead of developing our core product. Now, that's all taken care of. If/when we grow, we can look at the economics of running our own servers for base load vs. using cloud computing.
So, in our case, the main advantages were:
1. Reduced time to market,
2. VASTLY reduced up-front costs.
Here's a point of view from another Canadian. I ran my own SageTV/Windows PVR at home for probably 3 years, but now I just use an AppleTV. SageTV with an SD tuner for my satellite connection was fine, but when I bought an HDTV and then an Hauppague HD-PVR, things just got progressively worse. My hardware was starting to get noisier, and I was spending probably 10x as much time messing with the setup as I was spending watching TV. I figured out that we were paying probably $15+ per hour of TV actually watched, and eventually cancelled all of it.
We had also been downloading all our HD shows off the internet for a while anyway, as the %#$#@ content companies DRM the heck out of HD transmissions. We were paying customers, but as usual the companies think it's good business to screw over people who are ACTUALLY PAYING FOR CONTENT. Eventually we had to ask ourselves why we were paying $60 per month for satellite TV and then just downloading all our TV anyway.
Now I only download stuff that I legitimately can't really get any other way, i.e. a couple British shows. Otherwise it's Netflix or iTunes. Some people I know don't like Netflix because they like to watch show X or Y. My wife and I, on the other hand, like to do things besides watching TV and I'm very happy to not have this or that show that I "have" to watch every Thursday night. It's very freeing. Therefore, Netflix suits us fine. With $60 per month saved in satellite TV fees, we'd have to do a LOT of video renting and buying every month before reaching that level.
I've had mechanical throttles stick wide open on me at least three times that I can remember. Once was on a motorcycle when I was about 17. I was up to about 4th gear, wondering semi-concernedly what I should do, when I remembered the kill switch.
The other two times were in my Land Rover Discovery after off-roading. The cable got too dirty and stuck open. In both cases, the solution was to turn the car off, pull over (being careful to avoid steering lock) and free up the cable.
The point is that things can, and do, go wrong with any system.
Slashdot Mirror
For $12 a month VOD you have to *pay for cable* (AFAIK, anyway), which is a very significant base cost.
I'm in Canada, and I think Netflix is awesome. I'm very happy with it. I'm not the sort of person who has to watch "show x" every week, so I couldn't care less that it's not on Netflix. I just go on, find something I want to watch, and watch it.
I can rent/buy whatever the heck I want on iTunes, and I'll still never come close to what I was paying for satellite TV before.
Why not? I do. I make sure they're bundled up properly with the right gear, and I check on them regularly to ensure their comfort and safety. I make sure they're having fun so that it's a good experience for my two little girls. Cross-country skiing, hiking, tobogganing, skating and snowshoeing are all activities that are possible at night in the snow, with the right gear and a careful attitude toward safety.
Of course you need to live somewhere where the activities are practically available, but that's a different problem.
Put a bike trainer or treadmill in your garage, and watch Netflix while you exercise. Problems (real and perceived) solved ;-)
I don't have a philosophical argument with UBB as a concept. However, its implementation by Bell/Rogers/etc. was a cash grab and a way to stifle market innovation by choking out resellers. I wrote a bit about it a few months ago, if you or anyone actually cares.
IIRC, Bell's per GB overage charges were over a thousand times their actual costs. No matter how you slice that, it's anti-consumer and anti-competitive. Additionally, in a fair system I'd expect to see the base cost of an internet connection go down for the vast majority of lower-than-average users. Of course that wasn't going to happen.
Over the last couple months I've averaged about 280GB per month on my home DSL. Of course I think I should pay more than the average user for that. However, I think the excess charges should be in line with costs plus reasonable profit.
Good point. I didn't mention CO2 emissions in my post, but I can see how the two would be conflated. I said "pollution" to try to differentiate the two concepts, but then I also used the word "emissions".
Plus, of course, it IS a discussion about CO2.
Just 15 of the world's biggest ships may now emit as much pollution as all the world's 760m cars.
Making more of an effort to produce items more locally is sort of the same as "living closer to where we work", but it has benefits far beyond a shorter commute. Additionally, where most of us live we probably have stricter environmental controls, which would mean that what IS produced is produced more cleanly. This would likely drive up the costs of goods, forcing us to buy fewer items of higher quality and own them longer, which would provide further environmental (and, dare I say, social) benefits. Overall, it seems like a good plan.
I have 12,079 messages in my main GMail inbox. All my email inboxes combined contain 26,369 messages. This only goes back to November 2005 as I have never gotten around to importing my emails dating back to the early '90s.
I don't find this number of messages unwieldy at all. I've set up a few (7) smart mailboxes for different clients, but I use Apple Mail's search feature to take care of the rest of my needs.
To make the classic car analogy, it is like when Honda started selling rebadged Isuzu Troopers (Honda Passport). They didn't do it to make money, they did it so they had a "me too!" product on their lot during the peak of the SUV wars while they scrambled to make the real product (the CR-V and then the Pilot).
This is OT, but the Isuzu Trooper was rebadged as the Acura SLX. The Isuzu Rodeo was rebadged as the Honda Passport.
I agreee with the GP. I'm going to generalise a bit here, but if you're one of the "significantly above average" workers when it comes to productivity, creativity, and getting along with others, you'll have no problem getting and holding a good job, and being recognised for the work you do.
If you're a very capable individual and you're at a job where you're not recognised, you'll likely be able to move and find a better job. Do that, work your 8 hours and be twice as productive, and be recognised and compensated for it.
Sure, if you want to work hard for two hours and then slack off for the rest of the day, you can work for a crappy employer and/or stay in your current job and get passed over for promotions and keep doing what you're doing until you're laid off or you retire. To each his/her own.
I live in Canada but I've been looking for a job in Europe. Mostly I'm interested in continental western Europe but I've looked at some jobs in the UK as well. I'm really shocked at how little many IT jobs in England pay. Here in Canada a job that would likely pay around C$75-90k (~£48-57k) will probably be advertised at around £35-50k in most of England.
Factor in Canada's overall lower cost of living and better economy, and I have to wonder why people in the UK enter the IT profession to begin with. In more senior positions (i.e. once you hit maybe £70,000 p/a), pay gets equitable with Canada, and there's generally more vacation time and other benefits. However, you've got to slog through your time in the trenches and rise to the top before you can reasonably expect to get one of the better jobs.
I'm going to make myself sound foolish here, but what the heck. I had a fax machine a few years ago. I hadn't used it in a few years, but I needed it so I dug it out and plugged it in. I tried everything I could think of, and I couldn't get it to work. Finally, after trying for quite a while I gave up on it. I was going to throw it out but a friend of mine asked me for it so I gave it to him.
It turns out I just had the phone line plugged into the "line out" jack instead of the "line in" jack.
Maybe I unconsciously assumed the jacks were interchangeable. Who knows. I felt pretty stupid. The point is that, to some extent, technology seems familiar to us because we use it. To me, a fax machine was just something I had to use, but resented, and therefore I suppose had no interest figuring it out. However, I can spend hours taking apart a computer or troubleshooting a strange network connectivity issue that would make the average traditional fax user's head explode. To each, his or her own domain.
How many kids do you have? Good luck trying to get your 18 month old to "contribute positively to your conversations". Way to be both obnoxiously rude and out of touch at the same time.
The GP wasn't suggesting that this is ALWAYS the appropriate response, but that it's a good tool. I've done this with my kids too. Maybe one out of every 15-20 times I take the kids to a restaurant. I would venture to say that most people would consider this to be reasonable.
Others have responded to your comments too, but I'll add a couple points. First of all, you can't really just remove "sub-prime victims". They make up a significant portion of the US market. Actually, according to http://strikelawyer.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/us-mortgage-default-rates/ (I just looked up a random source), "it appears that default rates are running at an average of about 25% nationwide on typical residential mortgage loans." In this context, I don't think a 75% non-default rate can be referred to as "the vast majority".
Also, in my opinion, the subprime mortgage crisis is indicitave of the American viewpoint towards credit and debt. When I lived in the US, I heard from so many people, "I can afford this new truck", or "I can afford this TV", when really what they meant was that they had the credit rating to support borrowing the money to make the purchase. In a tradtional economy, "I can afford" means "I possess the money and have no critical need for it". This is why many of us are alarmed about the American, and other, governments spinning wildly out of control with their borrowing. It seems irresponsible in the extreme, and it appears that the American government and people are heading towards the same fate as many sub-prime mortgage buyers: out of credit and out of options.
Apple is not (much of) a hardware MANUFACTURING company. However, I'm not sure how you can intelligently take the position that hardware does not make up a significant portion of the company's focus. Look at the hardware they design, have custom made, sell, support, and yes, market.
I wish people would accept that a company can be a hardware company, a software company, AND a company that takes design and marketing seriously.
The article didn't cover Amazon SimpleDB (http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/). SimpleDB is part of Amazon AWS, so it's cloud-only. However, if you're planning to deploy on AWS anyway, it makes for a formidable option.
The anonymous coward claimed that "the whole service [was] down for a week". The link you posted isn't even remotely close to that.
You can run a variety of OSs in VMs. For example, you might have 3 Windows Server VMs running, and 2 CentOS VMs. This way you can standardize on Hyper-V and not worry, "what if I need some Linux VMs too"?
Or maybe I misunderstood your question.
I have a hard time understanding how this could be news to anyone who has travelled with children in the last few years. While travelling from Canada through London to Amsterdam last year, our then 7 month old girl was given a patdown (at LHR IIRC). It was pretty comical, really. My wife stood her up, and my daughter stood there looking a little confused, like babies do, while some woman patted her down. I guess if I'd been a blogger with a sense of self importance, I'd have taken a photo and informed the world about it.
I'm sure ours can't have been an isolated occurrence. There must have been thousands of little kids given a patdown by now. Maybe it's not news because it didn't happen In America.
For your edification: Top Gear: BBC: Aston Martin V8 Vantage vs Man on Jet Powered Roller Blades.
I was in a similar situation out of university back in 1996. I had a degree in Civil Engineering from a top-tier university, but no desire to be a civil engineer. I took the first 9 months out of university to learn to program better. I took any contract job I could find, including one where we were writing a search engine where I was going into work every day and literally being paid nothing at all. I spent most of the time living on my dad's farm, but also headed from Ontario Canada to Arkansas for 2 months to do some Perl coding (again, for no pay except food & boarding), and finally moved to California (I took a chance with no job waiting for me) where I got my first "real job" on the technical side of "technical support", doing client integrations for an e-commerce pioneer. By then, though, I had 9 months of demonstrable coding experience and a clear desire to succeed in the field.
So yes, it's certainly possible to obtain demonstrable coding experience. I had a 5 year university degree but I considered the following year after school to be part of my education, and I went and got the experience that I was missing from my formal education. Financially it hurt, but then so does going to school. It was an investment and it's paid off, both financially and in allowing me to enter the career path I want to be in.
Maybe you store your passwords in your huge brain, but if you're using something like KeePass or 1Password on your computer, you're still storing your passwords on the internet. Granted, they're not in an amalgamated "hack me" target like LastPass, but it's not like they're securely offline, taped to your monitor.
Transfer your savings into a different currency. Problem solved.
The solution to the American financial crisis isn't to stop saving, but to be smart about how you do it.
Here's an example. I just released Bullhive. It uses cloud-based computers to provide on-demand CPU cycles for financial modeling. As a startup, we COULD have gone out and spent all our lunch money on a huge rack of computers, and spent a bunch more time configuring and managing them instead of developing our core product. Now, that's all taken care of. If/when we grow, we can look at the economics of running our own servers for base load vs. using cloud computing.
So, in our case, the main advantages were:
1. Reduced time to market,
2. VASTLY reduced up-front costs.
I hope that helps.
- Andrew.
Here's a point of view from another Canadian. I ran my own SageTV/Windows PVR at home for probably 3 years, but now I just use an AppleTV. SageTV with an SD tuner for my satellite connection was fine, but when I bought an HDTV and then an Hauppague HD-PVR, things just got progressively worse. My hardware was starting to get noisier, and I was spending probably 10x as much time messing with the setup as I was spending watching TV. I figured out that we were paying probably $15+ per hour of TV actually watched, and eventually cancelled all of it.
We had also been downloading all our HD shows off the internet for a while anyway, as the %#$#@ content companies DRM the heck out of HD transmissions. We were paying customers, but as usual the companies think it's good business to screw over people who are ACTUALLY PAYING FOR CONTENT. Eventually we had to ask ourselves why we were paying $60 per month for satellite TV and then just downloading all our TV anyway.
Now I only download stuff that I legitimately can't really get any other way, i.e. a couple British shows. Otherwise it's Netflix or iTunes. Some people I know don't like Netflix because they like to watch show X or Y. My wife and I, on the other hand, like to do things besides watching TV and I'm very happy to not have this or that show that I "have" to watch every Thursday night. It's very freeing. Therefore, Netflix suits us fine. With $60 per month saved in satellite TV fees, we'd have to do a LOT of video renting and buying every month before reaching that level.
I've had mechanical throttles stick wide open on me at least three times that I can remember. Once was on a motorcycle when I was about 17. I was up to about 4th gear, wondering semi-concernedly what I should do, when I remembered the kill switch.
The other two times were in my Land Rover Discovery after off-roading. The cable got too dirty and stuck open. In both cases, the solution was to turn the car off, pull over (being careful to avoid steering lock) and free up the cable.
The point is that things can, and do, go wrong with any system.