I'm not saying that for love of Nielsen (because shows I've loved got screwed by the ratings system), but basically, TV shows have two models for monetization outside of PBS:
1: Give the shows away over the air and sell ads to pay for it.
2: Sell access to the channel at a premium and make the shows worthy of the premium.
The first covers all network TV and virtually all of basic cable - even though the cable companies pay to carry the basic cable channels. The second covers HBO, Showtime, etc. In the premium model, they might care about non-traditional ways of engaging with content. Because it increases interest and loyalty, thereby driving up demand for the channel - which either can result in a better deal for the channel or more subscribers.
But for a traditional channel, all they care about is the ads, who views them, when they are viewed, and if they are viewed. Looking up info on IMDB doesn't help them, ordering the season on DVD is a nice bonus but not essential, browsing the show website doesn't help them. TV channels sell ads, and they want to sell them to the right people at the right times. Viagra ads don't run during Bugs Bunny cartoons. Breakfast cereal ads don't run during Matlock (just to use obvious examples). Cadillac doesn't advertise on a WWE show, but Kia might. They want to know who the audience is and how big it is. DVRs don't help them that much, though they are awesome for us.
The fragmentation of the TV market and the explosion of channels makes it exponentially tougher to handle the advertiser-based market properly, but still the Nielsen data is the most useful metric that they have. It needs to be updated for the modern era for sure, but it still provides the raw data needed to sustain the ad-based model.
This. SPF is fine as something you can use to tag messages and increase their filter score. If they lack a valid SPF there's a slightly higher risk it's spam. But to block based on SPF records is just goofy. It's a good idea, but nowhere near universally adopted and there's plenty of valid reasons why mail would go through a different source.
On my own mail server, I add 1 to the scoring, with tag at 3.5 and block at 5.5. Those have worked pretty well (I use Kerio Connect, which has a Spamassassin-based system).
The US has an advantage in missile defense compared to many nations - the places from which you'd launch a missile at the US are distant, and it takes a lot of resources to attack them from a distance. Plus there's a lot of ground to target, but relatively little to defend. Defending NYC, Washington, LA, etc. from a distance of thousands of miles isn't as hard as defending Tel Aviv from 150 miles away, or defending Seoul from Pyongyang.
Sure, you can overwhelm a defense system, but it's cheap to make enough rockets to overwhelm a system when they don't have to travel 5000 or more miles. And at this point outside of the US and (to an extent) Russia, though there are plenty of nuclear powers there aren't a lot of missiles that can travel that far with any kind of payload and hit a target.
Those sort of missiles are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and very expensive to maintain.
So it's a vulnerability in the WRT54GL (and maybe the related routers) running mainly older firmware - it's a pretty old router model as are its cousins. And from watching the exploit video, it's a local vulnerability - not one you can exercise against the WAN port. So it looks like not such a big deal. After all, 98% of those just have the default password anyways.
If the more advanced gear (like the RV routers and such) have this issue then I might be concerned. But I don't have enough info yet to worry or not.
I'll shop locally, and I'll shop online. Depends on what for. I like to go to bookstores and buy books. I try and stick to the independents when I do so - but I also buy some of my more obscure books, new releases, or e-books online from Amazon. The same holds true for most other purchases. Mostly I use Amazon (or a similar vendor) to buy things that I would otherwise get at a big box retailer. That works pretty well.
The exception is clothing - there isn't much I get from brick & mortar retailers in general. I buy my sportcoats from Jos. A Bank in a nearby strip mall, otherwise I get shirts mainly from LL Bean online and everything else I use for clothes I pretty much order from Duluth Trading. They both have stores, but since I live in Massachusetts rather than Minnesota or Maine, it's a pain to go to them (yes, LL Bean has other stores, but they don't have nearly as much selection).
I'm lucky that we have a downtown with a very good and diverse shopping district, and we can get a lot of the things we want from local merchants at reasonable prices. Yes, I can get better prices online much of the time, but I still like to hand over money for my goods when feasible.
I was a frequent poster, submitter, and reader back in the day. I used the journals before moving to these newfangled things called blogs. I still post, though not that often anymore - no longer being a desk jockey the spare time isn't around to participate like it used to be. But even with all the changes, Slashdot is still the place I go for my all-in-one-place scan of tech news, still the most interesting place to go and get perspective on the story, and still one of the most informative communities out there.
I hope I'm still reading the site daily in 15 more years.
Our son is going into 5th grade. He's attending a public school that has a 190-day school year with an extended 8-3 day, and they go to school until late July, only getting 5-6 weeks of summer vacation. In compensation for the long July in school, they get a vacation week in late October and another one in the beginning of June that other kids don't get.
For the most part, he loves it. And when he and his schoolmates get back to school, there seems to be less time getting kids back up to speed than there is at the conventional schools here in town. Overall results trend better here as well, and we've got a lot of overall issues in the system here outside of our school. Within reason, I think an extended day/extended year model is ideal for most learning situations, but not necessarily universal. I don't think school should be fully year-round, there should be some sort of summer break. But the 2+ month summer vacation is a relic of this country's agricultural roots, and it certainly could go away without causing a problem.
Glad I got 4 packages of them through Woot last year, then. My 10-year old son is smart enough to not eat them, and also capable of making cool things and shapes with them. I'm pretty sure they won't be fatal.
A lot of today's internal server support jobs will go away. But there will still be network infrastructure to support (somebody has to manage the switches, firewalls, and access points), there's still going to be desktop support (PEBKAC errors, hardware, and malware), and there will likely be at least some local resources that need to be managed. We won't have a lot of people managing Exchange servers or Active Directory anymore. Or actually we still will - they'll just be working for the cloud providers instead of the client company.
Besides that, this will open up opportunities for outsource support firms (disclaimer: I own a small one). Companies will still need specialized support resources on occasion, just likely not enough to employ a lot of them as staff. They will get that expertise as-needed to supplement what they have in-house.
Like it or not, carriers bring no value-add to the table. All they do now is provide pipes. They were able to charge outrageous fees for text messaging before because there were pretty much no alternatives for instant connections - despite the actual cost of SMS being virtually nil.
Now that we have BBM, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc., there's a host of alternatives that work just fine and only use minuscule squirts of data to connect. The future is integrated apps like Apple's Messages - it uses SMS, but switches to IMessage if it's available. And eventually it (and the like) will connect via whatever the first/best message alternative it has - only falling back to SMS if all else fails.
I'm not saying everything's OK (and unlike what one of the ACs thinks, I'm not a Republican either - I'm actually a Democrat and even an elected office holder - though a minor one). But the nature of manufacturing has changed drastically in the last few decades. Manufacturing used to be a place of great added value. Building things like homes, cars, industrial equipment, aircraft, and even many consumer electronics items was a place for skilled labor and the value of a domestic workforce was high.
Nowadays, those jobs building iPhones, PCs, and flat screen TVs are highly automated and the only real labor intensive part of the job is fitting things in place and tightening screws. Even though they're retail jobs (and not great), there's several thousand people working at the stores - and those are far better jobs than the Foxconn workers have. And overall Apple has about 50,000 employees.
It's not so much that it would add a tremendous extra price to iPhones to make them here - it's that the supply chain and people aren't available here to do it, even if they wanted to. You try and find a factory complex in the US that can draw a quarter-million employees with thousands of engineers to supervise them. We just don't have enough people for that.
We can still build things that provide good jobs and employ plenty of people. We just can't do that sort of manufacturing here. But it's not a huge loss - we can do better.
Apple makes gobs of money by owning the high-value part of the product - the design, engineering, and final sales. There's virtually no profit in actually manufacturing the product. So as a result, companies have emerged like Foxconn (the biggest) that specialize in the manufacturing process. And they make money by doing a _lot_ of manufacturing, for a lot of different vendors. They set up shop in mainland China for easy access to workers - and for most of those workers the crappy pay they get is better than they could earn elsewhere.
And because of that, a whole supply chain rose around those companies to keep them freshly supplied with components. There's an entire infrastructure in and around China specialized in low-cost electronics manufacturing. That's not the only place Foxconn makes stuff (they have factories in Eastern Europe, Brazil, and India - all places where they can get relatively cheap access to an educated workforce). And also, Foxconn doesn't just make products for Apple - nor are they Apple's only manufacturing vendor.
Also worth noting again is that the manufacturing is a low-margin business. Based on their 2010 numbers, they had about $59 billion in sales. Sounds like a lot, but less than 2/3 of Apple's numbers alone. Again, in profit they did $2.2 billion - but that's a low percentage of sales, and that's after supporting nearly a million employees.
The only other thing I'd mention here is that there are companies manufacturing products in higher-wage places, and there are products better-suited to manufacturing here in the US. Precision electronics, low-volume, high-price items, and goods where the manufacturing cost is lower than the shipping costs from overseas would be - these are all good candidates for onshore manufacturing. iPhones, PCs, gaming consoles - those are gone, and they're not coming back. But the jobs they create are crappy ones anyways. And they'll always be chasing the lowest cost somewhere in the world.
I think Winer's story extends out to a myriad of professions (mainly technical ones, but plenty of others). If an observer doesn't understand the work you do, they think it can't be too hard. Most folks overestimate their own abilities. I run a small IT company - we've got a few employees of varying skill sets but all pretty good at solving network issues. But I still regularly see clients complain about how long a task takes, or how a five-minute fix couldn't have been that hard. Car repairmen still get bitched at by people about a $200 bill to replace a tiny part.
There are good programmers, there are great programmers, and there are assuredly mediocre programmers. But that's what they do - and they are guaranteed to know more about it than virtually any layperson. Just because your car runs does not mean you know how to build a car. If your lawyer gets you off the hook for a crime you didn't commit, does that mean you could be a lawyer?
It takes very little skill to stock shelves in a grocery store. But a person who is doing that for a living definitely is better at that task than we are. More people need to understand this basic fact.
Of course, then people would be convinced that they were better at understanding facts.
I think as a practical matter, any spying done on devices outside of RIM would have to be at the cellular carrier level - and that wouldn't require the handset makers to cooperate at all. Blackberries all get routed through RIM's servers, but pretty much every other smartphone is just an Internet node.
In the same vein, I'd think that if it's on wifi there wouldn't be anything special that a backdoor would get. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.
Re:Just seems like a well thought out list
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The RMS Tour Rider
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The old "digital delivery service" WAM!NET used to stick a rubber chicken in their non-sealed (but still not supposed to be opened normally) box. In the box was a small 19" rack with the router, communications gear (an SGI box), and a rubber chicken.
They didn't mind you seeing it, it was a little joke on their part. Sometimes their techs would tell me to go in the box.
They sold turnkey communications services to ad agencies, print shops, and media companies for file transfer. Back in the days when a T-1 was a couple of thousand per month. They installed their box and all the gear, stuck it on your network, created user accounts, and hooked it up to the T-1 they'd order. And then you'd be billed by the transfer.
They also gave out hundreds of pairs of purple Chuck Taylors at the Seybold conference in Boston where they debuted. Still have mine.
Having a reverse DNS is a good practice, and anyone with a mail server should be doing it. That said, a lot of small businesses don't have reverse DNS set up, don't know what you mean when you tell them to do it, or have ISPs that are a pain to deal with. I'd mark up the spam score on a message without reverse DNS on the sending server (and I do on my own server) but I wouldn't block it entirely unless it sets off a lot more flags than just that one.
I use Kerio Connect on my server - I add 2 points for lack of reverse DNS. 3.5 points drops you into the junk folder, 5 blocks you completely. Doing that I get pretty much no false blocks, a false positive every few days, and about 3-5 spams that make it to the junk folder per day. I block a few hundred.
"Hey, I hope you don't mind, I got up a little early, so I took the liberty of milking your cow for you. Yeah, it took a little while to get her warmed up, she sure is a stubborn one, whew."
You know, I have to give Apple all these props (yes, my life is filled with iThings, but still), but once again they set the standard. Macs have been mounting ISO images and DMG files for the last decade - I was really surprised when Vista dropped without this basic native ability and even more so when it didn't make the cut for Windows 7. Sure, most PCs still ship with optical drives but it's been more convenient for years now to ship image files than.EXE installers or zip files in most cases. You'd think that Windows would have gained this ability before now.
As said earlier in this thread, the App Store model now will begin to take over for most packaged software and for Windows as well. Linux users have downloaded from repositories for the better part of 20 years (ever since the RPM). Mac users have downloaded DMG installers forever, and now have an App Store. Retail software distribution is going down the toilet.
The only wildcard is bandwidth capping - the carriers all want it, none of the users and none of the content providers want it. More and more things are going digital. Something's got to give, and within the next year or so we'll know which it is.
The trend in IT since day 1 has been to alternate waves of centralization (Mainframe, client-server, cloud) with waves of decentralization (PC, workstation). Really, it'll probably be like it is now, just more so. Firms with very simple needs will use cloud-based mail and sharing solutions, firms with more need for customization and/or performance will run their own servers. If they are large enough to justify the expense, they'll hire an IT staff, otherwise they will use companies like mine when needed. Computers themselves will still need support, even if all the data is in a server farm somewhere. Not to mention that cloud computing assumes Internet that's always there and always working.
Wireless will become more important, but wired will still be used when viable because it's faster and more reliable (plus every wired computer is one less tapping shared spectrum). Windows will continue to suck less, Macs the same, and Linux will keep being just a couple of years away from desktop usage.
The wildcard is the emergence of the iPad (not tablets in general yet - the market so far has decreed that no tablet other than the iPad matters thus far). iPads alone won't redefine the IT business, but if any other platform takes hold to even close to the degree the iPad has thus far then tablets may finally become a viable part of the IT environment - ant that has the potential to redefine how applications are used and support is provided.
Kerio Connect is based on a lot of open-source technologies, and they do contribute back - but it is in itself a commercial product. For a small number of users, though, it's still a good value for those looking to DIY.
(disclaimer: Though I'm a user of it, I'm also a fairly large reseller by Kerio standards and my business gets a lot of our revenue from it)
The minus of Kerio is that it's commercial software and therefore not roll-your-own in nature. Limited tinkering is available. And to get updates after year 1, there's a subscription charge. The webmail is good but a little dated compared to some of the latest stuff out there.
The pluses, though, are these (in my non-biased opinion):
- Good antispam tech (blacklists, SpamAssassin, Bayes filtering). Not state-of-the-art, but traps most of it. - Uses built-in Sophos engine and/or your own AV for filtering - Easy to administer with web GUI, plus it's extensible with an API. - Mail and config files are stored in plain text and can be accessed and edited by hand if needed. - Supports native client for pretty much everything (Outlook, Mac apps, Sunbird and Thunderbird, etc.). Supports IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV. - Integrates with AD or OD if needed - Supports ActiveSync and if you have a Windows server it can support Blackberries (you have to run BES to do that, and BES is Windows-only) - Easy to manage SSL, and it'll automatically use SSL for SMTP transfers if the target server supports it as well (so you get encrypted transmission) - Runs on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Plus it comes as a pre-packaged VM for VMware or Parallels for appliance use. That's kind of handy. - Scales well. It'll go from 5 to 1000 users pretty well on good-enough hardware. My largest client on it has an Xserve with an SSD boot drive and a RAID 1 mirror to support 1000 users.
They'll give you a 30-day trial if you want for free. And if you try it and like it, feel free to buy it from someone other than me - I don't get referral fees or anything for that but I'm not pimping it on my own behalf here.
I've got a Mid 2010 i7 15" MBP, 8GB RAM and an SSD. It's got a NVIDIA GT330M card in it, and I've been running Lion full-time since the GM seed was put out on 7/1. I've also used all the DPs from another boot drive I have in it (I took out the DVD drive and installed a smaller SSD). Lion has had some issues, but never a graphics-related lockup. That's both using the built-in display and also connected to a LED Cinema Display. No graphics issues at all.
In fact, the only problems I've really had were that Pogoplug's software doesn't work, my older copy of PDFpen Pro crashes, and the Cinema Display now makes a "popping" noise the moment it initializes when I hotplug it (that wasn't the case on Snow Leopard). Otherwise Lion's easily the most solid 1.0 release I've ever used.
It's a cool idea and the YouTube video is neat, but requiring Chrome? Non-starter. I'm sure it's because they're pushing WebM video out, and so it's just another shot in Google's War On Apple (the WebM vs. H.264 battle again). No thanks. I use Chrome on occasion, but I refuse to use websites that require one specific browser even when it's supposedly up to standards.
Last summer when Arcade Fire did their Chrome Experiments video (the interactive film for "We Used to Wait"), it rendered really well on Safari and Chrome, OK on prerelease Firefox builds, and not really on IE8, but that was because it really was built in HTML5 and made concerted efforts to be neutral.
They made one server-grade piece of hardware. It was the Xserve. Rumor has it that the next Mac Pro will be convertible to a rack setup, but I wouldn't bet on that coming true (as much as I'd like it). Snow Leopard Server on an Xserve was the high-water mark for the enterprise Mac server. Apple just didn't sell that many.
On the other hand, they practically can't make the mini servers fast enough to keep the channel stuffed. I've installed likely 10 or more mini servers for each Xserve I ever set up in all my years in business. They aren't industrial, but they're great SMB servers. The current model adds Thunderbolt so you can finally do good external storage (no more networked flakey FW800 drives) and a quad i7 for a grand. Lion Server has been turned into a small business server for the average shop. It'll sell millions. Might not be an enterprise product now, but when was it, really?
Apple is busy making scads of money in the consumer space. Enterprise IT is a "nice to have", but not a "gotta have" for Apple. Sure Lion is initially available as a download only. And no IT department with any brains will install Lion right away to begin with. That all said, it's easy to download it once, then make it available for mass deployment (just pay the license fees as if you were downloading it a ton for starters - there's no DRM on the download). And next month it'll be shipped on USB stick (like they do now for all the current DVDless Macs).
Besides that, there's plenty of third-party deployment and management tools that are being updated for Lion right now. It's really not going to be that big a deal. They are dumbing down the server software, but they also have a virtualization license that is far more generous than it has been in the past. The App Store is getting a corporate version. Third parties like Apperian are getting opportunities there, too.
Apple's focus from a corporate side is making Lion a good client OS. They've done a lot to advance it. The server is backtracking to be a SMB OS (we'll see how server-friendly the next Mac Pro is, but the mini is pretty slick even if it's not readily rackable). Apple, though, is focused on delivering the features that sell the most units to the most people. Period. Anything they deliver on top of that is pretty much a bonus.
When your Mac sales are considered disappointing because they're "only" up 14% you're doing something right.
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I'm not saying that for love of Nielsen (because shows I've loved got screwed by the ratings system), but basically, TV shows have two models for monetization outside of PBS:
1: Give the shows away over the air and sell ads to pay for it.
2: Sell access to the channel at a premium and make the shows worthy of the premium.
The first covers all network TV and virtually all of basic cable - even though the cable companies pay to carry the basic cable channels. The second covers HBO, Showtime, etc. In the premium model, they might care about non-traditional ways of engaging with content. Because it increases interest and loyalty, thereby driving up demand for the channel - which either can result in a better deal for the channel or more subscribers.
But for a traditional channel, all they care about is the ads, who views them, when they are viewed, and if they are viewed. Looking up info on IMDB doesn't help them, ordering the season on DVD is a nice bonus but not essential, browsing the show website doesn't help them. TV channels sell ads, and they want to sell them to the right people at the right times. Viagra ads don't run during Bugs Bunny cartoons. Breakfast cereal ads don't run during Matlock (just to use obvious examples). Cadillac doesn't advertise on a WWE show, but Kia might. They want to know who the audience is and how big it is. DVRs don't help them that much, though they are awesome for us.
The fragmentation of the TV market and the explosion of channels makes it exponentially tougher to handle the advertiser-based market properly, but still the Nielsen data is the most useful metric that they have. It needs to be updated for the modern era for sure, but it still provides the raw data needed to sustain the ad-based model.
This. SPF is fine as something you can use to tag messages and increase their filter score. If they lack a valid SPF there's a slightly higher risk it's spam. But to block based on SPF records is just goofy. It's a good idea, but nowhere near universally adopted and there's plenty of valid reasons why mail would go through a different source.
On my own mail server, I add 1 to the scoring, with tag at 3.5 and block at 5.5. Those have worked pretty well (I use Kerio Connect, which has a Spamassassin-based system).
The US has an advantage in missile defense compared to many nations - the places from which you'd launch a missile at the US are distant, and it takes a lot of resources to attack them from a distance. Plus there's a lot of ground to target, but relatively little to defend. Defending NYC, Washington, LA, etc. from a distance of thousands of miles isn't as hard as defending Tel Aviv from 150 miles away, or defending Seoul from Pyongyang.
Sure, you can overwhelm a defense system, but it's cheap to make enough rockets to overwhelm a system when they don't have to travel 5000 or more miles. And at this point outside of the US and (to an extent) Russia, though there are plenty of nuclear powers there aren't a lot of missiles that can travel that far with any kind of payload and hit a target.
Those sort of missiles are expensive to build, expensive to operate, and very expensive to maintain.
So it's a vulnerability in the WRT54GL (and maybe the related routers) running mainly older firmware - it's a pretty old router model as are its cousins. And from watching the exploit video, it's a local vulnerability - not one you can exercise against the WAN port. So it looks like not such a big deal. After all, 98% of those just have the default password anyways.
If the more advanced gear (like the RV routers and such) have this issue then I might be concerned. But I don't have enough info yet to worry or not.
I'll shop locally, and I'll shop online. Depends on what for. I like to go to bookstores and buy books. I try and stick to the independents when I do so - but I also buy some of my more obscure books, new releases, or e-books online from Amazon. The same holds true for most other purchases. Mostly I use Amazon (or a similar vendor) to buy things that I would otherwise get at a big box retailer. That works pretty well.
The exception is clothing - there isn't much I get from brick & mortar retailers in general. I buy my sportcoats from Jos. A Bank in a nearby strip mall, otherwise I get shirts mainly from LL Bean online and everything else I use for clothes I pretty much order from Duluth Trading. They both have stores, but since I live in Massachusetts rather than Minnesota or Maine, it's a pain to go to them (yes, LL Bean has other stores, but they don't have nearly as much selection).
I'm lucky that we have a downtown with a very good and diverse shopping district, and we can get a lot of the things we want from local merchants at reasonable prices. Yes, I can get better prices online much of the time, but I still like to hand over money for my goods when feasible.
I was a frequent poster, submitter, and reader back in the day. I used the journals before moving to these newfangled things called blogs. I still post, though not that often anymore - no longer being a desk jockey the spare time isn't around to participate like it used to be. But even with all the changes, Slashdot is still the place I go for my all-in-one-place scan of tech news, still the most interesting place to go and get perspective on the story, and still one of the most informative communities out there.
I hope I'm still reading the site daily in 15 more years.
Our son is going into 5th grade. He's attending a public school that has a 190-day school year with an extended 8-3 day, and they go to school until late July, only getting 5-6 weeks of summer vacation. In compensation for the long July in school, they get a vacation week in late October and another one in the beginning of June that other kids don't get.
For the most part, he loves it. And when he and his schoolmates get back to school, there seems to be less time getting kids back up to speed than there is at the conventional schools here in town. Overall results trend better here as well, and we've got a lot of overall issues in the system here outside of our school. Within reason, I think an extended day/extended year model is ideal for most learning situations, but not necessarily universal. I don't think school should be fully year-round, there should be some sort of summer break. But the 2+ month summer vacation is a relic of this country's agricultural roots, and it certainly could go away without causing a problem.
Glad I got 4 packages of them through Woot last year, then. My 10-year old son is smart enough to not eat them, and also capable of making cool things and shapes with them. I'm pretty sure they won't be fatal.
A lot of today's internal server support jobs will go away. But there will still be network infrastructure to support (somebody has to manage the switches, firewalls, and access points), there's still going to be desktop support (PEBKAC errors, hardware, and malware), and there will likely be at least some local resources that need to be managed. We won't have a lot of people managing Exchange servers or Active Directory anymore. Or actually we still will - they'll just be working for the cloud providers instead of the client company.
Besides that, this will open up opportunities for outsource support firms (disclaimer: I own a small one). Companies will still need specialized support resources on occasion, just likely not enough to employ a lot of them as staff. They will get that expertise as-needed to supplement what they have in-house.
Like it or not, carriers bring no value-add to the table. All they do now is provide pipes. They were able to charge outrageous fees for text messaging before because there were pretty much no alternatives for instant connections - despite the actual cost of SMS being virtually nil.
Now that we have BBM, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, etc., there's a host of alternatives that work just fine and only use minuscule squirts of data to connect. The future is integrated apps like Apple's Messages - it uses SMS, but switches to IMessage if it's available. And eventually it (and the like) will connect via whatever the first/best message alternative it has - only falling back to SMS if all else fails.
Dumb pipes it is.
And nothing of value was lost.
Then again, I'm not one who sees any particular use to bitcoin other than interesting math.
I'm not saying everything's OK (and unlike what one of the ACs thinks, I'm not a Republican either - I'm actually a Democrat and even an elected office holder - though a minor one). But the nature of manufacturing has changed drastically in the last few decades. Manufacturing used to be a place of great added value. Building things like homes, cars, industrial equipment, aircraft, and even many consumer electronics items was a place for skilled labor and the value of a domestic workforce was high.
Nowadays, those jobs building iPhones, PCs, and flat screen TVs are highly automated and the only real labor intensive part of the job is fitting things in place and tightening screws. Even though they're retail jobs (and not great), there's several thousand people working at the stores - and those are far better jobs than the Foxconn workers have. And overall Apple has about 50,000 employees.
It's not so much that it would add a tremendous extra price to iPhones to make them here - it's that the supply chain and people aren't available here to do it, even if they wanted to. You try and find a factory complex in the US that can draw a quarter-million employees with thousands of engineers to supervise them. We just don't have enough people for that.
We can still build things that provide good jobs and employ plenty of people. We just can't do that sort of manufacturing here. But it's not a huge loss - we can do better.
Apple makes gobs of money by owning the high-value part of the product - the design, engineering, and final sales. There's virtually no profit in actually manufacturing the product. So as a result, companies have emerged like Foxconn (the biggest) that specialize in the manufacturing process. And they make money by doing a _lot_ of manufacturing, for a lot of different vendors. They set up shop in mainland China for easy access to workers - and for most of those workers the crappy pay they get is better than they could earn elsewhere.
And because of that, a whole supply chain rose around those companies to keep them freshly supplied with components. There's an entire infrastructure in and around China specialized in low-cost electronics manufacturing. That's not the only place Foxconn makes stuff (they have factories in Eastern Europe, Brazil, and India - all places where they can get relatively cheap access to an educated workforce). And also, Foxconn doesn't just make products for Apple - nor are they Apple's only manufacturing vendor.
Also worth noting again is that the manufacturing is a low-margin business. Based on their 2010 numbers, they had about $59 billion in sales. Sounds like a lot, but less than 2/3 of Apple's numbers alone. Again, in profit they did $2.2 billion - but that's a low percentage of sales, and that's after supporting nearly a million employees.
The only other thing I'd mention here is that there are companies manufacturing products in higher-wage places, and there are products better-suited to manufacturing here in the US. Precision electronics, low-volume, high-price items, and goods where the manufacturing cost is lower than the shipping costs from overseas would be - these are all good candidates for onshore manufacturing. iPhones, PCs, gaming consoles - those are gone, and they're not coming back. But the jobs they create are crappy ones anyways. And they'll always be chasing the lowest cost somewhere in the world.
I think Winer's story extends out to a myriad of professions (mainly technical ones, but plenty of others). If an observer doesn't understand the work you do, they think it can't be too hard. Most folks overestimate their own abilities. I run a small IT company - we've got a few employees of varying skill sets but all pretty good at solving network issues. But I still regularly see clients complain about how long a task takes, or how a five-minute fix couldn't have been that hard. Car repairmen still get bitched at by people about a $200 bill to replace a tiny part.
There are good programmers, there are great programmers, and there are assuredly mediocre programmers. But that's what they do - and they are guaranteed to know more about it than virtually any layperson. Just because your car runs does not mean you know how to build a car. If your lawyer gets you off the hook for a crime you didn't commit, does that mean you could be a lawyer?
It takes very little skill to stock shelves in a grocery store. But a person who is doing that for a living definitely is better at that task than we are. More people need to understand this basic fact.
Of course, then people would be convinced that they were better at understanding facts.
I think as a practical matter, any spying done on devices outside of RIM would have to be at the cellular carrier level - and that wouldn't require the handset makers to cooperate at all. Blackberries all get routed through RIM's servers, but pretty much every other smartphone is just an Internet node.
In the same vein, I'd think that if it's on wifi there wouldn't be anything special that a backdoor would get. Maybe I'm just not paranoid enough.
The old "digital delivery service" WAM!NET used to stick a rubber chicken in their non-sealed (but still not supposed to be opened normally) box. In the box was a small 19" rack with the router, communications gear (an SGI box), and a rubber chicken.
They didn't mind you seeing it, it was a little joke on their part. Sometimes their techs would tell me to go in the box.
They sold turnkey communications services to ad agencies, print shops, and media companies for file transfer. Back in the days when a T-1 was a couple of thousand per month. They installed their box and all the gear, stuck it on your network, created user accounts, and hooked it up to the T-1 they'd order. And then you'd be billed by the transfer.
They also gave out hundreds of pairs of purple Chuck Taylors at the Seybold conference in Boston where they debuted. Still have mine.
Having a reverse DNS is a good practice, and anyone with a mail server should be doing it. That said, a lot of small businesses don't have reverse DNS set up, don't know what you mean when you tell them to do it, or have ISPs that are a pain to deal with. I'd mark up the spam score on a message without reverse DNS on the sending server (and I do on my own server) but I wouldn't block it entirely unless it sets off a lot more flags than just that one.
I use Kerio Connect on my server - I add 2 points for lack of reverse DNS. 3.5 points drops you into the junk folder, 5 blocks you completely. Doing that I get pretty much no false blocks, a false positive every few days, and about 3-5 spams that make it to the junk folder per day. I block a few hundred.
"Hey, I hope you don't mind, I got up a little early, so I took the liberty of milking your cow for you. Yeah, it took a little while to get her warmed up, she sure is a stubborn one, whew."
"We don't have a cow. We have a bull."
"I'm gonna brush my teeth."
You know, I have to give Apple all these props (yes, my life is filled with iThings, but still), but once again they set the standard. Macs have been mounting ISO images and DMG files for the last decade - I was really surprised when Vista dropped without this basic native ability and even more so when it didn't make the cut for Windows 7. Sure, most PCs still ship with optical drives but it's been more convenient for years now to ship image files than .EXE installers or zip files in most cases. You'd think that Windows would have gained this ability before now.
As said earlier in this thread, the App Store model now will begin to take over for most packaged software and for Windows as well. Linux users have downloaded from repositories for the better part of 20 years (ever since the RPM). Mac users have downloaded DMG installers forever, and now have an App Store. Retail software distribution is going down the toilet.
The only wildcard is bandwidth capping - the carriers all want it, none of the users and none of the content providers want it. More and more things are going digital. Something's got to give, and within the next year or so we'll know which it is.
The trend in IT since day 1 has been to alternate waves of centralization (Mainframe, client-server, cloud) with waves of decentralization (PC, workstation). Really, it'll probably be like it is now, just more so. Firms with very simple needs will use cloud-based mail and sharing solutions, firms with more need for customization and/or performance will run their own servers. If they are large enough to justify the expense, they'll hire an IT staff, otherwise they will use companies like mine when needed. Computers themselves will still need support, even if all the data is in a server farm somewhere. Not to mention that cloud computing assumes Internet that's always there and always working.
Wireless will become more important, but wired will still be used when viable because it's faster and more reliable (plus every wired computer is one less tapping shared spectrum). Windows will continue to suck less, Macs the same, and Linux will keep being just a couple of years away from desktop usage.
The wildcard is the emergence of the iPad (not tablets in general yet - the market so far has decreed that no tablet other than the iPad matters thus far). iPads alone won't redefine the IT business, but if any other platform takes hold to even close to the degree the iPad has thus far then tablets may finally become a viable part of the IT environment - ant that has the potential to redefine how applications are used and support is provided.
Kerio Connect is based on a lot of open-source technologies, and they do contribute back - but it is in itself a commercial product. For a small number of users, though, it's still a good value for those looking to DIY.
(disclaimer: Though I'm a user of it, I'm also a fairly large reseller by Kerio standards and my business gets a lot of our revenue from it)
The minus of Kerio is that it's commercial software and therefore not roll-your-own in nature. Limited tinkering is available. And to get updates after year 1, there's a subscription charge. The webmail is good but a little dated compared to some of the latest stuff out there.
The pluses, though, are these (in my non-biased opinion):
- Good antispam tech (blacklists, SpamAssassin, Bayes filtering). Not state-of-the-art, but traps most of it.
- Uses built-in Sophos engine and/or your own AV for filtering
- Easy to administer with web GUI, plus it's extensible with an API.
- Mail and config files are stored in plain text and can be accessed and edited by hand if needed.
- Supports native client for pretty much everything (Outlook, Mac apps, Sunbird and Thunderbird, etc.). Supports IMAP, CalDAV, and CardDAV.
- Integrates with AD or OD if needed
- Supports ActiveSync and if you have a Windows server it can support Blackberries (you have to run BES to do that, and BES is Windows-only)
- Easy to manage SSL, and it'll automatically use SSL for SMTP transfers if the target server supports it as well (so you get encrypted transmission)
- Runs on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Plus it comes as a pre-packaged VM for VMware or Parallels for appliance use. That's kind of handy.
- Scales well. It'll go from 5 to 1000 users pretty well on good-enough hardware. My largest client on it has an Xserve with an SSD boot drive and a RAID 1 mirror to support 1000 users.
They'll give you a 30-day trial if you want for free. And if you try it and like it, feel free to buy it from someone other than me - I don't get referral fees or anything for that but I'm not pimping it on my own behalf here.
I've got a Mid 2010 i7 15" MBP, 8GB RAM and an SSD. It's got a NVIDIA GT330M card in it, and I've been running Lion full-time since the GM seed was put out on 7/1. I've also used all the DPs from another boot drive I have in it (I took out the DVD drive and installed a smaller SSD). Lion has had some issues, but never a graphics-related lockup. That's both using the built-in display and also connected to a LED Cinema Display. No graphics issues at all.
In fact, the only problems I've really had were that Pogoplug's software doesn't work, my older copy of PDFpen Pro crashes, and the Cinema Display now makes a "popping" noise the moment it initializes when I hotplug it (that wasn't the case on Snow Leopard). Otherwise Lion's easily the most solid 1.0 release I've ever used.
It's a cool idea and the YouTube video is neat, but requiring Chrome? Non-starter. I'm sure it's because they're pushing WebM video out, and so it's just another shot in Google's War On Apple (the WebM vs. H.264 battle again). No thanks. I use Chrome on occasion, but I refuse to use websites that require one specific browser even when it's supposedly up to standards.
Last summer when Arcade Fire did their Chrome Experiments video (the interactive film for "We Used to Wait"), it rendered really well on Safari and Chrome, OK on prerelease Firefox builds, and not really on IE8, but that was because it really was built in HTML5 and made concerted efforts to be neutral.
They made one server-grade piece of hardware. It was the Xserve. Rumor has it that the next Mac Pro will be convertible to a rack setup, but I wouldn't bet on that coming true (as much as I'd like it). Snow Leopard Server on an Xserve was the high-water mark for the enterprise Mac server. Apple just didn't sell that many.
On the other hand, they practically can't make the mini servers fast enough to keep the channel stuffed. I've installed likely 10 or more mini servers for each Xserve I ever set up in all my years in business. They aren't industrial, but they're great SMB servers. The current model adds Thunderbolt so you can finally do good external storage (no more networked flakey FW800 drives) and a quad i7 for a grand. Lion Server has been turned into a small business server for the average shop. It'll sell millions. Might not be an enterprise product now, but when was it, really?
Apple is busy making scads of money in the consumer space. Enterprise IT is a "nice to have", but not a "gotta have" for Apple. Sure Lion is initially available as a download only. And no IT department with any brains will install Lion right away to begin with. That all said, it's easy to download it once, then make it available for mass deployment (just pay the license fees as if you were downloading it a ton for starters - there's no DRM on the download). And next month it'll be shipped on USB stick (like they do now for all the current DVDless Macs).
Besides that, there's plenty of third-party deployment and management tools that are being updated for Lion right now. It's really not going to be that big a deal. They are dumbing down the server software, but they also have a virtualization license that is far more generous than it has been in the past. The App Store is getting a corporate version. Third parties like Apperian are getting opportunities there, too.
Apple's focus from a corporate side is making Lion a good client OS. They've done a lot to advance it. The server is backtracking to be a SMB OS (we'll see how server-friendly the next Mac Pro is, but the mini is pretty slick even if it's not readily rackable). Apple, though, is focused on delivering the features that sell the most units to the most people. Period. Anything they deliver on top of that is pretty much a bonus.
When your Mac sales are considered disappointing because they're "only" up 14% you're doing something right.