Microsoft, Sony, whatever - none of them seem to really provide a quality product that they'll really stand behind. 90-day warranty? What is that shit? I've got a 3 year/36000 mile warranty on my vehicle, and I likely won't have to avail myself of it. The el-cheapo Wal-Mart PC that sits under my desk and cost less than my Xbox at least has a 1 year warranty. Also, what's with these proprietary memory cards? I guess they just wouldn't make enough money selling equipment that could use a standard CF card.
I guess I'll stop, because now I'm just bitching in general and I'd probably mod myself down for it if I could.:-) I did at least take the time to send MS a real snail-mail letter expressing my views on my situation. I don't expect a reply, but you never know.
This article is describing a bandwidth hog pure and simple. My heart does not bleed for him. Excessive bandwidth is not a "right", it really does amount to "abuse".
I would agree, and I would also agree that it's the ISP's right to throttle bandwidth. However, it's absolutely imperative that the ISP be very upfront about this. They need to stop going around advertising "unlimited usage" when in fact that's not what they're offering. They need to advertise that there are caps, and what those caps are. They also should provide their users with a means to see what their usage for the month is.
ISPs have the right to regulate the use of their own equipment, but advertising unlimited usage when it's not is fraudulent.
$135 for a refurb? Screw that, a new one is only $40 more.
Unfortunately, the Xbox is different enough from a standard computer such that you can't just put a different DVD drive in without modchipping the unit. Absent a modchip you have to use a drive that works specifically with the Xbox. Unless you buy one on eBay, that pretty much means either paying the MS repair tax or buying a Samsung drive and modifying it to work with the unit. You can't buy OEM replacement parts from MS, either. I see absolutely no reason why MS designed the Xbox this way except to drive the profit from the repair center - PC DVD drives are substantially faster and more capable than the crippleware they put into the Xboxes
One of the things that really snarked me off in my situation was that MS made it clear that they would neither tell me what was fixed on the unit, nor would they return the original parts (that I've already paid for) back to me. If you run an auto repair shop and you try to pull that, there's all kinds of trouble you get into - I don't see why MS should be any different. I'm sure MS is well aware of the Thomson problems, but they refuse to publicly acknowledge them. No matter, I'm not spending another dime on this unit and MS can kiss my ass on the matter as far as I'm concerned.
It was my understanding that the majority of the Thomson DVD problems were owing to a bad lens assembly - is the pot adjustment supposed to clear that up? I don't need to read CD-Rs, I just need to be able to run original Xbox games.:-)
Of course it cost them - they're forced to buy components from their distributors and are thus at the mercy of their prices. Sony actually makes their own hardware, and so it's a no-brainer for them to continue to lower the chip count for each revision of the system, and consequently lower the production cost. Microsoft simply doesn't have that luxury.
If you go with Myth, you'd have to have a PC to record with, and you could drive the TV from the Xbox. Myth is a client-server system - the server does the recording and everything else needed involving the tuner card(s). The clients can be anything that Myth can run on. Don't expect it to be painless to set up though - the documentation is spotty and sometimes lacks important information. It took a while to get my single CPU system set up, and even now there are still some bugs that require an occasional reboot.
And for the Xbox not being the same hardware quality as the ps2? What the hell are you smokeing? If my Xbox died, I would pay 179 for it again...
Not me - I bought mine new last year and recently discovered that it seems to be one of the early units with a bum Thomson drive in it. All 15 or so of my games plays wonderfully except my recently-purchased copy of Crimson Skies, and Microsoft's statement is "sorry, it's out of warranty, fork over some cash and we'll fix it". Well, given that this is only game I own that exposes this problem that was present from the date of manufacture (I verified the read problem on another older Thomson-equipped box, and verified the media was good on a newer Samsung-equipped box), I don't guess that warranty does one a lot of good - I'm not paying an extra $50 just so I can play one game, and because MS insists that I have to, they won't be getting any more of my business - I sold Crimson Skies and will just be happy with what I have.
I'll agree that the basic hardware is *supposed* to be better, but I'd at least like a functioning DVD drive in the damn thing - I'm not buying any more games when the odds are questionable about whether the game will even run on my console or not.
Devil's in the details there. Such sweeping advice is pretty useless unless there actually is a means to implement it. Maybe they should just leverage their synergy across multiple paradigms, and hope for the best.
I'm seeing a lot of people that *did* take responsibility for their career choices getting cut off at the knees because they went into serious debt to learn a skill that they believed would form the basis of a stable career. Interesting that this happens when the corporate world has whined for years that American schools aren't turning out enough qualified people, and now will refuse to hire many of those very people they asked for.
Actually AFAIK an Indian programmer would have a pretty hard time going to America and getting a job there, they would similarly need a work permit to work in America.
That work permit in America isn't that big of a deal. To my knowledge, there are not American *and* Indian political action groups that are actively lobbying the Indian government to let more Americans in the country with the intent of driving salaries down. The same can't be said in the U.S., and all one needs to do is look around at the H1-B/L1s to see just how hard it is to get a job here. Does India even have a professional work visa program?
5. Japan's government provides a lot of subsidies to their corporations - they're very long-term oriented in their thinking, and will sell at a loss if it means gaining market share.
If we outsource 100% of our IT, then we have a bunch of people available to do other things and create additional innovation.
We do? Great!! Uh, who's going to pay for the rather expensive and time-consuming retraining of the former IT people that already have a demonstrated ability to innovate? We're not going to retrain them? Oh well, we weren't really serious about that "innovation" thing anyway....
There's likely very little you can do to stop Dell or IBM from outsourcing to India, but I guarantee a 5-person development company in the US is not going to outsource your job.
The 7 person development company that I used to work for years ago has now jumped on the bandwagon whole-hog, and has quite a few Bulgarian H1-Bs on the payroll. Yeah, it's not quite outsourcing, but the intent is the same.
The Wired article stated that the $11K salary in question was more than 22X the per-capita Indian income. As you say, it is something of an apples/oranges comparison, as most of the poorest people in the U.S. still have a substantially higher quality of life than the poorest people in India, and that's largely due to the fact that our government provides a bunch of services that simply aren't available in India. In part because of the cost of government, there's a basic COL difference that isn't going to allow the American coders to be competitive on price given these salaries - it's expensive to live in the U.S.
Don't you think that if Corporation XYZ could open a new office in Arkansas, or South Carolina, or Wyoming, i.e. a place with lower cost of living and lower pay scales, then they would've done that before they "sent" their jobs to India
There's absolutely nothing keeping them from doing just that, except for the fact that you can't find software people that will work for $10K per year anywhere in the U.S. You make more than that working as a greeter for Wal-Mart, for crying out loud.
However, you have to question the quality of a life where from the womb all you do is study in order to get into a good university where all you do is work in order to get a code-monkey job which is your life.
This is true, but from the American perspective, it's not very encouraging to see that you can work hard, study, blow some serious cash on school, and then have your job sold out from under you, leaving you with $7/hour flipping burgers and trying to pay off those student loans. That's one aspect of the Wired article that was almost completely ignored - with all of the people saying, "just move laterally into another field", no one seems to have a good idea just how to afford that lateral move and the training it entails, especially for the poor schmucks that are just now graduating.
There are lots of comparisons made with the steel and textile industries, but those didn't require an expensive specialized education that suddenly became worthless. Also, there is *such* a gap between the COL between here and India - the Wired article mentions that the project manager they interviewed makes $11,000 per year and lives quite comfortably - that's practically at U.S. minimum wage and not really a sum you could live on here.
I guess that this whole thing is an object lesson in going into business for oneself - when it comes down to it, you're the only person that can really be trusted to look out for you, because you can't trust an employer to give a damn.
Or perhaps it's like our guy who was hired to do our device driver work (never mind that I could write it myself and have almost three times his experience - he has a Masters' and used to work at MS, so he must know his shit, right?). Here we are more than a year later, and the damn driver *still* doesn't work properly (it's not a particularly complex piece of hardware), and if you even imply there is a problem with his code, he goes ballistic. Further, he refuses to listen to anything I have to say about how the driver really needs to work. Yeah, no big Western ego there. When presented with the schematics for a simple I/O board that consisted of nothing more than an 8255 and two 16-bit DACs, he refused to do anything until he was presented with a functional software spec for the board (which I wrote for him). Give me a break.
On the other hand, the Sri Lankans that make up the majority of our software team are bright as hell and pretty friendly guys to boot. They can't stand this other guy either.:-)
I've bought two machines from Wal-Mart - one is a C3 system I've had for about a year now that's run 24/7 with zero problems. The other is a Duron 1.4GHz system that I recently bought for my mom to replace her ailing Toshiba laptop. I've been quite pleased with both machines, and they're cheap enough that if I have to replace them in a year, it's no big deal.
For my mom's machine, I investigated Dell (I also have a Dell Dimension PIII-700), but the thing that turned me off the most about them was the $99 shipping charge they were asking, when shipping from Wal-Mart was a whopping $14. I don't mind paying extra for noticeably better quality, but frankly my Wal-Mart Microtel box has held up better than my Dell.:-)
And the 350 also has an MPEG decoder on board - I don't yet have my Myth install completely up and running, but "dd if=/dev/video of=/dev/video16 bs=64k" takes less than 2% of my PIII-700's CPU at 720x480 on the 350's TV-out, and gives me a damn nice picture too.
I think what he was saying is that the fuel cells don't have the capacity to run it for more than 7 nights. During the daytime, it's running on the solar panels and not using any fuel.
I'd be willing to bet in 20 years you won't be able to get Micro-ATX boards either, or ATA-100 drives, or the copy of Win XP that you'll need to run the whole thing. 20 years later, I can still get support from Yamaha for my DX5 and other older gear - are these guys going to be able to offer the same?
The main point I was making was that even though they say it's standards-based, it's not going to be a matter of just swapping boards out when their mobo vendor discontinues the product in 6 months or so, owing to the nature of the PC motherboard market.
Something that's not addressed anywhere in the ad is the issues that will crop up when using an "industry-standard" motherboard. What happens when the mobo dies, and an exact replacement is not available because it's no longer manufactured? I've had the not-too-pleasant experience of having to replace mobos, and invariably there are chipset, video, and other differences that can make it difficult if not impossible to boot a Windows box off the original hard disk without reinstalling the OS, not to mention the fact that the synth will only be as stable as the drivers for that particular hardware are. If I order a new board for my 20-year old DX-5, I'm quite confident that it will work out of the bag. I wouldn't have that degree of faith with this rig.
You want a real all-in-one workstation? Save your pennies and get an old Synclavier or Fairlight III, or go the ProTools route if that's your fancy. For performance uses, it seems to me this behemoth is a non-starter, and for studio work, there are a lot more modular and powerful solutions for a comparable price. And finally, as others have mentioned, if they want to be taken seriously, they need to do something about the keyboard - you can't charge $5K and only provide a 61-key sprung keyboard.
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Microsoft, Sony, whatever - none of them seem to really provide a quality product that they'll really stand behind. 90-day warranty? What is that shit? I've got a 3 year/36000 mile warranty on my vehicle, and I likely won't have to avail myself of it. The el-cheapo Wal-Mart PC that sits under my desk and cost less than my Xbox at least has a 1 year warranty. Also, what's with these proprietary memory cards? I guess they just wouldn't make enough money selling equipment that could use a standard CF card.
:-) I did at least take the time to send MS a real snail-mail letter expressing my views on my situation. I don't expect a reply, but you never know.
I guess I'll stop, because now I'm just bitching in general and I'd probably mod myself down for it if I could.
This article is describing a bandwidth hog pure and simple. My heart does not bleed for him. Excessive bandwidth is not a "right", it really does amount to "abuse".
I would agree, and I would also agree that it's the ISP's right to throttle bandwidth. However, it's absolutely imperative that the ISP be very upfront about this. They need to stop going around advertising "unlimited usage" when in fact that's not what they're offering. They need to advertise that there are caps, and what those caps are. They also should provide their users with a means to see what their usage for the month is.
ISPs have the right to regulate the use of their own equipment, but advertising unlimited usage when it's not is fraudulent.
$135 for a refurb? Screw that, a new one is only $40 more.
Unfortunately, the Xbox is different enough from a standard computer such that you can't just put a different DVD drive in without modchipping the unit. Absent a modchip you have to use a drive that works specifically with the Xbox. Unless you buy one on eBay, that pretty much means either paying the MS repair tax or buying a Samsung drive and modifying it to work with the unit. You can't buy OEM replacement parts from MS, either. I see absolutely no reason why MS designed the Xbox this way except to drive the profit from the repair center - PC DVD drives are substantially faster and more capable than the crippleware they put into the Xboxes
One of the things that really snarked me off in my situation was that MS made it clear that they would neither tell me what was fixed on the unit, nor would they return the original parts (that I've already paid for) back to me. If you run an auto repair shop and you try to pull that, there's all kinds of trouble you get into - I don't see why MS should be any different. I'm sure MS is well aware of the Thomson problems, but they refuse to publicly acknowledge them. No matter, I'm not spending another dime on this unit and MS can kiss my ass on the matter as far as I'm concerned.
It was my understanding that the majority of the Thomson DVD problems were owing to a bad lens assembly - is the pot adjustment supposed to clear that up? I don't need to read CD-Rs, I just need to be able to run original Xbox games. :-)
Of course it cost them - they're forced to buy components from their distributors and are thus at the mercy of their prices. Sony actually makes their own hardware, and so it's a no-brainer for them to continue to lower the chip count for each revision of the system, and consequently lower the production cost. Microsoft simply doesn't have that luxury.
If you go with Myth, you'd have to have a PC to record with, and you could drive the TV from the Xbox. Myth is a client-server system - the server does the recording and everything else needed involving the tuner card(s). The clients can be anything that Myth can run on. Don't expect it to be painless to set up though - the documentation is spotty and sometimes lacks important information. It took a while to get my single CPU system set up, and even now there are still some bugs that require an occasional reboot.
/me still loves his Myth system
And for the Xbox not being the same hardware quality as the ps2? What the hell are you smokeing? If my Xbox died, I would pay 179 for it again...
Not me - I bought mine new last year and recently discovered that it seems to be one of the early units with a bum Thomson drive in it. All 15 or so of my games plays wonderfully except my recently-purchased copy of Crimson Skies, and Microsoft's statement is "sorry, it's out of warranty, fork over some cash and we'll fix it". Well, given that this is only game I own that exposes this problem that was present from the date of manufacture (I verified the read problem on another older Thomson-equipped box, and verified the media was good on a newer Samsung-equipped box), I don't guess that warranty does one a lot of good - I'm not paying an extra $50 just so I can play one game, and because MS insists that I have to, they won't be getting any more of my business - I sold Crimson Skies and will just be happy with what I have.
I'll agree that the basic hardware is *supposed* to be better, but I'd at least like a functioning DVD drive in the damn thing - I'm not buying any more games when the odds are questionable about whether the game will even run on my console or not.
Devil's in the details there. Such sweeping advice is pretty useless unless there actually is a means to implement it. Maybe they should just leverage their synergy across multiple paradigms, and hope for the best.
I'm seeing a lot of people that *did* take responsibility for their career choices getting cut off at the knees because they went into serious debt to learn a skill that they believed would form the basis of a stable career. Interesting that this happens when the corporate world has whined for years that American schools aren't turning out enough qualified people, and now will refuse to hire many of those very people they asked for.
Actually AFAIK an Indian programmer would have a pretty hard time going to America and getting a job there, they would similarly need a work permit to work in America.
That work permit in America isn't that big of a deal. To my knowledge, there are not American *and* Indian political action groups that are actively lobbying the Indian government to let more Americans in the country with the intent of driving salaries down. The same can't be said in the U.S., and all one needs to do is look around at the H1-B/L1s to see just how hard it is to get a job here. Does India even have a professional work visa program?
5000 square feet? Um, more like 1500-2000. That's nowhere near "something like that".
5. Japan's government provides a lot of subsidies to their corporations - they're very long-term oriented in their thinking, and will sell at a loss if it means gaining market share.
If we outsource 100% of our IT, then we have a bunch of people available to do other things and create additional innovation.
We do? Great!! Uh, who's going to pay for the rather expensive and time-consuming retraining of the former IT people that already have a demonstrated ability to innovate? We're not going to retrain them? Oh well, we weren't really serious about that "innovation" thing anyway....
There's likely very little you can do to stop Dell or IBM from outsourcing to India, but I guarantee a 5-person development company in the US is not going to outsource your job.
The 7 person development company that I used to work for years ago has now jumped on the bandwagon whole-hog, and has quite a few Bulgarian H1-Bs on the payroll. Yeah, it's not quite outsourcing, but the intent is the same.
The Wired article stated that the $11K salary in question was more than 22X the per-capita Indian income. As you say, it is something of an apples/oranges comparison, as most of the poorest people in the U.S. still have a substantially higher quality of life than the poorest people in India, and that's largely due to the fact that our government provides a bunch of services that simply aren't available in India. In part because of the cost of government, there's a basic COL difference that isn't going to allow the American coders to be competitive on price given these salaries - it's expensive to live in the U.S.
Don't you think that if Corporation XYZ could open a new office in Arkansas, or South Carolina, or Wyoming, i.e. a place with lower cost of living and lower pay scales, then they would've done that before they "sent" their jobs to India
There's absolutely nothing keeping them from doing just that, except for the fact that you can't find software people that will work for $10K per year anywhere in the U.S. You make more than that working as a greeter for Wal-Mart, for crying out loud.
However, you have to question the quality of a life where from the womb all you do is study in order to get into a good university where all you do is work in order to get a code-monkey job which is your life.
This is true, but from the American perspective, it's not very encouraging to see that you can work hard, study, blow some serious cash on school, and then have your job sold out from under you, leaving you with $7/hour flipping burgers and trying to pay off those student loans. That's one aspect of the Wired article that was almost completely ignored - with all of the people saying, "just move laterally into another field", no one seems to have a good idea just how to afford that lateral move and the training it entails, especially for the poor schmucks that are just now graduating.
There are lots of comparisons made with the steel and textile industries, but those didn't require an expensive specialized education that suddenly became worthless. Also, there is *such* a gap between the COL between here and India - the Wired article mentions that the project manager they interviewed makes $11,000 per year and lives quite comfortably - that's practically at U.S. minimum wage and not really a sum you could live on here.
I guess that this whole thing is an object lesson in going into business for oneself - when it comes down to it, you're the only person that can really be trusted to look out for you, because you can't trust an employer to give a damn.
Or perhaps it's like our guy who was hired to do our device driver work (never mind that I could write it myself and have almost three times his experience - he has a Masters' and used to work at MS, so he must know his shit, right?). Here we are more than a year later, and the damn driver *still* doesn't work properly (it's not a particularly complex piece of hardware), and if you even imply there is a problem with his code, he goes ballistic. Further, he refuses to listen to anything I have to say about how the driver really needs to work. Yeah, no big Western ego there. When presented with the schematics for a simple I/O board that consisted of nothing more than an 8255 and two 16-bit DACs, he refused to do anything until he was presented with a functional software spec for the board (which I wrote for him). Give me a break.
:-)
On the other hand, the Sri Lankans that make up the majority of our software team are bright as hell and pretty friendly guys to boot. They can't stand this other guy either.
I've bought two machines from Wal-Mart - one is a C3 system I've had for about a year now that's run 24/7 with zero problems. The other is a Duron 1.4GHz system that I recently bought for my mom to replace her ailing Toshiba laptop. I've been quite pleased with both machines, and they're cheap enough that if I have to replace them in a year, it's no big deal.
:-)
For my mom's machine, I investigated Dell (I also have a Dell Dimension PIII-700), but the thing that turned me off the most about them was the $99 shipping charge they were asking, when shipping from Wal-Mart was a whopping $14. I don't mind paying extra for noticeably better quality, but frankly my Wal-Mart Microtel box has held up better than my Dell.
I've got an old P-200 IT5H-based system too - those motherboards seriously kicked ass when they first came out.
Yes, I am a part-time driver there. :-)
I had the privilege of seeing Opportunity start its journey, and I'm glad to see it made it to Mars okay. Great job, JPL/NASA, and congrats!
And the 350 also has an MPEG decoder on board - I don't yet have my Myth install completely up and running, but "dd if=/dev/video of=/dev/video16 bs=64k" takes less than 2% of my PIII-700's CPU at 720x480 on the 350's TV-out, and gives me a damn nice picture too.
I think what he was saying is that the fuel cells don't have the capacity to run it for more than 7 nights. During the daytime, it's running on the solar panels and not using any fuel.
I'd be willing to bet in 20 years you won't be able to get Micro-ATX boards either, or ATA-100 drives, or the copy of Win XP that you'll need to run the whole thing. 20 years later, I can still get support from Yamaha for my DX5 and other older gear - are these guys going to be able to offer the same?
The main point I was making was that even though they say it's standards-based, it's not going to be a matter of just swapping boards out when their mobo vendor discontinues the product in 6 months or so, owing to the nature of the PC motherboard market.
Something that's not addressed anywhere in the ad is the issues that will crop up when using an "industry-standard" motherboard. What happens when the mobo dies, and an exact replacement is not available because it's no longer manufactured? I've had the not-too-pleasant experience of having to replace mobos, and invariably there are chipset, video, and other differences that can make it difficult if not impossible to boot a Windows box off the original hard disk without reinstalling the OS, not to mention the fact that the synth will only be as stable as the drivers for that particular hardware are. If I order a new board for my 20-year old DX-5, I'm quite confident that it will work out of the bag. I wouldn't have that degree of faith with this rig.
You want a real all-in-one workstation? Save your pennies and get an old Synclavier or Fairlight III, or go the ProTools route if that's your fancy. For performance uses, it seems to me this behemoth is a non-starter, and for studio work, there are a lot more modular and powerful solutions for a comparable price. And finally, as others have mentioned, if they want to be taken seriously, they need to do something about the keyboard - you can't charge $5K and only provide a 61-key sprung keyboard.