> "There was a time when pay TV could get away with discontented users without being penalized by revenue losses from defecting customers," says Claes Fornell, chairman and founder of the Index. "But those days are over."
Right. In the past, you had to suck it up because there was generally no place to go. Now there is.
Think of it as a video version of an H1B visa (yes, I realize it's Canada, not the US). People are using the VPN to access content not available otherwise, just like an H1B visa is to obtain labor not available otherwise at starvation wages.
> The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
This is hardly a twist. More like standard operating procedure. At other companies it may be called "stay pay", (to avoid the legal entanglement of threatening to deny what might be required exit benefits) but the mechanism is the same -- as an exiting employee, you are required to train your slave-wage replacement or lose some compensation or other. The typical employee will grasp at anything to improve their chances to ride out the coming period of unemployment, so at least a visible attempt to train one's replacement is highly likely.
This goes along with the perception of IT revealed by outsourcing -- that IT isn't hard, doesn't require thought, and any store clerk could do it with a couple weeks of training and adequately documented procedures. That IT is merely a matter of pressing this button when that light goes on, and pressing this other button when that other light goes on -- anyone could do it, so let's hire a bunch of H1-B "contractors" at slave wages and,,,, $$profit$$.
In three to six months, highly unpublicized, Disney will be asking the outsource company why the environment is so unstable and it takes forever to get stuff done. The answer will be "your exiting employees didn't document their jobs well enough", which will buy the outsource company another six months or so. In actual fact, they're sorta right, because exiting employees know it's an impossible job to pass on years of experience and insight to a very junior worker in a couple weeks, and will most likely be doing the minimum necessary not to lose their benefits, secure in the knowledge that Management won't be able to tell the difference, else they'd see through the outsourcing sham in the first place.
A year or two down the road, Disney will realize that fixing the situation by insourcing is no longer practical, as all their former employees have moved on, taking thousands, maybe millions of man-hours of tribal knowledge with them, never to be seen again. The outsourcing company will be in a strong position to bully Disney into paying more money for better caliber contractors in order to salvage something out of the deal. Over the long term, they'll end up not saving much if anything, and IT will never again be as responsive or as stable as it was pre-transition. As a steady state, the outsourcing company's strategy is to continue to make insourcing as impractical as possible, while maximizing profits.
Had I stock in Disney, I'd note that announcement of outsourcing usually causes a stock jump, so hang on for a few more months, then dump the stock before it becomes common knowledge that Disney is not meeting their milestones. If they're still around in 3 to 5 years, cautiously pick up some shares at a new bargain basement price.
I'd like to point out that a lower receiver is not a rifle, and it's not even the most stressed part of the rifle during use, it's just the part that the BATF has chosen must be serialized.
You still have to buy a barrel somewhere, and a bolt and a bunch of other furniture pieces and a bunch of small parts and have some technical knowledge to put it all together. Just managing to fabricate a lower receiver, which is basically just a hollow lump of metal with no moving parts, is more of a legal milestone than a technical one. What makes it interesting is not that it's the most important part of the gun (I'd argue that the bolt/chamber/barrel are) but that it's the part that the government decided must be tracked in some fashion. Which makes the lower receiver, from a regulation standpoint, "the gun", even though it's not.
This is the internet -- Sourceforge doesn't control content they don't own any more than anyone else does on the internet. And their audience being geeks rather than Fred and Ethyl Consumer, who would be better connected into threads like these and would know to go to the "official" sites... I just don't see this strategy working.
> In the end, you'll have cable or fiber, and pick the content/services you need/want at prices you're willing to pay, delivered exactly when you want.
Like I said, the pieces are all there, but it's up to some provider to actually deliver the service. It's technically feasible to do what you describe. Whether it'll actually happen in a widespread fashion, unfortunately, remains to be seen.
I read somewhere not long ago that the big networks negotiated high per-subscriber charges in the early days of cable that are still in effect, long after the networks have lost relevance. I don't know if that includes ESPN. (Probably not.) Point is, what the cable companies pay the networks may not be an accurate representation of actual viewership, as many of those contracts were negotiated long ago and are still in effect. (Or so I'm told.) I can actually see a situation where a cable/ISP might be glad to dump the cable business and its unprofitable legacy contracts, and look for new, more stable revenue sources.
Side note, the Comcast salescreature that comes by once a month insists that Frontier (which we have) is "getting out of the cable business -- your cable is GOING TO GO AWAY" (like this is a huge tragedy). Fact is, we haven't had cable TV for many years. With fiber to the house, and the content available over the internet, it's just not necessary. (Except for sports, which is why I still have an old-fashioned antenna.) Side-side note, I wonder if this is why ISPs are resisting with all their might the laying of fiber in metropolitan areas -- that maybe when people get reasonable internet speeds, they'll realize they no longer need cable TV?
On streaming -- yes, it's inefficient and wasteful and will probably cost a lot at some point. But we have a mature tool to solve this, if only the content creators could figure out how to work it into their business model -- torrenting, and (at least temporary) local storage. (Side note: Local storage has never been cheaper.) People have had years of experience (since the advent of the VCR) with the usage model of deciding what you want to watch, programming an appliance, and then watching it at some later time. Torrents are a modern extension of that model.
The pieces are all there. It'll just take a very bright collection of people to turn it into a viable business. And then Comcast will come along and figure out how to make it behave badly... But I digress.
You're absolutely right. This calls to mind a recent video that has the elements you describe and manages to be informative and entertaining. This is how to do this type of video right.
> Heroin dealers make the first few hits free or really cheap because when you still have a choice, they need to sell you on it. After you're seriously addicted, the price can be raised because you no longer have the ability to say no.
I always wondered if you could circumvent this by getting all of your friends to solicit free or really cheap hits.
When I installed solar panels, I did not connect the system to the grid because I was primarily after fault tolerance rather than lower costs or "greenness". Sine wave inverters (necessary to run motors, like in refrigerators) are expensive, and it made more sense to run a parallel 12 volt circuit to run things that are ok with 12 volts, than try to run an entire 110 - oriented house on 12 volts. Most non-motor appliances step 110 down to a low DC voltage anyway, and it seems wasteful to me to step up 12 DC to 110 AC and then back to 5 or 6 volts DC at the appliance end.
It turns out that there are a plethora of 12 volt choices at the local RV store. Even 12 volt CFLs. Any portable appliance can be run off a car adapter, and even appliances that aren't meant to be portable can be run off 12 volts with careful selection of the right adapter. (Voltage, noise, and current are important.)
Who knows, maybe some day we'll see major appliances with built-in inverters designed to plug right into a 12 volt circuit. Or maybe appliances with DC motors? Not really my area.
The only thing that worries me a little is the current requirements. Approx 1/10 the voltage, it seems to me, would mean 10X the nominal current for the same power, and I don't see running car-starter-cable gauge wire through the house. I'll have to do some measurements. For CFLs and electronics, it hasn't been an issue so far.
Apologies if this has been said already. Some number of accidents are inevitable in city traffic no matter who or what is behind the wheel. The only question I have to ask is this: If a reasonably competent human driver had been behind the wheel, was there an opportunity in any of these accidents for the human to take evasive action to avoid the accident, something that it may be currently impractical to program into the autonomous driving system?
Generally true, but consider this -- a person called me Saturday who had a relatively new computer that just stopped booting. It gets to the splash screen and doesn't get any further. You don't throw out a computer for that reason (at least not yet) but Joe User probably doesn't have the expertise or understanding to diagnose and repair it. He found the original media (which was very fortunate -- many users have no idea where they put the disk) and I was able to talk him through the repair without losing his files. I don't think any offshore tech support person would even *try* to provide that level of service, let alone succeed.
I've had fairly good luck in freelance computer repair. I found that there were enough customers to scrape together a living who were tired of "tech support" they couldn't understand and weren't any help.
I'd say, work for yourself, find a job that requires the personal touch, and just be better at it than any offshore or H1B contractor could be.
It's important to say, IT people tend to be an isolated bunch to start with, but yeah, although I didn't apply the label "Millennials", it does seem that the young members of the team seem more... brittle, I guess is the expression I'd use. And in IT, that's not a good thing.
YA THINK??? Sorry sorry sorry. That's a little unfair, now that they're trying to do something more reasonable. Too bad it took a shot to the pocketbook, though.
I didn't really understand his response. I carry a low end Android phone that I'm not happy with at all [1], precisely because that's what my company issues. I don't see how this makes anyone a fuck-wit. Maybe because you carry an i-phone and aren't an Apple fanatic?
[1] Not because it's an Android phone, but because it's a considerable downgrade from my previous company issued Android phone.
I'm really hoping the entire non-demand cable paradigm collapses as soon as possible. It really hasn't been necessary for some time
A lot of people would disagree with you in the case of live sporting events. One well-known example is the College Football Championship Game on ESPN. How should we convince people that it is acceptable to watch the big game a week after the fact?
You have a point -- I don't watch sports at all -- wife is the sports nut in our family -- but I do understand the absurdity of time-shifting sports events -- there is a human need to see it while it's happening -- so I'd say that live streaming -- a well known and mature technology these days -- is probably the answer in cases like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but the content on local stations is available (eventually) on the Roku. And you can always go to sports bars to watch football.
> "There was a time when pay TV could get away with discontented users without being penalized by revenue losses from defecting customers," says Claes Fornell, chairman and founder of the Index. "But those days are over."
Right. In the past, you had to suck it up because there was generally no place to go. Now there is.
Think of it as a video version of an H1B visa (yes, I realize it's Canada, not the US). People are using the VPN to access content not available otherwise, just like an H1B visa is to obtain labor not available otherwise at starvation wages.
FIFY.
> The other twist? The U.S. tech workers are required to train their replacements before vacating their jobs, or risk losing severance benefits
This is hardly a twist. More like standard operating procedure. At other companies it may be called "stay pay", (to avoid the legal entanglement of threatening to deny what might be required exit benefits) but the mechanism is the same -- as an exiting employee, you are required to train your slave-wage replacement or lose some compensation or other. The typical employee will grasp at anything to improve their chances to ride out the coming period of unemployment, so at least a visible attempt to train one's replacement is highly likely.
This goes along with the perception of IT revealed by outsourcing -- that IT isn't hard, doesn't require thought, and any store clerk could do it with a couple weeks of training and adequately documented procedures. That IT is merely a matter of pressing this button when that light goes on, and pressing this other button when that other light goes on -- anyone could do it, so let's hire a bunch of H1-B "contractors" at slave wages and,,,, $$profit$$.
In three to six months, highly unpublicized, Disney will be asking the outsource company why the environment is so unstable and it takes forever to get stuff done. The answer will be "your exiting employees didn't document their jobs well enough", which will buy the outsource company another six months or so. In actual fact, they're sorta right, because exiting employees know it's an impossible job to pass on years of experience and insight to a very junior worker in a couple weeks, and will most likely be doing the minimum necessary not to lose their benefits, secure in the knowledge that Management won't be able to tell the difference, else they'd see through the outsourcing sham in the first place.
A year or two down the road, Disney will realize that fixing the situation by insourcing is no longer practical, as all their former employees have moved on, taking thousands, maybe millions of man-hours of tribal knowledge with them, never to be seen again. The outsourcing company will be in a strong position to bully Disney into paying more money for better caliber contractors in order to salvage something out of the deal. Over the long term, they'll end up not saving much if anything, and IT will never again be as responsive or as stable as it was pre-transition. As a steady state, the outsourcing company's strategy is to continue to make insourcing as impractical as possible, while maximizing profits.
Had I stock in Disney, I'd note that announcement of outsourcing usually causes a stock jump, so hang on for a few more months, then dump the stock before it becomes common knowledge that Disney is not meeting their milestones. If they're still around in 3 to 5 years, cautiously pick up some shares at a new bargain basement price.
Not that I've ever seen this happen before...
Sorry, citizen, it was not lawful for you to view that content. Nurse, scalpel please.
I'd like to point out that a lower receiver is not a rifle, and it's not even the most stressed part of the rifle during use, it's just the part that the BATF has chosen must be serialized.
You still have to buy a barrel somewhere, and a bolt and a bunch of other furniture pieces and a bunch of small parts and have some technical knowledge to put it all together. Just managing to fabricate a lower receiver, which is basically just a hollow lump of metal with no moving parts, is more of a legal milestone than a technical one. What makes it interesting is not that it's the most important part of the gun (I'd argue that the bolt/chamber/barrel are) but that it's the part that the government decided must be tracked in some fashion. Which makes the lower receiver, from a regulation standpoint, "the gun", even though it's not.
This is the internet -- Sourceforge doesn't control content they don't own any more than anyone else does on the internet. And their audience being geeks rather than Fred and Ethyl Consumer, who would be better connected into threads like these and would know to go to the "official" sites... I just don't see this strategy working.
> In the end, you'll have cable or fiber, and pick the content/services you need/want at prices you're willing to pay, delivered exactly when you want.
Like I said, the pieces are all there, but it's up to some provider to actually deliver the service. It's technically feasible to do what you describe. Whether it'll actually happen in a widespread fashion, unfortunately, remains to be seen.
I read somewhere not long ago that the big networks negotiated high per-subscriber charges in the early days of cable that are still in effect, long after the networks have lost relevance. I don't know if that includes ESPN. (Probably not.) Point is, what the cable companies pay the networks may not be an accurate representation of actual viewership, as many of those contracts were negotiated long ago and are still in effect. (Or so I'm told.) I can actually see a situation where a cable/ISP might be glad to dump the cable business and its unprofitable legacy contracts, and look for new, more stable revenue sources.
Side note, the Comcast salescreature that comes by once a month insists that Frontier (which we have) is "getting out of the cable business -- your cable is GOING TO GO AWAY" (like this is a huge tragedy). Fact is, we haven't had cable TV for many years. With fiber to the house, and the content available over the internet, it's just not necessary. (Except for sports, which is why I still have an old-fashioned antenna.) Side-side note, I wonder if this is why ISPs are resisting with all their might the laying of fiber in metropolitan areas -- that maybe when people get reasonable internet speeds, they'll realize they no longer need cable TV?
On streaming -- yes, it's inefficient and wasteful and will probably cost a lot at some point. But we have a mature tool to solve this, if only the content creators could figure out how to work it into their business model -- torrenting, and (at least temporary) local storage. (Side note: Local storage has never been cheaper.) People have had years of experience (since the advent of the VCR) with the usage model of deciding what you want to watch, programming an appliance, and then watching it at some later time. Torrents are a modern extension of that model.
The pieces are all there. It'll just take a very bright collection of people to turn it into a viable business. And then Comcast will come along and figure out how to make it behave badly... But I digress.
You're absolutely right. This calls to mind a recent video that has the elements you describe and manages to be informative and entertaining. This is how to do this type of video right.
I think that's his point....
> Heroin dealers make the first few hits free or really cheap because when you still have a choice, they need to sell you on it. After you're seriously addicted, the price can be raised because you no longer have the ability to say no.
I always wondered if you could circumvent this by getting all of your friends to solicit free or really cheap hits.
oh c'mon, you knew someone would post it.
Why don't providers just buy storage from the cloud?
Oh, wait.
When I installed solar panels, I did not connect the system to the grid because I was primarily after fault tolerance rather than lower costs or "greenness". Sine wave inverters (necessary to run motors, like in refrigerators) are expensive, and it made more sense to run a parallel 12 volt circuit to run things that are ok with 12 volts, than try to run an entire 110 - oriented house on 12 volts. Most non-motor appliances step 110 down to a low DC voltage anyway, and it seems wasteful to me to step up 12 DC to 110 AC and then back to 5 or 6 volts DC at the appliance end.
It turns out that there are a plethora of 12 volt choices at the local RV store. Even 12 volt CFLs. Any portable appliance can be run off a car adapter, and even appliances that aren't meant to be portable can be run off 12 volts with careful selection of the right adapter. (Voltage, noise, and current are important.)
Who knows, maybe some day we'll see major appliances with built-in inverters designed to plug right into a 12 volt circuit. Or maybe appliances with DC motors? Not really my area.
The only thing that worries me a little is the current requirements. Approx 1/10 the voltage, it seems to me, would mean 10X the nominal current for the same power, and I don't see running car-starter-cable gauge wire through the house. I'll have to do some measurements. For CFLs and electronics, it hasn't been an issue so far.
Apologies if this has been said already. Some number of accidents are inevitable in city traffic no matter who or what is behind the wheel. The only question I have to ask is this: If a reasonably competent human driver had been behind the wheel, was there an opportunity in any of these accidents for the human to take evasive action to avoid the accident, something that it may be currently impractical to program into the autonomous driving system?
Generally true, but consider this -- a person called me Saturday who had a relatively new computer that just stopped booting. It gets to the splash screen and doesn't get any further. You don't throw out a computer for that reason (at least not yet) but Joe User probably doesn't have the expertise or understanding to diagnose and repair it. He found the original media (which was very fortunate -- many users have no idea where they put the disk) and I was able to talk him through the repair without losing his files. I don't think any offshore tech support person would even *try* to provide that level of service, let alone succeed.
I've had fairly good luck in freelance computer repair. I found that there were enough customers to scrape together a living who were tired of "tech support" they couldn't understand and weren't any help.
I'd say, work for yourself, find a job that requires the personal touch, and just be better at it than any offshore or H1B contractor could be.
Good point. We are seeing a group before years of selection process.
It's important to say, IT people tend to be an isolated bunch to start with, but yeah, although I didn't apply the label "Millennials", it does seem that the young members of the team seem more ... brittle, I guess is the expression I'd use. And in IT, that's not a good thing.
Facebook is an informational environment?
> "Quite honestly, we were wrong."
YA THINK??? Sorry sorry sorry. That's a little unfair, now that they're trying to do something more reasonable. Too bad it took a shot to the pocketbook, though.
I didn't really understand his response. I carry a low end Android phone that I'm not happy with at all [1], precisely because that's what my company issues. I don't see how this makes anyone a fuck-wit. Maybe because you carry an i-phone and aren't an Apple fanatic?
[1] Not because it's an Android phone, but because it's a considerable downgrade from my previous company issued Android phone.
I'm really hoping the entire non-demand cable paradigm collapses as soon as possible. It really hasn't been necessary for some time
A lot of people would disagree with you in the case of live sporting events. One well-known example is the College Football Championship Game on ESPN. How should we convince people that it is acceptable to watch the big game a week after the fact?
You have a point -- I don't watch sports at all -- wife is the sports nut in our family -- but I do understand the absurdity of time-shifting sports events -- there is a human need to see it while it's happening -- so I'd say that live streaming -- a well known and mature technology these days -- is probably the answer in cases like this.
Score "troll", seriously? Who among us here hasn't had to fix breakage from a drive-by update?