There was a study done (Gartner, courtesy of ZDNet Australia) of 200 European companies where they looked at outsourcing contracts. Only 23% of the respondents were NOT expecting to renegotiate. One in eight contracts were renegotiated within the first year.
Your RFP, irrespective of how well thought out it is, will be incomplete at best. It's going to take a significant amount of time to get at and negotiate the whitespace in the contract. Especially in this instance, where you likely won't have a very complete idea of what this guy does.
I'm no fan of Gartner, but the point is that your company is going to have a relationship with the outsourcer, which will need fine tuning throughout the life of the contract(s). It's a (not terribly) hidden cost of the outsourcing paradigm, but people seem to consistently miss it.
It doesn't matter. Eventually, whichever one you pick will have her flaws exposed. At that point, you will find yourself thinking wistfully back to the one you didn't pick, and the ideal, if totally fictional, life you and she would be leading.
As such, which one you pick makes no difference whatsoever.
Didn't there used to be a keychain fob for this?
on
Too Many Passwords
·
· Score: 1
I seem to recall something on thinkgeek or something that had five buttons, and required 5+ keystrokes to validate that you could get into the password file. Then, on the attached LCD display, you'd see your passwords.
Seems like exactly the sort of thing that would be useful in this sort of situation. Anybody else had experience with this gadget, or similar?
For the love of God, rip to a lossless codec. I just re-re-refinished ripping my 1200 CDs to flac, and I've never been happier. I don't have the network space you do, but they sit happily on 60 or so DVDs, and, thanks to a quick donation to dbPowerAMP, getting them into whatever mp3 format I want is just a matter of processor time.
I'm not married to flac, but just the convertability of the lossless codec is easily worth the hassle. Pick one, stick to it.
Last year the 2k5 series of games (NBA, NFL, College Hoops, NHL, and I think their MLB) were $20. NFL, at least, got better reviews than Madden, and the move made EA so scared that they snapped up every exclusive license they could get their hands on.
Was that a loss leader in expectation of eventual market domination, or did those titles actually make a profit? I haven't seen anything definitive either way.
I get that the development cycles are getting nastier, but if you could make a better football game than Madden at a $20 price point, what's stopping nextGen titles from being $30?
The value of reviews is that they let you ignore the truly crappy games, IMHO. I've bought several highly rated games, and, after playing them for a while, decided they didn't suit my tastes. FFX, and NBA Street Vol. 2, for example.
Could've rented first, of course. Shoulda but dinna. I'm far enough behind the curve that I generally only buy used games anyway, so it doesn't REALLY matter.
Picking nits here, but let's say you bought three top titles @ $50 each. One you play obsessively, but barely get started on the other two before getting sick of them (FFX, I'm looking in your direction).
You'll probably get down to $1/hr on the big one, but might not break $20/hr on the other two. Overall, you're still looking at less than $3/hr (not factoring in console price), which is still better than most other options.
Of course, my current obsessions (Katamari and NCAA Hoops 2k5, both $20 new) are probably sitting around $0.25/hr right now, and still going strong. Gotta love that.
My wife and I visted my parents in the UAE this winter, and I was looking for a portable gaming solution, just to get me through the flights. We're flying coach for about 30 hours, so no recharge possibilities existed.
Older GBAs were the only ones with replenishable power supplies. Took along a boatload of AAs, and happily wasted tens of hours with Mario Golf Advance and Advance Wars. Turned out that I only had to change batteries once the entire two week trip.
Let's see your nextgen portables do that, then we'll talk.
R&D, at high numbers of units, goes to zero/unit. I'll extend your example a little bit:
DevCosts = $1000 Unit cost = $1
1000 units = $2/unit 2000 units = $1.50/unit 10000 units = $1.10/unit 100000 units = $1.01/unit
Marginal cost of R&D/unit is asymptotic (sp?) to the marginal unit cost. At the production numbers that the PS3 will likely reach, R&D costs per unit will approach nil.
There's a secondary issue in that it's unclear what else those development costs can be used for. If a tech demo becomes a viable PSP game, for instance, that'll eat into the R&D payout.
In addition, you can occasionally claim that R&D is basically sunk cost (money that would have been spent anyway), so it's irrelevant. I'd think that would be the case here. Those R&D guys were going to be doing SOMEthing, it just happened to be the PS3.
So, what business people tend to look at carefully is (selling cost - manufacturing cost)/unit. It keeps the math simple (which business people like), and keeps the really important margin as the top attention getter. This is just a slightly weird case, as it's the razor blade model.
I mean, seriously, half the G4 coverage w.r.t. the PS2 last night addressed that issue. Then I thought about what I'd seen. In the PS3 "ducky" demo, there was that bald SCEE VP allegedly tweaking the duck's movement. Was it live, or was it Memorex? We've no idea. We have to take the presenters at their word until somebody can lay their hands on a demo, which at this point, will not be the final hardware, or the game's engine isn't properly tweaked, or something.
Besides which, so what? The PS3 tech demos were, IMHO, better than anything MS showed, so why didn't MS show prerendered stuff too? Or did they, and it just doesn't look that good?
I suppose it's just one of those "lies, damnable lies, and benchmarks" kind of things, but it's a little absurd devoting much effort to a discussion.
"Oh, I just happened to scrape together a 2.5GHz Athlon, 1GB of RAM, and 4 300GB drives for this. I mean, they were just lying around...."
or, from that guy who put together the digital window:
"Yeah, I had eight 15" LCDs, so I put a wood frame over them, and had them simulate a window on an interior wall."
Don't get me wrong. Some of these ideas are great, but I don't know how one gets the hardware. At my WORST hardware hoarding stage, the best I could've come up with was multiple monitor support. I had a lot of RageIIs hanging around.
My wife's the same way. One big (HUGE) key for her is that she be able to pick up the controller and go. Hack and slashers are fine, but if (as in Return of the King, which you can play coop) you start getting into combos like Square-Triangle-L2-Triangle, you lost her at Triangle.
She LOVES the Diablo series, at least on the PC, and has a decided weakness for the Civ family of games (even relatively crappy ones like Pharoh). She doesn't play from the strategy, "kill your enemies" standpoint, but she really enjoys building the civilization. I think she's actually completed one game in untold hours of play, and never plays at any level above "super-wuss."
It's also important that you can have sessions that last a couple of hours. She gets lost in those 80 hour RPGs. Cutscenes are not your friend.
Your boss, I assume, will not accept a cable outage as an excuse.
Your company's paying for it, so see if they'll pony up real money for a proper business level 24/7 connection. If not, point out the various problems with using a consumer level connection. You're going to be living on the net, so you'd better have that link locked down tight.
I can't find pricing, but I can't imagine it would be more than $200/month, which I would think is well within the parameters for your company. If it's not, you can always scale back appropriately.
So fork the kernel. Unless I'm missing something, OSS is rife with opportunity to make something else happen. Lord knows, there are plenty of branches of the kernel that are available.
If microkernel is the way to go, then write the code, and we'll see what happens in the OSS marketplace. I'm not going to say "best technology wins," as that's rarely been the case historically.
There is, after all, a reason that the HURD hasn't taken over yet. I might well be missing something, as this isn't really my area.
MBA holding UNIX admin here, so I've got some knowledge of the problem. To manage a project effectively, you have to have some knowledge of the space in which the project lives. I'm not talking line-of-code specificity here, but (for instance) a web project cannot be properly managed by a guy whose most recent experience is in managing a COBOL app on a VAX. They're different, in important ways.
You've got two issues here.
1) For some reason, people who have done "computer stuff" seem to think that the skills commute to whatever platform they're working with. You would almost NEVER hear someone contradict a CPA with only a passing knowledge of GAAP, but it happens all the time in IT. I happen to think this is a function of the lack of respect for IT functions, but, well, whatever.
2) There's an ongoing problem with managerial bandwidth. One of the current management theories (which change biweekly) is "the thumbtack." Generically speaking, the structure of companies used to be pyramid-shaped, with several people reporting to the CEO, several people reporting to each of the several C*Os, and so on.
A thumbtack-ed company pares down the number of middle managers, so that the top and middle levels of the pyramid shrink, and it's shaped more like a thumbtack (pointy end up). The number of employees in the base generally remains the same, but the managerial responsibilities of the remaining middle managers grow exponentially.
Obviously, you're shedding a fair number of expensive positions, but upper management is banking on the increased bandwidth of the manager class. The easily replaced managers can't complain, or they're gone.
What I, personally, think this theory misses is that availability of a manager != effective management. If someone's getting input from email, phone (cell and land), blackberry, IM, etc., how much of that information can they EFFECTIVELY process before they start missing things, and the project becomes undermanaged?
The CEO can't come down into the trenches, and the techies shouldn't be making the big, company-level decisions. There's a middle ground that is increasingly ignored at the expense of project efficiency.
It's the question of what comes between the CEO stating "I want a CRM system." and the programmers executing the technical requirements for that system. There's an entire array of important skills there that neither the CEO nor the techies should have, as they should be busy doing what they do best.
In buyouts like this, there are any number of things to consider:
- debt load - payout schedule - amount financed through new debt (junk bonds used to be a common component) - ongoing ability of the buyer to actually pay
and so on. Have a look at the excellent "Barbarians at the Gate" (isbn: 0060536357) to get a feel for what happens. That was an extreme case (RJR/Nabisco), but it brings up a lot of the variables involved.
Back in college (mid-1980's), I was working with a nonprofit to provide local access to a database of development-related articles. How to build an artisian well, that sort of thing.
The proposal was to use a satellite or ham radio connection, with absurd latency (like: request today, the document comes down in two days). It would've worked fine, in theory, but I'm almost certian it never saw the light of day.
I'm a little surprised there isn't an existing network of ham radio connections. It obviously wouldn't be broadband, but I'd think it would beat nothing.
The original idea has long been outstripped by other means of information delivery, but if you can deliver blueprints / health information / agricultural data to people who don't have access to a library, the applications of this technology are pretty obvious.
I did an order a while ago for some books through some of the resellers, and their S&H is separate from Amazon's. Turned out to be cheaper overall to pay the $0.33/book extra to Amazon, and ship for free.
I've been wondering where these products are. Like just about everyone else on/., I'd LOVE to get a 1TB server going with (virtually) no processor, a decent amount of RAM, and so on, BUT:
Why can't it be silent? I mean "drive noise + just about nothing" silent. The file serving can't use much more than a P2 for a family unit, so it strikes me that there should be a readily available fanless option.
If it's just running the file system + maybe a minor family intranet, I'd think you could run this off of a relatively modern PDA mainboard w/an IDE controller. This shouldn't be rocket science here.
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Your RFP, irrespective of how well thought out it is, will be incomplete at best. It's going to take a significant amount of time to get at and negotiate the whitespace in the contract. Especially in this instance, where you likely won't have a very complete idea of what this guy does.
I'm no fan of Gartner, but the point is that your company is going to have a relationship with the outsourcer, which will need fine tuning throughout the life of the contract(s). It's a (not terribly) hidden cost of the outsourcing paradigm, but people seem to consistently miss it.
It doesn't matter. Eventually, whichever one you pick will have her flaws exposed. At that point, you will find yourself thinking wistfully back to the one you didn't pick, and the ideal, if totally fictional, life you and she would be leading.
As such, which one you pick makes no difference whatsoever.
http://www.firaxis.com/community/asksid.php
Second question down.
I seem to recall something on thinkgeek or something that had five buttons, and required 5+ keystrokes to validate that you could get into the password file. Then, on the attached LCD display, you'd see your passwords.
Seems like exactly the sort of thing that would be useful in this sort of situation. Anybody else had experience with this gadget, or similar?
For the love of God, rip to a lossless codec. I just re-re-refinished ripping my 1200 CDs to flac, and I've never been happier. I don't have the network space you do, but they sit happily on 60 or so DVDs, and, thanks to a quick donation to dbPowerAMP, getting them into whatever mp3 format I want is just a matter of processor time.
I'm not married to flac, but just the convertability of the lossless codec is easily worth the hassle. Pick one, stick to it.
Last year the 2k5 series of games (NBA, NFL, College Hoops, NHL, and I think their MLB) were $20. NFL, at least, got better reviews than Madden, and the move made EA so scared that they snapped up every exclusive license they could get their hands on.
Was that a loss leader in expectation of eventual market domination, or did those titles actually make a profit? I haven't seen anything definitive either way.
I get that the development cycles are getting nastier, but if you could make a better football game than Madden at a $20 price point, what's stopping nextGen titles from being $30?
Well, other than profit...
There's a link here:
http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3142257
The list may not be accurate, and is certianly yawn inducing, IMHO, but it appears there will be several firstgen nextgen titles available.
Me? I'll be waiting for the second round of console price cuts, just like always.
The value of reviews is that they let you ignore the truly crappy games, IMHO. I've bought several highly rated games, and, after playing them for a while, decided they didn't suit my tastes. FFX, and NBA Street Vol. 2, for example.
Could've rented first, of course. Shoulda but dinna. I'm far enough behind the curve that I generally only buy used games anyway, so it doesn't REALLY matter.
Picking nits here, but let's say you bought three top titles @ $50 each. One you play obsessively, but barely get started on the other two before getting sick of them (FFX, I'm looking in your direction).
You'll probably get down to $1/hr on the big one, but might not break $20/hr on the other two. Overall, you're still looking at less than $3/hr (not factoring in console price), which is still better than most other options.
Of course, my current obsessions (Katamari and NCAA Hoops 2k5, both $20 new) are probably sitting around $0.25/hr right now, and still going strong. Gotta love that.
All the pictures have a light source.
My wife and I visted my parents in the UAE this winter, and I was looking for a portable gaming solution, just to get me through the flights. We're flying coach for about 30 hours, so no recharge possibilities existed.
Older GBAs were the only ones with replenishable power supplies. Took along a boatload of AAs, and happily wasted tens of hours with Mario Golf Advance and Advance Wars. Turned out that I only had to change batteries once the entire two week trip.
Let's see your nextgen portables do that, then we'll talk.
R&D, at high numbers of units, goes to zero/unit. I'll extend your example a little bit:
DevCosts = $1000
Unit cost = $1
1000 units = $2/unit
2000 units = $1.50/unit
10000 units = $1.10/unit
100000 units = $1.01/unit
Marginal cost of R&D/unit is asymptotic (sp?) to the marginal unit cost. At the production numbers that the PS3 will likely reach, R&D costs per unit will approach nil.
There's a secondary issue in that it's unclear what else those development costs can be used for. If a tech demo becomes a viable PSP game, for instance, that'll eat into the R&D payout.
In addition, you can occasionally claim that R&D is basically sunk cost (money that would have been spent anyway), so it's irrelevant. I'd think that would be the case here. Those R&D guys were going to be doing SOMEthing, it just happened to be the PS3.
So, what business people tend to look at carefully is (selling cost - manufacturing cost)/unit. It keeps the math simple (which business people like), and keeps the really important margin as the top attention getter. This is just a slightly weird case, as it's the razor blade model.
A friend of mine from a while ago was fond of saying:
"The more you get paid, the more the stuff you have to do sucks."
I mean, seriously, half the G4 coverage w.r.t. the PS2 last night addressed that issue. Then I thought about what I'd seen. In the PS3 "ducky" demo, there was that bald SCEE VP allegedly tweaking the duck's movement. Was it live, or was it Memorex? We've no idea. We have to take the presenters at their word until somebody can lay their hands on a demo, which at this point, will not be the final hardware, or the game's engine isn't properly tweaked, or something.
Besides which, so what? The PS3 tech demos were, IMHO, better than anything MS showed, so why didn't MS show prerendered stuff too? Or did they, and it just doesn't look that good?
I suppose it's just one of those "lies, damnable lies, and benchmarks" kind of things, but it's a little absurd devoting much effort to a discussion.
How about a thread re: the estimated $400 console price on both the Xbox2 and PS3? I know that's going to keep me on my trusty PS2 for at least another year.
Who the hell are these people?
"Oh, I just happened to scrape together a 2.5GHz Athlon, 1GB of RAM, and 4 300GB drives for this. I mean, they were just lying around...."
or, from that guy who put together the digital window:
"Yeah, I had eight 15" LCDs, so I put a wood frame over them, and had them simulate a window on an interior wall."
Don't get me wrong. Some of these ideas are great, but I don't know how one gets the hardware. At my WORST hardware hoarding stage, the best I could've come up with was multiple monitor support. I had a lot of RageIIs hanging around.
My wife's the same way. One big (HUGE) key for her is that she be able to pick up the controller and go. Hack and slashers are fine, but if (as in Return of the King, which you can play coop) you start getting into combos like Square-Triangle-L2-Triangle, you lost her at Triangle.
She LOVES the Diablo series, at least on the PC, and has a decided weakness for the Civ family of games (even relatively crappy ones like Pharoh). She doesn't play from the strategy, "kill your enemies" standpoint, but she really enjoys building the civilization. I think she's actually completed one game in untold hours of play, and never plays at any level above "super-wuss."
It's also important that you can have sessions that last a couple of hours. She gets lost in those 80 hour RPGs. Cutscenes are not your friend.
Your boss, I assume, will not accept a cable outage as an excuse.
Your company's paying for it, so see if they'll pony up real money for a proper business level 24/7 connection. If not, point out the various problems with using a consumer level connection. You're going to be living on the net, so you'd better have that link locked down tight.
I can't find pricing, but I can't imagine it would be more than $200/month, which I would think is well within the parameters for your company. If it's not, you can always scale back appropriately.
So fork the kernel. Unless I'm missing something, OSS is rife with opportunity to make something else happen. Lord knows, there are plenty of branches of the kernel that are available.
If microkernel is the way to go, then write the code, and we'll see what happens in the OSS marketplace. I'm not going to say "best technology wins," as that's rarely been the case historically.
There is, after all, a reason that the HURD hasn't taken over yet. I might well be missing something, as this isn't really my area.
MBA holding UNIX admin here, so I've got some knowledge of the problem. To manage a project effectively, you have to have some knowledge of the space in which the project lives. I'm not talking line-of-code specificity here, but (for instance) a web project cannot be properly managed by a guy whose most recent experience is in managing a COBOL app on a VAX. They're different, in important ways.
You've got two issues here.
1) For some reason, people who have done "computer stuff" seem to think that the skills commute to whatever platform they're working with. You would almost NEVER hear someone contradict a CPA with only a passing knowledge of GAAP, but it happens all the time in IT. I happen to think this is a function of the lack of respect for IT functions, but, well, whatever.
2) There's an ongoing problem with managerial bandwidth. One of the current management theories (which change biweekly) is "the thumbtack." Generically speaking, the structure of companies used to be pyramid-shaped, with several people reporting to the CEO, several people reporting to each of the several C*Os, and so on.
A thumbtack-ed company pares down the number of middle managers, so that the top and middle levels of the pyramid shrink, and it's shaped more like a thumbtack (pointy end up). The number of employees in the base generally remains the same, but the managerial responsibilities of the remaining middle managers grow exponentially.
Obviously, you're shedding a fair number of expensive positions, but upper management is banking on the increased bandwidth of the manager class. The easily replaced managers can't complain, or they're gone.
What I, personally, think this theory misses is that availability of a manager != effective management. If someone's getting input from email, phone (cell and land), blackberry, IM, etc., how much of that information can they EFFECTIVELY process before they start missing things, and the project becomes undermanaged?
The CEO can't come down into the trenches, and the techies shouldn't be making the big, company-level decisions. There's a middle ground that is increasingly ignored at the expense of project efficiency.
It's the question of what comes between the CEO stating "I want a CRM system." and the programmers executing the technical requirements for that system. There's an entire array of important skills there that neither the CEO nor the techies should have, as they should be busy doing what they do best.
Personal opinion, of course.
and booze! In fact, forget about the office...
In buyouts like this, there are any number of things to consider:
- debt load
- payout schedule
- amount financed through new debt (junk bonds used to be a common component)
- ongoing ability of the buyer to actually pay
and so on. Have a look at the excellent "Barbarians at the Gate" (isbn: 0060536357) to get a feel for what happens. That was an extreme case (RJR/Nabisco), but it brings up a lot of the variables involved.
Back in college (mid-1980's), I was working with a nonprofit to provide local access to a database of development-related articles. How to build an artisian well, that sort of thing.
The proposal was to use a satellite or ham radio connection, with absurd latency (like: request today, the document comes down in two days). It would've worked fine, in theory, but I'm almost certian it never saw the light of day.
I'm a little surprised there isn't an existing network of ham radio connections. It obviously wouldn't be broadband, but I'd think it would beat nothing.
The original idea has long been outstripped by other means of information delivery, but if you can deliver blueprints / health information / agricultural data to people who don't have access to a library, the applications of this technology are pretty obvious.
I did an order a while ago for some books through some of the resellers, and their S&H is separate from Amazon's. Turned out to be cheaper overall to pay the $0.33/book extra to Amazon, and ship for free.
YMMV.
I've been wondering where these products are. Like just about everyone else on /., I'd LOVE to get a 1TB server going with (virtually) no processor, a decent amount of RAM, and so on, BUT:
Why can't it be silent? I mean "drive noise + just about nothing" silent. The file serving can't use much more than a P2 for a family unit, so it strikes me that there should be a readily available fanless option.
If it's just running the file system + maybe a minor family intranet, I'd think you could run this off of a relatively modern PDA mainboard w/an IDE controller. This shouldn't be rocket science here.
Or is it, and I'm just missing something?
Thanks for the info. Hard to make a business case with those kind of numbers.
Dammit. Would've loved the $20 price point to continue.