I know at least one (large, multinational, sorta-conglomerate) company that makes more money manufacturing things in the U.S. that overseas. The things in question include great big cast-iron valves for refineries, with little bitty electronic sensors and steppers. The insides and valve seats are automatically ground to tight specs, the electronics are added on an automated line, and lift truck carry them around. The humans are qa inspectors, set-up guys and the lowest-skilled job is the lift-truck driver. Shipping costs are high (these things weigh a lot!) so it makes sense to do as much as possible in America, on the same continent as the customers.
That also applies to major appliances, power tools, electrical distribution panes, air conditioners and a whole wodge of other things.
Manufacturing is back! (and I buy their power tools for the cottage)
UofT had a textbook for one of their software engineering courses called "Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States" (Heidelberg Science Library). The author, P. Kraft, pointed out that all engineering careers were "in high, out early", and that it was most visible in the programming business. He too recommended you be prepared to get out early. Still available at http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Managers-Routinization-Programming-Heidelberg/dp/0387902481
I didn't get out, nor did my smarter colleague Fred (hi, ratboy!), and we're both still happily employed, still doing the hard stuff. We each do end up doing management, you understand, but the core of what we do is programming.
Indeed: The only time you get less-than-world-prices is when you can't ship your oil to a port, and have to sell it somewhere near you produce it. That's exactly what's happening with the Alberta oil/tar sands: It sells for a moderate price in Alberta and more when refined, but will sell for much more unrefined if it can be shipped to the Gulf coast or a port in British Columbia.
The Canadian and Alberta governments seem quite happy to not refine it, but sell it to, in the current proposal, China. This is short-term-smart, long-term dumb (;-))
That's amazingly common: IMHO, the folks who accuse others of X are often terrified that they will be accused of X, and strike out at other without realizing what they're implying.
This has the pleasant effect of making it easy to discover what they're doing, and afraid of being called on (;-))
The "Conservatives" of today are, alas, something of a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reform Party, who were really quite far right of the Republicans. The "Progressive Conservatives" were perhaps a little to the center/left relative to the Republicans. It was the PCs who supported universal health insurance and other center-to-left initiatives.
Confusing the two can lead one to self-contradictory conclusions (;-))
Further to the bufferbloat comment, the effect happens where a higher-capacity net meets a lower one, and that can and does happen in the path to the backbone from local ISPs. It almost has to (;-))
Some of the measurement tools mentioned in the bufferbloat articles cited here can be use to winkle out the nature of the problems, if you're sufficiently curious.
It's admittedly hard to get past the "help" desk, but sending the ISP a package of evidence and politely, adamantly requiring a bug number so you can track the problem tends to get the evidence passed on to the actual engineers.
Just remember that the help desk is tasked with making you happy with whatever you've got, not handling bugs. They can get in real trouble with their management if they try to report problems, so you may have to swear not to say they helped! Be prepared to ask to the "escalations manager" and praise the first-line folks for trying to help even though it wasn't their fault.
--dave, who once discovered a company where only Directors and above could file bugs
A former customer demanded everyone use Windows laptops, and had an insecure locked-down configuration that accidentally prohibited the use of Windows ssh. I chained it to a desk inside the firewall, and used an rdp session to access it when traveling. My (personal) travel machine contained no work files, not even email, just a copy of rdesktop and a putatively secure VPN for contacting work.
I don't like modifying the work machine to support my environment, I'd rather have an environment and ssh or rdp into any legacy systems. Rdp supports mounting disks and virtualizing devices, so it's not hard to export the required parts of my environment to the crippled Windows box.
Of course, it always was (;-)) Hyperlinks were invented for footnotes and case citations.
For a quick look, see What's hot on CanLII This Week. I love the Leroy Smickle case described there (go to then end of the case link for the link array )
In literature, of course, they're pretty much a done fad.
I already have a box dedicated to MythTV, and am willing to invest the time to add stuff to it, but I'm not likely to buy another box and have another ^&#$%%@! remote for something that insists it's the only game in town (;-))
A new way to profit: leave the holes in place, and charge anyone who discovers them. If the person is stupid enough, he or she will do more than notify you. If they exceed what a random uninterested person would do with the the hole, they've just self-identified as a criminal. You can therefor recover enough money from them to pay for fixing the holes.
This creates a whole new meaning for "honeypot" (;-))
The Progressive Conservatives were the equivalent of centrist Republicans, but they joined with Reform to become the just-plain Conservatives, who are roughly the Tea Party Republicans.
Reform in Canada was pretty much the same as Ross Perot's Reform in the 'States.
--dave
[Full disclosure: I partnered with Perot Systems in my Siemens days: Ross' company was cool]
That's true of Canada, too.
As far as I know, it is also true of the U.S.: the telco must be able to wiretap a certain percentage of their customers without service degradation, and do a traffic analysis of up to 100% of their customers at all times. The latter is easy for telephone companies: they just use their existing billing systems.
The latter is easier in Europe, where billing for local calls is normal, and amazing hard for non-telco IP shops (ISPs), as they don't bill by the connection.
The Australian telcos, who are being converted to an IP backbone, found there were some difficulties. Because they must operate a wiretapping facility [citation needed] for their various police forces, they have to invent and build one for voice over IP. Being a new initiative, this is fraught with risk, unexpected costs and scalability issues.
This will be true of any telco in a legal regime where the government requires the telephone companies to provide the mechanics needed for spying on their customers.
No one is going to arrest you for reading a history or politics book, even if it is about how great communism is.
The Canadian Library Association and the circulation software vendors like Geac continuously have to fight against demands they record and be prepared to report who has borrowed what books. Librarians are the people who first had to fight "lawful access" laws, which are now being drafted to force ISPs to record and report your activities.
Tracking and recording anything that can be linked to your name is excellent for counter-espionage, but I want it done only with a court order. At the very least.
The imaginary 1984 had cameras in each room: the real one had them on light-posts and police cars in the UK.
There's an old, well-honored principle in Unix that explains why it's hard to design a good GUI, a good language, a good interface set or even a good command-line interface: Easy tasks should be easy, hard tasks should at least be possible.
It's easy to do one or the other. It's surprising hard to do both.
--dave
I think this originated as a criteria for the old Bourne shell, and it certainly was part of perl and Elliotte Rusty Harold's XOM.
A properly designed assembly line uses humans as supervisors and QA persons, not machines
I've worked on the old kind, where I actually manhandled truck rims, and it was an insanely expensive way to make them. The same time, Honda opened its assembly line for the old 305 twin engine: no humans did work! They made sure the machines worked properly.
If course, you needed to locate those lines where there were good (if expensive) machine designers, engineers and repairmen. For Honda, that meant the home islands. For certain other companies, it now means the USA and Canada.
It's probably as valid to say that the newspapers value sales, which they can get by sensationalism. If at the same time they're owned by someone who has something he doesn't want discussed critically, they can get strongly encouraged to become the "News of the World".
Conversely, if a newspaper gains a reputation for digging deeply into the facts and reporting honestly, they can make good sales on that basis.
Where I live we have three papers, one of the first type, and two of the latter. The two who nourish accuracy and fairness hold opposing political views, and so many people subscribe to both. I buy one and read the other in the coffee-shop (:-))
Slashdot Mirror
Over and above the claim that torrents helped pirates, there was the claim that it was a bandwidth-hog.
Well, it aint so! Jim Gettys researched it, and found what the network vendors were seeing was ... bufferbloat! See https://gettys.wordpress.com/2012/05/14/the-next-nightmare-is-coming/
I know at least one (large, multinational, sorta-conglomerate) company that makes more money manufacturing things in the U.S. that overseas. The things in question include great big cast-iron valves for refineries, with little bitty electronic sensors and steppers. The insides and valve seats are automatically ground to tight specs, the electronics are added on an automated line, and lift truck carry them around. The humans are qa inspectors, set-up guys and the lowest-skilled job is the lift-truck driver. Shipping costs are high (these things weigh a lot!) so it makes sense to do as much as possible in America, on the same continent as the customers.
That also applies to major appliances, power tools, electrical distribution panes, air conditioners and a whole wodge of other things.
Manufacturing is back! (and I buy their power tools for the cottage)
--dave
Reporting a simple average latency "across the Rogers network" in the case of my particular ISP, would be easy to understand.
To use a car analogy., it's just like the signs before construction zones that say "Time to Warden Ave, 7 minutes, normally 4".
--dave
UofT had a textbook for one of their software engineering courses called "Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States" (Heidelberg Science Library). The author, P. Kraft, pointed out that all engineering careers were "in high, out early", and that it was most visible in the programming business. He too recommended you be prepared to get out early. Still available at http://www.amazon.com/Programmers-Managers-Routinization-Programming-Heidelberg/dp/0387902481
I didn't get out, nor did my smarter colleague Fred (hi, ratboy!), and we're both still happily employed, still doing the hard stuff. We each do end up doing management, you understand, but the core of what we do is programming.
--dave
Indeed: The only time you get less-than-world-prices is when you can't ship your oil to a port, and have to sell it somewhere near you produce it. That's exactly what's happening with the Alberta oil/tar sands: It sells for a moderate price in Alberta and more when refined, but will sell for much more unrefined if it can be shipped to the Gulf coast or a port in British Columbia.
The Canadian and Alberta governments seem quite happy to not refine it, but sell it to, in the current proposal, China. This is short-term-smart, long-term dumb (;-))
--dave
That's amazingly common: IMHO, the folks who accuse others of X are often terrified that they will be accused of X, and strike out at other without realizing what they're implying.
This has the pleasant effect of making it easy to discover what they're doing, and afraid of being called on (;-))
--dave
The "Conservatives" of today are, alas, something of a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reform Party, who were really quite far right of the Republicans. The "Progressive Conservatives" were perhaps a little to the center/left relative to the Republicans. It was the PCs who supported universal health insurance and other center-to-left initiatives.
Confusing the two can lead one to self-contradictory conclusions (;-))
--dave
Further to the bufferbloat comment, the effect happens where a higher-capacity net meets a lower one, and that can and does happen in the path to the backbone from local ISPs. It almost has to (;-))
Some of the measurement tools mentioned in the bufferbloat articles cited here can be use to winkle out the nature of the problems, if you're sufficiently curious.
It's admittedly hard to get past the "help" desk, but sending the ISP a package of evidence and politely, adamantly requiring a bug number so you can track the problem tends to get the evidence passed on to the actual engineers.
Just remember that the help desk is tasked with making you happy with whatever you've got, not handling bugs. They can get in real trouble with their management if they try to report problems, so you may have to swear not to say they helped! Be prepared to ask to the "escalations manager" and praise the first-line folks for trying to help even though it wasn't their fault.
--dave, who once discovered a company where only Directors and above could file bugs
A former customer demanded everyone use Windows laptops, and had an insecure locked-down configuration that accidentally prohibited the use of Windows ssh. I chained it to a desk inside the firewall, and used an rdp session to access it when traveling. My (personal) travel machine contained no work files, not even email, just a copy of rdesktop and a putatively secure VPN for contacting work.
I don't like modifying the work machine to support my environment, I'd rather have an environment and ssh or rdp into any legacy systems. Rdp supports mounting disks and virtualizing devices, so it's not hard to export the required parts of my environment to the crippled Windows box.
--dave
Of course, it always was (;-)) Hyperlinks were invented for footnotes and case citations.
For a quick look, see What's hot on CanLII This Week. I love the Leroy Smickle case described there (go to then end of the case link for the link array )
In literature, of course, they're pretty much a done fad.
--dave
Excellent, thanks, all! --dave
I already have a box dedicated to MythTV, and am willing to invest the time to add stuff to it, but I'm not likely to buy another box and have another ^&#$%%@! remote for something that insists it's the only game in town (;-))
--dave
... or perhaps just mutiny?
Perhaps because they didn't believe they could have bugs (:-))
A new way to profit: leave the holes in place, and charge anyone who discovers them. If the person is stupid enough, he or she will do more than notify you. If they exceed what a random uninterested person would do with the the hole, they've just self-identified as a criminal. You can therefor recover enough money from them to pay for fixing the holes.
This creates a whole new meaning for "honeypot" (;-))
--dave
The Progressive Conservatives were the equivalent of centrist Republicans, but they joined with Reform to become the just-plain Conservatives, who are roughly the Tea Party Republicans. Reform in Canada was pretty much the same as Ross Perot's Reform in the 'States.
--dave
[Full disclosure: I partnered with Perot Systems in my Siemens days: Ross' company was cool]
That's true of Canada, too.
As far as I know, it is also true of the U.S.: the telco must be able to wiretap a certain percentage of their customers without service degradation, and do a traffic analysis of up to 100% of their customers at all times. The latter is easy for telephone companies: they just use their existing billing systems.
The latter is easier in Europe, where billing for local calls is normal, and amazing hard for non-telco IP shops (ISPs), as they don't bill by the connection.
--dave
The Australian telcos, who are being converted to an IP backbone, found there were some difficulties. Because they must operate a wiretapping facility [citation needed] for their various police forces, they have to invent and build one for voice over IP. Being a new initiative, this is fraught with risk, unexpected costs and scalability issues.
This will be true of any telco in a legal regime where the government requires the telephone companies to provide the mechanics needed for spying on their customers.
--dave
No one is going to arrest you for reading a history or politics book, even if it is about how great communism is.
The Canadian Library Association and the circulation software vendors like Geac continuously have to fight against demands they record and be prepared to report who has borrowed what books. Librarians are the people who first had to fight "lawful access" laws, which are now being drafted to force ISPs to record and report your activities.
Tracking and recording anything that can be linked to your name is excellent for counter-espionage, but I want it done only with a court order. At the very least.
The imaginary 1984 had cameras in each room: the real one had them on light-posts and police cars in the UK.
--dave
Leverage what you know by choosing a company that that uses an agile method: it's not "mechanical engineering", but it's definitely engineering.
--dave
There's an old, well-honored principle in Unix that explains why it's hard to design a good GUI, a good language, a good interface set or even a good command-line interface: Easy tasks should be easy, hard tasks should at least be possible.
It's easy to do one or the other. It's surprising hard to do both.
--dave
I think this originated as a criteria for the old Bourne shell, and it certainly was part of perl and Elliotte Rusty Harold's XOM.
We have three people who are have been at least semi-retired, now working full time and one on contract... --dave
A properly designed assembly line uses humans as supervisors and QA persons, not machines
I've worked on the old kind, where I actually manhandled truck rims, and it was an insanely expensive way to make them. The same time, Honda opened its assembly line for the old 305 twin engine: no humans did work! They made sure the machines worked properly.
If course, you needed to locate those lines where there were good (if expensive) machine designers, engineers and repairmen. For Honda, that meant the home islands. For certain other companies, it now means the USA and Canada.
--dave
It's probably as valid to say that the newspapers value sales, which they can get by sensationalism. If at the same time they're owned by someone who has something he doesn't want discussed critically, they can get strongly encouraged to become the "News of the World".
Conversely, if a newspaper gains a reputation for digging deeply into the facts and reporting honestly, they can make good sales on that basis.
Where I live we have three papers, one of the first type, and two of the latter. The two who nourish accuracy and fairness hold opposing political views, and so many people subscribe to both. I buy one and read the other in the coffee-shop (:-))
--dave
Ditto